The New York Times frames it as, this man “says” his prosecution puts privacy at risk — as if there’s some reasonable perspective that it doesn’t.

Good coverage of extremely rotten news:

Excerpt: Last June, the DOJ issued over 20 administrative subpoenas to hospitals across the United States demanding extensive medical records for trans minors who received gender-affirming care. It claimed that it could request these records because HIPAA, a medical privacy law, allows the release of records for an investigation into a federal crime. However, the DOJ said it needs these records for an investigation into off-label prescriptions, which isn’t a crime.

Consequently, until now, every court in which the subpoenas have been challenged has quashed them in whole or in part. Judges doing so have called the DOJ’s campaign a “fishing expedition” intended to “harass” and “intimidate,” and to end gender-affirming care through “fear.”

Screenshot: Homepage of one of the US government’s principal statistical agencies features an unauthored report with analysis not by career civil servants, but a team that includes individuals affiliated with a President Trump-aligned think tank

Excerpt: “In the rule, the Postal Service said that it would deliver mail ballots only in states that shared voter data with the federal agency.”

Me again: The Postal Service’s new motto: “The mail must not go through.”

① It’s not merely “key election files,” these are files required by law to be released, and Trump won’t release them.

And ②, the article mentions the Trump-Epstein files in passing, saying only that the Trump regime has released “millions of pages,” without mentioning that the law compels release of all the files, and ginormous swaths remain cloaked in secrecy, because they would incriminate the President.

Drones just helped Iran defeat the US in a war, so now’s the time to dissolve America’s experimental drone battalion and get back to military basics?

If a disaster of this scope had happened under any other President, it is inconceivable that ten days could pass with no FEMA presence, no federal help. It’s not even newsworthy, though. With Trump & the Republicans, the big “fuck you” is taken for granted.

Excerpt: With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy, upending debate over an intractable problem with life-and-death stakes and showing how rich donors can shape the safety net.

Excerpt: A federal judge asked the Trump administration a simple question: who drafted, reviewed, and approved the executive orders targeting Biglaw firms?

You know the kind of basic information that appears on privilege logs every single day. Not the internal communications, not the drafts, the edits, the strategy memos (at least not yet). Just the names of the people who worked on the orders that tried to blacklist disfavored law firms out of existence. In the ABA’s lawsuit over that whole campaign, Judge Amir Ali ordered the government to file a notice identifying the individuals involved in drafting the Biglaw Executive Orders, and the custodians of a handful of records. The most basic housekeeping in all of civil discovery.

…The administration would rather not.

Only respect for the whistleblower, but there is no informed American who doesn’t already know that these “antisemitism” “investigations” have been only expensive harassment by Trump & the Republicans.

Thank you, New York Times, for coming out and saying it this time, instead of cloaking it with words like “unusual” or “unprecedented.”

Excerpt: The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. And while it is unclear how far any suit the president might ultimately file will get in court, it could force the organization to spend money fighting it off and make it even more of a target of his allies and supporters.

Eric Swalwell is walking sleaze and quite possibly guilty of sexual assault, but such crimes are almost always investigated and prosecuted by state and local authorities. The feds are involved this time, only because Swalwell, when he was in Congress, was a minor irritant to President Trump. It’s revenge, again, the continued weaponization of all government offices against Trump’s perceived enemies.

Excerpt: Ellison told a news conference that unless he’s extradited, Castro could be released from jail as early as next week — 90 days since he was detained — under Texas law. And if he’s freed, Castro could slip into Mexico from the border town where he’s being held, Ellison said. The lawsuit said Castro has been making calls from jail to a woman in Mexico, talking “about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico when he is released.”

Nobody within acres of power will say it, but this is simply human trafficking.

Go to sleep perfectly legal, and wake up outlawed.

Excerpt: The majority of the 75 countries on the State Department’s list are non-European and have significant nonwhite populations. They range across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, including a number of U.S. allies, such as Jordan and Egypt.

Excerpt: Trump-supporting Christian preachers barked out demands that Muslims accept Jesus as their savior. Many young Muslim men barked back that they, too, loved Jesus (honored as a prophet in the Quran) and the U.S.A. A group of neo-Nazis showed up with a swastika flag. A few men wandered around with assault rifles.

Musk is, of course, lying, especially when he says “That is the truth.”

It’s a vast, interlocking system of hatreds.

Excerpt: “These firings are a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press,” she said.

Me again: I was always pleasantly surprised, reading Stars and Stripes, that it was journalism, not public relations for the military. I will no longer be surprised, as the paper will no longer be journalism.

You know, it’s not illegal to tell someone — even the President of these United States — to shut up.

“Revealed”? Kudos to The Guardian for getting the docs, but it’s another scandal that’s been out in the open for years.

Why does so much of the media cover SpaceX launches, successes, and even its common failures as if Elon Musk is the reincarnation of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet — gee-whiz — instead of noticing he’s just Lex Luthor with rockets?

Excerpt: He has enlisted a team of 250 workers to push ahead with construction 20 hours a day, seven days a week to complete as much work as quickly as possible. This week, there are plans to install one million pounds of rebar and pour 3,000 cubic yards of concrete for a project that is now two-thirds complete, the administration said in a court filing.

Me again: This militarized “ballroom,” built with no permits, no oversight, no public knowledge except what Trump has said about it, is probably where Trump plans to hide out after the 2028 election, during the War to Prevent His Removal from Office.

Supreme Court’s chief justice allows work on Trump’s $400M White House ballroom to continue for now

Indefensible, logically or legally.

Excerpt: By offering preferred access to presidential missives, the monetization plan, dubbed “Truth API,” would violate the First Amendment rights of journalists and other members of the public to equal access to official information, the lawsuit argues, while allowing Trump to trade his public statements for cold hard cash.

Is crypto an ‘industry’, really?

Crypto bank part-owned by Trump family offers depositors way to ‘gain favor’ with White House, experts say

Excerpt: House Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Guest, whose committee enforces compliance of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, violated the insider trading and transparency law, a NOTUS review of congressional financial records indicates.

Excerpt: Imagine for a moment that your bank changed the terms of a loan that you had been paying down for more than a decade. It informs you that it is increasing your payment and extending the term by five years.

Any commercial bank would most likely be accused of violating basic contract law. So what happens when the federal government does it?

President Biden couldn’t be bothered to dissolve Trump’s Space Command, so they’re still out there.

Excerpt: This week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made a surprising move to calm the jittery bond market. He announced that the Treasury Department would be doubling the amount of government debt it is permitted to buy back from investors. The increase was intended to limit the rise of long-term government bond yields as a way to contain borrowing costs.

“Part of this is signaling and to show that we believe that yields don’t reflect the underlying fundamentals,” Mr. Bessent said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday.

Me again: Bessent’s argument is that capitalism has it wrong, and the government is intervening to ‘correct’ that. Sounds like the socialism and communism we’re always supposed to fear…

Trump threatens military action against bond market

The coming collapse will make 2008 look like being a few days late paying the electric bill.

And then, for comparison: China sentences big money swindler to life in prison

Worth remembering, when the next American big money collapse leads to the next federal bailout of swindlers.

Excerpt: The “Have I Been Flocked” site compiles Flock Safety’s audit logs, allowing drivers to look up their license plate number to see if authorities — or someone else — has run their information through the system.

Flock is testing a new AI tool that tracks and identifies people based on their driving habits

Flock’s fastest-growing business is 60 mph police drones that can read license plates from the sky

Flock has a powerful new ai tool for police. Wired got its code.

Excerpt: The Trump administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to attack California’s position as a national leader in environmental protection, enlisting at least a half-dozen federal agencies to undermine the state’s efforts to pivot away from fossil fuels.

Me again: Long term, Trump is killing your grandchildren.

Not enough dead Cubans yet, I guess.

Where the money’s going seems very opaque to me, which means it’s going to Trump’s pocket.

Excerpt: By walking away, Mr. Carney chose a road that no major U.S. ally has taken: With his country’s economy on the line, he stood up to President Trump and refused to accept the administration’s offer of a new trade relationship with tariffs permanently baked in. Britain, the European Union and other major U.S. trading partners have agreed to smaller deals that have been volatile and often left them worse off.

Me again: In a world of Neville Chamberlains, be Mark Carney.

Excerpt: Russians withdrew around €24.4 billion from the country’s banking system in the first seven months of this year, as Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries and logistics infrastructure deepened the economic crisis, and fear spread that the Kremlin could move to freeze or nationalise private deposits to fund its war in Ukraine.

Excerpt: Tuesday morning members of the groups – including some of the 15 anti-ICE activists facing federal conspiracy charges – gathered outside Target’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis.

Speakers called for large companies in the state to use their influence to condemn what they see as a federal crackdown on dissenters.

Me again: “What they see” as a crackdown. Oh, fuck you, “impartial journalism.”

Anyway, yeah, if any big company spoke out against the growing Nazification of America, it would be a major breakthrough indeed. That’s unlikely, since all the big companies are as fascist as ICE, but still, thumbs up for the performance art of askin’ companies to do the right thing.