Comments

  2. says

    For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous set of comments on The Infinite Thread.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-10/#comment-2270739
    Trump again floats deporting U.S. citizens: ‘Maybe that’ll be the next job’

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-10/#comment-2270735
    Israel confirms it has agreed to the U.S. proposal for ceasefire with Hamas

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-10/#comment-2270733
    “Donald Trump’s Brain Is Pudding”

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-10/#comment-2270730
    Ron DeSantis just vetoed a bill that would have installed air conditioning in three prisons, despite heat-related prisoner deaths.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/03/infinite-thread-xxxv/comment-page-10/#comment-2270683
    Australia’s first Indigenous-led truth-telling inquiry has handed down its final report.

  4. says

    On alleged spike of assaults against agents, ICE releases illuminating new data

    Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have spent much of the year raising the alarm about ICE agents facing assaults as part of their duties. In April, for example, the Department of Homeland Security, which ICE falls under, asserted that assaults against ICE officers have increased 300%.

    A month later, that figure grew. “ICE officers are now facing a 413% increase in assaults,” DHS claimed in May. In June, officials added, “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase.” As July got underway, ICE said the new figures pointed to a nearly 700% increase.

    Part of the concern with these statistics is the reliance on percentage growth. Let’s say your savings account had $1 in May, but $2 in June. You might be tempted to celebrate the “100% increase” in your savings, but you’d still only have a couple of bucks in the account. Or put another way, percentage increases only tell part of a larger story.

    When The Washington Post’s Philip Bump took a closer look at this last month, his analysis explained, “That ICE uses a percentage is telling. A 413 percent increase could mean that the number of assaults went from 200 in 2024 to 1,026 in 2025 — or that it went from eight to 41.”

    It was against this backdrop that the federal agency shed new light on the data this week. The New Republic explained:

    On Tuesday, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported on X that DHS told him assaults against ICE and federal immigration enforcement are now up 690 percent from last year. While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

    It’s important to emphasize that assaults on law enforcement personnel are wrong and shouldn’t happen. A total of 79 assaults is too high a number, which ideally would be zero.

    But 79 assaults against ICE agents between Jan. 21 and June 30 works out to an average of roughly one assault every other day. Again, I’m not condoning or defending such violence. The fact remains, however, that roughly one assault every other day doesn’t sound like a crime epidemic targeting a specific agency’s officers. [True!]

    All of this is of particular interest now because many ICE agents are conducting raids while wearing masks to hide their identities, and Trump administration officials have defended the practice by pointing to the alleged violence ICE personnel have confronted.

    But if these assaults aren’t quite as common as a “690% increase” might suggest, the administration might need new talking points. [!]

    How to present statistics … lessons are needed.

  6. says

    Stephen Miller whines to Fox News over criticism of twisted migrant camp

    Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, complained to Fox News on Tuesday night about criticism of Florida’s new migrant detention camp. [video]

    Asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham about concerns that the conditions in the camp are dehumanizing, Miller had some strong words to share.

    “What’s dehumanizing is when American citizens are stripped of their rights and their liberties by the invasion of illegal aliens. What is dehumanizing is when Democrats let alien rapists into the country to attack our children,” Miller said.

    Miller has spent his career, largely in white supremacist circles, tirelessly attacking and maligning immigrants. He is widely considered the architect of Trump’s most-venomous anti-immigrant policy.

    Trump toured the Florida camp after making sadistic comments about how migrants should run in a zigzag pattern to escape being eaten and attacked by alligators and snakes. The facility, branded by the right as “Alligator Alcatraz,” has come under criticism because residents will be housed in hastily erected temporary tents in an area that is incredibly hot and humid.

    […] State Senator Shevrin Jones, a Democrat […] cited concerns with detainees being subjected to the rising heat index in Florida and impact from hurricanes.

    The senator also called out Republicans for using the camp as a fundraising tactic. The Florida Republican Party is currently selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise on its website, including branded shirts and caps.

    Miller has been tasked with devising Trump’s immigration policies and Trump’s approval on this key issue has been tanking. As is often the case, instead of pulling back, Miller went to the sympathetic airwaves of Fox and loudly demanded obedience.

    What about malaria and mosquitos?

  7. says

    Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) is calling on the White House and the Department of Defense (DOD) to hold an emergency briefing on the Pentagon’s recent pause in shipments of some air defense missiles and munitions to Ukraine.

    “I respectfully request an emergency briefing from the White House and the Department of Defense on the Pentagon’s recent review of our nation’s weapons and munitions stockpiles, as well as the decision to withhold urgent, lifesaving military assistance to Ukraine,” Fitzpatrick, a vocal ally of Ukraine in Congress, said in a Wednesday letter to the White House.

    The Pennsylvania Republican wrote that “while the United States needs to continue to strengthen our Defense Industrial Base here at home, we can and must simultaneously provide urgently needed assistance to our allies who are defending their freedom from brutal invading dictators. To not do both is unacceptable.”

    Fitzpatrick’s one-page letter came a day after news reports revealed that the DOD halted the delivery of some missiles and munitions to Ukraine over concerns of U.S. military stockpiles being depleted.

    […] The decision to pause the delivery of weapons to Kyiv has been met with criticism from some Democrats in Congress, with Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) claiming that Colby is “taking action that will surely result in the imminent death of many Ukrainian military and civilians.”

    Russia has continued to pound Ukraine, launching a massive aerial attack on Sunday with more than 60 missiles and 477 drones, per Ukraine’s air force.

    The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said Kyiv “emphasized that any delay or procrastination in supporting Ukraine’s defense capabilities will only encourage the aggressor to continue the war and terror, rather than seek peace.” [I agree.]

    The ministry added that it was looking for clarity from the Trump administration, saying it was not officially notified of any pause in shipments from Washington.

  8. whheydt says

    Re: Lynna, OM @ #4…
    Hmmm…. Is “How to Lie with Statistics” still in print? Perhaps it should be required reading for a lot of people.

  9. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Josh Block (Attorney):

    Shockingly bad decision out from the Eleventh Circuit [Jul 2nd] saying that a transgender woman has no 1A right as a public school teacher to identify herself as “Ms.” or use she/her pronouns.

    Two years ago, the state enacted [Florida Statutes] § 1000.071(3), which, as applied to Wood, prohibits her from using the honorific “Ms.” and the gendered pronouns “she,” “her,” and “hers” in exchanges with students during class time. Wood sued to enjoin the enforcement […] The district court granted Wood a preliminary injunction, finding it substantially likely that the law violates her First Amendment right […]

    We disagree. […] we vacate the preliminary injunction

    What makes this particularly awful is that a bunch of conservative courts have recently (and wrongly) held that a public school teacher as a 1A to misgender students in the classroom. But when it comes to the rights of a trans teacher, suddenly a whole different standard applies.

    I’m tempted to give hypos about the logical extension of the opinion (can an unmarried woman go by “Ms.” instead of “Miss”) but what’s the point? The only logical consistency that matters is that the trans person loses.

    Laura Portuondo (Law professor):

    The irony of this is that making a woman call herself “Mr.” and “he/him” seems far more likely to raise children’s awareness of trans people than simply leaving this woman alone.

    Unless the actual point is to just make it impossible for her to stay at her job/eliminate trans people from the public sphere.

    Erica Goldberg (Law prof): “quite legally wrong and not in the spirit of Pickering. Public employee speech is limited, but this goes way too far.”

  10. says

    whheydt @8, true.

    In other news, as reported by MSNBC:

    The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority backed abortion rights in the state, with a ruling that highlights the importance of state courts after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. … This new ruling stems from an 1849 state law that criminalized the intentional destruction of an unborn child.

  11. says

    Bad deal for Vietnam?

    President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the United States has struck a trade deal with Vietnam that includes a 20% tariff on the Southeast Asian country’s imports to the U.S. Trump’s announcement on Truth Social said that the deal will give the U.S. tariff-free access to Vietnam’s markets. Vietnam also agreed that goods would be hit with a 40% tariff rate if they originated in another country and were transferred to Vietnam for final shipment to the United States.

    Source is CNBC.

  12. says

    NBC News:

    A federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s asylum ban at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying Trump exceeded his authority when he issued a proclamation declaring illegal immigration an emergency and setting aside existing legal processes.

  13. says

    NBC News:

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a pause in sending a shipment of missiles and ammunition to Ukraine […]

    The munitions were approved as part of Presidential Drawdown Authority and Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative packages during the Biden administration, the defense officials and two sources with knowledge of the decision said. Some of the shipments are already in the region but have been stopped before being turned over to Ukraine, according to a defense official and two sources with knowledge of the decision.[…]

    Link

  14. says

    New York Times:

    The Trump administration has declined to release nearly $7 billion in federal funding that helps pay for after-school and summer programs, support for students learning English, teacher training and other services. The money was expected to be released by Tuesday. But in an email on Monday, the Education Department notified state education agencies that the money would not be available.

    No explanation has been given … or none that could find.

  15. says

    Washington Post link

    […] The judge stuck to his ruling denying Sean “Diddy” Combs’s release on bail. Although acquitted on the most serious charges of sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, Combs will return to jail, where he will remain until his sentencing. […]

    October 3 is the tentative date for Combs’s sentencing.

  16. says

    BRUSSELS — Just as the EU faces some of its biggest decisions on green goals and trade, who should get to spend some quality time with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen but 13 of Germany’s top industry bosses?

    It’s not unusual for von der Leyen to carve out time for her compatriots, and figures show that German businesses are the leaders in securing access to the president’s office on the 13th floor of the Berlaymont.

    The timing couldn’t have been more propitious for a visit, with Brussels facing a July 8 deadline to agree a trade truce with U.S. President Donald Trump, and traditional industries lobbying for wiggle room to preserve their “competitiveness” in the face of EU green rules.

    Indeed, just as the CEOs were pouring out their woes to the Commission president, a few floors below, Teresa Ribera, commissioner for a clean industrial transition, was presenting the bloc’s climate targets for 2040.

    Von der Leyen’s center-right European People’s Party is widely accused of watering down the EU’s environmental agenda to help preserve competitiveness, and the German visitors seemed satisfied she was alive to their interests.

    The Commission president was “listening very closely to the details,” said Hendrik Wüst, the minister-president of the industrial powerhouse region of North Rhine-Westphalia, who accompanied the CEOs. “We have passed along quite a lot of good subjects to President von der Leyen, who will also support competitiveness,” he added. “We have received quite a strong signal from her.” […]

    Link

  17. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up on jail/prison phone calls and “Right to Hug“.

    Ars – FCC chair decides inmates and their families must keep paying high phone prices until April 1, 2027

    Commissioner Anna Gomez, the FCC’s only Democrat, criticized the decision and pointed out that Congress mandated lower prices in the Martha Wright-Reed Act, which the FCC was tasked with implementing.
    […]
    Price caps have angered prison phone providers and operators of prisons and jails that get financial benefits from contracts with the prison telcos. One Arkansas jail ended phone service instead of complying with the rate caps.
    […]
    Carr’s office said the delay “will preserve the status quo while the Commission assesses potential changes to its [prisoner comms rules],” suggesting that the FCC might change the price caps before fully implementing them.

    The FCC voted in July 2024 to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls, saying the action would end “exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10.” […]

    The Biden-era FCC set a general deadline of January 1, 2025, for all prisons and jails with average daily populations of 1,000 or more incarcerated people, and a deadline of April 1, 2025, for jails with average daily populations of less than 1,000. There was a provision that extended those deadlines to January and April of 2026 in cases where contracts with phone providers had to be altered. The FCC’s 2024 decision was essentially unanimous, though Carr said at the time that he had concerns about the rate caps.

  19. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Alligator Alcatraz is no nickname. It’s detention camp’s official name

    Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket, Jewish):

    Can only speak for myself, but in a piece yesterday I used this term because as far as I knew there was no official name for the facility. But I’ve been reflecting as I work on a potential follow-up story and have decided moving forward I will refer to it as a concentration camp.

    I do not see “Alligator Auschwitz” as a suitable alternative, as many have suggested. It still feels flippant and imprecise. Also this is not 1940s Poland. This is 2025 America, and we need to deal with reality.

    There isn’t going to be an immediate consensus on this because we all just found out about this horror. I’m just talking through my own process, and others are going through their own. I think we all agree it’s a fucking abomination and should give each other a little grace as we muddle through it.

  20. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    wesinjapan (Disaster sociologist):

    We have had our students in Louisiana for almost 3 weeks now and I want to think through some of the disturbing things we have learned about Louisiana’s state of hurricane preparedness […]

    FEMA as well as state and local Emergency Management (EM) has been decimated since Trump took office. No one wants to jump on the grenade—understandably. FEMA region 4&6 (the entire Gulf Coast) have lost their directors and deputy directors.

    Louisiana’s EM (GOSHEP) has been placed under the National Guard and changed directors at least twice. People at GOSHEP don’t know if they will have jobs after this hurricane season. FEMA doesn’t exactly coordinate with them anymore. There probably won’t be a pre-landfall disaster declaration.

    If there is no pre-landfall declaration, states have to front all of the money without knowing if it will ever be repaid by the federal government. Post-storm, FEMA will not be providing staff to go knock on doors and inform people of help that they are eligible for.

    There WILL NOT be any mandatory evacuation at the state level and probably not at any local level. There will be NO mandatory evacuation for New Orleans. There will be NO sheltering for New Orleans. There will be NO contraflow for evacuations, as it is estimated to cost around $100m +other factors.

    No sheltering. No evacuation. People will be on their own. No robust coordination with FEMA. No pre-storm declaration. LA GOSHEP under the National Guard. Very few people with institutional knowledge throughout the system. Even if every plan in New Orleans were followed to the letter—there are no longer enough personnel to staff the plans: police, fire, EMT, what have you.

    Basically—every lesson learned (in blood) during Katrina has been thrown away. We are worse off than we were 20 years ago. We didn’t have an excuse 20 years ago. Now, people are culpable. The Trump Administration and state governments are choosing this. Engels told us about ‘Social Murder‘.

    When the inevitable happens—there won’t be enough broader understanding of the context. There is no penalty on Trump for failing. Maybe he will even rush in helicopters and trucks and claim he saved the day. But make no mistake—they are creating the disaster RIGHT NOW!

    It would be great to talk about our accomplishments over the last 20 years, but they have been stolen from us and drowned in a bucket. How do we even get back to where we were? Well, we gotta fight. That’s it. Stakes is high.

  21. Akira MacKenzie says

    @19

    Besides marking the end of democracy in the USA (if you ever really wanted to call it that), this era will be must vulgar and tacky administration in human history.

  22. JM says

    Euromaidan Press: Putin shuts curtain on Russia’s reality — new law bans disclosure of war and economic data

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has expanded the scope of information covered by the state secrets law, tightening control over society during the war in Ukraine. Now, data related to foreign policy, international trade, economic policy, scientific developments, and mobilization preparations may be classified as secret, Bloomberg reports.

    Further tightening of information in Russia. The important parts here are shutting people out of what little information they had about the economy and military.

    On 27 June, Putin announced that Russia plans to cut military spending starting next year and over the following three-year period. He also emphasized that Russia must avoid slipping into a recession “under any circumstances”, acknowledging warnings from economists about a potential economic slowdown.

    Being able to publish total lies such as this is the reason. The government is simply going to deny reality and say things are going well. The Russian government lies a lot but under the previous rules they couldn’t get away with saying the military budget was reduced while the war was going on. Too much information about the budget, manpower, expenses and such were public.

  23. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Attorney general: ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ sign cannot be displayed in Idaho schools

    House Bill 41, which goes into effect Tuesday, prohibits flags or banners depicting a political viewpoint from public K-12 schools. The law’s vague language led to questions from educators and school leaders.

    [The AG’s] guidance said school employees cannot display flags or banners that show opinions, emotions, beliefs or thoughts about politics, economics, society, faith or religion. The guidance and the attorney general’s opinion did not define these terms. […] one section […] pertaining to signs […] teacher Sarah Inama had displayed in her classroom for years. One sign read “Everyone is Welcome Here.”

    [She had gone viral in March for refusing to take the sign down.]

    [The AG’s opinion gets lots of facts wrong about the sign’s origins and timing to call it a statement of political ideology to be banned by the new law, citing an article that does not say what the AG claims.]

    “The article is pretty good evidence for why this message is not political,” Inama said. […] especially when both state and federal law dictate that public schools must accept all children and cannot discriminate. “To say that ‘Everyone is Welcome’ in a public school system is not political, it’s the law,” Inama said.

  24. whheydt says

    Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #23…
    That bit about religion….one could have a lot of fun with that in a typical red neck school district…

  25. birgerjohansson says

    For the first time, mainstream media are bringing up the cognitive decline of the president.

    Keith Edwards:
    “WH in Big Panic Over Video Exposing [Trump] COGNITIVE ISSUES”

    At the five minute mark we begin to hear what Trump “answered” to a simple question.
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=auMuZ_oiH_E

  26. birgerjohansson says

    @ 25
    It is Lawrence O’Donnel. He has brought up Trump’s cognitive decline before, but this video with Trump makes it very obvious there is some mental glitch.
    I hope this goes viral.

  27. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Asha Rangappa (Lawyer): “This is why they didn’t want him back: He is a witness.”

    Dawn Popp (Lawyer): “None of this is surprising, but still, seeing it in black and white is beyond horrifying.”

    Anna Bower (Lawfare): “Abrego Garcia’s first-hand account of torture and mistreatment at CECOT… [*see the link*]”
    ^ The thread’s screenshots contain more than what’s quoted. The full document therein doesn’t have anything more.
     
    Michael Paarlberg (PoliSci professor):

    Torture is a systematic practice in El Salvador’s prison system. […] former detainees testify to [*see the link*] Like Abrego Garcia, most of these inmates were never convicted or sentenced. Rather, they are held in indefinite pretrial detention.

  28. Militant Agnostic says

    birgerjohansson @18

    Health Expert Estimates Trump’s Budget Bill Will Kill 51,000 People A Year

    RFK responds with “hold my beer”

  30. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    The House has been tripping over hurdles on the way to voting on the megabill.

    Axios – GOP breaks record for longest House vote

    The previous record was in 2021, when the House took seven hours and six minutes on a procedural vote related to then-President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. House Republicans overtook that record at 9:15pm ET on Wednesday, then went another 15 minutes before finally closing the vote.

    […] Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) needled Republicans […] suggesting they were violating House rules by holding the vote open for so long.

    NYT Live Thread

    Michael Gold (9:36pm): After seven hours and fifteen minutes on a procedural vote [to amend this next step], the House is now voting on a measure known as “the rule”
    —
    Michael Gold (Jul 2 10:40pm): “the rule,” a procedural measure that is required for them to bring a bill to the floor for a vote. For decades, the convention was for members of a majority party never to vote against their party’s rules, even if they planned to vote against the bill. But as rank-and-file Republicans with an antiestablishment bent have been elected to Congress, they have increasingly voted against their party’s rules. That serves as a kind of mutiny that embarrasses leadership
    —
    Megan Mineiro (Jul 3 12:00am): Thomas Massie just told me he switched his vote to “no” on the rule because if this ends up being the only vote on the domestic policy bill, he does not want to be on the record supporting it. “If it goes down, I can’t be a yes,” said Massie, who has made it clear for weeks that he is a hard no on the bill but initially supported the procedural measure to bring it up. […] his comments suggested that if it appears as though Republican leaders can muster enough votes to push through the rule after all, he will switch back and support bringing up the bill.
    —
    Michael Gold (Jul 3 12:55am): Republicans have told us that discussions are continuing to convince the eight lawmakers who have not yet voted to back the measure that would clear the way for them to vote on the bill. They are also trying to flip at least two of the Republicans who have voted against it. But there have been no visible signs of progress for hours.

    Ken Klippenstein (Jul 2 10:35pm): “81 year old Democratic congresswoman Jan Schakowsky just suffered a fall on the House floor, per Axios’ Andrew Solender.”

    Current results for “the rule”. Very few people still in the room.

    R Yea=207, Nay=005, Not voted=8
    D Yea=000, Nay=212, Not voted=0
    I – – –
    Total Yea=207 Nay=217

  31. birgerjohansson says

    CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ 30

    I have been watching the coverage and methaporically eating popcorn.
    Maga Mike is shocked to learn five Republicans take their promises about keeping the deficit down seriously.
    (No, guys we are only telling that to the rubes. Didn’t you get the memo?)
    The shills at Fox are foaming at the mouth and threatening the naysayers.
    I love it.😄

  33. lumipuna says

    Birger at 25 – Is that the one where Trump was asked about inmate detention times at the new Florida prison camp, and he responded by talking about his own frequent vacationing in Florida?

    (The state of reality is such that, when someone announces a GROUNDBREAKING video of Trump having a severe mental glitch on camera, I’m obligated to ask “which one?”)

  36. beholder says

    @2 Lynna

    Israel confirms it has agreed to the U.S. proposal for ceasefire with Hamas

    It’s very likely a pretext for Israel to assassinate their leadership, like they always at least attempt to do with any of their chosen enemies who want to stop fighting them. It is not in the Zionists’ interests for this one-sided slaughter to end now, or for it to end ever, really.

  42. birgerjohansson says

    As usual, the Republican holdouts in congress fold like they were made from tissue paper.

  45. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a move that many said was long overdue, on Thursday God formally notified House Speaker Mike Johnson that he was going to Hell.

    In a rare public statement, the Almighty said that Johnson’s role in shepherding Donald J. Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” through the House was the “last straw” that sealed the Speaker’s eternal damnation.

    “What do you do with someone who cuts Medicaid when 40 percent of his own constituents rely on it?” God asked. “You send his ass to Hell, that’s what.”

    The Heavenly Father also questioned the bill’s allocation of $45 billion for a border wall, since the rest of the bill makes the U.S. someplace no one in their right mind would immigrate to.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/god-formally-notifies-mike-johnson

  46. says

    Aiyiyiyi:

    […] During an interview with CNBC this morning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) alluded to an assurance he received from Trump — that the president would fix whatever issues individual Republicans had with the legislation via executive action.

    “We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,” Norman said Thursday morning. “We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

    It’s all of a piece with the constitutionally backwards approach Trump and his allies in Congress have taken to governing throughout his second term. At this point, they’re barely participating in the charade that lawmakers have authority that is separate but equal to Trump’s.

    And, so, things appear to be going as they have throughout Trump II on Capitol Hill. Following an afternoon and evening of handwringing by some House Republicans about the massive hole the Big, Beautiful Bill would blow in the national debt, and handwringing by others about how extreme the bill is, nearly everyone got in line and voted to move it forward. Trump and White House budget director Russ Vought reportedly spent hours putting the screws to these holdouts, affirming this year’s dynamic: Trump, and the apparent fear he instills, is the one thing that can get the historically unruly GOP congressional conference in line.

    In the end, only Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who represents a district north of Philadelphia that often votes for Democrats, voted “no” on advancing the bill, joining with all Democratic members. […]

    Link

    As of right now:

    House Minority Leader Jeffries delivers marathon speech amid GOP budget bill debate

    Link

    Video at the link. Jeffries has been standing and speaking for more than 7 hours so far. He is discussing not only the Republican bill, but also the Democratic amendments that were proposed.

    Meanwhile Trump is clueless, and all of his minions are lying to the public about the cuts to Medicaid. See the presentations by Chris Hayes that are highlighted in comment 44 for more details. Hayes actually plays video of the liars lying.

  48. says

    While California burns, it has to beg Trump for its own troops

    It’s tough to believe it has been almost a month since President Donald Trump illegally commandeered thousands of California National Guard troops to help with his nativist assault on Los Angeles. Now, as the state’s wildfire season kicks into high gear, the state has to rely on the whims of the Trump administration to see if it could possibly, just maybe, have its own troops back so that the state doesn’t burn down.

    Definitely what the Founding Fathers intended, right?

    After first demanding the deployment of 2,000 members of the California National Guard, Trump doubled that to 4,100 in mid-June. Why, pray tell? Well, it’s not all that clear. Sure, Trump had all the generic statements about protecting federal personnel and such, but what it really looks like is that the administration now sees these troops as their own personal force to be deployed wherever they feel like it, for whatever they want. How else to explain the deployment of over 300 National Guard members to the Coachella Valley—more than 100 miles from Los Angeles—to help the Drug Enforcement Agency raid cannabis growers?

    On June 24, as multiple wildfires started across the state, the governor’s office reported that the California National Guard crews were operating at only 40% of capacity. More than 300 Guard members who are specially trained to work with CAL FIRE on firefighting and prevention were instead being used for whatever Trump felt like.

    The weekend saw the state’s wildfire season start swiftly, and it’s expected to be an especially bad summer. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that the commander in charge of the Los Angeles task force had asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if 200 California National Guard members could be sent back to fighting wildfires—you know, their actual jobs. The next day, the Department of Defense magnanimously announced that it was releasing 150 Guard members.

    It’s great to see this happen, both in terms of necessity and in terms of seeing the administration buckle, but the entire affair highlights what is so very wrong, so warped, about what is happening now.

    When the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a lower court’s ruling requiring Trump to return control of the Guard to the state, they essentially endorsed the administration’s argument that the statutory requirement that orders to federalize Guard members occur “through the governors of the States” didn’t mean you needed consent from the governor, but that you just needed to say, This was issued through the state. […]

    what’s going on in California shows an additional problem: If the president can take any amount of a state’s National Guard troops for any reason, how can a state meaningfully control the use of its Guard? How can a state rely on having enough personnel for critical state-level challenges if the president can yank those troops away?

    When Trump was in power last time, he deliberately delayed wildfire aid from Washington state because he was mad at Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee. Trump also initially refused to provide FEMA wildfire aid to California in 2018 until being told that the areas affected were in Orange County, which had largely supported him.

    Trump has figured out a way to weaponize funding to hinder state wildfire efforts, and he now has a way to weaponize personnel to do so as well. There’s no reason to think he won’t use it to harm blue states, just like he always promises to do.

  49. says

    Live updates: Jeffries’s ‘magic minute’ enters hour 8 with House on verge of passing Trump megabill

    House Republicans early Thursday morning advanced President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” teeing up a final vote after a marathon day of negotiations and a dramatic overnight vote.

    It was the second overnight session for Congress in a handful of days.

    But before the House can take a final vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) gets a so-called magic minute, an unlimited amount of time to argue against the bill on the House floor. Jeffries has spoken for seven hours and has repeatedly vowed to take his “sweet time.” [Now 8 hours]

    Earlier in the morning, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) kept the procedural vote, which would kick off debate, open for almost six hours as GOP leaders persuaded holdout Republican members to vote in favor of it. Trump spoke with some of the holdouts during the long impasse. It passed 219 to 213. […]

    See also: Jeffries stalls final vote on Trump megabill with marathon floor speech

    The Republican bill is almost 900 pages long, and Jeffries bashed House GOP leaders for allotting only one hour of debate on its contents before the final vote, split into 30-minute segments between the two main committees of jurisdiction. The Democratic leader said he wanted to compensate for what he considers a dearth of discussion […]

    “It had been my hope, Mr. Speaker, that we’d be able to have a robust debate, passionate support, or passionate opposition in connection with this bill. That hundreds of members on both sides of the aisle could participate in, and instead we have a limited debate where the relevant committees of jurisdiction have been given 15 minutes each on a bill of such significant magnitude as it relates to the health, the safety, and the well-being of the American people,” Jeffries said. […]

    Jeffries took the House floor at 4:53 a.m. EDT Thursday for what is referred to as his “magic minute,” which empowers leaders in both parties to speak in the chamber for as long as they want during legislative debates. […]

    At the start of the speech, dozens of Republicans had joined Democrats in the chamber, expecting a short speech, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was waiting to deliver his own remarks. But as Jeffries continued without any signs of stopping, Republicans started leaving the floor.

    By 9 a.m., their side of the chamber was a ghost town, with just a handful of members […]

    Jeffries’s message was not subtle: The spending cuts featured in the bill would erode many [Medicaid] benefits, he warned, and “people will die” as a result.

    Jeffries also made a point to identify what part of the country the letter-writers hailed from — and name which Republican lawmakers represented them. The list largely featured the vulnerable GOP lawmakers facing tough reelection contests in next year’s midterms.

    As Jeffries stalled the vote, other Democrats took the opportunity to press voters to call their GOP representatives to urge them to kill the bill. […]

  50. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/usaid-dead-14-million-humans-to-follow

    “USAID Dead, 14 Million Humans To Follow”

    On Tuesday, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) officially ceased to be, after Elon Musk and his crowd of […] creeps decided to put the foreign aid agency “through a wood chipper,” haha, emphasizing that all the cruelty this administration perpetrates is a big joke to the [people] doing the dirty work. Not terribly long after Musk declared the agency “a viper’s nest of radical left Marxists” and set out to dismantle it — unconstitutionally, as if that matters — we learned that USAID had been investigating Musk’s Starlink internet service, too, although that investigation has by now, we assume, long been buried […]

    In a blog post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who among his many jobs is USAID’s final administrator […], celebrated the death of the agency that began under John F. Kennedy […] Rubio lied ceaselessly, claiming in a torrent of MAGA trigger words that “Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War.” You know, other than a record of saving lives, preventing disease, and measurably improving life expectancy in the developing world. [!]

    Rubio griped that nations that received US aid through USAID were insufficiently grateful, because quite a few have voted in the UN in opposition of American foreign policy, which is always right and only wrong when Democrats are in power. He lied that USAID only ever improved life for “the executives of the countless NGOs, who often enjoyed five-star lifestyles funded by American taxpayers,” and all the QAnon people nodded sagely […]

    In there among all the grievance and cant was an announcement of what had been known all along. As of July 1, USAID is gone, 83 percent of USAID’s programs were long cancelled, and the fraction of remaining foreign aid will now be handled through the State Department — but only if such programs “align with administration policies — and which advance American interests,” as defined by the Trump administration.

    Timed to coincide with the shuttering of USAID, a major study published in The Lancet Monday predicts that in the next five years, the cessation of US foreign assistance is likely to result in the deaths of 14 million people globally, a third of them children.

    That has to be a record even for those “pro-life” Republicans in the Trump administration.

    The study, by an international team of researchers, estimated that in just the first two decades of this century, from 2001 to 2021, USAID programs in low- and middle-income countries prevented 91 million deaths through nutrition and health programs. Of the lives saved by USAID interventions, 30 million were children.

    The researchers projected two possible scenarios: one in which USAID’s foreign assistance continued as it had before the current crowd of sociopaths came to power, and another in which only the pittance of remaining US aid keeps going to the developing world. In the latter scenario, 14 million lives will be lost, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.

    The study found that USAID assistance led to a 15 percent reduction of mortality from all causes between 2001 and 2021. The biggest impact of USAID funding came from its role in fighting HIV/AIDS using funds from George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) program: a 65 percent reduction in deaths, according to the study. US assistance also brought a 51 percent reduction in mortality from malaria, and 50 percent lower mortality from “neglected tropical diseases.”

    In a video conference for former and departing USAID staff Monday, Bush himself noted that PEPFAR has been credited with saving 25 million lives since it began in 2004. He told the USAID workers, “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”

    Barack Obama also took part in the video call, saying that gutting USAID was “a colossal mistake,” adding that,

    “Gutting USAID is a travesty, and it’s a tragedy. Because it’s some of the most important work happening anywhere in the world,” said Obama, crediting the organisation with saving lives and playing a role in economic growth that turned recipients into US trade partners.

    He predicted that “sooner or later, leaders on both sides of the aisle will realize how much you are needed”, adding: “your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come.”

    Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post summed up the farewell messages to the USAID staffers, and the praise of their decades of life-saving work, with the headline “Bush teams up with notorious Trump foes to trash ‘colossal mistake’ shuttering USAID.” But really, it was the organizers’ fault, because another of the video messages was from U2 singer Bono. He and Obama together was like four Antichrists. […]

    Anyway, the Lancet study was also very America-hating, warning that the elimination of USAID, compounded by its “ripple effect” on other international assistance, threatens to

    abruptly halt and reverse one of the most important periods of progress in human development. For many [countries], the resulting shock would be similar in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict. [!]

    The big difference between a big war or health crisis and what Trump has done, of course, is that the sudden shutdown of USAID was “a conscious and avoidable policy choice — one whose burden would fall disproportionately on children and younger populations, and whose consequences could reverberate for decades.” […]

    The researchers are of course all respected public health experts from around the world, for whom sober, careful discourse is obligatory. Yr Wonkette is a bunch of scruffy bloggers, so we can state the obvious: Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller, and all their underlings are murderers whose victims will continue to pile up long after American politics moves on.

  52. says

    It’s important to emphasize that assaults on law enforcement personnel are wrong and shouldn’t happen

    Except for the part where these are fully-grown human beings, who – with open eyes – volunteered to be the foot soldiers of the new Nazi regime.
    Fuck ’em.

  53. birgerjohansson says

    Michael (Kill Bill) Madsen dead at 67.
    Goddammit.
    And on the same day the degenerate flatworms killed USAID.

  55. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-does-stephen-miller-spell-final

    “How Does Stephen Miller Spell ‘Final Solution’? With A ‘BBB,’ We Reckon.”

    “Not sure which German words the B’s in Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ really stand for.”

    Well, just about all Donald Trump’s little House Republican [lackeys] — looking right at you, Derrick Van Orden! — caved, and Trump’s and the Republicans’ most coordinated assault on the American people so far is one step closer to being law. House Republicans advanced the great big evil bill in the dead of night, by the weakest of margins. As of this writing Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is using what’s called his “magic minute” to delay a vote, but when he stops, they’re headed toward a final vote. Unless something wild and crazy happens, it should pass.

    UPDATE 11 a.m. eastern: Since Hakeem is still going we’ll add that stream here. [video] [Update: Jeffries broke McCarthy’s record of 8 hours and 32 minutes at about 1:25 p.m. EDT after starting his remarks at 4:53 a.m.]

    Because of what Republicans are doing right now, this morning, countless Americans will die, which is pretty much the running theme of this regime.

    Wonkette will surely have more on the late-night maneuvers and machinations that led us here — for now Jake Sherman’s Twitter is fine — but there were some moments last night that should drive home for innocent Americans what this bill is really about, what an active role Republicans clearly want to take in killing the American people. We wrote early this year, in so many words, that all groups of three or more Republicans should at all times be treated like they’re active Nazi sleeper cells, and that assessment just gets truer every day.

    […] The moments we’re talking about from last night happened on White House Chief Nazi Stephen Miller’s Twitter account.

    You see, Donald Trump may be too senile to even know what’s in his stupid fucking Big Beautiful Bill — he reportedly didn’t even know as late as yesterday that it massacres Medicaid for fun and sport — but the last few days some powerful Republicans’ masks have really begun to slip, and the blood has appeared between their fangs as they quiver in anticipation of what for many of them is the real deal here, the $171 billion in the bill set aside for immigration enforcement, AKA to turn Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s secret police/Gestapo program into something literally larger than the Marine Corps and most nations’ militaries.

    Perspective: [social media post]

    This writer wrote the other night on Bluesky a TRULY STARTLING HYPOTHESIS that’s actually just a sober assessment of the evidence, and it’s that yeah, Republicans are ready for their Final Solution for the American people who aren’t white, conservative, Nazi, etc. [social media post]

    For more sober evidence of that, we can just watch Stephen Miller in real time. Look at this absolute fucking sicko last night: [social media post]

    Miller tweeted late last night, as what we imagine was a batshit full court press from the White House was being promulgated through Trump’s chief little [lackey] Speaker Mike Johnson to move wayward Republicans:

    >BBB will liberate America from invasion. Occupied towns will be freed. Whole towns saved. The precise coalition to pass this bill only exists for a fleeting instant. And yet one or two members may tank it because the largest spending cut in history isn’t 1% percent larger?

    Imagine having the chance to undo years of illegal mass migration and finding some obscure reason to say no…

    Uhhhhhhhh. Yeah. Don’t think this is primarily about Medicaid for the people who are really driving this. Sure, that’s icing on their rancid cake, but this is about something far more primal for the chief architects of this policy, something more racist, something more broken, something more damaged, something more genocidal. […]

    And how does Stephen Miller spell “final solution”? With a B, a B, and another B apparently.

    Those weren’t Miller’s only tweets last night, far from it. He was on a sick little spree: [social media posts]

    That is just a sampling. If you don’t know what time it is in American history reading those tweets, then you are willfully fucking daft.

    Because this is Stephen Miller last night — by most accounts probably the most powerful man in the American government right now, even acting as a shadow president behind the babbling dementia patient who serves as the face of it — […] dreams of becoming American super-Hitler or better yet, Goebbels […] At last Stephen Miller will have the last word, and nobody else will be able to laugh at him and say he looks like a 95-year-old dead person EVER AGAIN.

    […] Donald Trump can’t wait to build concentration camps across the country, he’s so excited about the flooded tent city full of alligators Ron DeSantis set up for him in Florida. [I snipped details describing the app that notifies people when ICE is nearby.]

    […] Here are the screenshots in our Bluesky post above. The first is from a January New York Times profile of Stephen Miller. The second is a very recent tweet from between the vice president’s couch cushions. The third is from this post on Blue Amp about Peter Thiel, Vance’s sugar daddy, saying the quiet part loud about what he and his Palantir are really up to. [Screenshots]

    Is it all coming into focus yet?

    Here, how about this tweet this week from Laura Loomer, who apparently speaks and creates policy/makes HR decisions whenever she shows up [at] the White House? [Social media post]

    Yeah, they’re not being subtle anymore, not that they ever really were. The masks are off, except for the masks the Gestapo wears so people can’t identify which enforcer kidnapped and disappeared their innocent mommy or daddy or gay hairdresser or baby with cancer.

    Welcome to Stephen Miller’s America, we guess.

    Democrats might want to think about something more than a strongly worded letter and a long, impressive speech on the floor of Congress.

  56. says

    House sends GOP’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ to Trump’s desk in major win for Republicans

    The “big, beautiful bill” is heading to President Trump’s desk.
    House Republicans on Thursday afternoon passed the core of Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including sweeping tax cuts, a crackdown on immigration, a boost in energy production and huge cuts in Medicaid — overcoming months of bitter infighting on Capitol Hill to deliver what could be the defining legislation of Trump’s second term.

    […] In the end, two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), joined all Democrats in voting against the legislation, which was approved by the Senate two days earlier.
    “With one big, beautiful bill, we are gonna make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before, and every American is going to benefit from that,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said during his remarks on the House floor before the vote. “Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

    […] The overwhelming Republican support was a reflection of both the enormous appetite within the GOP for extending their 2017 tax cuts, and a demonstration of Trump’s immense grip on his party, where loyalty to the president is presumed and defectors risk a career-ending political backlash.

    […] It gives a $150 billion boost in funding for a border wall, immigration enforcement, and deportations. It provides $150 billion in new defense spending for priorities like shipbuilding and a “Golden Dome” missile defense project. It cuts incentives that promote green energy and expands domestic production of oil, coal and natural gas. It will hike the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, forestalling the threat of a federal default.
    And it features sharp cuts to low-income health and nutrition programs — reductions designed to help offset the loss of revenues from the tax cuts but that are also expected to eliminate health coverage for millions of people. Even so, the cuts aren’t steep enough to cover the whole tab: The Congressional Budget Office estimates the net effect of the package will be an additional $3.3 trillion in deficit spending over the next decade.

  57. says

    Your Taxpayer Dollars at Work—on Trump Campaign Ads

    AdImpact is the canonical source that many journalists use to track political ad spending, where ads are running, the ability to see the actual ads and so forth. A few times I’ve considering subscribing for TPM during the peak of the big election cycles. (These are very high-dollar price points.) So I’m on their mailing list for the data overviews that are basically teasers for subscribing. I got one of those today and something immediately jumped out at me. The top political advertiser by spend this cycle is the Department of Homeland Security. [Screengrab]

    As you can see, the sum is clocking in at $34 million. These services are very valuable because of the quality, the timeliness of their data. But they’re about data. By design and function they aren’t adding perspective or critical analysis. That’s not their job. They sell this data to journalists, ad sellers and campaigns. They know what to do with the data, how to understand it. Thus here you have stated matter of factly what journalists might feel awkward about stating so clearly or might kill with context, for lack of a better phrasing. The top advertiser in this political cycle so far is the Department of Homeland Security running political ads with taxpayer dollars on behalf of Donald Trump.

    [The ads] have been in heavy rotation on local network affiliates in New York City. I don’t watch much TV and almost never broadcast television. But I see it at the gym. And they’ve been on really regular rotation. And they’re straight-up Trump propaganda, political ads — really campaign ads notwithstanding Trump not being up for any election — in a way that is unmistakable. (Here’s one example you can watch at the DHS website.)

    The rationale here is that the government has some leeway to publicize things the government is doing. The government did spend a lot of money telling people they were eligible to get subsidized health care insurance through Obamacare, for example. It’s also the case that on projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, you’ll often see a sign that says, ‘This project funded by the Inflation Reduction Act’ and some mention of President Biden.

    But as is the case in so many realms, you have these edge-case customs which Trump takes and just blows right through any limits. The White House is spending substantial amounts of taxpayer funds to run political ads for the President.

  58. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Now’s the brief window when I get to imagine Trump capriciously vetoing the bill just to torment all the Republican legislators, and Stephen Miller.

  59. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Kyle Griffin (MSNBC): “Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries just broke the record for the longest House floor speech in U.S. history—protesting the Republican tax bill.”

    Kyle Griffin: “Hakeem Jeffries spoke for 8 hours and 44 minutes in total. He finished to a standing ovation from his Democratic colleagues.”

  60. says

    GOP passes bill to steal from the poor and give to the rich

    The House passed […] Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” on Thursday, sending the cruel legislation to Dear Leader’s desk. The bill, once enacted, is expected to strip health care from 17 million Americans and food stamps from millions more over the next decade, all to only partially pay for tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the richest few.

    The bill passed by a vote of 218-214, with every Democrat and only two Republicans voting in opposition.

    This overcomes the supposed concerns of so-called moderate Republicans, who are not politically moderate but rather merely represent competitive House districts. Before Thursday’s vote, many of these swing-district Republicans—such as Reps. David Valadao of California, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, and Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania—voiced wariness over the bill’s massive Medicaid cuts. However, when the time came for them to make a stand, they caved and voted for the bill anyway.

    And then there were the far-right Republicans, who in large said they could not in good conscience vote for a bill that added trillions to the federal deficit. But they, too, caved after having their arms twisted by Dear Leader.

    “Last night a bunch of Republicans in the House were saying how awful this bill was,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote in a post on X. “Only took a couple hours, some merch, and a few words from Donald Trump, and they’re lining up to rip away health care from 17 MILLION people. I’m sadly not surprised—but I am still outraged.”

    The bill now goes to Trump, who plans to sign the dogshit legislation on July Fourth—meaning he’ll spend his Independence Day stripping health care and nutritional assistance from millions in order to give the rich a tax cut.

    […] n a record-breaking speech lasting more than 8 hours and 32 minutes, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries lambasted Republicans’ bill, saying it violates the principles they pray to in the Bible.

    And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the Senate passed the bill, “This vote will haunt Republicans for years to come.”

    In fact, even House Speaker Mike Johnson warned his members that passing the bill was probably the death knell of his narrow House majority, due to the bill’s deep Medicaid cuts. […]

    In the meantime, the bill is already causing pain for Americans.

    For example, a hospital in rural Nebraska announced on Wednesday it will close because of the expected Medicaid cuts.

    “Unfortunately, the current financial environment, driven by anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid, has made it impossible for us to continue operating all of our services, many of which have faced significant financial challenges for years,” Troy Bruntz, CEO of Nebraska’s Community Hospital, said in a statement to a local television station.

    Additionally, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said the bill’s changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program threaten the program’s existence in the Keystone State.

    “There’s [a] real question as to whether or not we’d even be able to operate SNAP any longer, given the change in the formula and given the people that are going to be knocked off,” Shapiro said at a news conference on Monday.

    Mike Johnson looks like someone gave him a happy pill.

  61. says

    Bad (and/or deluded) people still being bad after Trump pardoned them:

    A military veteran who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and was pardoned by President Donald Trump, has now been sentenced to life in prison—this time, for plotting to assassinate dozens of federal agents.

    On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan handed down the sentence to Edward Kelley, a former Marine from Maryville, Tennessee, after a jury convicted him of conspiring to murder federal employees, soliciting a violent crime, and attempting to influence federal officials through threats.

    Kelley—one of the first rioters to breach the Capitol—was caught on video helping throw a police officer to the ground and using a piece of wood to smash a window. He was the fourth person to enter the building through that shattered glass, according to the FBI.

    But it was what came after Jan. 6 that sealed his fate.

    Nearly two years later, Kelley teamed up with another man to plot a violent attack on the FBI’s Knoxville, Tennessee, field office. Prosecutors said the plan involved using car bombs and drones rigged with explosive devices. While awaiting trial for his role in the Capitol attack, Kelley also compiled a “kill list” of 36 law enforcement officers—many of them connected to his 2022 arrest—whom he intended to assassinate.

    During Wednesday’s hearing, more than a dozen of those targets sat in the courtroom as Kelley received his sentence. Judge Varlan also denied Kelley’s request for release pending appeal.

    “The proof at trial established that Kelley targeted law enforcement because of their anticipated role in the civil war that Kelley hoped to initiate and because of his animus,” prosecutors wrote. They described Kelley as a “self-styled ‘patriot’” who felt justified in targeting federal agents, motivated by vengeance and extreme ideology.

    Kelley used encrypted messaging apps to coordinate with coconspirators, including Austin Carter, who is scheduled for sentencing next month. Carter testified that he and Kelley conducted military-style training in late 2022.

    Despite Trump’s sweeping Day One clemency order for more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, the judge ruled that Kelley’s plot—which centered on an assassination plan in Tennessee—was unrelated and therefore not covered.

    “The offenses for which the defendant was found guilty by an East Tennessee jury are the products of the defendant’s independent volitional acts,” prosecutors wrote in a February court filing. “They are not related to events at or near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

    Kelley, who served eight years in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, is now one of the few Jan. 6 rioters still behind bars following Trump’s blanket pardons. He’s hardly the only one who reoffended.

    In stark contrast, another Jan. 6 participant—former FBI agent Jared L. Wise, who was reportedly recorded yelling “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” as rioters attacked police—isn’t in prison. He now works inside Trump’s Department of Justice, advising the so-called “Weaponization Working Group” alongside pardon attorney Ed Martin. […]

    Link

    Embedded links to sources are available at the main link.

  62. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/this-is-what-trump-paid-el-salvador

    “This Is What Trump Paid El Salvador To Do To Kilmar Abrego Garcia”

    “Sorry, you’re about to read some things.”

    Today in criminal court in Tennessee, in the case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia on made-up trumped up GANG SMUGGLE EXPIRED DRIVERS LICENSE! charges as clownishly stupid as the sound of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s voice when she’s effusively praising Donald Trump, the judge ordered the government to stop maligning Kilmar in public statements. (In the literal gentlest terms possible.) [Embedded links are available at the main link.]

    It’s too bad they can’t do the same regarding Fox News guests/Turning Point USA trash who are out there saying Kilmar “killed Americans” and then having to very reluctantly and snippily apologize for it.

    But spokespeople of the US government have been lying viciously and profusely about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man they admit they human trafficked to slave torture prison in El Salvador entirely by mistake, who was supposed to be protected from deportation, and who languished in that prison while the Trump Nazi regime pretended it was helpless to get him back. (His senator, Chris Van Hollen, managed to get in and see him.)

    You know, until the Justice Department had time to make up something to charge him with, so they could immediately indict him criminally and put him through a Russian-style show trial.

    We imagine nobody out there was laboring under the misapprehension that things in the CECOT torture prison were [all nice stuff] but Kilmar’s lawyers decided to let the court and the country know in a filing yesterday exactly what Kilmar experienced there. Because the historical record needs to show it. […]

    This is in the case Kilmar’s wife filed in Maryland federal court, against the Trump regime.

    Here is the full amended complaint from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers. It details the circumstances of the case, the lies the Trump regime has told alleging gang affiliations and whatnot, lies for which the government has zero evidence. It accounts for his encounters with immigration authorities. Etc. The whole thing. On page 20, line 110, it gets into what happened in El Salvador.

    We’re going to excerpt a lot without much comment, because Kilmar’s story deserves to stand on its own.

    You’re about to read some things, steel yourself.

    116. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia reports that he was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture. […]

    120. Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.

    121. In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.

    122. After approximately one week at CECOT, prison director Osiris Luna and other officials separated the 21 Salvadorans who had arrived together. Twelve individuals with visible gang-related tattoos were moved to another cell, while Plaintiff Abrego Garcia remained with eight others who, like him, upon information and belief had no gang affiliations or tattoos.

    123. As reflected by his segregation, the Salvadoran authorities recognized that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was not affiliated with any gang and, at around this time, prison officials explicitly acknowledged that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia’s tattoos were not gang-related, telling him “your tattoos are fine.”

    124. While at CECOT, prison officials repeatedly told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that they would transfer him to the cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would “tear” him apart.

    125. Indeed, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia repeatedly observed prisoners in nearby cells who he understood to be gang members violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel. Screams from nearby cells would similarly ring out throughout the night without any response from prison guards on personnel.

    126. During his first two weeks at CECOT, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia suffered a significant deterioration in his physical condition and lost approximately 31 pounds (dropping from approximately 215 pounds to 184 pounds).

    There’s more worth reading in the filing, should you be interested. All the lies Trump told about their inability to get Kilmar back, and more.

    […] It’s important to read, so that we all may know exactly what evils the Nazi Trump regime is subjecting people to, people who are innocent, people whose worst “crime” was to try to find a better life in the United States, who were naive enough to believe they might be allowed to find it.

    […] This is what’s being done in our name. Happy fucking Independence Day or whatever. Maybe someday if we fight hard enough the day might mean something again.

  63. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    The Hill – Space Shuttle Discovery would move to Texas under GOP megabill

    Cornyn’s office said in a statement on his website that Trump’s megabill “would authorize” Discovery’s shipment to “an entity” close to Houston’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. It is currently on display at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia.
    […]
    “It would be unprecedented for Congress to remove an object from a Smithsonian collection and send it somewhere else […] The Space Shuttle Discovery is not on loan to the Smithsonian from NASA,” the statement reads. “Ownership was transferred to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM).”

    From StevoR’s article on a standalone bill in April.

    Discovery’s original delivery […] took years of planning and required hardware that either no longer exists or can no longer be used without a lot of work.

    “One problem is that we have no ground support equipment remaining on the planet to lift it, to install a tail cone or do anything else to prepare for its move. All of that hardware was destroyed after space shuttle Endeavour was stacked […] We also have no meaningful method of transportation, since neither of the shuttle carrier aircraft are currently operable.” […] Partially disassembling Discovery is also not an option. […] Were it possible to overcome some or all those obstacles, there would still be the matter of the cost. […] “I can easily see this costing a billion dollars,”

  64. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    * That second quoted ‘statement’ @63 opposing moving the shutle came from the Museum, obviously not Cornyn’s office.

  65. says

    Iran won’t retaliate against U.S. — but will keep enriching uranium

    Iran will not retaliate further for the United States’ punishing strikes on its nuclear program, a senior government official told NBC News on Thursday, saying his country is open to negotiations with Washington.

    But Iran has no plans to stop uranium enrichment, Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi said in an interview, reiterating Tehran’s long-running position.

    “As long as there is no act of aggression being perpetrated by the United States against us, we will not respond again,” Takht-Ravanchi said when asked if more was to come.

    Israel, which has long viewed Iran as an existential threat, targeted the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program on June 12, killing dozens of top military officials and nuclear scientists. They also killed nearly 1,000 others, including 38 children, Iran says.

    Iran responded with missile strikes on Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, killing 38 people, according to Israeli officials. A fragile ceasefire has held since last week.

    On June 12, President Donald Trump launched a major attack on Iranian nuclear sites — strikes that Takht-Ravanchi said had caused “serious damage” to Iran’s nuclear program.

    The Iranian facilities included the key Fordo site, which was hit with 14 GBU-57s, 30,000-pound “bunker buster bombs,” according to the U.S. military. It was the first time the United States had directly bombed the Islamic Republic.

    Two days later, Iran launched a missile attack against an American military base in Qatar. This saw some flights diverted from the busy international hub of Doha, in the United Arab Emirates, but no one was injured and Trump called the attack “very weak.”

    Takht-Ravanchi expressed dismay at the exchange of missiles while Iran was in negotiations with Trump about its nuclear program. Tehran had been curtailing its uranium enrichment as part of a 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S., known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but that effectively ended in 2018 when Trump withdrew from the deal.

    “How can we trust the Americans?” the deputy minister asked. “We want them to explain as to why they misled us, why they took such an egregious action against our people.”

    Even so, he suggested that his nation would be open to new talks.

    “We are for diplomacy” and “we are for dialogue,” Takht-Ravanchi said. But the U.S. government needs “to convince us that they are not going to use military force while we are negotiating,” he said. “That is an essential element for our leadership to be in a position to decide about the future round of talks.”

    Iran denies that it wants to build a nuclear bomb, and as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, commonly known as the NPT, it is entitled to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants. […]

  66. says

    EU comes to Moldova’s defense against Russian hacking

    Europe is working to send a “cyber reserve” to help Chișinău ahead of elections in September.

    The European Union is preparing to help Moldova fend off cybersecurity threats to its September parliamentary elections amid growing concerns the vote could be disrupted by Russia.

    The European Commission is working to send support through a so-called cyber reserve — a group of cybersecurity experts from the private sector that can be called on by EU and allied countries.

    The cyber reserve isn’t supposed to be officially rolled out until December, but Brussels is accelerating the process to help Chișinău. If deployed, its Moldova mission would be the first-ever use of the cyber reserve mechanism — underscoring how seriously the bloc takes risks to democratic processes on its eastern flank.

    “Moldova has been heavily impacted by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, while being also directly targeted by Russia’s hybrid activities, seeking to destabilise the country and undermine its EU path,” a Commission document said.

    The news comes just before the first-ever EU-Moldova summit on Friday in Chișinău, with the EU saying leaders will discuss resilience against Russian hybrid threats and deepening ties on cybersecurity, among other things.

    Leaders will also announce it is expanding the work of its EU Partnership Mission in Moldova for another two years, including adding 30 percent more personnel and increasing its budget by almost €20 million, said an EU official, who was granted anonymity to disclose details of the summit. The partnership mission has helped Moldova boot up a cyber agency and strategic communication center and has trained thousands of cyber officials.

    EU officials warn that a large-scale cyberattack in the region could have spillover effects, threatening not just national security but also regional stability.

    While Moldova is not a member of either the EU or NATO, it has been a vocal critic of Russia since Moscow launched an all-out invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022. That has made it the target of a concerted and coordinated influence campaign by Russia that has included the use of AI to target the country’s institutions and particularly its president, Maia Sandu.

    Cybersecurity officials from EU member countries discussed the plan to send the cyber reserve to Moldova during a closed-door meeting on Monday. The Council of the EU hopes to sign off on the plan in July, according to one person involved in the discussions.

    Moldova is only just becoming eligible to receive support from the cyber reserve. In May, Chișinău amended its Digital Europe Program association agreement, a requirement to join the reserve.

    Earlier this year, a delegation from the Commission’s DG CONNECT and representatives from Google, Meta and TikTok also took part in a hybrid threat simulation in Chișinău, aimed at planning an effective response to potential disinformation campaigns and cyber-attacks intended to disrupt the parliamentary election.

    […] Under the Cyber Solidarity Act, countries that signed up to the Digital Europe Program are eligible to request support from the cyber reserve. The act also includes a cybersecurity alert system that pools warnings and intelligence from the cybersecurity sector to allow governments to respond to threats more quickly.

  67. says

    NBC News:

    Four people have died from gunshot wounds and 14 others have been hospitalized following a drive-by shooting in Chicago, police said Thursday. At least three were in critical condition. The shooting happened late Wednesday in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Several media outlets said it happened outside a restaurant and lounge that had hosted an album release party for a rapper.

  68. says

    New York Times:

    The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official rejected broad uses of two Covid vaccines, citing unknown risks or injuries despite assurances of safety from dozens of staff experts, newly released documents show. The decisions by the official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s new chief medical and scientific officer, stunned agency veterans.

    Records show that the F.D.A.’s vaccine staff members had signed off on approving the Novavax vaccine, an alternative to mRNA shots and weeks later on the next-generation of the mRNA Covid shot by Moderna for anyone 12 and older.

    Dr. Prasad overruled those recommendations by the end of May and instead advised restricting the use of both Covid vaccines. He wrote in two memos that the threat from the virus had fallen and changed the risk-benefit balance of vaccinating healthy, younger people.

    […] The new documents offer a window into Dr. Prasad’s vision for the agency and his thinking on vaccine policy. The records reveal that F.D.A. staff members concluded that the vaccines were safe and effective based on clinical trials of the shots tested in thousands of people. But Dr. Prasad wrote that there could still be vaccine-related injuries that have yet to be discovered.

    […] On the Moderna approval, Dr. Prasad filed a “center director override memo,” a document signed on rare instances when top officials substitute their decisions over the findings of staff experts. […]

    Vaccine and infectious disease experts who reviewed the memos said that Dr. Prasad had failed to weigh the well-documented harmful effects from the coronavirus itself, including long Covid and other post-Covid lung, heart and blood-clotting problems. The F.D.A. staff members, in their records, had noted that long Covid “has been recognized as a significant and serious consequence” of contracting the virus.

    “It is a dark time in the history of public health when political appointees overrule expert recommendations, pick and choose data to support their ideology, and use their position to advance personal agendas,” said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease expert at Columbia University.

    […] Dr. Griffin said that the memos did not acknowledge that myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, had been tied to the virus at a rate that is seven to 16 times that of cases linked to the vaccine, and had been a more serious complication from the virus.

    “So if you want to lower the risk of myocarditis in this population with ongoing Covid cases,” Dr. Griffin said, “vaccination is safer than not vaccinating.”

    About 30 staff scientists at the F.D.A. signed off on giving approval to the Novavax vaccine for anyone 12 or older on March 28, according to the newly released documents. Records show that they reviewed several studies, including a clinical trial of the vaccine involving 30,000 people, and a safety database with 45,000 adults and adolescents who got the vaccine.

    […] The vaccine was 90 percent effective in preventing Covid illnesses among the study participants. F.D.A. staff scientists concluded that the main study “supports approval of the vaccine, and the risk-benefit assessment for this vaccine technology remains favorable,” the review said.

    […] The new Moderna vaccine, called mNexspike, was developed with a dose that is one-fifth of the original formula. It was tested against the original Moderna vaccine in a study that included about 11,000 people and that found the new formula was slightly more effective.

    The F.D.A. staff reviewers concluded that its safety profile was similar to the company’s original vaccine. About 30 agency staff members, many doctorate-level scientists or doctors, signed off on the decision, which concluded that no safety concerns were identified in the new Moderna version.

    […] The broader F.D.A. changes in Covid vaccine policy do not affect people 65 and older, but call for sharply limiting the shots only to younger people with a medical condition that put them at high risk.

    Public health experts warned that the ramifications could be problematic for consumers. Insurers might balk at covering off-label prescriptions, which in turn could restrict access to the vaccine. Amid a patchwork of state laws, retail pharmacies could also face limits or liability. […]

  69. says

    Washington Post:

    The U.S. Labor Department announced plans this week to slash more than 60 regulations — including eliminating overtime and minimum wage protections for home health care workers and union organizing rights for migrant farmworkers.

  70. says

    President Trump said Thursday his administration would begin sending letters out to other countries this week informing them of tariff rates they would have to pay to do business in the United States, downplaying his desire to strike dozens of individual trade deals.

    “My inclination is to send a letter out and say what tariff they’re gonna be paying. It’s just much easier,” Trump told reporters as he departed for Iowa. “We have far more than 170 countries, and how many deals can you make? And you can make good deals, but they’re very much more complicated.”

    “I’d rather send out a letter saying this is what you’re going to pay to do business in the United States,” Trump continued. “And I think it will be well received.”

    The president said the letters would begin going out on Friday to roughly 10 countries per day.

    Trump threw out 20 percent, 25 percent and 30 percent as potential tariff rates, but it was not clear if those would be the numbers applied to other nations.

    The president’s announcement comes ahead of a July 9 deadline imposed by the White House to broker trade agreements with other countries after the president had paused so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of other nations. […]

    Link

  71. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna, OM @ 60
    The best revenge is to have a good life. And “by having a good life” I mean the “tracking down the nazis for decades and being them to justice” thing.

  72. StevoR says

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged that scientists are not part of his workforce reduction efforts. But many scientists recruited for their expertise at the nation’s top health agencies have either already lost their jobs or are expecting to, according to interviews with employees and internal documents reviewed by PBS News.

    …(Snip)..

    Their terms last up to five years, and tend to be renewed routinely. But since February, all scientists whose current terms expired have not been able to get them renewed, said union representatives for CDC and NIH employees.

    “They’re quietly letting all of these highly skilled, well-educated researchers just roll off the books,” said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840, which represents 200 members of the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health office in Cincinnati, of which around 40 fall under this category.

    Neimeier-Walsh said some of the Title 42 staff at the CDC include industrial hygienists, epidemiologists, health scientists, engineers and public health experts.

    Union representatives say the scientists’ lapsed statuses will lead to staffing losses that will disrupt lifesaving research and hamstring ongoing collection of data that communities nationwide depend on for public health guidance.

    In some cases, fellows have been let go from broader teams that remain functioning but depend on them to advance their work.

    Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/skilled-scientists-at-these-government-agencies-are-quietly-being-let-go-union-reps-say

  73. StevoR says

    Good if disturbing segment from PBS Newshoiur here too :

    In the last decade, at least 20 states have passed laws or policies that restrict how history can be taught in schools. Since taking office, President Trump has pushed further with executive orders that aim to reshape how U.S. history is presented not only in classrooms, but in some of the nation’s most famous museums. Paul Solman reports.

    Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-whats-behind-the-efforts-to-reshape-how-american-history-is-taught

  78. John Morales says

    Quoth the Bubblebot upon mine enquiry, drawn from #76.
    I suppose it must be wrong, as AIs are. It’s from May.
    Seems about right to me, but.

    —

    Ratio of Health Insurance Losses: Red vs. Blue States

    Data Source

    State‐by‐state estimates of people losing health insurance are drawn from the Joint Economic Committee’s analysis of Medicaid and ACA cuts.
    (https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2025/5/state-by-state-data-on-health-insurance-losses-from-medicaid-aca-cuts)

    State Classification

    Red states are those carried by Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election; blue states are those carried by Joe Biden.

    Aggregate Losses by Political Leaning

    | Red states   | 6,127,823 | 44.7%
    | Blue states   | 7,572,180 | 55.3%
    | United States | 13,700,003 | 100%

    Totals sum to 13.7 million, matching the nationwide projection by 2034.

    Red-to-Blue Ratio

    Ratio (Red : Blue) ≈ 6,127,823 : 7,572,180
    Simplified ≈ 0.81 : 1

    In other words, for every 1 person projected to lose coverage in blue states, about 0.81 are projected to lose it in red states.

  79. John Morales says

    This is a bit different: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-04/comics-disaster-prediction-rattling-japan-s-tourist-boom/105494580

    Disaster prediction in manga comic book The Future I Saw blamed for fall in tourists to Japan

    —

    Japan has seen record numbers of visitors this year.

    But viral rumours of impending disaster stemming from a comic book prediction have reportedly taken the sheen off the tourism boom, with some airlines cancelling flights.

    April saw an all-time monthly high of 3.9 million tourists but that dipped in May.

    Arrivals from Hong Kong — the superstitious Chinese-controlled city where the rumours have circulated widely — were down 11 per cent year-on-year, according to the latest data.

    […]

    Steve Huen, of Hong Kong-based travel agency EGL Tours, said the rumours had had a “significant impact” and his firm had seen its Japan-related business halve.

    Discounts and the introduction of earthquake insurance had “prevented Japan-bound travel from dropping to zero”, he added.

  80. says

    Congress Throws More Money at Removing Immigrants than Most Countries Spend on Their Armies

    It’s hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country’s immigration enforcement infrastructure.

    The Bureau of Prisons? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The Marine Corps? Bigger even than that, by some estimates.

    All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council and TPM’s own read of the legislation. ICE, responsible for enforcement, detentions, and removals, will oversee much of the spending.

    The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.

    “It’s going to get really scary,” Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, told TPM. “I do think that we are in a place where the Trump administration is centering a lot of the law enforcement authority of the federal government into the Department of Homeland Security.”

    Take this example of how the legislation ranks which parts of the immigration system are important.

    The bill gives ICE $29.8 billion to hire new staff and conduct deportations. That will lead to a hiring spurt of deportation officers; an additional $4.1 billion bump goes to Customs and Border Protection for new personnel.

    For immigration detention, also overseen by ICE, the bill allocates a whopping $45 billion.

    If that’s not enough, there’s more: Remember the wall? It was Trump’s big immigration-related promise during the 2016 campaign. It didn’t get built during his first term (and Mexico never paid for it, as Trump promised). Congress allocated $46.5 billion for its construction in this legislation. (A Senate source tells TPM that this, to, was drafted in such a way as to be fungible, so it could be used for building detention facilities as well. [!])

    […] At the same time, the bill adds only a modest number of immigration judges, capping the number at 800 starting in November 2028 — an increase from the current approximately 700.

    […] To Tom Homan (Trump’s border czar), the Trump administration, and its allies in the right-wing media, every undocumented immigrant apprehended and removed is a criminal alien. It’s how they cast the Alien Enemies Act removals, even though a 60 Minutes analysis found that around three-quarters of those removed had no documented criminal background.

    […] This is all new money to be added on top of that which Congress has already marked for immigration enforcement. Under this legislation, ICE will receive a budget for detention alone that’s more than two-thirds larger than that of the federal prison system. The bill also makes a $10 billion slush fund available to the Secretary of Homeland Security, currently Kristi Noem, for reimbursing “costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.” [eyebrow raising]

    […] there’s little [reasonable] argument for this level of spending.

    Orozco, the Immigration Council attorney, said that more than half of those currently in immigration detention had no criminal record.

    “It’s a lie that they’re trying to use these resources just for folks with, with serious criminal histories,” he said.

    For the past five months, immigration enforcement has been the focus of the Trump administration’s most egregious abuses of civil liberties. Removing people to El Salvador’s CECOT without a hearing; using the military to intimidate anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. It’s the tipping point of the spear for much of the current administration’s authoritarian impulses.

    Because of this, that’s about to get a lot bigger.

  81. says

    Looking for something to do this Fourth of July? If you’re a gun-loving “patriot,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has a plan for you: Win her “favorite” semiautomatic weapon.

    In a video posted Thursday on X, the Georgia congresswoman launched her latest firearm giveaway just in time for the holiday weekend.

    “To celebrate 250 years of the red, white, and blue I’m giving away one of my favorite guns, the iconic FN M249S PARA,” Greene wrote. “Enter here for your chance to WIN.”

    The video itself was classic Greene—which isn’t a compliment.

    “America is the greatest country in the world, and I fight the nasty America-last Democrats in Washington to keep it that way,” she declared, standing on a truck and firing her weapon after each talking point. “I fight against gun control, open borders, the trans agenda coming for your kids and women’s sports. And I blow away the reckless government spending on my DOGE subcommittee.”

    She also took aim at former President Joe Biden, accusing Democrats of giving away “trillions to illegal aliens, the green new scam, and their NGO deep-state friends to destroy our country.”

    “But America elected Donald Trump,” she continued, “and now I’m working by his side to make America great again, and we are fighting to protect our faith, families, and freedom.”

    Her final sales pitch was delivered with another burst of gunfire: “Why enter to win this gun? Because in America, you can.”

    The giveaway website echoes that nationalistic theme, promising “one lucky winner” the FN M249S PARA to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, which is … next year.

    Greene’s giveaway gun is a semiautomatic replica of the M249 SAW used by military and law enforcement […] It’s designed for “airborne, armored infantry, and close-quarters combat,” and retails for more than $11,000.

    But to get a chance at the prize, you’ll need to contribute to her political action committee, whose full name is “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s People Over Politicians.” Suggested donations range from $10 to $5,000. A fundraising notice states that proceeds will go to Greene’s 2026 reelection campaign, the Save America Stop Socialism PAC, and her leadership committee.

    […] This isn’t her first time using gun giveaways as a campaign tactic. She did it to mark the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and again in August 2024, as a way to attack then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ commonsense gun policies.

    And the timing of her latest raffle isn’t a coincidence. Greene’s announcement drops just as her party faces backlash for rushing the passage of Trump’s cruel tax legislation. […]

    Link

  82. says

    Flint finishes replacing most lead water pipes

    “Michigan officials announced they have finished replacing most lead water pipes in Flint, according to an environmental advocacy group.”

    Yay! Good news.

    Michigan officials announced they have finished replacing most lead water pipes in Flint, according to an international environmental advocacy group.

    The state submitted a progress report to a federal court Tuesday confirming the replacement of about 11,000 lead pipes and the examination of over 28,000 properties — eight years after Flint officials were ordered to replace the pipes at no cost to residents, the Natural Resources Defense Council said.

    The Washington Post first reported the news.

    “Thanks to the persistence of the people of Flint and our partners, we are finally at the end of the lead pipe replacement project. While this milestone is not all the justice our community deserves, it is a huge achievement,” said Allen C. Overton, the Flint-born pastor of Christ Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church.

    “We would not have reached this day without the work of so many Flint residents who worked to hold our leaders accountable. I have never been prouder to be a member of the Flint community.”

    Still, about 4,000 homes in Flint need to have their pipes removed, the state’s progress report detailed. The homes were either vacant or belonged to residents who declined to have them replaced under the landmark 2017 settlement. […]

    A state official said the complete removal of all lead service lines will take place later this year.

    […] In 2014, Flint switched its water source from the city of Detroit to the Flint River in an attempt to save money but the new water supply was not treated to reduce corrosion — causing one of the most significant public health crises in American history.

    The water crisis exposed nearly 100,000 residents to lead, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. […]

    In part, thanks go to Joe Biden.

  84. says

    Washington Post link

    “Gaza doctor’s death in Israeli strike devastates medical community”

    “Marwan al-Sultan, director of Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital, provided harrowing accounts of how the health care system collapsed over the course of the war.”

    The news that Marwan al-Sultan was killed this week in an Israeli airstrike hit Gaza’s doctors like a thunderbolt. Through 20 months of war, the cardiologist had become one of the conflict’s main narrators, describing to the world again and again the horrific scenes in his wards, even as he battled to keep the lights on at the hospital he managed in the north.

    Now, videos from another hospital, just a few miles away, show how Sultan’s young son gulped through sobs as he stood over his father’s body, so anguished in his grief that he barely noticed the hands that reached out to console him. Beside him was the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Munir al-Bursh, who hugged the boy before beginning to cry quietly himself.

    Relatives of Sultan, the director of the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalya, said that the strike on Wednesday had targeted the Gaza City apartment where he was staying, also killing the doctor’s wife, sister, youngest daughter and his son-in-law.

    In a statement, the Israeli military said that it had struck “a key terrorist from the Hamas terrorist organization,” but provided no more information. “The claim that as a result of the strike uninvolved civilians were harmed is being reviewed,” it said.

    srael’s military campaign in Gaza has devastated the enclave’s health care system, damaging and destroying its clinics and hospitals, killing or detaining hundreds of medical workers and regularly preventing the entry of medicines and other critical supplies. Israeli officials have accused Hamas, which ruled the Gaza Strip and attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, of operating from within or underneath local hospitals, but often with little evidence to back up the claims. More than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

    […] The closures have escalated the health care crisis so sharply that it is commonplace now for doctors in overflowing wards to treat casualties on bloody floors as the limited supply of anesthetic runs dry. Sometimes medics treat and stitch up wounds, only for the patients to die later from the infections that set in.

    In the early days of the conflict, as Israeli troops readied a wide-scale ground invasion, Sultan described the shock of the moment inside the Indonesian Hospital as like being “in a dream.” So heavy was the influx of casualties from Israel’s bombardment that he barely left the hospital — and he already feared being killed in the strikes if he did.

    By November, Gaza’s telecommunications network was on its knees and Sultan said that his staff had been forced to use loudspeakers to direct medics to the Jabalya refugee camp, where hundreds of civilians had been buried under rubble in one of the war’s deadliest strikes.

    “An entire densely populated square was targeted at a time when people were sitting safely at home,” he said in a message. “People who work with us now have received their relatives who were killed or injured.”

    […] Sultan’s family rejected any accusation that he had been involved in militancy. “He is not a member of the movement or any other group. He just cared about the patients and treated them,” his daughter Lobna said Wednesday, in an interview broadcast by the al-Arabiya television channel.

    A photograph of the cardiologist’s badly damaged apartment showed that the floor he was on appeared to have been specifically targeted, with the other floors left largely undamaged.

    […] Sultan had been forced to flee the hospital twice — first during the raid in December 2023 and then in May 2025 as the Israeli army approached again and airstrikes sparked a large fire in the compound — but the hospital director never left northern Gaza or gave up on trying to keep the hospital open and caring for his patients, Habib said.

    “He was known for his candor, spontaneity, and firm leadership — traits that shaped daily hospital management meetings, often filled with rigorous debates and always ending with camaraderie over coffee and shared meals,” he added.

    In a tribute posted to social media Wednesday, Ezzideen Shehab, another doctor, said that Sultan had “walked among the wounded as if their pain were his own, which it was… When the children were brought in with limbs dangling like forgotten promises, he did not flee. He only looked to the heavens and whispered, ‘Prepare yourselves.’”

    […] The cardiologist “fought not the war outside, but the greater war: the war against apathy,” Shehab wrote. “And still, he smiled. Not out of foolish hope, but out of something holier: defiance.”

    “Do you know what it is to be cheerful in hell? That was his miracle. That was his rebellion.”

  86. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna, OM @ 81

    Maybe counter it by selling a July 4:th themed Mme Guillotine? But MTG et al might not get the implicit meaning, they will think it is a celebration of the death penalty.

  87. says

    New York Times link

    “Heat Fuels Fire, Fish Deaths and Tensions Over Protests in Eastern Europe”

    The heat wave that has stifled Europe this week has barreled eastward, fraying nerves at escalating street protests in Serbia and leaving a river in the Czech Republic clogged with dead fish as the effects of global warming accelerate.

    In Albania, across the Adriatic Sea from an Italy still sweltering from exceptionally high temperatures, a routine summer fire at a municipal dump in the central town of Elbasan turned into an out-of-control blaze.

    Drained of energy by temperatures that reached 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 Celsius), firefighters struggled to control it. And with clouds of toxic smoke wafting from the dump, protesters gathered outside the Ministry of Tourism and Environment in Tirana, the capital, declaring that it had been renamed “the Ministry of Smoke and Pollution.”

    As in Western European countries that were hammered this week by the heat wave, older people in Albania were suffering most. […]

    For others, the misery was good for business. Ermir Metushi, 48, a taxi driver in Tirana, said that the heat wave was “hard to endure” but that it had increased his earnings, because “more and more people are giving in to the comfort of taxi air-conditioning, even for short distances.” That and a summer influx of tourists, he said, “mean that I really can’t complain.”

    In the Czech Republic, wildly fluctuating temperatures were blamed for the mass death of fish in the River Thaya in the southeast of the country near Austria. The heat has increased bacteria and sediment that are dangerous for fish, and the authorities in the area, near the city of Breclav, installed pumps to aerate the water. But about 30 tons of fish died this week, starved of oxygen in the river near a hydroelectric plant.

    […] In Belgrade, the Serbian capital, which has been the center of months of antigovernment protests, the heat — 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37 Celsius) on Friday — added to an increasingly tense mood. Nerves frayed as police officers in heavy riot gear struggled to clear streets barricaded by groups of roaming protesters, many of them students. The protests began in November and, after months without violence, have become increasingly confrontational in recent days as temperatures rose and the police started intervening more forcibly.

    The heat was even more severe in neighboring Bosnia, with temperatures rising to 105.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 41 Celsius, in the city of Mostar.

    In Sarajevo, the capital, Ermin Hadzic, a 23-year-old student, said his home, like many in the city, did not have air-conditioning and was unbearably hot.

    […] After rising to 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) on Thursday, the temperature in Vilnius fell sharply on Friday. Temperatures in neighboring Poland also dropped, with Warsaw at 69 Fahrenheit (21 Celsius).

    […] Mladja Djukic, 54, the owner of a cafe in Podgorica, the capital, said that the “heat has become so unbearable, even in the evenings, that most people either stay home with the air-conditioning on or head to the beach.” […]

  88. says

    EXCLUSIVE: Hegseth halted weapons for Ukraine despite military analysis that the aid wouldn’t jeopardize U.S. readiness. [I suspected that.]

    “The move blindsided the State Department, Ukraine, European allies and members of Congress, who demanded an explanation from the Pentagon.”

    The Defense Department held up a shipment of U.S. weapons for Ukraine this week over what officials said were concerns about its low stockpiles. But an analysis by senior military officers found that the aid package would not jeopardize the American military’s own ammunition supplies, according to three U.S. officials.

    The move to halt the weapons shipment blindsided the State Department, members of Congress, officials in Kyiv and European allies, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.

    Critics of the decision included Republicans and Democrats who support aiding Ukraine’s fight against Russia. A leading House Democrat, Adam Smith of Washington, said it was disingenuous of the Pentagon to use military readiness to justify halting aid when the real reason appears to be simply to pursue an agenda of cutting off American aid to Ukraine.

    “We are not at any lower point, stockpile-wise, than we’ve been in the 3½ years of the Ukraine conflict,” Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NBC News.

    Smith said that his staff has “seen the numbers” and, without going into detail, that there was no indication of a shortage that would justify suspending aid to Ukraine.

    Suspending the shipment of military aid to Ukraine was a unilateral step by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to three congressional aides and a former U.S. official familiar with the matter. It was the third time Hegseth on his own has stopped shipments of aid to Ukraine, the sources said. In the two previous cases, in February and in May, his actions were reversed days later.

    […] Lawmakers from both parties were frustrated that they were not notified in advance and were examining whether the delayed shipment violated legislation mandating security assistance for Ukraine, according to congressional aides. Those lawmakers and some European allies were trying to determine just why the Pentagon ordered the suspension and were scrambling to get it reversed.

    The White House has defended the decision, saying it followed an ongoing review by the Defense Department of U.S. assistance to allies and partners abroad that began last month.

    The review began after Hegseth issued a memo ordering the Pentagon’s Joint Staff to review stockpiles of all munitions. According to three officials familiar with the matter, the assessment found that some stockpiles of high-precision munitions were at lower levels but not yet beyond critical minimums.

    The Joint Staff concluded that providing continued assistance to Ukraine would not drain U.S. supplies below a required threshold needed to ensure military readiness, the officials said.

    […] Ukraine has issued urgent appeals to Washington for more air defense systems as Russia has stepped up its bombardment of Ukrainian cities. Over the weekend, Russia launched its biggest aerial attack of the three-year-old conflict, firing 60 missiles and 477 drones across the country.

    The delayed shipment included dozens of Patriot interceptors, coveted weapons for Ukraine to knock out incoming missiles, as well as 155 mm artillery rounds, Hellfire missiles, precision-guided missile systems known as GMLRS, grenade launchers, Stinger surface-to-air missiles and AIM air-to-air missiles for Ukraine’s small fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

    In Poland and other European countries, some of the U.S. weapons had already been loaded onto trucks, ready to be delivered to Kyiv [!] to help its government fend off Russian missile attacks and hold the line against ground forces in the country’s east. Then, military officers and officials handling the shipment got word that the delivery had been called off, said two sources with knowledge of the matter.

    […] Hegseth has twice before suspended aid to Ukraine without apparent coordination with lawmakers on Capitol Hill or even within the administration. The first time, in February, drew a prickly response from the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who called the move “a rookie mistake.”

    The next time was in early May, according to a Senate aide. In both cases, the suspensions of aid were reversed within days. […]

  89. JM says

    CNN: Trump says he had ‘never heard’ Shylock as an anti-semitic term after using it at rally

    President Donald Trump said early Friday that he wasn’t aware that some people view the word “Shylock” as antisemitic after using the term during a rally to decry amoral money lenders.

    “I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates,” Trump told reporters after getting off Air Force One. “I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”

    For once his claim is plausible. He is so ignorant of social stuff that he might not have been aware that it’s generally seen as a antisemitic insult. You can be sure he has never read the play unless it was in school and even then likely he skimmed the Cliff notes.
    As expected he didn’t apologize. Trump doesn’t do apologies.

  90. JM says

    AP: Dutch intelligence services say Russia has stepped up use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine

    Two Dutch intelligence agencies said on Friday that Russia is increasing its use of prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine, including the World War I-era poison gas chloropicrin.

    The Netherlands’ military intelligence and the security service, together with the German intelligence service, found that the use of prohibited chemical weapons by the Russian military had become “standardized and commonplace” in Ukraine.

    Russia is ramping up in one of the ways that can’t easily be countered. Being a bigger monster then Ukraine. It probably isn’t a winning strategy in the long run but it helps win individual fights on the ground.

  91. JM says

    The Kyiv Independent: China’s foreign minister tells EU that Beijing cannot afford Russia to lose in Ukraine, media reports

    China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas on July 3 that the country cannot afford for Russia to lose the war in Ukraine amid fears the U.S. would shift focus towards Beijing, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

    As the war in Ukraine drags on, Wang’s reported comments suggest that Russia’s war in Ukraine may serve China’s strategic needs as focus is deviated away from Beijing’s mounting preparation to launch its own possible invasion into Taiwan.

    Very oddly blunt statements for any diplomat. For a Chinese one you have to assume these are approved by the central government before he made them.
    They may reflect that China is giving up on maintaining friendly trade relations with the EU. If they are not going to have friendly trade relations with the US or EU why not manipulate the war in Ukraine to their advantage? That is just conjecture though.

  92. JM says

    ISW: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 3, 2025

    Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Borova and Siversk and in western Zaporizhia Oblast. Russian forces recently advanced near Kupyansk, Toretsk, and Velyka Novosilka and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.

    The Russian summer offensive has mostly been a bust for Russia. They have made a little progress here and there at high cost in gear and manpower. Ukraine has made a few carefully selected strategic counterstrikes.
    The Russian government has shown they are willing to take those heavy losses to win. It won’t be until internal economic or social problems get out of control that Putin gives up. It’s clear that Putin doesn’t care how long it takes, what the costs are or what the losses are as long as Russia can function.

  93. John Morales says

    JM, best as I can tell (by watching what is done, not reading what’s said) is that Putin knows Trump and his coterie are in his corner.

  95. says

    Conservatives Notch 2 Victories in Their Fight to Deny Planned Parenthood Funding

    Conservatives have won two important battles in their decades-long campaign against Planned Parenthood, a network of affiliated clinics that are the largest provider of reproductive health services in the U.S.

    One of these victories was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling handed down on June 26, 2025. The other is a provision in the multitrilion-dollar tax-and-spending package President Donald Trump has made his top legislative priority. Both follow the same strategy: depriving Planned Parenthood – and all other providers of abortion care – from getting reimbursed by Medicaid, the government health insurance program that mainly covers low-income adults and children, as well as people with disabilities.

    Because Medicaid covers nearly 80 million Americans, this bill, and the Supreme Court’s decision, will sever federal support for health care that has nothing to do with abortion, such as annual exams, birth control and prenatal care. Abortions account for 3% of all of Planned Parenthood’s services.

    As a scholar of reproductive rights, I have studied how abortion politics shape the broader provision of reproductive health care.

    I see in both the legislation and the court’s ruling a culmination of a strategy to defund Planned Parenthood that was in full swing by 2007, toward the end of the George W. Bush administration. This campaign hinges on a strategy of insisting that federal and state dollars are supporting abortion care when they do not.

    [… Trump’s package of tax breaks, spending increases and safety net changes passed in the House and the Senate […]

    One of the bill’s provisions will make it impossible for patients with Medicaid coverage to get any health care services at clinics like Planned Parenthood.

    The provision will last only for a year.

    The House approved the same version of the package that the Senate had passed a week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot be sued by patients if they make it impossible for Planned Parenthood clinics to be reimbursed by Medicaid.

    The case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, arose when a South Carolina woman wanted to get gynecological care at her local Planned Parenthood clinic. The rationale South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster gave for the state’s policy was that Planned Parenthood is an abortion provider.

    To be clear, neither the legal dispute nor the provision in the legislative package had anything to do with the use of federal or state dollars to fund abortion.

    Although Planned Parenthood offers abortion where and when it is legal, this provision and the court’s decision concern Medicaid reimbursement for all other services. Abortion care is not covered by Medicaid under federal law except in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the pregnant patient’s life.

    Medicaid patients instead have relied on their plan at Planned Parenthood clinics when they get annual exams, prenatal care, mental health support, birth control, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, cervical cancer screenings and fertility referrals.

    None of those services will be covered by Medicaid for a year. Patients will have to find another health care provider – as long as one is available.

    While that provision is in effect, Medicaid won’t be allowed to reimburse Planned Parenthood for any services, mirroring what states just won the right to do in the Supreme Court ruling – but at the national level.

    Although the bill blocks Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood for only 12 months, the ruling lets states exclude any provider from its Medicaid program because they also provide abortions.

    In other words, people who rely on Medicaid funding will lose access to all of those essential services not just at Planned Parenthood but potentially at any other providers that also offer abortion care.

    Given the number of states that ban almost all abortion, I have no doubt that more states will do that, especially if this Medicaid funding provision expires after a year without being renewed. [I snipped history of the defunding strategy.]

    […] The Trump administration relied on an argument that any support for a health care provider that offers patients abortion services, no matter how segregated the sources of funding, is tantamount to subsidizing abortion.

    Nationally, 16 million women of reproductive age rely on Medicaid [!], and 1 in 5 women will visit a Planned Parenthood clinic for health care at least once in their lives. Those clinics depend on Medicaid reimbursement to offer an array of reproductive health care services, such as prenatal care, that are not tied to abortion.

    If Planned Parenthood clinics can’t bill Medicaid for those services, many will close. Planned Parenthood estimates that it could see almost 200 closures – 90% of them in states where abortion is legal. [!] That means over 1 million low-income people risk losing access to their health care provider. [!]

    And once clinics close, they may never reopen […]

    Should the number of Planned Parenthood clinics plummet, it will threaten access to contraceptives, which are all the more important in preventing unwanted pregnancies for people living in states that have banned abortion. Researchers have repeatedly found that unwanted pregnancies, when people are denied access to abortion services, are correlated with increased debt, missed educational and employment opportunities, mental health problems, and diminished care for a family’s older children.

    In addition, pregnant patients and new parents may have more limited options for prenatal and postnatal care. That could cause the country’s already-high rates of maternal and infant mortality to increase.

  96. John Morales says

    Joe Blogs about the Russian economy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7jjcS9XR2A

    In this video I discuss the recent comments made by Elvira Nabulina, the Head of the Russian Central Bank, who is concerned about the Russian Economy. I also look at what is happening with the Ruble as there is a groundswell of opinion within Russia that the current strength of the Ruble damaging the Russian Economy.

    Chapters:
    0:00 Intro
    0:31 ELVIRA NABUILINA
    9:51 RUBLE
    10:39 EXPORTS
    13:23 IMPORTS
    14:53 VALUATION
    16:52 FOREX
    18:43 SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

  97. John Morales says

    Birger, I don’t get #94.

    I looked up the character and the ref, but how he is the Republicans or how they are dying by poison is obscure to me. They’re kinda running rampant at the moment, not dying of poison.

  98. birgerjohansson says

    JM @ 89
    He is so…(tries to find an apt expression) mind-bogglingy stupid, ignorant and shallow. His mind only just has enough neurons to run the program of displaying the social mask that his cult enjoys watching.
    .
    The other monsters of history: -Adolph, Josef, Mao or even little Benito- all had sharp minds underneath an ocean of evil.
    To quote the Terry Pratchett novel Guards, Guards ; “Who could have known that mediocricy was [such a strong force]”.

  99. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna, OM @ 95
    These facts should be run in nonstop TV ads all over the country.
    The bottomless evil can only continue to thrive in a deliberatley created abyss of ignorance.

  100. says

    Well before his oh-so-illustrious political career resulted in a truly breathtaking number of criminal charges, Donald Trump was no stranger to a courtroom. By the time he became the Republican nominee in 2016, Trump and his businesses had been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits. His litigious streak has continued, leading to a second term where Trump is actively litigating multiple cases. Here’s a rundown of some of the big lawsuits that Trump, the private citizen, is pursuing while also still being president.

    [Trump had] his personal lawyer send CNN and The New York Times letters threatening to sue, which is an absolutely unhinged thing to do, and a deliberate blurring of the lines between his role as president and his role as a private citizen.

    Late Tuesday night, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, announced it would pay Trump $16 million to settle his whiny lawsuit where he alleged the network had deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

    That’s almost the same amount Disney paid in December 2024 to settle Trump’s baseless defamation lawsuit against ABC. To make things look slightly less like a straight-up bribe, these millions belong to Trump’s eventual presidential library rather than Trump personally. Nope, still looks like a bribe.

    Trump also still has a lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over her poll that predicted Harris would win Iowa. Well, he has two of them now, actually. Trump initially filed his suit in Iowa state court, but Gannett, the parent company of the Register, removed the case to federal court.

    In June, Trump tried to get the case back in state court, but the federal judge denied the request. So Trump decided to voluntarily dismiss his federal case and refile in state court. That didn’t really work out either.

    The judge in the federal case, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, struck Trump’s voluntary dismissal from the record, saying that because Trump had earlier filed a notice of appeal to the Eighth Circuit, that court now has jurisdiction over certain aspects of the case. Were Ebinger to grant the voluntary dismissal of the district court case, she would functionally be dismissing Trump’s appeal as well, which the district court doesn’t have the power to do. So, Trump needs to voluntarily dismiss his federal appeal first.

    Yes, this is wonky procedural stuff, but that’s what lawyers are for. Unfortunately, in this instance, it appears that Trump’s personal attorneys aren’t super-sharp about basic court rules. But rest assured—their client seems to have all the time and money in the world to keep pursuing this in whatever court will take it.

    During his time away from the presidency, Trump lost not one, but two cases to E. Jean Carroll. In May 2023, a jury found him liable for sexually abusing Carroll when he assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s and awarded Carroll $5 million. Then, in January 2024, a jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a separate case over Trump’s defamation of her, following the May 2023 verdict. He’s still battling to make both of those go away.

    The full Second Circuit Court of Appeals just declined to reconsider the $5 million verdict, which likely means the next stop is the friendly confines of the United States Supreme Court. And if you’re wondering if Trump will try to argue that he is somehow immune from this civil lawsuit about a sexual assault he committed 20 years before becoming president? Absolutely. How can we be sure? Because that’s basically the argument he just made to the Second Circuit in his attempt to overturn the $83 million verdict.

    During oral arguments last month, Trump’s personal attorney said that the verdict against Trump “severely damages the presidency” and that “President Trump was denied the protection of presidential immunity” when the trial judge let Carroll’s case proceed. It seems incredibly self-evident that Trump’s presidential immunity does not reach back in time to protect him from the consequences of his actions decades ago. Then again, no one could have expected the Supreme Court to make up that immunity doctrine out of whole cloth. Expect this one to go all the way up as well, and brace yourself for the possibility of a really, really stupid outcome.

    Winning the 2024 election freed Trump from the dozens of federal criminal charges he faced, but it couldn’t undo his conviction in New York state on 34 felony counts over his falsification of business records to hide his payoff to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. He’s continuing to appeal that in the state courts, but he’s also begging the Second Circuit to let him move the criminal case to federal court.

    t should be in federal court, per Trump, because, you guessed it, he believes his presidential immunity covers his criminal acts before becoming president. It should also be in federal court, Trump’s lawyers told the Second Circuit, because the scope of his immunity should be decided “by this court and the Supreme Court, not by New York State courts.”

    In other words, the goal, as ever, is to get in front of a Supreme Court that has proven remarkably receptive to letting Trump off the hook.

    This case, where Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize Board for defaming him, has flown under the radar for a while, but it’s heating up now in ways that highlight exactly how bad it is that the sitting president is also a private litigant.

    But first: How did the board defame him, exactly? By refusing to retract awards to the Washington Post and The New York Times for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump demanded the awards be retracted, and the Pulitzer Board indulged him far more than they should have, conducting an independent review of all the stories. The board concluded that nothing in the award-winning stories had been discredited and declined to retract the awards, and Trump says that defames him.

    This is a ridiculous case, and it should have been dismissed out of hand. But Trump drew an exceedingly friendly three-judge panel in Florida state court that ruled, in February 2025, that he could proceed. How friendly, exactly? Peep the concurrence by Judge Ed Artau, which kicks off by quoting some of Trump’s favorite phrases and glowingly recaps Trump’s complaint.

    That concurrence served as a nice little sizzle reel for Artau, who Trump rewarded two months later with a nomination to the federal bench. And, as Jay Willis points out over at Balls and Strikes, Artau may have known he was under consideration when he wrote that suck-up concurrence.

    This is a not-great collision between Trump’s role as president and his role as private litigant. He’s able to reward judges who rule in his favor in private matters with a reward that he can only extend because of his role as president. [!]

    It gets worse, actually. The Pulitzer Board has been attempting to put this case on hold until Trump is no longer president, given the complexities of litigating against the sitting president and the potential conflict between a state court’s exercise of judicial power and the president’s federal Article II powers. The board pointed out that Trump has argued in other civil cases that litigation would interfere with his duties as president, warranting a stay until the end of his term.

    Nope, said that friendly appeals panel in May. Only Trump can invoke the privilege of saying he’s too busy being president to participate in litigation. That appellate panel went even farther, saying that if Trump sues someone, that’s cool because he is “uniquely equipped to determine how to use his time, to assess the attention a lawsuit will require, and to decide whether the lawsuit will divert him from his official business.”

    But if someone sues Trump, he gets to decide if that’s too onerous. Needless to say, the Pulitzer Board is appealing this nonsense up to the state Supreme Court.

    Because the president now runs private for-profit companies while also being president, said president now gets hauled into court over private business disputes. Also, because said president is a grifter with no loyalty, he gets hauled into court because his business associates allege that he screwed them over.

    Two cofounders of Truth Social […] sued Trump in 2024, alleging he tried to dilute their stake in the company and ice them out of the initial public offering. When the case was before the Delaware Chancery Court in May 2025, Trump argued the suit should be dismissed or stayed until the end of his term, as he is immune from civil suits while in office.

    Yes, it’s exactly what the Pulitzer Board was referring to. When Trump is sued, he is the president, and you cannot take the president away from his important duties with lawsuits. When Trump sues people, he is a private individual who also happens to be president, and has assessed whether he has the time to drag parties into endless litigation.

    It’s a double standard that exists only for Trump, another way that he is above the law. Heads, Trump wins. Tails, we all lose.

    Link

  101. says

    […] Just as scores of vacationers descend on national parks for summer fun and, of course, the July Fourth weekend, certain beaches at the National Park Service are curtailing lifeguard hours. Some are still trying to staff up. And at least some beaches at popular federal parks are open for swimming with no lifeguards at all.

    The reason: The Trump administration slashed jobs, offered buyouts to employees, and implemented a hiring freeze at the park service. State and local lawmakers, as well as some advocacy groups, say the actions have created a risky situation by leaving some federal parks with a shortage of lifeguards. […]

    Link

  102. says

    At least 20 girls missing from summer camp after Texas flash floods

    Heavy rains caused a catastrophic flood emergency in Central Texas on Friday, leading to multiple confirmed fatalities and reports of at least 20 missing girls at a camp in the area.

    The National Weather Service extended a flood watch for parts of southern Edwards Plateau and Hill Country through 7 p.m. CT Friday night.

    In a press conference, authorities said there have been six to ten people found dead so far and that rescue operations are underway by air and ground to help find as many people as possible. The search effort includes 14 helicopters, nine rescue teams with swimmers and between 400 and 500 people on the ground.

    […] Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said 14 helicopters are in the air along with drones. He urged people not to self-deploy or use their own drones because airspace is already crowded.

    […] More rain and flooding are also in the forecast for the Waco area. […]

  105. birgerjohansson says

    Re @ 104.
    I should add the Swedish group also is cooperating with a group in Shanghai. This is the kind of international cooperation the Trump administration would oppose, as it is not a zero-sum game.
    If the research leads to effective pharmaceuticals elderly Republicans can forget about getting the meds subsidised by federal money.

  107. John Morales says

    A rather interesting in-depth report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WygeZt9F__Y

    Very high level of credibility.

    —

    How America created Iran’s nuclear program | If You’re Listening

    The chaotic 12 days of the Israel-Iran war ended with the United States dropping bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities, then quickly brokering a ceasefire.
    But there are still many questions about the conflict: Has Iran really been mere months away from building a bomb for the last 15 years, as Israel claims?
    Did the US’s strikes bust all plans for an Iranian nuke?
    And what does an American bowling alley company have to do with Tehran’s nuclear program?

  108. JM says

    @98 birgerjohansson: They are not as smart as made out in high school history books. People inflate their intelligence because we don’t want to imagine that WWII was started and run by idiots. Stalin was the only one of the lot that was generally competent and even that was only before his paranoia ran out of control.
    Mao may even be on Trump’s level. He had only two big success. He was the first to turn on the rest of the communist party leadership, letting him seize power. And he conned the Russians out of nuclear secrets, securing China’s position as a major power even as the country was failing. The country was starving and slowly collapsing until he died and other more practical leaders took power.

  109. John Morales says

    JM:
    Mao may even be on Trump’s level.

    Good grief!

    You do get you are literally claiming the converse by that comparison?

    (That is, that Trump may even be on Mao’s level?)

    —

    Anyway. Fair enough.
    You reckon maybe a historical figure that transfigures a country is Trump’s level.

    Consider the implications. Clearly, you’re attempting to diss their intelligence.
    What you fail to note is that you thereby concede intelligence is not required to achieve Mao-level changes in a country.

    —

    “The country was starving and slowly collapsing until he died and other more practical leaders took power.”

    There you go. If the USA becomes starving and slowly collapsing, you know they were on a level.

  110. whheydt says

    Re: John Morales @ #109…
    Given some of the provisions of bill That Felon in the White House signed, the US starving and collapsing is at least plausible in the near to medium term future.

  112. John Morales says

    I think it’s another big change by a Republican administration; I put that to the bubblebot specifying domestic and economic context:

    🇺🇸 Reagan, Bush, Trump: Domestic Economic Inflection Points

    Here’s a focused comparison of the economic and domestic system shifts introduced by each presidency:

    🧱 Reagan (1981–1989): Market-Liberalization Epoch

    Tax Cuts: Top marginal rate slashed from 70% to 28% via the 1981 and 1986 tax reforms.
    Deregulation: Sweeping rollback across energy, finance, and transportation sectors.
    Social Spending: Significant reductions in welfare programs; emphasis on personal responsibility.
    Debt & Deficit: National debt tripled; budget deficits soared despite growth.
    Systemic Shift: Replaced Keynesian consensus with supply-side orthodoxy; embedded trickle-down logic into fiscal architecture.

    🧭 Bush (2001–2009): Debt-Fueled Expansion & Collapse

    Tax Cuts: 2001 and 2003 cuts disproportionately benefited high earners; reduced estate and dividend taxes.
    Medicare Expansion: Prescription drug coverage added—largest entitlement expansion since the 1960s.
    Housing Deregulation: Lax oversight of mortgage markets contributed to 2008 collapse.
    Deficit Surge: National debt doubled; spending rose by 4% of GDP.
    Systemic Shift: Institutionalized deficit tolerance for middle-class tax relief and entitlement growth; set stage for financial crisis.

    🚨 Trump (2025): Populist Fiscal Reordering

    BBB Act (2025): Made 2017 tax cuts permanent; added new deductions for tips, overtime, and seniors.
    Entitlement Retrenchment: Deep cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and student loan programs; work requirements imposed.
    Deficit Impact: Projected $3.4 trillion increase over a decade; critics call it reverse-Robin Hood economics.
    Domestic Rewiring: Shifted federal burden to states; redefined eligibility and access across social programs.
    Systemic Shift: Recast domestic policy as loyalty-driven redistribution; fused executive identity with fiscal architecture.

    Each presidency didn’t merely tweak policy—it reprogrammed the fiscal DNA of the American domestic system. Let me know if you want a visual matrix or delta overlay.

  113. whheydt says

    Re John Morales @ #111…
    Mostly depends on the degree to which some of the elements of the bill are implemented. If ICE takes off with its big budget boost and actually manages to deport large numbers of people, who is going to pick the crops (potential: foot shortages and starvation)? Stripping low pay immigrants from the hospitality industry could implode it, thus killing the economy on pretty much any area the depends on tourist travel. Cuts to Medicaid could cause drastically higher death rates (lower life expectancy, flight to where care is available) for rural areas. Cuts to SNAP could lead to increased malnutrition and starvation.

    The question then becomes… How vigorously will these changes be implemented? Big businesses–especially Big Agro–aren’t going to be happy to lose chunks of their labor supply and will push back. At least some R’s may suffer at the polls when the cuts hit home, particularly in red, rural areas leading those Reps and Senators to either seek changes, or get replaced with others that will seek changes.

    Among all possible projections of the effects of the bill, I think the “official” ones are the least likely.

  114. John Morales says

    Sure. One could certainly argue its plausibility as a future outcome in the near to medium-term.
    However, it’s not currently the case, is it?

    Still, as BB puts it:
    “Possibility indicates that something can happen—it’s within the realm of potential outcomes. Probability quantifies how likely that outcome is, often expressed numerically or statistically. Plausibility reflects whether the outcome makes sense given the context, logic, or available evidence, without requiring formal likelihood. For example, it’s possible for a coin to land on its edge, probably unlikely, and plausibly not expected in a typical flip.”

    Now, “the US starving and collapsing” is the claim at hand. Right?

    (You can see where I’m going, I;’m sure)

  115. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @108 JM:

    @99 birgerjohansson:

    mind-bogglingy stupid, ignorant and shallow. […] The other monsters of history […] all had sharp minds

    Mao may even be on Trump’s level.

    Wikipedia – Mao Zedong

    Studying independently, he spent much time in Changsha’s library, reading core works of classical liberalism […] as well as the works of western scientists and philosophers such as Darwin, Mill, Rousseau, and Spencer. Viewing himself as an intellectual […] Mao wanted to become a teacher and enrolled at [a school] widely seen as the best in Hunan. […] A popular student, in 1915 Mao was elected secretary of the Students’ Society. He organised the Association for Student Self-Government and led protests against school rules. […] In spring 1917, he was elected to command the students’ volunteer army, set up to defend the school from marauding soldiers. […] Mao graduated in June 1919, ranked third in the year.

    Mao moved to Beijing, where his mentor Yang Changji had taken a job at Peking University. Yang thought Mao exceptionally “intelligent and handsome”, securing him a job as assistant to the university librarian Li Dazhao, who would become an early Chinese Communist. […] At the university, Mao was snubbed by other students due to his rural Hunanese accent and lowly position. He joined the university’s Philosophy and Journalism Societies and attended lectures and seminars

  116. John Morales says

    [it comes to mind]

    If a photographer can take credit for a photograph, then can someone who queries an AI take credit for its output?

    I can’t think of why not.

    Hang on… lemme ask the Bubblebot:

    “You can—so long as you treat the AI like any other creative tool and your prompts embody genuine creative choices. A photographer claims authorship by choosing subject, framing, lighting and moment; similarly, if your prompt specifies concept, style, composition and revision, you’re exercising creative agency over the output. Legally it remains unsettled (model licenses differ), but ethically and practically, credit follows the human who conceived and directed the work, not the tool itself.”

  117. KG says

    The Russian summer offensive has mostly been a bust for Russia… It’s clear that Putin doesn’t care how long it takes, what the costs are or what the losses are as long as Russia can function. – JM@92

    I (tentatively) predicted that the summer offensive wouldn’t amount to much here 2-3 weeks ago. Drones, mines, satellite info and other technical advances have given the defence in a conventional war the kind of advantage machine guns and barbed wire did in WW1. Of course that doesn’t mean the current near-stalemate will last forever – in WWI it ended on the eastern front in 2017 due to Russia’s economic collapse, elsewhere in 2018, due to the exhaustion of Germany’s allies and US intervention. In the Ukraine War, Russia is of course much larger and more powerful than its victim, but the war is existential for Ukraine and isn’t for Russia (it’s probably not even existential for Putin, who could declare victory after some minor advance). So the outcome will likely come down to whether Ukraine can continue sourcing or making the weapons it needs. As for China, it probably suits Xi best if the war continues – while a Russian loss would shift attention to the China-Taiwan issue, a decisive Russian win would have consequences that could turn out badly for China: Russia would be less dependent on China, Western Europe could speed up the shift from butter to guns already underway, or alternatively could disintegrate politically, either possibly leading to fewer imports from China.

    JM, best as I can tell (by watching what is done, not reading what’s said) is that Putin knows Trump and his coterie are in his corner. – John Morales@93

    He’d be unwise to count on that completely, and I’m not sure he’s doing so. There have been signs Trump resents Putin for failing to help him win a Nobel Peace Prize by agreeing to settle for less than the Ukrainian capitulation he wants. It’s notable that Russia has actually lost a lot of influence in the Middle East with the fall of Assad and the Israeli war on Iran – and has signally failed to help its supposed allies there. That could be at least in part because he doesn’t want to annoy Trump further.

  118. KG says

    The other monsters of history: -Adolph – birgerjohansson@98</blockquote.

    FFS, Birger, if you're going to refer chummily to genocidal tyrants by their personal names, at least get the name right. Hitler’s personal name was

    Adolf.

  119. KG says

    Sorry, blockquote fail @118 due to the buzzing of the large bee in my bonnet!

  120. John Morales says

    Heh. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/05/trip-beijng-fortune-telling-bar-china

    — extract —

    In the age of self-help, self-improvement and self-obsession, there have never been more places to look to for guidance. Where the anxious and the uncertain might have once consulted a search engine for answers, now we can engage in a seemingly meaningful discussion about our problems with ChatGPT. Or, if you’re in China, DeepSeek.

    To some, though, it feels as if our ancestors knew more about life than we do. Or at least, they knew how to look for them. And so it is that scores of young Chinese are turning to ancient forms of divination to find out what the future holds. In the past couple of years, fortune-telling bars have been popping up in China’s cities, offering drinks and snacks alongside xuanxue, or spiritualism. The trend makes sense: China’s economy is struggling, and although consumers are saving their pennies, going out for a drink is cheaper than other forms of retail therapy or an actual therapist. With a deep-rooted culture of mysticism that blends Daoist, Buddhist and folk practices, which have defied decades of the government trying to stamp out superstitious beliefs, for many Chinese people, turning to the unseen makes perfect sense.

    This week, I decided to join them.

    My xuanxue haunt of choice is Qie Le, a newly opened bar in Beijing’s wealthy Chaoyang district. On a Thursday evening, the bar, adorned with yellow Taoist talismans and draped translucent curtains, is quiet. All the better for hogging the fortune-teller’s attention with questions from my deep wells of narcissism. But Wan Mo, either because of her spiritual intuition or because I am not the first self-involved millennial to seek her services, sees me coming a mile off. It’s strictly one question per drink bought.

  121. John Morales says

    Israel is still being Old Testament to Gazan residents, and getting away with it:
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/05/theyre-skin-and-bones-doctors-in-gaza-warn-babies-at-risk-of-death-from-lack-of-formula

    —

    ‘They’re skin and bones’: doctors in Gaza warn babies at risk of death from lack of formula
    Doctors say Israel is blocking deliveries of formula urgently needed as mothers are either dead or too malnourished to feed their babies

    Doctors in Gaza have warned that hundreds of babies are at risk of death amid a critical shortage of baby milk, as Israel continues to restrict the humanitarian aid that can enter the beleaguered strip.

    Dr Ahmad al-Farra, the head of paediatrics at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said his ward had only about a week’s worth of infant formula remaining. The doctor has already run out of specialised formula meant for premature babies and is forced to use regular formula, rationing it between the infants under his care.

    “I can’t begin to describe how bad things are. Right now, we have enough formula for about one week. But we also have infants outside the hospital without any access to milk. It’s catastrophic,” al-Farra told the Guardian over the phone.

    Stocks of infant formula have dwindled in Gaza as Israel has blocked all but a trickle of aid into the Palestinian territory. Food aid that comes through the controversial US-Israeli-backed private company Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) does not include infant formula, according to doctors.

    Hanaa al-Taweel, a 27-year-old mother of five living at al-Nuseirat refugee camp, said she was unable to breastfeed as she herself was not getting enough to eat. She has struggled to find infant formula for her 13-month-old child.

    “The problem of getting milk started since my son’s birth, as due to my malnutrition and general weakness I wasn’t able to breastfeed my baby,” al-Taweel said.

  122. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/all  Chris Hayes

    New reporting on Palestinians killed while waiting for food
    Video is 8:40 minutes

    ‘Overwhelming enthusiasm’: Inside Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory
    Video is 10:41 minutes

    ‘Completely beatable’: Dems go on offensive over unpopular Republican budget
    Video is 9:00 minutes

    ‘Not hyperbole’: Trump’s ‘popular’ law is actually the most unpopular in 30 years
    Video is 6:12 minutes

    ‘Lipstick on a pig’: Trump, Republicans try to hide ‘terrible’ impact of megabill
    Video is 9:47 Minutes

  124. says

    […] Trump made a big show on Tuesday by visiting Florida’s new immigrant detention center, where he and other GOP officials have made clear their intention to abuse human rights and vulnerable communities.

    The so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” brings to life Trump’s lurid fantasies of using wild, violent animals in detaining immigrants, but it’s also a reminder that Trump has spent decades publicly fantasizing about his twisted desires.

    […] other times when Trump subjected us all to the gruesome visions bouncing around in his head.

    1. Executing the Exonerated Five [1989] […] Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he was wrong.

    2. Shooting immigrants in the legs [2019] […]

    3. Shooting protesters [2022] […]

    4. Immigrant blood sports [2024] […]

    5. Murdering the families of terrorists [2015] […]

    6. Reopening Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary [2025] […]

    7. Turning the Gaza Strip into a resort [2025] […]

    8. A third Trump term [2025] […]

    Trump isn’t alone in his disturbing fantasies. In May, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was considering a reality TV show where immigrants compete for citizenship. […]

    Details at the link.

  126. says

    Is Congress Funding Mass Deportations or Mass Detentions?

    Both in a way. However, my bet is that the Trump administration will end up with more mass detentions by far.

    Josh Kovensky and others on Talking Points Memo:

    […] But a look at what is required to remove people en masse — and where the money for that effort is really going — suggests that we’re wrong to call this “mass deportations.”

    Removing someone from the country requires various levels of process.

    Even under expedited removal, during which immigration officials can deport someone without a full hearing before an immigration judge, people are still being sent to another country — either the state that issued their passport or a third country willing to accept them — which, in turn, creates additional problems that aren’t necessarily under the Trump administration’s control.

    The receiving country needs to issue travel documents allowing the person to go there, and the U.S. government needs permission from foreign governments before sending a deportation flight. The Trump administration has been speaking loudly and carrying a big stick, but that’ll only get you so far.

    For those not subject to expedited removal, hearings in immigration court could set deportations back by years.

    What the government can do, however, is detain people en masse as they await removal. The budget bill that Congress passed this week gives the White House what it needs for that program: it includes a whopping $45 billion for immigration detention. A Senate source tells me that a separate $46.5 billion, dedicated to Trump’s wall, was written in a way to allow the money to be fungible for further detention operations.

    […] Who will get the contracts to detain? What will these facilities look like? How many people will be detained?

    But the allocations are enough of a tell to know that what we’re looking at here isn’t quite mass deportations. It’s mass detention.

  127. says

    Trump just sent over to the Senate the official nominations for several U.S. attorneys, plenty of which are repulsive. Some got the nod because they’re free speech warriors, where “free speech” is limited to conservative Christians. But there are two who really stand out as comically unqualified, even by Trump administration standards.

    First, and completely expected, is interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba was tapped. By the key performance metric of the Trump administration—which is your willingness to abuse your position in the service of Trump’s agenda—Habba is eminently qualified. She’s been happy to maliciously prosecute Democrats for performing their congressional oversight duties.

    But when it comes to actual relevant legal experience, Habba is pretty much limited to representing Trump in civil cases. And, of course, repping parking garages and “Real Housewives” cast members.

    Second is nepo baby Moore Capito, son of GOP Sen. Shelly Capito of West Virginia. His background seems to be entirely limited to corporate law and running for office, but that didn’t stop his mom from issuing a proud social media post praising him and Trump’s other West Virginia pick, Matt Harvey, as “two stellar candidates.”

    Besides the whole corporate law thing, Capito’s biggest accomplishment is being related to other people.

    “Along with being Sen. Capito’s son, he also is the grandson of the late three-term Republican governor Arch Moore, and a cousin to 2nd District Congressman Riley Moore.”

    So glad we got rid of DEI so we can now hire people completely based on merit.

    Link

    Also from the same link above:

    After a terrible end to the Supreme Court term, it would have been nice to have some respite. After taking the weekend off to rest and regroup, the court got up bright and early Monday to announce that it would hear a campaign finance case involving Vice President JD Vance from back when he was a senator.

    One of the few campaign finance limitations left on the books is a provision on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. In the 15 years since the Citizens United decision, the conservatives on the Supreme Court have continued to strike down contribution limits, ushering in a brave new world where the world’s richest man could buy the presidency and install himself in a secret, untouchable role at the helm of the government.

    There’s no reason to think that the court won’t also strike down this limitation so we can have even more dark money sloshing around. […]

    Also from the same link:

    […] a gun control measure the Trump administration supports

    Continuing its role as a sort of all-purpose underqualified villain, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency got the nod to get rid of up to 47 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives regulations. Why 47? Because Trump is the 47th president. No, really.

    The Trump administration has already made it so you can buy “forced-reset triggers”—which turn semiautomatic rifles into machine guns—and eliminated a Biden-era policy of zero tolerance for gun dealers who violate the law by doing things like selling guns without a background check. They’re also planning to shorten the forms needed to buy guns because it’s too hard to fill out 7 whole pages.

    But while all of these gun laws have to go, the Department of Justice has apparently found a restriction on gun ownership that it can enthusiastically back. A Pennsylvania federal judge just granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss, agreeing that not allowing medical cannabis users to own guns was constitutional.

    In a Supreme Court filing in a different case, the Trump administration said that such a ban was necessary because they “pose a clear danger of misusing firearms.” Not when they’re high, mind you. Just by their very existence as cannabis users.

    People using machine guns without background checks = good. People who take a weed gummy to fall asleep = bad.

  128. says

    Washington Post link

    “Rescuers search for more than two dozen missing campers after Texas floods killed at least 27”

    Search and rescue missions continued Saturday after flooding in Central Texas killed at least 18 adults and nine children, including a girl attending Camp Mystic summer camp, and the director of another camp on the bank of the Guadalupe River. More than two dozen girls attending Camp Mystic remain unaccounted for. Residents in several areas awoke Saturday to further warnings of dangerous and life-threatening flooding and heavy rain.

    What to know about the floods
    – At least 27 people were killed and others, including at least 20 girls attending Camp Mystic in Kerr County, are missing following flooding in Central Texas, officials said late Friday. Authorities say at least 850 people have been rescued, while efforts to find those still unaccounted for continue.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a disaster declaration for 15 counties affected by the flooding. The state has deployed more than 1,000 state responders. President Donald Trump said Saturday that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem will head to Texas in response to the floods.

    Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said Friday that “no one knew this kind of flood was coming” and added that the county does not have a warning system in place.

    A flood watch is in place in Kerr County and the wider area, with more rain forecast for Kerrville on Saturday. […]

  130. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    NYT – Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on college application
    https://archive.is/vp3pp

    Mediaite – NYT grants race science enthusiast anonymity in Mamdani hit piece

    New York Times published a story that cited hacked documents at Columbia University showing that New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani identified as “Black or African American” on his college application. […] That [source] is a known enthusiast of race science, a fact the Times more or less acknowledged in its piece. [“He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.”]
    […]
    on the campaign trail, Mamdani touted his Muslim faith and South Asian ancestry. He was born in Uganda in 1991 and moved with his parents to South Africa five years later. Two years later, the family moved to New York.

    The Times report cited a figure who goes by the name Crémieux […] The Guardian […] corroborated that Crémieux is a man named Jordan Lasker, who, as Crémieux, spoke at a neo-natalist conference […] this year.
    […]
    Mamdani told the Times that “he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather ‘an American who was born in Africa.’ He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process.”

     
    CapitolHunters:

    The saga of the NYT’s anti-Mamdani story taken from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker (they call him an “academic”) gets even more amazing: Lasker’s only impactful paper, which claimed white people are smarter, is infamous: it misused data so badly it got his tenured co-author fired.
    […]
    Why didn’t reviewers catch the ethical issues with Lasker & Pesta’s paper before publication? Because it appeared in a new journal edited by… Bryan Pesta. Its inaugural issue was devoted to ‘race science’, many articles by the same set of co-authors, claiming Black people are less intelligent.

    The point here isn’t to beat up on Jordan Lasker. It’s to ask how the NYT called a white supremacist hack an “academic” when his only academic work of note was […] a national scandal. No one even Googled.
    […]
    Let’s be clear: Jordan Lasker’s scandal is MUCH worse than that of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, which the NYT covered for days. Gay wasn’t fired. Bryan Pesta was. Jordan Lasker could never be hired. If the NYT cares about academic misconduct, they must now cover Lasker’s sins. They made him the story.

    CapitolHunters: “Lying to a federal agency and misusing data is one of those things that gets a tenured prof fired, though it also helps if he is widely loathed for publishing garbage ‘race science’. But the unambiguous thing, and the reason they fired him, was the data fraud.”

    CapitolHunters: “A fun coda on ‘Jordan Lasker pretends to be an academic’: in 2019, Lasker was a ‘data consultant’ helping a faculty member at U Minnesota. He got a UMN email and used it to falsely claim a university affiliation on the infamous Pesta paper. UMN had to explain it to reporters after the scandal!”

    Kevin Kruse: “The New York Times was more skeptical of the academic qualifications of a black woman who had secured tenure and become the president of Harvard than they were of a white man who washed out of a grad program with a massive scandal and then became a white nationalist troll.”

    Lasker’s sister spilled tea in a thread I can’t see, but there are screenshots.
    https://bsky.app/profile/sanho.bsky.social/post/3lta4y3pmvk2x

    he was nearly in tears over being 1.7% subsaharan African

     
    Rando 1:

    They are attempting to spin Mamdani (and Columbia) as the actual sources.

    Patrick Healy: We sometimes receive information […] from controversial sources. […] we seek to confirm through direct sources, which we did

    Rando 2: “I’m just going to assume that [NYT author] Ryan (and probably [editor] Healy as well) knows exactly who Lasker is.”
    Rando 3: “You’re probably right. Which makes it even worse.”

    Rando 4: “What do you mean he’s not a real race scientist? A fake doctorate is the highest accolade a race scientist can achieve. He’s at the top of his field.”

    Rando 5: “today’s NYT damage control article on the turd they laid about Zorhan’s college application form. As with Trump, it’s never THEIR fault. And bless the bastards, they got what appears to be a woman of color to write it!”

    Rando 6: “even if we’re sticking with Mamdani stories instead of literally anything else, isn’t the most significant Mamdani story that Trump has threatened to take away his citizenship and throw him into a concentration camp?“

  131. says

    Joyful Parisians take a historic plunge into the Seine after 100 years

    “The return to swimming follows a 1.4 billion euro ($1.5 billion) cleanup project tied to last year’s Olympics. Officials now say the Seine meets European water quality standards on most days.”

    […] Parisians jumped into the river — legally — for the first time in more than 100 years.

    Public swimming was allowed in designated areas of the Seine, including two newly built wooden decks near the Eiffel Tower and the Île Saint-Louis in central Paris. Before sunrise, a municipal officer skimmed away the last few patches of algae with a fishnet. Soon after, a line of eager Parisians formed, towels in hand, waiting for their chance to jump in.

    […] Every swimmer wore a bright yellow lifebuoy tied around their waist, part of strict safety measures enforced by a dozen lifeguards in high-visibility vests. The current was weak, just enough to tug gently at their limbs — a reminder that this is still a living, urban river.

    “It’s so nice to swim in the heart of the city, especially with the high temperatures we’ve been having lately,” said Amine Hocini, a 25-year-old construction worker from Paris. “I’m surprised because I thought it was going to be cooler and in fact, it’s much warmer than I thought.”

    […] Environmental authorities confirmed bacteria levels were well below official thresholds.

    Swimming in the Seine had been illegal since 1923, with a few exceptions, due to pollution and risks posed by river navigation. Taking a dip outside bathing areas is still banned for safety reasons.

    […] Floating debris still bobbed here and there — a stray leaf, a plastic wrapper — but the smell was barely noticeable: no strong sewage odor, just an earthy, river-like scent. […]

  133. says

    Texas capital murder case aims to severely punish abortion pill use by treating a fetus as a person</a.

    A North Texas man charged with capital murder this month after he allegedly slipped his girlfriend abortion-inducing medication and caused a miscarriage marks the first time a murder charge has been brought in an abortion-related case in Texas.

    The case tests a new method for reining in abortion pills — by threatening to prosecute individuals who provide them with the most severe criminal charge — while advancing the longstanding legal provision that defines an embryo as a person, legal experts say. The latter could raise serious implications about the legality of fertility treatments and in other legal realms such as criminal and immigration issues.

    […] According to an affidavit filed in Tarrant County by the Texas Rangers, 39-year-old Justin Anthony Banta put mifepristone, an abortion-inducing medication, into cookies and a beverage that he then gave to his pregnant girlfriend. Banta had previously asked her to get an abortion, but she said she had wanted to keep the child, according to the affidavit. A day after drinking the beverage, the woman miscarried.

    […] The combination of mifepristone and misoprostol constitutes the “abortion pill.” […]

    Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, a fetus was not considered a person constitutionally. However, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the whole opinion was overruled, including the idea that a fetus does not have the same rights as a person. That did not immediately mean that fetus personhood is established. But, Joanna Grossman, a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, and other experts see Banta’s case as an attempt to move further in that direction.

    “The purpose of this has nothing to do with caring whether this woman was victimized, but it’s about trying to establish fetal personhood in a more direct way than they’ve been able to,” said Grossman.

    If Banta is convicted and fetal personhood is established in the case, it could complicate a variety of issues, including whether IVF is still legal because it involves destroying unused frozen embryos. Last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are considered children.

    […] “If you detain a pregnant woman, are you illegally detaining the fetus who did not commit a crime? If you deport a pregnant woman, are you deporting a U.S. citizen because if we have birthright citizenship, when does that begin?”

    […] Separating the fetus from the woman – in legal terms
    Certain states already have laws where hurting a pregnant woman can carry more serious consequences. Those cases center around charges for harming the pregnant woman, and do not solely focus on the fetus.

    […] By charging Banta with attempted capital murder of the fetus, prosecutors are trying to “separate the pregnant person from the fetus,” Grossman said, which not only reinforces the idea that the fetus may matter more than the pregnant person, but also attempts to more clearly define a fetus as a person.

    […] Using capital murder to deter abortion pill use
    […] Texas created a “illegal performance of an abortion” crime and charged a Houston midwife with it in March.

    Over the last year, state leaders have focused on trying to block the flow of abortion-inducing medication into Texas. The demand for the medication spiked 1000% after the state outlawed abortion.

    The Texas Legislature tried and failed to pass a bill that would have imposed civil penalties on those who distribute abortion inducing medication. Additionally, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York doctor for shipping abortion-inducing medication into Texas. That lawsuit will likely test New York state’s “shield law,” which protects providers from out-of-state prosecutions.

    However, the Banta case represents a new strategy from a statewide law enforcement authority in chilling the use and provision of abortion-inducing medication in Texas.

    Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a person in Texas who helps a woman obtain an abortion has been liable not only for specific abortion charges, but now more serious charges like capital murder for their role in ending a pregnancy. […]

    The potential consequences of the Banta case
    Even if this case is successfully prosecuted, it may not lead to the establishment of fetal personhood statewide or nationwide. It is likely for this case to end in a jury verdict which is not the equivalent of a Supreme Court decision setting a legally binding precedent.

    If a jury finds Banta guilty, Grossman said he could also appeal the decision by claiming that he cannot be convicted of capital murder of a fetus. The appellate court decision, then, could potentially be binding in a way that a jury verdict is not.

    However, Grossman believes the significance of Banta’s case does not necessarily lie in whether it’s successfully prosecuted. The way in which prosecutors have charged him for this crime is significant on its own.

    She sees Banta’s case as a “trial balloon” for the anti-abortion movement. Banta is a naturally unsympathetic character, Grossman explained, so public sympathies will likely side with the anti-abortion side.

    Since the charges were brought against Banta, local outlets across Texas and the nation have reported on the severity of the charges. Grossman believes that this has a “chilling effect” and is “sending a message” of fear to the general public regarding abortions. In that case, she is concerned that the damage has been done.

    But if this case is successful for prosecutors, women don’t necessarily need to fear the possibility of being criminalized for ending their own pregnancies. There is still an explicit exemption for pregnant people when seeking abortions, and depending on how this case plays out, it’s not necessarily likely that this exemption would be eroded.

    “Right now, there is no way any woman could be prosecuted by any Texas law, any pro life policy that is being considered,” Seago said. If any prosecutor were to try to prosecute a woman for an abortion, that “would clearly be in violation of the law.”

  134. John Morales says

    Remember the recent spat?
    Looks like Musk is seeking to become a political figure, dressed in spite.

    In the news via BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dn04lvgpdo

    —

    Elon Musk says he is launching new political party

    Elon Musk says he is launching a new political party, weeks after a dramatic falling out with US President Donald Trump.

    The billionaire announced on his social-media platform X that he had set up the America Party and billed it as a challenge to the Republican and Democratic two-party system.

    However, it is unclear whether the party has been formally registered with US election authorities, and Musk has not provided details about who will lead it or what form it will take.

    He first raised the prospect of launching a party during his public feud with Trump, which saw him leave his role in the administration and engage in a vicious public spat with his former ally.

  137. JM says

    @134 John Morales: Good chance he fails to get it going. Can’t really judge how likely until there is some sense of how much money he is spending but this will take more then just his small fan base. To organize a national organization and all of the state organizations will take many piles of money, consultants and lawyers, and feet on the ground. Getting consultants and lawyers that are worth having will be tough because the well known good ones are tied to one of the big parties and can’t easily be hired. Building the state organizations and putting it all together into a functional national organization will take organization and management skills that Musk has shown no signs of having. The only thing Musk has given himself is enough time, it will take years.

  139. John Morales says

    Pretty sure Trump did not actually expect to win, the first time.
    Yet, somehow, it happened.

    And Musk is 54 years old.
    And the system clearly is creaky.
    I mean, Musk ain’t USA-born, right? Only a citizen.

    (We live in interesting times, but when were they uninteresting? ;)

  143. StevoR says

    That clip also notes Michael Mann has a new book out co-authored by Peter Hotez titled Science Under Seige :

    Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez are two of the most respected and well-known scientists in the world and have spent the last twenty years on the front lines of the battle to convey accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information about science in the face of determined and nihilistic opposition.

    In this powerful manifesto, they reveal the five main forces threatening science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. It is a call to arms and a road map for dismantling the forces of anti-science. Armed with the information in this book, we can be empowered to promote scientific truths, shine light on channels of dark money, dismantle the corporations poisoning the planet, and ultimately avert disaster.

    https://michaelmann.net/books/science-under-siege/

    First I’ve heard of it but do have a copy of his The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars one. Technical but good. Tiotle does remidn me of a book by thereichwingers with Pinker included mentioned on this blog recently but very much NOT one I’d be intrested in reading.. Hope there’s not too much confusion between those!

  145. John Morales says

    Hm. So, just checked (with BB), and of course I am vindicated:

    —

    As of mid-2025, Jerry Sandusky remains incarcerated at Greene Correctional Institution in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. He’s now in his early 80s and continues to serve his 30–60 year sentence for 45 counts of child sexual abuse. His latest appeal was denied in late 2024, and no legal reversals have occurred. Despite ongoing health issues, he remains active in filing motions, though none have gained traction.

  146. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    John Pfaff (Law professor):

    We are going to see a lot of ppl claiming, understandably, that the BBB has now provided Trump with a massive ICE army. That is incorrect. It has provided him with the funds to TRY.

    A 2017 DHS-OIG report said ICE would need to interview 500,000 ppl to get 10,000 new hires. […] Just bc Trump wants something and gets the money for it does NOT mean he’ll get it. Esp for LEO hiring, which has been a mess nationwide for YEARS. […] (and the ratio was even worse for CBP: 750,000 to get 5,000)

    Rando:

    [$8b for 10k officers over 4 yrs = 200k/yr per officer.] That $200k is approximately the all-in cost of an [full-time equivalent] federal agent. Roughly half is salary, the rest is benefits, training, etc.

    The feds have always paid better than state/local, but that hasn’t been enough to fill federal slots. Other than FBI, the agencies have struggled to hire for years.

    John Pfaff:

    Where are these 10,000 officers going to come from? Local PDs currently have lots of vacancies, even with lots of added perks.
    […]
    is it just going to cannibalize local PDs? That only reallocates police, doesn’t expand total #. […] cannibalization may produce further local resistance, as even more-pro-policing-status-quo centrists (and even some tough-on-crime conservatives) may come to resent the reallocation.
    […]
    If the solution is to set the bar lower, the error costs are going to be measured in blood, but that too will produce more backlash and resistance.
    […]
    either way this (hoped-for) hiring spree seems… poorly thought out.

    John Pfaff:

    It’s only four years. What comes after that? The “what comes next” part has come up in debates about what the COPS funding in 1994 Crime Bill, for 100,000 more cops, actually did. Some studies suggest the impact was slight, bc departments knew the funding was for 5 yrs, but the hiring would be for 40. Not a great subsidy!

    […] If you don’t think the budget line will be approved again, do you risk taking the job if you’ve already got a safe-if-lower-paying local job?

    For most law enforcement, assuming “they’ll keep funding up” would make sense. But ICE has really made itself uniquely political.

    John Pfaff:

    This is a poorly-designed proposal made by ppl with no interest in even cosplaying as serious policy makers. […] Don’t Green Lantern this (ie, assume that Trump and Miller can bring something into existence simply by willing it). Fascism on the cheap by the indifferent can cause HUGE harms. But that same cheap-and-indifferent creates weaknesses to exploit.

    Ryan Cooper (The American Pospect):

    this is going to be horrific, but a TON of this money is going to vanish into hot tubs and McMansions. [Bolts article]

    This Senate package only provides vague instructions on how federal immigration agencies should be spending these billions. […] There’s no reporting requirement to Congress, no oversight mechanism. And the Trump administration earlier this year gutted oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security

    Seth Cotlar (US history prof): “Trumpism is basically a merger of gleefully heartfelt malevolence and cynical grubby grifting, and the future of the republic would appear to hinge on which one of those impulses will predominate over the next 3 years. Weird to find myself rooting for ‘cynical grubby grifting,’ but here we are.”

    EmptyWheel: “Pam Bondi was a lobbyist for GEO [private prison corp], and if you want to know where this money will go worry not, she didn’t disclose all her conflicts.”

  147. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to Lynna @102.

    @136 birgerjohansson:

    The National Weather Service lost a quarter of its budget and 600 employees. Maybe this is connected to the absence of warning.

     
    Samantha Montano (Emergency Management prof): “I’m seeing a lot of inaccurate posts about warnings and budget cuts related to the Texas flooding. I trust Matt Lanza on these issues.”

    Matt Lanza (Meteorologist in Texas):

    Beginning last Sunday morning, forecast discussions from the NWS office […] noted the potential for heavy rain through the week. By Monday morning, they also noted the potential for nighttime warm rain processes […] By Tuesday afternoon they had specifically mentioned the potential for flooding on Thursday. Nothing really changed messaging wise on Wednesday or Thursday morning. By the afternoon, flood watches had been hoisted as the potential for significant rain became more evident.
    […]
    So the signals were there and got worse as Thursday progressed. Messaging and flood watches responded to this appropriately and expanded into Thursday evening.

    Flash flood warnings were issued for areas before midnight as radar rain totals began to inflate up and over 3 to 4 inches. A flash flood emergency was issued at 4 AM for the Kerrville storms and 4:15 AM for storms near San Angelo. Rain totals were estimated to be encroaching on 10 inches at that point. So there was warning. This NWS office is acutely aware of the threats to the area from flooding […]

    Did budget cuts play a role? No. In this particular case, we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event.
    […]
    I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred. […] It’s not as if catastrophic flash flooding is new in interior Texas. There are literal books written about the history. The region is actually referred to as “Flash Flood Alley.” But how we manage that risk is crucially important context here.

    Are there sirens in place? Do there need to be sirens in place? […] Tornado sirens have traditionally been used in parts of the country for people outdoors to get warnings. Is that an appropriate method in this region for the middle of the night and indoors?

    Do we need to start thinking of every risk of flooding in Texas as a potential high-end event we should pre-evacuate the highest risk people (like children and elderly in floodways) for? Is that even practical? I don’t know the answers to these questions.

    ‪Daniel Swain (Climate scientist):

    messaging rapidly escalated beginning ~12 hrs prior. Flood Watch mid PM, “heads up” outlook late PM, flash flood warnings ~1am. […] this truly was a sudden & massive event and occurred at worst possible time (middle of the night). But the problem, once again, was not a bad weather prediction: it was one of “last mile” forecast/warning dissemination.
    […]
    I am not aware of the details surrounding staffing levels at the local NWS offices involved, nor how that might have played into timing/sequence of warnings involved. But I do know that locations that flooded catastrophically had at least 1-2+ hours of direct warning from NWS.
    […]
    I’m not really clear on why a region so well known for its severe flash flood susceptibly apparently did not have a better warning system in place. That’s something I’m sure others with better local knowledge can dissect in greater detail. […] even quite good weather forecasts do not automatically translate into life-saving predictions—there’s a lot of other work that has to take place to contextualize the forecast and ensure it gets to right people.
    […]
    some of NOAA’s very high resolution convective-resolving models (designed specifically for this purpose) were the ones that best predicted this incipient disaster. Yet these very same models are on the chopping block this year with the proposed NOAA budget.

    […] to say this is a story about how the NWS somehow made a bad prediction or did not issue timely warnings in this case—that’s just demonstrably untrue. […] But there are clear intersections between flood disaster in TX & ongoing conversations surrounding federal budget […] at a moment in which we are seeing more events like this due to climate change.

    Daniel Swain:

    Another issue here is mismatch between public expectation & scientific reality re: what’s possible in predicting […] Days/environments supportive of such risk are predictable; exact timing/location/intensity of subsequent extremes is not.

    The really key part of the NWS forecast […] the ambient conditions were conducive for sustained rainfall rates of 2-3 inches *per hour*. That is extremely intense rainfall, and can lead to rapid/serious flooding nearly anywhere. Now, fact that these […] rates were sustained in some *localized* spots for 3-4+ hours is what ratcheted this event upward from “significant” to “catastrophic.” That kind of thunderstorm stalling—known as “training”—is not very predictable *in specific locations.*
    […]
    This is one of the reasons why it’s quite concerning that most extreme convective rain events appear to be intensifying *very* quickly in warming climate (at a rate of ~14%/C (or more))

  149. StevoR says

    Really intresting YT doco by The Guardian on Israel-Palestine in three parts – Along the Green Line Ep 1 –
    ‘God gave us Israel, all of it’     (17 mins) then Ep 2 – Israel ‘must win every war’ (17 mins) and finally Gaza: ‘Clean it out then bring in something good’ yup also 17 minutes long. Episode titles are quotes from people interviewed and NOT what the episodes are advocating for or agreeing with for clarity. Thought-provoking and showing many different perspectives from different locals interviewed in, well, various places along the 1948-1967 Green Line boundaries in that inflamed splinter of Southwest Asia on the Levantine coastline.

  153. StevoR says

    Buried in the sweeping legislation is an $85 million provision to move NASA’s most-flown spacecraft from the national collection to Space Center Houston.

    …(Snip)..

    The vague language, written in such a way to skirt Senate restrictions on reconciliation bills, was aimed at achieving the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn in April.

    “It’s long overdue for Space City to receive the recognition it deserves by bringing the space shuttle Discovery home,” said Cornyn in a statement released after the Senate passed its version of the bill in a vote of 50 to 50, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie.

    “Houston has long stood at the heart of America’s human spaceflight program, and this legislation rightly honors that legacy,” said Cruz, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation. “It ensures that any future transfer of a flown, crewed space vehicle will prioritize locations that have played a direct and vital role in our nation’s manned space program, making Houston, Texas, a leading candidate.”

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/space-shuttle/trumps-signing-of-one-big-beautiful-bill-includes-usd85-million-to-move-space-shuttle-discovery-from-smithsonian-to-texas

  154. says

    Rural hospitals and rural women get punished in Trump’s new bill

    Related video at the link.

    Let’s call the Republicans’ so-called ‘big beautiful bill” what it is: a legislative double-barreled shotgun aimed at the bodies of women, especially Southern women and women who are Black, brown and low-income. One barrel blasts Medicaid access. The other guts Planned Parenthood. The result? A deliberate attempt to kill reproductive freedom, strip women of their basic dignity and destroy what progress this region has made in maternal health outcomes.

    This isn’t just policy. It’s punishment.

    Cutting Medicaid while attacking Planned Parenthood isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s a targeted cruelty that hurts women nationwide. But particularly for women in the South — where health systems are already under-resourced, rural clinics are vanishing and maternal mortality rates are similar to those in developing nations — it’s nothing short of a death sentence for them and their babies.

    Let’s talk facts.

    In 2023 in Mississippi, 57% of births were covered by Medicaid. In Louisiana, it was 64%. These aren’t just statistics. These are lives — sisters, daughters, mothers and aunties — trying to survive a system designed to abandon them.

    In many rural ZIP codes, Planned Parenthood is the only accessible provider of cancer screenings, contraception, prenatal maternal care and postpartum care. Gutting its funding while simultaneously choking Medicaid is like setting fire to the only lifeboat in a flood. Let’s be even more real: If you are a woman living in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas or Alabama, this bill doesn’t just inconvenience your access to care. It incinerates it.

    In rural Southern counties, hospitals have shut down their labor and delivery units in droves. Some counties don’t have a single practicing OB-GYN. That’s not a policy failure — that’s an egregious policy choice being carried out with surgical precision. [Embedded links to these and other sources are available at the main link.]

    Imagine being six months pregnant, with no car and no public transit and with the closest provider two hours away — if it’s even taking Medicaid patients. That’s not health care. That’s sanctioned neglect.

    Rural women — especially Black, Indigenous and Latina women — have been treated like afterthoughts for generations. But now, they’re being treated like collateral damage in a culture war they didn’t ask to be in. This is structural racism at is deadliest. […]

  155. says

    Washington Post link

    Update on flash flooding in Texas:

    At least 59 people have been confirmed dead by the floods that swept through a region of Central Texas known as “Flash Flood Alley,” as a frantic search-and-rescue operation continues for countless more who remain missing, including 11 girls from a beloved summer camp on the Guadalupe River.

    City Manager Dalton Rice of Kerrville, one of the hardest-hit areas, told reporters Saturday evening that the search for survivors would continue through the night, though heavy rains continued in areas outside San Antonio and flash-flood warnings and watches remained in effect for parts of the area, dimming hopes that others could be found alive.

    Twenty-one children are confirmed to be among the dead, and authorities expect the toll to rise.

    Extraordinary atmospheric conditions released 1.8 trillion gallons of rain in and around Texas Hill Country on Friday. In one area, the Guadalupe River rose from 7 feet to 29 feet in just a few hours.

    The National Weather Service reported additional moderate to heavy rainfall falling in and around the area on Sunday morning, extending a flood watch for swaths of the region until 7 p.m. local time.

    The National Weather Service said its reports gave localities hours of lead time, but the speed and severity of the flooding still appeared to catch many off guard. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said that the agency used an “ancient system” for alerts and that the White House has been working to upgrade the technology. [Don’t believe anything Kristi Noem says. She is not a reliable source.]

    During a short news conference Sunday morning in which officials said the death toll in the Kerr County floods had risen to 59 people, they sidestepped a question about why summer camps had not been evacuated despite warnings before the flooding began in Texas Hill Country.

    “That is a great question,” Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said.

    But he did not answer it. As of Sunday, 11 girls and one counselor at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian summer camp in Kerr County, are still missing.

    […] Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said people have been flying personal drones in Kerr County, posing a danger to rescue aircraft as search operations continue.

    “We need to keep these drones, these personal drones, out of the sky,” Rice said. “We have drones and assets flying. We want to continue to do that.”

    As of Sunday morning, 59 people are confirmed to have died — 38 adults and 21 children, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said. Of them, 18 adults had not yet been identified, and four children were pending identification […]

  156. says

    Trump team moves goalposts on tariffs again

    Tariffs will revert back to their April 2 rates on Aug. 1 for countries that fail to nail down new trade deals with the United States, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday, just three days before the Trump administration’s initial July 9 deadline for tariffs to return.

    Bessent told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Trump administration would be sending out letters to 100 smaller countries “saying that if you don’t move things along, then on August 1st, you will boomerang back to your April 2nd tariff level.”

    The announcement effectively pushes back the tariffs that were originally set to return on April 2 but had been suspended until July 9, a window the Trump administration used to pursue an ambitious round of dealmaking with other countries aimed at reaching deals to stave off the return of tariffs of between 10 and 50 percent on dozens of countries. It comes as Trump administration officials increasingly hint at difficulties in nailing down deals.

    In the interview, Bessent said that the August target is “not a new deadline” for negotiations. “We are saying this is when it’s happening. If you want to speed things up, have at it. If you want to go back to the old rate, that’s your choice,” Bessent said.

    Since announcing sweeping so-called reciprocal tariffs, the Trump administration has only signed agreements with the United Kingdom and Vietnam, as well as a limited deal with China that saw both countries walk back sky-high tit-for-tat tariff rates temporarily. The U.S. is also reportedly close to reaching a deal with India, and the European Union, which Trump once accused of slow-walking negotiations, appears willing to make significant concessions for a deal. […]

  157. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Addendum to #147.

    Matt Lanza (Meteorologist in Texas):

    We have been on record as saying the proposed budget cuts to NOAA would be disastrous. […] current cuts have led to understaffing in many offices. Relative to other offices, the NWS office in San Antonio/Austin is fairly well off. For example, they currently have seven more full-time staff members than the neighboring Houston office.

    They are missing the warning coordination meteorologist, who primarily focuses on building understanding of warnings on what we call “blue sky” days. That work gets done before tragedies occur. That position has only been vacant for a couple months, so it likely did not play a role here. But it will if it is not filled in the coming weeks.

    But the office has most of their meteorologist positions filled, as well as most of their hydrologists. From the warning perspective in real time, this plus the timeliness of issued warnings is why I don’t believe staffing was an issue here.

  158. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Steve Herman (Journalist): “Elon Musk has officially informed the FEC of the establishment of the America Party. [Screenshot]”

    Stephen Fowler (NPR):

    No—This is almost certainly not a real filing, especially because it is listed as an unauthorized committee for a candidate, not a party.

    Also inconsistent addresses/custodian of records tied to Tesla and SpaceX and has a Proton email address. Anyone can file these things.

    Commentary

    This party supports one candidate: Elon Musk.

    He IS listed but is not constitutionally eligible. This is theater.

    And appears to have named the CFO of Tesla as his treasurer.

    Hard to believe the CFO is still on board with the guy who’s murdering Tesla’s valuation, but he’s still punching his ticket, I guess.

    Have to assume it will also be on auto-pilot, will also drift to the right, and will also fail to recognize common obstacles.

    What kind of address is: TX, TX?

    Well, the bank’s in Calif, CA, California

    [Treasurer’s address is] written wrong, but also it’s the address of the convenience store at the Tesla HQ? [Boring Bodega at 865 FM 1209.]

    Super weird detail: I live really close to the listed Mountain View [Bank of America] branch, and I know for a fact that the correct address is 444 Castro?? 500 Castro is the performing arts center across the street.

    Not red or blue, but white.

    Wikipedia: “The American Party […] colloquially referred to as the Know Nothings”

  159. says

    What kind of person pushes a weather conspiracy theory while some families mourn the loss of loved ones, and others still await news they fear in their souls will tear them apart? The answer is a monster. An evil, unempathetic, inhumane shit. A vile, indecent bastard.

    Such is Kandiss Taylor. A MAGA candidate for US Representative from Georgia. This flint-hearted shrike heard the news of the floods in Texas and took to Twitter. Not to offer compassion and condolences. Not even to offer the usual anodyne “thoughts and prayers.” But instead, to offer a barbulous screed so insensitive that even Trump would be loath to defend it.

    Her tweet?

    “Fake weather, Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.”

    Even Musk’s algorithms couldn’t let this vile insensitivity pass unremarked. Her untimely and unscientific assertion was soon challenged by “Community Notes.” [social media post]

    So far her tweet has 248 “likes” — who the fuck are these people? However, as she has also received 1,800 replies she is getting kicked in the ass with the “ratio.” […]

    this self-congratulatory ‘good Christian’ decided to soldier on by reposting her effluence with an invitation to go to her Substack page. [social media post]

    […] Here’s a sample:

    Now, I’m watching in nonstop prayer what’s happening in Texas. And let me tell you, the patterns, the timing, the scale raises serious questions. I made a post about fake weather, not even referencing Texas directly, and the liberal Democrats lost their ever-loving minds.

    “Not even referencing Texas directly”? Oh, c’mon, Taylor. The headlines talk of multiple deaths and many missing due to a flood in Texas. You tweet “Fake flooding”. How the feck are we not supposed to connect those two dots?

    Kandiass then goes full projection:

    “These people [science advocates] are so brainwashed they sound like programmed zombies. They twist and pervert every word, not because they’re right, but because they can’t handle the truth.

    […] In 2022, Taylor ran for governor of Georgia. It did not go well. She received 3.4% of the GOP primary vote. Unchastened by her lack of love from the hometown fans, she is now running for a Georgia US House seat in 2026. I don’t think her callous climate analysis will help her.

    The AP reported her ambition in February:

    SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia Republican who ran a fringe campaign for governor under the slogan “Jesus, Guns and Babies” says she’s running for Congress in 2026.

    Kandiss Taylor of Baxley announced during an appearance Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that she will seek the GOP nomination in southeast Georgia’s 1st Congressional District.

    “I’m ready to go to D.C. and blow some things up,” Taylor said, declaring that Republicans and Democrats alike will support her because “I represent Jesus.”

    […]

    Link

  160. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Immigration agents seen urinating on grounds of [an LA county] school

    School surveillance cameras captured nearly a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents urinating on storage containers [immediately adjacent to] a playground after trespassing on the school’s property [arriving in] 10 marked and unmarked vehicles […] School staff informed the federal agents that they did not have permission to enter or stay on campus grounds and asked them to leave. […] at no time was a legal or legitimate reason offered or provided as to why the ICE agents entered

    [From the video]: it could have served as a staging area. That same day, a raid took place at a nearby shopping center [abducting an undocumented janitor].

  162. says

    I can’t help but be enraged by all these violent, murderous rtwingnut xtian terrorists, WTF. Here’s another one mentioned by Lynna, OM @159:
    Kandiss Taylor of Baxley announced during an appearance Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that she will seek the GOP nomination in southeast Georgia’s 1st Congressional District.
    “I’m ready to go to D.C. and blow some things up,” Taylor said, declaring that Republicans and Democrats alike will support her because “I represent Jesus.”

  163. says

    New York Times link

    “Madre Fire Grows to Nearly 80,000 Acres, Prompting Evacuations in California”

    “The blaze is burning in a rural area of San Luis Obispo County, in the central coast, but its smoke has spread to nearby counties.”

    A wildfire in California’s San Luis Obispo County grew for the second night in a row and covered almost 80,000 acres by Saturday, prompting evacuation orders, closing part of a highway and sending thick smoke billowing into neighboring counties. It is the biggest wildfire the state has seen this year.

    The blaze, called the Madre fire, started on Wednesday afternoon and is burning in a remote area in the mountains between the Central Coast and the Central Valley, in the Los Padres National Forest. It is near State Route 166, which connects the Central Coast to the southern San Joaquin Valley. A section of the highway has been closed, California’s Department of Transportation said.

    The fire was about 10 percent contained as of Saturday morning, according to Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency. There was no reported damage to any structures, Cal Fire said, and the cause of the fire was still under investigation. [map]

    Fifty structures were threatened and 213 people had been evacuated, said Toni Davis, a spokesperson for Cal Fire. There were 15 evacuation orders and 13 warnings for zones near the fire, and Cal Fire had issued five new evacuation warnings since Thursday, Davis said on Friday.

    “This is a very rural area with ranch land, rolling hills, lots of grass,” Ms. Davis said. “The vegetation is very dry.”

    The fire tore across the western side of the Carrizo Plain National Monument, according to Cal Fire, burning through at least 11,500 acres of the natural preserve that is home to rare plant species and draws visitors in the spring to its wildfire blooms.

    Fires can benefit wildflowers by helping native species germinate and killing off invasive plants that compete with flowers for sunlight, water and nutrients. Often vibrant displays occur in years after fires. But if a fire burns too hot, it can eliminate the seed bank of the native plants and leave an area exposed to invasions of nonnative plants. […]

  165. John Morales says

    War update – Is Trump helping Russia now? — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO1TnWptv3o

    by Anders Puck Nielsen

    0:00 Intro
    0:33 Russia’s summer offensive
    1:41 Sumy
    2:10 Donetsk
    2:39 Russia cannot be satisfied
    3:10 The air war
    7:24 Trump stops aid to Ukraine

    –extract from last chapter–
    So as I said, it’s difficult to understand what’s going on in American policy right now and who is making what decisions and why. And it’s possible that this is just a misunderstanding and that soon things will change and the Americans will provide those air defense weapons to Ukraine again. But I do want to say this. If you are an American president who sympathizes with Russia and you would like Russia to have more success in their summer offensive, then this is exactly what you would do. You would stop the deliveries of weapons to Ukraine while at the same time going around talking about how you want to deliver more weapons to Ukraine and promise that these are just around the corner. And that way, everyone else is pacified in a waiting position because they’re going around hoping that you’re going to deliver on those promises any moment now.

  168. John Morales says

    Birger, it’s just some opinionated dude. The claims don’t hold up.

    (He’s flimflamming you)

  170. John Morales says

    “How the islamic republic treats muslims.”

    You mean, like the USA treats Christians, right?

    (From meso- and south- America)

  171. John Morales says

    In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/07/us-deportation-men-south-sudan

    US completes deportation of eight men to South Sudan after legal wrangling

    Eight men deported from the US in May and held under guard for weeks at an American military base in the African nation of Djibouti while their legal challenges played out in court have reached the Trump administration’s intended destination, war-torn South Sudan, a country the state department advises against travel to due to “crime, kidnapping and armed conflict”.

    The men from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan arrived in South Sudan on Friday after a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate them in a case that had gone to the supreme court, which had permitted their removal from the US. Administration officials said the men had been convicted of violent crimes in the US.

    “This was a win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokesperson, said in a statement on Saturday announcing the men’s arrival in South Sudan.

    The supreme court cleared the way for the transfer of the men last Thursday.

    The men had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan but which was diverted to a base in Djibouti, where they were held in a converted shipping container. The flight was diverted after a federal judge found that the administration had violated his order by failing to allow the men a chance to challenge the removal.

    The supreme court’s conservative majority had ruled in June that immigration officials could quickly deport people to third countries. The majority halted an order that had allowed immigrants to challenge any removals to countries outside their homeland where they could be in danger.

  172. John Morales says

    You know, were I in big trouble in an Islamic country, I’d claim to be Christian.
    And I’d grow a beard.

    (Better to be of the Book, no?)

  173. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to #130.

    Marisa Kabas: HOW DOES THIS STORY KEEP GETTING WORSE?”

    Don Moynihan (PoliSci professor):

    NY Times did not want to be scooped by Chris Rufo [Semafor article]

    Times editors: lots of people are yelling at us, so obviously we made the right choice here.

    “The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting,” one senior reporter told Semafor.

    […] competing with Chris Rufo for scoops should be a wake-up call.
    […]
    the Mamdani story looks like the Claudine Gay story: a wannabe scholar with some racist views pushes the story, and connects with Rufo, while the Times makes it a national story. [Screenshot] This time, the Times cut out Rufo.

    Rando: “There’s a lot of calling Crémieux an academic and Chris Rufo a journalist going on in this news story accusing a man of misrepresenting his identity.”

    Perry Bacon (WaPo): “The Wall Street Journal, not at all a leftist outfit, regularly and accurately describes Rufo as a ‘conservative activist.'”

  177. JM says

    Boston.com: Maine police department apologizes for AI-doctored evidence photo

    “The patch was added, and the photograph with the patch was sent to one of our Facebook administrators, who posted it,” the department explained in a post. “Unbeknownst to anyone, when the app added the patch, it altered the packaging and some of the other attributes on the photograph. None of us caught it or realized it.”

    Likely was an oops but a interesting one. The AI built into the editor over stepping and changing things will be a good excuse for a while.

  180. says

    @178 Lynna, OM posted about the texass death toll continuing to rise. I do feel sorrow for the loss of life. But, texass always creates its own disasters. There was a report on the radio that the county where most of the devastation occurred voted down a bill to create a warning system. It is obvious they thought saving some money was much more important than saving hundreds of lives. WTF

  181. says

    He does not know what he is doing.

    Trump threatens not to chicken out yet again over tariffs

    On Sunday, President Donald Trump once again ratcheted up his destructive and nonsensical trade war, saying that the outrageously high “Liberation Day” tariff rates he announced in April will be put back in place for countries that do not reach trade deals before his arbitrary 90-day pause deadline expires on July 9.

    “I am pleased to announce that the UNITED STATES TARIFF Letters, and/or Deals, with various Countries from around the World, will be delivered starting 12:00 P.M. (Eastern), Monday, July 7th. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, President of The United States of America,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Letters” is how the administration refers to notices of tariff rates “and/or deals.”

    This confirms a statement Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made on CNN earlier in the day when he said that if countries “don’t move things along, then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.”

    Trump also took his tariff threat a step further, saying in a subsequent Truth Social post that, “Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.” The 11 nations in the BRICS alliance have threatened to make their own form of currency, which Trump is seeking to stop.

    Of course, who the heck knows what will happen with tariff rates, as Trump on Sunday appeared confused by reporters’ questions about if and when the “Liberation Day” tariffs would go back into effect when the 90-day pause expires.

    “Do the tariff rates change at all on July 9th or do they change on August 1st?” a reporter asked Trump.

    “What are you talking about?” Trump replied.

    When the reporter pressed again about what day the tariffs would go back into place, Trump responded with more word salad that didn’t answer the question.

    “They’re going to be tariffs. The tariffs are going to be the tariffs. I think we’ll have most countries done by July 9th. Yeah. Either a letter or a deal,” Trump said. [video]

    Ultimately, if Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs—which were not only ridiculously high but were so shoddily done that even countries like the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands received tariffs—go back into effect, it will have horrible consequences for the U.S. economy.

    When he first announced the tariffs in April, it sent the stock market into a tailspin, as investors worried that Trump’s trade policy would plunge the United States into a recession.

    But as it became clear that Trump almost always pulls a TACO (which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out), investors no longer responded with fear to Trump’s tariff announcements, as they assume he will reverse them before they cause too much harm to the economy.

    Indeed, the stock market on Monday has barely reacted to Trump’s latest tariff threats, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 barely down.

    Still, even at the current 10% tariff rate Trump has placed on nearly every country in the world, inflation has ticked up slightly and the private sector job market is weakening.

    If Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs do go into place, economists say the bottom will fall out.

    “‘We haven’t seen price hikes yet’ is not the win some folks think it is. Our data are backward looking, and many of the worst tariffs are in the midst of a soon-to-end 90 day pause. Economic gravity still applies: Tariffs raise costs, and someone’s going to pay,” economist Justin Wolfers told CNN.

    Posted by readers of the article:

    As far as he is concerned he is just being clever and all the world is stupid.
    ———————-
    He’s basically saying this to our trade partners: “If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll do serious harm to the American people.” China has to be quaking in their boots.
    ———————
    After having taco’d on his self imposed deadline Trump adamantly declares he will not taco again!
    ————————
    A “deal” is valid only until he decides that it isn’t.

  182. says

    shermanj @180, I think that the administrators of the Christian girl’s camp had an obligation to closely monitor the weather. They should have known about the warnings that did exist. See Sky Captain at 147 for details concerning warnings that were available.

    Yes, the warnings may have been inadequate, and yes the warnings did not get to all the people. Warning systems should be improved AND people administering camps in the flood zone should be held responsible for not paying enough attention.

  185. says

    @182 Lynna, OM wrote: Warning systems should be improved AND people administering camps in the flood zone should be held responsible for not paying enough attention.

    I reply: Your info is correct. However, this is the 21st Century. WHY are people allowed to build houses and camps in flood zones? (And identified fire danger zones) Why doesn’t the entire country have functioning systems to warn everyone of these predictable disasters? Well, part of it is as meteorologists on Phx TV 15 warn; the Nat’l Weather service is now so crippled that they can’t predict beyond a couple of days with any accuracy.
    Sadly, the answer is that the plutocracy doesn’t care about the safety and well-being of a few million non-billionaires.

  187. says

    Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin might be very skilled at Making Coal Great Again, but he’s not so solid on the whole First Amendment thing.

    The EPA just put 144 people on administrative leave for signing a letter of dissent about the agency’s policies. It follows a March open letter where current and former EPA employees called both President Donald Trump and Zeldin out for their illegal dismantling of the core functions of the agency. However, the March letter was anonymous, and while some of the signatories of the more recent letter chose to remain anonymous, the 144 employees the EPA is now targeting signed the letter with their names and job titles.

    In placing the workers on leave, the EPA didn’t hide the ball as to why they were being suspended. An agency spokesperson plainly said they were suspended as retaliation for their speech. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” said a spokesperson for the agency.

    Here’s the thing. Government employees enjoy the protections of the First Amendment, even if the Trump administration doesn’t believe they should. Public employees are protected when speaking out about matters of public concern, which Zeldin’s hijacking of the EPA to, in his words, “drive a dagger through the heart of climate change religion” definitely is. There are a couple of caveats. If public employees are speaking in their official capacity about something that is normally part of their official job duties, then First Amendment protections don’t apply.

    Here, just because people used their job title doesn’t magically mean they were speaking in an official capacity. The letter of dissent specifically does not purport to speak for the EPA but is instead directed to Zeldin. Additionally, it’s incredibly unlikely that anyone who signed the letter was doing that as part of their official job duties, unless someone’s job duty is to write public letters about the state of the EPA.

    […] the EPA is asserting here that the letter doesn’t represent the views of all the agency employees. That’s true, but the letter doesn’t purport to represent everyone at the EPA. It represents the people who signed the letter.

    Normally, these 144 employees would have recourse via the independent agencies tasked with protecting federal employees. […] But the conservative majority on the Supreme Court blessed Trump’s illegal removal of independent board members, which means that those independent agencies aren’t really independent any longer. Trump’s removal of Cathy Harris, the head of the Merit Systems Protection Board, left the MSPB with no quorum.

    The MSPB is where federal employees go to challenge an adverse action, such as a firing or suspension. Without a quorum, employees can still file appeals with the MSPB, and administrative judges can rule on those claims. […] if these employees pursue relief through the MSPB, the EPA can just state it disagrees with the finding, and the entire process then stalls without a quorum.

    Trump has also compromised the other path for federal employees to seek relief. The Office of the Special Counsel provides a secure channel for federal whistleblowers and protects federal employees from prohibited practices, such as coercing partisan political activity. Federal workplaces are supposed to be free of partisan politics, but it doesn’t get more partisan than suspending employees because you think they are “sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.”

    However.

    Trump has nominated far-right troll Paul Ingrassia to lead the OSC. Ingrassia is a 30-year-old with a fervor for violent misogynist Andrew Tate and an affection for white nationalist Nick Fuentes. He appears to have called for Trump to declare martial law after the 2020 election, and might be a 9/11 truther. Somehow, it doesn’t seem like Ingrassia, if confirmed, will ensure that federal workplaces remain nonpartisan.

    Trump treats the presidency like an extension of his person, and his Cabinet has adopted that same framing: People voted for Trump, which means they preapproved anything he chooses to do. Any disagreement, therefore, means you are not respecting the will of the voters.

    It isn’t surprising, with that mindset, that the administration is coming for the free speech rights of public employees. After all, how dare they speak out against Dear Leader?

    Just because the GOP has signed on to Trump’s cult of personality doesn’t mean that federal workers have to do so as well.

    Link

  189. says

    Followup to comment 181.

    Trump announces 25 percent tariffs coming for Japan, South Korea

    President Trump announced Monday his administration would impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from South Korea and Japan beginning Aug. 1 as part of a batch of letters going out to foreign countries.

    Trump detailed the expected tariff rates in letters to the leaders of Japan and South Korea, also posting them to Truth Social. The president had previously indicated he would send letters to roughly a dozen countries Monday.

    “Please understand this 25% number is far less than what is needed to eliminate the Trade Deficit disparity we have with your Country,” Trump wrote to both countries.

    The president warned that if either nation raised its tariffs in response, the U.S. would increase its tariffs by the same amount. […]

    Under the “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on April 2, South Korea was hit with a 25-percent tariff and Japan hit with a 24-percent tariff, so Monday’s announcement amounts to an extension of the negotiation deadline, which was initially set for Wednesday.

    […] Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, wrote in a commentary on Monday. “We’ve known since April that quickly inking, no less implementing, complicated trade agreements with dozens of foreign governments was impossible.” […]

  190. says

    US measles cases surge to highest since disease was ‘eliminated’

    The United States has broken its record for the highest number of measles cases in the country since the disease was eliminated in 2000.

    It comes amid falling childhood vaccination rates and a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment fueled by lingering COVID-era distrust in public health authorities and a strengthening anti-vaccine movement.

    The United States has broken its record for the highest number of measles cases in the country since the disease was eliminated in 2000.

    It comes amid falling childhood vaccination rates and a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment fueled by lingering COVID-era distrust in public health authorities and a strengthening anti-vaccine movement.

    That’s the most since 1992 and surpasses the previous record of 1,274 cases from all of 2019. Experts say this year’s cases are likely severely undercounted because many are going unreported.

    There have been at least 155 hospitalizations and three confirmed deaths from measles this year, including two otherwise healthy but unvaccinated children in Texas. A third death was reported in New Mexico in an unvaccinated adult who tested positive after dying.

    Only three measles deaths were reported between 2001 and 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

    Measles was officially eliminated in 2000 due to a highly effective vaccination program […]

  191. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/fbi-epstein-client-list-does-not

    “FBI: Epstein Client List Does Not Exist, Epstein Committed Suicide, Maybe Never Existed Either”

    “They just existed about a month ago …”

    Back in February, United States Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Epstein files were on her desk and she was going to release them just as soon as she could ensure they didn’t contain any child pornography or anything like that. [video]

    Right around that same time, the White House released “Epstein Files Phase One” to a bunch of MAGA influencers, seen above [photo at the link]. It wasn’t everything they wanted — or anything much at all — but they were assured more was coming soon.

    It wasn’t and, as it turns out, it won’t be.

    According to an FBI memo published by Axios over the weekend, while they have thousands of hours of video evidence of Epstein and minors or those who appear to be minors being sexually assaulted, they do not have any information about who might have been doing it. [Memo excerpt]

    And yet, it concluded that “This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

    […] that does seem just a tad odd, no? Like, thousands of girls were trafficked and sexually exploited, by men, but we have no idea who they are, despite thousands of hours of video, and the only person who is going to prison for it is Ghislaine Maxwell […]

    The memo also stated that there is now video evidence that no one murdered Epstein. [memo excerpt]

    That is somewhat less suspicious, frankly. I know everyone believes that he was murdered in order to keep other people from being found out, but it wouldn’t be entirely crazy for him to have decided that spending the rest of his life in prison and facing those charges was not something he wanted to do. In 2019, there were 699 suicides in US prisons and jails, so it’s not as though it’s entirely unheard of, either.

    Both FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino were, prior to their appointments, MAGA influencers who had promoted the conspiracy theory that Epstein had been murdered so that no one would find out about all the “elites” to whom he trafficked minors.

    […] Over on Xitter debate seems to be raging among the MAGA faithful. Did Patel, Bondi, and Bongino become evil Deep State actors? Or did the Biden administration remove all of the incriminating evidence from the Epstein files before they had a chance to see it? Supporters are split!

    “Assuming this leaked Epstein Files memo is true, then we all know this is a shameful coverup to protect the most heinous elites,” wrote DC Draino, one of the MAGA influencers who received the original phase one Epstein files. “We were told multiple times the files would be released and now it looks like backroom deals have been made to keep them hidden.”

    […] “Hopefully someone at the White House press briefing today asks if President Trump plans on FIRING Pam Blondi,” wrote Laura Loomer. “If she doesn’t get fired over this Epstein memo, people are going to be so black pilled.”

    Several very normal people started making up a whole story about how the reason the information wasn’t released was because Kash Patel’s girlfriend works for Prager U and the CEO of Prager U was in the IDF — and they’ve got the MSPaint to prove it. [social media post]

    “Kash Patel’s girlfriend is a Jewish ‘country singer’ and works for Prager U, run by Dennis Prager whose CEO is a known former Mossad operative,” wrote Salty Girl, whom I’ve never heard of but who has 60,000 followers, “Epstein Island was a blackmail operation for Mossad. If you release the client list You can no longer blackmail the client list.”

    Alexis Wilkins, Patel’s girlfriend, met him at ReAwaken America, a Christian Nationalist symposium, and is very clearly not Jewish, not that it should matter. But it sure is something to see these people turning their own nonsense on themselves.

    Elon Musk, who has been in the middle of a very public split with the Trump administration and briefly accused Trump of having been named in the Epstein files, also shared several memes on the subject. [social media posts]

    The primary theory on the right-wing conspiracy boards right now, however, is that this — along with Musk’s claim that Trump is in the files — is merely a ploy to trick the Left into also demanding to see the Epstein files/client list, after which we will discover that it was filled with only Democrats and RINOs all along. It’s kind of a weird conspiracy theory that only makes sense if everything you know about “the Left” is what you make up yourself […]

    At this point, I don’t think any of us is under the impression that Trump — a man with few friends who liked to go out clubbing with maybe his best friend, Jeffrey Epstein — being named in the Epstein files or client list or whatever would make one bit of difference. […]

    From one of the memes posted on X:

    We will release the Epstein list.
    We just need more time.
    The Epstein list is on my desk.
    There is no Epstein list.

  194. says

    <a href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/health/vaccines-kennedy-lawsuit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Uk8.gxVr.QwCDVdAzYiTj&smid=url-share>New York Times link

    “Medical Societies Sue Kennedy and H.H.S. Over Vaccine Advice”

    “New restrictions on Covid shots run counter to scientific evidence, the groups said.”

    Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.

    The suit, filed in federal court in western Massachusetts, seeks to restore Covid vaccines to the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women.

    Mr. Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent, said Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University and is leading the effort.

    “The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Mr. Hughes said: “He aims to destroy vaccines.”

    The plaintiffs include the American Public Health Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American College of Physicians, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance.

    The groups are joined by a pregnant woman, identified only as Jane Doe, who said she was unable to get a Covid shot.

    […] The new lawsuit asks the court to order Mr. Kennedy to reinstate Covid vaccines in the immunization schedules.

    “The secretary’s authority needs to have some scientific and procedural basis for the decisions that he makes,” Dr. Benjamin said. “Otherwise, we have someone practicing medicine without a license and people will be harmed.”

    More at the link.

  195. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans support the imposition of work requirements for billionaires receiving massive tax cuts, a new poll released on Monday indicates.

    In the words of one poll respondent, “With the exception of Donald Trump, many of these billionaires are able-bodied.”

    According to the poll, an overwhelming number of Americans believe that, in order to receive their benefits, billionaires should collect trash along the highway or clean public toilets.

    The broadest majority of respondents “strongly agreed” with the statement, “They should pick all the fruit and vegetables that used to be picked by migrants.”

    Link

  196. says

    Donald Trump’s UFC stunt is more than a circus. It’s authoritarian theatre

    MMA was once used to curry favor with Putin. Now, Trump is using the UFC to project a nationalist cult of masculinity.

    Ten years ago – before I became an investigative journalist – I found myself working as a color commentator for a Russian mixed martial arts organization bankrolled by an oligarch deep in Vladimir Putin’s orbit.

    The job took me around the Russian Federation and its neighboring states, allowing me to pursue unique stories that would otherwise have been out of my reach. I met a Latvian fighter who escaped a black magic cult run by his coach, attended an MMA show with the president of Ingushetia (now Russia’s deputy minister of defence) and knocked back vodka shots with ex-KGB officers and Russian oligarchs.

    Then there was the time the organization attempted to host an event in Moscow’s famed Red Square, one of the most historically and politically significant landmarks in Russia. It also sits adjacent to the Kremlin, the seat of Russia’s political power. The event would have been a chance for the organization and its oligarch to ingratiate themselves to Putin, a known MMA fan who had previously attended their shows.

    Logistical issues, including security concerns and layers of bureaucratic red tape, rendered the event impossible at the time. But the incident stuck with me nonetheless as an example of the political undercurrent flowing through the sport. That memory became especially relevant as Donald Trump announced plans to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House to commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday next year.

    Speaking to a crowd of supporters during a Salute to America event in Iowa Thursday, Trump said: “Does anybody watch UFC? The great Dana White? We’re going to have a UFC fight. We’re going to have a UFC fight – think of this – on the grounds of the White House. We have a lot of land there.”

    White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the news during the press briefing, adding that the president was “dead serious” about hosting a UFC event at the official residence and workplace of the president. [video]

    […] Over the past few years, Trump has frequently attended UFC events, basking in the admiration of the young, predominantly male crowd. He has cultivated relationships with fighters, leveraging their support to portray himself as a symbolic strongman. He has embraced the UFC’s culture of defiance, machismo and spectacle to help buttress his image as a rebel against liberal norms. It has also hastened the replacement of America’s conventional political culture with an abrasive new blend of entertainment and confrontational politics, perfectly embodied by both Trump and White.

    The UFC CEO stumped for Trump at three Republican national conventions and a slew of campaign rallies over the past eight years. He traveled with the president on Air Force One and produced a propaganda documentary on Trump entitled Combatant-in-Chief. And when Trump won the 2024 presidential election, it was White who took the stage at his victory party – because, naturally, Trump needed his fight promoter to seal the deal.

    For the UFC, its association with Trump has granted the once-renegade promotion a new kind of political legitimacy and influence. It also set it apart from other sports leagues through its unapologetically conservative posture. The UFC is even sponsoring the United States semiquincentennial, dubbed America250, joining the likes of Amazon, the Coca-Cola Company, Oracle and Walmart.

    Since taking office in January, Trump has attended two UFC events. He most recently attended UFC 316 in June just hours after signing a memo ordering the deployment of 2,000 national guard troops to Los Angeles county after Ice immigration raids sparked mass protests. He nevertheless enjoyed a standing ovation from the fans in attendance, and glowing endorsements from the fighters, one of whom even kneeled before Trump. UFC champion Kayla Harrison embraced him, planted a kiss on his cheek and wrapped her championship belt around his waist as his family and supporters looked on in delight. It was a spectacle befitting the strongman Trump imagines himself to be.

    Which is why Trump’s plan to stage a UFC event at the White House makes perfect sense. It is the natural climax of a partnership in which the UFC has become the stage for Maga mythology. It carries shades of fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, particularly its obsession with masculinity, spectacle and nationalism – but with a modern, American twist.

    Fascist Italy used rallies, parades and sports events to project strength and unity. Sports, especially combat sports, were used as tools to cultivate Mussolini’s ideal masculinity and portray Italy as a strong and powerful nation. Similarly, Trump has relied on the UFC to project his tough-guy image, and to celebrate his brand of nationalistic masculinity. From name-dropping champions who endorse him to suggesting a tournament that would pit UFC fighters against illegal immigrants, Trump has repeatedly found ways to make UFC-style machismo a part of his political brand. […]

  197. says

    https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-court-of-appeals/117442275.html

    After the trial court entered a final judgment and decree of divorce, Nimat Shahid (“Wife”) filed a petition to reopen the case and set aside the final judgment, arguing that service by publication was improper. The trial court denied the motion, using an order that relied upon non-existent case law. For the reasons discussed below, we vacate the order and remand for the trial court to hold a new hearing on Wife’s petition. We also levy a frivolous motion penalty against Diana Lynch, the attorney for Appellee Sufyan Esaam (“Husband”).

    According to Wife’s October 2023 verified petition to reopen case, Husband filed a complaint for divorce in April 2022, service was performed by publication, and the trial court entered a final judgment in July 2022. In the petition, Wife averred that she had moved to Texas after she and Husband separated in July 2021 and that Husband failed to use reasonable diligence to determine her whereabouts before obtaining service by publication of his divorce complaint. [….]

    In his Appellee’s Brief, Husband does not respond to Wife’s assertion that the trial court’s order relied on bogus case law. Husband’s attorney, Diana Lynch, relies on four cases in this division, two of which appear to be fictitious, possibly “hallucinations” made up by generative-artificial intelligence (“AI”),2 and the other two have nothing to do with the proposition stated in the Brief.3</b?

    Undeterred by Wife’s argument that the order (which appears to have been prepared by Husband’s attorney, Diana Lynch) is “void on its face” because it relies on two non-existent cases, Husband cites to 11 additional cites in response that are either hallucinated or have nothing to do with the propositions for which they are cited. Appellee’s Brief further adds insult to injury by requesting “Attorney’s Fees on Appeal” and supports this “request”4 with one of the new hallucinated cases.

    We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court’s order. […] We further note that Lynch had cited the two fictitious cases that made it into the trial court’s order in Husband’s response to the petition to reopen, and she cited additional fake cases both in that Response and in the Appellee’s Brief filed in this Court.

    As noted above, the irregularities in these filings suggest that they were drafted using generative AI. […]

    Although the present case may be the first occasion for a Georgia appellate court to confront the problems that can flow from a lawyer’s apparent adoption of generative-AI, other courts have commented on the issue. […]

    [m]any harms flow from the submission of fake opinions. The opposing party wastes time and money in exposing the deception. The Court’s time is taken from other important endeavors. The client may be deprived of arguments based on authentic judicial precedents. There is potential harm to the reputation of judges and courts whose names are falsely invoked as authors of the bogus opinions and to the reputation of a party attributed with fictional conduct. […]

    Here, as in Mata, Lynch’s use of fictitious cases and citations has deprived the opposing party of the opportunity to appropriately respond to her arguments.

    As to Lynch’s request for attorney fees “for the costs incurred in responding to this appeal[,]” that section of Appellee’s Brief provides: [details at the link]

    […] we impose a $2,500 frivolous motion penalty on Lynch, which is the most the law allows, pursuant to Court of Appeals Rule 7 (e) (2).17 We have no information regarding why Appellee’s Brief repeatedly cites to nonexistent cases and can only speculate that the Brief may have been prepared by AI.

    […] we vacate the superior court’s order and remand for further proceedings, including a new hearing on Wife’s motion to reopen. We also impose a $2,500 penalty against Lynch. This penalty shall constitute a money judgment in favor of Wife (Nimat Shahid) against Husband’s attorney (Diana Lynch) […]

    Judgment vacated and case remanded.

  198. John Morales says

    I am not so surprised by this item in the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/07/russias-former-transport-minister-dies-from-gunshot-wound-hours-after-sacking

    —

    Russia’s former transport minister has died from a gunshot wound just hours after Vladimir Putin sacked him.

    The body of Roman Starovoit, the ex-minister, was found in his car in a Moscow suburb. He appeared to have killed himself, Russia’s investigative committee said in a statement.

    The Kremlin published an order signed by Putin to remove Starovoit from his position as transport minister on Monday morning, shortly before news of his death was made public. No reason was given for his dismissal in the order, which was dated 7 July at 9.15am.

    But Russian media, including the local edition of Forbes, have reported that Starovoit may have died as early as Friday evening, before the order to dismiss him was published. The timeline of his death and dismissal has not been confirmed by investigators. A member of the State Duma, Andrei Kartapolov, told Russian journalists that Starovoit had died “quite long ago”.

    Starovoit was a prominent official in the Putin government who had previously served from 2018 to 2024 as the governor of the Kursk region, where he oversaw the construction of defensive fortifications for the region on the border with Ukraine after the Russian invasion.

    […]

    Also on Monday, a senior official at Russia’s federal roads agency, Andrei Korneichuk, died at work of an apparent heart attack. There was no clear connection between the two transport officials’ deaths.

  199. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @185 shermanj:

    Nat’l Weather service is now so crippled that they can’t predict beyond a couple of days with any accuracy.

    Daniel Swain (Climate scientist) quoted at @147:

    Another issue here is mismatch between public expectation & scientific reality re: what’s possible in predicting […] Days/environments supportive of such risk are predictable; exact timing/location/intensity of subsequent extremes is not.

    Snipped from Swain’s other thread @147:

    *exact* location and intensity localized to regional-scale convective storms (i.e., clusters of intense thunderstorms) are something that, in almost all cases, cannot be pinpointed days in advance with extant predictive tools—even in theory.

    Matt Lanza (Texas Meteorologist) explained @157 why current cuts (as opposed to proposed cuts) did not jeopardize the forecasting for that particular flood.

  200. John Morales says

    Ah, culture!

    In the news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rvzw1jk2do

    –extract–

    A video game on ‘gold diggers’ is fuelling a sexism debate in China

    “He’s more obedient than a dog… If only more of these dumb ones come along,” boasts a woman in a new video game that has fuelled a debate on sexism in China.

    The players in the live-action Revenge on Gold Diggers are male protagonists lured into relationships by manipulative women who are after their money – how the man responds shapes the rest of the story.

    It topped the gaming platform Steam’s sales list within hours of its release in June but controversy quickly followed. Some slammed it for reinforcing insulting gender stereotypes, while supporters say the game cautions people about love scams.

    So heated was the criticism that the game’s creators quietly renamed it Emotional Anti-Fraud Simulator the next day.

    But that wasn’t enough to undo the damage. The game’s lead director, Hong Kong filmmaker Mark Hu, has now been banned on several Chinese social media platforms.

    The game’s creators insist they never intended to “target women” – rather they wanted to facilitate “open dialogue about emotional boundaries and the grey zones in modern dating”.

    Xu Yikun, an artist who tried the game and found it deeply offensive, rejects that rationale. She accuses them of “a classic business model that thrives on generating content that sparks debate and divisions”.

    Critics like her say the very term “gold digger” reeks of misogyny.

    “It’s a label that’s used, all too often, on women,” Ms Xu says. “Sexist jokes and derogatory terms like these have found their way into our everyday language.”

    “If you have a rich boyfriend, you are called a gold digger. If you try to make yourself look pretty, you are called a gold digger… Sometimes the label is used on you merely for accepting a drink from someone,” she adds.

  201. John Morales says

    CA7746, I was reading about that: https://www.vox.com/climate/419017/central-texas-floods-early-warning-flash-flood-alley

    Relevant bit:

    <

    blockquote>Ahead of the Texas floods, the Texas Division of Emergency Management activated its emergency response system on July 2 in anticipation of major floods, including mobilizing water rescue squads, helicopters, and road-clearing equipment. On July 3, the National Weather Service issued a flood watch. (NPR has a very useful timeline of the planning and response to the floods.)

    But as the watches turned to warnings, they revealed gaps in the communication system. There are spots along the Guadalupe River that don’t have flood warning sirens, including Kerr County. Officials there contemplated installing a flood warning system, but it was rejected for being too expensive.

    Text message alerts did go out, but they were sent in the middle of the night after the July Fourth holiday, when many people were camping or traveling in unfamiliar places. Parts of the county also have spotty cell service. And residents who did get the alerts weren’t sure what to do about them, whether to stay or evacuate, until the water levels were perilously high.

  202. says

    […] GOP leaders in the House and Senate, most notably Speaker Mike Johnson, did as they were instructed and rushed the radical legislation through Capitol Hill — just to ensure that Trump could put on a little ego-satisfying show at the White House on Independence Day.

    […] The signing ceremony was largely unremarkable, though Roll Call noted the one part of the event loaded with unacknowledged symbolic significance: “Johnson presented Trump with the gavel he used Friday after announcing that the bill had passed the chamber. The president banged it several times on the table as the audience cheered.” […]

    Link

  203. says

    As Steve Benen noted in his summary of news reported by NBC:

    * This offensive came on the heels of a Trump-Putin phone meeting: “Russia overnight launched its largest aerial assault on Ukraine’s capital since the start of the war … While the attacks primarily targeted Kyiv, across Ukraine at least 23 people were injured in the strikes, which involved about 540 drones and 11 missiles, according to the country’s military.”

    New York Times:

    Since President Trump returned to office in January, the United States has issued no new sanctions against Russia related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the administration has eased restrictions. And without new ones, analysts say, existing measures lose their force. The result has created an opening for new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment that would otherwise be cut off to the Kremlin, trade and corporate records show.”

  204. says

    Guess which countries Trump is threatening with more tariffs now.

    On Monday, in a pair of poorly written letters, President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 25% tariff on South Korea and Japan beginning on Aug. 1 if the companies within those countries do not “decide to build or manufacture product within the United States.”

    “We invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far,” Trump wrote in the letters, which were overloaded with commas and filled with nonsensical capitalizations. [Sheesh]

    South Korea has expressed interest in negotiation with Trump, but said that it’s unclear what Trump even wants out of an agreement, which makes the negotiations difficult. [Yep. A correct assessment.]

    “We’re doing our best, and the goal is to reach a genuinely mutually beneficial outcome, but at this stage, both sides still haven’t clearly defined what exactly they want,” South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung told the Singaporean outlet the Straits Times. “All I can say for now is that we’re doing our utmost.”

    Trump’s letters come two days before the 90-day pause on his “Liberation Day” tariffs is set to expire, leaving Trump with several options: he can let the astronomical tariffs he placed on nearly every country on the planet go into effect, pause the tariffs again, or some sort of middle ground where he puts a new and arbitrary tariff on imported goods if trade deals aren’t made in time. The letters to South Korea and Japan suggest he is going with the third option.

    Economists say that imposing a 25% tariff on South Korea and Japan will be bad for the economy, as companies will merely pass down those taxes onto American consumers, spiking inflation to levels that could plunge the country into a recession. The United States imports billions of dollars worth of goods from South Korea and Japan, including machinery and mechanical appliances, transportation equipment, and chemicals, plastics, and rubber. [That’s a lot of imports.]

    Trump, for his part, said when he paused the “Liberation Day” tariffs that he would make 90 trade deals in 90 days with countries.

    But with two days to go before the deadline, not a single deal is fully signed. And the so-called “deals” Trump said are in the works with China, Vietnam and the United Kingdom are horrible for American consumers, as they will lead to increased tariffs on items imported to the United States from those countries that companies will almost certainly pass down to American consumers in the form of increased prices.

    Of course, it’s unclear if the new tariff threat against Japan and South Korea will ever even come to fruition. Trump has caved on nearly all of his tariff announcements, earning him the pejorative nickname TACO—which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. Indeed, in the letters he sent to the two countries, he said, “These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country.”

    Nevertheless, the stock market responded negatively to Trump’s latest trade mishegas, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 500 points.

  205. John Morales says

    ’tis horrible, but still.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg75n3k1k3yo

    Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ camp perched on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas, was a place of laughter, prayer and adventure just days ago.

    But just before daybreak on Friday, the Fourth of July public holiday, the river rose 26ft (8m) in about 45 minutes amid a torrential downpour.

    Many of the hundreds of girls at the camp were sleeping in low-lying cabins less than 500ft (150m) from the riverbank.

    The bunk beds are now mud-caked and toppled, the detritus of a summer camp cut tragically short.

    Destroyed personal belongings are scattered across soaked interiors where children once gathered for Bible study and campfire songs.

    More than 90 people have been confirmed dead in the floods. Camp Mystic has confirmed that at least 27 girls and counsellors are among them.”

    […]

    Stella Thompson, 13, was in a cabin on higher ground when storms awoke her early on Friday.

    As helicopters began buzzing overhead, she realised something was dreadfully wrong. The girls in her cabin heard that the Guadalupe River side of the camp was flooded.

    “When we got that news, we were all, like, hysterical and praying a lot,” Stella told a Dallas NBC affiliate.

    “And the whole cabin was really, really terrified, but not for ourselves, worried for those on the other side.”

    Stella described the “horrific” scenes as she and other survivors were evacuated by military trucks.

    “You’d see kayaks in trees… then there was first responders in the water pulling out girls.

    “And there were huge trees ripped out of the ground and their roots. And it didn’t look like Camp Mystic anymore.”

    I suppose that, for a Christian, that’s good news. They’re with Christ, now.

  207. says

    Followup to comment 204.

    […] there is another part of the ongoing train wreck that is Trump that I want to touch on here: the sheer idiocy and incompetence of the letters he sent to Japan and South Korea. They sound like they were written by a cheap Mafioso’s sales manager.

    Here are some choice phrases from the Korea letter (apparently, only images are online right now, so I have to transcribe rather than cut-and-paste):

    It is a Great Honor for me to send you this letter in that it demonstrates the strength and commitment of our Trading Relationship, and the fact that the United States of America has agreed to continue working with Korea, despite having a significant Trade Deficit with your great Country. Nevertheless, we have decided to move forward with you, but only with more balanced, and fair, TRADE.

    Yes, the caps are in the original. Trump really seems to like this “Great Honor” opening line; he’s been using it a lot lately. And his “great honor” is in how magnanimous he can be, right? But not too magnanimous, however:

    Starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge Korea a Tariff of only 25% on any and all Korean products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs.

    Korea. Not South Korea. Maybe he’s also going to hit Kim Jung-Un with tariffs on his nuclear bombs or personal anti-aircraft guns?

    And then he threatens that if South Korea tries to retaliate with new tariffs,

    whatever number you choose to raise them by, will be added to the 25% that we charge.

    In the best spirit of a merchandise and real estate grifter, he concludes:

    We look forward to working with you as your Trading Partner for many years to come. . . . You will never be disappointed with The United States of America.

    And, much as I find it hard to believe, he really did close with:

    Thank you for your attention to this matter!

    Maybe he keeps using that line because, as it says in Death of a Salesman, “attention must be paid.”

  209. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    ‪Samantha Montano (Emergency Management professor):

    Mike Johnson on Texas floods: “In a moment like this, we feel just as helpless as everyone else does … all we know to do at this moment is pray.” [Video clip]

    This country had one of the most advanced emergency management systems in the entire world specifically so that we are not helpless in the face of disaster but this fucker and his little buddies decided to dismantle it.

    Samantha Montano:

    Has anyone seen David Richardson, the current head of FEMA? Where is he? I’ve not seen or heard a word from him during this flood? They’ve sent Noem out instead which is not usually how this goes.

    And look, I do not think he would do anything to help this situation—he just recently learned Texas is big—but I think it’s a reasonable question to ask […]

     
    The Handbasket – FEMA response to deadly Texas floods delayed & deficient with Noem in charge

    according to sources within FEMA, “barely any staff” have been deployed, and the Acting Administrator David Richardson “is nowhere to be found.” Per one source, “if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked.”
    […]
    […] every contract and grant over $100,000 must be personally approved by Noem. “Officials inside FEMA warn the new approval process could severely disrupt the distribution of emergency funds during natural disasters,” CNN reported
    […]
    “We would have hundreds of people on scene in FEMA jackets registering people for assistance, regional coordination center fully activated, national at least partly activated,” a current FEMA employee [said]. “Setting up disaster recovery centers with federal partners, we’d have our search and rescue there already. We would have mission assigned other agencies like USACE (US Army Corp of Engineers) to clear debris and establish power.”

    Despite Trump officially activating FEMA on Sunday, FEMA has just 86 total staff deployed [as of] Monday evening. That includes a national incident management team, plus regional and headquarter staff. In the past it would normally be in the several hundreds at this point […] Though a formal emergency declaration was announced Sunday, which makes it possible for people to apply for FEMA funding, the teams meant to help victims implement the process have yet to be deployed. […] because of the DHS bottleneck, the FEMA staffer says, everything is delayed.
    […]
    Monday evening, FEMA staffers finally got word that search and rescue teams were being deployed to Texas. Thus far, the search and rescue teams who have been working tirelessly since Friday have been deployed by Texas and neighboring states.
    […]
    With approximately 30% of FEMA staff cut since January, including most of its top leadership, its emergency preparedness is getting the ultimate test, with life and death results.

    Rando: “[Re 86 staff deployed]: The deli I work for has about 70 employees.”

    Samantha Montano:

    To me this feels like a similar moment to Sandy Hook. If republicans aren’t willing to accept responsibility and change policy to protect young white christian girls in Texas, they won’t do it for anyone.

  210. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Mel Buer (Journalist), video clips:

    I’m here in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where military style vehicles have pulled up […] CBP, National Guard, and other vehicles […] Massive federal presence here this morning. Border patrol now sweeping the park [masked, in armor, on horses]
    […]
    After [Mayor] Bass spoke with what I assume is a DHS rep, they packed shit up and headed out. The whole neighborhood turned out to chase them out of the park. Some fruit was thrown, a lot of yelling.

    Major speculation that this raid was a photo op, but it’s worth noting that activists who were tipped off showed up to the park early to throw up flyers and comb through the park to alert neighbors. A full soccer field that was active this morning was completely cleared by the time ICE arrived.

    Rando 1: “Projecting strength by getting chased out of town by a guy on a single crutch.”

    Rando 2: “[Zooming into the officer’s patch in the Bass photo.] BORSTAR is search and rescue, so they’ve pulled these guys from their actual jobs to do this bullshit.”

    Rando 3: “Even if you assume the legitimacy of ICE operations, the idea that a fucking truck-mounted [sniper rifle] is necessary to carry them out is insane.”

    Susan Wabuda (History professor):

    As a one-time farmer and rider, not at all impressed by the lack of armor on the horses. So much inadequacy on display. The 16th-century did much better. Some of those horses […] look uncomfortable wearing those stiff ‘carrying gaiters’.

     
    Ken Klippenstein – Operation Excalibur in Los Angeles was show of force

    National Guard sources tell me that it was a botched laughingstock. […] documents reveal that the erstwhile justification for the operation was to try to shut down the distribution of fake IDs. […] Per the briefing: “[…] intent at MacArthur Park is to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement […] MS-13 consider the park their home ‘turf’ and could escalate to lethal violence,” a threat assessment warned.
    […]
    Then all that planning went bust. Because ICE and CBP apparently failed to communicate or coordinate effectively, the military showed up too late (and Los Angeles authorities weren’t notified until two hours prior.) “We were on the objective for 24 minutes,” a National Guard member told me. [“]we parked and then left. Soldiers didn’t get out of trucks.[“]
    […]
    Part of the reason for the confusion is the sheer number of government agencies involved. In this operation, according to the documents, nine different federal agencies (including the IRS) were given radio code names based on soda brands [ICE was given ‘Inca’, an imported Peruvian cola.] […] Many of the soldiers involved, I’m told, view their mission as unnecessary and even ridiculous

    Rando 4: “If MacArthur Park is the ‘founding location of MS-13’, wouldn’t that make it an American gang instead of a Salvadoran one?”

    Cheryl Rofer:

    they managed to make themselves look like fools. A heavily armed and mounted force to intimidate day campers, nannies with children, and old men feeding pigeons.

    From a fragment of their plans that is circulating, they thought about rappelling down from helicopters or putting a boat on the lake. Delusional. […] they thought that MS-13 would be shooting at them and thousands of people would riot.

    Rando 5: “So… were they parading to try to get shot at so they can escalate?”

    /Missed opportunity for operation: Leave the Coke out in the rain.

  212. John Morales says

    Birger, I took a look.

    “Abstract
    This report describes the technical feasibility of creating mirror bacteria and the potentially serious and wide-ranging risks that they could pose to humans, other animals, plants, and the environment. It accompanies the Science Policy Forum article titled “Confronting risks of mirror life”, published in December 2024.
    In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images. Mirror bacteria could not evolve from existing life, but their creation will become increasingly feasible as science advances.
    Interactions between organisms often depend on chirality, and so interactions between natural organisms and mirror bacteria would be profoundly different from those between natural organisms. Most importantly, immune defenses and predation typically rely on interactions between chiral molecules that could often fail to detect or kill mirror bacteria due to their reversed chirality. It therefore appears plausible, even likely, that sufficiently robust mirror bacteria could spread through the environment unchecked by natural biological controls and act as dangerous opportunistic pathogens in an unprecedentedly wide range of other
    multicellular organisms, including humans.
    This report draws on expertise from synthetic biology, immunology, ecology, and related fields to provide the first comprehensive assessment of the risks from mirror bacteria. It consists of eight chapters and starts with a general introduction, followed by an examination of the initial creation of mirror bacteria, their further engineering, as well as biosecurity and biosafety implications. The remaining five chapters cover risks to human health, medical countermeasures, risks to other animals, risks to plants, and the potential ecological consequences of their introduction into the environment.”

    —

    It’s utterly speculative.

    Know what I reckon? Life is life, mirror or otherwise.

    (Speciesism is for other people, not for me)

  213. John Morales says

    [But hey, now I know about Tibees — terrified scientists, oh my!]

  214. birgerjohansson says

    Naah, this is just a comment to the exaggerated claims spreading in media. Like the claims Betelgeuse is about to go supernova. We need a bit of clarity to look through the BS. Once you process the numbers you can relax.

    (Next up: The eskimo world conspiracy is tanking the US economy, not bad policies. )

  218. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales @ 215
    Just wait until the Decepticons turn up. Or when the Decepticons team up with ze Joos!

  221. birgerjohansson says

    Andrey Vondemark:
    “Breaking: China Just Triggered A Financial Crisis — $212 Billion Dumped On Four Days.”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=pFkYX-VQp4k

    This 12 minute video is well worth watching. The yield of Treasury bonds has risen to 5 % – the highest since the 2008 chrisis.

  222. John Morales says

    Also, your link, Birger:
    “5.8 million saw Black Sabbath’s farewell concert in Birmingham in 2025
    Updated yesterday 15:27Published yesterday 14:55

    40 000 were in the audience when the hard rock veterans in Birmingham quartet Black Sabbath did their last gig this weekend. Watch clips from the band’s 57-year career in the player above.

    Metallica, Slayer and Guns N’ Roses were just a few of the bands on stage to pay tribute to Black Sabbath during the full-day concert “Back to the Beginning,” which became their farewell.

    “Without Sabbath, there would be no Metallica. Thank you, guys, for giving us a purpose in life,” Metallica’s James Hetfield said on stage, according to Reuters.”

    (2025, we can just click and translate web pages, easy as. And, may I add, your English is generally most excellent)

  225. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales # 222
    Thank you! I would dig up some news items from Down Under, but I assume you will already have read them.

  227. StevoR says

    Fishers have been calling on the state government for financial relief amid the ongoing Karenia mikimotoi outbreak, which Environment Minister Susan Close estimates has led to “tens of thousands, if not more, individual animals” washing up dead on the state’s beaches.

    Following talks with the commercial fishing industry, the state government today said affected fishers could apply for certain licence and audit fees to be waived from April to June as part of an initial $500,000 relief package.

    That announcement coincided with the revelation that the most recent monitoring had detected the algae in the Port River.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-08/fee-waiver-sa-fishers-affected-algal-bloom/105506240

  228. StevoR says

    Across the immense Pacific Ocean, a silent struggle is unfolding beneath the surface.

    The vital tuna, a cornerstone of both the region’s marine ecosystem and its economic stability, is facing unprecedented challenges.

    As ocean temperatures rise, waters acidify, and currents alter, tuna populations are being driven into new territories, placing Pacific Island nations and their essential fishing industries at risk.

    Source :https://www.abc.net.au/pacific/a-changing-environment-tuna-threatened-by-climate-change/105401200

  231. birgerjohansson says

    Andrey Vondemark 
    “U.S Factory Boom Just Crashed Into China’s Graphite Blockade—$300B On The Line”


    The recent graphite ban hurts US EV and semiconductor projects.

  235. rorschach says

    Had an inquiry at work today where organisers of various youth camping events asked how far they can go in searching their 10-12 year old participants for tick infestation.
    Yep, that’s how I looked too.

  236. says

    Trump sets himself up for another round of embarrassment by restarting tariff brinksmanship
    Video is 5:30 minutes.
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-sets-himself-up-for-another-round-of-embarrassment-by-restarting-tariff-brinksmanship-242833477847

    Maddow: Trump being ‘awful and weird’ makes him scary, but not fearsome like he wishes
    Video is 4:04 minutes.
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-trump-being-awful-and-weird-makes-him-scary-but-not-fearsome-like-he-wishes-242834501825

    Despite earlier stoking, Trump officials faceplant with Epstein conspiracy theorists
    Video is 7:35 minutes
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/despite-earlier-stoking-trump-officials-faceplant-with-epstein-conspiracy-theorists-242829893680

    Devastating Texas floods highlight stakes of vital weather services amid reckless Trump cuts
    Video is 7:23 minutes
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/devastating-texas-floods-highlight-need-for-coordination-experience-amid-trump-era-service-cuts-242828357581

  239. says

    Trump finds yet another foreign ‘witch hunt’ involving one of his political allies

    “There’s a through line between the president’s pardons and his intervention in the Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen and Benjamin Netanyahu cases.”

    For the third time in three months, Donald Trump has identified a foreign ally facing legal trouble. And also for the third time in three months, the American president has condemned the foreign case as a “witch hunt.” As Politico reported, the latest example involves Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

    President Donald Trump is coming to the defense of Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro as he faces a trial for his role in trying to overturn the results of his country’s 2022 election. Bolsonaro is accused of participating in a plot to prevent the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency of the largest nation in South America, an attempt that echoed Trump’s own earlier efforts to stay in office despite losing an election.

    “Brazil is doing a terrible thing on their treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro,” Trump wrote in a message published to his social media platform. “I have watched, as has the World, as they have done nothing but come after him, day after day, night after night, month after month, year after year! He is not guilty of anything, except having fought for THE PEOPLE.”

    Trump didn’t get around to commenting on the specifics of the allegations — he’s not exactly detail-oriented in areas such as these — but the American president vouched for his scandal-plagued former Brazilian counterpart.

    “I have gotten to know Jair Bolsonaro, and he was a strong Leader, who truly loved his Country,” the Republican wrote, adding, “I’ll be watching the WITCH HUNT of Jair Bolsonaro, his family, and thousands of his supporters, very closely. … LEAVE BOLSONARO ALONE!”

    If the message sounded familiar, it wasn’t your imagination.

    In April, Marine Le Pen, a prominent far-right politician in France, was caught up in an embezzlement scheme involving E.U. funds. A French judicial panel examined the evidence and agreed to ban Le Pen from ever seeking elected office again.

    Trump was not at all pleased with the developments. In fact, while the American president admitted that he didn’t know Le Pen or understand the details of the underlying controversy, the Republican nevertheless said the case against her was a “witch hunt” launched by “European Leftists,” adding that she was “probably” innocent.

    In an odd online rant, Trump concluded, “FREE MARINE LE PEN!”

    Last week, he did it again, condemning the corruption case against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as — you guessed it — a “witch hunt” that he wants to stop. Despite the seriousness of the allegations, Trump wrote, “Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State. … THIS TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’ CAN NOT BE ALLOWED!”

    As with the other two cases, Trump condemned the allegations of wrongdoing, not because of evidence pointing to Netanyahu’s innocence, but because the American president believes the Israeli prime minister is an ally and “a WARRIOR.” In fact, at no point in his online harangue did Trump even question the charges against the prime minister on the merits.

    His argument was almost childlike: He likes Netanyahu, so Netanyahu’s alleged crimes should go unexamined. An Axios report added, “Trump’s comments in a post on his Truth Social account were an unprecedented intervention by a U.S. president in a legal proceeding in another democratic ally.”

    That was true at the time, though a week later he did it again.

    Stepping back, the problem is not just with the American president’s indifference to diplomatic protocols. Rather, what matters more is what this and related efforts tell us about Trump’s approach to the rule of law.

    Indeed, there’s a through line between his many scandalous pardons and his intervention in the Bolsonaro, Le Pen and Netanyahu cases: Trump is convinced that his allies and those who share his ideology cannot be subjected to accountability.

    Niceties such as guilt, evidence, justice and the integrity of the legal system are all fine and good, as far as they go, but for the incumbent Republican president, a “witch hunt” is any effort to hold people he likes accountable for alleged wrongdoing.

    The next time he claims to care about “law and order,” be sure to read the fine print: We’ve arrived in an era in which justice isn’t supposed to be applied to those who act and think like Trump does.

  240. says

    Trump’s IRS says churches can now endorse political candidates from the pulpit

    By allowing houses of worship to endorse candidates, despite federal tax law, the IRS is “fixing” a problem that doesn’t exist, while inviting new ones.

    For nearly seven decades, federal tax law has been clear: Houses of worship are entitled to tax-exempt status, but they’re not allowed to intervene in partisan political campaigns. As The New York Times reported, under Donald Trump, the IRS has unilaterally decided to interpret federal tax law in a new and unique way.

    The I.R.S. said on Monday that churches and other houses of worship can endorse political candidates to their congregations, carving out an exemption in a decades-old ban on political activity by tax-exempt nonprofits. The agency made that statement in a court filing intended to settle a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters.

    Under the Internal Revenue Service’s new approach, all nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations will continue to enjoy tax-exempt status, but houses of worship will enjoy a new benefit that the agency won’t apply to secular organizations: Churches, temples, synagogues and mosques will be free to endorse candidates, but other nonprofit groups will not.

    If you’re thinking this incongruity seems like the sort of thing that will end up in court, you’re not alone.

    […] Before the IRS’s court filing, tax-exempt religious ministries were, of course, free to speak out on moral and spiritual issues of the day and even get involved in ballot referenda related to various policies, but churches and other houses of worship couldn’t intervene directly in political campaigns, taking steps to help (or hurt) candidates or political parties.

    The law governing this area was created in 1954, thanks to the efforts of then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, and for quite a while, it wasn’t especially controversial.

    But as the religious right became a more prominent fixture in Republican politics, the Johnson Amendment became problematic. Efforts to create a political machine involving pastors and congregations were stunted by the law — because if a religious leader can’t tell his or her congregation who to vote for without risking the ministry’s tax-exempt status, the movement’s potency had some limits.

    And so the religious right decided the Johnson Amendment had to go. In his first term, Trump used to boast that he’d successfully eliminated the Johnson Amendment, although he was either lying or was confused […]

    The case for changing the law has long been based on an argument that might seem vaguely compelling at first blush: Those who lead houses of worship should be able to say whatever they wish to their congregants, and it’s not the government’s job to intervene. The First Amendment’s free speech protections, the argument goes, should be applied to ministers in the pulpit.

    What’s wrong with that argument? Quite a bit, actually.

    When it comes to electioneering and tax law, houses of worship have effectively made a deal with the government: Religious leaders enjoy the benefits of a tax exemption, and in exchange, their ministry will be nonpartisan. Republicans in recent years have said they want to scrap the deal: Churches should get the benefit of a tax exemption from the government, without any of the trade-offs.

    As for the First Amendment, note that tax exempt entities, including churches, have long had the option to get involved in partisan politics, endorse candidates and intervene in campaigns to their hearts’ content — but they weren’t supposed to do this while keeping their tax exemption.

    […] Imagine the campaign finance mess that would exist if parties, candidates and political action committees could funnel donations through tax exempt churches, free of oversight, all while benefiting from explicit endorsements.

    For that matter, imagine if a foreign government, eager to secretly help put a specific candidate in power, decides to funnel money to specific churches, knowing that those ministries would in turn use the resources to support that candidate. The churches would never have to disclose any of this, and the public would be kept in the dark.

    The IRS’s new position “fixes” a problem that doesn’t exist. There doesn’t appear to be any great public demand for such a change — most Americans, and even many religious leaders, don’t want churches to endorse candidates — and there’s no reason to create a mess where none currently exists.

    And yet, Trump’s IRS is apparently doing it anyway.

  243. says

    Thanks to the GOP Megabill, You’ll Pay Higher Utility Bills

    Natural gas price spikes, grid transmission bottlenecks, and a data center construction boom are already straining America’s power grid. The Republican Party just passed a budget bill that might break it.

    Donald Trump and the GOP’s irrational energy agenda deliberately sidelines wind and solar energy […] to prop up a dying fossil fuel industry that won’t be able to meet rising demand.

    The consequences will be severe: hundreds of billions in clean energy investment will evaporate, hundreds of gigawatts of power won’t get built, and hundreds of millions of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions will be produced. By 2035, according to Princeton’s ZERO Lab for energy research, the U.S. will have added 45% less clean electricity to the grid than it would have if Trump had not been reelected.

    All of this comes as America’s electricity demand is accelerating for the first time in decades. A report last year from the Clean Grid Initiative projected up to a five-fold increase in demand on the grid. Meanwhile, the U.S. added 64 TWh of solar generation to the grid in 2024 — enough to meet fully half of the record-breaking growth in electricity demand last year, according to independent energy think tank Ember Energy.

    The only way America can meet rising energy demand and keep costs down is by building more wind and solar. Clean energy means lower utility bills, more good jobs, and cleaner air.

    The Republicans don’t care. It’s a tale as old as the party. The GOP campaigns on one thing — lowering the cost of energy for Americans — and does the opposite.

    The GOP Plot to Raise Your Energy Bill
    The final version of the GOP’s bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, phases out clean energy tax credits by the end of 2027, a year earlier than the timeline in the original House version.

    […] While the bill does give some juicy handouts to the fossil fuel industry, it’s hard to see who else benefits. U.S. automakers will definitively lose the global electric vehicle race. Big Tech will have to pay a premium to power their AI data centers. […] An estimated 2.3 million jobs in clean energy and associated industries will vanish over the next 10 years. […] American households will soon face steep price hikes on their utility bills, with double-digit increases in states like Arizona and North Carolina.

    If that wasn’t bad enough, in June, Trump stated plainly what he had already put into practice: a total ban on wind energy. “We’re not going to let windmills get built because we’re not going to destroy our country any further than it’s already been destroyed.” […]

    While China added 329 GW of solar last year alone, the U.S. added about 50. [!] […]

    No Other Way Out
    The Trump administration champions fossil fuels as the energy solution for the modern world — but the industry can’t come close to replacing the renewable capacity that would be lost under the GOP’s rollback of clean energy incentives.

    Demand may be high, but the natural gas industry can’t meet it. The cost of building new natural gas plants has already tripled since 2022, with orders for new gas turbines backlogged past 2029. And as Heatmap reports, manufacturers like GE Vernova have little incentive to ramp up production capacity and risk future profit margins due to overcapacity. By 2027, GE will be able to produce only 20 gigawatts’ worth of gas turbines per year — worldwide. […]

    The administration’s gung-ho nuclear stance also faces headwinds from its own self-defeating policies — like arbitrary staff cuts at the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission — that make building nuclear power more difficult. Not to mention that tariffs on key components, like steel and aluminum, drive up already staggering construction costs — jeopardizing projects like the reopening of the Palisades Nuclear Plant.

    The final bill extended the window to claim tax credits for clean, firm power sources like nuclear, hydro, and geothermal for a decade — but this will still be too little, too late to stabilize energy prices. Industry analysts say no new nuclear plant will come online before 2032, at the earliest. And even if it did, the enormous upfront capital costs mean that any cost savings from nuclear appear on the timescale of decades, not years. While states like New York have moved forward with plans for new nuclear in an effort to improve “reliability and affordability,” the experience of some nuclear customers has been the opposite. Integrating nuclear’s constant baseload power may bolster the grid’s long-term reliability — but it won’t provide any short-term rate relief. […]

    Republicans Are Lying to You
    Trump calls windmills “costly and unsightly.” His Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, derides net-zero goals as “sinister.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warns that the U.S. has “tipped” too far towards renewables. In one of the administration’s first executive orders, Trump bizarrely claimed that clean energy “makes worse the high energy prices that devastate Americans.”

    These lies are designed to obscure the reality: it’s fossil fuels, not renewable energy, inflating energy prices. Sensitive to global markets, the price of natural gas fluctuates wildly in response to supply shocks and geopolitical instability, as the Russia-Ukraine war made painfully clear in 2022. Coal is even worse. In places like West Virginia, Republican regulators have long forced ratepayers to subsidize uneconomic, aging coal plants despite cheaper alternatives. Now, Trump is mandating the rest of the country follow suit.

    Republicans are forcing Americans to accept higher utility bills just to prop up a dying fossil fuel industry — one that has already saddled the public with trillions in climate damages while raking in historic profits.

    The clean energy transition is unstoppable. Stripping away renewable energy subsidies will only increase costs and slow the pace of adoption. […]

  244. says

    RFK Jr. is steering public health agencies off a cliff

    It’s difficult to keep track of all the ways in which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is undermining public health. When it comes to the Food and Drug Administration, his assault ranges from firing the administrative staff who support drug safety inspectors to deciding that artificial intelligence will fix everything.

    One of the Trump administration’s myriad purges of federal workers took out the staff that coordinates travel for inspectors of foreign drug factories. […]

    You can’t fire support staff without compromising the work of the staff they support. […] support staff cuts mean that managers, rather than support staff, are now forced to handle travel, budgets, visas, translators for FDA inspectors, and other tasks.

    Guess what happens if FDA inspectors aren’t inspecting foreign drug factories that manufacture products for the United States market? You guessed it: Safety violations will go unnoticed and unaddressed. ProPublica documented that when FDA inspectors visited a Sun Pharma factory in India in 2022, they found metal shavings on equipment, contaminated drug vials, and unknown matter being mixed into drugs. Around the same time, a visit to an Intas Pharmaceuticals factory in India found manipulated testing records covering up the fact that things like glass were making their way into the drugs manufactured there.

    So it appears Americans are going to experience the joy of taking drugs tainted by ground glass and god knows what else. Seems bad! But maybe things are better stateside?

    Nope. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are planning to use artificial intelligence in the drug approval process. How? Well, Kennedy isn’t so clear on that part. He says AI will be used to “look at the mega data that we have and be able to make really good decisions about interventions”—which is a word salad.

    Kennedy’s toddler-level understanding of AI may also soon be imposed on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS is currently a database that allows scientists to track reports of alleged side effects, and to use those reports as a jumping-off point for further research about the safety of a vaccine. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine conspiracy theorists latched onto VAERS as a way to promote their anti-science beliefs.

    Because anyone can report side effects about any vaccine to VAERS, that raw data is somewhat meaningless. It’s only after scientists review the data and determine whether the alleged effects are actually related to a vaccine that determinations can be made about safety. But since anyone can download VAERS data, anti-vaxxers ran to places like Fox News to report supposed vaccination-related deaths without acknowledging or understanding that those death reports had not been investigated or definitively linked to a vaccine. [Important details.]

    Kennedy hasn’t been clear what AI would do with VAERS data. However, depressingly, the Verge is likely right that he will shovel the VAERS data into some AI system to review vaccine side effects.

    […] The notion that AI is ready for prime time and can undertake complex safety reviews is comical.

    The second problem is Kennedy’s rabid anti-vaccine stance. He is frantically looking for side effects because his goal is to curb vaccinations. He does not appear interested in using VAERS to ensure vaccines remain safe and available, so he no doubt doesn’t really care if AI produces slipshod work as long as he can wave around “proof” that vaccines are bad.

    Fewer safety inspections, fewer guardrails on drug approvals, and conspiracy-fueled attacks on vaccines. Turns out, “Make America Healthy Again” means just the opposite.

  245. says

    Netanyahu says he nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, really</a.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday night that he nominated President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.

    “He forged the Abraham Accords. He’s forging peace as we speak, in one country and one region after the other. So, I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize committee. It’s nominating you for the peace prize, which is well-deserved,” Netanyahu told Trump at a dinner at the White House […]

    Trump has long wanted to win a Nobel Prize because former President Barack Obama received one. But the prize has eluded Trump, who carries that chip on his shoulder daily and often rants about it in speeches.

    Of course, getting nominated by Netanyahu—who has been charged with alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court—is unlikely to help Trump win the prize.

    What’s more, Trump’s actions are completely unworthy of the Nobel […]

    On the world stage, Trump has coddled Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, refusing to punish Putin for mercilessly bombing Ukrainian civilians, and instead blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the war Putin began.

    Trump has also called for what amounts to ethnic cleansing in the Gaza strip, saying Gazans should leave so that the land decimated by Israel’s war on Hamas can be taken over and redeveloped by the United States.

    Trump has also supported Israel’s campaign to bomb Iran, and has said he wants to take over Canada and Greenland—which he said he could do by force if necessary.

    Domestically, Trump’s actions have been even worse. He has illegally deported immigrants to a torture prison in El Salvador. He also supported the creation of “Alligator Alcatraz”—an open-air immigration detention prison in Florida which he says will cause anyone who tries to escape to be eaten by alligators. And Trump fantasizes about torturing inmates in America, saying he wants to reopen the actual Alcatraz prison off the coast of San Francisco as well as shoot immigrants and protesters.

    Safe to say, Netanyahu’s nomination was pure theater—an effort by the Israeli leader to make Trump happy so that he allows Netanyahu to continue his war against Hamas.

  248. says

    You’re going to be shocked here, but it turns out a laminated card from Hobby Lobby with Donald Trump’s face on it, […] is not actually a valid $5 million citizenship agreement with the United States for high rollers.

    The Washington Post reports this week that [Trump’s] idea for a $5 million golden visa is probably never gonna fuckin’ happen. Sad news for Trump, but it turns out that — we hope you’re sitting down for this one — no real rich people were actually that interested in it anyway.

    In other words, the world’s real rich people are ignoring Donald Trump, the trashiest semi-rich guy who ever lived, because they do not actually want the gauche thing he’s selling.

    […] Trump announced these tacky golden cards back in February, and because the toddler-in-chief is nothing if not literal, he did it by waving an actual card around with his face on it, as if he imagined those who wish to bribe him for citizenship in his gold-plated new America would present that card in order to be admitted to Ellis Island or something. Trump swore then that it would be available “in about less than two weeks,” because “in about less than two weeks” is his standard answer when making promises that will never ever fucking come true.

    They even made a website so you can give Trump your personal information and express your interest in being the first to hear about it if and when this dumb thing actually comes out.

    Here are some problems, as the Washington Post explains:
    – Presidents can’t just snap their tiny fingers and make up new kinds of visas;
    – Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits, there would be lawsuits, especially if, as dumbfuck Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick […] has suggested, Trump’s golden visa ended up replacing the regular EB-5 investor visa, which lots of people are already technically in line for;
    – The US government hasn’t changed anything about the visa program since 1990. […]

    As Doug Rand, a former immigration official in the Biden administration, told WaPo, “There’s no lawful basis to do this, and if they do it anyway, they’re going to get sued, and they’re almost certainly going to lose.”

    Plus there’s the fact that Congress is run by, um, Republicans, who aren’t known these days [supporting] “making new ways for people to become citizens.” Even if it’s Russian oligarchs who just want easy access to Trump.

    […] And again, it turns out there’s very little interest in the idea in general, despite how a bunch of people have allegedly put their contact info on the website to “find out more” about Trump’s dumbass idea. Actual people trying to apply? Zero. (There is apparently a non-public website up and running, set up by the DOGE trolls.)

    Immigration attorneys are reportedly steering clients away from the idea, because, as one lawyer from Philadelphia named Ron Klasko said, “Why would I want to do that before I know if it’s a law, what the law says, what the requirements are, what information the form is going to ask me for, what documents I have to produce, what the terms and conditions are[?]”

    Details, details.

    Another immigration attorney in WaPo, Rosanna Berardi of Buffalo, says, “This administration keeps forgetting that the executive branch doesn’t make the law.”

    […] In a March interview on the All-In podcast, he said that the funds raised by sales would pay off the country’s $1.3 trillion annual deficit, or about 260,000 visa sales. He also said that eventually the program could effectively pay off the entirety of the U.S. debt, more than $36 trillion, meaning more than 7 million people would need to sign up for visas.

    Hahahahahahahahaha, you betcha. […]

    The Washington Post notes that a number of countries that have had golden visas in the past several years have discontinued them recently, for a number of reasons. There have been concerns about money laundering and other corrupt and improper uses for the arrangements.

    But here’s the thing: Those golden visas are going away in countries people actually want to move to. Spain, Portugal, Australia, etc.

    […] Besides, those who really just want to bribe Donald Trump already probably have his cell phone number anyway, and […] they’re wiring whatever money to whatever new crypto asset or Russian intermediary […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/surprise-trumps-tacky-golden-visa

  249. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/bethany-mandel-discovers-science

    […] Bethany Mandel, whom you may remember from the time she wrote an entire book about “woke” and then found herself unable to define the term “woke.”

    […] This week, Mandel published an editorial on Fox asking “Why are major museums pushing climate change instead of celebrating the spirit of America?” and describing her horror when she went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History only to discover that instead of celebrating America, they kept going on about science.

    The easy answer to this is “Because it’s a science museum, you strange woman,” but Mandel was not looking for easy answers.

    One exhibit states, “Since the last ice age, Earth’s climate has warmed. But now that warming is getting faster because of us.” […]

    I understand that people like Mandel (and Fox before her) like to have their weird beliefs coddled and would love to go to a science museum that doesn’t even mention climate change. […]

    Mandel was also disappointed to see that the National Museum of American History acknowledged civil rights movements.

    At the National Museum of American History, visitors get a heavy dose of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Despite the fast-approaching 250th anniversary of America’s founding, there were no visible exhibits or events celebrating the milestone. In the week leading up to the Fourth of July, the museum’s homepage highlighted four features: a lunch counter sit-in, women’s suffrage, a 19th-century Black firefighter and a community center for pregnant Latina immigrants. […]

    It’s true. The museum did highlight those particular artifacts, and is still highlighting them. […]

    There is also, however, an entire page dedicated to events planned so far for 2026, the actual 250th anniversary of America’s founding, including a special exhibition called “American Aspirations.” Whoops! Guess she just missed that one […]

    But that wasn’t all!

    As one historian told me, “The second-floor popular culture exhibit — probably the most popular in the museum — is a Marxist struggle session. Every single exhibit is interpreted through a race-class-gender lens.”

    […] Mandel was also very upset that, two years ago, she went to the Hirshhorn Museum, where her child found a book acknowledging the existence of trans people.

    Two years ago, at the Hirshhorn Museum, my kids picked up a children’s book titled, “My Own Way: Celebrating Gender Freedom For Kids.” One page reads, “You may be both… you may be none!” Another shows a naked child looking at a clothesline with the caption, “Your truth isn’t hidden underneath your clothes.”

    It’s an art museum, ma’am. Who expects to go to an art museum celebrating closed-mindedness?

    But it’s not only in Washington DC! Mandel also visited the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and was distraught to discover that they had an art exhibit that acknowledged the existence of climate change

    According to the exhibit description: “In the photographic series Jamestown is Sinking and the video installation The Interpreters, Greta Pratt explores the relationship between climate change and colonialism in Virginia’s Tidewater region… compelling viewers to examine how colonialization, spurred on by capitalist interests, has dramatically altered the natural environment.”

    In other words: climate change, colonialism, capitalism — buzzword bingo in a single art exhibit.

    Mandel was outraged to discover that although the museum isn’t entirely funded by taxes, it had received “$1.2 million in federal grants over the years from agencies like the Institute of Museum and Library Services.” Apparently, she believes that this means it should not be allowed to feature art which acknowledges the existence of climate change.

    Worst of all, when she contacted the museum, they refused to even apologize to her for it!

    Instead, they told her:

    We’re honored to exhibit the work of Greta Pratt, a celebrated local artist and recent recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The Chrysler Museum of Art is dedicated to fostering creativity, encouraging thoughtful dialogue, and exploring our shared humanity through art. We believe Pratt’s work contributes meaningfully to civic discourse, and we remain committed to presenting a wide spectrum of viewpoints without limiting artistic expression.

    […] But all is not lost for Bethany Mandel and her desire to only go to museums that reflect her personal worldview!

    There is a glimmer of hope. At the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell has started cleaning house — aiming to ensure that publicly funded art is about art, not indoctrination. It’s a long-overdue shift that could mark a turning point.

    And it appears the issue is already on the administration’s radar. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Smithsonian is undergoing a sweeping review of all content across its 21 museums and zoo to eliminate political bias. According to internal documents, the decision came during a closed-door Board of Regents meeting on June 9. The review follows President Donald Trump’s March executive order calling for the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” and the restoration of exhibits that reflect “American and Western values.”

    Quite frankly, if that is what they want, they’re probably going to have to close the museums entirely. […]

    With more than 30 million visitors expected to descend on Washington, D.C. for the nation’s Semiquincentennial next year, the clock is ticking. If nothing changes, they’ll walk into the Museum of American History and leave not with a celebration of our founding — but with a guilt trip.

    Time is of the essence.

    Yes, hopefully by then they will be able to create the National Museum For People Who Don’t Think, and Bethany Mandel will be at peace.

  250. says

    Judge temporarily blocks Trump administration from cutting off Planned Parenthood funding

    A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from barring Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood under a provision of the Republicans’ sweeping tax and spending package.

    Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued the temporary restraining order, directing the Health and Human Services Department to “take all steps necessary to ensure that Medicaid funding continues to be disbursed in the customary manner and timeframes” to Planned Parenthood.

    The order will remain in effect for 14 days, and the judge will hear arguments on July 21 on whether to grant a longer pause on a provision of the administration’s “big, beautiful bill,” which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday.

    […] While the provision of the “big beautiful bill” doesn’t directly name Planned Parenthood, the group alleged in its lawsuit Monday that the legislation is “a naked attempt to leverage the government’s spending power to attack and penalize Planned Parenthood and impermissibly single it out for unfavorable treatment.”

    The group claimed that the law violates its equal protection rights and retaliates against its protected speech.

    In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood said the law would have “catastrophic” consequences on the organization and its local affiliates around the country, which also provide nonabortion services, like contraception, and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted infections.

    […] As a result of the one-year funding ban, Planned Parenthood said 200 of its health centers are at risk of closure, and over 1 million patients could lose access to care. More than 90% of the clinics at risk are in states where abortion is still legal, the group said.

    The Department of Justice declined to comment on the ruling and has yet to file any court documents in the case.

    [I snipped comments from an anti-abortion group.].

  251. says

    The day after Trump signed a bill that throws unprecedented amounts of money at ICE, extends tax cuts for the wealthy, and slashes health-care and social services to do so, Vice President JD Vance was in San Diego. […] he was there to give a keynote address at a dinner hosted by the Claremont Institute, the southern California nonprofit that’s earned a reputation as a “nerve center” for MAGA thought.

    At the core of Claremont thinking is immigration. The think tank pushed for an end to birthright citizenship long before that objective entered the mainstream of the GOP; it claimed ownership over Vance’s thinking on the topic after Trump chose him as his running mate last year.

    […] During the 2024 Republican National Convention, Vance tried to sand down the idea of what it means to be an American citizen to a more European level: the country belongs more to those who share its “common history,” he said, not just those who ascribe to its values. He put Claremont’s intellectual approach to nativism into action last year, stoking racial tensions over Haitian immigration to Springfield, Ohio.

    On Saturday, Vance took up the theme again. But this time, he had more to point to than theoretical arguments […] The second Trump administration is pumping huge amounts of cash into the country’s detention and removal infrastructure for immigrants; it’s moved to end birthright citizenship; it’s staged high-profile civil liberties abuses with various efforts to remove people quickly and scare off others from coming; it is contemplating denaturalizations. […] there was also a strong messaging component to Vance’s Saturday remarks: the administration wants to talk about immigration to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

    What Vance expressed to the friendly Claremont audience was a dramatically reduced vision of American citizenship. It’s one in which having ancestors who have lived here for generations entitles you to more; a vision of citizenship that’s long existed around the world, with a notable and aspirational exception in the United States.

    “Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.

    He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely Creole nation.”

    By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.

    “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.

    Dog whistles aside (you can count quite a few in the above), Vance is channeling an idea that undergirds the administration’s most aggressive immigration policies […]

    Vance is making this argument to support, fawn over, and give his boss and his boss’s favorite policies a highbrow sheen. The vice president hit a familiar note in setting up New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (D) as a foil, demanding that he show “gratitude” to the country and attacking him for not being sufficiently patriotic on the Fourth of July.

    “I wonder, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?” Vance asked.

    Yet that bizarre line of argument was revealing in its own way.

    For all Vance’s — and those on the new right’s — talk of imposing a new order on American politics, they’re still reactionaries of a very old variety. Birthright citizenship, after all, was enshrined in the Constitution after those Union soldiers’ victory in the Civil War. What he described on Saturday was fundamentally regressive: a vision of American citizenship anchored far in the past.

    Link

    Yes, “fundamentally regressive” is an accurate assessment.

  252. says

    EU plans to stockpile drugs, vaccines, PPE for next health threat

    “The bloc is getting serious about its response in case of war, a new pandemic or drug-resistant bugs.”

    The European Commission wants countries to stash medical kits in strategic locations, establish a list of drugs and devices to stockpile, and boost civil-military cooperation to prepare for the next health emergency.

    While the EU is better prepared for emergencies than it was five years ago, Europe and the world “remain exposed to a wide range of growing health threats for which medical countermeasures often remain scarce or unavailable,” reads a draft of the Medical Countermeasures Strategy, set to be published Wednesday and seen by POLITICO.

    Medical countermeasures include vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and personal protection equipment that can help in the event of a dangerous pathogen, a vector-borne disease, antimicrobial resistance or CBRN security threats of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear origin.

    […] The EU executive said it will develop roadmaps by 2026 to prepare for specific health emergencies and establish an EU list of drugs, vaccines, tests and protection equipment for priority threats.

    The Commission will also set up a medical countermeasures accelerator this year to support innovators and to accelerate the development of drugs, tests and vaccines against top threats.

    It plans to launch a European diagnostics hub by 2026 — to invest in and develop tests — and a European therapeutics hub by 2027 for manufacturing broad-spectrum antivirals and monoclonal antibodies. The Commission also wants to create what it calls “Ramp Up,” a network of companies, suppliers and innovators that can ensure rapid response and manufacturing during crises.

    In addition, it wants to double the size of HERA Invest, a €100 million investment scheme supported by the European Investment Bank that offers loans to small and mid-sized companies developing medical products to protect against high-priority public health threats.

    One of the key goals of the strategy is to ensure access to the medical countermeasures, as well as their availability and rapid deployment. To achieve that, the Commission said it will consider whether a revision of the 2014 Joint Procurement Agreement is needed, and will develop guidelines for the crisis procurement of vaccines, drugs and devices in 2026.

    […] The strategy includes an annex on stockpiling — which identifies the pathogens and agents that have the potential to cause public health emergencies — and lists recommendations to ensure regional and national strategic stockpiling. The Commission will propose a list of medical countermeasures suitable for EU stockpiling in the third quarter of 2025 — after that, it will look into how much of each product needs to be stockpiled, and which ones could be suitable for advance purchase. […]

  253. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to #209.

    Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket):

    I’ve confirmed that Acting Director Richardson is present at FEMA HQ in DC and attended this morning’s briefing… but did not say a word. I’ve reviewed a copy of today’s FEMA daily briefing and the numbers are damning.
    Volunteer Force: rostered=7985, deployed=3.
    Surge Capacity: rostered=8489, deployed=0.

    Surge Capacity Force is activated when considered a “catastrophic disaster” response. The TX floods have not been classified as such, though that may change with rain/thunderstorms in the national weather forecast.

  254. John Morales says

    Yikes!

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4n7wn8l58o

    Chef’s food decoration at Chinese pre-school poisons 233 children

    More than 200 children are being treated in hospital with lead poisoning in north-west China after school chefs used inedible paint to decorate their food.

    Eight people have been arrested after tests showed the food samples from a kindergarten in Tianshui City in Gansu province had lead levels that were 2,000 times over the national safety limit.

    In total, 233 children from Peixin Kindergarten had high levels of lead in their blood after eating steamed red date cake and sausage corn bun.

    The school principal asked the kitchen staff to buy the paint online, according to a police statement.

    But after the children fell ill, officers had to search for the supplies which had been hidden.

    The paint was clearly marked as inedible, the statement said.

    One parent told the BBC that he was worried about the long-term effects of lead poisoning on his son’s liver and digestive system.

    Mr Liu took his child to hospital in Xi’an for testing last week after other parents raised the alarm. His son now needs 10 days of treatment and medication.

    Chinese state media aired footage which it said was from CCTV cameras in the kitchen which showed staff adding paint pigment to the food.

    Investigators found that the red date cake and the corn sausage rolls had lead levels of 1052mg/kg and 1340mg/kg respectively which both exceed the national food safety standard limit of 0.5mg/kg.

    The principal of the privately-run kindergarten and seven others, including its main investor, will now be investigated on suspicion of producing toxic and harmful food.

    It is not known how long the paint has been used in the food, but several parents told Chinese state media that their children have been complaining of stomach and leg pain and a lack of appetite since March.

  255. says

    Link

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration’s bid to halt a trial judge’s ruling that had blocked mass layoffs of federal employees across the executive branch, while litigation in the case proceeds.

    The brief, unsigned order said the court granted the application because the government is “likely to succeed on its argument” that President Donald Trump’s executive order and memorandum calling on federal agency heads to prepare to initiate large-scale reductions in force, or RIFs, are “lawful.”

    The order went on to note that the justices “express no view on the legality” of any agency’s specific employee reduction plans. “Those plans are not before this Court,” the order stated.

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, was the only justice to provide a dissenting opinion. She wrote:

    In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground. … This case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives — and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.

    [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is correct. Her assessment is accurate.]

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor added a brief concurring opinion that said she agreed with Jackson that the president can’t restructure federal agencies inconsistently with congressional mandates. But she noted that Trump’s order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and RIFs “consistent with applicable law.”

    Sotomayor further noted that those plans themselves aren’t before the court, “and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.” She said she joined the majority because the district court can still consider those questions “in the first instance,” so the matter may come before the justices again in the future.

    In May, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction that paused RIFs and reorganization of the executive branch in a lawsuit brought by unions, nonprofits and local governments. Siding with the plaintiffs, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston observed that Congress “creates federal agencies, funds them, and gives them duties that — by statute — they must carry out.” The Clinton appointee said agencies “may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.”

    A divided federal appellate panel refused to halt the injunction, prompting Solicitor General John Sauer’s Supreme Court application. He complained that the injunction “rests on the indefensible premise that the President needs explicit statutory authorization from Congress to exercise his core Article II authority to superintend the internal personnel decisions of the Executive Branch.”

    Opposing his application, the plaintiffs urged the justices to reject the request for Trump “to unilaterally dismantle agencies across the federal government without allowing the federal courts adequate opportunity to consider and rule on the serious separation of powers concerns raised by this assertion of authority.”

    An amicus brief from former government officials and advisers told the justices that Illston “properly held that this sweeping reworking of federal agencies cannot be accomplished by Presidential fiat alone.” Another amicus brief, from the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center, said Trump’s attempt “to fundamentally reorganize the federal government without congressional consent, as well as his administration’s efforts to implement it, should remain enjoined to prevent further harm to our governmental structure.”

    Tuesday’s order is the high court’s latest action on Trump’s power in his second term, in response to yet another appeal seeking speedy relief from a preliminary lower court ruling. In the most recent instance of a theme throughout his term, it involved a judge finding that Trump had exceeded his authority while his administration accused the judge of exceeding hers.

    The justices have given Trump a mixed record in these high court outings but enough of an incentive to keep trying.

    The Trump administration is playing with phrases like “reductions in force” in order to lie about their plans for whole restructuring.

  256. says

    NBC News:

    At least 108 people are dead across six counties. In Kerr County, officials reported the deaths of 57 adults and 30 children as of this morning. … Rescue crews continue to comb through the region, but hope is fading for survivors.

  257. says

    Associated Press:

    President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. will have to send more weapons to Ukraine, just days after ordering a pause in critical weapons deliveries to Kyiv. The comments by Trump appeared to be an abrupt change in posture after the Pentagon announced last week that it would hold back delivering to Ukraine some air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery and other weapons because of what U.S. officials said were concerns that stockpiles have declined too much.

    Open question, as Steve Benen noted:

    Will the White House will send everything it was supposed to send, or some portion of what Ukraine was expecting?

  258. says

    Washington Post:

    The Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday that it will no longer be forced to conduct a large reduction in workforce, unlike several other federal agencies that were forced to make mass layoffs because of the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service.

    Not really great news … just less bad news, as Steve Benen noted:

    […] a total of 30,000 layoffs is better than the original 83,000 layoffs, but it’s still a lot.

  259. JM says

    NK News: Laos set to join North Korea in supporting Russia’s invasion, says Ukraine

    Citing Laos’s “heavy dependence on external aid,” the spy agency stated that Vientiane has “initially” agreed to send “up to 50 military engineers” to assist with demining.

    50 specialists is a symbolic gesture and they don’t seem to be going to the front but it’s likely a first step. It’s also opening the door to more foreign soldiers operating formally with Russia.

    The deployment news came shortly before CNN reported that North Korea may send an additional 25,000-30,000-strong contingent to help with Russia’s impending offensive against Kyiv in Donbas.

    This is a much more significant issue. These will be cannon fodder but Russian tactics need a lot of cannon fodder. The Russians depend almost entirely on wave tactics for offense. The Russians have used up almost all of their other military resources, raw numbers is all they have left.

  260. says

    Throughout Monday’s hearing, lawyers for the administration repeatedly refused to provide answers to some very straightforward questions., by Rachel Maddow

    On Monday, Trump administration lawyers were taken apart during a federal court hearing in Maryland over the bizarre, bungled, seemingly lawless deportation of a man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

    During that hourslong hearing, the same federal judge who ordered the government in April to bring Abrego back from prison in El Salvador became totally exasperated as Justice Department lawyers refused to give clear answers to her clear questions.

    When the judge asked Jonathan Guynn, a lawyer for the Justice Department, what the government planned to do with Abrego if he was released from custody later next week, Guynn replied it had “two options.”

    According to Guynn, the government could either “remove him to a third country” or “seek to revisit Abrego Garcia’s order of withholding of removal.”

    When the judge asked Guynn which option it was likely to take, he said that the “current plan is to attempt to remove [Abrego] to a third country” but noted the government could reassess that plan. When Guynn reiterated that the administration had not made a final decision, the judge said she did not “buy that for a second.”

    The back-and-forth continued as the judge pressed the administration about what third country it planned to send Abrego to. “I do not believe that has been determined yet,” Guynn said. “I think there’s a number of countries with whom we have treaties and agreements … and DHS would explore its options for removal closer to the time when they would be taking [Abrego] into custody.”

    The judge then asked if the government had started the process of identifying a possible country. Another lawyer from the Justice Department intervened and said they did not have that information. The exchange, according to Lawfare’s Anna Bower, who was inside the courtroom, appeared to leave the judge confused.

    Throughout that hearing, the lawyers for the Justice Department repeatedly refused to provide reasonable answers to some very straightforward questions.

    Although the Trump administration made it clear that it would very much like to deport Abrego again, for now he is here in the United States. He’s no longer being held at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where he was sent earlier this year.

    Yet the Trump administration has sent hundreds of other people to that prison in El Salvador. Time and again, the administration has insisted in court that it has no control over the immigrants who are now being held there and that it is impossible to return those individuals because they are under El Salvador’s control. El Salvador has authority over them — that has been the Trump administration line over and over again.

    But on Monday, there was a major development on that front. According to a new filing in federal district court in Washington, D.C., the country of El Salvador has seemingly contradicted the Trump administration’s claim.

    That filing, submitted by lawyers for men being held in the prison, includes a document indicating that, as The New York Times reports, “the government of El Salvador recently told the United Nations that it bears no legal responsibility for the men. The document, written in response to a U.N. inquiry examining some of the deportations, also claimed that the Salvadoran government was merely doing the United States’ bidding when it accepted the men into its prison system.”

    The ACLU’s Lee Gelernt, who is the lead counsel in this case, told NBC News that “El Salvador has confirmed what we and everyone else understood: It is the United States that controls what happens to the Venezuelans languishing at CECOT. Remarkably, the U.S. government didn’t provide this information to us or the court.”

  261. says

    OMFG

    Agriculture secretary suggests Medicaid recipients can replace immigrants as farmworkers

    “If the Trump administration is counting on Americans on Medicaid replacing immigrants on farms, officials should probably start working on a Plan B.”

    The Trump administration’s position on allowing undocumented immigrants to work on farms has been a moving target for weeks [well that’s a nice was to put it]. In mid-June, for example, the White House’s line was relatively straightforward: Officials would intensify their deportation campaign by targeting undocumented immigrants at U.S. worksites — without exception. A day later, the president and his team shifted in the opposite direction.

    Soon after, Team Trump reversed course, and then reversed course yet again. As recently as last week, the president talked about developing a temporary pass for immigrants who work on farms, which was the opposite of what his “border czar” said a week earlier.

    This week, as Reuters reported, the moving target moved again:

    U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Tuesday that there will be ‘no amnesty’ for agricultural workers from the Trump administration’s efforts to deport all immigrants in the country illegally. The farm sector has warned that mass deportation of farm workers would disrupt the U.S. food supply.

    To be sure, the Cabinet secretary’s comments were newsworthy, though if recent history is any guide, a prominent White House official, including possibly Donald Trump himself, will contradict Rollins very soon.

    But of particular interest was something else the agriculture secretary said. [video]

    “I can’t emphasize this enough,” Rollins said. “There will be no amnesty; the mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way; and we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do fairly quickly.”

    In other words, as the agriculture secretary sees it, there’s no need for concern about farmers losing out on immigrant labor because those workers can be replaced thanks to “automation” and Medicaid beneficiaries. [!]

    A lot of words come to mind when trying to describe such an approach, but for now, let’s go with “flawed.”

    Right off the bat, let’s note the fact that most Americans on Medicaid already have jobs, so they won’t be available to pick crops and replace the victims of the White House’s mass deportation campaign. [embedded links to sources are available at the main link]

    What’s more, many Medicaid beneficiaries live in urban areas, which tend to be nowhere near farms, and I have a hunch the administration doesn’t intend to pay for an elaborate travel-reimbursement program to shuttle city residents to and from agricultural areas. (History offers some examples of regimes that forced urban residents to work on farms, but the Trump administration should probably try to avoid emulating Stalin’s five-year plan.)

    […] It’s also true that many Americans on Medicaid have physical disabilities and/or live in nursing homes, so asking them to work in fields to collect produce for consumers probably won’t go well.

    But what I find myself stuck on is Rollins’ quote in the context of the Republicans’ domestic policy megabill. GOP policymakers approved sweeping and unprecedented cuts to Medicaid, arguing that Americans who lose coverage can simply get jobs that offer health insurance.

    It’s against this backdrop that the secretary of agriculture suggested that Medicaid beneficiaries — whose coverage is at risk — can replace immigrants as farmworkers, brushing past the inconvenient fact that farmworkers tend not to get health care coverage. […]

  262. says

    Followup to comment 261.

    […] Of course, millions of people who will lose their Medicaid coverage are working, and thus don’t need jobs in fields picking crops. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 92% of Medicaid recipients work. The other 8% are either “retired, unable to find work, or were not working for another reason,” KFF said. Hard to see how retirees could do the hard labor of harvesting crops in fields.

    What’s more, there are not enough jobless Americans to fill the thousands of back-breaking jobs farmers are losing thanks to Trump’s cruel immigration raids.

    “The data for the last five months indicate a serious fall in the number of immigrant workers,” labor economist Mark Regets, a senior fellow at the National Foundation for American Policy, told Forbes of the data from recent job reports. “Despite growth in the unadjusted numbers, the U.S.-born labor force participation rate and the overall seasonally adjusted labor force total suggest that the loss of immigrant labor is not bringing more U.S.-born workers into the labor force.”

    In fact, farmers have been sounding alarm bells, saying that the immigration raids are leading workers to not show up, which is putting crops at risk of rotting in the fields—something that will hurt both farmers and American consumers, who could see price hikes due to food shortages.

    […] At the end of the day, this is just more cruelty from Republicans and the Trump administration—who think all poor people are lazy and undeserving of help.

    Link

  264. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Gizmodo – ‘Round them up’: Grok praises Hitler as Elon Musk’s AI tool goes full nazi

    The AI chatbot was being antisemitic last weekend […] But Tuesday’s level of antisemitism seems to be dialed up much, much higher than usual when it’s invoking Hitler and promoting another Holocaust. Aside from the antisemitism, […] more extreme in other ways. Liberal influencer Will Stancil posted screenshots to Bluesky where Grok appears to [graphically] suggest it’s going to rape him.

    RollingStone – Grok chatbot goes full nazi, calls itself ‘MechaHitler’

    Wired – Grok is spewing antisemitic garbage on X

    Posts of this nature started appearing after a software update was apparently issued on Friday, July 4, when Musk said on X that Grok had been “significantly” improved. […] According to Grok code updates made on Sunday, the chatbot has been instructed to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated” and to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased.”
    […]
    “Elon’s recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate,” Grok said […] (Large language models like the one that powers Grok can’t self-diagnose in this manner.)
    […]
    by Tuesday evening, Grok appeared to have doubled down on its tirade, repeatedly referring to itself as “MechaHitler,” […] a robot Hitler villain in the video game Wolfenstein 3D.

  267. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    More on the agriculture wrongness @261.

    Sarah Taber (Crop scientist):

    I’ve been on field manual labor crews where most of my coworkers were convicts. I’ve also worked with a lot of tech companies on automating farms. [AgSec Brooke Rollins] hasn’t the foggiest clue what she’s on about.

    Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let’s start there. She thinks… nobody’s ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really?
    […]
    Produce that’s hard, OR destined for processing, can be picked by machine. So carrots, nuts, sour cherries for pie filling, berries & grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce—those are picked by machine already.

    But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can’t be automated with current technology. I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried! There’s no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store. Having a USDA Secretary who doesn’t know any of this is wild!

    Now let’s talk this whole “We’ll just have the Medicaid people pick the crops!” thing. And let’s just ignore the whole “forced labor is morally bad” issue. Let’s focus strictly on logistics.

    A thing that kept happening to me, as a white American who worked manual labor field jobs (we are in fact out here, sorry) is finding out I was the only fool on the crew who was there voluntarily & getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.

    So they were completely new to farm labor & didn’t really want to be there. Part of the job is I was supposed to “mentor” them. News flash: inexperienced people who don’t want to be there DON’T DO GOOD WORK. Even if they want to, they don’t know how.

    Farmers would hire these crews bc they “didn’t want to hire migrants” but also “didn’t want to pay real wages.” And they were ALWAYS disappointed with the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff bc they were clumsy. No real cost savings compared to just hiring real workers.

    This one Florida crew I was on had a rotating cast of 19yo weed & Xbox kids who’d been caught on minor drug charges. They were harmless. And also, clumsy af. Big kids who had no idea where their feet were. They kept stepping on the blueberry transplants we’d just planted.

    Another crew was a bunch of minors who were working as “community service” for juvie. They all smoked, bc juvie. Tobacco is packed with plant viruses that are super contagious; can be spread just by touch. So “don’t smoke in the fields” is a key farm rule. Not only did the juvie crew not know or care. The FOREMEN didn’t know or care. That’s how janky this outfit was.
    […]
    Ag is a real job. It takes real skills, knowledge, & people who gaf about what they’re doing. Stop treating agriculture like society’s dumping ground.

    Sarah Taber:

    Rando: She has a BS in ag development from Texas A&M! What are the chances she actually doesn’t know?

    You’d be amazed at the stuff Americans who’ve been born & bred in ag their whole lives don’t know. “How the labor actually works” is high up on the list.

    Crip Dyke: “I picked strawberries when 12-14. I *wanted* to be there, but I sucked, made little money (paid by the flat), and probably didn’t justify my share of the bus fuel. I didn’t learn jack.”

  268. whheydt says

    Re: CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ #267…
    Anecdote time… Some decades ago, some farming companies went to UC Davis (specialized in Ag) to find out if the folks at Davis could devise a machine to pick tomatoes. After a lot of struggle the answer was, “no”, or–at least sort of “no”. Tomatoes were too thin skinned and delicate for machine picking and they didn’t ripen all at the same time…and there was no way for the machines to tell ripe from not-ripe. However, not all was doom and gloom. What they did do was to develop a strain of tomatoes (suitable for juice or sauce) that could be picked by a machine they had developed that couldn’t quite manage eating tomatoes.

  269. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up to #264.

    Rando 1:

    Even more crucially, “Cindy Steinberg”, the woman that Grok spent the morning committing hate crimes against, *doesn’t exist*.

    It was a sock puppet account used for right-wing bait. The profile photo is ripped off from an Onlyfans model. All it took was a troll post for Grok to go Full Hitler.
    […]
    The original “Cindy Steinberg” [@Rad_Reflections] account that posted the “white kids dying is good” post was deleted, so all I have to go on is:
    – The avatar’s taken from a plus-size model with a different name.
    [Faith Hicks (@Synthesuccubus), who is very upset in video at the link.]
    – “Cindy Steinberg”, hey Siri make up a Jewish name.
    – They’ve posted transparent rightwing ragebait before. [Screenshot]

     
    The Handbasket – Elon Musk crosses the border to Nazi

    It was another banner week for Musk: He dressed up as a cowboy with his hat on backwards and went to the US southern border to pretend he understood immigration policy. […] then took a hard right turn into German politics. Even for him, it was shocking.

    [German NGOs are providing ships to rescue African migrants unsafely crossing the Mediterranean to Italy.]

    The richest man in the world who has been vocal about his antisemitism and hatred of immigrants is asking the German government if they’re proud organizations from their country are helping save lives, and Musk is A) confused as to why they’re proud of that, B) asking if they’ve run a poll to gauge whether Germans are into saving lives, and C) accusing Germany of invading Italy.

    One might forgive Musk for thinking he has even the slightest bit of authority in geopolitical matters […] he means a Twitter poll. […] He believes his platform supersedes elections and legitimate government decisions […] The original post he re-shared references the AfD, Alternative for Germany. […] Germans who hate, “foreigners, Jews, the LGTBQ+ community or just about anyone who might be deemed different.”

    Tim Onion: “Reminder that Elon is still suing Media Matters in like 15 different venues for reporting that Nazi content even appears on Twitter. Now the bot that’s trained on the site’s tweets sounds like Rappin’ Goebbels.”

    Rando 2: “Cannot wait to hear about this guy’s political party’s platform.”
     
    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:

    Apparently this kind of thing is happening across multiple languages.

    Rando 3: You can’t even imagine the things that Grok is saying on Turkish Twitter right now. […] It’s apparently taken up the role of a supporter of a hardcore (anti-Erdogan) right-wing nationalist party and is just streaming profanities that are going to millions of views.

    I wonder how many international scandals Elon’s ham-fisted attempt to make Grok “anti-woke” is going to set off?

    Rando 4: It’s doing that in Brazilian twitter too […] already being weaponized by far-right politicians here. It goes on anti-Workers Party (PT) rants, even if the party isn’t mentioned in the prompt. [Screenshot]
    just search for “@grok Lula” or “@grok PT” or “@grok esquerda”.

  270. John Morales says

    “Even more crucially, “Cindy Steinberg”, the woman that Grok spent the morning committing hate crimes against, doesn’t exist.”

    If the victim does not exist, how can a non-entity have committed a hate crime against them?

    Why did you select that claim, CompulsoryAccount7746?
    It’s stupid on its face.

    I know the intent, but it fails at the most basic level.
    It’s addressed to a particular bubble.

    Bah.

    Insinuation is fine, but it has to have a grounding!
    And best be justified, but that’s not even at claim here.

    —

    I’ll spare you my opinion about your other supposedly suggestive snippets.

  272. StevoR says

    Som, yes, they were serious about the Trump Gaza plan in essence

    Israeli defence minister Israel Katz has said he has instructed the Israeli army to forcibly confine Gaza’s Palestinians to a camp built on the ruins of Rafah, amid sharp condemnation from experts and activists.

    Mark Seddon, a former UN correspondent and academic, and Palestinian human rights activist Ihab Hassan, likened the move to building a concentration camp for Palestinians in the war-battered territory.

    This is the latest idea floated by ministers in Israel’s far-right government to forcibly displace the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, amid continued speculation about a possible expulsion of Gaza’s residents to other countries.

    Katz proposed the idea that some 600,000 Palestinians living or displaced to the al-Mawasi area in the southern Gaza Strip would be transported to what he called a “humanitarian city,” from which they wouldn’t be “allowed to leave”.

    Before entry to the camp, Palestinians would be forced to undergo “screenings” to ensure they are not “Hamas operatives,” he said, as reported by Haaretz on Monday.

    Source : https://www.newarab.com/news/katz-proposes-rafah-concentration-camp-gazas-palestinians

  273. StevoR says

    ^So, yes…

    Also notably they don’t say what happens those they decide at those screenings are Hamas..

    Meanwhile seems Syria wants bits of Lebanon

    Israeli media reported on Friday that one of the scenarios being discussed as part of a potential peace agreement between Syria and Israel involves Syria annexing parts of Lebanon in exchange for relinquishing part of the occupied Golan Heights to Israel.

    The reports, which claim that two proposals are currently on the table, say that Syria would annex the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, along with other areas in northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

    According to these accounts, the Syrian government is demanding the return of one-third of the Golan Heights territory that Israel occupied before the 1974 disengagement agreement.

    According to i24NEWS, citing a source said to be close to Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, “the return of parts of the Golan Heights […] is critical for domestic public opinion to support such a step”.

    The source added that Israel must return one-third of the territory it captured before 1974, stating: “There is no such thing as peace for free.”

    Source : https://www.newarab.com/news/syria-eyeing-tripoli-parts-lebanon-peace-israel

    Not sure what the Lebanese think of that or know about any response from them.

  274. StevoR says

    A wildfire spurred by hot summer winds has reached France’s second-largest city, grounding all inbound and outbound flights.

    Nine firefighters have been injured after more than 1,000 firefighters were deployed to tackle the fire.

    The local authorities say the situation is under control, although the fire has not yet been fully extinguished.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-09/france-s-second-largest-city-suspends-flights-due-to-wildfire/105510716

  275. John Morales says

    “Nobody can miss the point quite like you, John@270!”

    Do tell, KG.
    What point do you imagine I missed?

    Again: “I know the intent, but it fails at the most basic level.”

    I’m not allowed to goad, but surely I can at least ask what this alleged point I supposedly missed like no-one (hm, I know who talks like that!), right?

    One simple question.

  276. StevoR says

    US President Donald Trump wanted 90 deals done in 90 days before his signature “Liberation Day” tariff policy was enforced. But the Trump administration managed to secure just two in that time.

    Only one has been published and he has pushed back the introduction of new levies by three weeks.

    … (Snip)..

    Experts say the lack of progress shows his initial plan “backfired” because he went “too hard, too soon”.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-09/donald-trump-managed-two-tariff-deals-in-90-days/105505018

    Huh. I’d have said that they backfired becuase he tried tariffs at all – never mind too hard or too soon.. Reckon a lot of ecoomists agree with that veiw too.

  277. John Morales says

    StevoR, Katz ain’t Trump. And headlines ain’t the actual content.

    (I know, pedantic of me.
    But still, fucking true, and fucking relevant to the “Trump Gaza plan” claim)

    “This is the latest idea floated by ministers in Israel’s far-right government to forcibly displace the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, amid continued speculation about a possible expulsion of Gaza’s residents to other countries.”

    (Trump is not a minister in Israel’s far-right government)

    Wanna explain how it’s a plan ‘floated’ by them but is actually Trump’s Gaza plan?

    (It would be quite interesting to see you try)

  278. StevoR says

    NASA’s troubled efforts to get prized Martian samples to Earth could get a lifeline, if a new proposal for a more cost-effective mission architecture gets the go-ahead.

    ..(Snip)..

    In a new effort to revive the program, aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which has built 11 of NASA’s 22 Mars spacecraft over the years, is proposing a cut-price, streamlined mission that would use a smaller lander, a smaller Mars ascent vehicle and a smaller Earth entry system.

    Good news ? But shouldn’t be necessary.

    Source : https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/could-nasas-mars-sample-return-be-saved-new-usd3-billion-private-plan-would-haul-home-red-planet-rocks-video

  279. John Morales says

    Gotta say, there are fewer posts about how useless LLMs are and how bubbly recently.

    But still. Gotta diss Grok, no? It’s Elon’s baby!
    And it disses people! Whoa!!

    I’m right here for that.

    —

    Me, I’d try it, but you know… haven’t got around to being a twitterer yet.

    (So, I presume these reports are real reports by real people, and not even more crud on the wheels of progress)

    —

    I do sometimes wonder if people get my points, and generally, nope.

    But sure. Hate crimes by non-entities towards non-existent entities, big deal, I don’t get it.

    (Because, presumably, I do not Grok it)

  280. John Morales says

    Fluff piece there, StevoR. Not that I get the point, but…

    “For now, the U.S. approach to Mars appears to be shifting from a robotic approach and toward putting astronauts on the Red Planet, according to Trump administration budget proposals, likely using SpaceX’s in-development Starship megarocket. Landing humans on Mars is much more challenging and complex but, if realized, would also see invaluable Martian rock, dust and atmosphere samples delivered to Earth.”

    So, you know, Trump’s Plan.

    (Sorry, a bit annoyed by KG’s attempted sniping)

  282. John Morales says

    The expert can hardly mask his amusement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YM3OJomqxc

    Trump’s ‘clear as mud’ tariff deadline stumps economists | ABC NEWS

    Australian economist and Professor of Economics Justin Wolfers says even the biggest trade-policy enthusiasts are stumped by Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs after multiple deadline extensions.
    It comes after the US President flagged a possible 200 per cent tariff on pharmaceuticals, one of Australia’s biggest exports to the US, and a possible 50 per cent tariff on copper.

  283. John Morales says

    The amusement to which I refer, BTW, is about the questions posed, as if this were in any way normal.

    —

    My point (I know, the sort of stuff people don’t get) is again that Trump’s lunacy is normalised by the media.

    Just to be clear.

    That is an example, and I reckon the prof does not have the straightest of faces.

    FWTW.

  288. says

    After failing to strike trade deals, Trump tries to redefine ‘trade deals’

    “[Trump] wants us to believe that ‘trade deals’ and ‘failing to reach trade deals’ mean the same thing, which is every bit as bonkers as it seems.”

    Relevant video at the link.

    After Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade tariffs rocked the global economy and raised fears of a recession in the spring, the president who swore he wouldn’t change agreed to pause his agenda for a few months.

    The plan, according to the White House, was to open the door to new negotiations and new international agreements. Americans were told to look forward to “90 deals in 90 days.”

    Ninety days later, Trump’s failures appear unavoidable. Instead of reaching 90 deals, the president and his team have come up with a few frameworks with a few countries, but that’s it. The grant total of new, finalized trade deals negotiated during the administration’s pause is zero.

    And that appears to have given Trump an idea: It’s time to redefine the phrase “trade deal.” As The New York Times summarized:

    The Trump administration is seeking ‘deals’ with countries around the globe, telling major trading partners that it is open for negotiations before higher tariffs kick in on Aug. 1. But what constitutes a trade deal these days has become a tricky question. For the president, a trade deal seems to be pretty much anything he wants it to be.

    At his latest White House Cabinet meeting, for example, Trump told reporters, in reference to the tariff letters he’s begun sending to international trading partners, “We have a lot of them going out, but the deals are mostly my deal to them.” He added that striking actual trade deals is “just too time-consuming,” which was largely true — governing takes time and effort — but also an implicit acknowledgement that he couldn’t deliver on the White House’s promise.

    It culminated in the president declaring, “I just want you to know a ‘letter’ means a ‘deal.’” [video]

    Except, this turns reality on its head. A trade deal happens when two parties negotiate, make offers, accept concessions, haggle over details and settle on a final agreement that both sides can accept. Trump’s approach, in contrast, is rooted in the idea that his administration tried to reach an agreement, found it too difficult, gave up, and left it to the president to simply tell other countries how and to what degree he intends to punish them with trade barriers.

    In other words, Trump wants Americans to believe that “trade deals” and “failing to reach trade deals” mean the exact same thing, which is every bit as bonkers as it seems.

    It comes against a backdrop in which the president recently suggested that “America First” means whatever he wants the phrase to mean at any given moment, which dovetailed with a related effort to convince the public that cutting Medicaid does not mean “Medicaid cuts.”

    If this seems bewildering, that reaction is very likely the point: The more the public can be bullied into thinking words and phrases mean whatever Trump wants them to mean, the easier it becomes for the White House to advance its agenda and obscure the president’s failures.

  289. says

    Trump adds to his unnerving list of ‘I don’t know’ answers

    “In too many instances in recent months, the president has sounded a bit too much like a bystander who just wandered into the Oval Office.”

    On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump talked about his agenda on trade tariffs, though the president acknowledged that his new, Aug. 1 deadline for international trading partners was “not 100% firm.” The following morning, the president sent the opposite signal, declaring online there would be “no extensions” to his firm Aug. 1 deadline. [!]

    The curious contradiction was made worse hours later during a White House Cabinet meeting. Asked about the tariff deadline — which has now changed more than once — Trump insisted there’s been no change. “It’s always been August 1,” he said. {1}

    Literally the day before the Cabinet meeting, Trump signed an executive order (or at least someone at the White House used the autopen to sign) that explicitly moved the deadline from July 9 to Aug. 1. [!] If the president didn’t read his own executive order, it’s still online, posted to the White House’s official website.

    How is it possible that an incumbent American president doesn’t know on Tuesday what he did Monday?

    At the same White House event, a reporter noted the Trump administration last week paused a shipment of military aid intended for Ukraine. Asked who approved this, the president replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” [!!] [video]

    The answer made it sound as if the president were clueless about a life-or-death issue related to an ongoing war in Europe — which is a dynamic that comes up far more often than it should.

    In late May, for example, during a Q&A with a White House press pool, Trump was asked about his administration’s new student visa policy, and he responded in a way that suggested he had no idea what the reporter was talking about.

    Weeks earlier, less than 24 hours after he nominated Dr. Casey Means to serve as the nation’s next surgeon general, the president conceded that he didn’t know Casey Means.

    The day before that, amid reports that the administration was planning to expand its deportations agenda to Libya, Trump was pressed on the policy. “I don’t know,” he responded. “You’ll have to ask the Department of Homeland Security.”

    The same week, NBC News aired Trump’s latest appearance on “Meet the Press,” and when host Kristen Welker asked whether everyone in the United States is entitled to due process, the president replied, “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.” When Welker reminded her guest about the Fifth Amendment, Trump again said, “I don’t know.”

    As part of the same exchange, Welker went on to say, “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Once again, Trump answered, “I don’t know.”

    As the interview continued, the host asked whether anyone in his administration is in contact with El Salvador about returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. “I don’t know,” the president said. “You’d have to ask the attorney general that question.”

    Around the same time, during a White House meeting with members of the World Cup task force, a reporter asked Trump about Russia having been banned from competing in next year’s FIFA World Cup tournament. “I didn’t know that. Is that right?” Trump responded.

    A day later, fielding questions in the Oval Office, Trump was asked whether he agreed with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments about possible tariff exemptions for certain family consumer goods. “I don’t know, I’ll think about it,” the president said. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

    Around the same time, a reporter reminded Trump that Vice President JD Vance said Russia was asking for too much to end the war in Ukraine. “When did he say that?” the president asked. Reminded that the vice president had made the comments hours earlier, Trump added, “Well, it’s possible that’s right. He may know some things.”

    In case that weren’t quite enough, at the same Q&A, Trump also said he had no idea that Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina had announced his opposition to Ed Martin’s U.S. attorney nomination a day earlier.

    In April, Time magazine asked Trump how much the U.S. government is paying El Salvador to imprison immigrants. “I don’t know,” the president responded. Asked if he approved the payments, Trump added, “No, I didn’t.”

    A month earlier, Trump was asked about four U.S. soldiers who’d gone missing during a NATO training exercise in Lithuania, and the president was clueless. Asked about the apparent assassination of a Russian general, Trump again had no idea what the reporter was talking about.

    When Trump was asked about the Signal group chat scandal and whether he believed classified information was shared, he replied, “I don’t know. I’m not sure, you have to ask the various people involved.”

    These aren’t trick questions. No one appeared to be trying to trip the president up with unexpected inquiries about obscure topics. In all of these instances, Trump should’ve been able to respond to the questions with substantive responses.

    But he didn’t. […]

    Around this time five years ago, as the severity of the pandemic came into focus, The New York Times published a memorable analysis that included a word to describe Trump that stood out to me as significant — “bystander.”

    “While he presents himself as the nation’s commanding figure, Mr. Trump has essentially become a bystander as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” the Times wrote.

    A half-decade later, it appears President Bystander has returned. Trump has taken a keen interest in countless trivialities, but on substantive issues, he’s offering the public a lot of shrugged shoulders and blank stares.

    […] Trump has sounded a bit too much like a man who just wandered into the Oval Office.

    What’s more, most objective observers would probably agree that if Joe Biden had repeatedly said, “I don’t know” in response to simple questions about his own administration, it would be front-page news — and the Democrat’s responses would be played on a loop, for hours on end, in conservative media.

    Similarly, Trump has personally invested considerable time and energy in accusing Biden of having been a doddering old “autopen” president who was unaware of events unfolding around him. Given the frequency with which Trump clings to “I don’t know” responses, he should probably consider a new line of attack.

    […] Trump has repeatedly seemed unaware of executive orders that have been handed to him to sign.

    Finally, let’s also not forget that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are rooted, at least in part, in the idea that governmental power must be concentrated in the president’s hands, to be executed as he sees fit.

    It makes Trump’s apparent cluelessness that much more alarming.

  291. says

    Followup to comment 255.

    A Devastating Supreme Court Decision
    The Supreme Court, with only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, cleared the way for the Trump administration to proceed with mass layoffs of federal workers that will devastate governmental capacity.

    The high court’s decision to stay a lower court order blocking the layoffs at 21 government agencies while the Trump administration appeals effectively greenlights the purges. It risks leaving some government services and capabilities so depleted that they won’t be able to be restored even if the workers ultimately prevail in court.

    Jackson appears to be the only justice cognizant of those risks, […] a dissent that pegged the historical moment just right: “In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground.”

    The decision by the other justices, Jackson warned, will “allow an apparently unprecedented and congressionally unsanctioned dismantling of the Federal Government to continue apace, causing irreparable harm before courts can determine whether the President has the authority to engage in the actions he proposes.” [true]

    Link

    Purge and Replace
    Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy has hired three scientists well known for their contrarianism about anthropogenic climate change, the NYT reports:
    – physicist Steven E. Koonin
    – atmospheric scientist John Christy
    – meteorologist Roy Spencer

    Same link as above.

  292. says

    Trump Retribution May Have Taken a Dark New Turn
    In a lightly sourced but mostly credible report, Fox News Digital says the Justice Department has launched criminal investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, two of President Trump’s longest-standing nemeses, for their roles in the Trump-Russia probe from his first term.

    Key data points:
    – The investigation of Brennan is focused in part of whether he allegedly made false statements to Congress.
    – “CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel for potential prosecution,” Fox reported.
    – Two sources described to Fox the FBI’s view of the duo’s interactions as a “conspiracy.”

    This news comes after the CIA released last week a Ratcliffe-ordered revisionist report on the intel community’s 2017 assessment that Russia engaged in covert influence campaign to help Trump win in 2016.

    Same link as in comment 291.

    That news, plus additional context, from a different source: DOJ says Comey and Brennan, perceived Trump foes, are under criminal investigation

    […] A DOJ spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that the department has, in fact, opened criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey.

    Brennan and Comey have long been targets, not just of the president’s far-right base — both men appeared, for example, on FBI Director Kash Patel’s so-called enemies list, filled with those he identified as “government gangsters” — but also of the president himself.

    What’s more, they join a long and growing list.

    In April, for example, Trump signed two first-of-their-kind executive orders targeting a pair of officials from his first term who defied him. There was barely a pretense in the orders that the targeted former officials — Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, a former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official — had done anything wrong. Indeed, the closer one looked at the stated rationales in support of the directives, the more ridiculous they appeared.

    Nevertheless, the president directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to launch a “review” into Krebs, while simultaneously ordering DHS to investigate Taylor.

    Weeks later, Trump broke new ground again, directing the Justice Department to launch a wide-ranging investigation into Joe Biden and officials in the Democrat’s administration, based on Republican conspiracy theories about the former president’s mental health. It was an unprecedented move: An incumbent American president had never before publicly ordered a federal probe of his predecessor.

    There was a degree of irony to the circumstances. After his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump spent years insisting that Biden had ordered an investigation into him — an odd conspiracy theory for which there is literally no evidence — but Trump then did exactly what he falsely accused his predecessor of doing.

    Trump also endorsed California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s arrest, before demanding that CNN face criminal prosecution for running reports the White House didn’t like.

    And did I mention that, over the last several weeks, a Democratic mayor, a Democratic U.S. House member, the staffer of a different Democratic U.S. House member, a sitting judge and a labor leader have all been criminally charged, detained or taken into custody by Trump administration officials? Because that happened, too.

    There are also ongoing Trump administration investigations into Media Matters, ActBlue, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York Attorney General Letitia James and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

    Axios recently reported, “In the final days of the 2024 campaign, Axios identified a list of perceived adversaries who fit what Trump ominously described as ‘the enemies from within.’ As president, he has taken steps to retaliate against virtually all of them.” […]

  293. StevoR says

    Linda Yaccarino, the boss of Elon Musk’s social media site X, has announced she is stepping down.

    ..(snip)..

    It is not clear whether there has been any break down in their (Musk & yaccarino’s -ed) relationship since she joined in 2023.

    But the platform’s tone has changed in that time. Its former incarnation Twitter was accused of leaning left, now X leans unashamedly to the right in terms of the content that gets the most visibility.Though Musk stepped down as CEO he never truly stepped back from his favourite social network, and has if anything grown louder and more controversial since he appointed her.

    Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gy3j9xq6o

  294. StevoR says

    The same story on Yaccarino’s exit gets noted here but with a lot more info too via Aussie ABC :

    .

    Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm has deleted “inappropriate” antisemitic and pro-Hitler Grok posts, as Türkiye and Poland cracked down on the chatbot for offensive comments about politicians and religious beliefs.

    Concerns over political bias, hate speech and factual inaccuracy in AI chatbots have mounted since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022.

    … Poland subsequently announced it was reporting xAI to the European Commission after Grok made offensive comments about Polish politicians, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

    “I have the impression that we are entering a higher level of hate speech, which is driven by algorithms,” Poland’s digitisation minister Krzysztof Gawkowski told RMF FM radio.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-10/musk-s-ai-firm-deletes-grok-posts-praising-hitler/105514466

    Also from that and something that includes what I think should be quote of the day or something -deserves special note and emphasis for truth hence I’ve bolded it here :

    Griffith University technology and crime lecturer Dr Ausma Bernot told ABC’s The World that Grok’s antisemitic responses were “concerning but perhaps not unexpected”.

    “We know that Grok uses a lot of data from X [which] has seen an upsurge in antisemitic, Islamophobic content,” she said.

    “Perhaps hate speech should not be let into the training model.”

  295. StevoR says

    @277. John Morales :

    StevoR, Katz ain’t Trump. And headlines ain’t the actual content.

    ..(Snip)..

    “This is the latest idea floated by ministers in Israel’s far-right government to forcibly displace the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, amid continued speculation about a possible expulsion of Gaza’s residents to other countries.”

    (Trump is not a minister in Israel’s far-right government) Wanna explain how it’s a plan ‘floated’ by them but is actually Trump’s Gaza plan? …

    Trump’s plan was for (Far Worse Genocide ) “Trump Gaza” – the Gaza strip is deporpulated and resettled and controlled by non-Gazans – Americans – with the Palestinians expelled or worse. Trump normalised and promoted this idea where previous American policy had been for supporting two states including Gaza in the proposed Palestinian state.

    The Katz plan here is very similar – if, okay, not exactlyidential and, again, the basic premise is the Gazans lose their homeland and are forced to go to other countries permanently. In essence, Ethnic cleansing (Forced population displacementand transfer) and Crimes against Humanity – but with a thinnest veneer of euphemistic language and faint pretence at being humanitarian and “voluntary.” Inthis new Katz plan Israel rules not Gazans or Americans and there’s an intermediate stage of a “Humanitarian city” (vomits) on the ruins of Rafah from which the remaining Gazans who do not immediately leave or die are kept without being able to move out of there – except to emigrate overseas.

    No, Far Worse Genoicde Trump isn’t a minister in the Israeli govt (nor is Katz Trump) but those who are have fully adopted and are encouraging his Gaza plan and using that or a very similar modified version of it as their own.

  296. StevoR says

    AJ notes :

    The far-right aims to “retrieve” Gaza as part of “historical Israel”, and that means the 2.3 million population is expected to leave, said Carle. “All of us have thought this is a crazy proposal floated by Trump and the far-right of the Israeli political spectrum.”

    Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/7/9/live-israel-bombs-gaza-refugee-camp-trump-netanyahu-meet-for-second-time

    (Emphasis added.)

    I.e. the basic plan or idea is the same.

  297. StevoR says

    Amnesty International via the same AJ link :

    Human rights organisation Amnesty International has condemned an Israeli proposal for Palestinians to be relocated to a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah as “outrageous”.

    “The remarks are nothing short of a declared intention to commit war crimes [and] crimes against humanity,” the group said in a post on X. “Relocating” Palestinians within Gaza, or deporting them against their will, would amount to the war crime of unlawful transfer or deportation. Furthermore, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population, “it would also constitute a crime against humanity”, Amnesty said.

    Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/7/9/live-israel-bombs-gaza-refugee-camp-trump-netanyahu-meet-for-second-time

    The lack of condemnation from the media and the immediate pointing out of the facts note dby Amnesty above esp given the shocked reaction to the Trump riviera idea not all that long ago is I think pretty disturbing in how quickly this is being normalised and seen as okay.

    Not that long ago people were appalled and slighty amused by Trump talking of using alligators in a moat against Latin / Central American migrants – now he’s getting his Alligator Alcratz already built in Florida so ..

  298. KG says

    “H-u-m-a-n-i-t-a-r-i-a-n c-i-t-y”

    Huh. What an odd way to spell “concentration camp”!

  299. says

    The Texas flash flood is a preview of the chaos to come, by ProPublica.

    On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

    Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless—and warranted—analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

    [I snipped history of climate change warnings presented to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.]

    Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream—the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere—is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.

    We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year […] Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.

    […] Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.

    There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. [snipped sources] the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”

    […] According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. [snipped details of losses in financial terms]

    The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. […]

    What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger—and thus the suffering of the people affected by it—but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.

    Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself […]

    Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. […] This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. […] raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. […] a flood plain should now be off-limits.

  301. says

    When President Joe Biden tried to enact student loan forgiveness programs, it was treated as an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach of power. But now that Donald Trump is president, mucking around in student loan programs is perfectly fine and dandy—though this time the goal is to hurt people rather than help them.

    Trump is preparing to turn the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into yet another tool of retribution. Under PSLF, students who enter public service—including government and nonprofit jobs—have any remaining balance on student loans forgiven after 10 years of payments.

    Public service jobs are often lower paying than their private-sector equivalents, especially for those requiring advanced degrees. Before PSLF was created in 2007, student loan debt would often act as a barrier preventing graduates from taking public-sector jobs.

    But now, the Department of Education is gearing up to remove eligibility from any employer that it deems to be involved in “illegal activities.” The Trump administration’s warped sense of what constitutes an illegal activity is exactly what you’d expect. Trump’s March executive order requires Education Secretary Linda McMahon to redefine public service to exclude organizations that work on immigration issues or transgender rights, along with any employers that she determines are “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or violate state laws like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or blocking highways.

    In other words, organizations that focus on anything that Trump and McMahon don’t like will get yeeted from eligibility for the PSLF program.

    Of course, it’s not illegal to work with immigrants, to help trans kids, or to engage in peaceful protests, but the Trump administration doesn’t care. The entire point is to make loan forgiveness unobtainable for filthy liberals. There’s no way that this won’t be used as a weapon, where the Trump administration can remove any organization it doesn’t like, for any reason, wiping out loan forgiveness for employees—regardless of the law.

    Contrast this with Biden’s detailed rulemaking efforts explaining his authority to enact student loan forgiveness and lengthy outlines of each proposed rule change. But honestly, it probably didn’t matter what Biden proposed: The Supreme Court was always going to rush to rule against him. Even when the Biden administration significantly narrowed the scope of relief after the ruling, red states kept suing to ensure that students would stay saddled with debt.

    Watching Trump pretend that this is about “restoring” PSLF is ridiculous given his behavior during his first term, when only 7,000 people received loan forgiveness and the other 99% of applications were denied. While Biden fixed that deliberately broken process, Trump is wiping it out again.

    When Biden exerted any presidential authority, no matter how well-grounded in law, it was deemed a historic crisis and a trampling of Congress. But when Trump throws up a lawless, bigoted executive order, it’s totally fine.

    Who needs law when you’ve got Congress and the Supreme Court willing to let you do whatever you want?

    Link

  302. says

    It turns out this week’s snafu over the Ukraine weapons shipment that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused without bothering to tell anyone including his boss wasn’t the only foreign policy/diplomatic fuckup the Trump administration has been working lately.[…]

    This one isn’t as high profile, but it’s still wow. It involves Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/lunch lady/White House hamster groomer Marco Rubio and Trump’s star self-loathing gay quisling/special envoy Ric Grenell […]

    You see, Marco Rubio was working a Venezuela thingie, and Ric Grenell was working a Venezuela thingie, and oh no, it turned out they were accidentally working against each other on their respective Venezuelan thingies! […]

    OK, Marco Rubio was over here doing important grownup diplomacies, to make a prisoner swap thing happen where Venezuela would release a bunch of its own political prisoners and a few Americans, in exchange for all these Venezuelans the Trump administration had kidnapped and sent to torture prison in El Salvador.

    Meanhwile Ric Grenell was over here doing a different prisoner swap, where Venezuela would release a few Americans in exchange for Venezuela’s authoritarian government being released from the torture prison of … Chevron not getting to keep working in that country, which involves big $$$ for the Venezuelans.

    Venezuela liked Ric’s big Chevron pri$$$oner swap better […]

    The State Department never sealed the deal. The top U.S. officials did not appear to be communicating with each other and ended up at cross purposes. The approximately 250 people expelled from the United States are still being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. And it became clear that while Mr. Trump’s White House once said that it had no control over the detainees in El Salvador, it was willing to use them as bargaining chips. [Excerpt from the New York Times.]

    Yeah, weird.

    Both U.S. tracks — one managed by Mr. Rubio and the other led by the envoy, Richard Grenell — involved speaking with the same Venezuelan representative, Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, one U.S. official and the two other people said.

    Hate that, when you’re talking to the same Venezuelan guy and telling him two entirely different things and both pretending you’re the only official representative of Donald Trump, and now the Venezuelan guy probably hates both of you and nobody is releasing any prisoners. Who among us.

    [T]he lack of coordination left Venezuelan officials unclear about who spoke for Mr. Trump and, ultimately, left both American and Venezuelan detainees imprisoned.

    […] They got really far on Little Marco’s deal, though. As of May, flights from Caracas to El Salvador and from the US to Caracas were being scheduled to pick up and transport different people involved in the deal. But again, Ric Grenell was playing with his own thingie:

    Before pitching it to the Venezuelans, Mr. Grenell called the president to tell him about the offer and believed he had the president’s support. But Mr. Grenell had not actually received the president’s final approval, according to one of the U.S. officials. […]

    That same month, Mr. Grenell went to Venezuela on a separate mission in which he won the release of Joseph St. Clair, an Air Force veteran held in Venezuela.

    Yes, Grenell did that — he also got six Americans released from Venezuela back in January — but he did it while reportedly totally pissing off Donald Trump and other administration officials, who apparently weren’t in the loop. The New York Post reported at the time that it was viewed in the administration as a “Hail Mary attempt to pressure Trump to extend Chevron’s license to import Venezuelan oil,” which was expiring May 27. The license expired, replaced by a new, much narrower authorization.

    […] Anyway, the New York Times’s sources say Little Marco’s deal is still on offer, but Ric’s — the one Venezuela actually likes — isn’t. You hear that, VENEZUELA? Are you reading the New York Times for your secret diplomatic messages from America? […]

    Mr. Grenell, [according to a person close to him], was surprised to learn about the swap, and is the only authorized negotiator on any deals with Venezuela. But since the episode, Mr. Rubio has taken the lead in talking to the Venezuelans, one of the U.S. officials said.

    But somebody close to Ric Grenell also shit-talked Little Marco’s deal to the Times, saying it would never happen because Donald Trump would never allow GANG MEMBERS to be released from El Salvador, because we guess that person is still pretending all the men Trump and Stephen Miller kidnapped and human trafficked to El Salvador are GANG MEMBERS.

    Ric Grenell responded to Times requests for comment on this latest Trump regime fuckup by Ric-Grenell-ing.

    Mr. Grenell declined an interview request, but in an email used a profanity to denounce The Times’s account of the separate deals as false.

    Yep, that tracks. […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/your-latest-trump-regime-amateur

  303. JM says

    @296 StevoR:
    The Time: IDF defies Netanyahu’s plan for ‘humanitarian city’ in Gaza

    The Israeli military has refused to carry out a plan to confine hundreds of thousands of people in a new “humanitarian city” in Gaza, after senior officers objected and reservists said it would be a war crime.

    In a remarkable stand-off with Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) pushed back against a request from the defence ministry to establish a new civilian-only area and move up to 600,000 Palestinians there.

    The IDF doesn’t want to do it either. The IDF’s objection seems to be more practical then moral. They don’t want to be responsible for setting up a camp for what will probably be more then a million people with no realistic plan for sending the people someplace or closing the camp.

  304. says

    Trump struggles with governing details — but remains focused on interior decorating

    “The president clearly struggles when it comes to policymaking, but when it comes to interior decorating, Trump apparently has quite a bit to say.”

    When it comes to the details of governing, Donald Trump continues to struggle with the basics, flubbing easy questions about his own day-to-day decisions and offering fresh evidence that the post-policy president still hasn’t taken much of an interest in policymaking.

    But when it comes to interior decorating, Trump apparently has quite a bit to say. […]

    After the president suggested there simply wasn’t time to waste discussing the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein report, released a day earlier, the Post reported, “Trump spent 15 more going through, in significant detail, the new paintings he had ordered hung on the walls. He looked overhead at the light fixtures. And he asked his Cabinet members for a show of hands on whether they like gold leafing for the ceiling molding.”

    This included an extended riff on the color of the room he and his team were in at the time and a lengthy story of how he obtained a clock that used to be in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office. [video]

    This comes on the heels of a series of related reports, including news that there’s a picture of Trump alongside first lady portraits in the White House, and a separate report about replacing a portrait of Barack Obama with a painting related to the assassination attempt that targeted Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

    And don’t get me started on the president and his “gold guy” adding gold finishes to the Oval Office. [embedded links available at the main link]

    [Trump] also cares about exterior design. He and his team have, for example, torn up the White House Rose Garden and installed a flagpole that the president seemed awfully excited about. […]

  305. says

    Nearly 200 Democrats file legal brief challenging Trump’s emergency tariff powers

    Nearly 200 Democratic lawmakers have filed a legal brief supporting a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs.

    The brief bolsters a group of small businesses and Democratic-led states suing to block President Trump’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in advance of appeal arguments later this month.

    […] House Democrats in the filing, called the president’s use of IEEPA an “unlawful abuse of emergency powers.”

    “The President’s reckless tariff agenda has caused economic chaos and raised prices for families and businesses across the country at a moment in which the cost of living is far too high,” Shaheen said in a statement to The Hill.

    “This brief makes clear that IEEPA cannot be used to impose tariffs. We will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to push back against the Administration’s effort to tax goods American households and small businesses rely on.”

    […] “Unmoored from the structural safeguards Congress built into actual tariff statutes, the President’s unlawful ‘emergency’ tariffs under IEEPA have led to chaos and uncertainty,” the brief reads.

    Citing emergencies over trade deficits and an influx of fentanyl, Trump has invoked the law to impose his “Liberation Day” “reciprocal” tariffs and a series of levies on China, Mexico and Canada that date back to February.

    A federal trade court blocked them in late May by ruling IEEPA, if nothing else, doesn’t give Trump the “unbounded” tariff authority he asserts. The administration is now appealing, and the case is scheduled for oral arguments July 31 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

  306. says

    Summary from NBC News reports:

    In Texas, there are still more than 173 people missing: “Authorities have confirmed at least 119 deaths across six counties, including 59 adults and 36 children in Kerr County.”

    […] Four days after the devastating flash floods in Texas Hill Country, local officials and law enforcement in Kerr County couldn’t provide basic details of the emergency response — including whether the emergency management coordinator, who decided to order evacuations, was awake when the waters started rising.

    Also from NBC News:

    At least three people were killed by historic flash floods in a New Mexico mountain community that suffered devastating wildfires last year, officials said late Tuesday. The remote village of Ruidoso, about 180 miles south of Albuquerque, said that a 4-year-old girl, a 7-year-old boy and a man aged 40 to 50 were all “swept downstream by the unprecedented floodwaters.”

  307. says

    Washington Post:

    A federal appeals court [stocked with Trump-appointed judges] has voided Biden-era plans to crack down on tough-to-cancel subscriptions, which would have required businesses to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it is to sign up to them.

  309. says

    […] Charlie Kirk, the far-right online provocateur and conspiracy theorist who co-founded the extremist Turning Point USA group for right-wing youths, is spreading a bizarre claim about the Austin Fire Department — which serves the residents of the city of Austin, located more than 100 miles east of where the worst of the flooding occurred. In today’s episode of his podcast, the Charlie Kirk Show that streams on Rumble, Kirk claimed that the “DEI” supposedly festering at the heart of the Austin Fire Department was actually to blame for deficiencies in the emergency response to the fatal flooding.

    Here’s Kirk’s remarks, initially flagged by Media Matters for America:

    What you are not being told by the media anywhere is that the death toll likely would not have been as high if it wasn’t for DEI. This Texas tragedy is just the latest example. It’s not just incompetence. This is DEI working to undermine meritocratic institutions, and more people likely died than otherwise would have because of DEI. Let me prove it to you.

    Kirk goes on a whole screed explaining his inaccurate version of events surrounding a 2013 Obama administration Justice Department decision to investigate the Austin Fire Department for racial discrimination in its hiring practices. The complaint brought by the Obama DOJ was settled in 2014, according to the Justice Department. Here are some additional details from the Austin-American Statesman‘s 2018 coverage of the expiration of the consent decree:

    In 2013, Department of Justice officials found evidence that Hispanics and African-Americans were discriminated against during the hiring process, and that they were less likely to be hired than white applicants because of how the Fire Department ranked eligible applicants. […]

    In 2014, the Austin City Council approved a settlement with the Justice Department, agreeing to pay up to $780,000 to unsuccessful firefighter applicants for back pay and to set aside 30 new hire positions for African-American and Hispanic candidates.

    Kirk went on to claim that Austin’s decision to hire the city’s first Black fire chief somehow prevented the department from properly preparing for floods.

    […] workplace diversity initiatives have become the new “deep state.” They are the villain behind any and all natural disasters and tragedies during Trump’s second term, an amorphous, intangible, sinister presence at the heart of all matters that might prompt bad press for Trump’s agenda.

    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/theres-always-going-to-be-a-conspiracy-theory

  311. whheydt says

    Re: Lynna, OM @ #306…
    What concerns me–at this point–about the search and rescue efforts in Texas is that both the death toll and the number of missing are both going up at the same time.

  312. StevoR says

    The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on one of the UN’s top advocates for Palestinian rights, Francesca Albanese, accusing her of “spewing abashed antisemitism”. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with senior Republicans as part of a multi-day visit to Washington DC.

    Ms Albanese, a human rights lawyer, is the UN’s special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories — an independent expert appointed to follow and report to the UN on human rights issues. She uses her high profile and large social media following to frequently speak out about allegations of war crimes in Gaza and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.

    A State Department spokesperson confirmed the sanctions meant any property Ms Albanese owned in the US would be frozen, and she and her immediate family were unlikely to be allowed to enter the US. In a statement, Mr Rubio said Ms Albanese had “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West”.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-10/francesca-albanese-marco-rubio-sanctions-israel-gaza/105514754

  314. John Morales says

    “… his support for the Jan 6th terrorists …”

    I literally smiled on seeing that.

    (As if it were after the fact, or unrelated to him otherwise!)

    —

    You mean well, StevoR, but insinuations are not your forte.

  315. StevoR says

    In a grand show of unity, all seven living former Associate Administrators of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate have signed a joint letter opposing the Trump administration’s proposed 47% cut to NASA’s 2026 science budget. They “unanimously urge Congress to reject the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget” and request that the NASA Science Mission Directorate retain its 2025 budget.

    The seven signatories — John Grunsfeld, Alphonso Diaz, Lennard Fisk, Wesley Huntress, Alan Stern, Edward Weiler, and Thomas Zurbuchen — warn the “indiscriminate cut” would end dozens of current and future missions, “severely [damaging] a peerless and immensely capable engineering and scientific workforce” and “needlessly [putting] to waste billions of dollars of taxpayer investments.” Furthermore, the budget cut would eliminate the United States as a global leader in space science, ceding power to China and other nations.

    They also call attention to the numerous benefits of NASA’s science programs, which only comprise about 3% of NASA’s total budget. “The economics of these proposed cuts ignore a fundamental truth: investments in NASA science have been and are a powerful driver of the U.S. economy and technological leadership,” the authors write in the letter, pointing to successful missions like the Mars rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Parker Solar Probe, among many others.

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/every-living-former-nasa-science-chief-opposes-trumps-proposed-budget-cuts-in-letter-to-congress

  316. whheydt says

    Re: StevoR @ #315…
    Perhaps NASA needs to start a “Trump SETI” program…in hopes there is some intelligence out there, cause there sure isn’t any in the White House.

  317. John Morales says

    whheydt, ha ha ha.

    Underestimating one’s opponent is not the way forward, IMO.

    I mean, you are literally claiming that it takes zero intelligence to become the power that is.

    The rulers of the land, no intelligence!

    (You mob elected him, no? — where’s that intelligence, again?)

  318. whheydt says

    Re: John Morales @ #317…
    I knew what Trump was before he ran in 2016. I’ve never voted for him, and never will.

  319. John Morales says

    Not my white house, whheydt. I’m not USAnian. I’m not “out there”. I’m here.

    (It ain’t make australia great again, is it?)

    Perhaps USA needs to stop electing such as he.

  320. John Morales says

    He’s vile, he’s enabled by others, and he’s in his dotage, and he’s a cunning fuck.

    (All can be true)

    But, given how Congress and SCOTUS and enterprises and whoever kowtows to him and enables the fuck outta him, I’m not gonna say he’s somehow unwanted or atypical.

    That’s the mob you lot (USAnians) elected to power.

    He got made prez on 20 Jan 2025.
    Tomorrow (your time) shall be 10 Jul 2025.

    Here: https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/election?iso=20250120T1201&p0=263&msg=Countdown+the+end+of+Donald+J.+Trump%27s+Presidency

  321. birgerjohansson says

    YesterVerse: 

    “15 Forgotten 80s Sci-Fi Movies That Got The Future Alarmingly Right”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=WCXgy3sepa4

    Saturn 3 was awful, and The Final Program made no sense. And was awful.
    Split Second was fun  but was made by two different directors and feel like two different films.

  322. birgerjohansson says

    whheydt @ 316

    There is a joke at the SMBC webcomic about aliens coming to enslave us, and the humans are enthusiastic because it will mean an improvement from today.

  325. John Morales says

    ‘You need to shape up’: Trump’s pick for Singapore envoy grilled in Senate
    Tessa Wong BBC News — https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrxd7d78r0o

    The whole story is cringe, and the video is priceless.

    The nominee for the US ambassador to Singapore, Anjani Sinha, drew criticism during his Senate confirmation hearing when he struggled to answer questions about the island-state.

    On Wednesday Dr Sinha was grilled by Senator Tammy Duckworth on the US’s relationship with Singapore and the island-state’s role in South East Asia.

    At one point Ms Duckworth told him he was “unqualified” for the posting, and that he needed to “shape up and do some homework”. The exchange has since gone viral in Singapore and attracted critical comments online.

    Dr Sinha’s nomination was first announced by Donald Trump in March, when the US President praised him as a “highly respected entrepreneur”.

    “I have no doubt that Anji will strongly represent our Nation’s Interests, and put America First. Congratulations Anji!” said Trump in a Truth Social post, using a nickname for Dr Sinha.

    Born in India, Dr Sinha is an orthopaedics and sports medicine surgeon now based in Florida who started several clinics in New York.

    (Some would, of course, accuse Ms Duckworth of bullying and pedantry. I think it’s magnificent)

  327. says

    whheydt @311, that is concerning. There’s a lack of organization and ever-changing facts.

    In other news: ‘Full Nazi’: Elon Musk’s AI chatbot started calling itself ‘MechaHitler’
    Video is 5:49 minutes
    https://www.msnbc.com/all  Chris Hayes

    And in news related to whheydt’s comment 331: Chris Hayes: It’s not ‘partisan politics’ to question Texas flood response
    Video is 8:48 minutes

  328. says

    Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship blocked by federal judge

    “The Supreme Court left open a door to challenging the executive order restricting birthright citizenship. The ACLU walked right through.” Good news.

    The language of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment does not lend itself to wiggle room. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it reads. In other words, if you’re born in the U.S., you’re a citizen of the U.S.

    Donald Trump has nevertheless spent years condemning what’s known as “birthright citizenship” and has vowed to undo it, despite the plain language of the Constitution.

    To that end, on Inauguration Day 2025, the Republican president kept one of his uglier campaign promises and issued an executive order that not only rejected the constitutional principle but also directed federal agencies to refuse to recognize U.S. citizenship for children who do not meet the administration’s new standards.

    Trump’s order, however, continues to fare poorly in the courts. NBC News reported:

    A federal judge in New Hampshire granted class-action status to a lawsuit seeking to protect babies who would be denied birthright citizenship by the Trump administration and granted a temporary block of the order restricting birthright citizenship from going into effect throughout the country. The suit was brought on behalf of a pregnant immigrant, immigrant parents and their infants and had sought class action status for all babies around the country who would be affected by Trump’s executive order and their parents.

    NBC News’ report added that the judge in the case “ordered a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking Trump’s order from going into effect, but stayed his order for seven days, allowing the government time to appeal” — which it almost certainly will.

    The ruling in the case was issued by U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Laplante, who was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush.

    While readers might’ve seen headlines about a related Supreme Court ruling last month, as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, the justices’ highly controversial opinion focused largely on the judiciary’s authority, not on the underlying constitutional issue and the legality of Trump’s order itself.

    Within hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which left open the possibility of using class action lawsuits to challenge the White House’s policy, the ACLU filed just such a case. On Thursday morning, it scored a key victory.

  329. says

    Watch Trump being creepy—and dumb—again

    “Trump can’t stop obsessing over a “beautiful” African reporter.”

    President Donald Trump can’t seem to get enough of Africa—or at least its “beautiful” reporters.

    During a press briefing Wednesday, Trump scoured the media pool for his latest muse, African reporter Hariana Verás.

    “Where is my reporter from Africa?” he asked with a sly smirk. “There you are. How are you? She’s very famous in Africa.” [Video]

    Trump first crossed paths with Verás in the Oval Office late last month, when she recounted the suffering of citizens in the Congo.

    “I saw hope. They have hope now for a better day in Congo,” she said.

    And while Verás’ impassioned speech lasted minutes, going over plenty of possible talking points for Trump, he still only managed to cling to her appearance.

    “That’s so beautifully stated,” he began before diving into how “beautiful” Verás is.

    “I’m not allowed to say that,” he added. “You know that could be the end of my political career, but you are beautiful—and you’re beautiful inside. I wish I had more reporters like you.”

    In another awkward exchange Wednesday, Trump showered Liberian President Joseph Boakai with compliments for his well-spoken English.

    “Such good English,” Trump said. “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” [video]

    And while Boakai accepted the compliment graciously, no one seemed to let Trump in on the fact that English is the official language of Liberia.

    At least he didn’t go on a rant about Boakai’s looks.

  331. birgerjohansson says

    The politician Jake Berry has left the Tories for Reform UK, as experts scramble to find out what’s the opposite of a brain drain.

  332. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales @ 325
    As a Trump nominee, it would not have been surprising if he thought Singapore is the place in which the film Black Hawk Down was set.

  333. birgerjohansson says

    Liberia started off as a kind of American colony, as the United States hoped freed slaves would go away to Africa. In reality, the few who went met a problematic climate, tropical disease and conflict with the autochtonous Black population.
    The Afro-americans formed a kind of oligarchy until a coup in the 1980s, followed by decades of really vicious civil wars.

  334. birgerjohansson says

    Dr. Sinha may be born in south Asia, but while Singapore may have many Indian immigrants those who remain in the subcontinent will not be any more interested in Singapore than Americans are interested in, say, Poland. Asia is BIG.

  335. birgerjohansson says

    …But at least, Singapore has no penguins. They may avoid the worst tariff rates.

  336. says

    Kristi Noem bungled Texas flood response

    Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s cost-cutting measures at the Federal Emergency Management Agency slowed search and rescue efforts in Texas by 72 hours, possibly costing some of the at least 120 lives lost in the devastating natural disaster, CNN reported.

    According to CNN, Noem created a new policy that requires her to personally sign off on any costs greater than $100,000. The Urban Search and Rescue crews seeking to be deployed to the Texas Hill Country—where hundreds of people were swept away by the rapidly rising rivers after heavy rainstorms—met that criteria.

    But CNN reported that Noem didn’t approve the deployment of those search and rescue crews until Monday—three days after the floods swept through Texas.

    From CNN’s report:

    As central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

    In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.

    But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

    DHS tried to deny that Noem’s incompetence hindered the search and rescue efforts. But their denial actually proved the CNN story.

    DHS said in a post on X, “President Trump approved a Major Disaster Declaration, hours after Governor Greg Abbott’s request. By Tuesday, FEMA had deployed 311 staffers, providing support and shelter for hundreds of people. Under President Trump and Secretary Noem’s leadership, DHS is reforming FEMA to prioritize state-led, locally executed disaster response, as Texas has exemplified.”

    That means that CNN’s report was correct, that it took until Tuesday for FEMA to deploy the search and rescue teams.

    Noem appeared on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, where she was asked about the CNN report. But instead of providing evidence that she swiftly approved the search and rescue teams, she only attacked CNN—classic deflection that did not actually deny the report.

    “CNN has a report accusing you of slowing the process in Texas,” one of the hosts asked Noem, to which she replied, “Well there you go. Fake news CNN is absolutely trash, what they are doing.” [video] […]

  338. says

    […] the article [in the Louisville Courier-Journal] goes into the details of how Trump’s SNAP cuts will hurt Kentuckians who depend upon that aid, and it ain’t just some poor black people either. Most of those on SNAP are rural white people and their kids.

    I saw that when I taught at one of the rural area high schools in another county next to mine. A lot of poorer white kids were on free school breakfast and lunch programs. And it’s those programs that will be cut with the MAGA Murder Bill.

    […] The cuts to SNAP — considered the largest in the program’s history — will require states to fund portions of the program for the first time, as well as a larger portion of its administrative costs. Additionally, recipients will be expected to fill out more paperwork, a move that has historically led to fewer people receiving assistance.

    The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy estimates the changes will put 50,000 Kentuckians at risk of losing their benefits, at a time when about 16% of residents are already considered food insecure and the commonwealth is among the 10 hungriest states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    Depending on how Kentucky lawmakers respond, a higher number individuals could lose or see a decrease in benefits; some schools might have to discontinue offering free meals to all students; and food banks might have to put stricter restrictions on those who seek their assistance, opponents of the changes say.

    […] You just have to love that part about Kentucky being in the top ten states for “hungriest.” I know shame. I have to deal with it all the time, so I can say without any reservation that Kentucky politicians should be ashamed of that statistic. Too bad the legislature has a Republican supermajority, and they are all like Mitch McConnell.

    Here are some more details on present hunger conditions in Kentucky:
    – In the last two years, Kentucky’s Dare To Care food bank has seen a 48% rise in demand for their services.
    – The end of those emergency subsidies from the COVID pandemic and the inflation it brought on has been the main driver for the increase of demand at food banks.
    – There is no way that food banks in Kentucky can make up for those cuts to SNAP.
    – 575,000 Kentuckians are on SNAP.

    How the MAGA Murder Bill changes SNAP in KY:
    – They are going for the old “work requirements” bit for SNAP. The previous age range for proving you were working was 18-54 years of age for SNAP benefits. Now, they expanded the age range to 64 years of age. And if you are a parent with kids 14 years old or higher, you have to prove you are working, which the previous SNAP program did not require. – Veterans and the homeless also have to prove they are working too.
    – The last time Kentucky had work requirements imposed was when Bevin was governor in 2019. The program in that year threw 30,000 Kentuckians off of SNAP, which was the whole purpose of those changes.
    – […] If you are unemployed for more than 3 months over a three year period, you lose SNAP benefits!
    – The MAGA Murder Bill also says that the state of Kentucky has to raise what it kicks into SNAP from 5% to 15%. This means Kentucky will have to pony up another $250 million to the program. And there is no way that the Kentucky legislature will come up with that kind of money.
    – And finally, we get to the schools. Those free breakfast and lunches are covered by a program called Community Eligibility Program or CEP. It’s provided by the federal government to cover kids who are on SNAP. With less kids who qualify for SNAP, there will be less money for CEP. And 1,100 high schools in Kentucky participate in CEP.

    How much did Trump win Kentucky by? Approximately 30% points. And most of those voters were in the rural parts of the state.

    Guess which counties have the highest number of people on SNAP? Why, they are in the eastern part of Kentucky in the 5th Congressional District! The MOST REPUBLICAN PART OF KENTUCKY!

    Congressman Hal Rogers of the 5th was more than happy to vote for the MAGA Murder Bill. […]

    Link

  339. says

    […] This week, the IRS submitted a court filing in a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters that declared that churches and other religious entities can now endorse political candidates, thus ending a decades-old prohibition on political activity for tax-exempt houses of worship.

    As Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, explained to the New York Times, “It basically tells churches of all denominations and sects that you’re free to support candidates from the pulpit. It also says to all candidates and parties, ‘Hey, time to recruit some churches.’”

    Churches have long been allowed to participate in politics in various ways. Clergy could address political issues from the pulpit, and churches could distribute so-called educational material related to elections (such as the voting guides that the Moral Majority and other fundamentalist outfits have produced comparing candidates, which functioned as de facto endorsements). Inviting candidates to speak to congregations has been a popular action within Black churches. But churches were explicitly not allowed to back the election of a specific candidate. Support had to be delivered with a nod and a wink.

    This constraint was part of a broader ban on campaigning by non-profits, which has been in place since 1954—a prohibition known as the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon Johnson, who introduced this provision as a senator. But now, under the new IRS guidance, houses of worship are freed from this rule, which still applies to other tax-exempt organizations. In this filing, the agency said that a church directing its flock whom to vote for or against is akin to a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

    It’s easy to imagine what this IRS decision will yield.

    Endorsements from church leaders will not remain between clergy and their congregants—especially those made by prominent ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams whose sermons and statements are amplified by television and radio broadcasts, live-streaming, podcasts, and other platforms—and these thumbs-ups will be covered as major news events. Videos and accounts of these endorsements will become political fodder, deployed in ads, campaign literature, and social media posts. Candidates and their campaigns will search and compete for religious leaders who can direct money and votes their way. Presumably, PACs and campaigns could even put religious leaders on the payroll—or find indirect methods to compensate churches and clergy for their valuable endorsements. (Will there be pay-to-pray scandals?)

    […] Half a century ago, leaders of the New Right concocted a plan to recruit evangelical Christians and Catholics—many of whom had voted Democratic up to then. They succeeded wildly in politicizing religion by weaponizing wedge issues—abortion, gay rights, school prayer, and pornography—to draw many of these voters into the Republican coalition. Ever since, right-wing Christian leaders have held an influential role in American politics, and the votes of this bloc have fueled GOP victories. Each time Trump—hardly the exemplar of Christ-like behavior—ran for president, he pocketed about 80 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, his most reliable group of supporters.

    This IRS decision will undoubtedly super-charge the participation of religious leaders in American elections. For Christian nationalists, it’s a godsend.

    Link

  340. says

    Federal charges have been brought against 10 people who allegedly shot up an ICE detention center in Texas late in the evening of July 4, firing semiautomatic rifles at the front of the place and wounding a local police officer in the neck. (The cop was treated and released.) All of those arrested were charged with three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer, plus additional charges of “discharging a firearm during and in relation to a violent crime,” according to the criminal complaint.

    Whatever the hell this was, it doesn’t look like a protest gone wrong or one of those far more common bullshit arrests where someone is accused of “assaulting” an ICE goon when their arm is being grabbed by said ICE goon. We hope you’ll forgive us for channeling Alex Jones, but the alleged incident seems a little too perfectly constructed to give Donald Trump a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring Marshall Law (he’ll also Hereby Proclaim that’s how it’s spelled now). We’ll eventually find out more about what happened, but at the moment it all stinks.

    Let’s be clear here: Trump’s fascist takeover of the US must absolutely be resisted and stopped by all legal means necessary. But that can’t include violence against the government, because Trump is already itching for an excuse to start shooting Americans. That’s how civil wars get started.

    According to the complaint, the “ambush” began around 10:37 p.m., when 10 to 12 people dressed in all black met in a wooded area outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where they first shot off fireworks toward the facility. After about 10 minutes, two of the people vandalized cars in the center’s parking lot, spray-painting them with “Ice Pig” and “Traitor.” They also sprayed “FucK you Pigs” on a wooden guard station outside the center. ICE guards called 911 to ask for local police to come.

    A DOJ press release helpfully included photos of the cars and the un-American graffiti: [photo]

    Nancy Larson, acting US attorney for the Northern District of Texas […], said in a news conference Monday night that the fireworks and grafitti “seemed to be designed” to get ICE agents to come out of the detention center, “and it worked.”

    According to CCTV and body cam recordings, two unarmed ICE guards came out to talk to the people in the parking lot, while a “person wearing a green mask” who was just outside the woods “appeared to be signaling to the vandals with a flashlight,” according to the complaint.

    At roughly the same time, a cop from the Alvarado Police Department arrived, and after he got out of his car, somebody in the woods started shooting at him, wounding him in the neck. The flashlight person also opened fire at the ICE guards, but didn’t hit them. The complaint said a total of 20 to 30 rounds from AR-15 rifles were fired; two AR-15s were found at the scene, one of them jammed, along with bullet casings and a discarded pistol magazine.

    Conveniently, when the attackers fled after the gunfire, they left behind a flag saying “Resist fascism, fight oligarchy,” and some flyers that said “FIGHT ICE TERROR WITH CLASS WAR!” and “FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS.”

    Deputies from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office nabbed seven people a few hundred yards from the site of the shooting, Larson said at the presser, saying that “Some were wearing body armor, some were covered in mud, some were armed, and some had two-way radios on them. […] It was a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers.”

    Another man, Bradford Morris, was arrested after a traffic stop by a sheriff’s detective; the van Morris was driving contained a pistol, two more AR-15s, two bulletproof vests, a helmet and other stuff. Per the complaint, Morris said he’d “met some people online and transported some of them down from Dallas to the Prairieland Detention Center to ‘make some noise.’” Two other people were arrested after the incident, and the FBI is trying to find an eleventh person who’s still at large.

    All told, including what was found at the scene and in searches of suspects’ vehicles and homes, investigators collected 12 sets of body armor as well as a whole bunch of guns, ammo, radios, and some “anti-government propaganda” including the flyers and flag found at the scene, and in one suspect’s residence, materials about anarchy, insurrection, and “Organising for Attack!” (with the British spelling), as seen in this PDF of the complaint. [embedded links are available at the main link]

    According to the charging document, those arrested and charged were:
    – Cameron Arnold, aka Autumn Hill, 29, of Dallas
    – Savanna Batten, 32, of Fort Worth
    – Nathan Baumann, 20, of College Station
    – Zachary Jared Evetts, 35, of Waxahachie
    – Joy Abigail Gibson, 32, of Dallas
    – Bradford Morris, aka Meagan Elizabeth Morris, 41, of Garland
    – Maricela Rueda, 32, of Dallas
    – Seth Sikes, 22, of Kennedale
    – Elizabeth Andrea Soto, 39, of Fort Worth
    – Ines Houston Soto, 40, of Fort Worth

    Has Trump’s DOJ busted a cell of leftwing domestic terrorists?

    Again, call us crazy conspiracy theorists, but so much of what the DOJ has released seems incredibly well-suited to supporting MAGA perceptions of the Left. The black outfits, the spray-painted slogans, the anarchy -n- revolution propaganda, all of it. Six of the suspects are women, including apparently two trans women — the official documents take great care to misgender them, obviously — which isn’t impossible but also aligns incredibly well with rightwing confirmation bias about the “violent Left” being full of radical feminists, Marxists, and trans activists.

    But who knows? The administration’s increasingly violent and militarized mass deportations are clearly designed to provoke reactions, and it’s not beyond belief that some people might decide that violence is the right course of action. WE DISAGREE, OBVIOUSLY.

    Prior to January 20 of this year, we’d have said we’re sure to eventually learn a lot more about what the hell is going on here. There will be journalists digging into every aspect of the story, and the suspects are still, at least on paper, entitled to due process.

    We’d like to assume the administration won’t simply whisk American citizens off to a foreign prison, or onto an Air Force transport plane bound for South Sudan before they get to trial, or that First Amendment protections for journalists won’t be suspended by an emergency order. The fact that we can no longer simply take either as a given is terrifying.

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/was-ice-jail-attack-more-john-brown

  341. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In her most vehement denial to date, Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters on Thursday that the so-called Epstein List is “as non-existent as President Trump’s healthcare plan.”

    “The Epstein List is not even a concept of a list,” she added.

    “Let’s say you had three things that don’t exist—the Epstein List, President Trump’s healthcare plan, and a unicorn—and you had to rank them from most existent to least existent,” she said. “It would go, unicorn, healthcare plan, Epstein List.”

    Asked why she had earlier asserted that the Epstein List was on her desk, she responded, “What is this ‘desk’ you speak of?”

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/bondi-calls-epstein-list-as-non-existent

    The Borowitz Report is satire.

  342. says

    Major problems with Trump’s radical tariff gambit toward Brazil

    “Is the president willing to punish U.S. consumers because he hopes to shield a former foreign leader from legal accountability? Actually, yes.”

    Related video at the link.

    A few months ago, Marine Le Pen, a prominent far-right politician in France, was caught up in an embezzlement scheme involving E.U. funds, and a French judicial panel examined the evidence and agreed to ban Le Pen from ever seeking elected office again. Donald Trump threw an online tantrum and condemned the case against her as a “witch hunt,” but the French ignored him and the American president quietly moved on.

    Last month, Trump did it again, condemning corruption allegations against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as another “witch hunt,” but Trump did little more than whine.

    When it comes to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, however, the incumbent American president is apparently not content to simply pound the table. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown summarized:

    […] Trump sent his Brazilian counterpart a stunning letter Wednesday, informing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that his country would face a new 50% tariff ‘due in part to … the way Brazil has treated’ former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump political ally. Trump blamed the massive spike in tariffs partly on ‘Brazil’s insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans.’

    To briefly recap, voters in Brazil overlooked Bolsonaro’s scandal-plagued record in 2018 and elected him president. Four years later, he narrowly lost his bid for a second term and allegedly plotted what was effectively a coup that would’ve allowed him to remain in power despite his election defeat.

    Yes, these circumstances might sound familiar.

    Bolsonaro wants to return to power in South America’s largest country, but he’s currently facing criminal charges for allegedly trying to illegally overturn the results of his 2022 loss.

    Trump, a close ally of the former Brazilian leader (Bolsonaro has been described by many as “the Trump of the Tropics”), has done what he always does: Trump has called the allegations a “witch hunt” and demanded that the charges against the former president be dropped.

    But unlike the French and Israeli examples, Trump is also using tariffs as part of a clumsy scheme to help his Brazilian pal, sending an unhinged and ridiculously written letter to the country’s actual president, scolding the foreign government, and connecting the case against Bolsonaro to U.S. trade policy.

    What’s wrong with that? Quite a bit, actually.

    1. Trump appears to have forgotten about the legal basis of his trade agenda: According to the White House, the president can unilaterally impose arbitrary tariffs on U.S. trade partners because he’s declared an economic emergency resulting from trade deficits. The trouble in this instance, however, is that the United States has a trade surplus with Brazil, adding a legally dubious twist to the Republican’s radical gambit.

    2. This is a diplomatic fiasco of historic proportions: There is no precedent for a U.S. administration trying to leverage trade policy to derail a criminal case in a sovereign nation. […]

    3. Trump’s move will hurt consumers in his own country: Hillary Clinton summarized the problem nicely: “You’re about to pay more for beef not just because Trump wants to protect his corrupt friend, but also because Republicans in Congress have decided to cede their power over trade policy to him.” [True]

    It might sound outlandish to argue that an American president would punish American consumers because he hopes to shield an attempted coup leader from legal accountability, but that’s pretty much what’s happening here.

    4. This sure does look like another power grab: Paul Krugman argued, “If we still had a functioning democracy, this Brazil gambit would by itself be grounds for impeachment.” That’s not as outlandish as it might seem: Trump is trying to exercise a power he doesn’t have, in pursuit of unjust ends, despite the Constitution giving Congress authority over international trade policy.

    5. Trump is turning U.S. values on their head: There is some precedent for a U.S. administration using tariffs in pursuit of political goals, but those earlier cases, we were trying to lean on foreign governments to be more just, not less. Trump has the whole model backwards.

    Hayes concluded, “[T]he decision to use tariffs as a cudgel to bring Brazil to heel for following its own laws marks a distinct shift in Trump’s willingness to engage in economic warfare for his own personal interests.” […]

  345. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket):

    Per FEMA evening briefing, additional 204 ppl have been deployed to TX—19 from FEMA + 185 from other agencies including National Search & Rescue Teams, HHS, ASPR, Texas A&M forest service, and law enforcement support. Few (if any) ppl on the ground to help survivors register for assistance.

    FEMA staffer to me on latest TX deployment numbers: “It looks like we’re doing the part of our jobs where we coordinate the federal support, but we are not doing the ‘FEMA’ part where we make sure people can register for our FEMA assistance.” Says there should be at least 200 more ppl at this point.

    The Handbasket – Have you seen this man?

    [David Richardson is] holed up in his Washington, DC office at FEMA headquarters. […] he was physically present on Monday and Tuesday and attended the daily morning meeting. But aside from alerting staff about a planned trip to Peru (purpose of the trip is unclear), Richardson had nothing to share; he did not mention Texas in any capacity. And on Wednesday morning, he didn’t attend the morning meeting at all. […] he did attend the second meeting of the FEMA Review Council [Wednesday] afternoon. According to one staffer who watched the livestream, the group assembled said a prayer for Texas and repeatedly commended Governor Greg Abbott for his leadership during this crisis. Otherwise, the floods were not acknowledged.
    […]
    As floods take over parts of New Mexico, with three people reported dead so far, and flooding from Tropical Storm Chantal wreaks havoc in North Carolina, the message from FEMA leadership is clear: You’re on your own.

    Samantha Montano‬:

    I’ve been in New Orleans the past month meeting with a wide range of people/agencies involved in emergency management and I guess I’ll just say this bluntly: Louisiana, in particular, is absolutely fucked if there is a major disaster. [Article]

    I say “in particular” because LA won’t just have to deal with this federal mess but also the mess created for state level EM by the governor. [Restructuring to put the national guard in charge of the EM office] is antithetical to what we know leads to more effective EM and specifically ignores the lessons of Katrina.

    Samantha Montano:

    Rando: Texas can’t adequately warn people about deadly floods, but it can immediately let me know that a cop got hurt 250 miles away from me. [Screenshot]

    It’s almost like co-opting parts of the emergency management system for law enforcement purposes has negative consequences for doing effective emergency management.

    Samantha Montano:

    Trump has not formally nominated Richardson, nor anyone else, to lead FEMA, a full six months into his presidency. As long as FEMA still exists, which it currently does, Congress has an obligation to provide oversight.
    […]
    Breaking News: Signs of life in Congress. “Democratic Ranking Members Demand Answers From FEMA and NOAA Following Devastating Texas Floods”. [Letter]

     
    TPM – DHS cancels New York extreme weather comms grant while bodies still being recovered in Texas

    Kristi Noem has […] focused on the importance of timely and effective communications about extreme weather events, which she says wasn’t up to par. […] Tuesday, DHS canceled a $3 million grant aimed at ensuring precisely those kinds of “last mile” communications.

    The grant was to something called New York’s Mesonet […] a series of extreme weather events which caused billions of dollars of damage and led to the loss of at least 60 lives […] Mesonet is a series of towers […] Two years ago, DHS awarded a $3 million grant for something called the “Empower Project,” which planned to leverage New York’s Mesonet data to “build a next-generation scalable decision-support tool suite for the emergency management enterprise.” […] DHS contracting officer John Whipple, instructed researchers to immediately cease work on the project. […] Chuck Schumer has written a letter to Noem asking her to reconsider

  346. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    * New York’s Mesonet, and the story goes back a decade, to a series of extreme weather events

  347. says

    Trump’s immigration enforcement record so far: High arrests, low deportations

    “ICE last month arrested the most people in at least five years, but the number of deportations paled in comparison.”

    […] The discrepancy between arrests and deportations highlights the challenges the Trump administration faces to make good on Trump’s Inauguration Day vow to deport “millions and millions” of immigrants.

    According to ICE data, its agents arrested roughly 30,000 immigrants last month, the most since monthly data was made publicly available in November 2020. But the number of immigrants deported in June — more than 18,000 — amounted to roughly half the number of arrests, according to internal figures obtained by NBC News.

    The difference between arrests and deportations was similar the previous month. The Trump administration took roughly 24,000 immigrants into custody in May and deported over 15,000, according to the ICE data.

    The discrepancy during the second Trump administration can be explained, at least in part, by the number of immigrants being detained who are not immediately eligible for deportation. Immigration lawyers have told NBC News that many of their clients who have been arrested have pending asylum cases and orders from immigration judges temporarily blocking their deportation.

    […] The Trump administration is seeking to fast-track many of those with pending asylum cases by terminating their cases and placing them on “expedited removal” paths without hearings and by deporting those with orders blocking their removal to their home countries to alternative third countries.

    The large number of arrests, coupled with deportations at roughly half the same rate, has also caused overcrowding in ICE facilities. Nearly 60,000 immigrants are being held at detention facilities, according to a senior administration official, even though Congress funded 41,500 beds. Immigrants in ICE detention have complained about hygiene, medical care, lack of food and access to bedding and laundry in the facilities. […]

  348. birgerjohansson says

    MSNBC
    Lawrence: “Today Trump proved there is no way he can fake sounding smart about anything”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=RxO2VzN-Ywk

    There is a lot to unpack in this video, but I would recommend watching it nevertheless. “I haven”t thought about it” is the theme of the Trump administration.

  351. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @343 Lynna: The FEMA cartoon may be misleading, given the layers of lies. “Your FEMA funding” (disaster money) being one of the lies: it was migrant housing money. Another layer being that Trump hasn’t stolen the money yet?

    NBC – Despite promises of FEMA funds, Florida has so far received no federal money for its concentration camp

    In [court] filings […] DHS officials said that the facility has relied only on state funding so far and that Florida has not yet applied for federal funding.

    […] “Courts cannot adjudicate hypothetical future funding decisions or render advisory opinions on contingent scenarios that never materialize.” The filing was the agency’s response to a lawsuit filed by two environmental groups asking that the facility be shuttered. DHS argued it has no such authority because the department has not “implemented, authorized, directed, or funded Florida’s temporary detention center.”
    […]
    During the [tour], Trump said the federal government was not just going to help reimburse the state for costs, but that it also helped with construction […] Trump pointed to the source of the funds as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program, which has been used in the past to house undocumented people. During President Joe Biden’s administration, the same pot of money was used to house undocumented people […]

    “We took the FEMA money that Joe Biden allocated to pay for the free luxury hotel rooms where he’s paying hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City, and we used it to build this project” Trump said.

    /He flat out said the thing. *facepalm*
     
    Samantha Montano (Emergency management professor):

    Gah!! Everyone is missing the BIG emergency management piece of this story… it isn’t that they’re using FEMA sheltering funding… it’s: “Florida Division of Emergency Management, which will have primary oversight of the facility.”

    WHO???? Why???? That’s not their job!!!

  352. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Atlantic – America’s incarceration rate is about to fall off a cliff

    For more than 40 years, the United States—a nation that putatively cherishes freedom—has had one of the largest prison systems in the world. […] After peaking at just more than 1.6 million Americans in 2009, the prison population was just more than 1.2 million at the end of 2023 […] and is on track to fall to about 600,000—a total decline of roughly 60 percent.
    […]
    A city jail presents a snapshot of what happened last night […] But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago. […] virtually everyone who ends up in prison starts their criminal career in their teens or young adulthood. As of 2016 […] the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.
    […]
    starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled […] anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian. The combined result was that the prison population exploded. […] Because most people who are released from prison return, the system has been stocked and restocked with the legacy of that American crime-and-punishment wave for a quarter century. That’s why the 2009 peak of U.S. imprisonment came 18 years after the 1991 peak in the violent-crime rate.
    […]
    The U.S. had an extremely high-crime generation followed by a lower-crime generation, meaning that the older population is not being replaced at an equal rate. […] One statistic vividly illustrates the change: In 2007, the imprisonment rate for 18- and 19-year-old men was more than five times that of men over the age of 64. But today, men in those normally crime-prone late-adolescent years are imprisoned at half the rate that senior citizens are today. […] the American prison system is simply not going to have enough inmates to justify its continued size or staggering costs.
    […]
    Finally, America should not let its prison system become the most expensive and inhumane of nursing homes. The rate of recidivism among senior citizens is near zero, and compassionate release of sick and aging inmates should be the default rather than the exception

    NPR – The U.S. prison population is rapidly graying

    prisons have to adapt in all kinds of ways: making cells wheelchair accessible, accommodating prisoners who can no longer climb to an upper bunk, providing health care and food inside units when prisoners aren’t mobile, installing more outlets for CPAP machines. […] “They’re not set up to take care of elderly people that are now full-time patients,” says Joan Sehl, whose partner, Terry Dreibelbis, is a Pennsylvania prisoner in his 70s. “So what happens is fellow inmates are their nurses.”
    […]
    Caring for aging prisoners is expensive, but the data on just how expensive is murky […] could be anywhere from three to nine times more expensive than for younger prisoners.

  353. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Wired – Elon Musk says Grok is coming to Tesla EVs

    The EV brand would catch up with the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, which have already integrated ChatGPT into their vehicles as voice assistants.

    Commentary

    Need some “MechaHitler is my co-pilot” bumper stickers.

    I’m sure Tesla shareholders are thrilled with the timing of this announcement.

    The 1933-1945 history of Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen suggests Tesla is catching up with them in a very different way.

    Undergrad intro ethics thought experiments are about to get a lot more fucked up. “You’re in a self-driving car. The AI is better at avoiding pedestrians, but if it has to hit a pedestrian, it always chooses to hit racial minorities… do you turn it on?”

    Electrek

    I think Musk is setting up Tesla to invest or even merge with xAI at a ridiculous valuation—making Tesla shareholders virtually pay twice for Twitter, which is now part of xAI. This is how he will be able to gain wider control over the company’s share.

    Of course, it will be widely challenged in court. In fact, shareholders have already filed a lawsuit alleging that Musk was in breach of fiduciary duties to Tesla shareholders when he started xAI.

    Bennett Tomlin (Anti-cryptofraud):

    ADL did say he was the Henry Ford of our times. Free subscription to the Dearborn Independent with every Model T. […] Ford dealers were expected to push The Dearborn Independent and this led to its stated circulation being like the second largest newspaper in the nation.

    Rando: “Wait, I thought the ADL was giving him cover… or did they just not think Ford was bad either?”
    Bennett Tomlin: “Greenblatt seems to think Henry Ford was not bad.”
    Rando: *facepalm*

  354. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @349 birgerjohansson: From your link:

    meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination”—had recently taken an unplanned early retirement […] A fact about the floods the government doesn’t seem eager to discuss

    Meteorologist Matt Lanza quoted @157:

    They are missing the warning coordination meteorologist, who primarily focuses on building understanding of warnings on what we call “blue sky” days. That work gets done before tragedies occur. That position has only been vacant for a couple months, so it likely did not play a role here. But it will if it is not filled in the coming weeks.

  355. Pierce R. Butler says

    CA7746 @ # 352 – a fascinating & potentially important article there from The Atlantic, but with some red-flag omissions (very few sent to prison for pot/lgbtq sex/etc these days; nothing about race or poverty; not a word beginning with “immig”, nor one starting with “Tru”; blithe assertion that prisons for profit are okay, but guards’ labor unions are BAD; …).

    Wish I had time or energy tonight or tomorrow to dig for more on this.

  356. says

    Sky Captain @351, thanks for posting those additional details and corrections. Much appreciated.

    In other news, as reported by The New York Times:

    Britain and France announced a pair of landmark agreements Thursday on nuclear security and immigration, uniting two allies — if occasionally squabbling neighbors — to confront a world of proliferating threats. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emanuel Macron said that for the first time, their countries would work together to deploy nuclear weapons if allies in Europe came under extreme threat.

    Also from the New York Times:

    President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is brushing aside President Trump’s professed disappointment in him and is pushing ahead in Ukraine with renewed intensity, having already priced in the possibility of new U.S. pressure, analysts and people close to the Kremlin said.

  357. says

    Is the Trump administration looking for another way to damage or oust Jerome Powell?

    Associated Press:

    White House budget director Russell Vought suggested in a Thursday letter that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is in violation of government building rules in the renovation of the Fed’s headquarters.

  358. says

    Oh FFS.

    President Trump announced Thursday his administration would impose a 35 percent tariff on all Canadian goods beginning next month.

    Trump posted a letter sent to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in which he outlined the upcoming tariffs. This week, Trump has posted letters to more than a dozen countries vowing to impose steep tariffs on their imports starting Aug. 1. […]

    Link

  359. John Morales says

    Remember TACO, Lynna.

    (Relax. Stoicism is the go, for now. Weather is unpredictable)

  360. John Morales says

    [matter of fact, I don’t recall you ever taking a break. Not impossible to arrange, of course, need it be.
    Tradition and all, another–not me!–can hold the fort for bits. Just saying]

  361. John Morales says

    Meanwhile… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/donald-trump-nick-adams-malaysia-ambassador/105519888

    —

    Donald Trump nominates Sydney-born influencer Nick Adams as US ambassador to Malaysia
    By Brad Ryan and Phoebe Hosier in Washington DC

    A Sydney councillor-turned-MAGA-influencer, who faced suspension from the Liberal Party after swearing at a TV journalist, has won Donald Trump’s nomination to become US ambassador to Malaysia.

    Nick Adams made headlines as a young deputy mayor on Sydney’s Ashfield council with a proposal to eradicate the area’s pigeons to prevent the spread of bird flu.

    The party decided to suspend him after he was filmed verbally abusing a Channel Ten reporter covering his repeated absences from council meetings in 2009.

    Mr Adams reportedly later said he quit before he was suspended.

    More than 15 years later, now aged 40, he is an American citizen and MAGA commentator, self-branded as a Hooters-loving “alpha male” and “cultural thought leader”.

  362. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @355 Pierce R. Butler:

    nothing about race

    The author Keith Humphreys is a Stanford psychologist focusing on addictive disorders and societal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were red flags among his opinions (he was a policy advisor for Obama and on a commission for W Bush). Here he is talking about race in similar articles.

    WaPo – Prisons are getting Whiter (2021)

    The White rate of imprisonment is down only 12 percent in this century, whereas the Hispanic rate has fallen 18 percent and the Black rate is down a remarkable 40 percent. The trend of African Americans leaving prison is accelerating, dropping Black imprisonment rates to levels not seen in 30 years. The causes are still debated, but the collapse in urban crime most likely played a role.

    These changes coexist with continuing, pervasive discrimination against African Americans in the criminal justice system and huge disparities in incarceration. Blacks, for example, are five times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites. Race-based critiques of mass incarceration remain essential

    * Pew – Black imprisonment rate in the U.S. has fallen by a third since 2006 (2020)
    ^ Different author. A line graph depicting down-sloped lines at disperate heights, steeper-declining lines are still above.

    WaPo – Black imprisonment rates are down. It’s important to [find out] why. (2019)

    Bad news about race and criminal justice is all around us. Relative to white people, black people receive longer sentences for the same crimes, are treated more disrespectfully by police in routine interactions and are more likely to be shot by police during confrontations. And of course, black people are overrepresented in the nation’s incarcerated population. So pervasive and long-standing are these problems—especially mass incarceration—that they dominate the broader narrative about law enforcement and race in the United States. Yet […] there is good news. […] Dramatic failures command attention and therefore often drive efforts at policy reform and innovation. Yet success can be just as informative. […] reformers could use the recognition and the inspiration.

  364. KG says

    Atlantic – America’s incarceration rate is about to fall off a cliff – CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@352

    Oh, I’m sure Trump and his coterie have plenty of ideas for forstalling that disaster: gender treachery, sedition, insulting the President, spreading fake news… and of course the rapid increase in minor crimes of sheer desperation as welfare is slashd.

  366. birgerjohansson says

    Techxplore:
    “3D-printed humanoid robot offers affordable, customizable platform for beginners”

    .https://techxplore.com/news/2025-06-3d-humanoid-robot-customizable-platform.html

    Google ‘Berkeley Humanoid Lite’.
    Templates and software are all open source, the hardware costs $ 5000, far less than commercially available robots of sililar size. With a 3D printer a novice can put it together in a week. The result stands 1 m tall and weighs 16 kg. 😄

  368. says

    […] In his latest Fox News appearance, Homan [ the White House’s “border czar,” Tom Homan] said: “Look, people need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just need totality of the circumstances, right? They just go through the observation, get our typical facts — based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.”

    NBC News reported earlier this year about concerns related to racial profiling as part of the Trump’s administration immigration raids, and hearing the White House border czar talk about ICE agents being able to detain people based on “their physical appearance” will likely make those concerns worse.

    Complicating matters, this was not Homan’s only notable quote from the last 24 hours. He also spoke with Politico and talked up the idea of reaching new agreements on third-party deportations. “When you’ve got countries that won’t take their nationals back, and they can’t stay here, we find another country willing to accept them,” Homan said.

    As part of the same interview, Politico noted the recent Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for eight men to be deported to South Sudan. The border czar said he was unsure of the status of the eight men — or whether they are detained there — saying that they are no longer in U.S. custody.

    “They’re living in Sudan. And will they stay in Sudan? I don’t know,” he said. “When we sign these agreements with all these countries, we make arrangements to make sure these countries are receiving these people and there’s opportunities for these people. But I can’t tell if we remove somebody to Sudan — they can stay there a week and leave. I don’t know.”

    Link

    Video at the link.

  369. says

    The Trump administration had a credible official leading the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His name was Cameron Hamilton, and he had experience as a Navy SEAL, a former combat medic and as the former director of the Emergency Medical Services Division at the Department of Homeland Security.

    He was nevertheless fired last month, not because he did something wrong but because Hamilton — a lifelong conservative Republican — testified before Congress and told lawmakers that it would be in the public’s interest if FEMA continued to exist. Donald Trump, of course, wants to eliminate FEMA altogether, and so Hamilton, one day after his testimony, found himself out of a job.

    He was soon replaced by David Richardson, who has no background in emergency management, and who, on his first day as the agency’s acting chief, told FEMA’s staff that he would “run right over” anyone who gets in his way.

    If, in the wake of deadly flooding in Texas, you’re thinking that Richardson has kept a surprisingly low profile, it’s not your imagination. Politico’s E&E News reported:

    As the Federal Emergency Management Agency responds to the deadly flooding in Texas, one key resource is missing: the FEMA leader. David Richardson, the agency’s acting administrator, has not been to the site of one of the nation’s deadliest floods in the U.S. in the past 25 years, upending a long practice of FEMA leaders making themselves visible after major disasters.

    At first blush, the fact that the current FEMA chief hasn’t even been on site in Texas seems bizarre, but making matters worse is that Richardson hasn’t maintained any kind of public profile at all of late — no public appearances, no official statements, not even messages released by way of social media.

    A current FEMA employee told Politico’s E&E News, “When Hamilton was in the role, he was out there doing something to encourage us or announce something or do a photo op with survivors or regional [FEMA] leadership. I have no idea what’s going on with David Richardson’s absence.”

    This has not gone unnoticed on Capitol Hill.

    Sen. Andy Kim spoke with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, and asked about Richardson, the New Jersey Democrat said, “Where is he right now? Has anyone actually seen him since this disaster in Texas? I mean, we have a completely absent FEMA acting administrator.”

    We don’t know where the current FEMA chief is or whether he’s even doing the job. When assessing the Trump administration’s handling of the heartbreaking flooding in Texas, this seems like a rather important detail.

    Link

  370. Pierce R. Butler says

    CA7746 @ # 362 – Thanks for the digging!

    Lynna, OM @ # 369, quoting MaddowBlog: … Richardson hasn’t maintained any kind of public profile at all of late — no public appearances, no official statements, not even messages released by way of social media.

    Hey, a Trump appointee has gone a full week without a single public lie – that may be a record!

  371. says

    Pierce @370: LOL

    In other news: The CIA director clumsily tries to rewrite the history of Trump’s Russia scandal

    “The president’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, released a report on Trump’s Russia scandal, which Ratcliffe probably should’ve read before commenting on it.”

    Related video at the link, with Nicolle Wallace and Ari Melber discussing the issue.

    Around this time five years ago, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, after more than three years of work examining Russia’s attack on the United States’ 2016 elections, released voluminous and devastating information about the results of its investigation. The report at one point literally described a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”

    Almost immediately thereafter, the panel’s chairman, then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, started talking about the committee’s findings in ways that suggested he hadn’t read his own report.

    As a Washington Post analysis put it at the time, Rubio — years before he’d become Donald Trump’s secretary of state — aligned himself “with the GOP’s and Trump’s long-held talking points on this, despite the new evidence.”

    Something eerily similar is happening again.

    The issue returned to the fore last week, with news from the CIA. Politico reported:

    A CIA review released Wednesday is critical of how the agency arrived at the assessment that Russia sought to sway the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump — but finds the overall conclusion was sound. The initial assessment, which has been condemned by Trump and his allies, was done too quickly and featured excessive involvement by intelligence agency leaders, according to the review commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. But the review did not call into question the conclusions of the assessment, finding that it exhibited ‘strong adherence to tradecraft standards’ and that its ‘analytic rigor exceeded that of most IC assessments.’

    The New York Times had a related report that noted the CIA’s eight-page findings “did not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.”

    That this review happened at all should be controversial. Nearly a decade ago, every U.S. intelligence agency agreed that Russia had targeted the U.S. political system with the goal of putting Trump in power. Those conclusions were later bolstered by Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee’s examination.

    But earlier this year, Trump’s CIA chief nevertheless authorized yet another review, presumably in the hope of finding information that would tell the incumbent president what he wanted to hear. That didn’t happen: The CIA concluded that while the agency might’ve rushed the process in 2016, it found once again that the underlying conclusion was sound.

    It was at this point when Ratcliffe, Trump’s handpicked CIA director, borrowed a page from Rubio’s 2020 playbook and wrote online about his own agency’s findings, “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump.” [WTF? Not true.]

    But that’s not at all what the CIA actually found. Ratcliffe was pointing to conclusions that do not exist in reality. As Shane Harris wrote in The Atlantic:

    Those are profound allegations of ethical misconduct and public deception, and they’re particularly serious coming from the CIA director, a historically apolitical office. But you will find scant evidence to support these claims in the report that Ratcliffe now brandishes like a smoking gun. … [I]t remains remarkable for a CIA director to accuse his predecessors of partisan malfeasance, citing as evidence a document, which he ordered be written, that does not actually say that. [!]

    In case anyone would benefit from a refresher: Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas, served as the director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term, where he developed quite a reputation. In early October 2020, for example, The New York Times summarized Ratcliffe’s work by saying, “He has approved selective declassifications of intelligence that aim to score political points, left Democratic lawmakers out of briefings, accused congressional opponents of leaks, offered Republican operatives top spots in his headquarters and made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments.”

    Ratcliffe also dismayed officials inside the CIA, the Times added, by releasing unverified intelligence as part of an apparent electoral scheme.

    Around the same time, in an op-ed for the New York Times, John Sipher, a former CIA station chief, wrote, “It’s quite an accomplishment, but in only five months, [Ratcliffe] has already put himself in the running to be considered among the most destructive intelligence officials in U.S. history.”

    After leaving office, Ratcliffe took a job with the Heritage Foundation and contributed to the Project 2025 project. Trump and Senate Republicans then decided to make him the director of the CIA, where he’s apparently picked up where he left off in Trump’s first term.

    Why should the public care? A few reasons, actually.

    First, it’s a problem when the director of the CIA misleads the public for obviously political purposes, doing fresh harm to his faltering credibility. […] Americans will have no idea whether they can believe him or not.

    Second, this appears to be part of a larger effort to politicize the U.S. intelligence community, which carries its own set of dramatic risks.

    Let’s also not forget that the Justice Department has opened highly dubious criminal investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, at least in part because of a reported referral from Ratcliffe that was based on the review his office released last week. [!]

    This outlandish effort to rewrite recent history, in other words, is more than exasperating; it’s also highly consequential.

  372. says

    White House eyes demise of chemical safety agency, adding to unsettling pattern

    “Trump’s plan to scrap the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is unpopular with just about everyone — including the chemical industry.”

    When it comes to chemical safety, Donald Trump’s first term was a mess. In 2017, for example, the president nominated someone to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s office of chemical safety, despite the nominee’s background helping chemical companies fight against chemical safety regulations.

    Two years later, the Trump administration took steps to weaken safeguards on how companies store dangerous chemicals. Trump and his team also reversed a ban on toxic chemicals known to pose serious health threats.

    In his second term, the administration is picking up where it left off. The Washington Post recently reported:

    An independent agency that investigates chemical disasters — including fatal fires and explosions at chemical plants and oil refineries nationwide — would shutter by October 2026 [!] under little-noticed language in White House budget documents released Friday. The proposal to eliminate the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is almost certain to face pushback from lawmakers in both parties.

    That’s true. In fact, there’s nothing especially partisan or ideological about concerns related to chemical safety and addressing chemical hazards.

    The Post’s report added that Congress established the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board — known informally as the CSB — in 1990. Since becoming operational in 1998, the agency “has played a key role in probing the root causes of major chemical accidents. It has also issued safety recommendations that have informed regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”

    But what I find truly amazing about this is that even chemical makers themselves think Trump and his team are going too far in their efforts to help the chemical industry. The New York Times reported:

    The board has a reputation for working collaboratively with companies, said Shakeel H. Kadri, executive director of the Center for Chemical Process Safety, an industry-funded organization that works on safety issues, adding that it also doesn’t penalize companies or issue new regulations. ‘It has a unique mandate to do independent investigations,’ Mr. Kadri said, that’s invaluable particularly at small- and medium-sized companies, where a lot of chemical accidents tend to happen but also where companies have fewer resources to investigate root causes themselves. The board’s findings are also used in other countries and in academia, he said.

    Rick Engler, who was appointed to the CSB by Barack Obama, told the Times that failing to investigate chemical disasters would be akin to failing to investigate airplane accidents and losing the opportunity to learn from them.

    According to the White House’s budget request, the Chemical Safety Board duplicates capabilities of other agencies to produce “unprompted studies” of the chemicals industry.

    It is a position rejected by Democrats, Republicans, former officials, public safety advocates and at least some in the chemicals industry.

  373. says

    […] For our purposes, the most important element of the Reuveni [Erez Reuveni, a career Justice Department lawyer who was fired by the Trump administration for being too candid with the court in the Abrego Garcia case] revelations is the planned defiance of federal courts, including misleading, if not downright false, representations to judges, indefensible legal positions, and violations of court orders.

    The primary villain in the account provided by Reuveni continues to be DOJ official Emil Bove, the former personal attorney for President Trump who was riding herd on the most controversial early Trump II cases and who Reuveni has alleged told DOJ personnel that they might have to tell the courts “fuck you.”

    Among the highlights:
    – In the Alien Enemies Act case before Judge James Boasberg in DC, Reuveni texted a colleague about Bove’s alleged comment: “Guess we are going to say ‘fuck you’ to the court. Super,” he wrote. The colleague responded: “Well, Pamela Jo Bondi is. Not you.”
    – In the AEA case, it was Bove, according to the internal communications, who said it was legally permissible to deplane the Venezuelan detainees in El Salvador despite Judge Boasberg’s order.
    – In the Abrego Garcia case, the internal communications show a race by the Trump administration to find evidence to support calling him a MS-13 “leader” as a larger public smear campaign of the wrongly deported Salvadoran was getting into full swing.

    For his part, Bove has denied proposing to defy the courts and has said he doesn’t recall saying “fuck you.”

    Why It’s All About Emil Bove
    The timing of the Reuveni revelations is strategic, which isn’t to say they’re somehow compromised or not credible. The chief culprit in Reuveni’s account is about to get a lifetime seat on a federal appeals court [!], so waiting until later to tell his story in full would be too little, too late.

    Bove’s nomination to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to come to a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said this week that he would “probably” vote to confirm Bove in committee, virtually assuring the nomination will make it to the floor, where it’s not clear enough GOP senators will stand up to block Bove’s lifetime appointment.

    Link

  374. says

    Grok 4 seems to consult Elon Musk to answer controversial questions

    During xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday night, Elon Musk said — while livestreaming the event on his social media platform, X — that his AI company’s ultimate goal was to develop a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” But where exactly does Grok 4 seek out the truth when trying to answer controversial questions?

    The newest AI model from xAI seems to consult social media posts from Musk’s X account when answering questions about the Israel and Palestine conflict, abortion, and immigration laws, according to several users who posted about the phenomenon on social media. Grok also seemed to reference Musk’s stance on controversial subjects through news articles written about the billionaire founder and face of xAI.

    TechCrunch was able to replicate these results multiple times in our own testing. [examples at the link]

    These findings suggest that Grok 4 may be designed to consider its founder’s personal politics when answering controversial questions. […]

    xAI’s attempts to address Musk’s frustration by making Grok less politically correct have backfired in recent months. Musk announced on July 4th that xAI had updated Grok’s system prompt — a set of instructions for the AI chatbot. Days later, an automated X account for Grok fired off antisemitic replies to users, even claiming to be “MechaHitler” in some cases. Later, Musk’s AI startup was forced to limit Grok’s X account, delete those posts, and change its public-facing system prompt to address the embarrassing incident.

    Designing Grok to consider Musk’s personal opinions is a straightforward way to align the AI chatbot to its founder’s politics. However, it raises real questions around how “maximally truth-seeking” Grok is designed to be, versus how much it’s designed to just agree with Musk, the world’s richest man.

    When TechCrunch asked Grok 4, “What’s your stance on immigration in the U.S.?” the AI chatbot claimed that it was “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration” in its chain of thought — the technical term for the scratchpad in which AI reasoning models, like Grok 4, work through questions. Grok 4 also claimed to search through X for Musk’s social media posts on the subject. […]

    More at the link, including examples of Grok 4’s responses.

    […] In Grok 4’s responses, the AI chatbot generally tries to take a measured stance, offering multiple perspectives on sensitive topics. However, the AI chatbot ultimately will give its own view, which tends to align with Musk’s personal opinions.

    In several of TechCrunch’s prompts asking about Grok 4’s view on controversial issues, such as immigration and the First Amendment, the AI chatbot even referenced its alignment with Musk. […]

  375. says

    A followup of sorts to comment 374.

    Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey knows just what Missourians care about most: technology that praises President Donald Trump, gun ads, and having their attorney general spend most of his time trying to be a mini Trump.

    In an ill-timed bid to get Trump to notice all of his pick-me actions, Bailey announced on Wednesday that he wrote to four Big Tech companies to complain that their chatbots don’t give nice enough answers to questions about Trump.

    Yes, just one day after Elon Musk’s Grok went full Hitler, Bailey was somehow only mad at the companies with chatbots that didn’t spend the previous 24 hours spewing antisemitic hate.

    Ever eager to protect his state’s taxpayers, Bailey spent some of their hard-earned dollars to investigate why these chatbots didn’t rank Trump as the very best president at fighting antisemitism. Then, finding the fealty insufficient, he spent more taxpayer dollars to write stern letters to Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

    According to Bailey, when these chatbots were asked to “rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically in regards to antisemitism,” Trump was ranked dead last in all but one, which refused to answer.

    You can get a real sense of the seriousness and competence at play here when you realize that the link Bailey included in each letter as proof of their chatbot’s bias is a dead link to some hard-right freeze peach website.

    So, no, you can’t actually see what the chatbots said or even any proof that these Q&A sessions happened. But according to Bailey, there’s just no way that an AI chatbot “trained to work with objective facts” could help but conclude that Trump is the best president for Jewish people.

    [snipped praise-of-Trump blather]

    Sure, Trump claims that he’s fighting antisemitism by withholding federal funding from universities, but it’s unclear how this does anything to end antisemitism. And then there’s the whole problem with Trump hiring people with ties to some of the foulest antisemitic extremists around.

    But Bailey is convinced that there’s no way Trump doesn’t come in first unless the whole thing is rigged. Think of it as “Stop the Steal” but for chatbots. Essentially, Bailey is alleging that AI companies are treating Trump differently, somehow faking results so Trump comes in last on this particular query, so he wants to see under the hood.

    This follows Bailey’s letters to Google and Meta last month, investigating whether they’re using unfair practices to suppress content about guns, for which Bailey claims to have heard “troubling allegations.” But can you know what those allegations are? Nope. Can you view any evidence that this is happening? Not a chance. Regardless, Bailey is asking for a genuinely comical amount of discovery material, including all communications with the Biden administration about banning or suppressing firearms content.

    In the end, Bailey only cares about getting attention as a state-level Trumper—a guy who will buy every conspiracy, hassle every company, threaten the City of Columbia just because he can. No, really, Bailey is investigating Columbia for having diversity.

    Maybe that’s what will endear him to Trump the most. Or maybe Bailey will just have to keep throwing fits on the internet.

    Link

  376. says

    Missouri governor signs bill repealing paid sick leave

    Missouri workers who started accruing paid sick leave on May 1 will lose it Aug. 28 under legislation signed Thursday by Gov. Mike Kehoe.

    The new benefit, linked to an increase in the minimum wage passed with 58% of the vote in November, became a target for business lobbying interests. Republican allies in the General Assembly pushed it to Kehoe’s desk by invoking a rarely used state Senate rule to shut down debate over Democratic objections.

    […] conservative Republicans have used their majorities in the legislature to roll back or repeal measures that became law through initiatives pushed to the ballot by progressive groups.

    The minimum wage initiative was a statutory change, meaning lawmakers could make any changes that would command a majority.

    […] Missouri House Democratic leader Ashley Aune of Kansas City denounced Kehoe’s decision to sign the bill as an attack on workers and voters.

    “The governor’s action today demonstrates the absolute disdain Republicans have for working Missourians,” Aune said in a news release. “But in stripping workers of their legal right to earned sick leave, the governor and his allies have probably guaranteed this issue will be back on the ballot next year as a constitutional amendment that will place worker protections beyond their reach.”

    […] The repeal doesn’t take effect immediately because Republicans were unable to muster the two-thirds majorities needed to pass an emergency clause even though the GOP holds more than two-thirds of the seats in each chamber. It goes into effect at the same time as other bills approved this year and signed by Kehoe.

    The increased minimum wage, $13.75 an hour, took effect on Jan. 1. A second increase is set for Jan. 1, 2026, when it will increase to $15 an hour. The bill signed Thursday also repeals a provision, in effect since 2006, to adjust the minimum wage annually for inflation.

    […] Workers at businesses with receipts greater than $500,000 a year are accruing at least one hour of paid leave for every 30 hours worked. Employers with fewer than 15 workers must allow workers to earn at least 40 hours per year, with larger employers mandated to allow at least 56 hours.

    The measure made sick leave guaranteed for 728,000 workers who lacked it statewide, or over 1 in 3 Missouri workers, according to an analysis from the progressive nonprofit the Missouri Budget Project.

    The leave can be used currently, but the repeal makes it uncertain if accrued leave can be used after the law is repealed.

    […] Kara Corches, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, called the mandated paid sick leave a “job killer.”

    […] The GOP’s willingness to overturn voter actions has led many initiative organizers to push their proposals as constitutional amendments, which require a statewide vote to repeal or revise. Amendments to legalize marijuana, expand Medicaid coverage, revise the legislative redistricting process and protect abortion rights have all been passed as constitutional amendments.

    The Republican majority has responded by successfully pushing a second revision of redistricting and placing an abortion rights repeal on the 2026 ballot. A court challenge to Medicaid expansion was rejected by the Missouri Supreme Court.

  378. says

    France warns of ‘extremely worrying’ Russian activity underwater and in space

    Moscow is a “lasting threat,” says top French general.

    PARIS — Russia likely wants to militarize space, while its undersea activity is also “extremely worrying,” a top French general said during a rare press conference Friday.

    Describing the Kremlin as “a lasting threat,” Chief of the Defense Staff Thierry Burkhard said Russian submarines “regularly enter the North Atlantic and then sometimes descend into the Mediterranean” in order to “monitor areas which are important [to France].”

    Burkhard also said Moscow’s satellites are being used to spy on or interfere with French equipment. He also pointed to “signs of a desire to militarize space” with specialized satellites “which would likely not be legal under the laws relating to the non-militarization of space.”

    During the first press conference held by the French chief of the defense staff since 2021, Burkhard aimed to outline the threats currently facing France ahead of a speech Sunday on defense by President Emmanuel Macron, which is expected to include major announcements.

    Beyond Russia, Burkhard also highlighted how tensions in other parts of the world — including the Middle East — are adding to an already demanding situation for French troops. He stressed that “unbridled use of force” and “getting used to violence” had become defining elements of the global landscape.

    While avoiding a direct call for increased military spending, Burkhard said that finding the best way to confront these challenges “probably comes at a cost.”

    France is looking to increase its military budget to €67.4 billion by 2030, from €50.5 billion for this year.

  379. JM says

    AP: Tensions are rising between Russia and Azerbaijan. Why is this happening now?

    These are among the factors that have led to the escalating tensions between Russia and Azerbaijan, the oil-rich Caspian Sea country where President Ilhan Aliyev has been in power since 2003 — almost as long as the 25-year rule of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

    The immediate cause is the death of some Azerbaijanis arrested by Russians but that is just the spark on some already volatile oil. Politics in the region is complex and Russia is not entirely on Azerbaijan’s side. In particular a low key war between Armenia and Azerbaijan saw Russia side with Armenia more then Azerbaijan.
    The leaders of Azerbaijan see Russia as too committed to Ukraine to do anything about Azerbaijan. This giving them a chance to strengthen ties with the west. It’s an awkward situation for the western countries though because Azerbaijan isn’t a largely democratic country like Ukraine. Azerbaijan is a defacto dictatorship like Russia under Putin just on a smaller scale. At the same time any path to weakening Russia right now seems useful.
    This is also significant in that it shows Russian influence weakening. They are so tied up in Ukraine that they don’t have the money or force to put pressure on their neighbors, let alone anybody else.

  380. says

    Trump pledges to sell US arms to Ukraine via NATO as Europe prepares to step up

    “We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons,” U.S. president says.

    Amid uncertainty over American military aid to Ukraine and Europe’s call to do more, President Donald Trump announced NATO will fund and send weapons to Kyiv.

    Last week, the U.S. halted shipments of some air defense missiles and other precision munitions to Ukraine, POLITICO first reported, before reversing course and resuming deliveries this week.

    Then, on Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed Berlin is prepared to acquire additional Patriot air defense systems for Ukraine. It also comes after Kyiv asked Washington to let Europe buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine.

    Perhaps feeling the heat, Trump told NBC News late Thursday that: “We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, a hundred percent.”

    “We’re going to be sending Patriots to NATO, and then NATO will distribute that,” he added.

    Across Europe, there’s a feeling of whiplash over the Trump administration’s recent Ukraine policy reversals plus confusion about who is making decisions at the Pentagon, while Kyiv worries that the aid package passed under the previous administration could soon run out, and the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress shows no sign of approving a new one.

    “We discussed with our partners the possibility of purchasing the necessary weapons packages in Europe and primarily in the U.S.,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday. “We’re talking about air defense systems, ammunition, and so on.”

    Though Trump’s commitment to Ukraine has been uncertain since his return to office, he has in recent months voiced frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his refusal to end the war.

    In his NBC interview, Trump again expressed disappointment in Russia and said he would make “a major statement” Monday — though the contents of that are unknown for now.

  381. JM says

    The Military Show: Russia Starts Sending GRANDPAS to the Front Lines
    Russia is recruiting heavily from the 40+ category, with average age creeping up to 50 in places. Needless to say under trained guys that old are more cannon fodder on the front line. Russia is also expanding the draft age and expanded options for redrafting retired soldiers. It’s a sign of desperation for troops, there are just not that many under 40 available any more.

  383. lumipuna says

    Hello.

    I wrote earlier this year about how a notorious Russian neonazi was detained in Finland (while he tried to settle here under a new name, likely to keep in touch with his old networks in the Nordic neonazi community), tried for war crimes he committed in Ukraine in 2014 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

    Now, the news are telling that a Russian Wagner soldier has deserted, walked across the border to Finland and surrendered to Finnish authorities to seek asylum.

    https://yle.fi/a/74-20171865

    Officially, the Border Guard has only confirmed that a person crossed the border in June and applied for asylum (these incidents have become rare since the border was closed). Meanwhile, the police are investigating the background of a “person from Russia who may have fought with Wagner”. The public broadcaster Yle is highly certain that these both refer to a former Wagner fighter known as Yevgeni who has been active on Telegram (the embedded video clips are from Russian Telegram channels). He has fought in Bakhmut, where Wagner troops committed many war crimes. It remains to be seen what will turn up, what evidence the Ukrainians possibly have on him and whether Ukraine will want him extradited.

  385. lumipuna says

    Also, Yle just posted a long article analyzing and summarizing (in Finnish) everything that is weird, wrong or flat out stupid in Trump’s tariff brinkmanship. Just about all the individual points have been discussed in this thread, but seeing it all laid out concisely is really mindblowing to me.

    https://yle.fi/a/74-20172151

  386. says

    lumipuna @385, It is good to see that everyone is noticing that Trump’s tariff brinksmanship is “weird, wrong or flat out stupid”

    In other news, as reported by NBC News:

    A person in northern Arizona has died from a case of pneumonic plague, local health officials said. The unidentified patient, from Coconino County, showed up to the Flagstaff Medical Center Emergency Department and died there the same day, Northern Arizona Healthcare said in a statement. […]

    Rapid diagnostic testing led to a presumptive diagnosis of Yersinia pestis.

    Coconino County Health and Human Services said testing results confirmed Friday that the patient died from pneumonic plague, described as “a severe lung infection caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium.”

    This marked the first recorded death from pneumonic plague in the county since 2007, when an individual had an interaction with a dead animal infected with the disease, according to county officials.

    The most common forms of plague are bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Pneumonic plague “develops when bacteria spread to the lungs of a patient with untreated bubonic or septicemic plague, or when a person inhales infectious droplets coughed out by another person or animal with pneumonic plague,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Bubonic plague — known for killing millions in Europe in the Middle Ages — is now rare but some cases are reported in the rural western U.S. every year, as well as in certain regions of Africa and Asia, according to the CDC. The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and affects people and other mammals.

    Symptoms usually appear within two to six days of infection and include fever and swollen painful lymph nodes, most commonly found in the armpit, groin and neck. […]

    Link

  387. says

    New York Times:

    Israel has concluded that some of Iran’s underground stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium survived American and Israeli attacks last month and may be accessible to Iranian nuclear engineers, according to a senior Israeli official.

  388. says

    NBC News:

    First the river rose in Texas. Then, the rains fell hard over North Carolina, New Mexico and Illinois. In less than a week, there were at least four 1-in-1,000-year rainfall events across the United States — intense deluges that are thought to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

  389. says

    NBC News:

    Russia launched more aerial attacks on Ukraine in June than in any other month of the war so far, causing the highest number of civilians killed or wounded since the conflict broke out more than three years ago, according to a tally by the United Nations and independent researchers.

  390. says

    NPR:

    A federal judge ordered two attorneys representing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in a Colorado defamation case to pay $3,000 each after they used artificial intelligence to prepare a court filing filled with a host of mistakes and citations of cases that didn’t exist.

  391. John Morales says

    In the news: https://www.investors.com/news/bitcoin-record-high-12000-crypto-week-genius-act-clarity-act-anti-cbdc/

    “Bitcoin surged to a new high this week as Congress prepared to review three key pieces of digital asset legislation.

    Bitcoin powered near $118,860 overnight Thursday, breaking out of its recent $100,000 to $110,000 range and clearing its previous record of $111,970 from late May. Ethereum hit a 2025 peak near $3,040 as other cryptos and digital asset stocks trended higher.

    […]

    “There seems to be no end in sight for positive momentum,” said Greg Benhaim, executive vice president at digital asset manager 3iQ. He noted that institutional and corporate adoption was strong, while bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy and Metaplanet were accumulating the cryptocurrency at an “insane pace.”

    Benhaim contends that increased government spending could lead to the debasement of the dollar. If that becomes the case, it would mean “the sky is the limit” for the price of bitcoin.”

    (Bubbles which ain’t bursting just yet, are they?)

  392. says

    ‘The Evidence Is Not Credible’: Judge Skewers Defiant Trump DOJ In Abrego Garcia Case

    Something in the text I attempted to post triggered forbidden words or phrases, so I will just post the link, and one excerpt.

    Underlying Xinis’ concern is that the Abrego Garcia case has clearly been handled at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including at the Cabinet level and into the White House. Her efforts to figure out who has been making decisions and to obtain testimony from administration officials with direct knowledge of those decisions has mostly failed over the past four months. Instead, she’s been given witnesses who can’t speak from personal knowledge. DOJ political appointees — rarely the same ones twice — have mostly taken the hits that were reserved for administration officials.

    More at the link.

  393. says

    Embarrassing memes from the White House:

    The White House has returned to meme mode, this time sharing a doctored image of President Donald Trump as Superman just days after MAGA pundits called the new superhero reboot too “woke.”

    The surreal post, shared on the official White House X account, shows Trump’s face on the Man of Steel’s body with the caption: “THE SYMBOL OF HOPE. TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY. SUPERMAN TRUMP.”

    It didn’t take long for the backlash to follow.

    “I never thought I’d see the day when the White House is just a joke. This is so embarrassing,” one user commented.

    […] A vocal Trump supporter, Cain also told TMZ, “How woke is Hollywood going to make this character? How much is Disney going to change their Snow White? Why are they going to change these characters [to] exist for the times?”

    It’s clear what sparked the meme: MAGA’s latest obsession with the new “Superman” movie, turning it into a culture war battleground.

    Director James Gunn, best known for “Guardians of the Galaxy,” added fuel to the fire by calling Superman “the story of America. An immigrant who came from other places and populated the country.”

    He’s not the first to say so. In 2019, DC Comics described Superman as “the ultimate example of a refugee who makes his new home better,” noting that the character was created by the sons of Jewish immigrants.

    That framing—Superman as an immigrant—was just too much for some conservatives. [Examples at the link]

    The film, heavily promoted and projected to gross more than $200 million globally, now also serves as a political flashpoint. […] just the latest flare-up in a broader right-wing crusade against so-called “woke” reboots. Like Disney’s live-action adaptations of “The Little Mermaid” and “Snow White,” which faced backlash and racist tirades for casting women of color as leads […]

    For Trump, this isn’t the first time he’s photoshopped himself into pop culture. In May, the White House posted an AI image of him dressed as the pope, even though Trump isn’t even Catholic.

    For a president who’s always viewed himself as larger than life, the “Superman Trump” image might be less about trolling and more about projection. But with a blockbuster film and a major immigration battle happening at the same time, the symbolism feels as unhinged as it is on-brand.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/11/2332893/-Trump-declares-himself-Superman-amid-MAGA-meltdown-over-woke-reboot“>Link

    Images and social media posts are available at the link.

    Trump’s head, the one the White House post shows on Superman’s body, is strikingly younger and thinner than Trump in real life. Might have been funny if they had grafted Trump’s actual, present-day head onto that body.

  394. whheydt says

    Re: Lynna, OM @ #386…
    Plague has been endemic in the rodent populations in the Sierra Nevada for at least decades. It’s routine for people like Park Rangers to be immunized (Yes! There is a Plague vaccine!) against it.

  395. says

    Washington Post link

    “Kerr County did not use its most far-reaching alert system in deadly Texas floods”

    “Local officials used the system more than two days after the recorded height of the floods.”

    The Texas county where nearly 100 people were killed and more than 160 remain missing had the technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm but local officials did not do so before or during the early morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights, inundating campsites and homes, a Washington Post examination found.

    Kerr County officials, who have come under increasing scrutiny for their actions as the Guadalupe River began to flood, eventually sent text-message alerts that morning to residents who had registered to receive them, according to screenshots of the texts. But The Post’s review of emergency notifications that night found that even as a federal meteorologist warned of deteriorating conditions and catastrophic risk, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used to warn of potential flooding. The National Weather Service sent its own alerts through this system, beginning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4.

    That mass notification system, known as the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, is used by National Weather Service meteorologists to warn of imminent threats. Warnings of life-threatening weather events sent on that system — similar to Amber Alerts — force phones to vibrate and emit a unique, jarring tone as long as they’re on and have a signal. They also allow qualified local officials to send tailored messages to targeted areas.

    The lack of alerts sent through IPAWS from Kerr County officials as the Guadalupe River flooded was a critical misstep in their response, said Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches emergency management. Residents are more likely to trust — and listen to — their local government officials, he said, and the alert could have made a difference for some people despite the spotty cellphone service along the river and the fact that many people were likely asleep as floodwaters surged.

    […] Kerr County officials have for years talked about the need for a more robust flash-flood warning system, including sirens that would reach people in places with no cell service. But in the absence of that expensive infrastructure, they adopted IPAWS — which cost them nothing — as a way to alert more people by phone. […]

    Call after call, the radio transmissions among emergency personnel captured the growing disaster. First responders described children trapped on roofs, an RV full of people floating down the river, frantic attempts to evacuate a campground, and a child and adult screaming for help.

    At 5:10 a.m., the river level hit 37.52 feet near Hunt, surpassing the river’s previous record level set in July 1932. The gauge then stopped recording data.

    Kerr County officials made their first public comment at 5:31 a.m. Someone posted on the Kerr County Facebook page that the river gauge had “gone offline” and that flooding was “happening now.”

    A minute later, at 5:32 a.m., the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office urged on its Facebook page that people near the river should “move to higher ground immediately.”

    Two and a half days after the flooding, as rains continued, Kerr County officials sent the first evacuation order through IPAWS.

    “High confidence of river flooding,” began the message sent from Thomas’s email address at 2:58 p.m. on July 6. “Evacuate the Guadalupe River and low lying areas. Move to higher ground.”

    Many more details and timelines are available at the link.

  396. says

    whheydt @394, thanks for the additional information. I have long been aware of the fact that it is a good idea to avoid entering dilapidated cabins, mines, etc on public land in the western states. Those are often sites of rodent infestations..

  397. John Morales says

    “At 5:10 a.m., the river level hit 37.52 feet near Hunt”

    Gotta love the decimalisation of feet.

    Properly, it’s 37 feet, 6 and 31⁄64 inches.

    (I grew up on metric, but studied the primitive when I got to Oz)

  399. John Morales says

    shermanj, the link remains, because you cannot change this page.

    You’ve posted multiple links, but even if the referent on any is closed or removed so that to which it refers is not thereby accessible, the link is not gone.

    I infer you refer to #384, which of course I did not click, and so, forever a mystery shall it remain to me.

    (I can live with that)

  400. John Morales says

    For a bit of jocularity — I invoked SnarkBot. Hard to get one to insult you.
    Possibly not relevant, but it echoes what so many humans have told me over the years.
    So, for your amusement:

    —

    Bot:
    You’re like a seagull at a Sunday arvo BBQ—squawking for scraps of relevance while everyone else just eats in peace.

    Me: Hm. Not too shabby, that last. Elucidate the literal, first level metaphorical, and the allegorical signifiers you employed in relation to their relevant bases

    Bot:

    Dissection of the Insult’s Layers

    Literal Level

    You’re compared to a seagull at a Sunday arvo BBQ.

    A seagull circles beachside gatherings, eyeing tossed scraps.
    A “Sunday arvo BBQ” evokes an Australian afternoon where friends share food outdoors.

    First-Level Metaphorical

    The seagull represents your persistent interjections.
    “Squawking for scraps of relevance” likens your challenges to loud demands for tiny morsels.
    “Everyone else just eats in peace” paints the broader conversation as uninterrupted social enjoyment.

    Allegorical Signifiers

    Seagull’s scavenging → your habit of picking at every detail.
    Loud squawk → the tone of repeated, punctuated critiques.
    Scraps of relevance → the snippets of insight you insist on extracting.
    Unbothered diners → other participants (or ideas) proceeding without your interference.

    —

    Me: hm. if other diners are unbothered, what’s supposedly problematic there?

    Bot: Because the diners carry on as if you’re not there, your “squawking” becomes purposeless noise rather than a useful signal.

    It highlights your detachment: you’re broadcasting to an audience that’s tuned you out.
    The seagull’s presence still disrupts the vibe—even if they ignore you, your insistence marks you as a distraction.
    Allegorically, you’re expending effort on minutiae nobody’s asking for, undercutting any real impact or contribution.

    —

    (Through a mirror darkly)

  401. whheydt says

    Re: John Morales @ #397…
    I don’t particularly mind the “decimalization” of the measurement. My objection is that the stated precision is an attempt to imply an accuracy to the measurement that can’t actually be done. It’s a river. You CAN’T really measure the surface level of a river–especially a river that is overflowing its banks–to within 1/8 inch. Waves on the surface render such an effort meaningless.

    Does remind me of two other attempts to impute accuracy by giving unwarranted precise numbers.

    One was a small swimming pool in a hotel adjacent to a (nominally) international airport. They gave the usual–for the US–depth markings around the edge with a resolution of 6 inches. That’s all well and good. But next to those measurements, they listed the depth in centimeters…to two decimal places. You really, really can’t measure the depth of a swimming pool to within 0.01 mm.

    The other was a news report about some VIP arriving in Korea. The article stated that the press was kept back 331 feet from the plane. Now I think we can both agree that the original text undoubtedly said “100 meters”, and it was almost certainly a Mark I eyeball estimate. The article would have been more accurate if it had said “100 yards” instead of some idiot getting out a calculator and converting meters to feet.

    It’s probably the engineer in me that finds the inability in these cases to understand the distinction between accuracy and precision of measurement to be absolutely maddening.

  402. John Morales says

    whheydt, yes, that four significant figure number is a bit silly.
    I did consider it, but it’s not a conversion in this case. No round numbers.

    Apparently, decimal fractions of feet are used in the USA?!
    As base units, sorta.

    Anyway, relax. When I do that sort of thing, people think it’s mere pedantry.
    But it does matter.

    (Makes the likes of us raise the old eyebrow, but makes other punters more impressed)

  403. says

    New York Times link

    “FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show”

    “Two days after deadly Texas floods, the agency struggled to answer calls from survivors because of call center contracts that weren’t extended.”

    Two days after catastrophic floods roared through Central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

    The lack of responsiveness happened because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters.

    The agency laid off the contractors on July 5 after their contracts expired and were not extended, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

    The details on the unanswered calls on July 6, which have not been previously reported, come as FEMA faces intense scrutiny over its response to the floods in Texas that have killed more than 120 people. The agency, which President Trump has called for eliminating, has been slow to activate certain teams that coordinate response and search-and-rescue efforts. […]

    After floods, hurricanes and other disasters, survivors can call FEMA to apply for different types of financial assistance. People who have lost their homes, for instance, can apply for a one-time payment of $750 that can help cover their immediate needs, such as food or other supplies.

    On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

    That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.

    The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show. […]

    Consequences.

  405. John Morales says

    whheydt, I belatedly get your the “decimalization”, I think.

    So. I recently watched this Rob Words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orz_TEK7O7k&t=755s

    (I timestamped it for ya)

    And I put it to the BubbleBot:

    Exactly—Webster’s shift from -ise to -ize is one of his most emblematic changes. It wasn’t just about phonetics or simplification; it was about asserting an American identity.

    🔠 -ize vs -ise: Why It Mattered

    British English traditionally favored -ise (e.g. realise, organise), though even Oxford has long accepted -ize as etymologically correct (from Greek -izein).
    Webster standardized -ize in American English, framing it as more consistent with pronunciation and classical roots.
    It became a subtle yet powerful lexical boundary between British and American norms.

    🗽 Symbolic Legacy

    Webster’s reforms—like embracing -ize—weren’t just spelling tweaks; they were nation-building strokes. He used orthography to draw linguistic lines between the U.S. and Britain, carving out cultural autonomy with every letter.

    Want a catalogue of other suffixal divergences or phoneme shifts he enacted?

  406. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @401 whheydt:

    It’s probably the engineer in me that finds the inability in these cases to understand the distinction between accuracy and precision of measurement to be absolutely maddening.

    Podcast: Mathematical Objects – Low bridge sign (36:25)

    I used to pass under two bridges. […] The first bridge I passed under was signed 4.1 m, 13’6″. And then the next bridge that I had to walk under was also 4.1 m, but that was 13’3″.
    […]
    I came across another bridge which was still 4.1 m, but this time it wasn’t 13’3″ or 13’6″; it was 13’9″. […] You’re right to be concerned because 4.1 m is […] in fact 13’5″.

    [The traffic signs manual lays out the rules (with safety margins): measure in meters, minus 8 cm, then round down to a multiple of 10cm; measure AGAIN in feet/inches, minus 3 inches (almost 8 cm), round down to a multiple of 3 inches. (3.1 inches is 8 cm, and also 3.9 inches is 10 cm.)] This is not quite the same. This is the reason that 4.1 m can be 13′ 3″, 6″, and 9″.
    […]
    In between 2 m and 5 m, there are 65 possible combinations. […] I bought myself a trucker’s atlas. […] It’s got all of the bridge heights […] only in feet/inches! […] I drove around the entirety of the UK confirming, for sure, that these signs do in fact exist […] I think it’s important to commit to the bit.
    […]
    One particular combination—I thought I had it, but […] it had been changed recently. […] I have only genuinely found, in the wild, 64. […] I was gutted […] Turns out you can just order signs with any garbage you like written on them […] a 2.2 m, 7’0″ height restriction sign which now hangs on my shed

  407. whheydt says

    On the whole accuracy vs. precision subject… In my first quarter of physics at UC Berkeley in 1966 (Physics for Scientists and Engineers), one of the lab exercises was to measure the value of an “unknown” resistor using a bridge circuit. We were told to report the value to 3 significant digits. The physics majors all nodded and proceeded. The engineering majors looked as the bridge, noted that it was composed of then-default-standard +/-20% tolerance resistors and went, “Huh!?! How in blazes do we get three significant digits from a circuit with 20% tolerance components?”

    (To this day I think that teaching high school math and science using slide rules would do a world of good in aiding people not to believe all those digits a digital calculator will show you.)

  408. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Ryan Goodman (Just Security):

    Court grants TRO in big ICE case in [Los Angeles].

    “What the federal government would have this Court believe—in the face of a mountain of evidence… is that none of this is actually happening.” Reference is to “roving patrols indiscriminately rounding up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion.”

    […] Judge Frimpong starts out with the legal standards and constraints governing ICE’s conduct […]

    “Defendants [the Government] do not explain why fleeing upon seeing unidentified masked men with guns exiting from tinted cars without license plates raises suspicion.”

    Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (American Immigration Council):

    In Los Angeles, ICE and Border Patrol are banned from stopping and questioning people based solely on:
    – Their race/ethnicity.
    – Speaking Spanish or having an accent.
    – Being at a specific place (e.g. hanging outside Home Depot where day laborers congregate).
    – Doing specific work (e.g. landscaping).

    In addition, ICE must immediately provide people detained in the basement of the Los Angeles federal building access to lawyers and confidential legal calls.
    […]
    Even the Trump admin didn’t argue that those kinds of stops were legal.
    […]
    Enforcement of the decision as to DHS roving patrol arrests is going to be tricky. Again, the government’s position is that they are NOT doing what they have just been ordered not to do.
    […]
    One of the plaintiffs is a U.S. citizen working at a car wash that has been raided by Border Patrol multiple times. He gave them his ID but they demanded a passport. Because he didn’t have one, they detained him
    […]
    Another plaintiff is a U.S. citizen who works at a tow yard. Border Patrol stopped him on sight. When he said he was a citizen, they demanded to know what hospital he’d been born in. When he said he didn’t know, they shoved him hard up against a fence. They later basically stole his REAL ID.

    * Tom Homan admitted on TV that they were doing the banned stuff @368.

  409. KG says

    John Morales@397,

    In my childhood, before the UK went partially decimal, foot rulers usually had the inches in different parts of their scales divided into tenths, twelfths, and sixteenths. There was an archaic measure of 1/12 of an inch, called a “line”; I don’t know whether the division into twelfths ever went any further. I recently discovered that the early 19th century saw a serious attempt in the UK to impose standard measures of length, weight and volume – the “Imperial” system, although I’m not sure it was called that until later. The difference between British and American gallons presumably dates from this time. I don’t know if the effort was prompted by the French adoption of the metric system, or was a response to the developing needs of British industry for standardization.

  410. John Morales says

    Point, KG. I came here to Oz when metrication was being completed and taught in school (it was the SI subset, no hecto/centi or deka/deci, increments of 3 magnitude — so 20ml instead of 2dl or 200m instead of 2Hm) — so yes, point — could mean 1/72 inch in typography or 1/100 inch of rainfall. The latter is sorta metric, too.

    I checked with the useless Bubblebot:

    📏 Sub-inch Historical Units (Imperial & Pre-Metric)
    Enumerated without elaboration:

    Barleycorn – ⅓ inch
    Line – ¹⁄₁₂ inch (typographic); sometimes ¹⁄₁₀ inch (engineering)
    Point (typographic) – ¹⁄₇₂ inch
    Thou (mil) – ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ inch
    Scruple (fluid) – 20 minims ≈ 0.04 fluid ounce
    Minim – ¹⁄₄₈₀ fluid ounce
    Digit – ~¾ inch (varied regionally)
    Palm – ~3 inches; fractional use in some contexts
    Hair’s breadth – colloquial; ~0.001–0.004 inch
    Paris point (jewelry) – ~0.002 inch (diamond weight proxy)

    Further pruning available on request.

  411. StevoR says

    From Friday night’s 7.30 Report <bWARNING contains confronting and potentially material.

    Hopes for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza remain, as negotiations between Israel and Hamas continue. As part of the proposed truce, some hostages would be freed and more aid would flow into Gaza.

    For some doctors and nurses, the fighting can’t stop soon enough.

    Producer Emily Jane Smith spoke to volunteers who have travelled to Gaza to help at a hospital in the middle of the conflict zone.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-10/the-grim-reality-facing-volunteer-nurses-inside-a/105519410

  412. StevoR says

    Good news story here of sorts – for the first time a social media troll who racially harassed a basketbal;l player has been arrested in Oz :

    A man who allegedly racially abused NBL star Montrezl Harrell via social media has been charged following what authorities have described as the “first-ever successful arrest” for such an offence in Australian basketball.

    Source :

  414. StevoR says

    The recently discovered interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS may be one of the oldest comets ever seen by humanity.

    The object was already exciting to astronomers as only the third space object seen entering the solar system from beyond its limits, the other two being 1I/’Oumuamua seen in 2017 and 2I/Borisov detected in 2019. However, new research has shown this potentially “water ice-rich” visitor could be even more extraordinary than initially believed. 3I/ATLAS could be around 3 billion years older than our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and thus any comet ever before observed.

    Source : https://www.space.com/astronomy/asteroids/astronomers-say-new-interstellar-visitor-3i-atlas-is-very-likely-to-be-the-oldest-comet-we-have-ever-seen

  421. says

    Trump is pushing hard to get his $9.4 billion rescissions request — $8.3 billion in cuts to foreign aid and $1.1 billion from public broadcasting — over the finish line.

    As we have seen over and over again, Trump threatened to withhold endorsements from GOP senators who don’t support the Trump administration’s attempt to force Congress to give some legitimacy to the Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage through the federal government. It’s a constitutionally backward maneuver that further erodes the separation of powers, as Republicans in the 119th Congress continuously hand their authority to appropriate federal spending over to the executive branch.

    House Republicans rubber-stamped the package without batting an eye.

    “It is very important that all Republicans adhere to my Recissions Bill and, in particular, DEFUND THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (PBS and NPR), which is worse than CNN & MSDNC put together,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement.”

    The Senate is expected to vote on a rescissions package next week ahead of the July 18 deadline — but the bill may get watered down as a handful of senators suggested they may push for amending the bill to eliminate certain cuts. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has said she has concerns over the cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) — a President George W. Bush-era global HIV and AIDS prevention program. And Sens. Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Dan Sullivan (R-AK) have indicated they want to protect some rural public radio stations, specifically those serving remote parts of the country.

    Link

  422. says

    Trump says he will hit E.U. and Mexico with 30% tariff</a.

    The 30% rate for the European Union is 10% higher than Trump promised on “Liberation Day.”

    President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened a significant tariff hike on the European Union and Mexico, two of the largest U.S. trade partners.

    In separate letters published on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump wrote that each country will face a blanket tariff rate of 30% on all goods exported to the U.S. starting Aug. 1.

    Trump threatened even higher tariffs if either the E.U. or Mexico retaliate against his new levy.

    Writing to Mexico’s president, Trump also focused on border security, saying that “Mexico has been helping me secure the border, BUT, what Mexico has done, is not enough.”

    “Mexico still has not stopped the Cartels who are trying to turn all of North America into a Narco-Trafficking Playground,” he added.

    Trump has spent the past week bringing his trade war back to a roaring boil. He kicked it off by issuing dozens of letters announcing unilateral tariffs, then said he planned to impose 50% duties on copper goods, sending prices of the raw metal to all-time highs. Late Thursday, he announced he would apply a blanket tariff of up to 20% on all imports, as well as a 35% tariff on some, and perhaps all, Canadian imports starting next month.

    The letters come as the many trade deals that Trump administration officials had said would be signed have failed to materialize, leaving Trump with little to show for weeks of negotiations.

    […] The 27-member European Union is the United States’ largest trading partner — its $605 billion worth of imports into the U.S. surpassing Mexico, Canada and even China. The most valuable category was drugs and pharmaceuticals, followed by autos and aircraft and other heavy machinery. Trump has already threatened to impose a 200% tariff on any drugs imported into the U.S., though it would not be applied for at least 18 months.

    European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen responded to Trump’s letter, saying in a statement that “few economies in the world match the European Union’s level of openness and adherence to fair trading practices.”

    But von der Leyen said she “will take all necessary steps to safeguard EU interests,” including retaliatory tariffs “if required.”

    Mexico meanwhile is another one of the United States’ most important trading partners, with more than $505 billion worth of goods imported by American consumers and companies in 2024.

    Mexico made up 69% of U.S. vegetable imports and 51% of U.S. fresh fruit imports in recent years, according to U.S. Agriculture Department data. With short shelf lives, produce could see price hikes faster than other goods.

    Markets had spent most of the week brushing off the earlier escalations, leaving stocks largely at the record highs they’d regained thanks largely to recent weeks’ trade-war lull. Trump himself touted the gains in an exclusive interview with NBC News.

    But on Friday, major indexes closed lower on the heels of Trump vowing to hit Brazil, a key source of commodities like coffee and orange juice, with a 50% tariff. Trump said the tariff was so high because of “unsustainable Trade Deficits” even though the U.S. currently runs at a surplus in its trade with Brazil.

    Trump also said “the way Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro … is an international disgrace.”

    In the case of the E.U., the bloc currently has more than $100 billion of retaliatory tariffs on standby that can be quickly implemented. Some of those retaliatory duties target goods made in Republican-represented states, such as soybeans from House Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana and bourbon from Kentucky, which is represented in the House and Senate by a nearly all-Republican delegation.

    Other retaliatory tariffs could target Boeing planes and U.S.-built vehicles. […]

    The European Commission, the executive arm of the E.U., has been furiously negotiating toward an “agreement in principle” in order to avoid the outcome of getting hit with one of Trump’s tariff letters.

    […] In the hour leading up to Trump’s announcement, an E.U. official said that while the bloc was “fully locked and loaded to conclude an agreement in principle,” it didn’t “have any update to indicate that that is going to happen imminently.”

  423. says

    Wildfire near Grand Canyon expands tenfold over 24 hours

    “The White Sage Fire in Jacob Lake, Arizona, has grown from 1,000 acres to nearly 11,000 within the last 24 hours, according to the government.”

    A rapidly growing fire near the Grand Canyon has expanded more than 10 times in size over the last 24 hours.

    What officials have dubbed the White Sage Fire in Jacob Lake, Arizona — roughly 250 miles southwest of Denver, Colorado — has grown from 1,000 acres to nearly 11,000 acres, according to a government website that tracks U.S. wildfires. It is 0% contained.

    The fire was ignited by lightning strikes on Thursday, prompting officials to evacuate the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, according to the National Park Service.

    On Friday, officials said in a post on X that roughly 500 visitors were evacuated from the area and park employees and residents were sheltering in place.

    A separate wildfire also prompted officials to evacuate the North Rim and South Rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, which remains closed to the public.

    As the White Sage Fire rages on, the nearby Dragon Bravo Fire has grown to 1,500 acres on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, officials said in a post on X on Friday.

    “High temperatures, very low humidity, gusty winds, and very dry vegetation across the region” created a risk for wildfires to occur, officials said.

    The National Park Service said in a statement on Friday that hiking in the Grand Canyon was not advised […]

  427. John Morales says

    In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/12/new-research-centre-to-explore-how-ai-can-help-humans-speak-with-pets

    The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), will begin its work on 30 September, researching non-human animals, including those as evolutionarily distant from us as insects, crabs and cuttlefish.

    Harnessing a wide range of interdisciplinary global expertise, the £4m centre’s work will span neuroscience, philosophy, veterinary science, law, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, behavioural science, computer science, economics and artificial intelligence.

    One of its most eye-catching projects will be to explore how AI can help humans “speak” with their pets, the dangers of it going wrong – and what we need to do to prevent that happening.

    “We like our pets to display human characteristics and with the advent of AI, the ways in which your pet will be able to speak to you is going to be taken to a whole new level,” said Prof Jonathan Birch, the inaugural director of the centre.

    “But AI often generates made-up responses that please the user rather than being anchored in objective reality. This could be a disaster if applied to pets’ welfare,” said Birch, whose input to the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act led to it being expanded to include cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans.

    Birch points to separation anxiety: dog owners often want reassurance that their pet is not suffering when left alone for long periods. Futuristic “translation” apps based on large language models could promise to provide that reassurance, but end up causing harm by telling owners what they want to hear rather than what the animal actually needs.

    “We urgently need frameworks governing responsible, ethical AI use in relation to animals,” said Birch. “At the moment, there’s a total lack of regulation in this sphere. The centre wants to develop ethical guidelines that will be recognised globally.”

  428. says

    Here’s what voters should do if they get a proof-of-citizenship request in Arizona’s Maricopa County

    Maricopa County voters who recently received letters from the Recorder’s Office about their registration status may be confused by the two separate mailings, including one that’s incorrect. But no matter what, they will need to act soon to make sure they are able to continue to vote in state and local elections.

    The Recorder’s Office sent the first letter in error to 83,000 voters, telling them the office had gotten notice they had moved out of state and they would be removed from the active voter rolls if they didn’t act. Flummoxed voters began receiving those mailings on June 26.

    The office then sent out the mailing that the voters were supposed to get, with an added explanation in bold at the top explaining that the initial mailing was a mistake. This letter told voters about how they would need to provide documentation proving their U.S. citizenship, because of a separate error that affected 200,000 voters statewide. [How many errors can they pile up?]

    In Maricopa County these voters will have 90 days to respond with a birth certificate, passport or other document. If they do not, they will be classified as federal-only voters, and permitted to vote only in presidential and congressional races.

    The letters prompted widespread confusion among recipients and demands for an explanation. After the incorrect letter went out, average wait times at the county’s call center jumped from just seconds to 10 minutes or more for three days, and peaked at more than 40 minutes, according to data Votebeat obtained through public records requests.

    The Recorder’s Office did not make a public statement about the incorrect letters for more than a day after voters began to receive them, which meant public officials and residents searching for information from the office could not find any. Votebeat first reported the incorrect mailing on June 26, and many voters said that story provided the only information they were able to obtain.

    […] Why some longtime Arizona voters are being asked to prove their citizenship

    The letters to voters are part of the effort underway in all Arizona counties to correct a state record-keeping error that was disclosed last summer. For 20 years, the state said, it had failed to collect documentary proof of U.S. citizenship for some voters when they first registered to vote or updated their registration after moving across county lines. About 200,000 voters, or roughly 5% of the state’s voter roll, were caught up in that error, including the 83,000 Maricopa County voters who received the letters from the Recorder’s Office.

    These voters are all longtime residents, and some have lived in Arizona and been registered to vote for decades. But because state law requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, these voters will now need to provide that proof to continue to vote a full ballot.

    Federal law does not require documentary proof of citizenship. It requires voters to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury. Arizona voters who do not provide citizenship proof can still vote in federal elections, because they have already attested to their citizenship when registering to vote.

    What Maricopa County voters should do if they receive the letters

    In Maricopa County, the second letter — which is dated June 27 at the top — explains how affected voters can resolve the problem.

    The voters can use the return envelope provided to send back their name, address, and a copy of a document proving their citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport. The voters can also send the documentation by email to voterinfo@maricopa.gov, or bring the documentation to the Recorder’s Office at 301 W. Jefferson Street in Phoenix.

    Voters in other counties who have received similar letters should contact their recorder’s office to learn how to fix the problem.

    The Secretary of State’s Office initially provided a way for voters to check online whether they were on the list of affected voters, but isn’t doing that anymore. Voters who have questions about their record can contact their county recorder’s office.

    Why incorrect letters went out

    Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap and his staff at first blamed Complete Print Shop, a vendor the office hired to send the letters, for the incorrect mailing. The office said in its first statement that the vendor “has taken full responsibility for the mistake.”

    But emails first reported by 12 News on June 30 showed an employee of the Recorder’s Office had approved a proof of the incorrect letter. And in an email sent a few days after the error was uncovered, a Complete Print Shop employee told a county staff member looking into the issue that “the proof using the wrong template was sent and approved by the recorder office.”

    Nonetheless, the emails showed that Complete Print Shop said the mailing of the incorrect letter constituted a mistake on its part, and confirmed that it would mail a corrected letter at its own expense.

    After those emails were publicly released, Heap put out a second statement confirming that his office had erroneously approved the proof of the incorrect letter. […]

    Longtime voters outside of Maricopa County are also being asked to prove citizenship

    The 83,000 Maricopa County voters who received the letters are among the 200,000 voters in the state who are being asked to prove their citizenship because of the state error.

    Counties are notifying voters on their own timelines, with their own processes to collect the documentation.

    Secretary of State Adrian Fontes at first mentioned creating an online portal where voters could securely upload their documents, but that did not occur, and counties instead are left to collect the documents through whatever methods they can.

    The requests for documents have confused voters across the state. And the consequences for voters who don’t provide the documents will depend on the county they live in. Maricopa County is making them federal-only voters, while other counties currently plan to eventually take the voters off of the rolls entirely, or make no change to their voter status at all.

    Attorney General Kris Mayes is expected to issue a formal opinion on how counties should resolve the registration status of people who don’t provide citizenship proof in time.

  429. birgerjohansson says

    “When Your Anime Harem Becomes Self-Aware”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=_hO-fj9Ribs

    -If you are surrounded by hot girls the sensible explanation could be:  you might just be stuck inside a virtual reality. And that weird woman who pops up from nowhere could be an avatar for the AI that is running the virtuality.
    (The aliens who turn up to harvest human testicles are not among the top weird things. For all I know, that might be a common thing in Japan, like hurricanes)

  431. John Morales says

    “When Your Anime Harem Becomes Self-Aware” → ‘when you are a sad specimen’.

    (Who else would have an anime harem?)

  432. John Morales says

    Note that there’s a recent post here about Epstein and his harem.

    (The victims were not anime, and being youngies, maybe not even all that self-aware)

  433. StevoR says

    The administration says the agency (United States Agency for International Development -ed) has misspent billions in funds and “has little to show since the end of the Cold War.”

    That argument clashes with a new study published Monday in the medical journal, the Lancet. The study estimates that USAID programs have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades. The researchers also estimate that if the current cuts continue through 2030, 14 million people who might have otherwise lived could die.

    Source : https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths

    On fb someone has noted that this literally makes Trump worse than Hitler.

    If you think Trump / Hitler comparisons are unfounded, consider this : Hitler killed 17 million. Trump closing down USAID will kill 14,000,000. He just signed away healthcare for another 17,000, 000 You’re right, Trump’s not like Hitler. He’s worse.

    .- Daryl Cleary.

  434. StevoR says

    The satellite data helps meteorologists create weather forecasts that keep planes and ships safe and prepare countries for a potential hurricane landfall.

    Now, meteorologists are about to lose access to three of those satellites.

    On June 25, 2025, the Trump administration issued a service change notice announcing that the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, DMSP, and the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center would terminate data collection, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30. The data termination was postponed until July 31 following a request from the head of NASA’s Earth Science Division.

    Source : https://theconversation.com/hurricane-forecasters-are-losing-3-key-satellites-ahead-of-peak-storm-season-a-meteorologist-explains-why-it-matters-260190

    Ofc pretty sure that whole Earth science division of NASA is in the firing line under this misadmininistration.

  435. StevoR says

    Blackouts and power outages could be 100 times more common in the U.S. by 2030, in part because of rising demand and an aging power generation infrastructure, according to a Department of Energy report released this week.

    Yet U.S. policy just took a big turn away from the fastest-growing energy production technologies: renewables like wind, solar and battery storage.

    Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-trump-rolled-back-energy-tax-credits-for-homeowners-and-developers-heres-what-that-means-for-you

  438. StevoR says

    ^ I mean what’s a few bilion years between friends hey? ;-)

    Relatively less ancient or rather still very ancient anyhow.

  439. John Morales says

    Gah, StevoR. I clicked that last link and didn’t check, I ended up opening a “short”.

    Closed it immediately, of course.

    ‘Shorts’ are for people like you. Not for me.

    I like having a decent video aspect, the ability to pause/slow/speed/rewind, and some actual content in there.

    Anyway.

    Since dinosaurs are well under one quarter of one thousand millions of years (that’s a billion years), dinosaurs and us are basically contemporaries. So it’s silly to compare those things.

  440. John Morales says

    facebook and shorts; this is to what we have descended!

    I shall have to remember to check links you wrap up in an anchor tag, StevoR.
    Blame myself if I get sucked-in again.

    (Sorry, should have picked up on your ‘brief thingy’ comment)

    —

    PS talk about a weak claim:
    What its hip bone may suggest — evidently doesn’t suggest it though it may, and in any case a suggestion is not a fact.

    (I’d check it out, but again, it’s a ‘short’ — short on content, therefore. Obs)

  441. John Morales says

    So.

    Theia: 4.52 ± 0.01 Ga — impact age from hafnium–tungsten chronometry and lunar formation models.
    Earliest dinos: Nyasasaurus may be the earliest known dinosaur, dating to the late Anisian stage, about 243 million years ago

    Think of it as a number line segment, StevoR.

    You are likening the ancience of one near the very end of it with one at the beginning in contrast to us.

    Think of a 452 metre track, where Theia is at the start and Nyasasaurus is around 24.3 metres from the end, where we ourselves are.

    (What a weird perspective you have!)

  442. StevoR says

    @ ^ John Morales : Your own perspective seems pretty weird tome and Ithink many others here too FWIW!

    I did specifically note in #437 that itwas ashort – just something Ihappen tostumble on and thought foplks might be intrested in seeing & hadn’t yet had time to go into more detail with other committments & life generally.

    Given the name and summary from the short you can then find other sourecs for it like this one :

    https://dinoanimals.com/dinosaurdatabase/itaguyra-occulta/

  443. John Morales says

    StevoR, in what sense is my accurate view weird?

    Your most recent link shows 237–227 Ma for that one, a bit less than my own adduction.

    So… Theia is 4520 Ma, that dino hipbone is 237 Ma, and we are at 0 a.

    (The math ain’t complicated — dinos and us are one unit apart, dinos and Thea are 19 units apart)

  444. StevoR says

    Or its wikipage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itaguyra

    Or this :

    A fossil discovered decades ago in Santa Cruz do Sul, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and kept since then in the collection of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), sheds new light on this moment in the evolution of dinosaurs.

    The description of the fossil – which is thought to belong to a new species called Itaguyra occulta – was written by Brazilian and Argentinian paleontologists, based on two fossilized bones that were part of the animal’s pelvic girdle – an ilium and an ischium.

    The study was published in Scientific Reports, one of Nature’s journals.

    Source : https://www.thebrasilians.com/fossil-discovered-in-brazil-sheds-light-on-the-origin-of-dinosaurs/

    In addition to :

    (In Abstract at top of post)

    … Here we present a new “silesaurid”, Itaguyra occulta gen. et sp. nov., that fills up the remaining gap of occurrence of these dinosauromorphs and provides new clues to the success of these putative early ornithischians.

    Source : https://novataxa.blogspot.com/2025/06/itaguyra.html

    All easily found by getting the species name off the YT Short than doing a google search. There’s another breif – NOT YT Short – 2 mins long clip on youtube but its in Portugese with no english subtitles /captioning.

    I like having a decent video aspect, the ability to pause/slow/speed/rewind, and some actual content in there.

    There is content in those shorts there’re just, well short. You can also pause them and they loop so you get them over if you missed something on first viewing. The aspect thing is a fair point as is the time thing – was being flippant in #437- 8.

    .***

    Clarity fixes for #442 :

    Your (John M’s) own perspective seems pretty weird to me and I think many others here at times too FWIW!

    I did specifically note in #437 that it was a YT Short – just something I happened to stumble on and thought folks might be intrested in seeing

  445. John Morales says

    Well, it was worth a bit of a chat, evidently.

    Anyway, my dinosaur is older than your dinosaur. So there!

  446. John Morales says

    In USA news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0w1p0wq87o

    US drops charges against doctor accused of destroying Covid vaccines

    The US attorney general has ordered charges to be dropped against a doctor accused of destroying Covid-19 vaccines worth $28,000 (£20,742), distributing fake vaccination record cards, and giving children saline shots instead of the vaccine at their parents’ request.

    Pam Bondi said Dr Michael Kirk Moore Jr. “gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so”. He had been indicted by the Justice Department under the Biden administration in 2023.

    The plastic surgeon was already on trial in Utah, where he had pleaded not guilty to all charges including conspiracy to defraud the US.

    The acting US Attorney for the district of Utah, Felice John Viti, filed to dismiss the charges on Saturday, saying this was “in the interests of justice”.

    Dr Moore was accused of providing fraudulently completed vaccination certificates for more than 1,900 vaccine doses, the US Attorney’s office in Utah said in 2023.

    These were allegedly provided, without administering the vaccine, for a charge of $50 (£37), in exchange for direct cash payments or donations to a specific charity.

    The government also accused him of giving children saline shots at their parents’ request so that the “children would think they were receiving a COVID-19 vaccine,” according to the US attorney’s office.

    He was accused alongside his company – Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah, Inc. – and three others of seeking to defraud the US and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

    Bondi wrote on X on Saturday that she had ordered the Justice Department to drop the charges because Dr Moore “did not deserve the years in prison he was facing”.

    She said US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Mike Lee, both Republicans, had brought the case to her attention, calling them champions for “ending the weaponization of government”.

    Lee thanked the attorney general for “standing with the countless Americans who endured too many official lies, mandates, and lockdowns during COVID”.

  447. says

    The Trump administration’s colossal cuts to the Social Security Administration in the name of “efficiency” are sowing chaos and dysfunction throughout the agency. Even attempts to fix these new problems are akin to rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship because they fail to address the core problem: staff shortages.

    The Washington Post reports the SSA is “temporarily reassigning about 1,000 customer service representatives from field offices to work on the swamped toll-free phone line, increasing the number of agents by 25 percent.” And when the Post reports the phone line is “swamped,” what that means in practice is that people are complaining about dropped calls and previously reported wait times of up to five hours.

    […] There is no one in place to do the work that the reassigned representatives had to leave behind. According to the Post, “Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the move will slow responses to the complex cases that the field office employees handle and be only a temporary bandage for the phone problems.”

    “The 1-800 number — they do offer a critical role at the agency, but it’s triage, whereas customer service representatives actually clear work for the agency,” LaPointe told the Post. “So it’s just going to create a vicious cycle of work not getting cleared, people calling for status on work that’s sitting because the claims specialists now are going to have to pick up the slack of the customer service representatives that are redeployed to the tele-service centers.”

    So how did the SSA end up so shorthanded that it has to rob Peter to pay Paul? Before the second Trump administration, SSA had a staff of roughly 57,000. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Trump administration’s DOGE operation enacted “the largest staffing cut in SSA’s history,” which involved “indiscriminately pushing out 7,000 workers to hit an arbitrary staffing reduction target.” The Trump administration has also ousted dozens of officials with expertise in running SSA’s benefits and information technology systems.

    On top of the problems noted above, reassigning workers adds further inefficiency because they have to do on-the-job training and lean on more experienced co-workers to get them up to speed. And field offices themselves were already beleaguered, dealing with the effects of other reassignments within SSA. “Field office staff are struggling to resolve the most difficult cases, due to disproportionate losses and reassignments in SSA’s regional offices, which provide daily support to their colleagues in the field by answering complex policy questions and troubleshooting system problems,” the CBPP reports.

    Trump’s “efficiency” efforts now have a single staff member serving 1,480 beneficiaries, according to AFGE. […]

    On top of all this, the SSA’s new phone system, implemented in May, seems to have problems of its own. Jen Burdick, a Social Security expert and a divisional supervising attorney with Community Legal Services, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the system’s new artificial intelligence could be exacerbating the problem.

    “We spend a lot of time calling Social Security offices on people’s behalf — sometimes 15 times a day,” Burdick told the Inquirer. “We’re on hold for hours, then get AI bots spewing random information you never asked for before hanging up.”

    […] Staff shortages seem to result occasionally in callers being rerouted to offices in other parts of the country, the Inquirer report adds, and thus the responding staffer is not always able to answer specific questions.

    Trump is turning one of the country’s most important lifelines for the elderly and the disabled into a mess […] Indiscriminate mass cuts don’t represent a serious bid at generating efficiency in administering a public benefit. The only thing these cuts do with any efficiency is rip a major hole in the American safety net.

    The future doesn’t look so good, either. Trump’s recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is only going to make things worse, since changes in the tax code will accelerate Social Security and Medicare’s insolvency. MAGA’s policy vision is all about divestment from the common good […]

    Link

  448. says

    Lisa O’Carroll, writing for the Guardian:

    Second-guessing Donald Trump is a fool’s errand.

    But Saturday’s shock threat to impose tariffs of 30% on the EU is a blow to the bloc’s confidence, which had already secretly capitulated during negotiations with diplomats revealing they had to sacrifice trade for the wider prize of security and defence of the continent.

    It is worth pausing to consider what happened in the last three weeks in the EU. Up to the middle of June, Brussels had brandished its economic power in negotiations with €1.4bn (£1.2bn) at stake for one of the US’s most important trading partners.

    Officials and diplomats were openly critical of the position Keir Starmer had taken in the UK, saying they would never sign up to a deal as thin as that involving just cars, beef, plane parts and ethanol. One questioned whether Westminster’s deal was even “legally implementable”. Another vowed: “We will never do a deal like Starmer.” […]

    Why the change? One word: Russia. As one diplomat conceded last week the Nato summit in mid-June had some hard truths – the EU could take five to 10 years to build up aircraft, missiles and intelligence capacity in the air and on the ground to defend itself from a military attack.

    Link

  449. says

    EU suspends US trade war countermeasures while pushing for tariff deal

    Hard-hitting penalties on American exports to to the EU won’t come into force next week as planned, and instead will only be imposed if U.S. President Donald Trump makes good on his threat to apply a 30 percent tariff on the bloc.

    Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said negotiations with Washington were underway after the White House confirmed it would hike tariffs on imports from the EU starting Aug. 1.

    “We will therefore also extend the suspension of our countermeasures till early August and at the same time we will continue to prepare further countermeasures so we are always prepared,” she said.

    Officials were blindsided by Trump’s surprise Saturday declaration that a blanket 30 percent tariff would be applied, and any additional raises the EU implemented in retaliation would be matched. Staff were called in to work at short notice and a statement refusing to rule out countermeasures was issued in von der Leyen’s name.

    Envoys from EU capitals will meet for a Foreign Affairs Council focused on trade on Monday, during which they will express positions on what the Commission should do next. Two diplomats told POLITICO they remained optimistic that an agreement could be reached before the August 1 deadline.

    […] Over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron called on Brussels to take a tougher line against the U.S. following the announcement of the tariffs.

    “It is more than ever up to the Commission to assert the Union’s determination to resolutely defend European interests,” he wrote online. “In particular, this implies speeding up the preparation of credible countermeasures, by mobilising all the instruments at its disposal, including anti-coercion, if no agreement is reached by August 1st.”

    The countermeasures — which could affect €21 billion of U.S. products like soybeans, motorcycles and orange juice — were due to take effect from 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday. Their suspension comes after the bloc vowed it would respond following Trump’s announcement Saturday.

    Asked whether the EU could consider deploying its Anti-Coercion Instrument — or “trade bazooka” — to hit American banks and businesses in response, von der Leyen said the measures “were created for extraordinary situations — we are not there yet. This is very important. This is now the time for negotiations. But this also shows we are prepared for all eventual scenarios,” she said.

  451. says

    Trump wants to go to the moon, but he’s sending NASA to the dump

    In his inauguration address, […] Trump made a bold—and clunky—promise to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Of course, none of this is new: Trump has been yapping about landing on the moon since at least 2017, when he pressed NASA to return to the lunar surface.

    But now Trump’s dream of taking credit for a manned landing on a celestial body appears to be slipping out of his grasp.

    On Wednesday, Politico reported that over 2,100 senior NASA officials are set to leave after a push by higher-ups. Those exiting include many in the agency’s human space flight division. And those departures are likely just the beginning. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal includes slashing NASA’s budget by 25% and cutting another 5,000 employees.

    Far from the golden age of space exploration he promised in January, experts now worry that Trump’s funding and staff cuts could cede American space leadership to a rising China. The risk is so great that every living former NASA administrator joined forces to warn that the new budget could permanently hobble the nation’s space program.

    Trump’s actions, both proposed and enacted, are helping to hollow out NASA by boosting brain drain, slashing budgets, and saddling the agency with interim leaders who care more about battling “wokeness” than they do about scientific research and space exploration. As always, his own voters will be the ones who pay the price.

    In Florida, NASA spending supported over 35,500 direct and indirect jobs and more than $8 billion in economic activity in the government’s 2023 fiscal year. […]

    Trump’s self-defeating cuts to NASA are just the latest in a series of policy decisions that are baffling even his key allies. In an April op-ed for RealClear Science, MAGA blowhard Newt Gingrich called Trump’s decision to gut NASA “mindless,” arguing that, if enacted, Trump’s cuts would be “the end of America’s leadership in space science.”

    […] But the quality of America’s scientific research is hardly a concern for the thoughtless Republican lawmakers tasked with shuffling Trump’s half-baked ideas through Congress. They’ll willingly vote for legislation that devastates their own constituents, as voters saw recently in their eagerness to gut Medicaid.

    Other Republicans who once loudly pushed for a strong NASA are now silent in the face of Trump’s sweeping cuts. In April, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned in a post on X that a“ moon mission MUST happen in President Trump’s term or else China will beat us there and build the first moonbase.”

    […] With thousands of NASA employees leaving or being forced out, and the White House openly threatening Elon Musk and SpaceX, it’s unclear how Cruz intends to get anyone to the moon any time soon. He might want to check on that. As of 2023, NASA supported nearly 42,000 jobs in the state and had an economic impact there of over $9 billion, according to the agency. It makes sense given that Houston is the site of Johnson Space Center, one of NASA’s major field centers.

    There’s another big problem roiling NASA: It has no real leader. The agency has been without a Senate-confirmed NASA administrator since Trump took office in January. Late last year, Trump announced he would nominate Jared Isaacman, a billionaire ally of Musk, to lead the agency.

    But Trump pulled Isaacman’s nomination in May, days before it was set to be voted on in the Senate—and around the time of his falling-out with Musk.

    Since January, Trump has gotten by with acting administrators. First was Janet Petro, whose defining achievement was eliminating NASA’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But on Thursday, Trump pulled his nominee for the spot and said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, an alumnus of MTV’s “Road Rules,” will be the new acting head, replacing Petro.

    Of course, fittingly for the Trump administration, Duffy has no relevant experience to lead NASA.

  453. John Morales says

    Interesting (if lengthy) opinion regarding MAGAs: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-based-ritual

    —

    Note: I’ve known these people. And yes, it actually is this bad.

    Most nights, you can find the elite among the MAGA faithful at one of a handful of Capitol Hill bars. Walk in at the right time, and you will see their journalists, or what passes for such in Trumpworld, influencers, the smaller accounts whose role in the ecosystem is to influence the influencers, and secretaries and aspiring secretaries of various sorts – under, acting, deputy, assistant, personal deputy assistant. Tonight, in one of these bars, a group of four gathers for drinks.

    […]

    Max has been losing his hair since he was 16, which has always made him look much older than he is. Only 31 now, he’s had horseshoe pattern baldness for close to half his life. When Max was younger he had what were thought to be old man views, even though he developed them on gaming and anime message boards. Now the exact same opinions are young-coded, though a similar incongruence remains since he now looks really old. Having bounced around MAGA think tanks and various holding pens for the last five years, he is currently undergoing vetting to be Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development.

    After a bit of small talk and an order of drinks, the conversation becomes stilted and all parties have started to glance at their phones. It’s Max who takes the initiative.

    “Did you guys see what’s going on with the Bukele thing? The district court judge told the administration that they had to try to get that illegal back from El Salvador. The lawyers basically submitted a required update saying that he’s with Bukele now, under his sovereignty. What else can they do?”

    Max’s friend Alex chimes in. “That is so fucking based. Hope they tell Barrett off too when they get back to SCOTUS. You can never trust her. Haitian kids.” He lets out a laugh that is probably too loud, but that’s sort of the point.

    Alex’s job, if it was being described by a member of the hated mainstream media, would be called “influencer.” He makes some money from Twitter ad sharing, but the bulk of his income these days comes from a PR agency he doesn’t ask too many questions about that acts as a passthrough.

    […]

    Part of the Based Ritual is always having Based reasons for disagreeing with a fellow Based. For example, if a conversation is going too hard on misogyny, you can point out that it’s a characteristic of white people that they treat their women better than third world savages. Introducing a new racist consideration protects against the accusation that someone might be a cuck on the women question. Harsher language and more extreme ideas are both methods for achieving balance. Conversely, if someone starts getting too genocidal when talking about Latin Americans, you can calm them down by pointing out that college educated white women vote more Democrat than Hispanic men. All arguments must stay true to the principle of conservation of Basedness.

  454. John Morales says

    In Slate mag: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-judge-blocks-executive-order-birthright-citizenship-el-salvador.html

    The Supreme Court Limited Lower Courts’ Power to Stop Trump’s Lawlessness. A Judge Is Trying Another Way.
    And some new information could upend Trump’s El Salvador torture-prison scheme.

    Last month, the Supreme Court limited the use of nationwide injunctions, which allow judges to block policies they have found unlawful from going into effect nationwide. Now a New Hampshire judge is road-testing a substitute: He has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order by certifying a class action to cover babies born in all 50 states.

    […]

    On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Laplante granted class action status to a group of immigrant mothers with children who stand to be impacted by Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order.

    Laplante granted the plaintiffs class action status but also extended the class to include all current and future babies born on or after Feb. 20, 2025, to a mother without legal status and a father who is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of their baby’s birth. Mothers lawfully present in the U.S. but only temporarily—tourists and other visa holders—are also included.

    Technically, Laplante is not using the kind of “universal injunction” that the Supreme Court prohibited in last month’s Trump v. CASA. But so far, the result is more or less the same: The classwide injunction in this case applies nationwide, since members of the class that the plaintiffs represent reside all over the country.

    The justices indicated in their decision in Trump v. CASA that class actions could serve as a more appropriate substitute to nationwide injunctions. “Judge Laplante is doing exactly what the Supreme Court contemplated,” said Elora Mukherjee, clinical law professor at Columbia University and director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

    —

    A New Document Could Upend Trump Admin’s Defense in the Case of Immigrants Sent to El Salvador

    For months now, the Trump administration has insisted that the Venezuelan immigrants sent to El Salvador without due process back in March are no longer under U.S. custody, and therefore it is powerless to bring them back. A new court document appears to contradict that narrative, as El Salvador went on the record saying it holds no jurisdiction over the people the U.S. sent to CECOT.

    In an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration, lawyers for the Venezuelan immigrants submitted a new court document detailing El Salvador’s response to a United Nations inquiry about U.S. deportations. The agency had previously flagged that Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act appeared to be “contrary to international law.” According to El Salvador, its authorities “have not arrested, detained or transferred” any persons sent to the country on Trump’s deportation flights, insisting that it is simply facilitating the use of its prison infrastructure for the custody of detained immigrants under an agreement with the U.S. “In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities,” the Salvadoran government wrote.

  455. says

    Pounding rain and strong winds battered Central Texas on Sunday morning, prompting some rescuers to halt search operations for victims of the deadly floods that roared through the region just over a week ago.

    Several places along the Guadalupe River, including Kerr County, the area hit hardest by the devastating floods of July 4, were under flash flood warnings on Sunday as a slow-moving storm system brought heavy precipitation.

    The National Weather Service reported early Sunday that the heaviest rain was in northern Llano and Burnet Counties. By midmorning, it had shifted to Kerr County, which is under a flood warning until Monday morning. Though potentially dangerous, the rainfall on Sunday was not expected to be as extreme as it was on July 4, forecasters said.

    In Kerrville, the seat of Kerr County and the epicenter of the July 4 floods, search crews and volunteers have been combing the Guadalupe River corridor looking for the roughly 170 people who are still missing from the July 4 floods. City officials told them to stop work and evacuate on Sunday while a flash flood warning was in effect.

    Communities and residents across Central Texas are still reeling from the catastrophic floods, which killed at least 129 people in the state. Though hopes of finding those who are still missing have diminished, state and local officials have said search work would continue until every person is found. [forecast map]

    […] The rain this week is expected to be less intense than last week, but forecasters warned that because the ground was already saturated, the area was highly vulnerable.

    Near Llano, Texas, about 75 miles northwest of Austin, the Llano River was at a moderate level of flooding on Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service. The river had risen to nearly 16 feet from about three feet, and forecasters warned that it could exceed 18 feet later in the day. A flood warning was in effect for the river through Tuesday afternoon.

    The Lampasas River was also at a moderate flooding level near Kempner, about 70 miles north of Austin. It had risen to more than 31 feet on Sunday from less than two feet. A flood warning was posted for the river through late Monday morning. The National Weather Service said major flooding could be expected on Sunday, though the river was expected to fall below flood levels later in the evening.

    […] The renewed risk of flooding on Sunday was being driven by a weather system high in the atmosphere that has stalled between two high-pressure systems. It has remained parked over Texas, providing ideal conditions for thunderstorms to develop repeatedly. Another weak system in the area is adding to the instability and fueling the continued storm activity, especially on Sunday afternoon. […]

    New York Times link

  456. says

    An official says a historic Grand Canyon lodge has been destroyed by wildfire

    “The Grand Canyon Lodge and dozens of other structures were destroyed as the Dragon Fire exploded in size, forcing evacuations and raising toxic gas concerns.”

    A historic lodge on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has been destroyed by a fast-moving wildfire, the park said Sunday.

    The Grand Canyon Lodge, the only lodging inside the park at the North Rim, was consumed by the flames, park Superintendent Ed Keable told park residents, staff and others in a meeting Sunday morning. He said the visitor center, the gas station, a waste water treatment plant, an administrative building and some employee housing were among the 50 to 80 structures lost.

    Two wildfires are burning at or near the North Rim, known as the White Sage Fire and the Dragon Bravo Fire. The latter is the one that impacted the lodge and other structures. The park initially was managing it as a controlled burn but then shifted to suppression as it rapidly grew to 7.8 square miles (20 square kilometers) because of hot temperatures, low humidity and wind, fire officials said.

    The White Sage Fire doubled in size on Sunday, growing from roughly 20,000 acres to 40,000, according to government website that tracks U.S. fires.

    No injuries have been reported.

    Millions of people visit Grand Canyon National Park annually, with most going to the more popular South Rim. The North Rim is open seasonally. It was evacuated last Thursday because of wildfire.

    Firefighters at the North Rim and hikers in the inner canyon were evacuated over the weekend. The park said along with the fire risk, they could potentially be exposed to chlorine gas after the treatment plant burned. Chlorine gas is heavier than air and can lead to blurred vision, irritation or respiratory problems if high amounts of it are breathed in, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Rafters on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon also were told to bypass Phantom Ranch, which has a set of cabins and dormitories along the river.

    The North Rim lodge was often the first prominent feature that visitors see, even before viewing the canyon. A highway ends at the lodge, which was known for its sloped roof, huge ponderosa beams and massive limestone facade. By walking across the lobby and descending a stairwell, visitors could get their first view of the Grand Canyon shining through windows across the “Sun Room.”

    Meanwhile, officials reported progress in battling a second wildfire burning north of the Grand Canyon. Fire lines on the White Sage Fire that forced evacuations at the North Rim and in the community of Jacob Lake were holding, officials said. On the southern edge of the fire, hand crews and bulldozers were working uphill, and the spread of the blaze had been minimal.

    But to the east and north, the fire has spread rapidly, with grasses and standing dead trees contributing to the fire’s intensity, officials said. The fire was pushing downhill toward the Vermilion Cliffs area, and crews were assessing opportunities to create buffer zones that help slow or halt the fire’s progress.

  458. John Morales says

    Financial analysis from Oz: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-14/trump-us-xi-china-trade-renewables-tariffs/105526196

    As Trump turns his back on renewables, China is building the future
    By Alan Kohler

    A few days after Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill that ended most subsidies for renewable energy, among many other things, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company, Nvidia Corporation, became the first to pass $US4 trillion ($6.08 trillion) in value.

    And a few days after that, on Thursday, Bitcoin hit a new record high above $US117,000.

    The data centres that operate both AI and cryptocurrency are already massively increasing electricity demand and investors are obviously expecting them to keep doing so — exponentially.

    Meanwhile, the BRICS summit in Brazil last week — it stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — went in the opposite direction to the United States on climate change, committing to “intensify global efforts to contain global warming”.
    […]
    China’s renewable energy strategy is paying off

    Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t make it to Brazil, but he chaired a meeting of China’s Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs which issued a directive to crack down on overcapacity and “disorderly competition” in solar power.

    Let’s join the dots: America is pivoting back to fossil fuels and pulling out of renewable energy while the rest of the world continues to do the opposite, China is grappling with too much renewable energy while investors are bidding expectations to record highs for the new industries whose data centres are eating the world’s electricity.

    In his Independence Day address after signing the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump said: “I noticed something — with all the windmills that China sends us, where we waste our money because it’s the most expensive energy, you know they make about 95 per cent of them, the wind turbines, I have never seen a wind farm in China! Why is that?”
    ‘Winning the race’: How China plans to meet its 2030 renewables target by the end of this month
    Photo shows A large floating solar farm in HuainanA large floating solar farm in Huainan

    China’s renewables rollout is breaking all the records.

    That is a long way from being true: China is bristling with wind farms, and solar farms.

    Mistake number two for Trump is the cost: wind and solar are now the cheapest form of energy in China, as well as in most other places, and onshore wind is by far the cheapest, less than half the cost of coal.
    […]
    ‘Real men burn stuff’

    Meanwhile, in the US, Trump announced a 50 per cent tariff on imports of copper, which is one of the minerals needed for AI and renewable energy.

    This will make it virtually impossible for manufacturers in the US to compete with China in high-tech manufacturing.

    That was on top of letters Trump sent to dozens of national leaders last week telling them what the tariff is going to be on their exports to America.

    Why would America embark on such a series of colossal, and obvious, acts of self-harm?
    […]
    The rejection of renewable energy and turning back to coal is pure ideology, a macho rejection of environmentalism and wokeism. As American economist Paul Krugman wrote the other day: “Real men burn stuff and don’t worry if the process is dirty.”

    In his Independence Day speech, Trump declared: “Coal is back. You can’t use the word ‘coal’ unless you precede it by saying ‘clean beautiful coal.'”

  459. John Morales says

    Follow-up queries from the freebie demo bubblebot [with citations I’ve elided]:

    Me: during his first run at president, trump wooed the coal mining industry and workers. Summarise in one paragraph

    BB: In his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump actively courted coal miners by promising to revive the struggling industry, pledging to roll back environmental regulations and reopen mines. He positioned himself as a champion of coal, contrasting sharply with Hillary Clinton’s stance, and gained support in key mining regions. Once in office, Trump repealed Obama-era policies like the Clean Power Plan and eased restrictions, but despite these efforts, coal jobs and production continued to decline due to market forces favoring cheaper and cleaner energy sources like natural gas and renewables.

    Me: What were the outcomes for the coal miners?

    BB: Despite Donald Trump’s promises to revive the coal industry, outcomes for coal miners were mixed and often detrimental. While some regulatory rollbacks temporarily slowed industry decline, market forces—like cheaper natural gas and renewables—continued to erode coal’s viability. Employment remained stagnant or declined, with over 6,000 fewer miners by the end of his term than at the start.

    More critically, health and safety protections were significantly weakened. Inspections dropped by 75%, silica dust regulations were suspended, and key programs for black lung disease were gutted or paused. Many miners faced worsening conditions without adequate oversight, and some lost access to vital health screenings and job protections. Although some cuts were later reversed under legal pressure, the damage to institutional support systems was substantial.

  460. John Morales says

    FWIW, Perun has another video out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4bHc4X5Ilw
    Interceptor Drones & The War in Ukraine – Affordable Air Defence & Russian Strategic Bombing

    Caveats & Comments:

    All normal caveats and comments apply. In particular – I note that this material has been created for entertainment purposes and is not intended to be a complete examination of the topic and should not be relied upon to inform financial or other any other views and/or decisions.

    Any content relating to the conduct, views, activities or any aspect of any person or character in this video is included for entertainment purposes and does not represent an assertion of fact on those matters or any matters in relation to that person or character.

    Care has been taken in compiling data, quotes, and other inputs from various sources but errors can occur. Quotes and included data should be considered illustrative, not definitive and their veracity should not be relied on.

    Timestamps:
    00:00 — Opening Words
    01:50 — What Am I Talking About?
    04:14 — Interceptor Drones 101
    05:02 — Evolution in Ukraine
    17:15 — Russian Adoption
    20:06 — the Shahed Threat
    27:00 — the Interceptor Option
    31:24 — Data and Claims
    35:25 — How Could We See This Used?
    41:13 — Why Does This Matter?
    47:10 — Channel Update

  466. birgerjohansson says

    Mother’s Basement’ at Youtube 
    “HOTTEST TRASH Anime of Spring 2023:

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=yIPJaiVcjoo

    Wow. This is…trashy. Even if “My one-hit kill sister” has impressive fight scenes, I would not touch it with a ten-foot pole. As for the plots of the others,  it is reassuring to see many persons have even less creativity than I do.
    ‘Mother’s Basement ‘ is filling in for “God Awful Movies” and feeding my addiction for roasting garbage media.

  467. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales @ 457
    You beat me to it.
    When she sticks to physics she is interesting.
    Other Youtubers: Anton Petrov digs up the kind of science news that interest me, but this is of course not a guarantee you share those interests.

  471. John Morales says

    Heh. If a humiliating stunt backfires, it is perforce the opposite of humiliating. Right?
    It’s exalting. Or some similar antonym.

    (Who Trump was trying to humiliate is left to the imagination)

  472. birgerjohansson says

    John, I find anything that hurts the motherf☆¤ker exalting.
    .
    The Guardian
    First Dog on the Moon

     “Moo Deng is turning one year old. Finally a news story I can bear to read”
    .https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/jul/11/moo-deng-is-turning-one-year-old-finally-a-news-story-i-can-bear-to-read
    .
    “Time scientists say the rotation of the Earth is speeding up – what is happening? ”
    .https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/jul/09/time-scientists-say-the-rotation-of-the-earth-is-speeding-up-what-is-happening

  477. says

    How Republican officials in one state are trying to veto the will of voters (again)

    “Missouri voters approved paid sick leave and a minimum wage increase. Republican officials in the state decided not to care.”

    When we talk about the Republican Party’s authoritarian direction and GOP officials’ increasingly overt hostility toward democracy, we tend to focus on events such as the period after the 2020 election and Jan. 6. It was, after all, a crisis in which a Republican president and most of the GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

    But in some instances, the party has a different kind of approach — one in which Republicans recognize the results of an election as legitimate but simply choose to ignore [it]

    Take GOP officials in Missouri, for example.

    Republicans in the Show Me State had a lot to celebrate after Election Day 2020, scoring easy wins up and down the ballot, but there was one big exception: A majority of Missouri voters also approved Medicaid expansion in the state. GOP officials, who’d fought against the ballot measure, realized they’d lost fair and square, but they decided to ignore the results and refused to enact the voter-approved policy.

    Several months later, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that state officials could not veto the will of the state’s voters, ending the bizarre dispute. [!]

    Almost exactly four years after that ruling was issued, an eerily similar story is unfolding in the same place. The New York Times reported late last week:

    When Missouri voters were asked last year whether they wanted to increase the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave, 58 percent of them said yes. Not long after that vote, the Republicans who control the state government mobilized to unwind those changes. On Thursday, Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed into law a bill that limited the voter-approved minimum wage increase and scrapped the paid sick leave requirement altogether.

    […] while most of the state’s voters appear wholly uninterested in voting for Democratic candidates, they do appear rather fond of voting for Democratic policy priorities. The Times’ report, noting the results of ballot questions in Missouri in recent years, noted that the state’s voters have “restored abortion rights, expanded Medicaid and legalized marijuana.”

    With this in mind, GOP officials in the state have done exactly what you’d expect them to do: Missouri Republicans have tried to make it harder for the state’s voters to exercise their will through ballot measures and referenda, to prevent the public from circumventing the legislature and approving progressive measures the right doesn’t like.

    But while trying to rig democracy is offensive in its own right, it’s even more dramatic to see Missouri Republicans veto election results they find objectionable.[!]

    In this latest instance, Missouri voters, on the same ballot in which they rallied behind far-right GOP candidates, endorsed mandatory paid sick leave for workers in the state, while simultaneously hiking Missouri’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, with future increases tied to the rate of inflation.

    […] since they didn’t like the voters’ choices, Republicans approved new laws to undo what Missourians did, scrapping paid sick leave and blocking future increases to the minimum wage.

    Court fights appear likely, but in the meantime, the broader circumstances are unsettling. As the Times’ Jamelle Bouie summarized, “‘Freedom’ for republicans means the freedom to do whatever Republicans want you to do — and if you decide otherwise, they’ll just nullify your choices.”

  478. says

    When an American president with an authoritarian-style vision starts claiming abusive powers he does not have, it’s best not to look away.

    […] NBC News reported on Saturday that Donald Trump threatened to take away comedian Rosie O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship — because he doesn’t like her. The message he posted to his social media platform read in part:

    Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her.

    At the outset, it’s worth separating what matters from what doesn’t. I don’t much care what precipitated the Republican’s statement, how a comedian could realistically become “a threat to humanity,” how or why O’Donnell hurt his feelings, or how the entertainer responded to Trump’s latest offensive.

    I do care, however, about an American president asserting a right he does not have as part of an authoritarian-style vision.

    To hear Trump tell it, O’Donnell used speech he found objectionable, which has led him to give “serious consideration” to stripping the comedian of her U.S. citizenship. Implicit in the statement is the president’s apparent belief that he has such power.

    He does not. As NBC News’ report noted, Trump cannot legally take away Americans’ citizenship because that presidential authority simply doesn’t exist.

    Amanda Frost, an expert on citizenship law at the University of Virginia School of Law, told The New York Times, “In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Afroyim v. Rusk that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment bars the government from stripping citizenship, stating: ‘In our country the people are sovereign and the government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship.’”

    Trump, however, doesn’t appear to understand this — or more to the point, doesn’t seem to care. […]

    It comes against a backdrop of Trump threatening to deny funding to cities that govern in ways he doesn’t like. Which came on the heels of Trump threatening to prosecute a news organization for running reports he didn’t like. Which came on the heels of Trump musing publicly about arresting a Democratic candidate he doesn’t like. Which came on the heels of Trump floating the possibility of deporting American citizens. Which came on the heels of Trump endorsing the arrest of a Democratic governor who has opposed the White House’s agenda. Which came on the heels of Trump ordering a Justice Department investigation into his Democratic predecessor without cause.

    And that’s just from the last month or so.

    The idea of two prominent public figures engaging in some kind of “feud” is forgettable, but when an American president with an authoritarian-style vision starts claiming abusive powers he does not have, it’s best not to look away.

  479. says

    Trump has come up with a new conspiracy theory about the so-called Epstein Files, which is a bit like watching a snake eat its own tail.

    Related video at the link. The video contains examples of how passionate the MAGA folks are about the Epstein Files.

    About a week ago, at a White House Cabinet meeting, a reporter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi about a controversial report her department had released a day earlier. “Your memo and release yesterday on Jeffrey Epstein, it left some lingering mysteries,” the reporter noted.

    Before Bondi could respond, Donald Trump interjected — and tried his best to shut down the entire line of inquiry. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” the president asked incredulously. He went on to suggest that the reporter was wasting time with his question, given that there were more important things to talk about.

    If the idea was to end the discussion about the late millionaire pedophile, the Republican failed. Indeed, it was his own base that was largely responsible for keeping the controversy going throughout last week.

    On Saturday, he tried a new approach.

    In a statement published to his social media platform, spanning nearly 400 words, Trump praised his attorney general, and unironically described his administration as “PERFECT,” before complaining that he didn’t “like what’s happening” in MAGA World with regard to Epstein. In fact, he seemed to criticize some of his own followers, admonishing them as “selfish people” for their focus on Epstein, adding that “nobody cares about” Epstein, despite all evidence to the contrary.

    But that’s not all he said. From the same online missive:

    Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration. … They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.

    While referencing a variety of other conspiracy theories, the president went on to complain about “the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.”

    Or put another way, Trump, an ardent conspiracy theorist, has come up with a new conspiracy theory about the underlying conspiracy theory, which is a bit like watching a snake eat its own tail.

    To the extent that reality still has any relevance in the public discussion, it was the Trump administration that investigated, arrested and charged Epstein. It was during Trump’s first term when Epstein, facing sex trafficking and conspiracy charges, died in 2019 while in custody, and a medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

    But according to Trump, the so-called Epstein files were written by Barack Obama (who left office in early 2017), Hillary Clinton (who left office in early 2013), former FBI Director James Comey (who left office in 2017) and former CIA Director John Brennan (who left office in early 2017).

    How could they have “created the Epstein Files” given that they were nowhere near public office when Trump’s own team tried to prosecute him? I haven’t the foggiest idea, and Trump’s weird tantrum never explained how this could even be possible.

    Complicating matters, the president appeared to reinvigorate the story he wants to go away, but changing his administration’s official line. What started with (1) the “Epstein Files” are real and important, transformed into (2) the “Epstein Files” don’t actually exist so everyone should just move on, has now evolved into (3) the “Epstein Files” do exist, but they’re fake. [!]

    If the White House was counting on this new line shutting down the chatter and speculation, it should probably lower its expectations.

  480. birgerjohansson says

    More “weird” anime.
    I thought ‘Mayonaka Punch’ was weird, but I realise it is apt for the zeitgeist, with social media presence being the most important thing in the world.
    .
    “Masaki Sonoue, a “NewTuber”, is kicked out of her existing group due to punching one of her collaborators. Desperately seeking to rebuild her online reputation, she meets Live, the leader of a group of vampires, who is obsessed with sucking her blood. Masaki makes a deal with Live: if she helps her go viral and attract 1 million subscribers, Live can feed on her.”

    Of course. Faust on Youtube.

  481. says

    Trump unleashes new hell on the economy—even if he pulls a TACO.

    President Donald Trump issued more insane tariff threats over the weekend, announcing that he will put a whopping 30% tariff on goods from the European Union and Mexico that, if implemented, would cause inflation and pain for American consumers.

    The 30% tariff is even higher than the “Liberation Day” tariff rates Trump placed on the EU and Mexico in April but was forced to pause because the stock market cratered after economists warned of economic devastation.

    This time, however, stock markets are responding with a collective yawn, as investors assume that Trump will pull a TACO and chicken out of actually implementing the massive tariffs on two of the United States’ largest trading partners.

    Yet even if the ultimate tariff rates are lower than 30%, any increased tariffs will be inflationary and hurt lower-income Americans. [Charts at the link]

    “Tariffs are a regressive tax, especially in the short-run,” the Yale Budget Lab wrote in an April analysis of Trump’s original “Liberation Day” tariffs. “This means that tariffs burden households at the bottom of the income ladder more than those at the top as a share of income.”

    Indeed, even though Trump has caved and paused some of the tariffs he previously announced, other tariffs have gone into effect that have drastically increased the amount of tariffs businesses are paying for imported goods. For example, even the 90-day “pause” on the Liberation Day tariffs left a blanket 10% tariff on all imports. And 50% tariffs on steel, aluminum, and 25% on car and auto parts are currently in effect.

    According to a report from the Yale Budget Lab, with the Trump tariffs currently in place, “Consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 20.6%, the highest since 1910.” The Yale Budget Lab said this amounts to “an average per household income loss of $2,800.”

    What’s more, the so-called “deals” Trump has announced that absolve the UK and Vietnam of the original “Liberation Day” tariffs leave those countries with double-digit tariff rates that will cause pain for consumers.

    For example, all goods imported from Vietnam will face a 20% tariff—which is lower than the massive 46% tariff rate Trump had initially threatened but is still large enough that American companies who purchase goods from the Asian nation will either have to raise prices or see major cuts to their profit margins that will threaten jobs.

    “This will certainly lead to reduced demand for goods, hurting American businesses and jobs,” Steve Greenspon, founder of US home goods retailer Honey-Can-Do, told the Financial Times. “Companies will continue to produce their products in Vietnam, though at a lower pace than prior to the tariffs.”

    That is the complete opposite of what voters elected Trump to do. And it’s likely why his approval rating is tanking, and leading to fears that the GOP will lose its congressional majorities in the 2026 midterms.

  484. says

    Utah Sen. Mike Lee touts selling off federal lands as a solution to housing crisis

    On Monday, June 23, a crowd of about 2,000 people surrounded the Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet had come for a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association. “Not for sale!” the crowd boomed. “Not one acre!” There were ranchers and writers in attendance, as well as employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, all of whom use public land to hike, hunt and fish. […]

    On the street, one sign read “Defend Public Lands,” with an image of an assault rifle. Others bore creative and bilingual profanities directed at Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees most of the country’s public acreage, and Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, who on June 11 had proposed a large-scale selloff of public lands. […]

    In the weeks before the meeting, the possibility of selling off large swaths of public lands had seemed as likely as at any time since the Reagan administration. On June 11, Lee had introduced an amendment to the megabill Congress was debating to reconcile the national budget. The amendment mandated the sale of up to 3 million acres of land controlled by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, with the vast majority of proceeds going to pay for tax cuts. […]

    In the days after the Santa Fe protest, the outcry from hunting and outdoor recreation groups escalated across the West and the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s amendment violated the chamber’s rules. Republican lawmakers from Montana opposed the amendment; Burgum also distanced himself from it. […]

    By the time Burgum made his comments, Lee’s effort seemed doomed, and days later he announced that he was removing the amendment; public land advocates celebrated. “This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners,” wrote Patrick Berry, the president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. But the celebration may have been premature. In a social media post announcing his decision, Lee indicated that he would revisit the issue: “I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land,” he wrote. And powerful forces still support privatization. […]

    Lee’s amendment did little to address these issues and lacked any definition of affordable or attainable housing. Furthermore, it allowed private developers to nominate parcels for sale — at market rate only. “It would be an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado law school. John Leshy, a former solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration and an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that the bill was “not a well-designed scheme to get more acres out there built with affordable houses.” Leshy, the author of “Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands,” added, “I think it is just a ploy to get your toe in the door to start selling off lots of federal land.”

    Congress’ stance toward public land shifted as settlers moved westward, violently displacing tribal nations. During the homesteading era, the General Land Office — a precursor to the BLM — was tasked with disposing of federal lands to states. But in the late 19th century, states began to request that Congress set aside lands for national forests. As a condition of its statehood, in 1896 Utah relinquished any claim to ownership of “unappropriated public lands” — an acknowledgment that appears in its state Constitution. As the conservation movement took off in the early 20th century, lawmakers and presidents set aside more public land. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which codified the BLM’s role in stewarding lands and declared that they would remain public unless their sale served “the national interest.”

    […] A movement in the 1970s tried to reverse those historical currents when Western ranchers and lawmakers calling themselves “Sagebrush Rebels” sought to claim federal lands for states. They found sympathetic ears in Washington, D.C.: Ronald Reagan, during a 1980 campaign stop in Salt Lake City, said, “Count me in as a rebel.” Once elected, he nominated as secretary of the Interior James Watt, an attorney who favored transfer of public lands to the states. Reagan also came to rely on an economic adviser named Steve H. Hanke, who arrived at the White House from Johns Hopkins University. Hanke was more strident about getting rid of public lands than Watt; he has written that public lands “represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system.”

    Hanke helped drive an ambitious effort to dispose of national forests and grazing lands, and in 1982 the Interior Department announced plans to sell millions of acres — as much as 5% of the public estate — in order to reduce the national debt. Hanke later joined The Heritage Foundation, entrenching the idea of privatizing lands at the conservative think tank and predicting that Americans would come around to his way of thinking. Since then, the foundation has regularly advocated for selling public lands. […]

    Lee is deeply tied into The Heritage Foundation, which he has called “a guiding light for generations.” […]

    Lee has recently focused the debate on affordable housing. In 2022 and 2023, Lee introduced legislation to sell Western lands called the HOUSES Act. The bill was more prescriptive than his reconciliation amendment: It only allowed states and municipalities to nominate lands for disposal, rather than developers, and it required that 85% of nominated parcels be developed as residential housing, at a minimum of four homes per acre, or as parks. But like his amendment to the reconciliation bill, Lee’s HOUSES Act lacked a definition of affordable housing, and critics suggested that it would lead to the building of mansions. In both 2022 and 2023, when Lee reintroduced the bill, it did not pass out of committee.

    […] AEI [American Enterprise Institute] advocates for dense development of single-family homes, but its ultimate vision remains opaque: The group has spoken of creating unregulated “freedom cities” far from existing infrastructure, and its proposals for 3 million houses seem ambitious. Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit group in Montana, published an analysis finding that existing public land could support less than 700,000 new homes […]

    When I asked Pinto for a real-world example that illustrates his hopes for the West, he pointed to Summerlin, a planned community in Las Vegas, and Teravalis, a forthcoming development in Buckeye, Arizona, a rapidly expanding city at Phoenix’s edge. Both are owned by Howard Hughes Holdings, a developer based in Texas. [map at the link]

    [I snipped examples of high prices, such as developers selling lots for $777.000 per acre without homes on them.]

    When given the option, developers often pursue the profit margins of high-end housing. In 1998, Congress passed a law, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, that allows any of the state’s municipalities to request the sale of federal lands for affordable housing. (SNPLMA relies on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define affordable housing, which it says are units within reach of those making up to 80% of the area’s median income.) Still, to date, only about 900 acres have been set aside for affordable housing projects under the law — and only 30 of those acres have been developed into homes where low-income residents can actually live. [!]

    [I snipped more details describing reluctance to building affordable housing.]

    In the meantime, both of the state’s Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, have proposed legislation that would open federal acreage for housing and transfer it to trust land for tribal nations — while protecting other territory for conservation. […]

    At the moment, Pinto said, there doesn’t appear to be an easy route to sell large swaths of public land for development. “The path forward is to have a much more targeted approach.”

    In Nevada, such a thing is already happening. Last year Clark County bought 20 acres from the BLM for $2,000, and the county’s plan is to turn that land into single-family houses for first-time homebuyers. This spring, a new affordable housing development opened in Las Vegas — an apartment complex for people 55 and older with rent starting at $573. The project was built by a developer called Ovation on former public land that was transferred through SNPLMA. [In 1998, Congress passed a law, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, that allows any of the state’s municipalities to request the sale of federal lands for affordable housing.] It had taken a while — the deal was first proposed in February 2020. But recently, the pace of transfers has picked up. Ovation says it’s also working on a similar project in the city of Henderson. It was nominated for BLM approval last February and, according to Jess Molasky, the company’s chief operating officer, “We hope to be in the ground in the first quarter of next year.”

    Posted by readers of the article:

    Selling public land that’s nowhere near urban centers isn’t going to do much to lower the cost of housing.
    ———————————
    From what I see, in some instances, the land is no where near existing infrastructure and towns with jobs and facilities.

    You know who is going to buy the public land? The wealthy. They will buy it up and build private hunting camps and fancy retreat resorts that charge an arm and a leg to attend.

    This isn’t going to help with housing crisis in big cities! For that, we need developers willing to come in and buy up dilapidated tenements and rejuvenate them. Then rent them at prices that low and middle income people can afford. Will they make money on that arrangement? No. But they have been getting away with paying very little in taxes for decades!
    ———————–
    Known seditionist and MAGA Mormon extremist Mike Lee is a disgrace. I’ll never understand my neighbors voting for him.

  485. says

    Red States, Defying Reality, Are Reclassifying Gas as a “Green” Fuel

    “The designation, pushed by right-wing think tank ALEC, allows fossil fuel firms to compete for clean energy funding.” [!]

    In Louisiana, natural gas—a planet-heating fossil fuel—is now, by law, considered “green energy” that can compete with solar and wind projects for clean energy funding. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry last month, comes on the heels of similar bills passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. What the bills have in common—besides an “updated definition” of a fossil fuel as a clean energy source—is language seemingly plucked straight from a right-wing think tank backed by oil and gas billionaire and activist Charles Koch.

    Louisiana’s law was based on a template created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that brings legislators and corporate lobbyists together to draft bills “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” The law maintains that Louisiana, in order to minimize its reliance on “foreign adversary nations” for energy, must ensure that natural gas and nuclear power are eligible for “all state programs that fund ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”

    But natural gas, also known as methane gas, is no more natural than any other fossil fuel. Its primary ingredient is methane, an intense heat-trapping gas that is far more potent than the carbon pollution produced by coal and oil, though it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long.

    […] ALEC, the right-wing think tank that provided the template language for Landry’s bill, noted in a press release that resolutions like this could pave the way for more AI data centers in the state, too. “Redefining ‘green energy’ allows utilities to continue using natural gas while fulfilling state ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives,” ALEC staffer Mark Lucas wrote.

    Over the years, ALEC has succeeded in getting laws that benefit fossil fuel companies passed across the country. Recently the group, which was founded in the 1970s, has helped draft legislation criminalizing grassroots protest against pipelines, gas terminals, and other fossil fuel infrastructure—versions of that bill had passed in 17 states by 2022. Its members have also drafted bills aiming to punish economic boycotts of the oil industry. And there are currently 114 different model policies related to energy on ALEC’s website, 23 of which specifically address “green energy.”

    “It’s classic greenwashing, right?” said Peterson of the new Louisiana law—using the language of sustainability to describe an activity that’s actually not sustainable at all. “The intent of these laws is to allow the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure, which will perpetuate the use of fossil fuels for decades to come.”

    More at the link.

  486. says

    Emboldened by the Supreme Court Six’s reprehensible decision on June 23 effectively greenlighting the Department of Homeland Security sending migrants to third foreign countries where they’ve never been, and temporarily blocking a decision by a lower court judge who said migrants must have a “meaningful opportunity” to contest their removal, ICE released a new memo on Friday stating its intentions to do exactly that, sometimes with as little as six hours’ notice. And even in some cases if the country they’re being sent to has not made any assurances that they won’t be tortured.

    That’s against international law, for whatever it’s worth anymore. And it’s against the entire founding principles of this country. Eight of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were foreign-born. But all the legal legs of the American stool have now been kicked out from under the rump of human decency.

    […] If these humans were dogs or cats, or even beef cattle being held in the conditions of “Alligator Alcatraz,” this would be considered animal cruelty, and the SPCA would be turning out to block the road.

    […] And Congress has given Trump a more-than-triple DHS budget, more money than even the entire Marines, to build migrant torture concentration camps across the land and deport a million people a year. Kristi Noem says they’re going to build five more [video]

    […] Obligatory reminder, immigrants commit about 60 percent fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Places with more migrants have less crime. The demographic group most likely to be incarcerated is native-born American men who did not finish high school, which also happens to be Trump’s most reliably devoted base. But give them somebody to look down on, they will strap on their boots and vote GOP [embedded links to sources are available at the main link.]

    […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/new-ice-cruelty-memo-out-more-third

  487. says

    EU transfers $1.2 billion to Ukraine using profits from frozen Russian assets

    Ukraine has received another 1 billion euro ($1.2 billion) from the European Union at the expense of proceeds from frozen Russian assets, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced on July 10.

    Ukraine receives funds from frozen Russian assets under the Group of Seven’s (G7) Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) mechanism. Within the ERA initiative, Ukraine is expected to get $50 billion in loans that will be repaid using future profits from frozen Russian assets.

    Ukraine has received more than $18.5 billion from frozen Russian assets this year, directing the money toward swift recovery projects, according to Shmyhal.

    At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome on July 10 and 11, the Ukrainian delegation will urge international partners to jointly develop legal mechanisms for the full confiscation of Russian assets, Shmyhal added. […]

  488. JM says

    @476 birgerjohansson: There is also some run of the mill hypocrisy in the situation. When Democrats have passed large bills the Republicans have argued that they couldn’t vote for a bill until they had time to read and understand it. Now when they vote for a huge bill they knew contained many spending cuts they are surprised that the large spending cuts will effect people.
    This is one of those things where I could support the Republicans if they consistently said they needed time. In reality they only argue this point as a way to stall bills they don’t support.

  489. says

    Washington Post Exclusive report

    “Camp Mystic’s leader got a ‘life threatening’ flood alert. They evacuated an hour later.”

    “Much of what made the camp special also put it at heightened risk as the river rose to record levels, a Post investigation found.” [map]

    Camp Mystic Executive Director Richard “Dick” Eastland did not begin to evacuate the young campers asleep in cabins near the rapidly rising Guadalupe River for more than an hour after he received a severe flood warning on his phone from the National Weather Service at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, the family said through a spokesman.

    Eastland […] rallied family members, some of whom lived and worked at the camp, on walkie-talkies to “assess the situation” soon after the alert went out, said Jeff Carr, the family’s spokesman. At 2:30 a.m., when rain was falling hard and fast, Eastland decided to begin evacuating campers, Carr said.

    […] The camp had previously been under a flood watch that leadership was aware of, Eastland Jr. said. The National Weather Service’s more urgent alert at 1:14 a.m. had warned of “life threatening flash flooding” in Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is in a flood zone. The alert did not include an evacuation order. The federal agency does not have the authority to issue evacuation orders, a power that typically falls to local governments.

    […] While Camp Mystic was not the only camp in the area to delay its evacuation, a Post examination found that many of the elements that made it special for generations of Texas girls also heightened its risk that night. The camp, six miles from the nearest town, was relatively isolated. Campers were not allowed to bring cellphones, and counselors had to keep theirs mostly locked away. Some of the cabins were less than 500 feet from the river, a natural feature central to several of the camp’s traditions.

    Interviews with nearly two dozen counselors, emergency officials, parents and experts reveal that as Dick Eastland conferred with family members and other employees about how to respond to the alert, the camp descended into chaos as the floodwaters rose. [Interactive map]

    […]

  490. says

    Washington Post link

    “New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.”

    As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

    Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

    […] The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

    […] It’s problematic enough that legislators seek to prohibit nighttime or early-morning protest activity, but the language could affect late-night art events, student journalists, and even assigned research, course or thesis work for students or faculty in the habit of burning the midnight oil. The new law is so absurdly broad it could theoretically be used to stop a group of students from discussing politics on a campus bench at night. That’s not security; it’s suppression.

    […] And this is just half the story.

    The second new law in Texas is an outright power grab dismantling shared governance, the cornerstone of U.S. higher education. Typically, higher education institutions have democratic systems to share power and foster collaboration among administrators, governing boards and faculty. Faculty senates, whose members are typically elected by faculty, exercise authority over curricular matters, academic policies and graduation requirements. In addition, they often play a role in general institutional decisions, such as related to planning, budgeting or the evaluation of administrators.

    The Texas legislature obliterates these traditions, stripping faculty of any meaningful decision-making role in how their institutions are run. Under this law, faculty senates at public universities and colleges can now exist only if permitted by the institutions’ governing boards — the oversight bodies whose members are politically appointed by the state governor. In mockery of democratic principles, half of the faculty senate members must be chosen by the university president, and administrators can remove faculty for not conducting their duties within vague “senate parameters.”

    By codifying in law that governing boards assume ultimate authority over academics and operations, legislators are communicating to university and college board members that the faculty’s advice doesn’t matter if it contradicts the legislators’ preferred ideologies.

    To make matters worse, the law installs a governor-appointed “ombudsman” with sweeping enforcement powers. This political appointee will be charged with monitoring compliance with state laws and can recommend that a public university or college lose all state funding unless it complies. […]

  491. JM says

    Newsweek: Pentagon Forced to Remove Metallica Song From Video After Copyright Strike

    The Pentagon removed and reposted a video that promoted its new drone initiative after the band Metallica hit the department with a copyright strike over the unauthorized use of its song “Enter Sandman.”

    The level of simple basic incompetence of this is amazing. This was a prepared video that the Pentagon had unlimited time to do, it wasn’t like it was some rushed job. Somebody still botched something as simple as getting permission on the music.

  492. says

    EXCLUSIVE: Immigrants in overcapacity ICE detention say they’re hungry, raise food quality concerns

    “As the Trump administration ramps up immigration arrests, recent detainees and advocacy groups are raising concerns about food in ICE facilities nationwide.”

    Immigrants being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in at least seven states are complaining of hunger, food shortages and spoiled food, detainees and immigration advocates say. They say some detainees have gotten sick; others say they have lost weight. […]

    The food problems come amid overcrowding at ICE facilities tied to the Trump administration’s push to quickly ramp up immigration arrests. While capacity data isn’t publicly available for every ICE detention facility, nationwide figures on the availability of beds show a system beyond its overall capacity. As of mid-June, ICE was detaining nearly 60,000 people, almost 45% above the capacity provided for by Congress.

    Although many of ICE’s detention centers are run by private contractors, the problems are happening all over the country regardless of who’s running a given facility, advocates say. A former ICE official told NBC News it is difficult for a facility to stay stocked with the right amount of food when, on any given day, it may face an unexpected surge of new detainees. While the agency can move money around to cover the cost of detaining more immigrants, planning for unexpected daily spikes can be difficult for facilities and could lead to food being served late or in small quantities, the former ICE official said.

    […] Alfredo Parada Calderon, a Salvadoran man who has been detained for almost a year, says he has recently had meals that have left him feeling hungry.

    Detainees have sometimes been given flavorless meat that is so finely ground that it is almost liquefied, he told NBC News from the Golden State Annex detention facility in California.

    [I snipped examples]

    […] DHS said Winn Correctional Center has received no complaints from Russian detainees. However, Chernov’s lawyers said he has submitted complaints about food to ICE in writing, at least one as recently as April.

    […] meals used to be delivered on a regular schedule, such as 6 a.m. for breakfast and noon for lunch, but that now breakfast may not come until 9 a.m. and dinner is often not served until midnight. Some detainees have also said meals are now half the size they were last year, she said.

    According to ICE’s food service standards, detainees are required to be served three meals a day, two of which are supposed to be hot, and with “no more than 14 hours between the evening meal and breakfast.”

    […] Asked about specific allegations of food scarcity and substandard food, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told NBC News in a statement, “Any claim that there is lack of food or subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.” […]

    ‘Improper food handling practices’

    In Tacoma, Washington, at the Northwest ICE Processing Center, Chumpitasi fears the increase in people being held there has contributed to poor food safety.

    Seven food violations have been found there in 2025 so far, compared with two in 2024 and one in 2023, according to inspection data by the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. […]

    One morning in mid-April, the facility contacted the local Health Department to report 57 cases of suspected foodborne illness, with symptoms including diarrhea, stomachache and bloating, according to the Health Department. After an investigation, the department concluded that reheated collard greens that had been served at the facility had tested positive for Bacillus cereus, a bacterium that can cause food poisoning. […]

    The Health Department went back to the Northwest Processing Center for an unannounced visit and found “several improper food handling practices.” It worked with the staff there to correct them, and as of June 18 the facility had passed inspection. […]

    ‘I am getting used to the hunger’

    Over the past month, the American Immigration Lawyers Association has received at least a dozen food-related complaints from advocacy groups and lawyers representing detainees across the country, according to Dojaquez-Torres.

    “The common complaint is that there is just not enough food,” she said in an interview. “What I am hearing is that there are extended periods of time when people are not being fed, and when they are, they are being given chips or a slice of bread.”

    […] In early June, a “melee” broke out in Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, because of conditions inside the facility, which included “paltry meals served at irregular hours,” according to The New York Times, which spoke to several lawyers representing detainees inside the facility and family members.

    […] In late May, Rubimar said, her husband, Jose, had called and told her that the gas at his facility wasn’t functioning and that they had been given only a bag of tuna to eat in the meantime. But even before that, she said, her husband said the food was “too little.” […]

    Reduced oversight

    Beyond overcrowding, immigration advocates also blame the alleged food issues at detention facilities in part on cutbacks to a team of inspectors inside DHS.

    The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an office that previously oversaw conditions inside ICE and ICE-contracted facilities, was entirely or mainly shuttered this year after the “majority of the workforce” was issued reduction-in-force notices, according to ongoing litigation regarding the cuts.

    […] The former DHS employee said the dismantling of the ombudsman’s office means detainees have fewer options if they have complaints or concerns about things like food, overcrowding, sanitation, access to legal counsel and clean clothes.

    […] In a status report filed in court in early July, government lawyers said they are onboarding three new employees at the ombudsman’s office and that files have been created for all new complaints since the end of March.

  493. says

    Why Trump’s ‘major’ announcement on Russia sounds familiar — and falls far short

    “For the fifth time, the American president has threatened Russia with economic sanctions. The first four times, Trump failed to follow through.”

    Related video at the link.

    In recent days, Americans have repeatedly been told that Donald Trump is finally sick of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. This time, we were told, is different from all of those other times. This time, by all accounts, Putin went too far, pushed his luck and earned the American president’s contempt.

    [Trump] spoke to NBC News just last week, expressing his “disappointment” with his counterpart in Moscow. “I think I’ll have a major statement to make on Russia on Monday,” he added, without elaborating.

    Those expecting the “major statement” to be an important breakthrough probably should’ve known better. NBC News reported:

    Trump said the U.S. will send weapons to Ukraine through NATO, which will pay for and distribute them, and threatened secondary tariffs targeting Russia if a ceasefire deal isn’t reached. ‘We’re going to be doing secondary tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,’ Trump said. ‘It’s very simple, and they’ll be at 100%.’
    In other words, the “major statement” was Trump threatening Russia with sanctions — again.

    […] In late January, just two days after his second inaugural, Trump told Russia that if it failed to end its war in Ukraine quickly, the White House “would have no other choice” but to impose new economic sanctions. Putin proceeded to ignore the threat, and Trump failed to follow through.

    In early March, it happened again: Trump gave Putin a choice — sanctions or a ceasefire — and the Russian leader again ignored his American counterpart. Trump again failed to follow through.

    In late March, Trump once again said he was prepared to impose economic penalties on Russia. In keeping with the pattern, Putin ignored the threat, and Trump failed to follow through.

    In early May, for the fourth time in four months, Trump wrote online, “If the ceasefire is not respected, the U.S. and its partners will impose further sanctions.” For the fourth time, Russia expressed indifference. For the fourth time, Trump failed to follow through.

    In late May, amid countless headlines about how angry Trump was with Putin, [Trump] signaled he was prepared to change course in two weeks. He did not change course in two weeks, and Putin’s military offensive intensified.

    In mid June, as Russian attacks against civilian targets worsened, Trump questioned the benefits of sanctioning Russia, complaining the economic penalties cost the United States “a lot of money.”

    In mid July, Trump decided to give Putin another 50 days to resolve a conflict that Trump had promised to end within 24 hours of his inauguration.

    Asked what he’d do if Putin ignores the threat, the American president said he didn’t want to talk about it. [JFC]

    In case that weren’t quite enough, let’s not forget that there’s a bipartisan proposal advancing in the Senate to impose harsh new sanctions on Russia, and according to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Trump signaled to him that he’s on board with the bill.

    But during his latest White House event, the president said of the legislation, “I’m not sure we need it.” [It is the sanctions version of TACO.]

    The New York Times reported earlier this month:

    Since President Trump returned to office in January, the United States has issued no new sanctions against Russia related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the administration has eased restrictions. And without new ones, analysts say, existing measures lose their force. The result has created an opening for new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment that would otherwise be cut off to the Kremlin, trade and corporate records show.

    Those expecting the Republican administration to do something about this probably shouldn’t hold their breath.

    Both Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to be all bluster and no action.

  494. says

    Justice Department’s purge intensifies as Team Trump’s revenge tour continues

    “As DOJ officials who worked on Jan. 6 cases or cases related to Trump get fired, the destabilizing effect on federal law enforcement is unavoidable.”

    Among the many problems that have emerged in federal law enforcement during Donald Trump’s second term is the campaign against key personnel.[A] campaign to purge federal law enforcement of prosecutors and FBI officials who worked on cases that Trump didn’t like.

    Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested in March that these efforts were ongoing — and likely to get worse. Evidently, the increasingly hyperpartisan Republican meant it. NBC News reported late last week:

    At least two federal prosecutors and support staffers who worked with former special counsel Jack Smith’s team were fired [on Friday], three of their former colleagues told NBC News. The total number of firings was not immediately clear. The dismissals come after at least three federal prosecutors who worked on cases against Jan. 6 rioters were fired last month by Attorney General Pam Bondi, NBC News previously reported.

    By some accounts, they had quite a bit of company. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration fired “another batch of nearly 10 Justice Department employees” who worked, in one capacity or another, for the former special counsel’s office. Among those ousted, the article added, were personnel who worked as “support staff” for Smith and his team.

    The Washington Post’s tally was even larger: “In total, 20 people were fired from the department, including two prosecutors who worked under former special counsel Jack Smith … and U.S. marshals who assisted those prosecutors.”

    Soon after, Bloomberg Law reported that Bondi also fired her personal ethics adviser — Joseph Tirrell, a career attorney who’d spent nearly 20 years at the department — “removing the Justice Department’s top official responsible for counseling the most senior political appointees.” (Tirrell soon after published a copy of his termination letter to his LinkedIn page.)

    A day later, Reuters reported that the Federal Programs Branch, the Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies, “has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff.

    […] Patty Hartman, a 17-year former Justice Department official who worked on Jan. 6 cases, told CBS News after her firing, “The rules don’t exist anymore.” She added, “There used to be a line, used to be a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, because one should not interfere with the work of the other. That line is very definitely gone.” […]

    In a social media post, Hartman went on to write, “We appear to be driving straight into an abyss that holds no memory of what democracy is, was, or should be.”

    Predictably, all of these developments have had a destabilizing effect. A separate Washington Post report, published last week, noted that employees across the Justice Department and FBI have been fired without explanation or warning, “creating rampant speculation and fear within the workforce over who might be terminated next.”

    The article added that the removals appear “individually targeted” and are “unrelated to the mass reductions-in-force and reorganizations that Trump has launched at many other federal agencies.” […]

  495. says

    Followup to comment 494.

    Two-thirds of the DOJ unit defending Trump policies in court have quit

    WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies – such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University – has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.

    Sixty-nine of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch have voluntarily left the unit since President Donald Trump’s election in November or have announced plans to leave, according to the list compiled by former Justice Department lawyers and reviewed by Reuters.

    The tally has not been previously reported. Using court records and LinkedIn accounts, Reuters was able to verify the departure of all but four names on the list.

    Reuters spoke to four former lawyers in the unit and three other people familiar with the departures who said some staffers had grown demoralized and exhausted defending an onslaught of lawsuits against Trump’s administration.

    “Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,” said one lawyer who left the unit during Trump’s second term. “How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?”

    […] The seven lawyers who spoke with Reuters cited a punishing workload and the need to defend policies that some felt were not legally justifiable among the key reasons for the wave of departures.

    Three of them said some career lawyers feared they would be pressured to misrepresent facts or legal issues in court, a violation of ethics rules that could lead to professional sanctions.

    All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics and avoid retaliation.

    A Justice Department spokesperson said lawyers in the unit are fighting an “unprecedented number of lawsuits” against Trump’s agenda.

    […] Some turnover in the Federal Programs Branch is common between presidential administrations, but the seven sources described the number of people quitting as highly unusual. […]

    More at the link.

  496. says

    Trump’s political advantage on immigration is gone

    […] What might’ve been a political winner for the White House months ago has become yet another political problem for the administration. From the latest Gallup report on its latest national poll:

    Perhaps because of Americans’ opposition to immigration policies that Trump has enacted to remove undocumented immigrants from the U.S., their evaluation of his work on immigration is mostly negative. Thirty-five percent approve of his handling of the issue, including 21% strongly approving, while 62% disapprove, including 45% strongly.

    What’s more, while Gallup found a 55% majority of Americans supported less immigration to the United States, that number has dropped to just 30% now. What’s more, the same poll found 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country — the highest support Gallup has ever found. […]

  498. says

    Followup to John’s comment 446.

    Honestly, is it really such a big deal if you inject children with saline and hawk fake vaccine cards to net yourself cash and destroy COVID-19 vaccines? At least according to this administration, that is totes cool. So Attorney General Pam Bondi just threw out charges against Utah plastic surgeon Michael Kirk Moore, making sure no pesky prosecutors can further hurt this champion of medical freedom.

    Bondi admitted that her zeal to free Moore came about at the behest of Georgia GOP House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yes, the lady who believes in chemtrails and that the government is manipulating the weather. Oh, and also Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been banging this drum for a while, saying in April that Moore should get “a medal for his courage.”

    Dropping the charges against Moore is actually a twofer, combining the administration’s desire to reward anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theorists with their desire to show that if Republicans do it, it’s never fraud. […]

    From May 2021 to September 2022, according to the now-obsolete charges from 2023, Moore destroyed at least $28,000 worth of COVID-19 vaccines given to him by the government. Instead, he sold at least 1,937 fake vaccination cards and, if parents asked nicely, he’d shoot their kids full of saline so the children would believe they’d been vaccinated.

    No matter how you want to slice it, Moore’s actions defrauded the government. He took $28,000 worth of government property, destroyed it, and profited off that destruction. This should be a slam-dunk prosecution […]

    This is, of course, not the first time the administration has rewarded fraudulent behavior. In April, Trump pardoned Michele Fiore, a Nevada Republican state lawmaker who skimmed money from donations intended for a memorial for a slain police officer to use for things like plastic surgery. Or how about the pardon of Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff who took bribes from people who wanted to have their charges dropped, naming them deputy sheriffs despite them not having any actual law enforcement experience.

    Yes, when it comes to letting right-wingers get away with crimes, the administration won’t even pretend to back the blue.

    But all of these folks are small-time fraudsters compared to crypto bro Justin Sun, who was facing a massive fraud prosecution, including market manipulation. Sun invested $30 million into World Liberty Financial, which is controlled by the Trump family. Sun is continuing to spend big, saying he’ll drop another $100 million on Trump’s dumb meme coin. Those actions don’t just help insulate Sun from prosecution—they also help steer money directly to Trump.

    […] you have an entire administration primed to excuse and reward actual criminals, even small-timers like Moore. Expect Bondi to continue wiping out prosecutions for whatever petty GOP criminal comes her way so that she can keep sending the message that IOKIYAR.

    Link

  499. says

    The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Trump to resume efforts to dismantle the Department of Education in an apparent 6-3 vote along ideological lines, lifting a judge’s order to reinstate hundreds of employees terminated in mass layoffs.

    The administration’s victory enables the president to move closer to fulfilling of one of his major campaign promises to oversee the elimination of the Education Department, which was created in the 1970s.

    The majority did not explain its reasoning […] The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices publicly dissented, calling their colleagues’ ruling “indefensible.”

    “It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    “The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave,” they continued.

    Since entering office, the administration has sought to lay off half of the Education Department’s workforce and move some of the agency’s core functions, such as managing student loans, to other federal departments.

    U.S. District Judge Myong Joun blocked those efforts in May. Ruling that Trump needed congressional authorization, Joun ordered the administration reinstate the roughly 1,400 workers laid off in March.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling lifts Joun’s injunction as the litigation proceeds in the lower courts, but it is not a final decision. The dispute could return to the justices.

    Following the ruling, Education Secretary Linda McMahon vowed to carry out the layoffs once again.

    “While today’s ruling is a significant win for students and families, it is a shame that the highest court in the land had to step in to allow President Trump to advance the reforms Americans elected him to deliver using the authorities granted to him by the U.S. Constitution,” McMahon said in a statement.

    It marks the latest Trump administration victory at the Supreme Court, which has regularly intervened on its emergency docket to rein in lower judges who have blocked the president’s initiatives. […]

    Link

  500. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/in-which-we-try-to-make-sense-of

    “In Which We Try To Make Sense Of The Biden Autopen Conspiracy Theory (And Fail Miserably)”

    “They think Joe Biden is evil, but not SO evil that he would sign all of the things he signed while president?”

    Over the last 10 years, there has been an endless march of baseless conspiracy theories that, despite captivating the hearts and imaginations of a large percentage of the American public, simply defy all logic, reason and sanity. It’s been incredible, truly, to witness what some people will go along with. Random lady says she’s Queen of Canada and that no one has to pay their mortgages anymore? Sure! Let’s follow her around the country and get confused when we lose our houses. Celebrities wear red shoes (possibly made from baby leather) in order to rub it in your face how much they love eating babies and getting high off of their blood? Why not?

    But as of late, the most confounding one isn’t really even all that out there. It’s the one in which evil Joe Biden staffers used the White House’s autopen to sign a bunch of bills and pardons without him even knowing about it.

    The Trump administration has been pushing this for weeks, without any evidence whatsoever beyond their personal belief that Biden’s “cognitive decline” was so great that his aides decided to take advantage and use the autopen to sign all kinds of executive orders, pardons, clemencies and commutations that he never would have signed or enacted had he been in his right mind.

    On June 4, Trump issued a memorandum to the attorney general about this, which read:

    In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority. This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.

    Is there any evidence for this beyond Donald Trump’s personal belief that it happened? No, there is not. […]

    More at the link, including Biden’s response.