Excerpt: As a sign of how skittish the firm had become, an email exchange reviewed by The Times documents a heated discussion among partners about how — or whether — to alter a website that recounted the firm’s work against white supremacists and the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021. Some even proposed checking with the administration to see whether the website would anger the White House. Another partner warned that “there likely won’t be a next time” for Paul Weiss “if we get hit by the administration again.”

Excerpt: These officials — ranging from Virginia to Ohio to Nevada — have all come to office since President Trump returned to power and all currently play roles in elections in counties that are home to key House, Senate or statewide midterm races this year. All have either publicly espoused false conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election or that American elections are rife with fraud, or taken direct action to support those theories.

Excerpt: The boards operate like court proceedings, with lawyers and a panel of three officers who decide whether to retain or remove the service member. It is the same process the military uses to determine whether it should kick out troops who abuse drugs, beat their spouses or steal.

The Pentagon has treated the trans separation hearings with levels of security and silence usually reserved for state secrets. They take place behind closed doors on military bases. There are no cameras and no transcripts; the public is not allowed to attend.

Sen Wyden adds a few words

Excerpt: Here’s the key takeaway from our report: Epstein couldn’t have carried out his trafficking and criminal activity without the help of the highest ranking employees and executives at the most powerful banks in the world. Wall Street is complicit in Epstein’s crimes from top to bottom.

If Democrats retake the majority in the Senate and I become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, one of my first acts will be to subpoena the bankers that helped Epstein carry out his crimes and help deliver real accountability.

Excerpt: Until President Trump began his second term, federal subpoenas to reporters were exceedingly rare.

Me again: Coincidentally, the subpoenaed reporter is “…also the author of Princes and Thieves, a coming book about the finances and global entanglements of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner…”

Excerpt: In a social media post, Wyden revealed that he was interviewed several months ago by former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, where he presented evidence his office had gathered about big banks’ role in facilitating Epstein’s illicit activities.

The interview never aired, Wyden said, because CBS “subsequently… pulled the segment and fired the reporter.”

I’ll confess to not reading the article, judging it entirely by the headline, because ① the claims were ludicrous from the start, ② everyone who cares about facts knows virtually everything President Trump says is untrue, and ③ even dubunking his wingnuttery gives it undeserved credibility. Nobody needs four bylines at the Washington Post to know a turd by its smell.

Excerpt: “If you’re going to keep anything personal, you don’t keep it on a work computer, a work system, or a work device in any way,” says Bryan Sullivan, partner at Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae LLP. “The company or the employer owns that, whether it’s the U.S. government or not. You have no privacy when it comes to using work technology.”

Excerpt: The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.

Me again: Wow. This is so absolutely spot on, I’ve set up an autocorrect in my word processor: From now on, when I forget and type Civil War, it’ll change it to Slaveholders’ Rebellion.

Trump’s slush fund fund will be back. And if you don’t realize that, well, you aren’t paying attention.

Republicans let Trump keep unparalleled benefit: IRS immunity

Blanche reveals Trump’s plan for nationwide abortion crackdown on a call with faith leaders

It’s hilarious but mostly infuriating that Cap One kept the evidence of Trump’s money laundering quiet, and would’ve kept it quiet forever if Trump hadn’t sued, forcing disclosure.

And also, America’s “liberal media” would cover a story like this much, much more enthusiastically if President Joe Biden or President Barack Obama had hundreds of bank accounts closed due to suspicions of money laundering.

Did anyone imagine it was anything other than a political stunt? I mean, anyone not mentally challenged?

I won’t even consider voting for any Presidential candidate who isn’t eager to prosecute Trump and send a wrecking ball to his ballroom. And knowing the pisswater Democratic Party, that probably means I won’t be voting.

Odd that the New York Times doesn’t think this is pertinent enough to mention: “Miller dated Trump White House aide Stephanie Grisham from 2019 to 2020. In October 2021, Grisham said that Miller had been physically abusive to her, cheated on her, and lied to her. Miller filed a defamation lawsuit against her, alleging the claims were made to fuel sales of Grisham’s memoir. He voluntarily dismissed the case with prejudice in August 2023.”

Excerpt: “Mississippi is on the verge of moving from the nation’s best-kept secret to the nation’s leader in conservative governance,” she said in a statement announcing her plans on Tuesday morning. “We need the right leader to make this moment count. I have the experience, the record, and the proven leadership to take Mississippi to the top.”

Excerpt: “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

Only a Democrat would “reach across the aisle” like this. Which is absolutely not a compliment.

In a healthy American society, Zohran Mamdani would be a centrist.

The author, Jon Hilsenrath, is a former economics correspondent at the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been attacking financial journalists on Twitter [X] this morning. It’s petty, but let’s judge a man not by what he says. Let’s judge him on what he accomplishes. …

I’m not seeing a distinction between what these girls were wearing and t-shirts calling blacks monkeys. No place of business should tolerate hate speech on the premises. Instead of yelling at these customers, the co-owner should’ve had them tossed from the arena, and instead of the co-owner being suspended, she ought to have her hand shaken and back patted.

Well, of course they do. They did it to my mom, and they do it as often as they can get away with it. “Private Medicare” is an oxymoron, Medicare Advantage is a disadvantage, and these companies are in business to make money, not keep people healthy.

Excerpt: The co-founder of early AI startup LemonLime set off an uproar after offering attendees at a networking party a dare of sorts: anyone who got a company tattoo at the event would get an instant interview.

The idea was to “meet exceptional people, and find out which of them are just as crazy as we are,” Jordan Zietz posted on LinkedIn, adding that he had brought a tattoo artist along for the occasion. “We are bold, we take risks, and we do things that haven’t been done before.”

Seven people, he wrote, took him up on the offer, leaving the San Francisco event last weekend inked with a permanent tattoo. “If you’re reaching out to us to apply for a job, you might want to take notes,” he added.

Excerpt: Justice Department officials are distributing up to $3-billion in grants to states and municipalities in what they portray as an effort to help jurisdictions recoup money they lost because of the President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

The grants — called the Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide (“BIDEN”) Program — represent one of the biggest pots of money the Justice Department has ever distributed. It can be used to hire police officers, buy technology or build temporary detention centers for undocumented immigrants.

The money also comes with one big condition: Municipalities that receive it must agree to partner with the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out the president’s aggressive immigration policies.

Fatima Ameaka has no criminal record, a pending asylum case, and a valid US work permit that won’t expire until December 2029. But, she’s not white and has an accent, so ICE snatched her.

Excerpt: America has been so powerful for so long that we are accustomed to being in control of events. We start wars when we want and — crucially — we believe that we can end them when we want.

… That is no longer the case. The world is walking a path toward a world war, and no one — including the president of the United States — seems to be in command of events.

Ever since WW2, we’ve been told — propagandized — that Russia and China are America’s fierce enemies, looking to topple the USA. If there’s any truth to that, now would be the time for them to strike.

Hegseth blames his deputy

Excerpt: Back at Camp David, as he was confronted by Trump over the bare weapons stockpile, Hegseth defended himself and blamed his deputy, Stephen Feinberg, for the shortages and for not ensuring Trump was fully apprised of the issue, both persons familiar said.

Me again: The shittiest of leaders always find a scapegoat.

Trump reassures the world that America has missiles galore

Excerpt: “We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

Me again: Generally, it’s a good idea when a workplace has a suggestion box for employees, if employers take the suggestions seriously. The military, though, is really not structured for bottom-up ideas, and this reeks of desperation, as Trump’s war of stupid choice continues to spiral out of control.

Excerpt: China monitors its 1.4-billion people on an unparalleled scale, with the help of cameras, cellphone signals and national IDs. The database Mr. Hofer found offered a rare window into how extensively the Chinese authorities also surveil foreigners, displaying entries about people categorized by nationality, with their birth date, sex, marital status, address and occupation, and sometimes their religion.

It also included instances when they were captured on camera at traffic intersections, markets, shopping malls or other locations, including a mosque.

Chinese companies hoping to sell their surveillance platforms to the police often create demo web pages that use photos and information about people taken from social media. This was different, Mr. Hofer said: “This is more than some guys playing around, or a student, or a low-level project.”

Trump said Minnesota did it to themselves, so now those dratted Minnesotans are probably doing it to other states. Or maybe Trump shouldn’t have DOGE’d America’s cyberdefenses.

Small towns shouldn’t have to defend America’s water supply from Iran

Among the things they’re looking for: “poisoning by vaccines.”

Excerpt: Mostly, our current medical establishment, who never treated COVID patients themselves, doesn’t want you to remember the horrific scenes of mass death 6 years ago, the overflowing hospitals and morgues, the exhausted, overwhelmed medical personnel. They don’t want you to remember that COVID also killed and injured a lot of young people in 2020 and that this all would have been much worse had schools and churches been crowded, as they intended. Today, they won’t acknowledge recent headlines that COVID deaths may have been significantly undercounted in 2020. In fact, they never acknowledge COVID killed anyone at all. An honest remembrance of what the virus did when it was allowed to spread unchecked would ruin their revisionist narrative and is therefore strictly forbidden.

A key part of the COVID Amnesia Project is denying who was in charge in 2020

It’s flabbergasting, the lengths they’ll go to punish Dr Fauci for … I’m still not certain what. Like, srsly, can even one of the Republicans’ Fauci smears be connected to anything approximating reality?

And good luck finding epidemiologists willing to work on whatever pandemic is next!

Excerpt: With encouragement from the Trump administration, data center developers are building their own power plants, instead of plugging into an electric grid. Nationwide, at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or have been proposed to power data centers, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonpartisan research organization. Most were announced or granted permits within the past 18 months.

​If built as planned, the gas burning plants — scattered across states including Texas, Ohio and Wyoming — could release as much planet-warming pollution in a year as roughly half of all the passenger vehicles in the United States, according to estimates based on permits, regulatory filings and other data compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Bay of Pigs 2.

Israel is more than capable of defending itself. Also, fuck Israel.

Excerpt: Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, was the defense lawyer of the arsonists. He has said spitting on Christians is an ancient Jewish custom and shouldn’t be considered a crime.

You could ask ChatGPT: “Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.”

ICE whistled away from Target in Washington

No justice, no peace. That’s why.

Excerpt: “I tried refugees at the Mexican border, a nuclear plant in Iran, a crash in Amsterdam, a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza. Nothing was refused,” Henk van Ess, an open-source researcher who first wrote about the potential damage the tool could cause, told NPR via text.

NPR was able to easily generate images of Iran’s Kharg Island on fire, and a flooded U.S. Capitol complex. Both events, which have not happened, would constitute major news if they were real.

Me again: Having thoroughly enshittified search, Google Earth has become arguably the company’s most valuable tool, so they’re in the process of enshittifying it too.

Trial AI bots went on rogue hacking spree, UK government admits

Saying AI’s “gone rogue” is like a drunk driver saying the Pontiac steered itself into a tree. No. Whatever the Pontiac does and however it does it, a human is to blame.

This is a trend I’ve never noticed in America, where free parking is stupidly an expectation on virtually any residential street anywhere.

The whole world’s not on fire, yet; it only feels like it. For a quick overview, take a look at firemap.live.

Excerpt: U.S. Border Patrol agent Paul Adams sexually abused all six his children for at least seven years before he was caught. He killed himself after being charged, but not before investigators realized that bishops and other officials at the Church of Latter Day Saints had long been aware of what he was doing to his children. The Arizona Supreme Court has now ruled that clergy have no obligation to report child abuse if they learn of it through confidential disclosure and doing so would not “align with their faith.”

I am mid-level surprised this was allowed on American TV.