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…

  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)

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