April 30, 2026 (Thursday)

Today G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted that Trump has hit a new low in overall job performance and in his handling of the economy, at -22.2 and -40.3, respectively. Those numbers reflect the percentage of people who approve of his handling of an issue minus those who disapprove. Indeed, Morris noted that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is so low it “literally broke the scale of this graph on my data portal.”

On Tuesday, Morris explained in Strength in Numbers that while Republicans have lately been arguing that they simply need to get people to show up to win the midterms, turnout is not their problem. Their real problem is that voters don’t like what Trump is doing.

An obvious symbol of Trump’s presidency is his unilateral decision to tear down the East Wing of the White House and replace it with a giant ballroom. A new Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll released today shows that Americans oppose the ballroom by a margin of about two to one. Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose it, while only 28% support it. Of those who oppose it, 47% oppose it strongly.

Dan Diamond and Scott Clement of the Washington Post note that people don’t like Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, either—52% opposed versus 21% in favor—or the idea of Trump’s signature on paper money. Sixty-eight percent of Americans oppose that plan, while only 12% support it. Even Republicans oppose it 40% to 28%.

And then there is Trump’s war on Iran. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that only 34% of Americans approve of the strikes on Iran, while 61% oppose them. Gas prices continue to rise, with Brent crude futures today briefly topping $114 a barrel—the highest price since June 2022, shortly after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine. Senator Angus King (I-ME) noted on CNN today that these higher prices are currently costing American consumers about $700 million a day.

On his Substack today, economist Paul Krugman noted that the acronym “TACO,” for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” has been replaced by “NACHO”: “Not A Chance Hormuz Opens.” Krugman explains that Iran is unlikely to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passed before Israel and the U.S. began airstrikes against Iran on February 28, 2026, until “the economic damage from its closure becomes much more severe.”

Trump is maintaining a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, and Iran says it will not reopen the strait until that blockade on Iranian shipping is lifted. Krugman notes that Trump’s ego will not permit him “to face up to the reality that he, more or less single-handedly, led America to the greatest strategic defeat in its history.”

So he is deluding himself into thinking he can extract concessions from Iran, although he has been unclear about what those might be. For their part, Krugman notes, Iranian officials have no incentive to make a deal, both because the pinch on oil is hurting the U.S. and thus Trump, and because they have no reason to believe Trump would honor any deal they made. He has made a habit of breaking deals.

“The question now,” Krugman wrote, is “how much destruction will the world, and America, have to bear before Trump is willing to accept reality?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified yesterday in front of the House Armed Services Committee and today in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee about Trump’s request for a $1.5 trillion defense budget and the Iran war. This was the first time a member of the administration had appeared in a public hearing since the war began, and lawmakers had much to say. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, summed up the situation:
“Sixty-one days ago,” he said, “President Trump unilaterally began the war in Iran. He had no coherent strategy. He refused to make a case to the American people or consult Congress. He failed to present any evidence of an immediate threat, and he ignored the advice of military and intelligence experts who warned him of the consequences. Today our nation is in a worse strategic position. The Strait of Hormuz was open. Now it is closed. Thirteen service members have tragically lost their lives, and more than 400 have been wounded. We have lost dozens of aircraft, sustained significant damage to our bases in the area, and expended an alarming amount of our missile inventory. Morale and readiness across the force, especially among overdeployed units and vessels like the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, have suffered. Gasoline and fertilizer prices throughout the world have surged. American families are bearing the cost of a war they wanted nothing to do with and have gained nothing from.”

Tomorrow marks 60 days since Trump informed Congress he had begun military actions against Iran. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, after 60 days the president has to either end those hostilities or get congressional approval. In his testimony today, Hegseth tried to argue that the 60-day clock stops during a ceasefire, only to have Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) note that the law doesn’t say that.

And yet, today Senate Republicans blocked another Democratic measure—the sixth, introduced by Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA)—to require Trump to end his war on Iran. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told Ryan Nobles, Monica Alba, and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News that Congress doesn’t have to meddle with Trump’s actions in Iran because the U.S. is currently “not at war.”

And then there is the corruption. Last week, news broke that a start-up company backed by President Trump’s son Eric had won a $24 million contract from the Pentagon. Today news broke that the U.S. Air Force has agreed to buy an undisclosed number of drones from a company backed by Trump’s sons.

And then there is the incompetence. Today, after a 76-day shutdown, House Republicans finally passed a Senate measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security while withholding funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for Border Patrol. The Senate passed the bill unanimously on March 27, but because it was what the Democrats wanted, Speaker Johnson refused to take it up until today.

In the face of Trump’s growing unpopularity, the Republicans are changing not their unpopular policies but the rules of elections, clearly hoping to game the system to win elections no matter how unpopular they have become.

Yesterday, with virtually no public input, the Florida Senate approved a gerrymandered map designed to give four more seats in Congress to the Republicans despite the fact that more than ten years ago, voters passed a constitutional amendment that bans partisan gerrymandering.

Also yesterday, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais threw open the door for Republicans in southern states to redraw their maps to shift between 10 and 15 seats from Democrats to Republicans. In the decision, the six Republican-appointed justices on the court declared that plaintiffs charging that district lines discriminate on the basis of race must prove that the lawmakers who drew those lines were intentionally making decisions based on race rather than partisanship, which the court has declared is beyond reach of the federal courts.

The decision means that states are now free to redraw district lines to undercut the power of minority voters, a demographic that tends to vote for Democrats.

Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, immediately declared a state of emergency, suspending the primary elections in the state in order to gerrymander the state to grab one or two more Republican seats. More than 100,000 absentee ballots had already been sent out—some have already been returned—and voting was due to start within days.
Democrats have already filed a lawsuit against the governor’s attempt to stop an election that’s already underway and to let the election proceed. The lawsuit notes, among other things, that the Constitution gives to state legislatures, not the governor, the responsibility for deciding “he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.”

Lawmakers in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama are also considering redistricting in the wake of the Callais decision.
Democrats have responded to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the Republican-dominated state gerrymanders that are sure to follow. States dominated by Democrats are considering their own gerrymanders to counter the Republicans, as well as new legislation to protect minority voting rights in their states.

“Today’s decision by this illegitimate Supreme Court majority strikes a blow against the Voting Rights Act and is designed to undermine the ability of communities of color all over this country to elect their candidate of choice,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told reporters Wednesday. “But we are not here to step back. We are here to fight back.”

Trump, meanwhile, wants even more. His social media account posted today: “How much abuse can the Republican Senate take from the Radical Left Lunatics in the form of Democrat Senators, before they BLOW UP (TERMINATE!) THE FILIBUSTER, and approve things at a record clip, including The Save America Act, that would be unthinkable without the Filibuster Termination??”

Without the filibuster, he told reporters, “e could pass one bill after the other. We could pass laws and acts and things that we never even dreamt of passing. And you know what else? We wouldn’t lose for 50 years.”

The upcoming elections are definitely on Trump’s mind. He called in to NewsMax today, saying: “It is a problem I’m not on the ballot. And I have to convince—Everyone says if I was on the ballot we’d win in a landslide. I have the best, I have some of the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.”

What an utterly, utterly, utterly corrupt and corruptible system.

“ The upcoming elections are definitely on Trump’s mind. He called in to NewsMax today, saying: “It is a problem I’m not on the ballot. And I have to convince—Everyone says if I was on the ballot we’d win in a landslide. I have the best, I have some of the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.””

He also said he’d be able to get into the space program. You don’t want a broken toilet with Trump around.

The damage to trust with allies is significant as well.
I imagine out of stubbornness now they will not side with the USA even possibly at a detriment to themselves.

Divine Angel said:

“ The upcoming elections are definitely on Trump’s mind. He called in to NewsMax today, saying: “It is a problem I’m not on the ballot. And I have to convince—Everyone says if I was on the ballot we’d win in a landslide. I have the best, I have some of the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.””

He also said he’d be able to get into the space program. You don’t want a broken toilet with Trump around.

Ha!

Heather discusses some of the fake posts about her and the the rest of the news and ways to resist

May 1, 2026 (Friday)

Today is the deadline for President Donald J. Trump to ask Congress for approval for his war on Iran. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval, so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.

Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran alongside Israeli attacks on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 is today.

And today, Trump sent letters to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore (officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present) Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire. Ignoring the fact the U.S. fired on an Iranian tanker on April 19, the letter says “there has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026.”

The next paragraph notes that the administration is nonetheless continuing to build up its military presence in the region “to address Iranian and Iranian proxy forces’ threats and to protect the United States and its allies and partners.”

In other words, the administration is trying to get around the War Powers Act with the dodge Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried in front of the Senate yesterday: a ceasefire stops the War Powers clock. This is not what the law says.

Trump’s letter also ignores the fact the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. A blockade is an act of war.

It’s worth reiterating that Trump’s war of aggression violated the Constitution from the start. He sidestepped Congress—which has the sole authority to declare war—by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. As Tess Bridgeman and Oona A. Hathaway of Just Security note, that attack also violated the United Nations charter, which prohibits the use of force except as defense against an attack or a legitimate threat of an imminent one.

Now the administration has just told Congress it intends to retain the power to do whatever Trump wants with the United States military.

This is another example of the administration trying to find a fuzzy way to get around acting within the boundaries of the law. It is clearly just a posture to permit Trump to act as he pleases. This afternoon, Trump told an audience: “You know we’re in a war, because I think you would agree we cannot let lunatics have a nuclear weapon.”

This afternoon, Trump told reporters that there was no need for him to ask Congress for authorization to extend the war because “it’s never been sought before.” “obody’s ever sought it before,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked for it before. It’s never been used before. Why should we be different?”

In fact, presidents before Trump have indeed honored the 60-day requirement for congressional approval of military operations.

Trump told reporters, “Every other president considered it totally unconstitutional, and we agree with that.”

In fact, the Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man. They also wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they put into the Constitution that Congress had the power “o declare War” and “o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

In Federalist No. 26, one of the newspaper essays Alexander Hamilton wrote to encourage the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton explained that people shouldn’t fear the strength of the new government outlined in the Constitution, because the necessity of debating war, alongside the two-year limit on government funding for the military, would force Congress to debate military actions. He expected members of the opposition to attack those in power over military appropriations, so that if those in power were “disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.”

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said yesterday he would not challenge Trump’s novel interpretation of the War Powers Act, in part, he said, because Senate Republicans have given him no reason to. Republicans have no interest in voting to support Trump’s unpopular war, and yet don’t want to buck Trump. So they are choosing to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities.

In contrast, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) posted: “There’s no pause button in the Constitution, or the War Powers Act. We’re at war. We’ve been at war for 60 days. The blockade alone is a continuing act of war.”

Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the top-ranked Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told Mary Clare Jalonick, Stephen Groves, and Seung Min Kim of the Associated Press: “Is the expectation that the Trump administration is going to follow the law? I do not have that expectation.”

Ironically, today is Law Day, a holiday established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 to remind us to “vigilantly guard the great heritage of liberty, justice, and equality under law.”

As former chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court Lawton Nuss wrote in the Kansas Reflector today, Eisenhower had seen lawlessness and the horrors it produced in World War II. In his first observance of Law Day, he reminded Americans that the U.S. rested not on, as Nuss writes, “the unchecked exercise of raw power,” but on law, individual rights, and the constitutional order.

With the enormously destructive capabilities of modern warfare and the power of leaders to hold loyalists in their sway in the modern era, Eisenhower said, “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”

Neophyte said:

May 1, 2026 (Friday)

Today is the deadline for President Donald J. Trump to ask Congress for approval for his war on Iran. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval, so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.

Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran alongside Israeli attacks on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 is today.

And today, Trump sent letters to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore (officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present) Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire. Ignoring the fact the U.S. fired on an Iranian tanker on April 19, the letter says “there has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026.”

The next paragraph notes that the administration is nonetheless continuing to build up its military presence in the region “to address Iranian and Iranian proxy forces’ threats and to protect the United States and its allies and partners.”

In other words, the administration is trying to get around the War Powers Act with the dodge Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried in front of the Senate yesterday: a ceasefire stops the War Powers clock. This is not what the law says.

Trump’s letter also ignores the fact the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. A blockade is an act of war.

It’s worth reiterating that Trump’s war of aggression violated the Constitution from the start. He sidestepped Congress—which has the sole authority to declare war—by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. As Tess Bridgeman and Oona A. Hathaway of Just Security note, that attack also violated the United Nations charter, which prohibits the use of force except as defense against an attack or a legitimate threat of an imminent one.

Now the administration has just told Congress it intends to retain the power to do whatever Trump wants with the United States military.

This is another example of the administration trying to find a fuzzy way to get around acting within the boundaries of the law. It is clearly just a posture to permit Trump to act as he pleases. This afternoon, Trump told an audience: “You know we’re in a war, because I think you would agree we cannot let lunatics have a nuclear weapon.”

This afternoon, Trump told reporters that there was no need for him to ask Congress for authorization to extend the war because “it’s never been sought before.” “obody’s ever sought it before,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked for it before. It’s never been used before. Why should we be different?”

In fact, presidents before Trump have indeed honored the 60-day requirement for congressional approval of military operations.

Trump told reporters, “Every other president considered it totally unconstitutional, and we agree with that.”

In fact, the Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man. They also wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they put into the Constitution that Congress had the power “o declare War” and “o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

In Federalist No. 26, one of the newspaper essays Alexander Hamilton wrote to encourage the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton explained that people shouldn’t fear the strength of the new government outlined in the Constitution, because the necessity of debating war, alongside the two-year limit on government funding for the military, would force Congress to debate military actions. He expected members of the opposition to attack those in power over military appropriations, so that if those in power were “disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.”

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said yesterday he would not challenge Trump’s novel interpretation of the War Powers Act, in part, he said, because Senate Republicans have given him no reason to. Republicans have no interest in voting to support Trump’s unpopular war, and yet don’t want to buck Trump. So they are choosing to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities.

In contrast, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) posted: “There’s no pause button in the Constitution, or the War Powers Act. We’re at war. We’ve been at war for 60 days. The blockade alone is a continuing act of war.”

Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the top-ranked Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told Mary Clare Jalonick, Stephen Groves, and Seung Min Kim of the Associated Press: “Is the expectation that the Trump administration is going to follow the law? I do not have that expectation.”

Ironically, today is Law Day, a holiday established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 to remind us to “vigilantly guard the great heritage of liberty, justice, and equality under law.”

As former chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court Lawton Nuss wrote in the Kansas Reflector today, Eisenhower had seen lawlessness and the horrors it produced in World War II. In his first observance of Law Day, he reminded Americans that the U.S. rested not on, as Nuss writes, “the unchecked exercise of raw power,” but on law, individual rights, and the constitutional order.

With the enormously destructive capabilities of modern warfare and the power of leaders to hold loyalists in their sway in the modern era, Eisenhower said, “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”

If they had spines, Republicans could end this today/tomorrow.

May 2, 2026 (Saturday)

Today was the 152nd running of the Kentucky Derby, which was launched in 1875 as horse racing—with its famous Black jockeys, who won more than half of the first 28 derbies—was gaining an audience in the U.S.

A horse-based event gives me the opportunity to repost a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. While it has no deep meaning, it does illustrate that there is history all around us, a theme you’ll hear more about from me and my team soon. And it was totally fun to research, too. First we spent hours deciding on which horses we would feature— we wanted even representation of different time periods— and then I spent hours watching Mr. Ed shows and reading entertainment theory, but the insightful detail—and the inclusion of Khartoum—is all Michael. This piece remains one of my favorite things I ever had a hand in writing.

So tonight, let’s take the night off from the craziness of today’s America and recall past eras when horses could make history.

1) Traveller
General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.

2) Comanche
Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.

3) Beautiful Jim Key
Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia—buttons, photos, and postcards—or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”

4) Man o’ War
Named for his breeder, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss—to Upset—came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.

5) Trigger
Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.

6) Sergeant Reckless
American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.

7) Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.

8) Black Jack
Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands—a U.S. brand and an army serial number—recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.

9) Khartoum
Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him…and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

10) Secretariat
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.”

May 3, 2026 (Sunday)

Late on Friday night, President Donald J. Trump took to social media. At 11:03 he posted an AI-generated image of himself, alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, all shirtless, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini, appearing to be relaxing in a swimming pool. But the “swimming pool” was the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Then, at 11:04, Trump posted an image of First Lady Melania Trump grinning at the press conference Trump held after the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when he said that incident proved he needed his proposed ballroom for his security.

Then, at 11:13, Trump posted an image of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who is Black, holding a baseball bat. The caption calls Jeffries “low IQ,” “a THUG,” and “a danger to our Country.”

Then, at 11:15, he posted an image of himself smiling and holding six wild cards from the game Uno. The caption read, “I HAVE ALL THE CARDS.”

Then, at 11:22, he posted a profile image of himself in gold.

Then, at 11:26, he posted an image showing him standing near Mt. Rushmore, with the angle arranged to make his head the fifth sculpture on the mountain, so from left to right they were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Donald Trump.

Then, at 11:32, he posted an image of himself and the first lady.

Then, at 11:37, he posted an image of himself and King Charles III.

Then, at 11:40, he posted an image of what appeared to be the reflecting pool full of algae next to one that appeared to be the reflecting pool clean and with a bright blue color. Above the dirty image was the label “Hussein Obama,” and below it, the caption “Photo taken Sept 29, 2012”; the clean one was labeled with “Trump” and “Coming Soon.” Over the two together, the caption read: “This is what our Country was before, and after, “TRUMP!”

Then, at 11:41, he posted an AI image of the reflecting pool appearing bright blue, under the caption “American Flag Blue.”

Then, at 11:45, he posted another AI image of the reflecting pool appearing bright blue under the caption “American Flag Blue.”

It was some 43 minutes.

The president appeared to have been triggered by graffiti that appeared in the reflecting pool Friday morning: “86 47” spray-painted across it in a message that was about 15 feet by 30 feet.

The message was double edged. To “86” something in slang means to get rid of it, and Trump is the 47th president. But the phrase has taken on a second meaning since April 28, when the Department of Justice under Trump launched a criminal case against former director of the FBI James Comey for posting a picture of seashells spelling out “86 47” on Instagram a year ago. But “86 47”—and, for that matter, “86 46”—is such a common meme that there are a wide variety of shirts and hats for sale with those letters on Amazon today, prompting the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker, to ask Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche if other people who shared that meme would also face charges. He said no and suggested that there was other evidence in Comey’s case, although he did not explain what that was and the indictment only talks about the seashell post.

As Trump’s popularity has sunk to new lows, he has renewed his efforts to remake Washington, D.C., into a monument to himself, almost as if he is trying to anticipate history by making future Americans think that he must have been great because of all the tributes to him in the capital. Part of that effort has been his decision to paint the reflecting pool bright blue, like a swimming pool, at a cost of about $2 million in taxpayer money.

Yesterday, Rick Maese and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported that one of Trump’s top fundraisers is collecting money to turn the heavily used, low-cost East Potomac Golf Links on the Washington, D.C., waterfront, one of three D.C. public golf courses the administration is taking over, into a championship golf course and to establish Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes nearby. That imagined sculpture park will feature about 250 Americans Trump believes are significant to our history.

The plans have not yet been made public, nor have they been approved by Congress or gone through the federal review process. The new golf course would erase the area’s public bike paths and open recreational space. Spokesperson Davis Ingle said: “President Trump continues to beautify and honor our Nation’s Capital during America’s historic semiquincentennial celebration.”

The Trump administration planned to take control of the East Potomac Golf Links today, shutting it down for the renovation.

Today, Democracy Forward, a watchdog group, asked a judge to stop the administration from going ahead with plans that would shut down the course.

Trump’s alterations to the capital seem to be a welcome distraction for the real estate developer from the crises around him. His claim that he has “all the cards” appears to be a boast about his dealings with Iran, but that is a wildly optimistic version of events.

On Thursday, Iranian officials sent a 14-point offer for a resolution to the war to mediators from Pakistan. An Iranian official said that Iran hopes to end the war and resolve questions around the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports now and deal with Iran’s nuclear program later.

On Friday, Trump said he was “not satisfied” with Iran’s offer but did not say why he disapproved. Then, at 6:47 yesterday evening, he posted: “I will soon be reviewing the plan that Iran has just sent to us, but can’t imagine that it would be acceptable in that they have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.”

And yet, Iran said today it had received a response to its offer from the U.S. and is reviewing it.

The Trump administration continues to look for a way to open the Strait of Hormuz. Today Trump announced that on Monday the U.S. will launch “Project Freedom,” an effort to escort stranded merchant ships through the strait. U.S. Central Command said tonight that Project Freedom will include “guided-missile destroyers, over 100 land and sea-based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms, and 15,000 service members.” Iran has said the use of U.S. Navy ships for the escort would be a violation of the ceasefire; it is not clear if Navy ships will participate.

As Barak Ravid of Axios notes, Trump says the attempt is “humanitarian”—ships stuck from the strait’s closure are running low on supplies and are facing sanitation problems—but it’s clear the administration is trying to challenge Iran’s control of the strait. It is also worth noting that Trump often makes announcements that appear designed to move the market, and the price of oil dropped after the announcement of Project Freedom.

As Chandelis Duster of NPR reported today, gas prices jumped more than thirty cents a gallon last week. According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), regular gas averages $4.446 a gallon. Two days before the Iran war began, the average price per gallon was $2.98.

Last week, German chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “he Americans obviously have no strategy” and suggested that Iranian officials were outwitting the Trump administration, saying the U.S. was “being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.” Trump didn’t take that comment well, posting screeds attacking Merz repeatedly and claiming, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”

On Wednesday, Trump talked to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin for an hour and a half—the twelfth phone call between the two leaders since Trump took office a second time—and just hours later posted about removing U.S. troops from Germany. Putin has wanted to weaken the U.S. commitment to Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for a long time. As Jack Detsch, Paul McLeary, and Stefanie Bolzen of Politico note, European officials worry that Putin is making plans to attack a NATO country.

On Thursday, Trump suggested to reporters that he might also pull troops out of Spain and Italy, “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. “Italy has not been of any help to us. And Spain has been horrible. Absolutely horrible.”

On Friday the Defense Department said it was pulling 5,000 troops from Germany and was cancelling a plan formulated under the Biden administration to put an artillery unit equipped with missiles in Europe. The U.S. had increased its European presence after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. These moves will take U.S. forces back to where they were before the invasion. As scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote: “You can apply lots of normalizing frameworks or you can just make a timeline of his calls with Putin. We don’t have a sovereign foreign policy. We have superpower suicide.”

Julian E. Barnes, Helene Cooper, and Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported that senior defense officials wanted the force reduction to be understood as a punishment for Germany after Merz’s comment. In fact, U.S. bases in Germany are staging areas for U.S. operations in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.

The Politico journalists report that defense officials were “stunned” by the announcement, and on Saturday the chairs of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), declared they were “very concerned by the decision to withdraw a U.S. brigade from Germany.” They noted that “any significant change to the U.S. force posture in Europe warrants a deliberate review process and close coordination with Congress and our allies. We expect the Department to engage with its oversight committees in the days and weeks ahead on this decision and its implications for U.S. deterrence and transatlantic security.”

And yet Trump is clearly worried about the upcoming midterm election, especially after Democratic-backed Quentin Wiltz yesterday flipped a seat in the Houston suburb of Pearland, Texas, that had been a reliable Republican stronghold.

After his Friday post calling Jeffries a “thug,” Trump posted yesterday that Democrats had “RIGGED the 2020 Presidential Election. GET TOUGH REPUBLICANS—THEY’RE COMING, AND THEY’RE COMING FAST! They’re no good for our Country, they almost destroyed it, and we don’t want to let that happen again!” He demanded Republicans “approve all of the necessary Safeguards we need for Elections to protect the American Public during the upcoming Midterms.”
Tonight, again, he posted that Jeffries was “a Low IQ individual” and called for his impeachment, although neither senators nor representatives can be impeached. His post went on to say more about his own fears than about Jeffries.

“I got impeached for A PERFECT PHONE CALL,” Trump wrote. “Where are you Republicans? Why not get it started? They’ll be doing this to me!”

FMD

Divine Angel said:

FMD

Trump could be occupied with crayons and butchers paper

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

FMD

Trump could be occupied with crayons and butchers paper

is that what they mean by occupy democrats then

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Divine Angel said:

FMD

Trump could be occupied with crayons and butchers paper

is that what they mean by occupy democrats then

All the photos and such he posted.
I mean is he bored to do such nonsense
That’s far from normal for any adult let alone a world leader.

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Trump could be occupied with crayons and butchers paper

is that what they mean by occupy democrats then

All the photos and such he posted.
I mean is he bored to do such nonsense
That’s far from normal for any adult let alone a world leader.

well we mean … we post here

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

is that what they mean by occupy democrats then

All the photos and such he posted.
I mean is he bored to do such nonsense
That’s far from normal for any adult let alone a world leader.

well we mean … we post here

We do that is true.

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

Trump could be occupied with crayons and butchers paper

is that what they mean by occupy democrats then

All the photos and such he posted.
I mean is he bored to do such nonsense
That’s far from normal for any adult let alone a world leader.

maybe he is an insomniac.. it explains why he always seems to fall asleep when the attention is not on him

buffy said:

May 3, 2026 (Sunday)

Late on Friday night, President Donald J. Trump took to social media…

…As scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote: “You can apply lots of normalizing frameworks or you can just make a timeline of his calls with Putin. We don’t have a sovereign foreign policy. We have superpower suicide.”

:((

The Incredibly Distasteful “Two Kings” Social Media Post

Heather for two minutes.

buffy said:

At 11:03 he posted an AI-generated image of himself, alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, all shirtless, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini, appearing to be relaxing in a swimming pool. But the “swimming pool” was the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Here’s the image:

!https://static.independent.co.uk/2026/05/02/15/17/Untitled-design-(1).png!

buffy said:

At 11:03 he posted an AI-generated image of himself, alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, all shirtless, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini, appearing to be relaxing in a swimming pool. But the “swimming pool” was the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Here’s the image:

May 4, 2026 (Monday)

According to a new Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll, fifty-nine percent of Americans believe President Donald J. Trump does not have the mental sharpness necessary to lead the country. Fifty-five percent think he does not have the physical health to serve as president. Fifty-four percent say they don’t think Trump is a strong leader. Sixty-seven percent think Trump doesn’t carefully consider important decisions.

Today, Susannah George and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported that as the U.S. ramps up its attempts to open the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is responding with military attacks. This morning, Iran fired drones and missiles at two U.S. destroyers and two merchant vessels moving through the strait. According to Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, none of the ships were hit.

But Iran also launched six fast boats at the commercial ships. Cooper said the U.S. destroyed those vessels.
Ahmad Vahidi, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posted on social media: “The Strait of Hormuz will not be opened by the tweet of the President of the United States; the management and control of this waterway is in the hands of Iran. Nothing will have the right to enter without permission, and in the event of a violation of this matter, it will be considered a legitimate target.”

Iran also hit the United Arab Emirates today with fifteen missiles and four drones. One of the armaments started a fire in the oil hub of Fujairah.

Trump told Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel today that his military blockade of Iranian ports is the “greatest military maneuver in history.” He also said that if the Iranians target U.S. ships, they will be ”blown off the face of the earth.” And yet, as Iran demonstrated by hitting the United Arab Emirates today, resuming the war could devastate the Middle East, plunging the globe into even more economic chaos. So, for now, Trump appears to be hanging onto the ceasefire.
Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal noted that today, at the White House, Trump told a group of small-business owners that he “call it a mini war.”

Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) called out the fact that the Trump administration argued on Friday that it did not have to get congressional approval for the war on Iran at the 60-day mark required by the 1973 War Powers Resolution because, it said, the war had “terminated” on April 7. It made the claim despite the fact that a blockade is an act of war and the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. Asked on Saturday how he could say the war had terminated when the U.S. military was enforcing the blockade, Trump told reporters: “Well, it’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody’s even challenging it.”

Duckworth, who lost both legs when serving as a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, posted: “U.S. and Iranian ships are exchanging missile fire today in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s claims that hostilities have ceased were bullsh*t. He is lying to the American people and prolonging his disastrous war of choice—And he’s doing it illegally.”

This afternoon, Trump posted an AI image of President Joe Biden on one knee with the caption: COWARDS KNEEL,” an AI image of President Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and an AI image of himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”

Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Trump is crazyposting at 3pm.”

buffy said:

May 4, 2026 (Monday)

According to a new Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll, fifty-nine percent of Americans believe President Donald J. Trump does not have the mental sharpness necessary to lead the country. Fifty-five percent think he does not have the physical health to serve as president. Fifty-four percent say they don’t think Trump is a strong leader. Sixty-seven percent think Trump doesn’t carefully consider important decisions.

Today, Susannah George and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported that as the U.S. ramps up its attempts to open the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is responding with military attacks. This morning, Iran fired drones and missiles at two U.S. destroyers and two merchant vessels moving through the strait. According to Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, none of the ships were hit.

But Iran also launched six fast boats at the commercial ships. Cooper said the U.S. destroyed those vessels.
Ahmad Vahidi, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posted on social media: “The Strait of Hormuz will not be opened by the tweet of the President of the United States; the management and control of this waterway is in the hands of Iran. Nothing will have the right to enter without permission, and in the event of a violation of this matter, it will be considered a legitimate target.”

Iran also hit the United Arab Emirates today with fifteen missiles and four drones. One of the armaments started a fire in the oil hub of Fujairah.

Trump told Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel today that his military blockade of Iranian ports is the “greatest military maneuver in history.” He also said that if the Iranians target U.S. ships, they will be ”blown off the face of the earth.” And yet, as Iran demonstrated by hitting the United Arab Emirates today, resuming the war could devastate the Middle East, plunging the globe into even more economic chaos. So, for now, Trump appears to be hanging onto the ceasefire.
Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal noted that today, at the White House, Trump told a group of small-business owners that he “call it a mini war.”

Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) called out the fact that the Trump administration argued on Friday that it did not have to get congressional approval for the war on Iran at the 60-day mark required by the 1973 War Powers Resolution because, it said, the war had “terminated” on April 7. It made the claim despite the fact that a blockade is an act of war and the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. Asked on Saturday how he could say the war had terminated when the U.S. military was enforcing the blockade, Trump told reporters: “Well, it’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody’s even challenging it.”

Duckworth, who lost both legs when serving as a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, posted: “U.S. and Iranian ships are exchanging missile fire today in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s claims that hostilities have ceased were bullsh*t. He is lying to the American people and prolonging his disastrous war of choice—And he’s doing it illegally.”

This afternoon, Trump posted an AI image of President Joe Biden on one knee with the caption: COWARDS KNEEL,” an AI image of President Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and an AI image of himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”

Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Trump is crazyposting at 3pm.”

The White House has been buying up images from private satellites so no one can see the damage to the American bases. I will have to find that article.

buffy said:

May 4, 2026 (Monday)

According to a new Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll, fifty-nine percent of Americans believe President Donald J. Trump does not have the mental sharpness necessary to lead the country. Fifty-five percent think he does not have the physical health to serve as president. Fifty-four percent say they don’t think Trump is a strong leader. Sixty-seven percent think Trump doesn’t carefully consider important decisions.

Today, Susannah George and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported that as the U.S. ramps up its attempts to open the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is responding with military attacks. This morning, Iran fired drones and missiles at two U.S. destroyers and two merchant vessels moving through the strait. According to Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, none of the ships were hit.

But Iran also launched six fast boats at the commercial ships. Cooper said the U.S. destroyed those vessels.
Ahmad Vahidi, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posted on social media: “The Strait of Hormuz will not be opened by the tweet of the President of the United States; the management and control of this waterway is in the hands of Iran. Nothing will have the right to enter without permission, and in the event of a violation of this matter, it will be considered a legitimate target.”

Iran also hit the United Arab Emirates today with fifteen missiles and four drones. One of the armaments started a fire in the oil hub of Fujairah.

Trump told Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel today that his military blockade of Iranian ports is the “greatest military maneuver in history.” He also said that if the Iranians target U.S. ships, they will be ”blown off the face of the earth.” And yet, as Iran demonstrated by hitting the United Arab Emirates today, resuming the war could devastate the Middle East, plunging the globe into even more economic chaos. So, for now, Trump appears to be hanging onto the ceasefire.
Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal noted that today, at the White House, Trump told a group of small-business owners that he “call it a mini war.”

Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) called out the fact that the Trump administration argued on Friday that it did not have to get congressional approval for the war on Iran at the 60-day mark required by the 1973 War Powers Resolution because, it said, the war had “terminated” on April 7. It made the claim despite the fact that a blockade is an act of war and the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. Asked on Saturday how he could say the war had terminated when the U.S. military was enforcing the blockade, Trump told reporters: “Well, it’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody’s even challenging it.”

Duckworth, who lost both legs when serving as a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, posted: “U.S. and Iranian ships are exchanging missile fire today in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s claims that hostilities have ceased were bullsh*t. He is lying to the American people and prolonging his disastrous war of choice—And he’s doing it illegally.”

This afternoon, Trump posted an AI image of President Joe Biden on one knee with the caption: COWARDS KNEEL,” an AI image of President Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and an AI image of himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”

Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Trump is crazyposting at 3pm.”

I’d understand the Biden hatred, but Obama was before him completely

AFAIK he didn’t post this

Divine Angel said:

AFAIK he didn’t post this

As a Star Trek fan I feel that not even the Star Wars fans deserve this.

Divine Angel said:

AFAIK he didn’t post this

FWIW that’s a parody site, though all too often it can be difficult to tell.

Spiny Norman said:

Divine Angel said:

AFAIK he didn’t post this

FWIW that’s a parody site, though all too often it can be difficult to tell.

I saw the post a bit later saying it was parody but yeah, hard to tell these days.

May 5, 2026 (Tuesday)

Late yesterday, Republicans in the Senate released their funding request for the budget reconciliation bill. It includes $1 billion for White House security, including Trump’s proposed ballroom. President Donald J. Trump unexpectedly began the process of knocking down the East Wing of the White House on October 20, 2025, just two days after millions of Americans turned out for the October 18 No Kings rallies.

Days later, Trump told reporters that the cost of the ballroom he intended to build on the site would be paid “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.” At the time, he claimed the ballroom was necessary because presidents needed more space to host events. Since the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the White House has emphasized the need for the space for security reasons. In response, Republicans proposed a measure that appropriated $400 million to build a secure ballroom.

And now, Republicans are advancing a measure that will appropriate $1 billion in taxpayer money for Trump’s ballroom. They are doing so through budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and so can pass the Senate with no Democratic votes.

The bait and switch of the ballroom plans seems to represent the bait and switch of the Republican ideology since the 1980s. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised voters that he would restore their freedom by cutting taxes and slashing regulations. With the resulting boom in the American economy, he argued, there would continue to be money for the social programs Americans liked. Americans could have tax cuts and social programs both.

In fact, Reagan’s tax cuts required deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion—more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country—prompting calls for cuts to social programs in order to address the ballooning debt. Rather than creating a rising tide that lifted all boats, as the saying went, the new system moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

And yet that theory still animates the Republican Party. Last July, with their budget reconciliation bill known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Republicans extended the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee promised the measure would fuel an economic boom. “Renewing the Trump tax cuts will be a huge boost to America’s economy—leading to higher wages and more job creation,” they said.

Not a single Democrat voted for the measure. Among other things, Democrats noted, its failure to extend the premium tax credits that enabled individuals and families to buy healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act markets would mean Americans would lose health insurance, and the slashing of about $186 billion in federal spending, about 20% of it, from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over 10 years would hurt Americans who live with food insecurity.

The numbers are starting to come in.

Last Friday, Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times reported the conclusion of insurers and analysts that at least 20% of those covered by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, are dropping their coverage, with analysts expecting that number will continue to rise another 6%. Already at least 5 million of the 24 million people who were covered last year have dropped their coverage. In Georgia, enrollment has fallen by more than a third.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month that the drop in coverage has come from the administration’s crackdown on fraud.

As Melissa Goldin of the Associated Press reported yesterday, there is a similar story about SNAP recipients. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins recently told the Fox News Channel that “we now have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program. A lot of that is fraud. A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been. And a lot of it is just a better economy…. So people don’t need food stamps.”

In fact, as Goldin notes, experts say that fraud in SNAP is rare, with less than 1% of those who enroll disqualified from the program for fraud. People appear to have dropped off the SNAP rolls because the new rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made it harder to enroll.

While Republicans don’t intend to fund healthcare or nutrition programs, the Senate’s proposed budget reconciliation bill appropriates $72 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for Border Patrol, through 2029. Extending the funding until then means that Democrats will not be able to use funding as leverage to try to reform ICE and Border Patrol after their aggressive sweeps targeting immigrants led to dramatic abuses, including the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

In February, G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers crunched the polls and found that reforms to ICE are extraordinarily popular. Ninety-two percent of Americans want ICE agents to wear body cameras, for example, and 80% wanted an independent investigation in the killings of Good and Pretti. Morris noted that between 60% and 90% of voters—a supermajority that includes Republicans and a majority of Independents—say they want “transparency, accountability, rules, and oversight” for federal agents.

Today, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump’s White House advisor on border security, Tom Homan, assured Republicans that mass deportation is coming and that the administration will flood immigration officers into jurisdictions that aren’t cooperative. Michael Williams of CNN reported that Homan told Republicans angry that the administration is not deporting enough people: “You ain’t seen sh*t yet. This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.” He added: “You’re going to see more ICE agents you ever seen before.”

The administration’s disregard for the will of the American people also shows in its approach to its war on Iran. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we’re done with that stage of it. We’re now on to this Project Freedom,” the attempt to open the Strait of Hormuz. The 1973 War Powers Act required the president either to get congressional approval for the war or to withdraw the troops within 60 days of notifying Congress of a military action. That deadline was May 1.

Now, according to Rubio, the war is now in a different phase: opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump’s military adventure.

But Iranian officials have responded to Trump’s Project Freedom with military strikes against both the vessels attempting the transit and other Gulf countries. This afternoon, Trump backed down.

He posted on social media: “Based on the request of Pakistan and other Countries, the tremendous Military Success that we have had during the Campaign against the Country of Iran and, additionally, the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement with Representatives of Iran, we have mutually agreed that, while the Blockade will remain in full force and effect, Project Freedom (The Movement of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz) will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the Agreement can be finalized and signed.”

What a mess.

It really doesn’t look like a retrievable system unless an enormous amount of goodwill is found. And that’s a scares commodity in the US political system.

Michael V said:

What a mess.

It really doesn’t look like a retrievable system unless an enormous amount of goodwill is found. And that’s a scares commodity in the US political system.

Its evil how the Republicans think, they may as well be Nazi’s
I assume their aim is a high tech dystopian police state with the elite controlling the masses through various means.
Its so uncaring, how dead must your soul be to think about some of those things let alone implement them.

Cymek said:

Michael V said:

What a mess.

It really doesn’t look like a retrievable system unless an enormous amount of goodwill is found. And that’s a scares commodity in the US political system.

Its evil how the Republicans think, they may as well be Nazi’s
I assume their aim is a high tech dystopian police state with the elite controlling the masses through various means.
Its so uncaring, how dead must your soul be to think about some of those things let alone implement them.

Actually, I think SCIENCE nails it. It’s a team sport. Your mob vs the other mob.

Win at all costs. Do whatever it takes. Supporters continue wearing their scarves and beanies and go to stadiums. Own the other team, even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts you a lot.

It’s not about discourse and ideas. It’s a battle that must be won.

Cymek said:

Michael V said:

What a mess.

It really doesn’t look like a retrievable system unless an enormous amount of goodwill is found. And that’s a scares commodity in the US political system.

Its evil how the Republicans think, they may as well be Nazi’s
I assume their aim is a high tech dystopian police state with the elite controlling the masses through various means.
Its so uncaring, how dead must your soul be to think about some of those things let alone implement them.

It is not just the Republicans, the genocide in Gaza was not a red line for Democrats. I know folks disagree with me but so many Americans stayed home because of the genocide. It was the breaking point. If you can’t fight to stop a genocide, then you won’t have the guts to save democracy.

Both Centrist Dems & Reps collaborated together to use the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 50 years.

70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days, pay rent & skip meals so their kids can eat.

They can’t afford a $500 medical emergency. They are one missed shift from homelessness.

The historians will be shocked that folks didn’t think that with not enough food to eat and no stable housing. That folks gave up on the political processes.

The Dems aren’t even pretending to fight back. Pelosi chose Connolly over AOC and Dingell over Jasmine Crockett. I had to look up who Connolly was, he had throat cancer and 4,000 followers. AOC has 20 million folIowers and I also had to look up Dingell and I haven’t heard anything about her since. Jasmine Crockett constantly goes viral.

Chuck Schumer was one of the seven Democrats who voted to keep the war in the Strait going. The They rotate Dems to vote through the unpopular with their base bills.

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Michael V said:

What a mess.

It really doesn’t look like a retrievable system unless an enormous amount of goodwill is found. And that’s a scares commodity in the US political system.

Its evil how the Republicans think, they may as well be Nazi’s
I assume their aim is a high tech dystopian police state with the elite controlling the masses through various means.
Its so uncaring, how dead must your soul be to think about some of those things let alone implement them.

It is not just the Republicans, the genocide in Gaza was not a red line for Democrats. I know folks disagree with me but so many Americans stayed home because of the genocide. It was the breaking point. If you can’t fight to stop a genocide, then you won’t have the guts to save democracy.

Both Centrist Dems & Reps collaborated together to use the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 50 years.

70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days, pay rent & skip meals so their kids can eat.

They can’t afford a $500 medical emergency. They are one missed shift from homelessness.

The historians will be shocked that folks didn’t think that with not enough food to eat and no stable housing. That folks gave up on the political processes.

The Dems aren’t even pretending to fight back. Pelosi chose Connolly over AOC and Dingell over Jasmine Crockett. I had to look up who Connolly was, he had throat cancer and 4,000 followers. AOC has 20 million folIowers and I also had to look up Dingell and I haven’t heard anything about her since. Jasmine Crockett constantly goes viral.

Chuck Schumer was one of the seven Democrats who voted to keep the war in the Strait going. The They rotate Dems to vote through the unpopular with their base bills.

I know some people think I rant on too much about the USA being awful as nation
The people themselves are like everyone else good and bad to varying degrees.
However their government is insidious in how they do it, they don’t appear outright evil like various regime around the world.
They conquered through things like Hollywood convincing everyone how important it is whilst abusing the very woman and children who are part of it.
They created blind patriotism and an underclass to fight their wars for them.
Monetised health care and a service class dependent on customers to survive, creating a huge power imbalance.
The cold war corrupted them to use proxies and not care what damage they did.
They have always had fascist leanings going back to the days of slavery with an underclass they consider inferior.

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Its evil how the Republicans think, they may as well be Nazi’s
I assume their aim is a high tech dystopian police state with the elite controlling the masses through various means.
Its so uncaring, how dead must your soul be to think about some of those things let alone implement them.

It is not just the Republicans, the genocide in Gaza was not a red line for Democrats. I know folks disagree with me but so many Americans stayed home because of the genocide. It was the breaking point. If you can’t fight to stop a genocide, then you won’t have the guts to save democracy.

Both Centrist Dems & Reps collaborated together to use the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 50 years.

70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days, pay rent & skip meals so their kids can eat.

They can’t afford a $500 medical emergency. They are one missed shift from homelessness.

The historians will be shocked that folks didn’t think that with not enough food to eat and no stable housing. That folks gave up on the political processes.

The Dems aren’t even pretending to fight back. Pelosi chose Connolly over AOC and Dingell over Jasmine Crockett. I had to look up who Connolly was, he had throat cancer and 4,000 followers. AOC has 20 million folIowers and I also had to look up Dingell and I haven’t heard anything about her since. Jasmine Crockett constantly goes viral.

Chuck Schumer was one of the seven Democrats who voted to keep the war in the Strait going. The They rotate Dems to vote through the unpopular with their base bills.

I know some people think I rant on too much about the USA being awful as nation
The people themselves are like everyone else good and bad to varying degrees.
However their government is insidious in how they do it, they don’t appear outright evil like various regime around the world.
They conquered through things like Hollywood convincing everyone how important it is whilst abusing the very woman and children who are part of it.
They created blind patriotism and an underclass to fight their wars for them.
Monetised health care and a service class dependent on customers to survive, creating a huge power imbalance.
The cold war corrupted them to use proxies and not care what damage they did.
They have always had fascist leanings going back to the days of slavery with an underclass they consider inferior.

It is a country built on genocide and stealing lands. Then stealing people and brutal slavery. And it never reckoned with this. IMHO this is always how America has been. It’s just some of it is now happening to some white people.

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

It is not just the Republicans, the genocide in Gaza was not a red line for Democrats. I know folks disagree with me but so many Americans stayed home because of the genocide. It was the breaking point. If you can’t fight to stop a genocide, then you won’t have the guts to save democracy.

Both Centrist Dems & Reps collaborated together to use the neoliberalist “Poverty as a Policy Choice” for the last 50 years.

70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They work 2-3 jobs over 6-7 days, pay rent & skip meals so their kids can eat.

They can’t afford a $500 medical emergency. They are one missed shift from homelessness.

The historians will be shocked that folks didn’t think that with not enough food to eat and no stable housing. That folks gave up on the political processes.

The Dems aren’t even pretending to fight back. Pelosi chose Connolly over AOC and Dingell over Jasmine Crockett. I had to look up who Connolly was, he had throat cancer and 4,000 followers. AOC has 20 million folIowers and I also had to look up Dingell and I haven’t heard anything about her since. Jasmine Crockett constantly goes viral.

Chuck Schumer was one of the seven Democrats who voted to keep the war in the Strait going. The They rotate Dems to vote through the unpopular with their base bills.

I know some people think I rant on too much about the USA being awful as nation
The people themselves are like everyone else good and bad to varying degrees.
However their government is insidious in how they do it, they don’t appear outright evil like various regime around the world.
They conquered through things like Hollywood convincing everyone how important it is whilst abusing the very woman and children who are part of it.
They created blind patriotism and an underclass to fight their wars for them.
Monetised health care and a service class dependent on customers to survive, creating a huge power imbalance.
The cold war corrupted them to use proxies and not care what damage they did.
They have always had fascist leanings going back to the days of slavery with an underclass they consider inferior.

It is a country built on genocide and stealing lands. Then stealing people and brutal slavery. And it never reckoned with this. IMHO this is always how America has been. It’s just some of it is now happening to some white people.

People would have Australia going down that path.
We aren’t perfect but damn we have so many better services that care for people, like Medicare
I wouldn’t want to be a leader whose got morals in this world and try to stick to them.

Michael V said:

Cymek said:

Michael V said:

What a mess.

It really doesn’t look like a retrievable system unless an enormous amount of goodwill is found. And that’s a scares commodity in the US political system.

Its evil how the Republicans think, they may as well be Nazi’s
I assume their aim is a high tech dystopian police state with the elite controlling the masses through various means.
Its so uncaring, how dead must your soul be to think about some of those things let alone implement them.

Actually, I think SCIENCE nails it. It’s a team sport. Your mob vs the other mob.

Win at all costs. Do whatever it takes. Supporters continue wearing their scarves and beanies and go to stadiums. Own the other team, even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts you a lot.

It’s not about discourse and ideas. It’s a battle that must be won.

It should be noted that MZL uses ‘team sports’ as a pejorative for democracy in general and not just the dysfunctional situation in the US.

May 6, 2026 (Wednesday)

It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.

While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”

The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.

Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.

This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.

This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.

The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.

Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.

Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains:
“Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”

In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.

Fitzpatrick notes that “everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”

“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”

Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.

If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.

Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.

Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”

Indeed.

This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

That’s quite amusing naming convention

buffy said:

May 6, 2026 (Wednesday)

It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.

While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”

The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.

Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.

This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.

This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.

The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.

Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.

Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains:
“Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”

In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.

Fitzpatrick notes that “everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”

“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”

Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.

If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.

Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.

Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”

Indeed.

Its interesting in regards to the USA carriers and if they are hiding vulnerabilities as they became complacent due to having no enemies capable of attacking them before.

buffy said:

May 6, 2026 (Wednesday)

It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.

While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”

The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.

Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.

This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.

This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.

The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.

Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.

Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains:
“Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”

In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.

Fitzpatrick notes that “everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”

“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”

Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.

If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.

Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.

Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”

Indeed.

Laughed at Kash wanting for give his own staff polygraph tests, but I am sombre about the rest of it. My fear is that whoever comes after Trump will be much, much worse.

ms spock said:

buffy said:

May 6, 2026 (Wednesday)

It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.

While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”

The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.

Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.

This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.

This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.

The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.

Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.

Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains:
“Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”

In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.

Fitzpatrick notes that “everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”

“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”

Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.

If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.

Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.

Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”

Indeed.

Laughed at Kash wanting for give his own staff polygraph tests, but I am sombre about the rest of it. My fear is that whoever comes after Trump will be much, much worse.

It’s certainly a worry that you can basically buy, lie and cheat your way to becoming president.

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

buffy said:

May 6, 2026 (Wednesday)

It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.

While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”

The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.

Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.

This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.

This evening, Iran’s foreign minister M.B. Ghalibaf posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”

Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.

The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.

Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.

Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains:
“Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”

In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.

Fitzpatrick notes that “everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”

“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”

Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.

If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.

Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.

Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”

Indeed.

Laughed at Kash wanting for give his own staff polygraph tests, but I am sombre about the rest of it. My fear is that whoever comes after Trump will be much, much worse.

It’s certainly a worry that you can basically buy, lie and cheat your way to becoming president.

It is a worry.

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

Laughed at Kash wanting for give his own staff polygraph tests, but I am sombre about the rest of it. My fear is that whoever comes after Trump will be much, much worse.

It’s certainly a worry that you can basically buy, lie and cheat your way to becoming president.

It is a worry.

Don’t know about the lie and cheat part but my father told me that you could basically buy the presidency in the USA back in the 60’s when my dad was still alive.

Cymek said:

It’s certainly a worry that you can basically buy, lie and cheat your way to becoming president.

what is politics

May 7, 2026 (Thursday)
Today Tennessee state representative Justin Jones burned a Confederate battle flag in the rotunda of the Tennessee State Capitol in protest of the legislature’s redrawing of the state’s congressional district maps to erase the majority-Black 9th Congressional District. By cracking the city of Memphis into three pieces and joining them to white suburbs, the legislature turned all the state’s districts into Republican seats.

The actions of the Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are a direct response to the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which found that in creating a second congressional district to enable Black voters to elect a representative of their choice, as mandated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Louisiana legislature unconstitutionally took race into account when drawing the district lines. Although the Supreme Court’s clerk normally waits 32 days to finalize an opinion, the Supreme Court made the decision effective immediately to allow Louisiana, where the primary election was already underway, to redraw its maps.

Immediately, Republican-dominated state governments rushed to redistrict their states to eliminate majority-Black districts, thus slashing through Democratic representation in their states. As Khaya Himmelman of Talking Points Memo explained today, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, immediately suspended a congressional primary election that was already underway in order to give Republican legislators a chance to change the maps to give at least one of the state’s two Democratic seats to Republicans.

Although a federal court injunction forbids Alabama from redrawing its maps before the 2030 census, Republican governor Kay Ivey called for the state to do so, and Republican attorney general Steve Marshall has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to let the state revert to a map struck down in 2023 because it was racially gerrymandered.

Trump began this gerrymandering arms race last year, pressuring Republican Texas legislators to redistrict the state to help Republicans win the midterms and protect him from investigations and possible impeachment. As of today, Patrick Marley of the Washington Post noted, Republican-dominated legislatures in Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida have redistricted to pick up Republican seats, while Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama are engaged in that process. In retaliation, Democrats have temporarily redistricted the states of California and Virginia.

Tennessee is now expected to send only Republicans to Congress. Just minutes after the Republicans cut Memphis into thirds to get rid of the voices of Black Democrats, Republican state senator Brent Taylor announced he was running for the new seat “to stand with President Trump and cement Tennessee’s conservative legacy for generations to come.”

In Tennessee, Representative Steve Cohen, who currently represents Memphis and who is the only Democrat in the Tennessee congressional delegation, posted: “And just like that, the TN GOP voted to enforce a racial gerrymander of Memphis and strip our city of effective representation for decades. Trump knows he HAS TO rig the game to keep his majority in November. And the TN GOP was willing to go along with it. It’s shameful. Next stop is the courts.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has already sued to block the redistricting.

Cohen is right that the Republicans recognize the only way for them to win going forward is to skew the maps so that Democrats can’t win, because right now, at least, the administration is a dumpster fire.

This morning, Warren P. Strobel, John Hudson, and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a confidential analysis of conditions in Iran that suggests the administration has been badly off the mark in its public statements about the war.

Although Trump insists that the war had been an overwhelming military victory and that Iran is suffering so badly from the U.S. military blockade it will have to cave to U.S. demands quickly, the CIA report assesses that, in fact, Iran can survive for at least three or four more months before having to deal with more severe economic hardship. The report also assesses that Iran still has about 75% of the mobile missile launchers it had before the war and about 70% of its missiles.

Trump has told reporters that Iran’s economy is “crashing” and that Iran was down to 18% or 19% of its former missile stocks.

The content of the analysis is important, and so is the fact that CIA analysts are sharing it with reporters, suggesting they are disturbed by the administration’s current trajectory.

The administration insists the war has “terminated,” meaning that it does not have to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to either withdraw troops or get congressional approval for continuing military actions. Today the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire in the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran firing on three U.S. destroyers and the U.S. firing on two ships entering the strait.

While the Iranian military called the strikes a violation of the ceasefire, a U.S. official told Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios that the exchange did not mean the war had resumed. This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

As the national average for a gallon of gas hit $4.56 today, the British energy giant Shell announced its profits were up 24% in the first three months of 2026. This amounted to almost $7 billion, more than twice what Shell made in the previous quarter.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Keilman reported today that Whirlpool, which makes refrigerators and washing machines, said the Iran war has caused a “recession-level industry decline” and that Americans should expect to pay higher prices for appliances going forward.

While experts say there were about 14 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2025, Trump border advisor Tom Homan told the Fox News Channel today that there are “well over 20 million” undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and “we’re going to do everything we can to arrest as many people as we can.”

But a new Pew poll shows that 52% of Americans already think Trump is cracking down too hard on undocumented immigrants. Politico adds that that number includes about a quarter of the people who voted for him in 2024. It also includes 67% of Latino voters, who had swung toward the Republicans in 2024.

Those poll numbers came before today’s story by Lisa Song, Maya Miller, Melissa Sanchez, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica identifying 79 children injured by tear gas or pepper spray during immigration encounters. While the reporters documented federal agents throwing tear gas and shooting pepper spray into crowds, the Department of Homeland Security said the fault for the children’s injuries lies with “agitators” and parents who put their children in harm’s way. “DHS does NOT target children,” it said.

The journalists assess that their count of 79 injured children is “likely still a vast undercount.”

Americans are paying dearly for the administration’s detention of immigrants. Just today, Patricia Mazzei and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that the administration of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is talking with the Trump administration about closing the Everglades detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz. The center has been called unsanitary and inhumane since it opened about ten months ago, yet the cost of housing its 1,400 detainees is more than $1 million a day. DeSantis has asked for $608 million to run the camp for a year.

And then there are Trump’s increasingly high profile attacks on the pope. Pope Leo XIV is the first pope from the United States, and Trump seems determined to challenge him. The pope has spoken out against inhumane treatment of migrants and has called for peace through diplomacy, an observation Trump has taken as criticism of his war on Iran. Last week, Pope Leo appointed Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala to become the new bishop of West Virginia. Menjivar-Ayala was once an undocumented immigrant himself.

Trump posted last month that Pope Leo was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and he has continued his attacks, saying Monday: “The pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don’t think that’s very good. I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics, and a lot of people, but I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

As Sarah Ewall-Wice reported in the Daily Beast, Pope Leo responded indirectly, noting that “he mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace. If anyone wants to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so truthfully.” He continued: “The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, so there is no doubt about that.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was at the Vatican today to ease tensions. The visit did not go particularly well. While Rubio gave Pope Leo a crystal football with the seal of the State Department, Pope Leo gave Rubio a pen made from the symbol of peace: olive wood. The Vatican’s statement did not suggest the men found much common ground, saying the meeting included “an exchange of views regarding the regional and international situation, with particular attention to countries marked by war, political tensions, and difficult humanitarian situations, as well as to the need to work tirelessly in support of peace.”

And finally, today the president himself is in the news…or, rather, out of it. Trump, both of whose hands have been covered in makeup lately, apparently to hide bruises, was supposed to have a meeting today with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil at 11:15 that was open to the press. The reporters waited three hours, but the event never happened. At 1:22, Trump’s social media account simply posted that “he meeting went very well” and that representatives from the two countries would continue to meet.

So when all these undocumented immigrants are gone who is going to do the underpaid exploited jobs they performed.
Anyone or the jobs disappear and entire industries collapse

Cymek said:

So when all these undocumented immigrants are gone who is going to do the underpaid exploited jobs they performed.
Anyone or the jobs disappear and entire industries collapse

the people once in well paid white-collars jobs who have just been made redundant by AI.

party_pants said:

Cymek said:

So when all these undocumented immigrants are gone who is going to do the underpaid exploited jobs they performed.
Anyone or the jobs disappear and entire industries collapse

the people once in well paid white-collars jobs who have just been made redundant by AI.

^

Gosh!

Thanks for posting.

This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

If I was on the Iranian War Board, this would come back to bite you-know-who’s bum in a big way.

Neophyte said:

This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

If I was on the Iranian War Board, this would come back to bite you-know-who’s bum in a big way.

Bit harsh on Rachel…

Neophyte said:

This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

If I was on the Iranian War Board, this would come back to bite you-know-who’s bum in a big way.

I noticed that too. ‘Love tap’ as terminology makes me squirm. So incredibly inappropriate. For lots of reasons.

buffy said:

Neophyte said:

This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

If I was on the Iranian War Board, this would come back to bite you-know-who’s bum in a big way.

I noticed that too. ‘Love tap’ as terminology makes me squirm. So incredibly inappropriate. For lots of reasons.

Yes.

Flooding the zone continues unabated.

I hope everyone with family in America knows that they are safe.

buffy said:

Neophyte said:

This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

If I was on the Iranian War Board, this would come back to bite you-know-who’s bum in a big way.

I noticed that too. ‘Love tap’ as terminology makes me squirm. So incredibly inappropriate. For lots of reasons.

Shows the way his mind works. The reveal isn’t in any way appropriate behaviour towards others.

roughbarked said:

buffy said:

Neophyte said:

This evening, the president told Rachel Scott of ABC News in a phone call that the ceasefire is still in effect and “the retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets are just a ‘love tap.’”

If I was on the Iranian War Board, this would come back to bite you-know-who’s bum in a big way.

I noticed that too. ‘Love tap’ as terminology makes me squirm. So incredibly inappropriate. For lots of reasons.

Shows the way his mind works. The reveal isn’t in any way appropriate behaviour towards others.

wait are these other fascist paedophiles now whining about war like the other ones write their emails

Today in politics explainer from Heather Cox Richardson

Posted 18 hours ago.

53 minutes long

Heather Cox Richardson on the gerrymandering arms race

Posted one hour ago

13 minutes long

It is a snippet of yesterday’s letter.

May 8, 2026 (Friday)

In case you’re wondering what kind of a news day it was, President Donald J. Trump announced that the “Department of War” was releasing “Government files related to Alien and Extraterrestrial Life, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and Unidentified Flying Objects.” The president posted: “Have Fun and Enjoy!”
It’s hard to see the release of this information at this moment as anything more than a distraction from the many stories in the news that show the administration in an unflattering light.

The biggest of those stories was not that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy took his family on a seven-month road trip to film a television series called The Great American Road Trip while he was supposed to be doing his job as secretary of transportation, or that he told Fox & Friends this morning that “it fits any budget to do a road trip” on a day when the national average for a gallon of gas was $4.54.

It was not the story, written by David A. Fahrenthold and Luke Broadwater and published in the New York Times, that Trump gave a no-bid $6.9 million contract to reseal the joints, waterproof, and paint bright blue the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such contracts are supposed to be reviewed and put out for bids, but Trump ignored the review process and used an exemption designed to prevent “serious injury, financial or other, to the government” to award a no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which has never before won a federal contract but which had worked at one of his golf clubs, because he wanted the work done before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026.

The contract is for more than triple the $1.8 million Trump promised, and officials say the repairs will last for seven to ten years, rather than the 50 years Trump claimed. Even that might be generous: One expert warned that the motorcade the president took onto the pool yesterday to review the project was heavy enough to have sprung the newly-repaired joints between the concrete slabs that make up the pool bed.

It was not the story by economist Justin Wolfers in the New York Times explaining that the Defense Department’s claim that the war on Iran has cost taxpayers $25 billion tallies only the price of the 2,000 spent Tomahawk and Patriot missiles, the airplanes lost, and the other matériel used. It does not measure the lives lost, the disruption in global oil markets, companies shut down (like Spirit Airlines), heightened geopolitical tensions, higher interest rates, lower stock prices, lower economic growth, Iran’s new ability to charge tolls in the Strait of Hormuz to fund its nuclear ambitions, and the new need for countries to increase military spending. Wolfers notes that the Iraq war cost about $3 trillion and estimates the Iran war “will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions.”

In any case, Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic reported today that Trump is “bored” with the war and wants to move on. Five of Trump’s aides and advisors told Lemire that Trump is convinced he can sell any agreement as a win, but so far Iran is unwilling to bail Trump out of the war he started.

It was not the story in the Washington Post by Brianna Sacks and Kevin Crowe reporting that under Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which helps people prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, has been denying aid to states that have Democratic-led governments while speeding it to Republican-dominated states.

It was not the story by Mark Olalde of ProPublica reporting that the Trump administration has granted a two-year pause on compliance with the Clean Air Act to more than 180 facilities, like coal power plants and medical sterilizers, that are polluting in 38 states and Puerto Rico. The administration sidelined the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by using a presidential exemption that can be tapped “if the technology to implement the standard is not available and it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”

This authority has never been used before, and other utilities say they are using the pollution controls the administration claims don’t exist. Trump has also invoked the national security justification for the pauses, claiming that the U.S. is in a national energy emergency out of concern that emerging industries, like AI and the data centers on which AI relies will not be able to get the huge amounts of energy they need. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Olalde: “The President has provided regulatory relief from certain burdensome Clean Air Act requirements due to national security concerns that critical industries would no longer be able to operate under such stringent standards.”

Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Adam Schiff of California have introduced a bill requiring the president to get Congress’s approval for such pauses in the future. Whitehouse noted that Trump’s exemptions show a willingness to “abuse every loophole available to pollute for free, damn the health consequences for Americans.”

It was not the story that the Court of International Trade in New York found Trump’s 10% global tariffs, imposed after the Supreme Court declared his “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2025 unconstitutional, to be illegal. Trump is expected to appeal. Yesterday, he threatened to impose “much higher” tariffs on the European Union if it does not approve a trade agreement with the U.S. by July 4.

The biggest story of the day was not even the dedication of the 22-foot gold statue of Trump installed at his golf course in Miami. Marth McHardy of the Daily Beast reported that a group of crypto investors paid for the $450,000 statue as part of a promotional push for their new memecoin.

No, the biggest story of the day was that after voters in Virginia turned out in record numbers to approve a new temporary congressional district map on April 21 to garner four more seats for Democrats, the Virginia state supreme court struck down the referendum. Virginia voters had agreed to the change in order to counter gerrymandering imposed by Republican legislators in Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, North Carolina, and Florida that is expected to gain them an additional 14 seats across the country. (Following last week’s Louisiana v. Callais Supreme Court decision, Republicans are hoping to change the lines in Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina to take four more.) So far, voters in California have agreed to a temporary redistricting of California to pick up four seats there.

The court split on partisan lines, saying the process of passing the referendum violated the state’s constitution. With Trump’s job approval ratings in the low 30s, anger at rising prices, frustration at the war on Iran, dislike of the administration’s attacks on immigrants, and growing outrage at the extraordinary corruption of the administration, Republicans were so worried they would lose control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections that they began the gerrymandering wars. Now those wars have turned in their favor.

“Huge win for the Republican Party, and America, in Virginia,” Trump gloated on social media. “The Virginia Supreme Court has just struck down the Democrats’ horrible gerrymander. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

In the end, the UFO files red herring from today’s news dump didn’t appear to work. Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called the UFO files a distraction from the Iran war and said: “Unless they roll out live aliens and test demo UFOs or actually admit what we know this really is then I have way better things to do on this Friday.” The chair of the Michigan Democratic Party also commented: “If any aliens had flown over Epstein Island, you could be damn sure Trump would keep their secret. Whether aliens are out there or not, I’m more concerned about the American people here on Earth struggling to pay for food rent.”

And Democrats certainly didn’t miss the Virginia decision. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, posted: “Today, in an outrageous outburst of right-wing judicial activism following the Roberts Court’s Callais decision, the Virginia Supreme Court has struck down the will of the voters. But democracy won’t end with right-wingers in black robes. Now is the time to campaign like never before for strong democracy, freedom and progress. The American people will have the final say in November. Organize!”

Luckily the UAPs aren’t using Hormuz oil. They’d be in some real trouble, coming all this way to find their fuel source closed.

May 9, 2026 (Saturday)

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that newly invented long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or withered into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.

The women who had watched their hale and healthy men march off to war were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers. The men who did come home were scarred in both body and mind.

Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.

But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they had every expectation that they would continue to be considered valuable participants in national affairs, and had every intention of continuing to take part in them.

But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that Black men were citizens, did not explicitly include women in that right. Worse, it introduced the word “male” into the Constitution when it warned states against preventing “male inhabitants” from voting. In 1869, the year after the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, women organized two organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association—to promote women’s right to have a say in American government.

From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer who in the early years of the Civil War had penned “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note that Christ was “born of woman.”

Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who believed that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.

For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:

“I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?’”

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.” Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her suffering,” to stop the madness.

“Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”

Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next great development in human history, ending war just as the antislavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air meetings.

Howe organized international peace conferences, and American states developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly realized that there was much to be done before women could come together on a global scale. She turned her attention to women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”

As Howe worked to unite women, she came to realize that a woman did not have to center her life around a man, but rather should be “a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility.” “This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world,” she later recalled, “or of a new testament to the old ordinances.” She threw herself into the struggle for women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal participants in American politics.

While we celebrate the modern version of Mother’s Day on May 10, in this momentous year of 2026, it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must have the same rights as men, and that they must make their voices heard.

Nice. Ta.

And here we are in 2026 still fighting equality battles.

Divine Angel said:

And here we are in 2026 still fighting equality battles.

and it is still a struggle.

Heather Cox Richardson

May 10, 2026 (Sunday)

There were two very different celebrations in Russia and in Hungary yesterday.

Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.

May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.
But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.

This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”

But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.

Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year.

Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”

Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.

As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.

Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus.

Russia had announced a ceasefire for Friday and Saturday, but when it unraveled, President Donald J. Trump announced that he had persuaded Russia and Ukraine to agree to a three-day ceasefire that would cover the Victory Day celebration and allow an exchange of 1,000 prisoners from each country. After the announcement of the ceasefire, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky trolled Putin with a formal presidential decree to “allow” a parade in Moscow. It said: “For the time of the parade…the territorial square of Red Square shall be excluded from the plan of application of Ukrainian weapons.”

By Sunday—after the parade—the ceasefire had already broken down.

Today McFaul noted: “Ukrainian warriors have stopped the invading Russian hordes. Putin is losing his war in Ukraine…. Putin would be wise to cut his losses.”

In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.

In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.

In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”

The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.

But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.

“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised.

Then Magyar and members of his party walked out to the crowd outside the parliament on Lajos Kossuth Lajos Square. Magyar urged them to see themselves as one community. He assured them that the story of the day had not been written by politicians in backrooms, but by them. “t was all of you. You wrote it, through your work, your hope, your concern, and your determination. This is now your transition to democracy, this is your homeland, your National Assembly, and we thank you!”

After Magyar spoke, as Roma singer Ibolya Oláh, a lesbian, began performing her anthem “Magyarország,” the crowd crossed the reflecting pool in front of the parliament building to surge forward, taking back their public spaces and their parliament, illustrating their faith in a new era for their country.

Bogsnorkler said:

Heather Cox Richardson

May 10, 2026 (Sunday)

There were two very different celebrations in Russia and in Hungary yesterday.

Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.

May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.
But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.

This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”

But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.

Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year.

Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”

Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.

As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.

Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus.

Russia had announced a ceasefire for Friday and Saturday, but when it unraveled, President Donald J. Trump announced that he had persuaded Russia and Ukraine to agree to a three-day ceasefire that would cover the Victory Day celebration and allow an exchange of 1,000 prisoners from each country. After the announcement of the ceasefire, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky trolled Putin with a formal presidential decree to “allow” a parade in Moscow. It said: “For the time of the parade…the territorial square of Red Square shall be excluded from the plan of application of Ukrainian weapons.”

By Sunday—after the parade—the ceasefire had already broken down.

Today McFaul noted: “Ukrainian warriors have stopped the invading Russian hordes. Putin is losing his war in Ukraine…. Putin would be wise to cut his losses.”

In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.

In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.

In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”

The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.

But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.

“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised.

Then Magyar and members of his party walked out to the crowd outside the parliament on Lajos Kossuth Lajos Square. Magyar urged them to see themselves as one community. He assured them that the story of the day had not been written by politicians in backrooms, but by them. “t was all of you. You wrote it, through your work, your hope, your concern, and your determination. This is now your transition to democracy, this is your homeland, your National Assembly, and we thank you!”

After Magyar spoke, as Roma singer Ibolya Oláh, a lesbian, began performing her anthem “Magyarország,” the crowd crossed the reflecting pool in front of the parliament building to surge forward, taking back their public spaces and their parliament, illustrating their faith in a new era for their country.

The only thing I’d be wary about in regards to LBGTQ rights is unscrupulous people pushing surgery as a cure all and perhaps overemphasising how good it is.
I’d assume you get what you pay for and if it’s botched then you could have permanent problems.

Thanks for posting.

Heather Cox Richardson

May 11, 2026 (Monday)

The story of the Trump Mobile phone seems a microcosm of the Trump administration.

As Judd Legum of Popular Information explains, on June 16, 2025, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric announced the launch of a new, gold plated, Trump smartphone, “proudly designed and built in the United States.” It would be available in August 2025 for $499. Its website urged customers to “pre-order” the phone by depositing $100 toward it. Don Jr. said the phone would be “American hardware, built in America, without the potential of… backdoor into the hardware that some of our adversaries have installed in there.”

And yet a disclaimer on the website said the Trumps and the Trump Organization were involved only in the branding of the phone; they had nothing to do with the design, development, manufacture, distribution, or sales of the item. As Legum notes, the idea of a superior U.S.-made phone was always a fantasy, and within two weeks the phone’s description changed from “MADE IN THE USA” to “designed with American values in mind.”

The phone never shipped, and on April 6, Trump Mobile updated its terms to say the $100 deposit was not actually a deposit for a pre-order, but rather “a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.” It went on to say the deposit “does not lock in pricing, promotions, service plans, taxes, fees, shipping costs, or other commercial terms” and that “stimated ship dates, launch timelines, or anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only.”

A new phone has recently gotten clearance from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Trump Mobile executives say they are waiting for approval from T-Mobile, the company whose network Trump Mobile wants to use. Legum points out that T-Mobile relies on the federal government for approval for business activities, creating an enormous conflict of interest.

Donald Trump has always ridden to power by projecting an image of dominance. He could maintain that image thanks to the people who covered for him: his father, Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, and in his first presidential term—as Sidney Blumenthal reminded readers in The Guardian today—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who filtered the options Trump received; chief of staff General John Kelly, who made a pact with Mattis that one of them would always stay in the country to stand in the way of Trump’s impulses; and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who stopped Trump from signing disastrous executive orders, sometimes going so far as to steal them off his desk.

In Trump’s second term, though, those people who curbed his worst impulses have been replaced with yes-men, and there is no one to protect him from the fallout.

Over the weekend, Trump took to social media to complain bitterly about the demise of his tariffs, about Iran, and about political opponents; to boast about his changes to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and about the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) mixed martial arts event he plans to host in front of the White House on his 80th birthday; and to try, once again, to project dominance.

Trump complained twice that in its decision declaring his “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2025 unconstitutional, the Supreme Court had not included a sentence saying, “Any money paid to the United States of America does not have to be paid back.” That sentence, he insisted, “would have saved America 159 billion Dollars!” He complained about his Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and suggested he should “PACK THE COURT! I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

He warned them to vote his way on the question of birthright citizenship because “A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”

On Saturday morning, the president’s social media account posted AI images of exploding Iranian drones beside an image of blue butterflies with the caption “Drones Dropping Like Butterflies.” Then it posted another AI image of a U.S. vessel shooting down drones with the caption “Bye Bye, Drones.” Then it showed a flotilla of ships with Iranian flags on the surface of the ocean under the caption “Obama/Biden” beside an image of those ships on the bottom of the ocean under the caption “Trump.” Then it showed an AI image of Trump on the bridge of a ship watching Iranian ships exploding. Then it showed another image of “Iran’s Navy” on the ocean floor.

The account posted a long screed about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the European Union to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and this weekend Trump rehashed false right-wing talking points about the deal to claim that former president Barack Obama was “a weak and stupid American President” who worked for Iran.

Trump’s account posted an AI image of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gorging on junk food under the caption “JB is too busy to keep Chicago safe!” It posted two clips of former FBI director James Comey, whom the Department of Justice under Trump has criminally charged for posting a photograph of seashells spelling out “8647.” Trump called him “A Dirty Cop!!!” He went after California representative Ro Khanna and warned: “The Radical left Dumacrats must fail—our Country is at stake!”

Trump’s account posted two AI images of a UFC fight surrounded by a stadium-style audience in front of the White House. Then it posted five images of the Washington, D.C., reflecting pool colored electric blue, one of which claimed Trump had renovated it in a week for just $2 million. A number of posts championed his proposed ballroom on the site where he bulldozed the East Wing of the White House.

But by far the most frequent postings on the president’s social media account over the weekend were praise for Trump himself. In addition to posting “Excellent Poll Numbers. Thank you!” he reposted stories saying that he had delivered “remarkable leadership” and is “Master of the Deal,” that he is one of the top three presidents in U.S. history, or “WITHOUT A DOUBT THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN.” A number of posts called him “The Greatest of All Time.”

But just as with Trump Mobile, the clock is running out and the advertising isn’t working.

On May 7, Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark called Trump “an economic serial killer, whacking firms left and right.” She noted that Trump’s tariffs, along with deportations of farm workers and cancelling of foreign food aid programs, led farm bankruptcies to rise 46% in 2025 from the previous year, and now higher costs for diesel, fertilizer, and other products because of the Iran war are putting farmers under even more pressure.

Similarly, tariffs have cut into manufacturing jobs, and corporate bankruptcies last year were at their highest level in more than a decade. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is paying almost $2 billion to stop wind projects and has cancelled or stalled dozens of other renewable energy products. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to issue tariff refunds beginning on May 12, but the money will not go to consumers. It will go to the “trade community.”

Trump’s war on Iran, undertaken alongside Israel, has not delivered the fast regime change Trump promised, either. Instead, it has mired Trump in a war Iran appears to have little interest in permitting the U.S. to leave, at least not without confirming a new global order that benefits Iran.

In The Atlantic yesterday, neoconservative foreign policy scholar Robert Kagan ranked the Iran debacle as worse than Vietnam. There will be no going back to a world in which the Strait of Hormuz is open, he writes. Iran is now a key player in the region, China and Russia are strengthened, and the U.S. is “substantially diminished.” Anyone can see that “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power” drastically reduced American weapons stocks, opening the way for aggression from China or Russia, while “the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.”

Last week, the U.S. proposed a one-page memorandum to establish a framework for later talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, offering to lift sanctions and release billions in Iranian funds in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians responded over the weekend, reiterating their determination to control the strait and calling for reparations for damages caused by the war, in addition to an end to the naval blockade and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted: “I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it—TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”

Today Trump told reporters the Iran proposal was a “piece of garbage” and warned that the ceasefire is on “massive life support where the doctor walks in and says ‘Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living.’” And yet Trump is relying on that ceasefire to justify his refusal to ask Congress for authority to continue his war on Iran. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, Trump had 60 days to get congressional approval after informing Congress of the attack, and that period ran out on May 1.

Gas prices have jumped more than 50% since the war began and now average more than $4.50 a gallon. Although Trump has downplayed concerns about higher prices, today Nancy Cordes of CBS News reported that he is planning to suspend the federal gas tax to bring down the cost of gasoline. But, Cordes notes, doing so would require Congress to agree and would cost the federal government about a half a billion dollars a week in revenue at a time when the national debt is skyrocketing. It crossed $39 trillion in March just five months after hitting $38 trillion and is on track to hit $40 trillion before the midterm elections.

On Saturday, Julian Borger reported in The Guardian that tensions between Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are high. Former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas noted that Trump stopped mentioning Netanyahu by the end of March and left Israel out of the loop on ceasefire negotiations in April. Pinkas noted that if Trump lashes out at Netanyahu, he will look like he was manipulated into going to war, while Netanyahu has tied himself to Trump at a time when the prime minister must hold an election before October. “This affects Netanyahu politically and this affects Trump politically,” Pinkas told Borger. “In other words, they have screwed each other pretty badly.”

Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted last week that, apparently determined to convince Americans all is going well, Trump is putting words in our mouths. Around Washington, D.C., signs are appearing that show Trump in a hard hat near construction scaffolding and read: “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Thanks for posting.

May 12, 2026 (Tuesday)

The biggest story in the country, today and always, is that the president of the United States is mentally unwell.

Over the course of three hours last night, he posted on social media fifty-five times. Those posts accused a number of those Trump considers his personal enemies, including former president Barack Obama, of treason; claimed that investigations of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives were an attempt to damage Trump; insisted the 2020 presidential election was stolen; reposted a fake quotation from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accusing Obama of making a personal fortune of $120 million from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare; labeled Obama and others “traitors” and called for their arrest; and demanded to know why acting attorney general Todd Blanche hadn’t indicted any of those people yet.

This morning, he started in again with a long screed attacking the New York Times for its coverage of his alterations to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and insisting that Democratic presidents Obama and Joe Biden had “botched” renovations that he was now fixing for “a ‘tiny’ fraction of the cost!” He posted an AI image of Obama, Biden, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently swimming in a filthy version of the reflecting pool with the caption: “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” Then he posted an image of himself on the $100 bill. And then he was back to calling House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) “Low IQ.”

After posting a number of AI images showing the U.S. military destroying the Iranian military, Trump posted: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

Then he posted an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.”

Trump seems to be comforting himself by lashing out at his perceived enemies and insisting he is competent and popular. Before he left for China today, he claimed: “We have Iran very much under control. We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.”

Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, and Monica Alba of NBC News reported today that if Trump decides to restart major combat operations against Iran, military leaders are considering renaming the operations with a new name, like “Operation Sledgehammer,” to suggest those operations would be different than the current “Epic Fury.” They argue that renaming the military operation would restart the clock of the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional authorization to continue it after sixty days, a deadline that ran out on May 1.

War Powers Act expert Brian Finucane, who was a lawyer for the State Department, commented: “Nope. Changing the name of the authorized war with Iran does not alter the application of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock.”

In the meantime, there is no apparent movement toward opening the Strait of Hormuz, even as numbers released today by the Department of Labor show that inflation in April hit its highest level since 2023. Trump’s own intelligence agencies assessed earlier this year that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s leader had not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003. An assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that Iran would not be able to reach the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile until 2035.

Nonetheless, the administration and its supporters appear to have settled on the idea that the cost of the war has been worthwhile because the U.S. was under imminent threat of nuclear attack by Iran. When a reporter asked Trump today, before he left for China, to what extent Americans’ financial situation is motivating him to make a deal with Iran, he answered:

“Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran—they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”
A CNN/SSRS poll released today shows that 70% of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.

Trump is, however, thinking about his own financial situation. Tonight Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice is in talks to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for damages after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax information, including his, to the media.

The judge in the case has ordered Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice to file briefs by May 20 explaining why this is a true case in which the two sides are opposed when Trump both is the plaintiff and runs the agency that is the defendant. If they settle before then, the judge will not be able to say much about whether the case was valid in the first place.

Duehren and Feuer note that the Department of Justice has fought similar cases brought because of the leak, arguing that the government can’t be held liable for something a contractor does. The government settled a case with hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin in 2024 by making a public apology.

The New York Times journalists report that one of the options for settling with Trump would be for the IRS to drop any audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses. Since 1977, IRS policy has been to conduct a mandatory audit of the sitting president every year, although it failed to audit Trump’s taxes for his first two years in office during his first term. Clearly, he would like for it to fail to audit his taxes this time around as well.

The special treatment certain people enjoy in the U.S. that enables them to get around accountability was in the news earlier today, too, as the victims of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein testified before a panel made up of the Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The top Democrat on the committee, Robert Garcia of California, began the day by introducing a new report called “The Price of Non-Prosecution.” It explained that the sweetheart deal U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta—later Trump’s secretary of labor—negotiated with Epstein to protect him from federal prosecution left him able to continue his sex-trafficking operation and to expand it.

The survivors recounted their anger and frustration when they discovered the federal government had made a secret deal with Epstein. One survivor, who identified herself as Roza, detailed how Epstein sexually assaulted her over three years when he was supposed to be serving a jail sentence. She broke down as she recounted how the Department of Justice under then–attorney general Pam Bondi continued that favoritism, exposing her name publicly while leaving the names of the perpetrators’ names redacted.

“I stepped forward along other survivors hoping those who allowed this to happen will be held accountable. I kept my identity protected as ‘Jane Doe.’ I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world. Now reporters from across the globe contact me. I cannot live without looking over my shoulder. I can only imagine the long-term impact this ‘mistake’ will have on my life.”

In Tennessee today, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.

“We will not stop fighting,” state representative Justin Jones posted. “We will not stop getting in good trouble. We will not go back!”

May 13, 2026 (Wednesday)

Two weeks ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act provided that no state or local government could impose any conditions or procedures on voting that would result “in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

In the past, the Supreme Court has recognized that the right to vote alone does not necessarily fulfill the aims of the law. It’s possible—even easy—to dilute the votes of Black Americans to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate they support. Sometimes, then, in order to guarantee Black representation in government, states have had to create districts that are made up primarily of Black Americans. The court has condoned this practice, upholding the idea that in such a case, the state has a compelling reason to draw districts according to race. In the past, the court saw the creation of majority-minority districts as a way to comply with the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing that Black voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer.

But in 2024, a “non-Black” voter in Louisiana challenged a new majority-minority district drawn so that the state’s congressional delegation might include two Black legislators out of the six allocated to the state. Those districts were designed to remedy the fact that although one third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, the state has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction.

On April 29, by a vote of 6–3, with the right-wing justices in the majority, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s construction of a majority-minority district unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. It was, they said, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And, as the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the federal courts have no business addressing partisan gerrymandering.

Immediately, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to stop the state’s congressional primary election, which was already underway. His declaration has thrown the election into chaos as 45,000 ballots already cast won’t be counted, and the ballots already sent out will still include the race that Landry has now postponed.
Since then, other Republican-dominated states have rushed to pass mid-decade gerrymanders that will shut Democrats out of power.
Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, immediately called the Tennessee legislature into emergency special session to get rid of the state’s only Democratic member of Congress, the one representing Memphis. Sixty percent of the people who live in Memphis are Black. Once back in session, the Tennessee lawmakers repealed their own law that prohibited mid-decade redistricting. Then, on May 7, they cracked Memphis into three districts, diluting Black votes by swamping them with voters in white suburbs. The state had similarly cracked Nashville in 2022, flipping that seat, as well, from Democratic to Republican.

“Tennessee is a conservative state, and this map ensures that our congressional delegation reflects that,” Republican state senator John Stevens said. “This is about allowing Tennessee to maximize its partisan advantage.”

On May 8 the Virginia state supreme court voted along partisan lines to strike down a plan Virginia voters had approved to redraw the state’s congressional districts temporarily to favor Democrats as a way to counteract the Republicans’ partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states.

The court majority argued that the redistricting measure was invalid because, as Amna Nawaz and Ali Schmitz of PBS explained, the Virginia constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a constitutional amendment twice: once before a legislative election and once after. This should guarantee two different sets of eyes on any such amendment by letting the people elect new lawmakers between the votes. But when the General Assembly passed the measure the first time, early voting was already underway. Thus, the court said, it was not “before” a scheduled election.

On May 11, a week before elections are due to start there, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 district map that lower courts ruled unconstitutional because it diluted Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, thus violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an unsigned one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts to reevaluate in light of the Callais decision.

On May 12, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.

On May 13—today—Georgia governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the Georgia General Assembly for June 17 to redraw Georgia’s congressional maps before the 2028 election. He said it was too late to change Georgia’s maps for 2026, but that the Callais decision requires Georgia to change its electoral maps.

Also today, Louisiana legislators advanced a congressional map eliminating one of the state’s two Black-majority districts. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster is expected to call for a special session to eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district and only Democratic seat, and Mississippi governor Tate Reeves said Mississippi lawmakers would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district before 2028.

Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket assesses that redistricting could net Republicans between 16 and 18 seats in Congress in 2026, while the Democrats will likely pick up six, at least so far: five in California and one in Utah where a court demanded a redrawing of districts. Many of these redistricting plans are being challenged in the courts, and it remains possible that not all of them will flip, but G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers assesses that the Democrats will have to win congressional elections by 3–4 points in order to win a majority.

We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South.

We have been here before.

The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by recognizing that right in the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and unscrupulous employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could only be paid for with tax levies. Black voters, they said, were ushering in socialism.

Former Confederates declared it their duty to “redeem” the South from “Black rule,” by which they meant the Republicans and third parties in which white men and Black men worked together for policies that benefited workingmen, policies like education and workers’ protections. White Democrats argued that because such parties, even if overwhelmingly white, could win only with Black votes, they represented “Black rule.”

By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until the mid-1960s as white southern Democrats worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in the South to cement their own control over the region. In 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and Its Results insisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had perverted the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars.

Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted.

Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2,000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to “reform” the city government. They issued a “White Declaration of Independence” and said they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by” Black men.

As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed “there was no intimidation used,” but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. In the years to come, white Americans would continue to maintain control of politics through violence. They considered it a public duty to purge society of Black Americans, taking photographs of themselves at lynchings.

The region white Democrats ruled at the beginning of the twentieth century enforced white supremacy with extralegal violence. That racial domination helped white Americans swallow the South’s dramatic inequality. A few wealthy men dominated the region, while most people were poor: southerners had about half the average per capita income of the rest of the nation.

It was this world Congress addressed when, after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, it passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, finally taking seriously the amendment’s charge to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted that democracies depend on members of each party recognizing the legitimacy of their partisan rivals. Even if they disagree with each other, each recognizes the others’ members as loyal to the nation and accepts their legitimacy as lawmakers if voters elect them. Democracy also depends on parties refusing to use the tools of government to destroy the ability of their partisan opponents to win elections.

A day after a Pennsylvania man was arrested for making a “hit list” of twenty Democratic legislators he called “communist infiltrators” and threatened to shoot, as President Trump calls Democrats “traitors” and as southern states destroy the ability of Black Democrats to elect representatives, the echoes of the past are deafening.

Although the parties have switched sides, the story is the same. Now, as then, a minority is disfranchising voters because it knows its ideas are unpopular and it cannot win on the merits of its policies. What it can do, though, is to deliver white supremacy to its followers in hopes that it will be enough to make them ignore the economic system that is leading them to ruin.

As Joyce White Vance noted tonight in Civil Discourse, Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II reacted to the news of Georgia’s special session for redistricting by saying: “If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.

“June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.

“Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”

Neophyte said:

May 13, 2026 (Wednesday)

As Joyce White Vance noted tonight in Civil Discourse, Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II reacted to the news of Georgia’s special session for redistricting by saying: “If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.

“June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.

“Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”

Racism is expensive. A lot of folks don’t seem to grasp when some of the voters lose their rights. It opens up a loss of voting by those who potentially disagree with Trump and the Republican Regime.

Voter suppression is covered really well by both Stacy Abrahams and Greg Palast. It is a long term problem, as is gerrymandering.

Heather Cox Richardson

May 14, 2026 (Thursday)

Vice President J.D. Vance was in Maine today to tout what the Trump administration claims is its push to combat fraud in public services. Vance blamed Democrats for fraud in Medicaid programs and vowed that the Trump administration would stop such fraud by refusing to distribute funds to states that were not cooperating with the federal government’s anti-fraud efforts. He announced yesterday the administration intends to withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California.

This alleged push against fraud is part of an old playbook the Republicans have used since at least 2000 in which they accuse the Democrats of their own weak points and misdeeds.

This play was often associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, but in 2024, Caroline Wazer of Snopes noted that it is most usually associated with Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Accusing opponents of what you, yourself, are doing, muddies the waters and makes it hard for real accusations against you for the same thing to stick.

Experts say fraud in federal programs is a real problem but that it is carried out primarily by transnational criminal organizations, not by individual recipients. Republican rhetoric claims a high rate of “improper payments,” but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services itself stresses that “improper payment measurement is not a measure of fraud.” Rather, that term identifies payments where the paperwork provided by the state or provider was incomplete.
Those numbers have been high recently because the government allowed states greater flexibility during the Covid-19 public health emergency.

According to the nonpartisan Maine Center for Economic Policy, MaineCare is overseen by both state and federal agencies, and the most recent federal review found that only about 0.1% of total program spending was in incorrect payments. Indeed, last month, Reed Shaw of Just Security noted that the administration’s claim to be rooting out fraud appears simply to be a new way to punish perceived political enemies that might have a better chance of getting through the courts than the administration’s previous attempts did.

Accusing Democrats of fraud will also accomplish the political goal of muddying the waters to make it harder for voters to see that the Trump administration is the most corrupt U.S. administration in history. And concern about voters’ perceptions of corruption must be uppermost in the minds of administration advisors right now, since new Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Trump ally Viktor Orbán was driven in large part by voters’ fury at Orbán’s corruption.

Muddying the waters for voters is the best the Trump administration can hope for because, for all the administration’s claims to be fighting fraud, Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling.

He has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general—the people key to oversight—and in 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse. Matthew Purdy and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times noted in March that in both terms as of March 2026, Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.

Steven Greenhouse of The Guardian reminded readers today that in January, David D. Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker reported that the Trumps have pocketed about $4 billion, primarily through cryptocurrency enterprises. Greenhouse notes that Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran, and that the Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”

Even as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is acting as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East, he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund overseen by Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has already invested $2 billion with Kushner.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects to remake the national capital. As Greenhouse notes, corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami. In December 2025, Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Charlie Smart of the New York Times estimated that Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.

On May 11, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas, Matt Dixon, Henry J. Gomez, and Allan Smith of NBC News reported that Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Although the UFC is paying for the event—and expects to lose as much as $30 million on it—and although tickets are technically free, Trump is picking who gets most of the tickets.

Sponsorship packages that include ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC would comment on where the money is going. A Republican lobbyist told the NBC News journalists: “It’s basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump. They are raising a sh*t ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give and gain favor with Trump.”

And now Trump is in China on a state visit on which he took along seventeen CEOs of companies—many of which do business in China—including billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook of Apple. Together, the members of the delegation are worth more than a trillion dollars. Trump also took his son Eric, who runs the family business. As economist Paul Krugman said today, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”

On Tuesday a group of Miami residents sued Trump, his library fund, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Miami Dade College and its trustees, and Florida officials to stop the construction of Trump’s presidential library, charging that state officials violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause when they transferred almost three acres of prime waterfront land, worth between $67 million and $300 million, to Trump’s library foundation for $10. Trump has already said he wants to build a hotel on the site rather than a traditional library.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported Tuesday that the Department of Justice was working with Trump to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax returns from thousands of wealthy individuals to the media. The Department of Justice and Trump were eager to settle before the judge in the case could rule on whether the case was valid, a decision that could easily go against Trump since he was both the plaintiff and, as the person overseeing the IRS, the defendant in the lawsuit.

This evening, Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported that Trump is in talks to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the government’s establishing a $1.7 billion fund to compensate those of Trump’s allies who claim they were harmed by the Biden administration’s alleged “weaponization” of the Department of Justice. Those eligible for payments from this taxpayer-funded account would include nearly 1,600 people convicted of committing crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, people Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of shortly after he took office in January 2025. While Trump himself will probably be barred from direct payments, entities associated with him will not be.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the ABC News reporters: “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

Thanks for posting.

Heather Cox Richardson speaks on the Trump family members corruption

2 minutes

May 15, 2026 (Friday)
President Donald J. Trump arrived back in the United States of America today after a three-day state visit to China. Isaac Arnsdorf, Michael Birnbaum, and Michelle Ye Hee Lee of the Washington Post note that the summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping yielded “exactly what Xi aimed to achieve with the visit.” Its pageantry and Trump’s gestures of friendship and admiration showed the U.S. and China as peers, something previous U.S. leaders have rejected.

In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that aired today, Trump said: “It’s the two great countries. I call it the G-2. This is the G-2. I think it’ll go down as a very important moment in history.”

Former China director on the National Security Council Julian Gewirtz, who served under President Joe Biden, told the Washington Post reporters: “Xi has done something Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades—bringing an American president to Beijing as an undisputed peer. Xi used the opulent optics of the visit to make clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”

Xi has said before he thinks “the East is rising and the West declining.” Referring to that idea Thursday, before the two leaders met in Beijing, Xi made it clear he sees the U.S. as a declining power and pondered, “Can China and the United States overcome the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm of major country relations?”

The Thucydides Trap is a theory, put forward by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, that when a rising power threatens to replace an existing power, the conflict between the two tends to spark a war.

As if to illustrate that the U.S. is a declining power, the Chinese media downplayed the importance of a visit from a U.S. president. As James Palmer of Foreign Policy noted, on the day Trump arrived, the main story on the front page of the state-run English-language newspaper China Daily was the visit of the president of Tajikistan the day before. The Chinese Communist Party newspaper featured Trump’s visit on page 3.

Trump seemed to miss the larger context of the honors he so clearly enjoyed, telling the Fox News Channel’s Brett Baier that the summit was a success and that the most significant win for the United States was “relationship. It’s all about relationship. I have a very good relationship with President Xi and with China. And it sounds like something that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s everything in dealmaking and problems we’ve solved. The two of us have solved a lot of problems between— that somebody else would have maybe done very badly with. We’ve solved a lot of problems over the years.”

Tamara Keith and Jennifer Pak of NPR noted that Xi did not return Trump’s personal praise, speaking instead about relations between the U.S. and China.

Keith and Pak also reported that Trump boasted the visit had produced “some fantastic trade deals, good for both countries” and told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel that China had agreed to buy soybeans and Boeing aircraft, before adding: “I sort of, I think it was a commitment. I mean, you know, it was sort of like a statement, but I think it was a commitment. It’s a great thing. It’s a lot of jobs.”

China has not commented on any promised purchases. It did warn that if the U.S. mishandles the question of Taiwan, a self-governing island Beijing claims, it could put the “entire relationship” between the U.S. and China in jeopardy, and that “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations” is Taiwan. The U.S. did not mention Taiwan in its own readout of the meeting.

Trump had stayed quiet on social media while in China, but once he left the country he had things to say. Somebody must have explained the meaning of Xi’s Thucydides Trap comment, but rather than taking offense, Trump on May 14 said Xi “was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct. Our Country suffered immeasurably with open borders, high taxes, transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, DEI, horrible trade deals, rampant crime, and so much more!

“President Xi was not referring to the incredible rise that the United States has displayed to the world during the 16 spectacular months of the Trump Administration, which includes all-time high stock markets and 401K’s, military victory and thriving relationship in Venezuela, the military decimation of Iran (to be continued!)—Strongest military on earth by far, economic powerhouse again, with a record 18 trillion dollars being invested into the United States by others, best U.S. job market in history, with more people working in the United States right now than ever before, ending country destroying DEI, and so many other things that it would be impossible to readily list. In fact, President Xi congratulated me on so many tremendous successes in such a short period of time.

“Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline. On that, I fully agree with President Xi! But now, the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world, and hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!”

At 4:52 this morning, Trump turned back to his plans for remodeling Washington, D.C. He announced that he intends to put his “NATIONAL GARDEN OF AMERICAN HEROES” in West Potomac Park, then after claiming that the people playing golf at his Doral club “are absolutely in love with” the 22-foot gold statue of him recently installed there, posted above a picture of himself walking with Xi:
“China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.! It’s under construction, ahead of schedule, and will be the finest facility of its kind anywhere in the U.S.A. Thank you for all the support I have been given in getting this project going. Scheduled opening will be around September of 2028. The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump appears desperate to be included as an equal in the world of strongmen, apparently not understanding that America’s strength was always about its alliances.

Yesterday, members of Congress and Pentagon officials both were blindsided by the sudden decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to cancel the deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland after the troops were already on their way and much of the necessary equipment was already in Poland. Poland is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally. The U.S. troops were going there as part of a nine-month rotation in which they would have trained with NATO allies.

Congress has tried to beef up the U.S. presence in Europe, warning that reductions would invite Russian aggression. Last year it passed a law limiting the number of troops Trump could withdraw from Europe and the circumstances under which he could do so.

Former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe Lieutenant General Ben Hodges told Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch of Politico that the Army’s role in Europe “is all about deterring the Russians, protecting America’s strategic interests and assuring allies. And now a very important asset that was coming to be part of that deterrence is gone.” Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) posted: “Once again the President and Pete Hegseth show that they are not committed to security in Europe. Actions like this make us less safe and embolden Vladimir Putin. At every turn the two of them cower to Russia.”

European allies have worried for years now about Russian aggression. A signal that the U.S. is losing interest in NATO allies heightens that concern, especially coming, as it does, less than two weeks after Hegseth announced the U.S. will withdraw 5,000 troops from military bases in Germany following German chancellor Frederich Merz’s criticism of Trump’s handling of his war on Iran.

Today Connor O’Brien of Politico reported that the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees were surprised and angry at the news that Hegseth was recalling the troops from their deployment in Poland. At a hearing with Army officials—who said they had only been informed of the decision days ago—House Armed Services chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) said: “We don’t know what’s going on here, but I can just tell you we’re not happy with what’s being talked about, particularly since there’s been no statutory consultation with us.”

Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE) said the canceled deployment “is a slap in the face to Poland; it’s a slap in the face to our Baltic friends. It’s a slap to the face of this committee.”

But Trump seems more interested in acting like an autocrat than in consulting Congress, a body that his ally Steve Bannon has compared to the Duma, the Russian assembly that does what Putin tells it to. In addition to the extraordinary corruption already public, Bill Allison and Jess Menton of Bloomberg reported yesterday that a new financial filing shows that in the first quarter of 2026, Trump or his investment advisors made more than 3,700 trades—over 40 a day—“totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.”

Allison and Menton note that Trump did not move his assets into a blind trust with an independent manager, as his predecessors did if they traded in stocks at all (former presidents Biden and Barack Obama did not trade stocks). Instead, his sons Don Jr. and Eric manage the business as it operates in areas that are directly related to government policies decided by Trump himself. Trump invested in major companies with business affected by what he decided to do, including Nvidia, Intel Corp, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros Discovery, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

Wall Street executives told the journalists they were “baffled” by the high volume of trades and concerned about the appearance of conflicts of interest. “All of this raises questions that you’d rather not raise as a president,” wealth manager Matthew Tuttle told the reporters. “So now people are asking why is he buying Nvidia and other companies now? When you’re the president you know everything, so any stock you buy, there’s a huge question mark.”

White House spokesperson David Ingle told the reporters that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public” and that “here are no conflicts of interest.”

Thanks for posting.

May 16, 2026 (Saturday)
Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, in the face of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Black Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls. To prevent the passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

(Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Thurmond’s record on March 31 through April 1, 2025, speaking for 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds, but his speech was not a filibuster.)

Southern Democrats known as “Dixiecrats” managed to weaken the measure, but Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) managed to wrestle the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and Black Americans and their white allies began trying to register Black Americans to vote.

But the law proved too weak to force white registrars to allow Black voters onto the rolls, and by 1961, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) were at work in Mississippi to promote voter registration. In 1964 they launched the “Freedom Summer,” bringing college students from northern schools to work together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters.

Just as the project was getting underway, three organizers—James Chaney, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York—disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson, president by then, used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, designed to try to hold back the white supremacists and to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. The measure passed, and on July 2, Johnson signed it into law.

On August 4, investigators found the bodies of the three missing men. Ku Klux Klan members working with local law enforcement officers had murdered them and then buried the bodies in an earthen dam that was under construction.

And still, white officials refused to accept the idea of Black voting. In Selma, Alabama, where the city’s voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, local Black organizers had launched a voter registration drive in 1963, but a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.

Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”

Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.

“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voted rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voting rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”

Neophyte said:

May 16, 2026 (Saturday)
They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”

Thanks.

Thanks.

May 17, 2026 (Sunday)

Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.

The “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to rewrite America’s history, turning it from one that champions the Enlightenment values of natural rights, equality, and self-government to one that requires Americans to accept that some people are better than others and to defer to their leaders.

This was not Congress’s intent when it established a bipartisan America250 commission in 2016 “to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” But shortly after he took office for the second time in January 2025, Trump and his loyalists began to take over the planning for the nation’s birthday celebration.

As Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore of Mother Jones explained, right-wing operatives, including the company that staged the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, jumped into the management of America250. But Trump chafed under the idea of congressional oversight and a pretense of bipartisanship, so in December 2025 he created his own new organization, Freedom 250.

Congress appropriated $150 million for the Department of the Interior to distribute to organizations for celebrations of the 250th. Of that money, America250 has been allocated $50 million and Freedom 250 has been allocated $100 million, although as of February, America250 had received only $25 million. Freedom 250 has also solicited donations in exchange for access to Trump. According to Karissa Waddick of USA Today, sponsors include ExxonMobil, Mastercard, Deloitte, Palantir, and IndyCar. Donors can also request anonymity.

As Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times explained in February, Freedom 250 has planned events that showcase Trump rather than important events and themes in the nation’s history. Those include an IndyCar race around the National Mall, the construction of a triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn on Trump’s 80th birthday in June, and today’s “Rededicate 250” event.

President Trump was golfing today, but he, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, spoke on video to the crowd, assuring them that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spoke in person. All but one of the nineteen clergy and faith leaders who spoke were Christian, and most were right-wing evangelical Protestants.

The video of Trump the organizers played was the same one he recorded three weeks ago for “America Reads the Bible.” The passage was 2 Chronicles 7:11–22, one Christian nationalists believe marks the U.S. as a Christian nation, when the Lord says to Solomon: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

But the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that. In the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate just a decade after the Constitution went into effect, U.S. leaders said “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and has “no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of” Muslims. They went on to say that “no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between” the U.S. and Tripoli.

Thomas Jefferson, the key author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, both wrote explicitly about the importance of keeping the government separate from religion. Jefferson wrote that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “ not opinions.”

In 1785, Madison explained that what was at stake in keeping the state and religion separate was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights, including those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.

Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Rather than basing the United States on religion, the nation’s founders and framers, as well as Americans of later generations, sought to instill in Americans reverence for the nation’s core political values, especially the right of self-government and the checks and balances that made that self-government possible. In speeches and memorials, novels and poems, they emphasized the sacrifices Americans had made to protect the values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That civic religion unified the nation, but it did more than that. It also instructed Americans on the rights and duties of citizens who live in a nation that rests on “We the People.” They must think for themselves, question elected officials, and take an active role in their government.

Replacing Americans’ civic identity with Christian nationalism destroys that vitally important understanding of the role of citizens in a democracy. Instead, it demands that Americans do as they are told, turning them into subjects.

The theme of obeying the leader runs deep in Trump’s politics, and in MAGA more generally. The Bible passage Trump read on video today emphasizes obedience, warning the chosen people that if they “forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you,” then they will be destroyed. Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin read the same passage at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that overturning democracy for Trump was obeying the Lord. Laura Jedeed of Firewalled Media reported that vendors at today’s event handed out buttons that said: “WIVES SUBMIT, HUSBANDS LOVE, CHILDREN OBEY.”

But blindly obeying authority has never been the story of America.

From its origins in resistance to the British government, the story of America has been the opposite of obeying. It has been about questioning, debating, criticizing leaders, and working to build “a more perfect Union,” as the Framers charged us to do. The story of America is how those who believed in the principles of democracy, those ideals articulated by the Founders however imperfectly they lived them, have struggled to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our government, come true.

“ Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.”

I have questions.

But then again, I don’t want to know.

Divine Angel said:

“ Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.”

I have questions.

But then again, I don’t want to know.

I think humanity is better off without religion.
It takes a lot of time and money away from people.
Is a means of controlling people.
Gives them false hopes.
Causes harm to young people.
Can create mental health problems.
It’s difficult to trust without evidence.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.”

I have questions.

But then again, I don’t want to know.

I think humanity is better off without religion.
It takes a lot of time and money away from people.
Is a means of controlling people.
Gives them false hopes.
Causes harm to young people.
Can create mental health problems.
It’s difficult to trust without evidence.

opium good

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.”

I have questions.

But then again, I don’t want to know.

I think humanity is better off without religion.
It takes a lot of time and money away from people.
Is a means of controlling people.
Gives them false hopes.
Causes harm to young people.
Can create mental health problems.
It’s difficult to trust without evidence.

opium good

buffy mentioned pipe dreams a little while back.

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Divine Angel said:

“ Thousands of people gathered today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.”

I have questions.

But then again, I don’t want to know.

I think humanity is better off without religion.
It takes a lot of time and money away from people.
Is a means of controlling people.
Gives them false hopes.
Causes harm to young people.
Can create mental health problems.
It’s difficult to trust without evidence.

opium good

Opium and Karma sutra in zero g gravity.

Michael V said:

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

I think humanity is better off without religion.
It takes a lot of time and money away from people.
Is a means of controlling people.
Gives them false hopes.
Causes harm to young people.
Can create mental health problems.
It’s difficult to trust without evidence.

opium good

buffy mentioned pipe dreams a little while back.

we suppose spiritual leaders are known to use hallucinogens

May 18, 2026 (Monday)

I have been traveling and tonight have hit the wall as I tried to write, so at this hour am opting for bed rather than trying to grind out today’s letter.

But I’ll leave you with this. Before I left home, I snuck onto the water one evening for my first kayak of the year and caught this picture.

Summer is around the corner, and I can’t wait.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Neophyte said:

May 18, 2026 (Monday)

I have been traveling and tonight have hit the wall as I tried to write, so at this hour am opting for bed rather than trying to grind out today’s letter.

But I’ll leave you with this. Before I left home, I snuck onto the water one evening for my first kayak of the year and caught this picture.

Summer is around the corner, and I can’t wait.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

:)

May 19, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday the Department of Justice announced it is creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate what it calls victims of the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

First of all, the insistence of Trump cronies that the Department of Justice and federal judges “weaponized” the law against them under former president Joe Biden—or under former president Barack Obama—is another example of regime officials blaming others for what they, themselves, are doing as Trump’s appointees try to manufacture criminal cases against those Trump considers his enemies. Trump’s attacks on the justice system are designed to convince his followers that he hasn’t really committed the crimes for which he has been indicted, and sometimes convicted, and they help to undermine faith in the rule of law, weakening our democracy.

Second of all, though, what this agreement is not, is a settlement of Trump’s case against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), although that term is being widely used to describe it. Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for damages after a contractor leaked his tax information—along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers—during his own first term after it became clear that the judge to whom the case was assigned seemed inclined to say that the case could not move forward because Trump could not be in charge of both sides of the suit.

The recognition that this is not a legal settlement is important. The Trump administration maintains it is doing what the Obama administration did in establishing a compensation fund to settle the case of Keepseagle v. Vilsack, when the Department of Justice established a $760 million fund as a settlement of a long-running class action suit charging that the Department of Agriculture had systematically discriminated against Indigenous farmers and ranchers.

Unlike the Keepseagle settlement, though, Trump’s fund is not part of a legal settlement.
In her order dismissing the suit, Judge Kathleen Williams noted that because Trump’s dropping of the suit “does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources’ and the ‘fair administration of justice,’ neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

Judge Williams was not alone in her skepticism about the deal. Andrew Duehren of the New York Times reported today that career lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service thought the agency should fight Trump’s suit, noting that the statute of limitations for such a suit had run out, the Justice Department has previously taken the position that people cannot sue the IRS for the actions of a contractor, and the Justice Department settled a similar case from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin with a public apology rather than a monetary payoff.

The document that purports to be a “settlement” has the words “settlement agreement” written in capital letters across the top of it, but the important word is “agreement.” It is not the settlement of a legal case: Trump dropped the case when it looked like the judge would throw it out. It is simply an agreement between Trump and his own appointees at the Department of Justice.

And what an agreement it is. It says that Trump and his older sons who also brought (and dropped) the suit “will receive a formal apology from the United States, but will not receive any monetary payment or damages of any kind.” The agreement sets up a fund made up of five people, four of whom Trump’s hand-picked attorney general will choose. The fifth will be chosen “in consultation with congressional leadership,” but Trump can remove any one of them “without cause.”

That group has complete say over how it decides to grant or deny claims, but what it does will be confidential, overseen only by the Department of Justice. The fund ends in December 2028, just after the 2028 presidential election. If all the money isn’t spent by then, Trump gets to decide to which federal account it goes.

In essence then, the settlement gives Trump full control over almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to spend however he wants, without oversight. The Department of Justice document establishing the fund declares that “nce the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

On the agreement, the signature of the lawyer representing the United States is not that of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, but rather that of Stanley E. Woodward Jr., who has been a key defense attorney for people in Trump’s orbit accused of committing crimes, including Kash Patel, now FBI director; Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro; and Walt Nauta, the Trump aide indicted for his actions surrounding Trump’s retention of classified documents. Woodward also has represented a number of those charged with crimes relating to the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

With the announcement of the agreement, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned.

The agreement says the amount dedicated to the fund “does not represent the value of any current claim by , but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” and thus “is not taxable income” for the Trumps, “who receive no economic benefit” from the agreement. But the number the Justice Department released for the establishment of the fund puts the lie to the idea the number was random. It is $1.776 billion, linking the fund directly to the attempt of Trump and his cronies to destroy American democracy and begin it again, on their terms.

Famously, on January 6, 2021, newly-elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted, “Today is 1776.” During the attack, the rioters shouted “1776.”

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that Trump and his loyalists “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

As political scientist Jonathan Ladd noted, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits compensation for those who engaged in insurrection. It says that “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…, but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.” In his comments to Sargent, Raskin noted that if the fund pays off the January 6 rioters, the government will be doing precisely that: “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

Acting attorney general Todd Blanche testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee today, facing senators for the first time since taking over for fired attorney general Pam Bondi. He refused to rule out paying money to rioters who had attacked police officers.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “an individual who after being pardoned by the president went on to molest two children, and that person actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying that he would pay them some of the funds that he was hoping to get from your slush fund. Can you commit to making the rule so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund?” Blanche accused Van Hollen of “obviously lying” because no such fund existed until yesterday.

But, in fact, administration officials have talked about paying off the January 6 rioters since at least December 2024, and in June 2025 the Justice Department paid close to $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, killed by police as she tried to break into the House of Representatives.

Apparently based on those signals, Florida’s Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump, was convicted earlier this year of sexually abusing two twelve-year-olds and trying to buy their silence by saying he would share some of the millions of dollars in restitution money he expected the Trump administration would pay him for his January 6 case. Van Hollen went on to read a series of news stories reporting that January 6 rioters expected payments.

Since Trump’s blanket pardon of nearly 1,600 of those convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of them have been rearrested for crimes. At the time of Johnson’s sentencing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s support has made the January 6 rioters “think they’re untouchable.”

Then, today, the plot got even thicker.

A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS.

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Vance commented that “he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.

Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.

Trump’s comments in that press conference have invited commentary suggesting he is turning the White House into a fortress. Describing the ballroom, he said: “Between the drone-proofing, the missile-proofing, we have ah, and the drone capacity upstairs, we can have all sorts of military—I hate to use the word snipers—but we have great sniper capacity. It’s built for our snipers, not enemy’s snipers, our snipers. And because of the height we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington.”

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Egads!

What else have they all been up to?

ms spock said:

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Egads!

What else have they all been up to?

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Egads!

What else have they all been up to?

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Egads!

What else have they all been up to?

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren and their if they get that long… the future is a dark mystery thta is not likely to be rosy.

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Egads!

What else have they all been up to?

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

The USA is set up to easily become a fascist state.

Military bases everywhere, patriotic rednecks to form militias like the brown shirts from WW2
Fundamentalist Christians who are so righteous they would lock up anyone not of the same opinion of them.
I don’t think it would happen but murdering millions of non-white people creates a job market.
I think Trump reign will end with bloodshed, either organised or just his supporters venting.

roughbarked said:

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren and their if they get that long… the future is a dark mystery thta is not likely to be rosy.

:(

It must be so hard having children and grandchildren. The fear from Climate Change and then the rest of it.

roughbarked said:

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren and their if they get that long… the future is a dark mystery thta is not likely to be rosy.

Yeah
I wasn’t joking the other day about not having children for people in todays world and they might have both a short and hard life.

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

The USA is set up to easily become a fascist state.

Military bases everywhere, patriotic rednecks to form militias like the brown shirts from WW2
Fundamentalist Christians who are so righteous they would lock up anyone not of the same opinion of them.
I don’t think it would happen but murdering millions of non-white people creates a job market.
I think Trump reign will end with bloodshed, either organised or just his supporters venting.

Civil war is what I have been expecting for a while now.

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

The USA is set up to easily become a fascist state.

Military bases everywhere, patriotic rednecks to form militias like the brown shirts from WW2
Fundamentalist Christians who are so righteous they would lock up anyone not of the same opinion of them.
I don’t think it would happen but murdering millions of non-white people creates a job market.
I think Trump reign will end with bloodshed, either organised or just his supporters venting.

It is terribly sad.

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

ms spock said:

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Egads!

What else have they all been up to?

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

Trump couldn’t have got to where he is, and the way he is, without Mitch McConnell (picture below).

Mitch is one of those who, back in 2014-2016, thought that Trump would be a useful buffoon, who could run distraction by being a more-Bush-than-Bush clown show.

Later, he realised that the creature had an agenda of its own.

Just like the German plutocracy thought that that silly Bavarian corporal and his comic opera band could be useful and compliant.

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

ms spock said:

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren and their if they get that long… the future is a dark mystery thta is not likely to be rosy.

Yeah
I wasn’t joking the other day about not having children for people in todays world and they might have both a short and hard life.

Back in our day it was be aware of the fact that any more than two children and you are only adding to the population problem.

So far in my family there have only been two children per couple apart from my childhood where there were three, me being the middle.

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

Cymek said:

Building some sort of star of death to keep the people in line when congress is dissolved.

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

Trump couldn’t have got to where he is, and the way he is, without Mitch McConnell (picture below).

Mitch is one of those who, back in 2014-2016, thought that Trump would be a useful buffoon, who could run distraction by being a more-Bush-than-Bush clown show.

Later, he realised that the creature had an agenda of its own.

Just like the German plutocracy thought that that silly Bavarian corporal and his comic opera band could be useful and compliant.

Mitch McConnell was in charge. He oversaw Trump’s installation.

And he hasn’t got the Republicans to use the 25th Amendment, so he is still overseeing it from afar.

ms spock said:

captain_spalding said:

ms spock said:

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

Trump couldn’t have got to where he is, and the way he is, without Mitch McConnell (picture below).

Mitch is one of those who, back in 2014-2016, thought that Trump would be a useful buffoon, who could run distraction by being a more-Bush-than-Bush clown show.

Later, he realised that the creature had an agenda of its own.

Just like the German plutocracy thought that that silly Bavarian corporal and his comic opera band could be useful and compliant.

Mitch McConnell was in charge. He oversaw Trump’s installation.

And he hasn’t got the Republicans to use the 25th Amendment, so he is still overseeing it from afar.

The Republicans are having their chance at winning the covil war thta never ended. Trump is their mechanism,. The longer they can prop him up as their scarecrow, the better for project 2025.

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

ms spock said:

There was a time that was funny, but now with the jailing of Americans across the US, without arrest warrants and they are building so many more of those “concentration camps” as Heather Cox Richardson calls them. It is hard to know what is coming.

Mitch McConnell obstructed Obama every step of the way, and even with this playbook in the public records, the Dems aren’t taking substantial actions.

It is most concerning.

I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren and their if they get that long… the future is a dark mystery thta is not likely to be rosy.

Yeah
I wasn’t joking the other day about not having children for people in todays world and they might have both a short and hard life.

why, are they hanging out with Thomas Hobbes or something

Heather

Heather on the issue of corruption.

May 20, 2026 (Wednesday)

Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn sued President Donald J. Trump, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today to block the creation of the fund to pay off those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The lawsuit begins: “In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.”

The suit continues: “The fund…is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.”

Both Hodges and Dunn defended the Capitol and the lawmakers in it on January 6. Hodges was the man in the infamous photograph of the rioters crushing a police officer between metal doors. The officers claim the standing to sue because they have had to live with death threats and harassment since January 6 from MAGA Republicans and the plan to pay off rioters “will both compensate and empower the very people making those threats. Militias like the Proud Boys will use money from the Fund to arm and equip themselves. The Fund will grant their past acts of violence legal imprimatur. And, most chillingly, the Fund will signal to past and potential future perpetrators of violence against Dunn and Hodges that they need not fear prosecution; to the contrary, they should expect to be rewarded.”

The lawsuit covers what actually happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, beginning shortly after noon, when rioters tried to break into the building to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. “Hours of hand-to-hand combat ensued,” the lawsuit recounts, “as police officers tried to prevent the rioters from entering the building and killing elected officials and their staff.”

On the west front of the Capitol, rioters broke down barriers made of bike racks, signs, and snow fencing and pushed forward to a line of police officers. “Rioters assaulted officers, sprayed them with chemicals, and hit them with pipes, tools, and the bike racks and stolen police equipment that were now strewn about.” After 2:00 the rioters broke through the line of officers, smashed windows, and forced their way into the building, opening the doors for their comrades.

“As rioters stalked the halls, staffers, journalists, and members of Congress hid in offices, hoping not to be found by people screaming ‘hang Mike Pence!’ and ‘Where’s Nancy ?’” They forced their way into the Senate chamber just minutes after Vice President Mike Pence left it.

Meanwhile, officers continued to fight against the advancing mob. “Rioters punched police, speared them with flagpoles, attacked them with tasers and stolen riot shields, and tried to drag them into the crowd. For three hours in the enclosed tunnel connecting the Capitol to the inaugural stage, rioters engaged in an almost medieval style of combat, pushing exhausted and outnumbered police to get into the building in a “heave-ho” rhythm, nearly crushing officers as they did. Through all of this, amid the fighting and screaming, flash bangs exploded, fire retardant shot into the air, and chemical spray filled the tunnel. Many officers were injured in this fight to defend this entrance, some gravely.”

Hodges was “hit from above with a heavy object, kicked in the chest, and driven to the ground. Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes. Hodges shook him off, and eventually made his way to the tunnel connecting the Capitol building to the inaugural stage. There, he joined in some of the most furious fighting that day, as police tried to stop the mass of rioters from flooding into the building. In the rushing crowd of the mob, Hodges was nearly crushed between metal doors by the enraged attackers. He later said that he thought, ‘this could be the end.’”

After several hours, national guard forces, including from Virginia and Maryland, helped the officers to get control and expel the rioters from the Capitol.

The lawsuit recounts the events of the day in detail, making it clear exactly who it is that Trump wants to reward with almost $2 billion in taxpayer money.

Hodges and Dunn are not the only people going after what is not just “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century,” but the most brazen act of presidential corruption in American history. By far.

In the House, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) today introduced the “No Taxpayer-Funded Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2026,” which would prohibit the use of federal funds to pay off anyone claiming to have faced “weaponization” of the law by the federal government, including any of the January 6 rioters. “Congress must reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for massive partisan corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government,” Raskin said.

Democrats also demanded the Department of Justice preserve any and all documents and communications about the agreement. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas Touch reported that even Republicans hate the slush fund and non-prosecution agreement, telling Nicolle Wallace of MS NOW: “There are so many Republicans coming out against this thing. It appears to me this slush fund is like as popular as poison ivy…. Nobody is claiming ownership of this thing. I have zero statements of support for this fund from any congressional Republican.”

Yesterday, before news broke of acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s addendum to the original agreement, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Adam Schiff of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, sent a memo to the Department of Justice asking whether Blanche was following the advice of ethics lawyers in the department in his handling of issues having to do with Trump, as he had promised to do in his confirmation hearings.

Lawyer George Conway posted that Blanche never intended to carry out that promise. It is clear that members of the Trump administration never intended to honor the Constitution or serve the American people, raising the question of what exactly they do intend.

For Trump, making money is clearly a major part of it. The anger over the slush fund has pushed out of the news a growing outcry over the news from earlier this week that Trump bought and sold at least $220 million in stocks like those of Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft while making policy and public announcements that affected the value of those stocks.

Trump is also into building monuments to himself in the nation’s capital: the repainted reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, and the Triumphal Arch behind the Lincoln Memorial that would frame the home of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Arlington National Cemetery.

Trump has paid special attention to the ballroom he intends to build on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be, saying it will be done by September 2028. Republicans tried to get $1 billion put into a reconciliation bill to fund what Trump claimed was security measures for the ballroom. Unlike most measures that come before the Senate, a reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered and so needs only 51 votes rather than 60 to pass.

But Democrats recently stopped that Republican plan by noting that Republicans failed to give the required instructions to all the relevant committees. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with them and said the request could not go into a budget reconciliation measure. Senate Republicans, who were uncomfortable with the request anyway, removed it.

Trump apparently did not get the memo. Today he insisted that Republicans replace the Senate parliamentarian with a Trump loyalist. His social media account posted: “Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of ‘Parliamentarian’ in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an ‘iron fist.’ Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans but not to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced?”

He went on to demand the Senate force through the SAVE America Act that would significantly restrict voting and to call for the Senate to “kill the Filibuster, which would give us everything!” He went on: “If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again.”

But Senate Republicans are signaling they might not want to play ball with a president whose approval ratings showed up today at an abysmal 34% and who is demanding loyalty to himself alone, rather than working for the party. On Meet the Press Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reacted to the defeat of Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s Republican primary after Trump backed his rival by saying: “This is the party of Donald Trump.”

Trump made that clear yesterday when, after waffling for months, he endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in a primary runoff over Senator John Cornyn’s seat to be held next week. Trump called Paxton “a true MAGA Warrior” and complained that Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Bloomberg reporter Steven T. Dennis noted that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico “has to be doing the happy dance.” “This is going like Dems would have scripted it,” Dennis wrote. “A late Trump endorsement after Cornyn/Senate Republicans incinerated ~$100 trying to nuke Ken Paxton as an impeached adulterer who violated ethics left and right.”

House Republicans also have borne the pressure of Trump’s wrath. Yesterday representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who helped to lead the charge for the release of the Epstein files, lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in what was the most expensive House primary ever. Ed Gallrein, who won the primary, vows that he will do whatever Trump tells him to. Trump-backed primary candidates also won in Georgia and Alabama.

White House spokesperson Steven Cheung posted: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. F*ck around, find out.” But as political commentator Jessica Tarlov noted, Massie’s district went for Trump by 35 points in 2024, but Gallrein won by just ten points after outside money spent an astronomical $35 million on the race when winning a primary usually costs between $100,000 and $500,000.

Tarlov added that Trump isn’t offering much of a platform for Republicans to run on. It’s basically “I want absolute loyalty. I want to trade stocks, make hundreds of millions of dollars. I want my 1776 fund to make sure J Sixers, you know, get the money that they’re owed. I want immunity for me and my family from an audit forevermore…. I want to get rich, and I don’t care that you are poorer.”

May 21, 2026 (Thursday)

Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.

Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.

Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”

Republicans were angry they had no advance warning about the plan, questioned the legal basis for the fund, were unhappy with Blanche’s descriptions of how payments would work, and said they wanted no part of it. As former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong—Take your pick.”

As many as 25 Republican senators spoke out against the slush fund and pitched ideas about how to draw some limits around it. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas News reported that senators want to know “what is Trump trying to mask by offering up this controversial fund? I mean, the optics of this are terrible. This looks bad, so is it a diversion technique? Is it some way of masking a different issue altogether?”

Dan Alexander of Forbes reported today that the tax immunity Todd Blanche is extending to Trump could save him more than $600 million on the estimated $1.4 billion he made in 2025 from crypto and licensing ventures and on the $100 million hanging over him from a previous tax bill.

Michael Gold and Carl Hulse of the New York Times reported that Republican frustration with the White House has been exacerbated by anger that Trump has intervened in Republican primaries to sink Republican incumbents he thinks have been insufficiently loyal to him.

One Republican senator texted Desiderio to say: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.”

In the end, Republicans were so angry about the slush fund and immunity agreement that Senate leadership decided not to try to pass $72 billion of funding for immigration agencies, left out of an earlier funding package, out of fear Democrats would force Republicans to vote on the slush fund.

Even before they decided to avoid the vote, Republicans had dropped from the measure the $1 billion Trump wants for security for his ballroom.

House Republicans had their own meltdown. House Republican leaders pulled a vote to stop Trump’s war on Iran based on the War Powers Act, recognizing that they did not have the votes to defeat it. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who voted with Democrats to pass such a measure last week, told Megan Mineiro, Robert Jimison, and Michael Gold of the New York Times that the next time the measure comes to a vote, it will pass.

As members head home to observe Memorial Day, the solemn remembrance of those Americans who gave their lives to defend the nation, they will likely hear an earful from their constituents about the $1.7 billion slush fund, the promise of immunity over Trump’s tax crimes, the $1 billion Trump is demanding for his ballroom, Trump’s unpopular war on Iran, and now the administration’s increasing threats against Cuba and Greenland, and about dramatically increasing prices.

On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”

Neophyte said:

May 21, 2026 (Thursday)

Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.

Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.

Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”
…

On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”

The wall is cracking at the seams.

roughbarked said:

Neophyte said:

May 21, 2026 (Thursday)

Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.

Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.

Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”
…

On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”

The wall is cracking at the seams.

Not quickly enough. They have kicked the can down the road a bit further.

They need to just fuck him off out of the White House.

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

Neophyte said:

May 21, 2026 (Thursday)

Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.

Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.

Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”
…

On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”

The wall is cracking at the seams.

Not quickly enough. They have kicked the can down the road a bit further.

They need to just fuck him off out of the White House.

Agree.

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

Neophyte said:

May 21, 2026 (Thursday)

Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.

Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.

Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”
…

On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”

The wall is cracking at the seams.

Not quickly enough. They have kicked the can down the road a bit further.

They need to just fuck him off out of the White House.

I doubt that is enough. Vance still has his faculties, but no proper moral compass.

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

The wall is cracking at the seams.

Not quickly enough. They have kicked the can down the road a bit further.

They need to just fuck him off out of the White House.

I doubt that is enough. Vance still has his faculties, but no proper moral compass.

Yes and then there’s the rest of the Trump nazimafia.

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

roughbarked said:

The wall is cracking at the seams.

Not quickly enough. They have kicked the can down the road a bit further.

They need to just fuck him off out of the White House.

I doubt that is enough. Vance still has his faculties, but no proper moral compass.

I reckon they should impeach them both as a package deal, plus half the cabinet.

The next in line after the VP is the Speaker of the House of Reps, followed by the Senate President. One of those two should be enough to limp the country along to the next election.

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

Not quickly enough. They have kicked the can down the road a bit further.

They need to just fuck him off out of the White House.

I doubt that is enough. Vance still has his faculties, but no proper moral compass.

I reckon they should impeach them both as a package deal, plus half the cabinet.

The next in line after the VP is the Speaker of the House of Reps, followed by the Senate President. One of those two should be enough to limp the country along to the next election.

More than fair.

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

I doubt that is enough. Vance still has his faculties, but no proper moral compass.

I reckon they should impeach them both as a package deal, plus half the cabinet.

The next in line after the VP is the Speaker of the House of Reps, followed by the Senate President. One of those two should be enough to limp the country along to the next election.

More than fair.

But the Speaker of the House wouldn’t have any idea of how to do the job without someone whispering in his ear.

buffy said:

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

I reckon they should impeach them both as a package deal, plus half the cabinet.

The next in line after the VP is the Speaker of the House of Reps, followed by the Senate President. One of those two should be enough to limp the country along to the next election.

More than fair.

But the Speaker of the House wouldn’t have any idea of how to do the job without someone whispering in his ear.

All he’s got to do is not bomb foreign countries.

buffy said:

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

I reckon they should impeach them both as a package deal, plus half the cabinet.

The next in line after the VP is the Speaker of the House of Reps, followed by the Senate President. One of those two should be enough to limp the country along to the next election.

More than fair.

But the Speaker of the House wouldn’t have any idea of how to do the job without someone whispering in his ear.

That’s why they have people whispering in their ears.

party_pants said:

buffy said:

Michael V said:

More than fair.

But the Speaker of the House wouldn’t have any idea of how to do the job without someone whispering in his ear.

All he’s got to do is not bomb foreign countries.

So the big red button responsibility passes down the chain without the chief of staff at the helm?

May 22, 2026 (Friday)

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing all of the problems in the country. “But I do promise this,” he said. “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.

Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity that would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.

When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.

They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.

But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.

“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.

“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?…”

“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”

Neophyte said:

May 22, 2026 (Friday)

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

A fine speech and all that, but it never happened. It got started and probably peaked around the early 70s. But they end of that decade neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology and they got 8 years of Reagan, followed by George Bush Snr who undid a lot of that idealism. Much the same with the UK under Thatcher.

party_pants said:

Neophyte said:

May 22, 2026 (Friday)

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

A fine speech and all that, but it never happened. It got started and probably peaked around the early 70s. But they end of that decade neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology and they got 8 years of Reagan, followed by George Bush Snr who undid a lot of that idealism. Much the same with the UK under Thatcher.

by the

party_pants said:

party_pants said:

Neophyte said:

May 22, 2026 (Friday)

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

A fine speech and all that, but it never happened. It got started and probably peaked around the early 70s. But they end of that decade neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology and they got 8 years of Reagan, followed by George Bush Snr who undid a lot of that idealism. Much the same with the UK under Thatcher.

by the

All the way with LBJ.

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

party_pants said:

A fine speech and all that, but it never happened. It got started and probably peaked around the early 70s. But they end of that decade neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology and they got 8 years of Reagan, followed by George Bush Snr who undid a lot of that idealism. Much the same with the UK under Thatcher.

by the

All the way with LBJ.

I remember all that. We followed him into Vietnam.

May 23, 2026 (Saturday)

President Donald J. Trump’s proposed triumphal arch would sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The proposed arch obscures the Lincoln Memorial, built to honor the president who steered the country safely through the Civil War, but perfectly frames Arlington House, the mansion built by enslaved Americans and once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved the land that had been Lee’s plantation as a national burying ground for soldiers on June 15, 1864. After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee resigned his commission and took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, fighting across the state.

In early 1864 the U.S. government bought Lee’s property at public auction after Lee defaulted on property taxes, and months later it became the logical place to establish a national cemetery after the U.S. Army under General U.S. Grant began its spring 1864 offensive to crush the Confederate forces once and for all.

As the army advanced the Wilderness Campaign, grinding through the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, and on to the siege of Petersburg, the dead piled up.

The Army buried the dead and sent the wounded back to Washington, D.C. Journalist Noah Brooks wrote: “Maimed and wounded…. arrived by hundreds as long as the waves of sorrow came streaming back from the fields of slaughter…. They came groping, hobbling, and faltering, so faint and so longing for rest that one’s heart bled at the piteous sight.” For many, that rest was forever. In the era before antibiotics and modern medicine, the soldiers died in the summer heat.

Cemeteries in the city quickly became overwhelmed and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed to Stanton that the government begin burials at the Lee property. The National Republican newspaper called it, along with the establishment of a village of formerly enslaved Americans, “righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee.”

By August 1864 the government had buried the bodies of twenty-six U.S. soldiers around the perimeter of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, and it continued to bury bodies around the house to make sure Lee would never again be able to live there. By the end of the war, more than 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

It was there, on May 30, 1868, that the first official Memorial Day ceremony took place. In those days the observance was called “Decoration Day” and was widely celebrated after the war as people put flowers on the graves of the war dead. At the 1868 event, the newly organized Grand Army of the Republic honored the occasion with a speech by then-congressman James Garfield, who had served as a major general and seen action across the war, including at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.

Garfield, who would later be elected president and lose his life to an assassin, told his comrades that the men buried at Arlington had “summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus…made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.“

They had fought, he said, to defend the fundamental principle of the United States. Before the war, Garfield said, “he faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. Peace, liberty, and personal security were blessings as common and universal as sunshine and showers and fruitful seasons; and all sprang from a single source, the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority. This is not one of the doctrines of our political system—it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in Heaven…. Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown. Its overthrow would have brought…ruin.”

And so, he said, “he Nation was summoned to arms by every high motive which can inspire men. Two centuries of freedom had made its people unfit no for despotism. They must save their Government or miserably perish.”

For those who had died to defend the nation, he asked: “What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as this under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor?”

“Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great Imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride and inspired no hope…. But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer! This will be forever the sacred mountain of our Capital….

“Hither our children’s children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage. For this are we met to-day. “

Garfield’s grand words obscured the extraordinary human cost of the war to defend the U.S. government. Almost seven years before, on July 14, 1861, at the very beginning of the conflict, Major Sullivan Ballou of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote his final letter to “My Very Dear Wife,” Sarah. Ballou anticipated the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war, and wanted to explain why he was willing to give up his life for his country, and what it would cost.

“If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my country, I am ready,” he wrote. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield.

“The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up, and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us.”

Ballou fell at the Battle of Bull Run. Sarah never remarried.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day

Ta.

Ta

May 24, 2026 (Sunday)

For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something. And tonight, at last, I have an announcement.

Last August, during one of my Politics Chat webcasts, at a time when those trying to impose white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or authoritarianism on our country insisted they were embracing American values, I urged people instead to see those who care about the preservation of democracy and who have worked to expand its values as the people who truly represent America.

That idea appealed strongly, apparently, to the two young women we had recently hired to manage my social media accounts and to produce the historical videos we’ve been putting up. As we kicked around ideas for our own celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, they kept coming back to the idea from that Politics Chat: that “we…are America.”
So, to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we decided to launch a series of one-minute videos that highlight the people, places, and events that have helped to move us toward a more perfect Union.

We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.

When we floated the plan, lots of wonderful people all over the country understood the idea immediately and jumped in to help, suggesting topics, writing scripts, offering images, narrating.

We’re launching the project tomorrow with the stories of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, narrated by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey; the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, narrated by Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; the Constitutional Convention (I narrated that one); Ruben Salazar, narrated by journalist Sylvia Salazar; Yellowstone, narrated by former senator Jon Tester of Montana; the AIDS Quilt, narrated by originator Cleve Jones; the Acadians, narrated by historian Jason Herbert; the Erie Canal, narrated by former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg; John Peter Zenger and the First Amendment, narrated by journalist Jelani Cobb; the Charter Oak, narrated by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, narrated by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland; and the story of actress and dancer Rita Moreno, narrated by Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose.

For the next several weeks, we will be telling these stories and hundreds more. We hope that you will share them widely to flood social media with the real story of how Americans have always worked, often against seemingly insurmountable odds, to create a more perfect Union.

What has made America great has always been the American people.
Now, as for the past 250 years, “We Are America.”

Neophyte said:

May 24, 2026 (Sunday)

For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something. And tonight, at last, I have an announcement.

Last August, during one of my Politics Chat webcasts, at a time when those trying to impose white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or authoritarianism on our country insisted they were embracing American values, I urged people instead to see those who care about the preservation of democracy and who have worked to expand its values as the people who truly represent America.

That idea appealed strongly, apparently, to the two young women we had recently hired to manage my social media accounts and to produce the historical videos we’ve been putting up. As we kicked around ideas for our own celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, they kept coming back to the idea from that Politics Chat: that “we…are America.”
So, to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we decided to launch a series of one-minute videos that highlight the people, places, and events that have helped to move us toward a more perfect Union.

We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.

When we floated the plan, lots of wonderful people all over the country understood the idea immediately and jumped in to help, suggesting topics, writing scripts, offering images, narrating.

We’re launching the project tomorrow with the stories of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, narrated by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey; the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, narrated by Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; the Constitutional Convention (I narrated that one); Ruben Salazar, narrated by journalist Sylvia Salazar; Yellowstone, narrated by former senator Jon Tester of Montana; the AIDS Quilt, narrated by originator Cleve Jones; the Acadians, narrated by historian Jason Herbert; the Erie Canal, narrated by former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg; John Peter Zenger and the First Amendment, narrated by journalist Jelani Cobb; the Charter Oak, narrated by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, narrated by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland; and the story of actress and dancer Rita Moreno, narrated by Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose.

For the next several weeks, we will be telling these stories and hundreds more. We hope that you will share them widely to flood social media with the real story of how Americans have always worked, often against seemingly insurmountable odds, to create a more perfect Union.

What has made America great has always been the American people.
Now, as for the past 250 years, “We Are America.”

Nice one, HCR.

May 25, 2026 (Monday)

Last Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned, effective as of June 30, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis as the factor that forced her decision. A source told Jonathan Landay and Erin Blanco of Reuters that President Donald J. Trump had forced her out. Certainly, he has sidelined her.
Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2004 after concluding that intelligence failures, including a lack of communication across agencies, had contributed to the vulnerability that permitted the 9/11 attacks. The ODNI is supposed to oversee the eighteen different intelligence agencies and to coordinate the information they produce.

Gabbard did not have deep experience in intelligence and had endorsed Russian talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when Trump named her director of ODNI. Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton called her “a hand grenade ready to explode.”

Gabbard ran into trouble with Trump by June 2025, when she released a video warning of “nuclear holocaust” because “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” They were bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said. She released the video days before Trump launched his first attack on Iran, and a former intelligence officer told Nick Schifrin of PBS that Trump considered the video an attempt to try to convince him not to launch the strikes.

Afterward, Gabbard seemed to try to regain Trump’s favor by backing his extremist pet projects, including accusing former president Barack Obama of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” and calling for him to be prosecuted over the FBI’s investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russian operatives. She also oversaw an FBI raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election headquarters during which the administration scooped up all the physical ballots from the 2020 presidential election, as well as ballot images, tabulator tapes, and the voter rolls from that election.
But she never recovered her standing with the president. As Shane Harris noted in The Atlantic, while Trump was preparing to invade Venezuela and extract its president and his wife, Gabbard was posting pictures of herself on a Hawaiian beach.

Trump stayed in the White House over the weekend, missing his son Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas with a social media post explaining that “hile I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so. I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time.”

Whatever else might be going on, Trump is under pressure to find a way out of Iran. Not only are prices skyrocketing owing to the rising cost of oil after Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to attacks from the U.S. and Israel, but the clock has run out on any authorization he could have claimed for his military adventure in Iran, and Congress seems ready to force his hand.

Congress alone can declare war, but the 1973 War Powers Act permits the president to act against an “imminent” threat so long as he notifies Congress within 48 hours. Then he has 60 days to get congressional approval. That timeline ran out on May 1, and the administration claimed it didn’t need authorization because it had declared a ceasefire on April 7, although it continued to maintain a blockade against Iranian ports—an act of war—and to exchange fire with Iranian forces. Republicans in Congress appeared to accept that argument for a time. But last Thursday, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to send representatives home a day early to keep members from passing a war powers resolution that would order Trump to remove U.S. troops from his war on Iran.

The House and Senate will come back on June 2, and Trump clearly would like to have an agreement with Iran in place before they do.

Trump’s social media account over the weekend was active. He twice posted an image of himself leering over Greenland with the caption “Hello, Greenland!” and repeated suggestions that “China Loves Trump.” He posted an AI image of Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) as a devil (I think), calling him a “SLEAZEBAG” and a “Dumocrat,” and an image of eight lawmakers or officials in orange jumpsuits (except for Obama’s tan one), claiming they had “Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization!” And he posted a number of images of colorful fountains.

But much of the account’s attention this weekend was on Iran. On Saturday morning the account posted an image of Iran covered by a U.S. flag, and at 4:30 that afternoon, it posted that Trump had just had a call with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain, and then a separate call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about Iran. All the calls “went very well,” according to the post.

“An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” the post read, “subject to finalization…. Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly. In addition to many other elements of the Agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened.”

But Iran’s state media immediately posted that Trump’s claim that the strait would reopen as it was before the war was “not true,” adding that “it should be noted that American officials have acknowledged in multiple messages to Iran that Trump’s tweets are primarily for promotional purposes and media consumption within the United States, and they have recommended that no attention be paid to these statements.”

Firm details about the deal were scarce, but as journalist David Schuster posted, Al-Jazeera reported that the deal included “unfreezing billions in Iranian funds, lifting U.S. blockade, pulling U.S. forces away, reopening strait of Hormuz though with tolls to Iran, and allowing Iran to keep its enriched uranium.” “This would be a total U.S. surrender,” Schuster noted. Iran’s military spokesperson Ibrahim al-Fiqar posted an AI image of Trump kneeling before Iran’s supreme leader with the caption “The end.”

Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, immediately condemned the deal. He told reporters it “would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.” Wicker urged Trump to “allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started. It is past time for action.”

By Sunday morning Trump was, once again, posting AI images of U.S. bombers attacking Iranian ships (complete with bodies flying through the air) and insisting that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration was “ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Trump added that he expected Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, to join the Abraham Accords, the deal hammered out during Trump’s first term under which the UAE and Bahrain formally recognized Israel. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Arab leaders met Trump’s suggestion of such a recognition during the Saturday phone call with silence.

Then his account posted: “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon. Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”

This morning, Trump’s account posted: “I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet.” “hey are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that!”

Meanwhile, on Meet the Press Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who last week lost the primary for reelection to his seat after Trump backed his opponent and Trump supporters threw a gobsmacking $35 million at the contest, reopened fire from a different direction. Massie has been key to demanding the release of the Epstein files, and the administration continues to ignore the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the Department of Justice to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025.

When host Kristen Welker, noting that Massie had named names from the files in the past, asked, “Can we expect you to name more names in the coming weeks and months?” Massie answered: “Yes.”

JFC what a baby

“ Trump’s account posted: “I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet.” “hey are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that!””

May 26, 2026 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility, yet the facility opened about a year ago.

In February, twenty-five detainees at Delaney Hall signed a letter distributed by the national advocacy group for undocumented immigrants, Cosecha, as “Our Cry: A Letter from Inside Delaney Hall.” In the letter, they apologized “for the way we entered the United States,” explaining that “we were experiencing safety circumstances that endangered our lives and the lives of some members of our family.” They emphasized that they had surrendered to border authorities and continued to work within the system, attending check-ins, getting work permits, and paying taxes, before being seized by ICE agents.

They explained that they have not been afforded the legal hearings guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and are being pressured to self-deport under threats of being sent not back to their country of origin, but rather to third countries like Uganda. They noted that ICE agents have arrested children, the elderly, and people with medical issues and that the facility is overcrowded.

In a second letter, Delaney Hall detainees expanded their picture of their circumstances, noting that some of them have lived in the country for more than a decade, have citizen children, and were complying with legal requirements. They noted that detainees with HIV, cancer, diabetes, and heart conditions are not receiving proper medical attention.
In the second letter, signed by nearly 300 people, the detainees pleaded with “Senators, Congress members, foundations, and organizations that collaborate with immigrants” for help. In big letters at the bottom of the document they wrote: “S.O.S.,” the international distress call.

As Sophie Nieto-Muñoz of the New Jersey Monitor reported, about 300 detainees at Delaney Hall began a work and hunger strike on Friday over the conditions and treatment there. From inside, they called their family members outside, who shared their stories of worm-infested food, crowded conditions, and pressure to self-deport until guards cut their access to phones and tablets. Their goal, they said, was the immediate release of young detainees, the elderly, and those who are medically vulnerable, and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases.
On Saturday, Kim and Representative Rob Menendez Jr. visited the facility.

Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.

Kim concluded: “Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.”

On Sunday evening, dozens of protesters blocked the entrances to Delaney Hall after it appeared that guards were trying to move Martin Soto, one of those who announced the hunger strike. His wife, Gabriela Soto, has been organizing protesters on the outside. “The people inside Delaney Hall are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and members of our community,” she told Ryan Mancini of The Hill. “In New Jersey, we believe in the rule of law and that everyone deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We have a duty to safeguard the rights, health, and well-being of everyone within our borders.”

On Monday, New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was denied entry to the facility. She said that refusal raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Sherrill’s visit was “nothing more than a political stunt on Memorial Day when visitation is currently suspended due to riots outside in the facility.”

DHS also insisted that Democratic lawmakers were “spreading smears” about ICE and Delaney Hall. It denied that there was a hunger strike underway, and claimed that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” although nearly 50 ICE detainees have died. It claimed Democratic concerns were “a political stunt” and insisted those it is detaining are “the worst of the worst.”

On Monday, Kim, Sherrill, and New Jersey representatives Nellie Pou and LaMonica McIver were back at the facility along with about 150 protesters when federal agents sprayed the crowd with pepper balls and pepper spray. In a statement, DHS said: “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” It then went on to call the protesters “dangerous rioters” and said their obstruction of the way out of the facility—preventing Soto’s removal—was “a federal crime.” It added that “assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”

In fact, far from being a dangerous rioter, then-representative Kim was caught on film in the evening of January 6, 2021, picking up the trash the actual rioters left behind in the Capitol.
On Monday afternoon, a DHS spokesperson said they had moved Soto to a different facility.

Representative McIver responded to DHS today, saying: “I was at Delaney Hall yesterday. Everything the detainees wrote in their S.O.S. letter is 100% correct. DHS is lying to keep their abuses from being exposed. And to make things worse, they pepper sprayed and are lying about it to cover their tracks.”

The administration’s deportation policies were back in the news this weekend after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within DHS, announced sweeping changes to policies for obtaining permanent residency in the U.S. Before this administration, about 800,000 people a year applied for a green card, and half of them applied from within the U.S. Now those people apparently will have to leave the country and apply through consulates abroad.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained that the new policy will “force people to leave their jobs, homes, and families for weeks or months, all at their own expense,” decisions made at consulates are “virtually unchallengeable” in court, and backlogs will get even worse than they already are. He notes that about half of all green cards go to people applying from within the U.S.: “everyone from spouses and children of US citizens to skilled professionals getting a green card through an employer.”

Law professor Daniel Kanstroom told Rebecca Schneid of Time magazine that it appears “his Administration is trying to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible to attain permanent resident status.” Referring to the spouses and family members of people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, he added: “We’re focusing now on the group of people who potentially have the strongest reasons to stay in this country legitimately.”

Schneid notes that in the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress explicitly allowed people to change their residency status from within the U.S.

David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told Schneid that DHS has already slashed green card approvals in half simply by failing to process the applications.

On Friday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed the criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García. After wrongfully deporting Ábrego García to El Salvador, the administration facilitated his return only after securing an indictment against him for human smuggling, based on a 2022 traffic stop, saying he is a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.

Ábrego García had not faced charges from the traffic stop initially, and Crenshaw said the Justice Department’s reopening of the old case to prosecute Ábrego García after he had successfully challenged his deportation to El Salvador showed vindictive prosecution. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw said.
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán of NPR reported that DHS called Crenshaw’s decision “naked judicial activism” and vowed that “this Salvadorian is not going to remain in our country.”

In a statement, Ábrego García said, “Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill; and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”

Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted today that he had just visited so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” which appears to be in the process of shutting down. He suggested that Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump haven’t wanted to admit it was closing because they have spent a billion dollars of taxpayer money on the site in less than a year.

But, Frost said, “we can’t allow this place to just shut down and then not talk about it anymore. That’s what they want because they used a billion of our dollars to enrich private contractors that built and operated the place. They want us to move on because they don’t want us to talk about the human rights abuses and civil rights abuses that happened there and in other facilities as well…. We have to continue to push for accountability and consequences for people who broke the law and misused our…money, meant for hurricane preparedness, to kidnap and cage our neighbors.”

Can just imagine what a privately run concentration camp prison in the USA for people with no rights would be like.

Cymek said:

Can just imagine what a privately run concentration camp prison in the USA for people with no rights would be like.

It’s already happening.

kii said:

Cymek said:

Can just imagine what a privately run concentration camp prison in the USA for people with no rights would be like.

It’s already happening.

Yes
Prisons are a law onto themselves with regards to access
As an official wanting to inspecting conditions it would almost be impossible if the prison boss refused
I’d assume people working there would either by threatened if they said anything or complicit

kii said:

Cymek said:

Can just imagine what a privately run concentration camp prison in the USA for people with no rights would be like.

It’s already happening.

And not just the one – weren’t they aiming for one in each state?

May 27, 2026 (Wednesday)

In Texas yesterday, Republican primary voters chose Trump-backed state attorney general Ken Paxton over incumbent senator John Cornyn by more than 27 points to be the Republican candidate for senator. President Donald J. Trump endorsed the scandal-ridden Paxton last week after Senate Republicans had dumped $90 million into the race to defend Cornyn. Democrats will now use their advertisements calling attention to Paxton’s many scandals against them.

As Philip Elliott of Time magazine noted, Republicans can look forward to dumping another $250 million into trying to get Paxton elected, money that they needed to flip Democratic seats elsewhere.

Trump backed Paxton because he didn’t think Cornyn was loyal enough to him, despite the fact that Cornyn voted with Trump 99.2% of the time. Trump preferred Paxton’s attacks on Democrats and his flaunting of his MAGA identity despite—or perhaps because of—Paxton’s many scandals.

As CNN’s Patrick Svitek explained, in 2015, shortly after he took office as Texas attorney general, Paxton was indicted on charges of felony securities fraud, a case ending in March 2024 with an agreement that Paxton would pay restitution and complete community service. In 2020, Paxton’s top aides reported him to the FBI for abusing his office. He fired four of them. A judge later agreed they were fired improperly and awarded them $6.6 million. In 2023 the Texas House, dominated by Republicans, impeached Paxton on a bipartisan vote; under pressure from Trump, the Texas senate acquitted him. And then, last year, his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”

Trump appears to see politics as a dominance sport, much like the mixed martial arts fighting promoted by Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose arena is currently going up on the lawn of the White House for the fights Trump will host on his birthday, June 14. Brian Wiechert of WBAL-TV explains that workers are putting up a massive 90-foot-tall structure called The Claw to loom over a temporary octagon fighting arena in a way that the White House and the Washington Monument will be framed for television during the event.

With his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving of the Rose Garden to create a patio that looks like the one at Mar-a-Lago, and now the framing of the White House through a UFC arena, Trump has asserted his dominance over the People’s House. Similarly, with his purging even of loyalists in favor of extremists, he is asserting his dominance over the Republican Party, turning it fully into the MAGA Party.

In a similar moment in the 1850s, elite enslavers who dominated the Democratic Party demanded party members line up behind their determination to spread human enslavement to the West. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state protected the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border from enslavement, Democrats in 1854 forced through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting slavery there.

Their purity test was a harbinger of a dramatic political realignment.

Frustrated that the existing parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were not taking a strong enough stand against the demands of elite enslavers, those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the spread of slavery abandoned their old political allegiances and came together. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.”

As voters swung away from the Democrats in the 1850s, those Democrats left in office represented the most extreme districts and were themselves the most extreme members of the party. They tried to rally their base by appealing to racism, warning that Black Americans would murder white people unless they remained enslaved and insisting that anyone opposing the spread of slavery was endangering the country and that the U.S. had always been a nation of and for white men.

The echoes of that tactic today are blaring as Trump and MAGA Republicans try to cement their power through racism and culture war issues. Trump today insisted—completely falsely—that ethnic Somalis in Minnesota, almost all of whom are American citizens, are “all crooks.”

Media Matters yesterday reported that Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio said he expected those Trump supporters convicted of crimes for their actions around the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would use the money Trump has promised them from the $1.776 billion slush fund to spread “conservative culture” and to run for office to take over the system.

The “not one of us” theme is also playing out in Texas, where Republicans appear to be attacking Democratic candidate for senator James Talarico primarily with accusations that he is not manly enough for Texas, falsely saying he is a transgender vegan. Paxton has called Talarico “tofu Talarico,” “six-gender Jimmy,” “James Talafreako” and “low-T Talarico” and has said that Talarico “is a threat to our very way of life and our values. “

But Talarico seems to have gotten the memo. He welcomed Cornyn supporters to his campaign and responded to the Republican attacks by telling Ben Meiselas of Meidas Touch: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”

He has refused to take the bait and has stood firmly on the idea of a government that works for everyday Americans. To Meiselas, he made a point of suggesting that “many of my family members, my friends, my neighbors” voted for Trump because they thought he would lower costs, end forever wars, release the Epstein files, and “drain the swamp.”

Instead, “he’s done the exact opposite.” Talarico said he wants to “speak directly to those Texans who feel disillusioned, who feel like the system doesn’t work for them, that it only works for billionaires and puppet politicians like Paxton and Cornyn.” If “we can bring those Texans together across all these divisions in our politics, if we can see past the distractions and the culture war tactics, I think we can do something extraordinary,” Talarico said. “We can end thirty years of one-party rule in Texas, and we can transform American politics in the process.”

Today his campaign announced a tour called “THE PEOPLE vs. KEN PAXTON.”

Unlike anti-Nebraska candidates in 1854, Talarico and other Democratic candidates this year have the advantage of running against a party whose leader is openly corrupt. In addition to the $1.776 billion slush fund, the fortune in cryptocurrency deals, and so on, David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported today that “the contractor given a no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being paid an inflated and excessive profit margin.” The government is paying $13.1 million for the pool work, seven times what Trump initially said it would cost.

Maxine Joselow and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times also reported today that Trump is using $7 million worth of the entrance fees visitors have paid to national parks across the country to pay for the work on the reflecting pool. He is also using nearly $60 million in those national park fees to repair nine ornamental fountains in the capital.

And the administration appears determined to hide what it’s doing. It proposed today in sweeping language that it will require federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement, a tool Trump has relied heavily on to protect him from potential exposure for wrongdoing. As Don Moynihan explained in Can We Still Govern, the new role would make it impossible for the American people to know what government officials are doing.

That secrecy is hurting the American people in obvious ways. Sarah Owermohle of CNN reports that the administration has barred key U.S. officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from talking to officials at the World Health Organization, from which Trump withdrew the U.S. This limitation has been relaxed slightly since the outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship with U.S. passengers and a breaking Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now U.S. officials can attend small virtual meetings “in a listening capacity.”

After a trip yesterday to Walter Reed Military Medical Center, after which Trump posted that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY” and the official White House social media account went further, posting, “PERFECT BILL OF HEALTH!” and, in even bigger letters, “PERFECT PHYSICAL.” Trump once again appeared to fall asleep today at a Cabinet meeting.
He did, though, threaten to “blow up” U.S. ally Oman if it doesn’t “behave” over Trump’s demands to open the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

Yesterday the U.S. military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the number of boats struck in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean to fifty-eight. At least 194 individuals have been killed. The administration insists the boats are trafficking drugs but has produced no evidence for that accusation, and as Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today, “military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.”

Taking these patterns, along with others, into consideration, G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers assesses that although Texas voters haven’t elected a Democrat statewide in thirty-two years, the Texas Senate election is a toss-up.

In the midterm election of 1854, northerners tore through the ranks of congressmen who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected eleven senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North. Still disorganized in 1854, by 1856, those in the new coalition opposed to the Slave Power had turned to a new political party, the Republican Party.

By 1859, that new party found a champion, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who articulated a new vision of government that worked not for a wealthy cabal, but for the American people.

Neophyte said:

May 27, 2026 (Wednesday)

The “not one of us” theme is also playing out in Texas, where Republicans appear to be attacking Democratic candidate for senator James Talarico primarily with accusations that he is not manly enough for Texas, falsely saying he is a transgender vegan. Paxton has called Talarico “tofu Talarico,” “six-gender Jimmy,” “James Talafreako” and “low-T Talarico” and has said that Talarico “is a threat to our very way of life and our values. “

The reason they are calling him six-gender Jimmy is that someone said cis-gender to Trump and that’s what he heard.

Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan talk about Trump mistaking cis-gender for six-genders on their I Have Had It Podcast

Length: 15 minutes

Like he mixed up refugees seeking asylum and turning it into countries are releasing all the “crazy” people from their “insane” asylums and are sending them to America.

ms spock said:

Neophyte said:

May 27, 2026 (Wednesday)

The “not one of us” theme is also playing out in Texas, where Republicans appear to be attacking Democratic candidate for senator James Talarico primarily with accusations that he is not manly enough for Texas, falsely saying he is a transgender vegan. Paxton has called Talarico “tofu Talarico,” “six-gender Jimmy,” “James Talafreako” and “low-T Talarico” and has said that Talarico “is a threat to our very way of life and our values. “

The reason they are calling him six-gender Jimmy is that someone said cis-gender to Trump and that’s what he heard.

Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan talk about Trump mistaking cis-gender for six-genders on their I Have Had It Podcast

Length: 15 minutes

Like he mixed up refugees seeking asylum and turning it into countries are releasing all the “crazy” people from their “insane” asylums and are sending them to America.

The Broadwater :)

..personal history

May 28, 2026 (Thursday)

It’s an excellent bet that future books and films made about the Trump Era will begin with an image of the White House this week. The world-famous Rose Garden has been replaced with a patio that looks like one at Mar-a-Lago. The East Wing is rubble. And on the sweeping South Lawn, right outside the front door of the White House, construction is underway on a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship arena for cage matches to be held on Trump’s 80th birthday.

Now treating the nation’s capital as his property, Trump appears to be leaning on his past role as a real estate developer as a solution in Iran remains elusive, inflation in the U.S. climbs, and his popularity drops.

In addition to turning back to real estate, Trump seems to be lashing out to reassert his dominance over those who have hurt him.

Last night, Hannah Rabinowitz, Paula Reid, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that the Department of Justice under President Donald J. Trump has launched a criminal investigation into whether 82-year-old E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully sued Trump for defamation and for sexual assault, committed perjury in her testimony by saying she was not being paid to launch the lawsuit when it turned out later that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her legal fees and expenses.

Trump also refiled his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its publication of an article describing a card for sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s fiftieth birthday. The card shows a crude sketch of a girl, bearing words that refer to “certain things in common” and saying, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump’s lawsuit says that the article damaged his reputation and that the card is fake, although it came from Epstein’s estate. The estate later provided a copy of the card to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which published it on its own website.

U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles tossed out the original lawsuit last month, saying that Trump came “nowhere close” to establishing that the article’s authors acted with “actual malice” to defame him, but said Trump could amend the lawsuit and refile it. Yesterday, he did.

On Tuesday, Alan Feuer of the New York Times noted that Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice means grand juries as well as judges appear to be losing faith in the department. Although it is a common saying that prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, government prosecutors have had trouble getting the indictments Trump wants against his perceived political enemies.

In part this is because Trump has replaced career prosecutors with inexperienced loyalists, as Feuer notes, but it is also because of trumped-up charges against people like former FBI director James Comey and the six Democratic lawmakers who released a public video reminding military and intelligence personnel that they must not obey illegal orders.

Federal judges have been accusing prosecutors of misconduct, most recently in a case last week in Chicago in which a grand jury indicted six people, including a Democratic congressional candidate, for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a protest at a detention facility.

As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case after she discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. After making these maneuvers, the prosecutors then tried to hide evidence of them by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.

Judge Perry said: “I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

If Trump can end the rule of law, he can do as he wishes.

At least some of what he appears to want is corrupt dealings that put money into the pockets of himself and his family members. Today Robert Faturechi of ProPublica reported that Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro personally pressured the Pentagon to loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup company in which Donald Trump Jr. has a financial stake.

Navarro and Don Jr. appear to be close, and a Pentagon official told Faturechi that “he call came from the White House: We have to get this done.”

According to Faturechi, the Pentagon invested $620 million in Vulcan, a rare-earth magnet company, and another $80 million in its partner ReElement. The Commerce Department provided another $50 million in incentives, and the government took a $50 million stake in Vulcan.

When Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital invested in Vulcan in August 2025, the company was worth about $200 million. After the government investments, that valuation jumped to around $2 billion. Bloomberg reported last week that the investment in ReElement might not go through because of concerns over its ability to scale up its technology.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon told Faturechi that the Vulcan deal was sped up as defense officials balance “lightning speed with rigorous diligence to close high-impact deals that directly strengthen America’s defense and empower our warfighters.”

And yet, despite their evident attempt to warp the U.S. legal system to their own purposes, Trump and his MAGA loyalists insist that they are the ones against whom the Department of Justice has been used. That is their justification for the $1.776 billion slush fund for paying off those who were convicted of crimes for their participation in Trump’s schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Last night, a group of thirty-five former federal judges took on that slush fund.

As Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post reported, the former judges, appointed by members of both political parties, asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization brought against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for a “judicial review of the extraordinary—and historically unprecedented—circumstances presented by this litigation and by the collusive ‘settlement’ that invokes this litigation as the legal justification for its terms.”

Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization dropped the lawsuit after Williams appeared to question whether it was actually a legitimate lawsuit, since Trump was both the plaintiff and the person in charge of the IRS, then announced they had reached a “settlement agreement” with the Department of Justice. Williams was clear in her order closing the case that there was “no settlement of record” in it.

The judges expressed concern that the Trumps were manipulating the judicial system, “which threatens to undermine confidence in the administration of justice.” They suggested that “this ‘case’ that the parties purport to have ‘settled’ is itself a fraud on the Court.” They also maintain that “this ‘settlement’ is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court,” and that “raud on the court is established by clear and convincing evidence.”

“The parties have used this lawsuit—which was never an adversarial proceeding over which the Court even had jurisdiction—as a means to allow a ‘commission’ controlled by the President to dole out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars without constitutional or congressional authority to do so, and to confer unlawful private benefits to the President and his family by purportedly prohibiting the United States from prosecuting any and all claims against them.”

“To be clear,” the judges wrote, “the parties’ settlement was not, and never will be, legally justified.”

“ Trump’s lawsuit says that the article damaged his reputation”

Yeah, that’s what did it.

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

This morning, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who just lost his primary after President Donald J. Trump endorsed Republican challenger Ken Paxton, posted:

“An old, but apt fable:
“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”

Cornyn appears to be firing a shot across the president’s bow, and now that Trump has alienated Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas by endorsing their opponents, there are six Republican senators who may be willing to stop moving in lockstep with him.

Trump’s war on Iran and the rising prices Americans are enduring in its wake are costing him support from all but his most fervent base, and there is no immediate solution that will make those problems go away. As Noah Berlatsky noted in Public Notice yesterday, no matter what he does in Iran, Trump will leave that situation with a loss. “f Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options,” Berlatsky wrote, “which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him.”

There has been more noise today about how the U.S. and Iran are on the verge of an agreement, but so far it has come to naught. Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported today that Trump met with advisors for two hours today in the Situation Room to discuss the agreement but came to no decision about it. What did happen today is that officials from both Chevron and Exxon warned that oil inventories are dangerously low, raising concerns about dramatic price spikes.

As Americans sour on Trump’s economy, lawmakers are backing away from his self-aggrandizing plans for a new $250 bill with his face on it for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is touting the plan, Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the necessary congressional approval is not forthcoming as lawmakers recognize that releasing a $250 bill raises images of gilded ballrooms and extravagance at a time when Americans are having trouble paying for gas and groceries.

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill.

But, so far, only fifteen Republicans have cosponsored a bill to create the Trump $250 bill.

Trump’s other plans for demonstrating his power also took at least symbolic hits today.

Today Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to remove Trump’s name from the building, and from all official materials and signage, within fourteen days and blocked its plan to close for two years. As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, Cooper stood firm on Congress’s authority over the Kennedy Center. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” he wrote, “and only Congress can change it.”

Cooper also found that the board of the Kennedy Center agreed to close it for two years without advice of legal counsel and that Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer since Trump appointee Ric Grenell left, “had served in the role of Kennedy Center Executive Director for all of a few minutes before suggesting that the institution be shut down for years.”

Yesterday, Trump’s Freedom 250 organization, which he set up to compete with the bipartisan America 250 celebration of the nation’s birthday, announced that nine musical artists would perform at a sixteen-day “Great American State Fair” it was sponsoring on the National Mall. By today, most of the performers had pulled out after realizing that they had not been invited to be part of the nonpartisan America 250 but instead had been invited to Trump’s personal version of the anniversary celebration.

Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported today that Trump is working hard for a certain kind of vibe at another Freedom 250 event: his Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House for his 80th birthday on June 14. They reported that the Pentagon is trying to recruit hundreds of troops to show up to watch the matches in their uniforms. In addition to paying for their own travel, those military personnel must meet height and weight requirements.
U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia Leonie M. Brinkema temporarily stopped the Department of Justice from creating or operating the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund, the $1.776 billion slush fund the administration created to pay off those convicted of committing crimes to help President Donald J. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The administration cannot transfer money to the fund, consider any claims for payments from it, or pay out any money from it.

Louise Radnofsky and Lydia Wheeler of the Wall Street Journal report that those challenging the fund are people and entities prosecuted or threatened by the Trump administration. The plaintiffs say the government is not treating them on a par with Trump loyalists as worthy of compensation for government “weaponization.”
Brinkema has scheduled a hearing on the case for June 12.

This afternoon, yesterday’s request by thirty-five federal judges that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization had brought against the IRS bore fruit. Although the Trumps dropped the suit, the Department of Justice used it as justification for the establishment of the $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those who claimed the country’s legal system had been “weaponized” against them because they were convicted of crimes related to their actions to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Today Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond to the judges’ filing by June 12 and to address the judges’ claims that the two sides in the case—the Trumps on the one hand and the Internal Revenue Service, which Trump oversees, on the other—were not in fact adversaries in the case.

Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that more than a dozen Republican senators have privately asked Trump advisors to get rid of the slush fund, suggesting it will be hard to defend on the campaign trail before this fall’s midterm elections.

As the courts and the American people challenge Trump, he is lashing out. He responded to the judge’s order to take his name off the Kennedy Center with a long social media screed in which he insisted that he alone was “saving a dying Performing Arts Center” and said he would “transfer this failing Institution back to” Congress, although of course it was never his to command.

“There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country.” Then, in another long screed, he complained that the New York Times “is doing everything possible to criticize the magnificent restoration of the Reflecting Pool.”

But as Trump lashes out, his loyalists are working to consolidate their power.

The Office of Management and Budget, overseen by director Russell Vought, who was instrumental in the construction of Project 2025, has proposed a sweeping change in federal rules that would put Trump’s appointees in charge of billions of dollars of federal grants. According to Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed, the change would empower Trump’s appointees to kill grants that aren’t aligned with Trump’s priorities. That includes grants awarded to universities through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth said that federally funded research at MIT is down 20% compared to last year. “That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,” she said. The number of graduate students MIT takes on will also drop by about 20%, or about 500 fewer.

As Erica Orden of Politico reported yesterday, in the case of the firing of former FBI director James Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Karen Lesperance, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, told Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the government’s position is that Trump has the power to fire anyone, even if he is doing so for political reasons. When Furman asked if there were any limits to that power—could he fire people to create an “all-white executive branch? Or all-Black?” he asked—Lesperance avoided the question.

Comey’s lawyer said the Justice Department’s position was a “novel and breathtaking theory about the scope of” presidential power.

Trump and his loyalists have tried for months now to get control of state voter lists but have lost repeatedly in court, since the Constitution establishes that states run elections. Today the United States Postal Service has proposed that it will send mail-in ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.

As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket note, this “would represent a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.”

buffy said:

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

This morning, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who just lost his primary after President Donald J. Trump endorsed Republican challenger Ken Paxton, posted:

“An old, but apt fable:
“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”

and yet they all get a free pass every time still

buffy said:

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill.

well there’s another solution

buffy said:

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

This morning, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), who just lost his primary after President Donald J. Trump endorsed Republican challenger Ken Paxton, posted:

“An old, but apt fable:
“A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’”

Cornyn appears to be firing a shot across the president’s bow, and now that Trump has alienated Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas by endorsing their opponents, there are six Republican senators who may be willing to stop moving in lockstep with him.

Trump’s war on Iran and the rising prices Americans are enduring in its wake are costing him support from all but his most fervent base, and there is no immediate solution that will make those problems go away. As Noah Berlatsky noted in Public Notice yesterday, no matter what he does in Iran, Trump will leave that situation with a loss. “f Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options,” Berlatsky wrote, “which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him.”

There has been more noise today about how the U.S. and Iran are on the verge of an agreement, but so far it has come to naught. Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported today that Trump met with advisors for two hours today in the Situation Room to discuss the agreement but came to no decision about it. What did happen today is that officials from both Chevron and Exxon warned that oil inventories are dangerously low, raising concerns about dramatic price spikes.

As Americans sour on Trump’s economy, lawmakers are backing away from his self-aggrandizing plans for a new $250 bill with his face on it for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is touting the plan, Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the necessary congressional approval is not forthcoming as lawmakers recognize that releasing a $250 bill raises images of gilded ballrooms and extravagance at a time when Americans are having trouble paying for gas and groceries.

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill.

But, so far, only fifteen Republicans have cosponsored a bill to create the Trump $250 bill.

Trump’s other plans for demonstrating his power also took at least symbolic hits today.

Today Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to remove Trump’s name from the building, and from all official materials and signage, within fourteen days and blocked its plan to close for two years. As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, Cooper stood firm on Congress’s authority over the Kennedy Center. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” he wrote, “and only Congress can change it.”

Cooper also found that the board of the Kennedy Center agreed to close it for two years without advice of legal counsel and that Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer since Trump appointee Ric Grenell left, “had served in the role of Kennedy Center Executive Director for all of a few minutes before suggesting that the institution be shut down for years.”

Yesterday, Trump’s Freedom 250 organization, which he set up to compete with the bipartisan America 250 celebration of the nation’s birthday, announced that nine musical artists would perform at a sixteen-day “Great American State Fair” it was sponsoring on the National Mall. By today, most of the performers had pulled out after realizing that they had not been invited to be part of the nonpartisan America 250 but instead had been invited to Trump’s personal version of the anniversary celebration.

Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported today that Trump is working hard for a certain kind of vibe at another Freedom 250 event: his Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House for his 80th birthday on June 14. They reported that the Pentagon is trying to recruit hundreds of troops to show up to watch the matches in their uniforms. In addition to paying for their own travel, those military personnel must meet height and weight requirements.
U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia Leonie M. Brinkema temporarily stopped the Department of Justice from creating or operating the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund, the $1.776 billion slush fund the administration created to pay off those convicted of committing crimes to help President Donald J. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The administration cannot transfer money to the fund, consider any claims for payments from it, or pay out any money from it.

Louise Radnofsky and Lydia Wheeler of the Wall Street Journal report that those challenging the fund are people and entities prosecuted or threatened by the Trump administration. The plaintiffs say the government is not treating them on a par with Trump loyalists as worthy of compensation for government “weaponization.”
Brinkema has scheduled a hearing on the case for June 12.

This afternoon, yesterday’s request by thirty-five federal judges that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams reopen the legal case Trump, his oldest sons, and the Trump Organization had brought against the IRS bore fruit. Although the Trumps dropped the suit, the Department of Justice used it as justification for the establishment of the $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those who claimed the country’s legal system had been “weaponized” against them because they were convicted of crimes related to their actions to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Today Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond to the judges’ filing by June 12 and to address the judges’ claims that the two sides in the case—the Trumps on the one hand and the Internal Revenue Service, which Trump oversees, on the other—were not in fact adversaries in the case.

Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that more than a dozen Republican senators have privately asked Trump advisors to get rid of the slush fund, suggesting it will be hard to defend on the campaign trail before this fall’s midterm elections.

As the courts and the American people challenge Trump, he is lashing out. He responded to the judge’s order to take his name off the Kennedy Center with a long social media screed in which he insisted that he alone was “saving a dying Performing Arts Center” and said he would “transfer this failing Institution back to” Congress, although of course it was never his to command.

“There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country.” Then, in another long screed, he complained that the New York Times “is doing everything possible to criticize the magnificent restoration of the Reflecting Pool.”

But as Trump lashes out, his loyalists are working to consolidate their power.

The Office of Management and Budget, overseen by director Russell Vought, who was instrumental in the construction of Project 2025, has proposed a sweeping change in federal rules that would put Trump’s appointees in charge of billions of dollars of federal grants. According to Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed, the change would empower Trump’s appointees to kill grants that aren’t aligned with Trump’s priorities. That includes grants awarded to universities through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth said that federally funded research at MIT is down 20% compared to last year. “That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,” she said. The number of graduate students MIT takes on will also drop by about 20%, or about 500 fewer.

As Erica Orden of Politico reported yesterday, in the case of the firing of former FBI director James Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Karen Lesperance, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, told Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the government’s position is that Trump has the power to fire anyone, even if he is doing so for political reasons. When Furman asked if there were any limits to that power—could he fire people to create an “all-white executive branch? Or all-Black?” he asked—Lesperance avoided the question.

Comey’s lawyer said the Justice Department’s position was a “novel and breathtaking theory about the scope of” presidential power.

Trump and his loyalists have tried for months now to get control of state voter lists but have lost repeatedly in court, since the Constitution establishes that states run elections. Today the United States Postal Service has proposed that it will send mail-in ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.

As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket note, this “would represent a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.”

Thank you for your attention to this matter that there are too many concerning issues for me to address today. I watched some of Heather, Danielle Moodie, Wajahat Ali, Mehdi Hassan and Mary Trump.

I am officially overwhelmed.

SCIENCE said:

buffy said:

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill.

well there’s another solution

Monopoly money?

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

buffy said:

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill.

well there’s another solution

Monopoly money?

against the law to put a living president on currency

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

well there’s another solution

Monopoly money?

against the law to put a living president on currency

Being against the law hasn’t stopped him so far.

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

well there’s another solution

Monopoly money?

against the law to put a living president on currency

Yeah but monopoly money isn’t real currency

Divine Angel said:

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Monopoly money?

against the law to put a living president on currency

Being against the law hasn’t stopped him so far.

He will say it is an emergency and he’s off scot free.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

buffy said:

May 29, 2026 (Friday)

It is currently against the law to put a living president on currency, so it will take an act of Congress to create this new bill.

well there’s another solution

Monopoly money?

Didn’t they already do this with BitCoin?

Divine Angel said:

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Monopoly money?

against the law to put a living president on currency

Being against the law hasn’t stopped him so far.

I am LOLing and it’s not good laughing.

I just want Trump not to nuke the world.

ms spock said:

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

well there’s another solution

Monopoly money?

Didn’t they already do this with BitCoin?

Yep.

May 30, 2026 (Saturday)

Life was good in 1889 for the more than fifty wealthy industrialists who belonged to Pennsylvania’s South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Most of the men had made their fortunes in nearby Pittsburgh in the heady years after the Civil War. New national markets and a new national financial system made business boom across the country. Factories grew and railroads hammered across the country, moving grain east and manufactured products south and west.

Pittsburgh produced the iron and steel that fed the railroad industry and the growing cities. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick ran the steel mills, while there was also money to be made in real estate, storekeeping, lawyering, and accounting in the booming city. Bankers like Andrew Mellon, who would become the U.S. secretary of the treasury during the boom years of the 1920s, made enough money to reshape the country.

In 1880, Frick’s friend Benjamin Franklin Ruff, who sold coke (the high-heat fuel necessary to make steel), contracted to make railroad tunnels, and bought and sold real estate, proposed to Frick and other wealthy friends that they establish a secret and exclusive club in the mountains, where members could spend their summers away from the heat and dirt of bustling Pittsburgh.

Ruff owned an abandoned reservoir on Pennsylvania’s Little Conemaugh River in southwestern Pennsylvania. The reservoir had been created in 1852, when Pennsylvania finished damming the river to create a canal system. But railroads soon replaced canals, and the reservoir became obsolete. The state sold it, along with the South Fork Dam, to private interests. By 1880 it was in Ruff’s hands.

Ruff and his friends organized the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which took control of the reservoir—renaming it Lake Conemaugh—and established a club on about 160 acres of land. The main building on the site was a 47-room clubhouse with a dining room that could seat 150. Sixteen members built large “cottages” along the lakeshore and spent their evenings at plays or musical performances.

At two and a half miles long and a mile wide, the lake was big enough to run the club’s two steam yachts or to enjoy on sailboats or canoes. It covered about 450 acres and was 70 feet deep. It held about 20 million tons of water. The club’s wealthy industrialists and financiers centered their summer relaxation around the artificial lake.

Private owners had already changed the lake and the dam significantly. The man who had bought the property from the state removed from the dam the five sluice pipes that allowed the removal of excess water, selling them for scrap. This meant there was no way to drain the reservoir either for repairs, or to lower water levels during periods of heavy rain.

As they prepared for summer recreation, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club stocked the lake with black bass sport fish. Then, worried that the expensive bass might get washed downstream, they put screens over the dam’s spillway. To enable carriages to cross the dam, the club lowered it. There was no way to lower water levels in their Lake Conemaugh, but in what must have been an idyllic existence in the summers of the early 1880s, they ignored warnings that the changes they had made to the dam had weakened it dangerously.

There were 30,000 people, mostly Welsh and German immigrants, living in Johnstown, a factory town in the valley below Lake Conemaugh, about fourteen miles downstream from the South Fork Dam. The economy that had made fortunes for the men of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was built on the labor of workers like the people in Johnstown.

The men there worked in the blast furnaces, converters, rolling mills, or coal mines of Cambria Iron or worked for the Gautier plant making barbed wire. The steep hills of the region meant the drop in elevation from the lake to Johnstown was about 450 feet, more than 40 stories in a modern-day building. But there was little reason for members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to think about the people who lived downstream.

Until May 30, 1889, Decoration Day, when a torrent of rain began to fall.

On the morning of May 31, the president of the club, Elias Unger, observed from his farmhouse above the lake that “…the valley below me seemed to be all under water, and I couldn’t understand what all that meant.” Unger was at the farmhouse to oversee the construction of a sewage system for the club, and when he ran down to the dam, he immediately ordered the Italian workers from the sewage project to dig an emergency spillway to relieve pressure on the dam. But the workers hit rock and made little headway. Then Unger ordered workers to tear out the fish screens that had become blocked with debris, but it was too late. By 1:30 in the afternoon, it was clear there was nothing to do but wait for the dam to fail.

A little before 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday, May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam on Pennsylvania’s Little Conemaugh River broke. Unger said the dam failed “little by little until it got a head way, and when it got cut through it just went like a flash.”

As 20 million tons of water spilled downstream, it picked up houses, trees, bridges, railroad cars, animals, and people. The water measured at least 35 feet high and traveled at 40 miles an hour. As it traveled, it became a wall of debris, grinding through more than $4.4 billion of property in today’s dollars. It swept locomotives from their tracks, discarding some nearly a mile away.

The water consumed victims. And when the wave smashed into a stone bridge in Johnstown, the trapped debris caught fire, trapping more. Two thousand, two hundred and eight people died in the Johnstown Flood, the largest loss of civilian lives in the U.S. at that time. Ninety-nine entire families died. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, four hundred miles away, and as late as 1911.

Gertrude Quinn Slattery later recalled that her father had been terribly worried about the heavy rains, warning that not a house would be left standing if the dam burst. Hearing the roar of the coming water, he grabbed one of his children and ordered the rest to “Run for your lives” to a nearby hill.

Slattery later recalled: “I can never forget what I saw! It was like the Day of Judgement I have since seen pictured in books. Pandemonium had broken loose, screams, cries and people were running; their white faces like death masks; parents dragging children, whose heads bobbed up and down in the water; a boat filled to capacity with eager, anxious passengers; household pets of all descriptions dangling from living arms; a wagon loaded to the breaking point lost a wheel and the despairing mortals riding therein were dumped down in a heap in the filthy water. They scrambled to their feet in less time than it takes to tell it, as the on-rushing mob moved rapidly forward, bent on self-preservation at any cost…and now a moving mass, black with houses, trees, boulders, logs and rafters was coming down like an avalanche.”

From around the world, people rushed to help the survivors. One of the first to arrive was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who stayed for five months. She brought with her fifty doctors and nurses, and together they learned how to respond to a natural disaster.

But those survivors who hoped to hold the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club accountable were disappointed. Blaming the club members for the disaster, newspapers built the story into one of the biggest in American history. Even the pro-business New York Times reported that “ustice is inevitable even though the horror is attributable to men of wealth and station, and the majority of the victims the most downtrodden workers in any industry in the country.”

But the club men denied responsibility for the disaster, and all four lawsuits launched against the club failed. Club members and law partners James Hay Reed and Philander Knox defended the club in court, claiming the flood was an act of God for which the members could not be held responsible. Reed went on to become a federal judge. Knox went on to become a U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, and U.S. attorney general.

Wow! That was quite a tale!

Bloody hell!

Michael V said:

Bloody hell!

There’s a youtube doco about it. Unnerving viewing.

You’ve got the text, now for the rest.

Livestream for Heather Cox Richardson for the 2nd of June, which is our 3rd of June.

Link

The Truth about the US Concentration Camps with Heather Cox Richardson..

Link