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Republican’s #TownHall Blows Up in His Face as He’s Showered in Boos
by Robert McCoy
Fri, August 1, 2025"#BryanSteil entered the Elkhorn High School auditorium on Thursday to resounding boos, and faced a raucous crowd for the duration of the 80-minute session, including fierce questions on his support of Trump’s agenda, as well as frequent interruptions, chants, and jeering.
"Attendees were evidently fired up over Steil’s support of Trump’s budget, poised to tilt taxes in favor of the #rich while tattering the #SocialSafetyNet. Steil defended his vote on the bill, which is also estimated to balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars. (When the lawmaker mentioned national debt as a pressing issue, one attendee interjected: 'Thanks to you!')
"He also voiced his support of Trump’s controversial immigration policies—a topic which elicited 'some of the loudest boos,' according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"More than one person in attendance referred to the Florida immigrant detention camp callously dubbed '#AlligatorAlcatraz' as a #ConcentrationCamp, which Steil objected to. A constituent noted that 'the difference between a #prison or a #DetentionCenter and a concentration camp is #DueProcess.'
"Steil also had to address Trump’s tariffs (which one attendee called 'a terrible tax that’s going to be placed on the citizens of the United States'), as well as Trump’s push to all but abolish the Department of Education ('Education is best resolved at the local level,' Steil said).
"Many questions Steil faced reflected a widespread perception that Steil is in Trump’s pocket. One attendee said, 'Southeast #Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run Southeast Wisconsin through you.'
"Another made similar remarks in the context of immigration. 'What I see happening to our #Immigrant population embarrasses me—horrifies me,' she said.
You have not raised a voice to complain about it. Where do I see your leadership? I see no leadership—I see you following Trump 100 percent of the time.' In response to this latter question, Steil, ironically, 'lauded Trump’s executive orders and #deportations,' Wisconsin #PublicRadio reports."https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republican-town-hall-blows-face-132736634.html
#USPol #TaxBreaksForTheRich #BigUglyBill #MedicaidCuts #SNAPCuts #PublicBroadcastingCuts #DoYourJob #WeKnowWhereYouLive
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Republican’s #TownHall Blows Up in His Face as He’s Showered in Boos
by Robert McCoy
Fri, August 1, 2025"#BryanSteil entered the Elkhorn High School auditorium on Thursday to resounding boos, and faced a raucous crowd for the duration of the 80-minute session, including fierce questions on his support of Trump’s agenda, as well as frequent interruptions, chants, and jeering.
"Attendees were evidently fired up over Steil’s support of Trump’s budget, poised to tilt taxes in favor of the #rich while tattering the #SocialSafetyNet. Steil defended his vote on the bill, which is also estimated to balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars. (When the lawmaker mentioned national debt as a pressing issue, one attendee interjected: 'Thanks to you!')
"He also voiced his support of Trump’s controversial immigration policies—a topic which elicited 'some of the loudest boos,' according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"More than one person in attendance referred to the Florida immigrant detention camp callously dubbed '#AlligatorAlcatraz' as a #ConcentrationCamp, which Steil objected to. A constituent noted that 'the difference between a #prison or a #DetentionCenter and a concentration camp is #DueProcess.'
"Steil also had to address Trump’s tariffs (which one attendee called 'a terrible tax that’s going to be placed on the citizens of the United States'), as well as Trump’s push to all but abolish the Department of Education ('Education is best resolved at the local level,' Steil said).
"Many questions Steil faced reflected a widespread perception that Steil is in Trump’s pocket. One attendee said, 'Southeast #Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run Southeast Wisconsin through you.'
"Another made similar remarks in the context of immigration. 'What I see happening to our #Immigrant population embarrasses me—horrifies me,' she said.
You have not raised a voice to complain about it. Where do I see your leadership? I see no leadership—I see you following Trump 100 percent of the time.' In response to this latter question, Steil, ironically, 'lauded Trump’s executive orders and #deportations,' Wisconsin #PublicRadio reports."https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republican-town-hall-blows-face-132736634.html
#USPol #TaxBreaksForTheRich #BigUglyBill #MedicaidCuts #SNAPCuts #PublicBroadcastingCuts #DoYourJob #WeKnowWhereYouLive
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Republican’s #TownHall Blows Up in His Face as He’s Showered in Boos
by Robert McCoy
Fri, August 1, 2025"#BryanSteil entered the Elkhorn High School auditorium on Thursday to resounding boos, and faced a raucous crowd for the duration of the 80-minute session, including fierce questions on his support of Trump’s agenda, as well as frequent interruptions, chants, and jeering.
"Attendees were evidently fired up over Steil’s support of Trump’s budget, poised to tilt taxes in favor of the #rich while tattering the #SocialSafetyNet. Steil defended his vote on the bill, which is also estimated to balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars. (When the lawmaker mentioned national debt as a pressing issue, one attendee interjected: 'Thanks to you!')
"He also voiced his support of Trump’s controversial immigration policies—a topic which elicited 'some of the loudest boos,' according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"More than one person in attendance referred to the Florida immigrant detention camp callously dubbed '#AlligatorAlcatraz' as a #ConcentrationCamp, which Steil objected to. A constituent noted that 'the difference between a #prison or a #DetentionCenter and a concentration camp is #DueProcess.'
"Steil also had to address Trump’s tariffs (which one attendee called 'a terrible tax that’s going to be placed on the citizens of the United States'), as well as Trump’s push to all but abolish the Department of Education ('Education is best resolved at the local level,' Steil said).
"Many questions Steil faced reflected a widespread perception that Steil is in Trump’s pocket. One attendee said, 'Southeast #Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run Southeast Wisconsin through you.'
"Another made similar remarks in the context of immigration. 'What I see happening to our #Immigrant population embarrasses me—horrifies me,' she said.
You have not raised a voice to complain about it. Where do I see your leadership? I see no leadership—I see you following Trump 100 percent of the time.' In response to this latter question, Steil, ironically, 'lauded Trump’s executive orders and #deportations,' Wisconsin #PublicRadio reports."https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republican-town-hall-blows-face-132736634.html
#USPol #TaxBreaksForTheRich #BigUglyBill #MedicaidCuts #SNAPCuts #PublicBroadcastingCuts #DoYourJob #WeKnowWhereYouLive
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Republican’s #TownHall Blows Up in His Face as He’s Showered in Boos
by Robert McCoy
Fri, August 1, 2025"#BryanSteil entered the Elkhorn High School auditorium on Thursday to resounding boos, and faced a raucous crowd for the duration of the 80-minute session, including fierce questions on his support of Trump’s agenda, as well as frequent interruptions, chants, and jeering.
"Attendees were evidently fired up over Steil’s support of Trump’s budget, poised to tilt taxes in favor of the #rich while tattering the #SocialSafetyNet. Steil defended his vote on the bill, which is also estimated to balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars. (When the lawmaker mentioned national debt as a pressing issue, one attendee interjected: 'Thanks to you!')
"He also voiced his support of Trump’s controversial immigration policies—a topic which elicited 'some of the loudest boos,' according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"More than one person in attendance referred to the Florida immigrant detention camp callously dubbed '#AlligatorAlcatraz' as a #ConcentrationCamp, which Steil objected to. A constituent noted that 'the difference between a #prison or a #DetentionCenter and a concentration camp is #DueProcess.'
"Steil also had to address Trump’s tariffs (which one attendee called 'a terrible tax that’s going to be placed on the citizens of the United States'), as well as Trump’s push to all but abolish the Department of Education ('Education is best resolved at the local level,' Steil said).
"Many questions Steil faced reflected a widespread perception that Steil is in Trump’s pocket. One attendee said, 'Southeast #Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run Southeast Wisconsin through you.'
"Another made similar remarks in the context of immigration. 'What I see happening to our #Immigrant population embarrasses me—horrifies me,' she said.
You have not raised a voice to complain about it. Where do I see your leadership? I see no leadership—I see you following Trump 100 percent of the time.' In response to this latter question, Steil, ironically, 'lauded Trump’s executive orders and #deportations,' Wisconsin #PublicRadio reports."https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republican-town-hall-blows-face-132736634.html
#USPol #TaxBreaksForTheRich #BigUglyBill #MedicaidCuts #SNAPCuts #PublicBroadcastingCuts #DoYourJob #WeKnowWhereYouLive
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Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
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Filling a void while living the dream. John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Back in 1982, I was finishing up my first Masters in 1982, taking a much-needed vacation to Europe to celebrate the event, trying to save the Savings and Loan Industry after the rug was pulled out of fixed rate assets with 30-year obligations, yet Congress decided in 1980 to let their liabilities be “open to the market” which was running amok with double-digit inflation. I also was pregnant with my oldest. I had a modest two-story, two-bedroom townhouse with a 30-year loan fixed at 16.7% but mercifully put to 12% because I worked at the Lender. I also could do nothing to stop them from heading to bankruptcy. I’d worked at a small commercial bank where the problem was having to pay interest now on checking accounts. This upset of the status quo left over from the Depression Days basically threatened homeownership and business. Repricing their liabilities more to market was a killer but considered necessary because savings funds were going to money market accounts. I also spent some time trying to explain these things to Congress. The only good advice I got there was never to get in an elevator with Strom Thurmond. The eighties economy was a mess, but you’d never know if you had read anything besides economic studies in journals. It didn’t really get better until we got what we call a regime change.
I planned on attending law school, taking the exams while noticeably pregnant with my oldest daughter, getting accepted to several, etc. I visited the University of Chicago as an undergrad. All I could think was there were too many damn lawyers around the country. So, I became a Financial Economist with eyes on my doctorate. I missed this seminal event in American History where a group of people worked to undermine the Justice System to benefit the wealthy. The Federalist Society, nicknamed FedSoc, was founded that same year. I don’t often rely on Wikipedia, but when I do, I make sure they’ve got citations.
The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by a group of students from Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and The University of Chicago Law School with the aim of challenging liberal or left-wing ideology within elite American law schools and universities. The organization’s stated objectives are “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning”,[1] and it plays a central role in networking and mentoring young conservative lawyers.[5] According to Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the Federalist Society “has evolved into the de facto gatekeeper for right-of-center lawyers aspiring to government jobs and federal judgeships under Republican presidents.”[8] It vetted President Donald Trump‘s list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees; in March 2020, 43 out of 51 of Trump’s appellate court nominees were current or former members of the society.[10]
In 2018, Politico Magazine wrote that “it is no exaggeration to suggest that it was perhaps the most effective student conference ever—a blueprint, in retrospect, for how to marry youthful enthusiasm with intellectual oomph to achieve far-reaching results.”[13] The society states that it “is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”[2]
The society looks to Federalist Paper Number 78 for an articulation of the virtue of judicial restraint, as written by Alexander Hamilton: “It can be of no weight to say that the courts, on the pretense of a repugnancy, may substitute their own pleasure to the constitutional intentions of the legislature … The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body.”
“Trump is an expert in lawfare, and his life has revolved around manipulating the judicial system. He’s out on bail while facing 54 more criminal charges and awaiting sentencing for conviction of 34 felonies. It is entertaining listening to MAGA whine about the corrupt DOJ while the corruption is all Trump.” John Buss @repeat1968
That sounds almost mundane, doesn’t it? The virtue of judicial restraint? Protecting individual liberty? However, we now have judges so far off the rails of restraint that it’s not even funny. Some of them are now vehemently anti-MAGA and Donald, but they’re still very much at the root of the problem. I found this ironic when I read it last year at WAPO. “Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6. Two law professors active in the Federalist Society wrote that the original meaning of the 14th Amendment makes Donald Trump ineligible to hold government office.”
Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.
The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”
He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”
Yet, this is the same group that vetted all of Trump’s appointments. But it didn’t start there, and it doesn’t end there. This is from The New Republic. “Clarence Thomas Is Hiding Even More Money Than We Knew. The justice has received millions of dollars worth of gifts, far more than his colleagues, but only reported a fraction of it.” These judges are not only activists whose findings are not based on anything in the Constitution or precedent, but they take cash for their positions. The news on Clarence Thomas is so bad that I cannot believe Dick Durbin won’t open an investigation or call him and his enablers to a hearing.
Crime doesn’t pay, but it seems that Justice can get you millions.
A new report from Fix the Court, a judicial watchdog and advocacy group, found that justices on the U.S. Supreme Court received close to a total of $3 million in gifts, at least, over the last 20 years—with more than $2.4 million of those gifts being directed solely to Justice Clarence Thomas.
Thomas has repeatedly been the focus of ethical scrutiny over reports that he received exorbitant gifts and vacations from Republican billionaires, never paid back a loan for his beloved R.V., and cavorted with the Koch brothers, while failing to adequately disclose many of the perks he’s received. All of this has been reported on extensively by publications such as ProPublica. Now, Fix the Court has worked to add it all up.
Fix the Court was able to identify 103 gifts that Thomas received between 2004 and 2024, totaling a value of $2,402,310. Overall, it found 193 when counting some gifts that were received before that period. These gifts could be a number of things: often meals or lodging, with a free flight counting as one gift and a round-trip journey counting as two.
The court’s gift-reporting threshold has slowly risen over the course of 20 years. In 2004, it was $285, and in 2023, it was $480. Of those 193 gifts, Thomas only disclosed receiving 27.
Fix the Court was also able to identify 101 “likely gifts”—mostly trips to exclusive clubs Bohemian Grove and Topridge—Thomas received during those 20 years, which added an additional value of $1,787,684. Including those “likely gifts,” Thomas has reportedly received $4,189,994 worth of perks.
For context, in January 2001, an associate Supreme Court justice like Thomas would’ve made $194,300, a sum that has since risen to $285,400, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Through gifts, Thomas has roughly doubled his official published income from the last 20 years, which would sit at approximately $4,747,700. To Thomas, being bought and paid for appears to be a second job altogether. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
When counting “likely gifts” furnished to Thomas, justices seated on the U.S. Supreme Court received an astounding 445 gifts valued at $4,780,720. Without those “likely gifts,” the justices’ tallies still hit 344, worth $2,993,036.
Here’s the report from Fix the Court, which details the massivCourtunts of grift. Of course, it’s the darlings of FedSoc that run amok with the bribes.
The tally captures the value of Thomas’ yacht trips to Russia, the Greek Isles and Indonesia, as well as some new information on the Thomas flights Tony Novelly paid for and the Scalia and Alito fishing trips Robin Arkley paid for that’s included in the congressional record. The value of the gifts Scalia received on his ill-fated trip to Marfa, Tex., in 2016 are also included.FTC estimated the value of most of the medals, plaques and trophies the justices received over the years and didn’t list on their disclosures — and there were several dozen, including 62 accepted by O’Connor — at $200, i.e., under the gift-reporting threshold. Several similar awards were accepted by Ginsburg, many of which have been auctionedoff by the Potomack Company to benefit various charities. That said, in some instances — namely for three of Ginsburg’s recent awards, two of which appear to be above the reporting threshold — FTC reached out to the gift-givers to inquire about value and is waiting to hear back.
Other awards unearthed by FTC include a blanket and gift basket Minnesota Law gave to Chief Justice Roberts; personalized Louisville Slugger bats given to Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett by the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center; silver julep cups given to Gorsuch by UK’s Heyburn Initiative; and football “gear” (likely a sweatshirt) and a skybox ticket given to Justice Kagan by the University of Wisconsin. Vague gifts from FTC’s open records requests — a photograph UF Law sent to Thomas, an “engraved gift” URI sent to Sotomayor and a something UW sent to Kagan — are also included.
FTC notes that several entities Thomas listed on his 2000 and 2002 disclosures as “reimbursing” him for “private plane” travel did not, in all likelihood, own private planes at the time (e.g., high schools, small colleges, civic organization, etc.). Those flight-legs were then gifts, 20 in total.
A fairly significant portion of several justices’ gift haul came in the form of honorary memberships at various golf, tennis and social clubs. These types of free memberships were largely outlawed by a law Congress passed in 2008, which is why they mostly drop off the tally after that year.
The reason FTC is focusing on the last 20 years is two-fold: first, it was 20 years ago that the L.A. Times filed its oft-referred to report on the justices’ gifts, and second, the record of the justices’ disclosures gets a bit fuzzy before 2004, since throughout the 1980s and 1990s and into the early 2000s, the justices’ disclosures were typically only available for inspection at the Supreme Court and were only later distributed by the judiciary on paper, in a thumb drive or on a database.
In terms of crunching the numbers, the tally counts “meals” and “lodging” as two separate gifts, and FTC counted each leg of a round-trip flight as one gift, so it’s two gifts per round-trip. Unless otherwise stated, FTC assigned the cost per hour of a flight on a private plane to be $10,000 (can range from $5,000 to $25,000-plus, depending on plane size and other circumstances). Awards accepted by retired justices were not included.
Newsweek has three charts that give you an idea of who was a crook and who took their job more conventionally.
According to Fix the Court’s analysis, Justice Clarence Thomas received the largest portion of gifts, identifying 193 for the George H.W. Bush appointee who has served since 1991.
Second was the late Sandra Day O’Connor with 73, who died last year. O’Connor was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, by then President Ronald Reagan, and served from 1981 to 2006.
The late Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were third and fourth with 67 and 61 identified gifts respectively. Scalia served 29 years on the court, and Ginsburg 27.
David Souter, who spent 18 years on the court before he retired in 2009, and Brett Kavanaugh received just one gift, according to the findings.
Thomas led here as well, with likely gifts totaling $4,042,286.
Justice Samuel Alito is alleged in the findings to have received just over $170,000 worth of gifts.
The Supreme Court justices with the lowest total value of gifts were Kavanaugh, Souter and Amy Coney Barrett, with $100, $349, and $500 respectively.
More importantly, the Newsweek report shows the split between disclosed and undisclosed gifts.
According to Fix the Court, Thomas was the worst offender on this front. The watchdog believed he openly disclosed just 8.5 percent of all gifts he received.
Kavanaugh and Barret disclosed none of their gifts, however, the report estimates the pair only received $600 worth of gifts between them.
Souter and the late John Paul Stevens were the only two SCOTUS justices to disclose 100 percent of their gifts.
Thomas filed his disclosure report last week. Here’s the coverage from the Washington Post. “Justice Thomas discloses two 2019 trips paid for by Harlan Crow. 2023 financial disclosure reports for Supreme Court justices also show six-figure book payments for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Jackson.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has disclosed for the first time trips to Bali and to a private club in California in 2019 paid for by his friend and benefactor, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, according to financial disclosures released Friday for eight of the nine justices.
The required annual reports, covering activity in 2023, also show three justices — Brett M. Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson — received six-figure book payments.
Jackson also accepted four tickets worth nearly $4,000 from Beyoncé to one of her concerts, and two pieces of art worth $12,500 to display in her chambers.
“Justice Jackson is Crazy in Love with Beyoncé’s music. Who isn’t?” said court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor reported a star turn as a cartoon character on the PBS children’s show “Alma’s Way,” an animated series about a Puerto Rican girl and her family from the Bronx. The justice was paid about $1,900 for voice work on one episode in which she played herself.
The reports show several justices earning additional income from teaching at law schools and accepting free travel to speak at events at universities and legal organizations.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was granted an extension to file his report, as he has received in past years.
Many Judges and Justices take their jobs seriously and do not go in with a political agenda. As BostonBoomer has reported, Judge Loose Cannon is one of those Judges who seems devious and incompetent simultaneously. This is from CNN. “Isolated and inexperienced: A portrait of the judge overseeing Trump’s documents case from veterans of her courtroom.”
Since Trump was first indicted a year ago, Cannon has dragged out the proceedings in ways that have flummoxed legal scholars and put a trial initially scheduled to begin last month on hold indefinitely.
Several attorneys who have practiced in front of Cannon – and who spoke to CNN for this story – pointed to her isolation as one explanation for her conduct. Cannon’s solitary post in the Fort Pierce courthouse, one that rarely sees high-profile action, deprives her of the informal, day-to-day interactions with more seasoned judges who sit at the other courthouses and could offer her advice, the lawyers told CNN.
They also said Cannon’s lack of trial experience, both as a lawyer and a judge, is apparent. In her seven years as a Justice Department attorney, Cannon participated on the trial teams of just four criminal cases. And on the bench, she’s only presided over a handful of criminal trials – and Huck took over one of them.
For this account of Cannon’s judicial demeanor, CNN spoke to ten attorneys who have had cases – both criminal and civil – before her. The lawyers spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity because of the professional and ethical risks of speaking to press about a sitting federal judge in front of whom they practice.
To corroborate their characterizations of Cannon’s approach, CNN reviewed the public dockets of scores of cases that have traveled through her courtroom.
The attorneys described Cannon as extremely diligent and well prepared, a tough questioner who accepts nothing at face value, and thoughtful in her rulings. But they also said that some of her habits that have raised eyebrows in Trump’s case have plagued her approach from the bench more generally.
Those tendencies include a penchant for letting irrelevant legal questions distract from core issues, a zero-tolerance approach to any technical defects in filings, and a struggle with docket management that allows the type of pretrial disputes that other judges would decide in weeks go unresolved for months.
“She is not efficient,” said one attorney who practices in south Florida. “She is very form over substance.”
Another attorney described her as “indecisive.”
A third attorney who’s had cases before Cannon said, “She just seems overwhelmed by the process.”
The Senate needs to take its review of judges much more seriously. This has been going on since Thomas sat on the court, and it’s the one thing I can never forgive Biden for, along with his coziness with Southern Senators on the busing issue, which also bothered me. We’ll lose more personal liberties if we don’t do something now. One more interesting article which outlines the results of a study. This is from PsyPost. “Why do Republicans stick with Trump? New study explores the role of white nationalism.”
A new study explores why many Americans, particularly Republican voters, continue to support former President Donald Trump despite serious charges against him. Researchers found that white nationalism and political views play crucial roles in shaping public attitudes towards these charges. The study, published in The British Journal of Criminology, sheds light on the interplay between racial attitudes and political allegiances in contemporary America.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by Trump supporters resulted in significant consequences, including fatalities, injuries, extensive property damage, numerous arrests, and psychological trauma. The subsequent investigation by the United States House Select Committee aimed to determine the role of Trump in inciting this attack and whether criminal charges were warranted.
Despite the evidence against Trump, polls indicated that a significant portion of Republican voters continued to support him. The study aimed to understand why this segment of the population remained loyal to Trump despite the serious allegations.
This introduction is followed by a thorough list of their control variables. Here are some of the specific findings.
The results demonstrated a clear interaction between participants’ racial and political views and their support for the Select Committee’s recommendations. White nationalists and individuals with conservative political views showed strong support for the Committee when it found no evidence against Trump and recommended no charges. However, their support drastically declined when the Committee recommended criminal charges based on incriminating evidence.
On the other hand, individuals who did not hold white nationalist views and those with liberal political views were overwhelmingly supportive of the Committee’s recommendations when charges were proposed but showed little support when no charges were recommended.
For example, 82% of white nationalists supported the Committee if it found no evidence against Trump, but only 35% to 39% supported the Committee when charges were recommended. In contrast, 76% to 80% of participants without white nationalist views supported the Committee when it recommended charges, but only 34% supported it when no charges were recommended.
The researchers found that right-wing political views mediated the relationship between white nationalism and support for the Committee. White nationalist attitudes were strongly associated with right-wing political views, which in turn influenced reactions to the Committee’s findings. This suggests that individuals with white nationalist beliefs are more likely to align themselves with conservative politics, and this political alignment significantly shapes their responses to the Committee’s recommendations.
“Our experiment suggests that for a non-trivial number of Americans, the desire to keep the United States a ‘white nation’ appears to be stronger than their desire to ensure that the country is led by a law-abiding president,” the researchers concluded.
John Buss has been a roll, and I’m using it! Lucky John graduated with Ginnie Thomas from our high school. I only had to put up with it for about a year. But wow, she was a hot mess then. She didn’t rebel against her Bircher parents, that’s for sure. What should be done with her and Alito’s wife? Ginnie’s help with the insurrection should be investigated. I have a feeling that a few of those leaks from the SCOTUS came from Martha Bombthrower.
Anyhow, have a great weekend, and see you on Monday!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/06/07/finally-friday-reads-judicial-just-ice/
#Repeat1968 #FedSoc #IsJusticeJUSTICE_ #JohnBuss #JusticeDelayedIsJusticeDenied #JusticeLooseCannon #SlowWalkingCases #SupremeCourtGrifting #TheFederalistSociety
-
And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.
A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.
According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.
They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.
In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”
They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.
(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)(14/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
-
And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.
A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.
According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.
They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.
In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”
They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.
(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)(14/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
-
And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.
A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.
According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.
They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.
In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”
They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.
(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)(14/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
-
And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.
A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.
According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.
They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.
In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”
They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.
(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)(14/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
-
After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.
“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.
Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.
“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.
It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.
It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.
The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.
A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.
A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.“I actually reject that,” he said.
“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.
But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”
(13/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
-
After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.
“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.
Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.
“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.
It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.
It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.
The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.
A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.
A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.“I actually reject that,” he said.
“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.
But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”
(13/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
-
After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.
“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.
Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.
“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.
It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.
It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.
The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.
A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.
A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.“I actually reject that,” he said.
“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.
But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”
(13/n)
#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin
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#BillMoyers #Journalism #USpol
Billy Don Moyers (June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025) was an American journalist and political commentator
i only knew of bill moyers from his interviews with joseph campbell (a tv series and book called “the power of myth”).
thus morning i received an interesting newsletter from mother jones about bill’s legacy, and wanted to share some quotes
_——————-
Moyers was acutely aware, sooner than most, that big money was eating away at American democracy. “Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s important that we reduce the influence of money [in politics],” he said in a 2014 interview. “Yet 91 percent think it’s not likely that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done. When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.” He went on to say that “there are people fighting back [and] if it weren’t for them, I would despair. It’s the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there’s still hope.”
“If the watchdog doesn’t bark… how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.”When I was growing up, I never heard anyone pray, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It was always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That stuck. We’re all in this together. I take “We, the People” seriously because I don’t know how we build a civilization without reciprocity...
news is what’s hidden, everything else is publicity…
Q: We’ve always had an upper class in America. What’s different now? Moyers: The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories…
One of our two major parties is dominated by extremists dedicated to destroying the social contract and the other party has been so enfeebled by two decades of collaboration with the donor class it can offer only feeble resistance to the forces that are devastating everyday people. Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats — the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms — while the field hands are left with the scraps…
They have raised ignorance to ideology and stupefied an entire political party…
Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere,” Moyers closed. “When he rode into town, it was ripe for plucking.”…
“…a conviction once expressed by Robert La Follette: “Democracy is a life, and requires daily struggle.” If it weren’t for them, I would despair. There’s a scene in Conrad’s The Secret Agent when the anarchist grows despondent over whether even the detonation of a bomb might arouse Londoners: “What if nothing could move them?”
———
a link to the 2014 interview
https://billmoyers.com/2014/05/08/an-interview-with-bill-moyers/
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Epstein Files, Brown U. Shooter, and Trump Insanity
Good Afternoon!!
By Zakir Akmedov
The DOJ released a small portion of the Epstein files yesterday, with massive redactions. They seem to have tried to focus on Bill Clinton and conceal anything about Donald Trump. Democrats are angry, noting that the DOJ has broken federal law by holding back and selectively redacting the files that they released.
In this post, I will focus mostly on the Epstein files and reactions to the release. I also include stories on the Brown shooter and Trump’s insanity.
Sam Levine at The Guardian: Trickle release of Epstein files on a Friday signals move to bury Trump ties.
The justice department’s partial release of the Epstein files on Friday signaled how the agency is using a variety of tactics to try to bury and obfuscate Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
As the department raced towards a legally mandated Friday deadline to release its files, little emerged about what it planned to release. There never really seemed to be a doubt that the department would release the files late on Friday afternoon, deploying the well-worn Washington trick of burying unflattering news before a weekend.
Then, on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”
By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.
The release underscores how the Trump administration is trying to balance both the demand to release the files – something encouraged in large part by the Maga base – while also obfuscating with a slow trickle of document dumps to prevent any embarrassment to Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years before they had a falling out. Blanche has said the department will continue to produce documents on a rolling basis in the coming weeks – a holiday period – a bet that Americans will simply tune out the story as it drags on.
Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who sponsored the law to release the files, was one of many members of Congress to express outrage. He said on Twitter that the release “grossly fails to comply” with the statute….
Trump is mostly missing from the release.
While Trump barely made an appearance in Friday’s release, Bill Clinton appears in several images. The Daily Wire, a Trump-friendly site, obtained a photo of Clinton and Epstein on Thursday, a day before the release. Photos of Clinton lounging in a pool and a hot tub were among those released on Friday. Justice department and White House spokespeople were quick to highlight the images on Twitter.
By Magdalena Lobao-Tello
“Beloved Democrat president. The black box is added to protect a victim,” Gates McGavick, a justice department spokesperson, posted alongside a photo of Clinton in what seems to be a hot tub with another person whose face is redacted. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted another photo of Clinton with someone whose face is redacted and, quoting the song Jumpman by Drake and Future, wrote “them boys is up to something”.
Angel Ureña, a Clinton spokesperson, released a statement on Friday saying the Trump administration was using the former president to try to distract from Trump’s connection to Epstein.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever,” he said. “So they can release as many 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”
Several other celebrities appeared in the images released on Friday, including Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Richard Branson, Chris Tucker, David Copperfield and Kevin Spacey. Like Clinton, none has been accused of any crime in connection to Epstein. But their immediate appearance in the files benefits Trump, creating the impression that it was not unusual for famous men to hang out with Epstein.
Liz Crampton and Andrew Howard Politico: Epstein files put Bill Clinton under scrutiny – and the White House wants him there.
The Trump administration, initially wary over the Justice Department’s release of Jeffrey Epstein documents, pounced on go-to villain Bill Clinton’s appearance in Friday’s trove of pictures, emails and interviews.
“I wonder why the Biden DOJ refused to release the files…,” DOJ spokesperson Chad Gilmartin posted from his personal X account, alongside one partially-redacted photo of Clinton in a pool with an unidentified woman. Another swimming pool photo Gilmartin posted shows Clinton with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime co-conspirator who was convicted of sex trafficking charges in 2021….
Clinton has long been linked with Epstein, contributing to his status as MAGA’s favored boogeyman. Some high-profile members of the movement cited him in pushing for the release of the files, and continued that message after the DOJ made public a trove of documents from the government’s investigation into Epstein.
“Slick Willy! @BillClinton just chillin, without a care in the world. Little did he know…” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted to X.
“Here is Bill Clinton in a hot tub next to someone whose identity has been redacted. Per the Epstein Files Transparency Act, DOJ was specifically instructed only to redact the faces of victims and/or minors. Time for the media to start asking real questions,” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson posted to her personal X account….
Clinton appears in photos posing with Epstein in coordinating shirts, interacting with a dancer, sitting with a redacted woman on his lap on what looks like an airplane and with someone who appears to be the late pop icon Michael Jackson. The music legend faced his own child sex abuse allegations as early as 1993, though he was never convicted of any crimes.
Edward Helmore at The Guardian: Bill Clinton says White House is using him as scapegoat after Epstein files release.
A spokesperson for Bill Clinton accused the White House late on Friday of using him as a scapegoat after pictures of the former president with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as with a young woman in a pool, were included as part of congressionally ordered release of government files.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” the spokesperson said in a statement on X.
“This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” the statement added.
Lady sitting with Siamese, Sharyn Bursic
It continued: “Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton,” it said, referring to comments made by White House chief of staff to Vanity Fair in which Wiles acknowledged that Clinton had not been on Epstein’s Caribbean island despite repeated claims by Trump to the contrary.
Clinton has long maintained that he cut ties with Epstein around 2005, before the disgraced financier plead guilty to solicitation of a minor in Florida.
In the statement, Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña said: “There are two types of people here. The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that. Everyone, especially MAGA, expects answers, not scapegoats.” [….]
Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times during the early years of Clinton’s presidency, according to White House visitor records cited in news reports. He later travelled with Epstein on the financier’s private jet in the years after he left office in 2001, including to Asia and Africa, on trips related the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
Democrats were outraged. Zachary Schermele at USA Today: ‘Grossly fails.’ Lawmakers behind Epstein files’ release slam DOJ.
The Epstein files are out, and the lawmakers who forced their release are not satisfied.
High-profile Democrats are among the most enraged at the Justice Department’s decision to release hundreds of thousands of documents on a “rolling basis”about the late accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein .
“A fraction of the whole body of evidence,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York. To demonstrate his point, he highlighted how 119 pages of one document were entirely redacted.
“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” Schumer said in a statement. “We need answers as to why.”
Schumer wasn’t alone in his criticism. Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member of House Oversight Committee, said on CNN that the Justice Department was “defying the Congress.”
The bipartisan authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act – Reps. Ro Khanna, D-California, and Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky – also accused the Trump administration of failing to comply with their law, which nearly unanimously passed Congress in November.
“It is an incomplete release with too many redactions,” Khanna said in a social media post.
“Unfortunately, today’s document release … grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” Massie added.
The law required the Justice Department by Dec. 19 to fully disclose all information in its possession related to its investigations of the well-connected financier who died by suicide in a jail cell in 2019. DOJ under the law is also required to make the files publicly searchable, but basic searches of what DOJ called the “Epstein Library” show that even basic queries – such as for “Trump” or “Clinton” – come up blank.
Read more at USA Today.
One more from Julie K. Brown, who researched and wrote the series on Epstein at the Miami Herald that forced new investigations into the sweetheart deal that Epstein got from the DOJ in September 2007.
From her Substack: The Epstein Files: My observations. Nothing to See Here.
Pages and pages of blacked-out documents. Photographs of Epstein’s mop closet and HVAC systems in house. Message pads, notes and other material from the Florida case that has been on the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s website since at least 2018. They didn’t even release the victim interviews; just pictures of the tapes of the interviews. Think about that. A photograph of a tape cassette.
This would be funny if it wasn’t about a crime involving the rapes of 14-year-old girls.
It’s clear that the Department of Justice is not only thumbing its nose at the public’s demand for transparency and accountability, it is not taking the crimes committed against children seriously. It’s as if they think we are so hungry for any crumbs about Epstein that stale bread will do.
What’s worse is that the documents and photos they did release were tossed up like a salad and served in such a mixed-up way that few people will even understand the significance of the material that was released on Friday.
Miss Kitty, a lazy afternoon, by Jan Panico
Imagine being a survivor who was raped by Epstein, and having to click, one photo at a time, through hundreds of photographs, just searching for something, anything, to explain how Jeffrey Epstein did what he did, hoping for some shred of hope that the FBI actually investigated your complaint — the story you painfully found the courage to tell.
There were few stories in the thousands of pages released Friday. Even victim Maria Farmer, who found some validation in the fact that her 1996 FBI report about Epstein’ was tucked into the mess, would learn that the FBI did nothing about it. Had they taken some steps, they may have prevented the sexual assaults of countless other girls and young women.
And what about Epstein’s clients? Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said there was no list. But Rep. Tom Massie has said he knows of 20 men who have been implicated in Epstein’s crimes. And what about Ghislaine Maxwell? Well, she filed a habeas corpus petition a few days ago that claims that 25 men arranged civil settlements with Epstein victims who could have “equally been considered as co-conspirators.” She adds: “None of them have been prosecuted.” [….]
Here is a link to the Epstein Files on the Palm Beach State Attorney’s website. You will learn more about the case here than what was released by the DOJ Friday: https://sa15.org/public-records/
Claudio Manuel Neves Valente
The Boston Globe: Brown campus shooter harbored resentment from time as a PhD student in the early 2000s, friend says.
Growing up in Portugal, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente stood out for his intellectual potential. In high school, he traveled to national and international physics competitions. He later graduated from Portugal’s top university for science and engineering.
But when he moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue a doctorate in physics at Brown University, his colleagues experienced an ill-tempered young man who felt that even an American Ivy League college was no match for his own intellect. Neves Valente complained the classes were too easy and left the school months after enrolling, apparently with hard feelings.
“He could be kind and gentle, though he often became frustrated — sometimes angry — about courses, professors, and living conditions,” said Scott Watson, a Syracuse University physics professor who befriended Neves Valente at Brown.
After authorities linked him to the mass shooting on Brown’s campus and the killing of an MIT professor earlier this week, Neves Valente, 48, was found dead by suicide Thursday night. In the immediate aftermath, a fuller picture of the suspect emerged: of a brilliant student whose academic promise seemed to dissipate abruptly, an angry genius with long-simmering resentment, a loner who painstakingly planned and executed extraordinary violence.
His death ended a frantic manhunt that began following the Brown shooting Saturday afternoon, according to police. He entered a storage unit in southern New Hampshire about an hour after shooting the MIT professor Monday night, officials said; based on an autopsy, authorities believe he died on Tuesday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound….
Investigators are still trying to determine what motivated his homicidal rampage after he seemingly abandoned the ambitions of his youth, what pushed him to finally act upon old grudges.
She and her cats, by Madison Moore
What’s clear is that he took careful steps to hide his identity and evade detection both before and after the shootings. Authorities believe he acted alone. They said he had been canvassing Brown’s campus for weeks, targeting a building where he spent significant time as a student in the early 2000s….
Both natives of Portugal, Neves Valente and Loureiro attended university together in Lisbon, authorities said. They graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico, a premier science institution that’s part of the University of Lisbon. Loureiro went on to pursue a lauded career as a professor and fusion researcher, with stops at Princeton University and in Europe; he joined MIT in 2016. Colleagues from across the world overwhelmingly praised his accomplishments and character, but none reported knowing Neves Valente.
More from Scott Watson, Valente’s friend:
Watson, his former classmate, said the two became friends despite Neves Valente’s standoffish nature.
“During orientation he was sitting alone, and I walked up and said hello. He was terse at first, but we eventually broke the ice and became close,” Watson told the Globe in an e-mail Friday, describing himself as essentially Neves Valente’s only friend at the university.
Neves Valente was a brilliant student, but he could be frustrated by the curriculum at Brown, which he found underwhelming, Watson said.
“He was by far the best graduate student in our class. Through our conversations, he was already ready to graduate when he arrived,” Watson said. “I don’t like the word genius, but he was.”
The Boston Globe: How a single anonymous tipster cracked the Brown University shooting case.
Information from a tipster who had a strange encounter with another man on a sidewalk outside Brown University was key to police identifying the suspect they believe killed two students at the school and then two days later gunned down a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Known only as “John” in a Providence police affidavit, the source is being hailed by investigators as the key figure who gave law enforcement the details needed to determine who was behind the Brown shooting, as well as the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who was shot in his Brookline home Monday.
Ever since a shooter unloaded more than 40 rounds inside a Brown engineering building, anxiety and frustration has plagued the Providence, Rhode Island, community as police appeared no closer to identifying the person.
Yet on the sixth day of the investigation, the case gathered steam, ending with police announcing late Thursday they had found the suspected gunman dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound….
“John” gave them the information they needed.
According to police, John had several encounters with 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente before Saturday’s attack. As police posted images of a person of interest — now identified as Neves Valente — John began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he recognized the person and theorized that police should look into “possibly a rental” grey Nissan. Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did. The police affidavit said they learned about the tip on Dec. 16, three days after the shooting and a day after the tip line was created….
Up until that point, the police affidavit says officials had not connected a vehicle to the possible shooter.
That detail led them to get more video of a Nissan Sentra sedan with Florida plates and enabled Providence police officers to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety.
Bedtime Story, by Jeanette Lassen
The affidavit says John gave investigators additional critical details: he encountered Neves Valente in the bathroom of the engineering building just hours before the attack, where John noted the suspect’s clothing was “inappropriate and inadequate for the weather.”
John also bumped into Neves Valente outside, mere blocks from the building, where John watched Neves Valente “suddenly” turn around from the Nissan when he saw John. What ensued was then a “game of cat and mouse,” according to John’s testimony — where the two would encounter each other and Neves Valente would run away.
At one point, John says he yelled out “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?”
“The Suspect responded, ‘I don’t know you from nobody,’ then Suspect repeatedly asked, ’Why are you harassing me?’” according to the affidavit.
John told police he eventually saw Neves Valente approach the Nissan sedan once more and decided to walk away.
I’ve quote a lot, because The Boston Globe doesn’t allow gift links or readers without subscriptions.
Trump Insanity Report
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-complains-the-fbi-made-a-mess-of-melanias-panties.
No doubt Melania was thrilled with these revelations, which are likely just Trump fantasies.That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?President Donald Trump raged at the FBI for making a “mess” of his wife Melania’s “panties” during a raid on their Mar-a-Lago estate.
In a rambling speech delivered at a rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on Friday night, Trump went off on a wild tangent about federal law enforcement agents, revealing how they had disturbed the First Lady’s underwear drawer during their 2022 search of the Palm Beach, Florida, property.
Her Quiet Companion, by David Arstamyan
“They went into my wife’s closet. I’ll say this. Number one, it’s very bad, but it sounds a little strange. They looked at her drawers,” Trump told the crowd while both himself and the crowd laughed.
“You have drawers, and then you have drawers. They looked at both,” he continued, miming the difference between the storage item and the undergarment.
The unprompted revelation of intimate details did not stop there, however, with Trump going full disclosure on the way his third wife likes to store her underwear.
“She’s a very meticulous person… Everything is perfect. Her undergarments, sometimes referred to as panties, are folded perfect, wrapped, they’re like so perfect. I say, ‘That’s beautiful,’” Trump continued.
“You know, that’s the part of the world she came from. Everything was perfect, no problem. Fold, fold, fold. I think she steams them just to make sure.”
#BillClinton #BrownUniversityShooting #catArt #caturday #ClaudioManuelNevesValente #DOJ #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #MelaniaTrump #TrumpInsanity
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Epstein Files, Brown U. Shooter, and Trump Insanity
Good Afternoon!!
By Zakir Akmedov
The DOJ released a small portion of the Epstein files yesterday, with massive redactions. They seem to have tried to focus on Bill Clinton and conceal anything about Donald Trump. Democrats are angry, noting that the DOJ has broken federal law by holding back and selectively redacting the files that they released.
In this post, I will focus mostly on the Epstein files and reactions to the release. I also include stories on the Brown shooter and Trump’s insanity.
Sam Levine at The Guardian: Trickle release of Epstein files on a Friday signals move to bury Trump ties.
The justice department’s partial release of the Epstein files on Friday signaled how the agency is using a variety of tactics to try to bury and obfuscate Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein.
As the department raced towards a legally mandated Friday deadline to release its files, little emerged about what it planned to release. There never really seemed to be a doubt that the department would release the files late on Friday afternoon, deploying the well-worn Washington trick of burying unflattering news before a weekend.
Then, on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”
By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.
The release underscores how the Trump administration is trying to balance both the demand to release the files – something encouraged in large part by the Maga base – while also obfuscating with a slow trickle of document dumps to prevent any embarrassment to Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years before they had a falling out. Blanche has said the department will continue to produce documents on a rolling basis in the coming weeks – a holiday period – a bet that Americans will simply tune out the story as it drags on.
Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who sponsored the law to release the files, was one of many members of Congress to express outrage. He said on Twitter that the release “grossly fails to comply” with the statute….
Trump is mostly missing from the release.
While Trump barely made an appearance in Friday’s release, Bill Clinton appears in several images. The Daily Wire, a Trump-friendly site, obtained a photo of Clinton and Epstein on Thursday, a day before the release. Photos of Clinton lounging in a pool and a hot tub were among those released on Friday. Justice department and White House spokespeople were quick to highlight the images on Twitter.
By Magdalena Lobao-Tello
“Beloved Democrat president. The black box is added to protect a victim,” Gates McGavick, a justice department spokesperson, posted alongside a photo of Clinton in what seems to be a hot tub with another person whose face is redacted. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted another photo of Clinton with someone whose face is redacted and, quoting the song Jumpman by Drake and Future, wrote “them boys is up to something”.
Angel Ureña, a Clinton spokesperson, released a statement on Friday saying the Trump administration was using the former president to try to distract from Trump’s connection to Epstein.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever,” he said. “So they can release as many 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”
Several other celebrities appeared in the images released on Friday, including Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Richard Branson, Chris Tucker, David Copperfield and Kevin Spacey. Like Clinton, none has been accused of any crime in connection to Epstein. But their immediate appearance in the files benefits Trump, creating the impression that it was not unusual for famous men to hang out with Epstein.
Liz Crampton and Andrew Howard Politico: Epstein files put Bill Clinton under scrutiny – and the White House wants him there.
The Trump administration, initially wary over the Justice Department’s release of Jeffrey Epstein documents, pounced on go-to villain Bill Clinton’s appearance in Friday’s trove of pictures, emails and interviews.
“I wonder why the Biden DOJ refused to release the files…,” DOJ spokesperson Chad Gilmartin posted from his personal X account, alongside one partially-redacted photo of Clinton in a pool with an unidentified woman. Another swimming pool photo Gilmartin posted shows Clinton with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime co-conspirator who was convicted of sex trafficking charges in 2021….
Clinton has long been linked with Epstein, contributing to his status as MAGA’s favored boogeyman. Some high-profile members of the movement cited him in pushing for the release of the files, and continued that message after the DOJ made public a trove of documents from the government’s investigation into Epstein.
“Slick Willy! @BillClinton just chillin, without a care in the world. Little did he know…” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted to X.
“Here is Bill Clinton in a hot tub next to someone whose identity has been redacted. Per the Epstein Files Transparency Act, DOJ was specifically instructed only to redact the faces of victims and/or minors. Time for the media to start asking real questions,” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson posted to her personal X account….
Clinton appears in photos posing with Epstein in coordinating shirts, interacting with a dancer, sitting with a redacted woman on his lap on what looks like an airplane and with someone who appears to be the late pop icon Michael Jackson. The music legend faced his own child sex abuse allegations as early as 1993, though he was never convicted of any crimes.
Edward Helmore at The Guardian: Bill Clinton says White House is using him as scapegoat after Epstein files release.
A spokesperson for Bill Clinton accused the White House late on Friday of using him as a scapegoat after pictures of the former president with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as with a young woman in a pool, were included as part of congressionally ordered release of government files.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” the spokesperson said in a statement on X.
“This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” the statement added.
Lady sitting with Siamese, Sharyn Bursic
It continued: “Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton,” it said, referring to comments made by White House chief of staff to Vanity Fair in which Wiles acknowledged that Clinton had not been on Epstein’s Caribbean island despite repeated claims by Trump to the contrary.
Clinton has long maintained that he cut ties with Epstein around 2005, before the disgraced financier plead guilty to solicitation of a minor in Florida.
In the statement, Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña said: “There are two types of people here. The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that. Everyone, especially MAGA, expects answers, not scapegoats.” [….]
Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times during the early years of Clinton’s presidency, according to White House visitor records cited in news reports. He later travelled with Epstein on the financier’s private jet in the years after he left office in 2001, including to Asia and Africa, on trips related the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
Democrats were outraged. Zachary Schermele at USA Today: ‘Grossly fails.’ Lawmakers behind Epstein files’ release slam DOJ.
The Epstein files are out, and the lawmakers who forced their release are not satisfied.
High-profile Democrats are among the most enraged at the Justice Department’s decision to release hundreds of thousands of documents on a “rolling basis”about the late accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein .
“A fraction of the whole body of evidence,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York. To demonstrate his point, he highlighted how 119 pages of one document were entirely redacted.
“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” Schumer said in a statement. “We need answers as to why.”
Schumer wasn’t alone in his criticism. Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member of House Oversight Committee, said on CNN that the Justice Department was “defying the Congress.”
The bipartisan authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act – Reps. Ro Khanna, D-California, and Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky – also accused the Trump administration of failing to comply with their law, which nearly unanimously passed Congress in November.
“It is an incomplete release with too many redactions,” Khanna said in a social media post.
“Unfortunately, today’s document release … grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” Massie added.
The law required the Justice Department by Dec. 19 to fully disclose all information in its possession related to its investigations of the well-connected financier who died by suicide in a jail cell in 2019. DOJ under the law is also required to make the files publicly searchable, but basic searches of what DOJ called the “Epstein Library” show that even basic queries – such as for “Trump” or “Clinton” – come up blank.
Read more at USA Today.
One more from Julie K. Brown, who researched and wrote the series on Epstein at the Miami Herald that forced new investigations into the sweetheart deal that Epstein got from the DOJ in September 2007.
From her Substack: The Epstein Files: My observations. Nothing to See Here.
Pages and pages of blacked-out documents. Photographs of Epstein’s mop closet and HVAC systems in house. Message pads, notes and other material from the Florida case that has been on the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s website since at least 2018. They didn’t even release the victim interviews; just pictures of the tapes of the interviews. Think about that. A photograph of a tape cassette.
This would be funny if it wasn’t about a crime involving the rapes of 14-year-old girls.
It’s clear that the Department of Justice is not only thumbing its nose at the public’s demand for transparency and accountability, it is not taking the crimes committed against children seriously. It’s as if they think we are so hungry for any crumbs about Epstein that stale bread will do.
What’s worse is that the documents and photos they did release were tossed up like a salad and served in such a mixed-up way that few people will even understand the significance of the material that was released on Friday.
Miss Kitty, a lazy afternoon, by Jan Panico
Imagine being a survivor who was raped by Epstein, and having to click, one photo at a time, through hundreds of photographs, just searching for something, anything, to explain how Jeffrey Epstein did what he did, hoping for some shred of hope that the FBI actually investigated your complaint — the story you painfully found the courage to tell.
There were few stories in the thousands of pages released Friday. Even victim Maria Farmer, who found some validation in the fact that her 1996 FBI report about Epstein’ was tucked into the mess, would learn that the FBI did nothing about it. Had they taken some steps, they may have prevented the sexual assaults of countless other girls and young women.
And what about Epstein’s clients? Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said there was no list. But Rep. Tom Massie has said he knows of 20 men who have been implicated in Epstein’s crimes. And what about Ghislaine Maxwell? Well, she filed a habeas corpus petition a few days ago that claims that 25 men arranged civil settlements with Epstein victims who could have “equally been considered as co-conspirators.” She adds: “None of them have been prosecuted.” [….]
Here is a link to the Epstein Files on the Palm Beach State Attorney’s website. You will learn more about the case here than what was released by the DOJ Friday: https://sa15.org/public-records/
Claudio Manuel Neves Valente
The Boston Globe: Brown campus shooter harbored resentment from time as a PhD student in the early 2000s, friend says.
Growing up in Portugal, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente stood out for his intellectual potential. In high school, he traveled to national and international physics competitions. He later graduated from Portugal’s top university for science and engineering.
But when he moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue a doctorate in physics at Brown University, his colleagues experienced an ill-tempered young man who felt that even an American Ivy League college was no match for his own intellect. Neves Valente complained the classes were too easy and left the school months after enrolling, apparently with hard feelings.
“He could be kind and gentle, though he often became frustrated — sometimes angry — about courses, professors, and living conditions,” said Scott Watson, a Syracuse University physics professor who befriended Neves Valente at Brown.
After authorities linked him to the mass shooting on Brown’s campus and the killing of an MIT professor earlier this week, Neves Valente, 48, was found dead by suicide Thursday night. In the immediate aftermath, a fuller picture of the suspect emerged: of a brilliant student whose academic promise seemed to dissipate abruptly, an angry genius with long-simmering resentment, a loner who painstakingly planned and executed extraordinary violence.
His death ended a frantic manhunt that began following the Brown shooting Saturday afternoon, according to police. He entered a storage unit in southern New Hampshire about an hour after shooting the MIT professor Monday night, officials said; based on an autopsy, authorities believe he died on Tuesday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound….
Investigators are still trying to determine what motivated his homicidal rampage after he seemingly abandoned the ambitions of his youth, what pushed him to finally act upon old grudges.
She and her cats, by Madison Moore
What’s clear is that he took careful steps to hide his identity and evade detection both before and after the shootings. Authorities believe he acted alone. They said he had been canvassing Brown’s campus for weeks, targeting a building where he spent significant time as a student in the early 2000s….
Both natives of Portugal, Neves Valente and Loureiro attended university together in Lisbon, authorities said. They graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico, a premier science institution that’s part of the University of Lisbon. Loureiro went on to pursue a lauded career as a professor and fusion researcher, with stops at Princeton University and in Europe; he joined MIT in 2016. Colleagues from across the world overwhelmingly praised his accomplishments and character, but none reported knowing Neves Valente.
More from Scott Watson, Valente’s friend:
Watson, his former classmate, said the two became friends despite Neves Valente’s standoffish nature.
“During orientation he was sitting alone, and I walked up and said hello. He was terse at first, but we eventually broke the ice and became close,” Watson told the Globe in an e-mail Friday, describing himself as essentially Neves Valente’s only friend at the university.
Neves Valente was a brilliant student, but he could be frustrated by the curriculum at Brown, which he found underwhelming, Watson said.
“He was by far the best graduate student in our class. Through our conversations, he was already ready to graduate when he arrived,” Watson said. “I don’t like the word genius, but he was.”
The Boston Globe: How a single anonymous tipster cracked the Brown University shooting case.
Information from a tipster who had a strange encounter with another man on a sidewalk outside Brown University was key to police identifying the suspect they believe killed two students at the school and then two days later gunned down a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Known only as “John” in a Providence police affidavit, the source is being hailed by investigators as the key figure who gave law enforcement the details needed to determine who was behind the Brown shooting, as well as the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who was shot in his Brookline home Monday.
Ever since a shooter unloaded more than 40 rounds inside a Brown engineering building, anxiety and frustration has plagued the Providence, Rhode Island, community as police appeared no closer to identifying the person.
Yet on the sixth day of the investigation, the case gathered steam, ending with police announcing late Thursday they had found the suspected gunman dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound….
“John” gave them the information they needed.
According to police, John had several encounters with 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente before Saturday’s attack. As police posted images of a person of interest — now identified as Neves Valente — John began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he recognized the person and theorized that police should look into “possibly a rental” grey Nissan. Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did. The police affidavit said they learned about the tip on Dec. 16, three days after the shooting and a day after the tip line was created….
Up until that point, the police affidavit says officials had not connected a vehicle to the possible shooter.
That detail led them to get more video of a Nissan Sentra sedan with Florida plates and enabled Providence police officers to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety.
Bedtime Story, by Jeanette Lassen
The affidavit says John gave investigators additional critical details: he encountered Neves Valente in the bathroom of the engineering building just hours before the attack, where John noted the suspect’s clothing was “inappropriate and inadequate for the weather.”
John also bumped into Neves Valente outside, mere blocks from the building, where John watched Neves Valente “suddenly” turn around from the Nissan when he saw John. What ensued was then a “game of cat and mouse,” according to John’s testimony — where the two would encounter each other and Neves Valente would run away.
At one point, John says he yelled out “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?”
“The Suspect responded, ‘I don’t know you from nobody,’ then Suspect repeatedly asked, ’Why are you harassing me?’” according to the affidavit.
John told police he eventually saw Neves Valente approach the Nissan sedan once more and decided to walk away.
I’ve quote a lot, because The Boston Globe doesn’t allow gift links or readers without subscriptions.
Trump Insanity Report
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-complains-the-fbi-made-a-mess-of-melanias-panties.
No doubt Melania was thrilled with these revelations, which are likely just Trump fantasies.That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?President Donald Trump raged at the FBI for making a “mess” of his wife Melania’s “panties” during a raid on their Mar-a-Lago estate.
In a rambling speech delivered at a rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on Friday night, Trump went off on a wild tangent about federal law enforcement agents, revealing how they had disturbed the First Lady’s underwear drawer during their 2022 search of the Palm Beach, Florida, property.
Her Quiet Companion, by David Arstamyan
“They went into my wife’s closet. I’ll say this. Number one, it’s very bad, but it sounds a little strange. They looked at her drawers,” Trump told the crowd while both himself and the crowd laughed.
“You have drawers, and then you have drawers. They looked at both,” he continued, miming the difference between the storage item and the undergarment.
The unprompted revelation of intimate details did not stop there, however, with Trump going full disclosure on the way his third wife likes to store her underwear.
“She’s a very meticulous person… Everything is perfect. Her undergarments, sometimes referred to as panties, are folded perfect, wrapped, they’re like so perfect. I say, ‘That’s beautiful,’” Trump continued.
“You know, that’s the part of the world she came from. Everything was perfect, no problem. Fold, fold, fold. I think she steams them just to make sure.”
#BillClinton #BrownUniversityShooting #catArt #caturday #ClaudioManuelNevesValente #DOJ #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #MelaniaTrump #TrumpInsanity
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#Netherlands "The government makes support for the most basic human principles conditional on the political desires of the Israeli government,"
Why did the Netherlands abstain in the UN ceasefire resolution on #Gaza on October 23? Or rather, why did it even consider voting against the ceasefire in the first place (knowing full well the humanitarian implications of Israel's unlawful #DahiyaDoctrine applied in Gaza)... and what did #Jordan and #Ukraine have to do with it?
[...] Later that day, a large majority of UN member states voted in favor of a resolution calling for the "immediate" and "sustainable" cessation of hostilities between #Israel and #Hamas, in order to enable a "humanitarian truce." 120 countries voted in favor of the resolution, fourteen countries - including the United States - voted against. The Netherlands was part of a group of 45 countries that abstained from voting. Other European countries, including France, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg, supported the resolution.
[...] The Dutch abstention in New York caused outrage in the Netherlands in recent days. "The government makes support for the most basic human principles conditional on the political desires of the Israeli government," Save the Children said. On X, formerly Twitter, parliament member Sjoerd Sjoerdsma of the ruling #D66 party called the Dutch abstention "shameful."
[...] On Monday morning, Prime Minister Rutte flies to Tel Aviv. After his meeting with #netanyahu he speaks of a "firm discussion." Rutte has urged the Israeli prime minister to get emergency aid going and prevent military violence from getting out of hand. A ceasefire was not brought up by him - there is no point in talking to the Israelis about it, is Rutte's thought.
[...] The next day, the ministers most involved gather in the so-called National Security Council (NVR). Minister of Foreign Affairs Hanke Bruins Slot (CDA) is abroad, but Prime Minister Rutte and the other ministers agree: Israel has the right to defend itself, but international humanitarian law must be guiding. In other words: Israel cannot cause unnecessary high numbers of civilian casualties. It is a message that Rutte stoically defends during a parliamentary debate on Tuesday evening - despite the fact that mainly left-wing parties in parliament call on the prime minister to explicitly advocate a ceasefire.
[...] Because of all these objections, the officials write, the choice is abstention or voting against. At that point, the Netherlands is "tending towards" a "no vote."
[...] In the days leading up to the vote, Minister Hanke Bruins Slot receives a phone call from her Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi. The Jordanian minister says the draft resolution has been amended on several points to accommodate Western countries. For example, October 7 is explicitly mentioned and the new text condemns "all violence against Palestinian and Israeli citizens, including all terrorist acts." The term "immediate ceasefire" has also been replaced by a "sustained humanitarian truce."
[...] Safadi asks the Netherlands to support the resolution. And the Jordanian minister adds a barely veiled threat: if European countries do not rally behind this, support from Arab countries for aid to Ukraine will become "difficult," an official writes.
[...] Meanwhile, concerns are growing at the Dutch mission in New York about the negative consequences of a Dutch 'no'. A no vote on "such an urgent and important dossier" will not be "quickly forgotten" by many non-Western countries, a diplomat writes in an email to The Hague. Europe is often accused in the so-called Global South of double standards: taking firm action against Russia's war crimes, but weak knees when it comes to Israel. The Dutch mission believes it is wiser for European countries to abstain: a "joint abstention - but especially as few no votes as possible - (...) [is] important (...) for the credibility of the EU."
[...] The Netherlands decides to abstain from voting - as do many other European countries. France does vote in favor of the motion. “That the Netherlands did not even consider voting in favor is very strange,” D66 spokesperson Sjoerdsma says in response. “It also does not mean that the Netherlands is now exempted from working towards a humanitarian ceasefire, releasing the hostages and providing more aid. The resolution has been adopted, and the UN has spoken.”
[...] Kati Piri of GroenLinks-PvdA calls it "appalling" that the government considered voting against, "thereby completely ignoring the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza." There is also resentment among the D66 ministers. D66 ministers Ernst Kuipers and Robbert Dijkgraaf said on Monday in the TV program Beau that they disagree with the cabinet's assessment. “If you had asked me personally, I would have voted in favor, with an explanation,” says Kuipers.
Dutch: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/10/31/hoe-vn-resolutie-het-kabinet-verdeelt-a4179273
See related: https://kolektiva.social/@oatmeal/111410722042361697
@israel
@palestine
#IsraelHamasWar
#WareCrimes
#DahiyaDoctrine -
I am just about to wrap up my lunch break on this fine Tuesday-in-the-office. I have a few minutes before the next thing starts so I figured I’d come here and write something… anything…
Unfortunately, I have zero inspiration for any topics at all. Way to have an empty brain, Robert. Ugh.
So… here’s a topic. If the Dodgers win tonight they will complete the sweep of the Yankees and win the World Series. I freakin’ hate The Dodgers with the passion and fury of a thousand burning suns. Fortunately I hate the Yankees even more (with the passion and fury of a million, million burning suns) so that’s actually a good thing. As a lifelong Red Sox fan, watching the Yankees lose is fun for me. Watching them get humiliated by their (former) cross town rivals, The Dodgers, is even more fun. The only thing better would be watching them lose in humiliating fashion to The Red Sox… like they did in 2004. ‘Member that? Yeah, I ‘member!
What else I can I write about… hmmm… oh, here’s a quick topic worth mentioning. My step son, Harry, has been trying to get me to watch Better Call Saul for months now. He’s actually taking a class on the show at UVM and has been rewatching and loving the hell out of it. I told him I would start it this week, and last night I did. One episode down. Who knows how many to go. I did not see the twist at the end of that first episode coming, but when it happened I was all shit-eatin’-grins. I have to work episodes in around the shows that are currently airing, though most of my watch list is ending in the next week. There’s Daryl Dixon (which has been a little disappointing this season but this week’s penultimate season two episode was good) and The Penguin (which is excellent) and Only Murders in the Building (which is always fun) and Agatha All Along (which took a couple of weeks to suck me in but has turned out to be really good) and What We Do in the Shadows (which kicked off with three episodes last week, all of which were excellent). That’s a lot of TV. I’ll get to it all, somehow.
What else, what else… the Bruins have been pretty mediocre to start the season. They play Philly at home tonight and Philly has been pretty bad. Here’s hoping the offense wakes up. Also the defense. Also the goaltending. Yeah, it’s been a long first nine games here in Bruins nation. The same cannot be said for my old school, UMass Lowell. I actually saw a poll last night (I think it was US College Hockey Online’s poll but I’m not sure) that had them break into the top 20 teams in the country. They are 4-1 overall and 1-0 in Hockey East. The spanked Merrimack College last weekend (that’s my brother’s old school. Sorry, John). I should pay closer attention to my alma matter. Did I spell alma matter correctly? Google tells me I did not. It’s alma mater. There. Better.
Okay, folks. Time to go join a conference call or two. Hope you’re all having a good Tuesday afternoon. I hope you all had a good lunch. Hang in there, folks. Talk to you later.
https://robertjames1971.blog/2024/10/29/lunch-break-26/
#Baseball #betterCallSaul #BostonBruins #breakingBad #collegeHockey #Hockey #MajorLeagueBaseball #memberBerries #myOldSchool #ncaa #NHL #Television #umassLowell #umassLowellRiverHawks #worldSeries
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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Finally Friday Reads: TACO Tales
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
The fury started when a pro-MAGA account clipped portions of Pelley’s speech and shared them on X, writing “Scott Pelley raged at Trump in angry, unhinged commencement address at Wake Forest.”
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
I say this because I watched a news program where the new AI installed at the Social Security phone line repeatedly ignored the question they asked, then kept squawking “Can I help you with something else?” endlessly. This is the point where I hear my Nana’s voice telling little me, “Well, you can, but may you?” AI does not grok manners and polite conversations. It could be because human mutants like Elon Musk and his Dodge cluster have never quite figured that out either. Garbage in, garbage out. But, then maybe that’s what they want. Cease being polite and just be technically acceptable. Okay, it’s long but I’m getting there, I promise.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-30T16:16:57.733Z
I think we can start making the Big Brother is watching you references now. This is the subheading, which is startling IMHO. “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.” Getting your passport ready yet?
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
- Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
- The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
- The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
- The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
- Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Times has more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a Fox News interview on Thursday, said that trade talks with China “are a bit stalled.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #DrugAddict #ElonMuskNAZI #kakistocracy #PalantirDataTheftSpecialists #ScottPelley #TACO #WhoAreYOU_ #WifeStealer
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CW: Yet another example of Fox News covering for Trump and the GOP, and acting more like a cheerleader and ally, than a real news organization. Also, yet more examples of Trump and his lieutenants being in bed with and beholden to Putin. Putin did everything he could to get Trump elected and was hoping for a big payoff for his efforts. Treason was running through the highest levels of the Trump administration, including Trump. Yet, the GOP and their base turned a blind eye to all this so they could have power, control, own the libs and more tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy. They would sell out our entire country to get their way yet strut around like they are real patriots. They are just the opposite, they are treasonous and adversaries of our democracy! Trump Said He Might Have Let Russia “Take Over” Parts of Ukraine. Fox News Edited It Out.
Yet another example of Fox News covering for Trump and the GOP, and acting more like a cheerleader and ally, than a real news organization. Also, yet more examples of Trump and his lieutenants being in bed with and beholden to Putin. Putin did everything he could to get Trump elected and was hoping for a big payoff for his efforts. Treason was running through the highest levels of the Trump administration, including Trump. Yet, the GOP and their base turned a blind eye to all this so they could have power, control, own the libs and more tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy. They would sell out our entire country to get their way yet strut around like they are real patriots. They are just the opposite, they are treasonous and adversaries of our democracy!
Trump Said He Might Have Let Russia “Take Over” Parts of Ukraine. Fox News Edited It Out. – Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/trump-ukraine-hannity-fox-news-russia-take-over/
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithPutin
#TrumpWasPutinsBitch"Last week, Donald Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he could have stopped the invasion of Ukraine by allowing Russia to “take over” parts of the country.
“I could have negotiated. I could’ve made a deal to take over something,” Trump said in a radio interview Monday. “There are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could’ve worked a deal.” The Daily Beast reported last week that Hannity left those newsworthy remarks out of excerpts of the interview that he played that night on his primetime show.
What seems most notable here is that Trump is explicitly saying he might have given Russian president Vladimir Putin something the leader has sought since 2016.
The deal Trump said he could’ve “worked” sounds a lot like the “peace plan” that Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate Intelligence Committee described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” pressed on Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chief, in a secret meeting in August 2016 at a New York City cigar bar. The two men continued to discuss the plan until 2018, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Manafort famously gave Kilimnik some of the Trump campaign’s polling data to pass on to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was known to be close to Putin. What gets less attention is what else happened in the same meeting. Kilimnik also asked Manafort to seek Trump’s support for a plan to end fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists, along lines highly favorable to Russia. The idea was to create an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving the Kremlin sway over a valuable industrial area, along with continued control of Crimea, which Russian troops seized in 2014. Kilmnik later said in an email to Manafort that the plan needed only “a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push)” from Trump if he won in 2016.
Remember: Russia was helping Trump through its hack and leak of Democratic emails. (Kilimnik himself “may have been connected to the hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” the Senate Intelligence Committee report said.) The Trump campaign—both Mueller‘s investigation and the Senate’s found—worked to capitalize on Russia’s leaks. That makes Trump’s comments especially interesting. Andrew Weissmann, a Mueller deputy who prosecuted Manafort, later wrote that the plan for an autonomous republic outlined to Manfort by Kilimnik was the “quo” Putin wanted for the “quid” of assisting Trump against Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton..."
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is
refusing to consider Moderna’s application for a new flu vaccine
made with Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology.The news is the latest sign of the FDA’s heightened scrutiny of vaccines under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
particularly those using mRNA technology,
which he has criticized before and after becoming the nation’s top health official.Moderna received what’s called a “refusal-to-file” letter from the FDA
that objected to how it conducted a 40,000-person clinical trial comparing its new vaccine to one of the standard flu shots used today.
That trial concluded the new vaccine was somewhat more effective in adults 50 and older than that standard shot.The letter from FDA vaccine director Dr. #Vinay #Prasad said the agency doesn’t consider the application to contain an
“adequate and well-controlled trial”
because it didn’t compare the new shot to “the best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study.”
Prasad’s letter pointed to some advice FDA officials gave Moderna in 2024, under the Biden administration, which Moderna didn’t followAccording to Moderna, that feedback said it was acceptable to use the standard-dose flu shot the company had chosen
— but that another brand specifically recommended for seniors would be preferred for anyone 65 and older in the study.Still, Moderna said, the FDA did agree to let the study proceed as originally planned
The company said it also had shared with FDA additional data from a separate trial
comparing the new vaccine against a licensed high-dose shot used for seniors.The FDA “did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with our product”
and “does not further our shared goal of enhancing America’s leadership in developing innovative medicines,”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/moderna-vaccine-flu-mrna-2fc551cb2fb45735e67db0a4e2e2b0fb -
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is
refusing to consider Moderna’s application for a new flu vaccine
made with Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology.The news is the latest sign of the FDA’s heightened scrutiny of vaccines under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
particularly those using mRNA technology,
which he has criticized before and after becoming the nation’s top health official.Moderna received what’s called a “refusal-to-file” letter from the FDA
that objected to how it conducted a 40,000-person clinical trial comparing its new vaccine to one of the standard flu shots used today.
That trial concluded the new vaccine was somewhat more effective in adults 50 and older than that standard shot.The letter from FDA vaccine director Dr. #Vinay #Prasad said the agency doesn’t consider the application to contain an
“adequate and well-controlled trial”
because it didn’t compare the new shot to “the best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study.”
Prasad’s letter pointed to some advice FDA officials gave Moderna in 2024, under the Biden administration, which Moderna didn’t followAccording to Moderna, that feedback said it was acceptable to use the standard-dose flu shot the company had chosen
— but that another brand specifically recommended for seniors would be preferred for anyone 65 and older in the study.Still, Moderna said, the FDA did agree to let the study proceed as originally planned
The company said it also had shared with FDA additional data from a separate trial
comparing the new vaccine against a licensed high-dose shot used for seniors.The FDA “did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with our product”
and “does not further our shared goal of enhancing America’s leadership in developing innovative medicines,”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/moderna-vaccine-flu-mrna-2fc551cb2fb45735e67db0a4e2e2b0fb -
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is
refusing to consider Moderna’s application for a new flu vaccine
made with Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology.The news is the latest sign of the FDA’s heightened scrutiny of vaccines under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
particularly those using mRNA technology,
which he has criticized before and after becoming the nation’s top health official.Moderna received what’s called a “refusal-to-file” letter from the FDA
that objected to how it conducted a 40,000-person clinical trial comparing its new vaccine to one of the standard flu shots used today.
That trial concluded the new vaccine was somewhat more effective in adults 50 and older than that standard shot.The letter from FDA vaccine director Dr. #Vinay #Prasad said the agency doesn’t consider the application to contain an
“adequate and well-controlled trial”
because it didn’t compare the new shot to “the best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study.”
Prasad’s letter pointed to some advice FDA officials gave Moderna in 2024, under the Biden administration, which Moderna didn’t followAccording to Moderna, that feedback said it was acceptable to use the standard-dose flu shot the company had chosen
— but that another brand specifically recommended for seniors would be preferred for anyone 65 and older in the study.Still, Moderna said, the FDA did agree to let the study proceed as originally planned
The company said it also had shared with FDA additional data from a separate trial
comparing the new vaccine against a licensed high-dose shot used for seniors.The FDA “did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with our product”
and “does not further our shared goal of enhancing America’s leadership in developing innovative medicines,”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/moderna-vaccine-flu-mrna-2fc551cb2fb45735e67db0a4e2e2b0fb -
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is
refusing to consider Moderna’s application for a new flu vaccine
made with Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology.The news is the latest sign of the FDA’s heightened scrutiny of vaccines under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
particularly those using mRNA technology,
which he has criticized before and after becoming the nation’s top health official.Moderna received what’s called a “refusal-to-file” letter from the FDA
that objected to how it conducted a 40,000-person clinical trial comparing its new vaccine to one of the standard flu shots used today.
That trial concluded the new vaccine was somewhat more effective in adults 50 and older than that standard shot.The letter from FDA vaccine director Dr. #Vinay #Prasad said the agency doesn’t consider the application to contain an
“adequate and well-controlled trial”
because it didn’t compare the new shot to “the best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study.”
Prasad’s letter pointed to some advice FDA officials gave Moderna in 2024, under the Biden administration, which Moderna didn’t followAccording to Moderna, that feedback said it was acceptable to use the standard-dose flu shot the company had chosen
— but that another brand specifically recommended for seniors would be preferred for anyone 65 and older in the study.Still, Moderna said, the FDA did agree to let the study proceed as originally planned
The company said it also had shared with FDA additional data from a separate trial
comparing the new vaccine against a licensed high-dose shot used for seniors.The FDA “did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with our product”
and “does not further our shared goal of enhancing America’s leadership in developing innovative medicines,”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/moderna-vaccine-flu-mrna-2fc551cb2fb45735e67db0a4e2e2b0fb -
@MishaVelthuis @mob yeah I’d do as Misha said. #AkademieNL has no stand-alone app. From what I gather people on Android seem to prefer Tusky and on iOS Metatext.
-
“URGENT NEEDS” by Peter Lingard
I’d been in this club, dancing with a number who’d seemed willing to get horizontal with me. She said she’d arrived with someone else and would see me outside. The fact that I believed her shit will give you an idea how drunk and stoned I was. Hope springs more than eternal when my mind is altered.
It was after three in the morning, the place had closed, the staff had gone somewhere else, and still I waited. The street was deserted, and it was raining. Well, not actually raining if I stood unmoving, but when I walked forward, I could feel little drops of cold gently colliding with my face. I stood still and allowed the influences I had absorbed to rock me backward and forward. They (those wonderful influences) enabled me to reason that I was conducting a scientific experiment to determine the quality of the rain, provided it was rain. I brushed my face with my hand and gained some satisfaction in feeling the wetness.
A phone rang. How could that be? I was amidst grey surroundings devoid of anything but the floating wetness and me. I became a mite miffed at the interruption, although it didn’t completely break my reverie because I looked about me, half expecting the scene to lose all colour (all that grey) and a director to urge me to run to the telephone kiosk I suddenly saw across the street. I looked around to confirm I was alone. Being alone meant nobody would know if I was fool enough to succumb to my curiosity. It was my night to act the fool. My second-to-last ex would pick it up. “You never know, it could be an emergency,” she would say. After another second or two of hesitation, I again wiped the rain from my face, suppressed my need to urinate, and ran to answer the call.
“Hello,” I said, slightly breathless from alcohol and exertion. “Oh,” said a flat, female voice. There was a pause, and then she said, “You’ll do. Thank God!”
“I will? Why?”
“I’m trapped and I need your help. Can you come and get me out of here?”
Maybe my second-to-last ex had a point. “You’re having a fuckin laugh, aren’t you?”
“No, please, I’m serious. My name’s Tess Bailey. Please help me.”
“This is a street phone. How come you called it?” There was a long pause. “I haven’t got all night.”
“Look! It’s not easy.”
“It’d better get easier if I’m gonna help you. For starters, you can tell me where you are.” There was another long silence. I banged the phone on the side of the kiosk in case the hearing part was faulty.
“Stop that!”
“No, you stop it. If you’re into long, dramatic silences, you’ve got the wrong man. I’m outta here.”
“No! Don’t go. Please. I … I met a guy last weekend and we arranged to meet again tonight … last night … whatever. We had a few drinks and then he invited me to his place. We came in a taxi and I paid more attention to him than to the route we took.”
“Can’t you remember the address he gave the driver?”
“No. Only …” she stifled a sob, “ … only Glen Waverley and I’m not even sure about that. I’ve been wracking my brain, but … enough of this shit! I’m here and I’m scared and I want you to do something about it!” She fell silent, perhaps wondering if her outburst had pissed me off. When she spoke again, she was calmer. “Look, I … I know I’ve been stupid and, believe me, it gets worse. I like to be tied up, and he had some handcuffs, so, well, you can imagine what happened.”
“So, where’s this guy now?”
“I think he’s dead. Oh God, this is so embarrassing. You have to help me.”
“Dead! He’s fuckin dead, and all you feel is embarrassed. How the fuck did he die?”
“I don’t know. I think he might have had a heart attack. We were playing a game, and he undid the left handcuff. He said he was going to get something. I sensed him feeling his way around the end of the bed when I heard him grunt and drop to the carpet. I’ve been trying to get his attention, but he isn’t responding. I remembered seeing a phone on the bedside table, and so I felt around and found it.”
“So why didn’t you call the cops?”
“And be found naked and handcuffed to a bed of a near stranger!” The woman’s voice was rising. I wasn’t sure if it was through anger or hysteria.
“But it’s okay if I find you, is it? This all sounds a bit far-fetched to me.”
“I’m serious!” she screamed. “I tried to punch out the number of a friend, but it’s not easy when one hand is restrained and you’re in a completely darkened room.” She gave her friend’s number. I looked at the number of the phone I was speaking into and saw she had only missed by a couple of close digits.”
“So why don’t you try again?”
“Because it’s totally black in here and I’m scared, and because I’ve got you, and you’re talking to me and … I don’t know … I need you to help me.” I decided to stay on the phone a little longer.
“How about you give me your number and I call your friend and tell her to call you?”
“I don’t know the number here.”
I’d have to think some more. “Ya try and call anyone else?”
“No! I thought of all the people I know, and there’s only one person I would allow to see me like this. I was trying to get her, not you.”
“If you say so. Exactly how dark is it?”
“I told you. Totally black. I enjoy a little sensory deprivation now and then, if that’s all right with you.” Her words could have been titillating, but the sneer in her voice made me feel like a voyeur.
“All right, all right. Enough with the snide. So, why don’t you hang up on me and try and call your friend again?”
“We just had that conversation and, shit that you are, I don’t want to lose contact with you.”
“Well, this shit needs a piss. Try your friend again, and if it doesn’t work, call me back.”
“How stupid are you! Look, I’m scared, and it’s very dark.”
“I thought you liked the dark.”
“Not when I’m handcuffed to a bed and alone with a dead man, I don’t!”
I could understand that, but I’d downed a lot of beer in the club and my need to drain off was growing urgent. “Is this a mobile phone?”
“No.”
“Do you have a mobile phone?”
“Yes, I have one! It’s in my handbag, which is with my clothes on the other side of the room.”
“You have one hand free. Can’t you get off the bed and drag it to where your handbag is?”
“I already tried that, well, I tried to get to Robert’s body. He’s…”
“Yeah, I can guess who Robert is. What’s his last name?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“So, you let a guy whose last name you don’t know handcuff you to his bed in a house at an address you don’t know. Ya wanna buy the Bolte Bridge from me?”
“Now who’s getting snide! I know I’ve been stupid, but there’s nothing I can do about that right now. Anyway, as I was saying, this bed must be made of cast iron or something because I couldn’t move it.”
“All right. I have a friend works for Telstra who could pinpoint exactly where you are if your mobile was switched on. Why don’t you try moving the bed again?”
“I’ve already tried several times, you shithead. I’m not going to put down this phone in order to try again.”
“Shithead? I guess your situation isn’t as bad as you would have me believe.”
“Jesus! Look, I’m sorry. It’s just … you pissed me off, is all.”
I stood on one foot and then the other as I looked around for a toilet. I didn’t see one. “Is there a lamp on the bedside table?”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried all this? I’d do anything to get out of this predicament alone, believe me. So, no, there is no lamp on the bedside table. I knocked a few things to the floor when I searched its surface, but I don’t think there was a lamp.”
I was switching feet so rapidly I felt like Bojangles performing a tap dance. “Okay,” I said, devoid of ideas. “What the hell do you want me to do? You don’t know where you are, you can’t get to your mobile phone, and I’m in desperate need of a piss. I’m calling for a short hiatus while I go for one.”
“No, please don’t hang up. Don’t leave me.”
“I have to.”
“No, don’t! I need you to stay on the line. Please talk to me at least til the sun comes up.”
“I thought the place was artificially dark.”
“It is, but …” She made a sob-like sound, and then apparently pulled herself together. “You stay right on this phone, you bastard! Take your piss while you talk to me.”
“Nah, I can’t do that. Look, I have to go. Instead of replacing the receiver, I’ll let it dangle while I go and relieve myself. When I’m done, I’ll come back. Okay?”
“Promise? Please don’t hang up.”
I let go of the phone. As I hurried to the wall of the club, I shouted over my shoulder, “I’ll be right back, luv. Don’t worry.” Maybe we could date. At the wall, I lived one of life’s greatest pleasures; emptying a seriously swollen bladder is happiness to the nth degree. I felt at peace with the world and forgot all its troubles. Steam rose as my urine joined the rain. I rocked forward and let my head bang against the wall. It didn’t hurt. I realised the wall, the ground, and I made a triangle. As the ground and the wall were at a ninety-degree angle, it was a right-angled triangle. Didn’t Pythagoras prove that the square on the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides? Yeah, that was it. I was the hypotenuse. I was close enough to six feet, so my square was thirty-six. My heels had to be about three feet from the wall, and that made a square of nine. If my head rested on the wall at about five feet from the ground, it would make a square of twenty-five. Twenty-five and nine is thirty-four. Shit! Nine from thirty-six is twenty-seven. What’s the square root of twenty-seven? Five point something. Who cares! My stream lessened. Getting into bed would be a delight. Oh, to be rid of my constraining clothes, especially my ill-fitting shoes. Cool sheets and a pillow waited for me; all I had to do was to get to them and surrender. My stream withered, then stopped. The pleasure had gone, but another one awaited me in my bedroom. I set out for the colourful lights of Main Street. A taxi would cruise by soon enough.
Copyright © 2026 Peter Lingard
#club #dark #death #drunk #handcuffs #night #phone
All Rights Reserved -
AMG’s Unsigned Band Rodeö: Sunnata – Chasing Shadows
By Dolphin Whisperer
“AMG’s Unsigned Band Rodeö” is a time-honored tradition to showcase the most underground of the underground—the unsigned and unpromoted. This collective review treatment continues to exist to unite our writers in boot or bolster of the bands who remind us that, for better or worse, the metal underground exists as an important part of the global metal scene. The Rodeö rides on.”
Does Poland evoke the heated and stinging breeze of the open desert to a lost mind? No? Sunnata likes to think otherwise, or at least it’s their life’s mission to expand on the ideas of exotic scales, eerie harmonization, and chanting repetitiveness to match the power of shifting sands in their homeland. Back in 2021, our very own Cherd had a tough time coming to terms with what these Eastern bloc mystics conjured on Burning in Heaven, Melting on Earth. But now a few years wiser, ever iterating,1 and pursuant of their own self-produced visions, can Sunnata sway both our grumpy grandpa Cherd and his crack rodeo crew with Chasing Shadows? – Dolphin Whisperer
Sunnata // Chasing Shadows [May 10th, 2024]
Cherd: I wasn’t terribly keen on Sunnata’s 2021 record Burning in Heaven, Melting on Earth, so I passed on reviewing their follow-up when it landed in the promo sump. Then Dolph decided to go and write a whole damn Rodeö about Chasing Shadows, so I figured I’d better give my two cents after all. Chasing Shadows is a definite step up, thanks to the heavy dose of 90s grunge these Poles have injected into their psych/stoner doom. I’m sure you’ll be sick of reading the name Alice In Chains by the end of this article, but good god do the vocal harmonies call them to mind. The strongest tracks, like “Torn” and “Saviour’s Raft” rely heavily on these. Meanwhile, when the band leans into their “exotic” side—vaguely Middle Eastern motifs—as they do on “Wishbone” and “The Tide,” the songs drag. There’s fat to trim across the album’s 60+ minutes, especially the throwaway closing quasi-dance track. That said, the eight-minute “Hunger” earns its entire runtime with a hypnotic tempo and the record’s best build up. There’s a lot to like in Chasing Shadows, even if there is some bloat. 3.0/5.0
Maddog: Sunnata’s Chasing Shadows is an hour of shameless psychedelia. Take Dvne riffs, add a pinch of Mayhem in Blue-era Hail Spirit Noir, and pour a bucket of fuzzy stoned melodies on top, and you get the gist. This recipe is a blessing and a curse. Chasing Shadows’ most well-formed pieces hit hard. When Sunnata focuses on developing melodies, they hold me transfixed, like on album highlight “Torn.” When Sunnata focuses on buildups, they whisk me out of the world and onto a dramatic ride (“Chimera”). When Sunnata focuses on rhythmic sections that hypnotize the listener, they conjure a beautiful soundscape, like the primordial chorus of “Hunger.” When Sunnata focuses on rock-solid bass lines, they add power and depth to their atmosphere (“Adrift”). But sometimes, Sunnata focuses on nothing. Even the strongest cuts overstay their welcome with meandering fuzz. As the album progresses, some full tracks get swallowed by tedium, and the moaned vocals become grating; neither undivided attention nor psilocybin can save songs like “The Sleeper” from fading into the background.2—Still, Sunnata has a talent for writing sludgy psychedelic passages that stand out from their peers. If they can trim some low-hanging fat and focus on their strengths, their next record could be a gem. 2.5/5.0
Dolphin Whisperer: Chasing Shadows seems to know exactly what it is—a dry, desert-wandering, bass-heavy affair that leans into psychedelia via shifting repetitions. And Sunnata seem to have figured out exactly how they want to explore this meditation—heavy and dark Alice in Chains vocal melodies, twangy stoner guitar refrains, and song drives that creep ever faster into their snaking swirl. Though, throughout this dusty adventure, guitar passages resemble less of the easy-to-digest percussive draws of a band like Kyuss and more of the modal and trilling explorations of similar sounds that you’d hear in an occult act like Sabbath Assembly. (“Chimera,” “Wishbone”). And on longer cuts, at least before Sunnata achieves maximum throttle, doom inflections, fat bass rumbling, and laser-pointing drone that bubbles and bakes and broils the experimental madhouse of Obake. But most importantly, as a fever dream like this sound, Chasing Shadows maintains a warping yet consistent tonality that slowly and sneakily lures as the rattle of a hissing pit viper to a lost and dazed traveler. It does, however, require a hefty dose of patience and practice to maintain a footing the whole way through its hour-long trial, its various interludes and strange darkwave closing adding little. To curious ears, though, Chasing Shadows will be an easy listen, despite its limited bag of tricks and hefty presence, and those who buy in fully to its tonal landscape may find even more rewards. 3.0/5.0
Itchymenace: Chasing Shadows reminds me of the Albert Camus story, The Adulterous Woman. In fact, the cover art seems plucked directly from the final scene in which the protagonist runs out into the Algerian desert a changed woman after realizing life with her husband will never fulfill her. The music provides the perfect soundtrack for the existential metamorphosis she goes through, or that anyone might go through when they peel back the delicate layers of life and search for deeper meaning. I did not expect to like this as much as I do, but Sunnata has created a masterpiece. This album drags you across a jagged desert landscape and drenches you in rich, dreamlike musical passages that leave you questioning your very existence. The music is complex, varied, heavy and meditative. The arrangements are deceptively simple to make the journey seem easy—until you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore. Especially noteworthy is how the bass guitar drives the compositions. Bassist Michal Dobrzanski’s tone is massive but somehow leaves plenty of room in the soundscape for Szymon Ewertowski and Adrian Gadomski’s intricate guitars and vocals. Drummer Robert Ruszczyk keeps a ritualistic tempo that seamlessly moves the caravan forward through the heart of darkness. If I were to try to describe this to a metalhead, I’d say imagine Alice in Chains trying to play Gorguts by way of Earth. Brilliant! Original! Frightening! And a new experience with every listen. 4.5/5.03
Mystikus Hugebeard: True to Sunnata’s desert prog premise, Chasing Shadows is a mirage: captivating, frustrating, and an incomplete vision of something spectacular. At sixty-two minutes long, the length will likely prove to be as controversial as it is intentional; repetition is key to Sunnata’s songwriting, as it weaves a surreal soundscape through thick, drawn-out riffs. Sometimes, it’s entrancing. Other times, I’m just bored. The more evolutionary tracks are where Chasing Shadows come to life. The off-key vocal layers and thick, fuzzy guitars are in “Chimera” and “Saviour’s Raft” take their time to progress into explosive riffs that feel earned by the buildup. Even a less progressive track like “Torn” works just by nature of how palpable the desert atmosphere is, with the chugging bass, elusive guitar lines, and hallucinatory vocals hypnotizing the listener. “Hunger” and “The Sleeper” also have a satisfying chug to them but feel emptier, with resolutions that are satisfying in the moment but still less memorable than those from earlier tracks. The worst offenders, “Wishbone” and “The Tide,” are almost completely aimless and are fully devoid of the strong atmospheric qualities that makes the rest work. The emulation of an endless trek through an endless desert is uncanny, and the aimlessness can work when paired with hypnotic songwriting like in “Torn,” but overall the lack of a meaningful destination or payoff within the already less engaging tracks only gets worse as the album drags on, and it slowly begins to drown out the parts that work well. I really love the thematic intent behind Chasing Shadows, which only makes the final result all the more frustrating that it falls short of being a truly great desert odyssey. 2.5/5.0
#2024 #AliceInChains #AngryMetalGuySUnsignedBandRodeo #AngryMetalGuySUnsignedBandRodeo2024 #ChasingShadows #DoomMetal #Dvne #Earth #HailSpiritNoir #IndependentRelease #Kyuss #Obake #OccultRock #PolishMetal #PostMetal #PsychedelicDoomMetal #PsychedelicRock #SabbathAssembly #SelfRelease #StonerRock #Sunnata
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AMG’s Unsigned Band Rodeö: Sunnata – Chasing Shadows
By Dolphin Whisperer
“AMG’s Unsigned Band Rodeö” is a time-honored tradition to showcase the most underground of the underground—the unsigned and unpromoted. This collective review treatment continues to exist to unite our writers in boot or bolster of the bands who remind us that, for better or worse, the metal underground exists as an important part of the global metal scene. The Rodeö rides on.”
Does Poland evoke the heated and stinging breeze of the open desert to a lost mind? No? Sunnata likes to think otherwise, or at least it’s their life’s mission to expand on the ideas of exotic scales, eerie harmonization, and chanting repetitiveness to match the power of shifting sands in their homeland. Back in 2021, our very own Cherd had a tough time coming to terms with what these Eastern bloc mystics conjured on Burning in Heaven, Melting on Earth. But now a few years wiser, ever iterating,1 and pursuant of their own self-produced visions, can Sunnata sway both our grumpy grandpa Cherd and his crack rodeo crew with Chasing Shadows? – Dolphin Whisperer
Sunnata // Chasing Shadows [May 10th, 2024]
Cherd: I wasn’t terribly keen on Sunnata’s 2021 record Burning in Heaven, Melting on Earth, so I passed on reviewing their follow-up when it landed in the promo sump. Then Dolph decided to go and write a whole damn Rodeö about Chasing Shadows, so I figured I’d better give my two cents after all. Chasing Shadows is a definite step up, thanks to the heavy dose of 90s grunge these Poles have injected into their psych/stoner doom. I’m sure you’ll be sick of reading the name Alice In Chains by the end of this article, but good god do the vocal harmonies call them to mind. The strongest tracks, like “Torn” and “Saviour’s Raft” rely heavily on these. Meanwhile, when the band leans into their “exotic” side—vaguely Middle Eastern motifs—as they do on “Wishbone” and “The Tide,” the songs drag. There’s fat to trim across the album’s 60+ minutes, especially the throwaway closing quasi-dance track. That said, the eight-minute “Hunger” earns its entire runtime with a hypnotic tempo and the record’s best build up. There’s a lot to like in Chasing Shadows, even if there is some bloat. 3.0/5.0
Maddog: Sunnata’s Chasing Shadows is an hour of shameless psychedelia. Take Dvne riffs, add a pinch of Mayhem in Blue-era Hail Spirit Noir, and pour a bucket of fuzzy stoned melodies on top, and you get the gist. This recipe is a blessing and a curse. Chasing Shadows’ most well-formed pieces hit hard. When Sunnata focuses on developing melodies, they hold me transfixed, like on album highlight “Torn.” When Sunnata focuses on buildups, they whisk me out of the world and onto a dramatic ride (“Chimera”). When Sunnata focuses on rhythmic sections that hypnotize the listener, they conjure a beautiful soundscape, like the primordial chorus of “Hunger.” When Sunnata focuses on rock-solid bass lines, they add power and depth to their atmosphere (“Adrift”). But sometimes, Sunnata focuses on nothing. Even the strongest cuts overstay their welcome with meandering fuzz. As the album progresses, some full tracks get swallowed by tedium, and the moaned vocals become grating; neither undivided attention nor psilocybin can save songs like “The Sleeper” from fading into the background.2—Still, Sunnata has a talent for writing sludgy psychedelic passages that stand out from their peers. If they can trim some low-hanging fat and focus on their strengths, their next record could be a gem. 2.5/5.0
Dolphin Whisperer: Chasing Shadows seems to know exactly what it is—a dry, desert-wandering, bass-heavy affair that leans into psychedelia via shifting repetitions. And Sunnata seem to have figured out exactly how they want to explore this meditation—heavy and dark Alice in Chains vocal melodies, twangy stoner guitar refrains, and song drives that creep ever faster into their snaking swirl. Though, throughout this dusty adventure, guitar passages resemble less of the easy-to-digest percussive draws of a band like Kyuss and more of the modal and trilling explorations of similar sounds that you’d hear in an occult act like Sabbath Assembly. (“Chimera,” “Wishbone”). And on longer cuts, at least before Sunnata achieves maximum throttle, doom inflections, fat bass rumbling, and laser-pointing drone that bubbles and bakes and broils the experimental madhouse of Obake. But most importantly, as a fever dream like this sound, Chasing Shadows maintains a warping yet consistent tonality that slowly and sneakily lures as the rattle of a hissing pit viper to a lost and dazed traveler. It does, however, require a hefty dose of patience and practice to maintain a footing the whole way through its hour-long trial, its various interludes and strange darkwave closing adding little. To curious ears, though, Chasing Shadows will be an easy listen, despite its limited bag of tricks and hefty presence, and those who buy in fully to its tonal landscape may find even more rewards. 3.0/5.0
Itchymenace: Chasing Shadows reminds me of the Albert Camus story, The Adulterous Woman. In fact, the cover art seems plucked directly from the final scene in which the protagonist runs out into the Algerian desert a changed woman after realizing life with her husband will never fulfill her. The music provides the perfect soundtrack for the existential metamorphosis she goes through, or that anyone might go through when they peel back the delicate layers of life and search for deeper meaning. I did not expect to like this as much as I do, but Sunnata has created a masterpiece. This album drags you across a jagged desert landscape and drenches you in rich, dreamlike musical passages that leave you questioning your very existence. The music is complex, varied, heavy and meditative. The arrangements are deceptively simple to make the journey seem easy—until you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore. Especially noteworthy is how the bass guitar drives the compositions. Bassist Michal Dobrzanski’s tone is massive but somehow leaves plenty of room in the soundscape for Szymon Ewertowski and Adrian Gadomski’s intricate guitars and vocals. Drummer Robert Ruszczyk keeps a ritualistic tempo that seamlessly moves the caravan forward through the heart of darkness. If I were to try to describe this to a metalhead, I’d say imagine Alice in Chains trying to play Gorguts by way of Earth. Brilliant! Original! Frightening! And a new experience with every listen. 4.5/5.03
Mystikus Hugebeard: True to Sunnata’s desert prog premise, Chasing Shadows is a mirage: captivating, frustrating, and an incomplete vision of something spectacular. At sixty-two minutes long, the length will likely prove to be as controversial as it is intentional; repetition is key to Sunnata’s songwriting, as it weaves a surreal soundscape through thick, drawn-out riffs. Sometimes, it’s entrancing. Other times, I’m just bored. The more evolutionary tracks are where Chasing Shadows come to life. The off-key vocal layers and thick, fuzzy guitars are in “Chimera” and “Saviour’s Raft” take their time to progress into explosive riffs that feel earned by the buildup. Even a less progressive track like “Torn” works just by nature of how palpable the desert atmosphere is, with the chugging bass, elusive guitar lines, and hallucinatory vocals hypnotizing the listener. “Hunger” and “The Sleeper” also have a satisfying chug to them but feel emptier, with resolutions that are satisfying in the moment but still less memorable than those from earlier tracks. The worst offenders, “Wishbone” and “The Tide,” are almost completely aimless and are fully devoid of the strong atmospheric qualities that makes the rest work. The emulation of an endless trek through an endless desert is uncanny, and the aimlessness can work when paired with hypnotic songwriting like in “Torn,” but overall the lack of a meaningful destination or payoff within the already less engaging tracks only gets worse as the album drags on, and it slowly begins to drown out the parts that work well. I really love the thematic intent behind Chasing Shadows, which only makes the final result all the more frustrating that it falls short of being a truly great desert odyssey. 2.5/5.0
#2024 #AliceInChains #AngryMetalGuySUnsignedBandRodeo #AngryMetalGuySUnsignedBandRodeo2024 #ChasingShadows #DoomMetal #Dvne #Earth #HailSpiritNoir #IndependentRelease #Kyuss #Obake #OccultRock #PolishMetal #PostMetal #PsychedelicDoomMetal #PsychedelicRock #SabbathAssembly #SelfRelease #StonerRock #Sunnata