Monday, September 28, 2026

THE BROWN PEOPLE ARE COMING! THE BROWN PEOPLE ARE COMING!!

Just in time for the midterms.  But it’s okay! Football players will protect us!

Just the way God intended. 😎
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🗳️👑🇨🇦

But he is a xenophobe. Old man mutters to himself in a room full of people. If he says it, he thinks it is so. Yeah, it’s only the polls that are fake. We don’t need Canada, but doesn’t Canada realize they need us?
Trump: How is the governor treating you because I freed up the iron ore and I said I absolutely won the election, but they cheat like hell…

“We were there only 10 days ago actually to initiate the mine..”

Trump: We can supersede the state, right? If we can supersede the state, it's good, otherwise the state will never be good.
"Fuck state sovereignty.” And winning elections now means he is king. 👑 
Trump: Because of tariffs, we are taking in hundreds of billions of dollars of profits. It's one of the reasons I can offer, if Republicans win the House and the Senate, $5000 to every adult. And we can do it and the Democrats can't because the Democrats don't have any income and they're going to drive us into a depression.

(As many have pointed out, tariffs wouldn’t cover the cost and he has made similar promises before without following through)
"Profit”? And this “income” belongs to Republicans, who will only share it as a bribe for votes? Is he talking to the guys behind him? Confidence building.... They’re counting on that $88 billion package passing to replenish what you wasted in Iran in just a few weeks. I look forward to the resolution in the next Congress affirming that the lake is “Lake Ontario,” and the gulf is “the Gulf of Mexico.” Sometimes it’s just the little things. Grandpa needs a nap. And his anti-psychosis drugs.
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The People V. The Rich Guys

Somebody in Texas owns that property; or lives on it, or near it.

But the real question is: why is Paxton throwing away the rural Texas voters? That’s where the GOP strength is. Paxton’s talking like what he is: a rich city boy. But the cities are where the Democrats are.
Talarico: So many of our Latino neighbors across Texas supported the president in 2024 because they thought he was going to lower prices. They thought he was going to end the forever wars. They thought he was going to drain the swamp and release the Epstein files.

A year into this administration, we've seen the president do the exact opposite. So I'm extending an open hand to all of our Latino neighbors who supported the president.
The people v. the rich guys.
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“My Death, Is It Possible?”

Not that I mind mortality as an incentive to act (or not act, in this case), but maybe somebody should tell the Senator that if he dies in office, he won’t be around to care who replaces him.

(My father left rather explicit, and detailed, directions about what NOT to do for his funeral; like no funeral procession. Ironically, the last one I drove in was for my mother’s younger brother, about a year ago, now. In a very small community in the Dallas suburbs. And it was a short trip from the church to the cemetery. I told my father he wouldn’t be around to complain. He said he’d come back and haunt us. In the end a family friend arranged an honor guard, because Dad was in the Navy at the end of WWII. The honor guard was six very patriotic bikers. Also almost as old as the man being buried. It was perfect. And not something he’d included in his objections. Or probably ever imagined. No funeral procession, though.)

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“But We’ve Got To Continue What We’re Doing”

Culling the herd. And no, that’s not the most pathetic thing Mike Johnson said today. This is: Granted, the day is young.

🎶 “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow!”🎶
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It Won’t Lower The Price Of Diesel…

... , so it won’t fix the major problem farmers, and everyone else face in Iowa face right now. It won’t lower inflation or food prices, either! It won’t even lower the interest rate.

And the plant, if construction is finished on time, won’t start producing steel until 2030. So hang in for four  more years, Iowa! The sun’ll come out tomorrow in 2030, and everyone in Iowa will have a job in the steel plant! In the meantime, you can all be construction workers! 👷‍♀️ 

Now you have to vote Republican, or Tinkerbelle will die!

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Or, We Could Just Lower Tuition In State Schools

When I entered college in the ‘70’s, I paid more each semester for textbooks than I did for tuition. IIRC, state university tuition was $4 a semester hour. The most I paid in one semester was $72, when I took 18 hours. (I was young and foolish.) Fees increased that bill usually by 100%, but I still paid more for books. I took three postgraduate degrees (and here I am), two at private schools (one on a full scholarship. Not merit, just a fund to encourage students to attend seminary.
A noble effort that really didn’t solve the denomination’s problems.). My daughter learned CAD at a community college. She paid more in tuition in two years, at a public college, than I paid for my undergraduate and MA degrees.

There’s something wrong with this picture.

I had student loan debt for a decade or so after law school (private school). My daughter took about that long to pay off her student loans.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The whole purpose of public universities was to be affordable. The Lovely Wife’s father died when she was an infant (she doesn’t remember him). She, and her older sister, got their degrees at the same state school I did. Social Security survivor benefits paid for it.

It should be that way. It shouldn’t be this way.
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To The Man With A Hammer 🔨

So it is artificial, but it’s not intelligence? If intelligence was an engineering problem, we’d have solved the problem of Trump and the Trump voter by now.

Might I suggest computers have no intelligence at all, and simply run programs. Yes, the problem is the program; but maybe we don’t need to create the program or the problem at all, until we’ve thought this thing through.

Building nuclear weapons, after all, was an engineering  problem. Using them, was not. And we’ve successfully contained their use since Nagasaki, although I was assured for about the first 30 years of my life that couldn’t be done. We didn’t really need nuclear weapons, and I’m not sure we need AI.  But we can surely contain it while the “engineering problems” are solved. Or just abandon it, if engineering fails us. After all, the major contributions of AI so far are bad videos, bad advice, and bad military operations information. 

I’m pretty sure we can make things worse without the expense and burden of AI.
AI hacked his programming. That’s not a conspiracy theory. I really believe that.  ðŸ¤–
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Sunday, September 27, 2026

The GOP’s Winning Issue

... in one tweet.
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The Whole Concept Is Unsustainable

Well, to be accurate, Baby Boomers were too young to give themselves colleges that were tuition free. Almost tuition free, actually. I paid more for the dorm and my textbooks than I did for tuition (well, my father funded it, but I wrote checks every semester). But my parents’ generation gave us that. We also let them tear it down, pretty much for the reasons AOC states. It’s the same reason Boomers and the children of Boomers are trying to give public money to private schools. Which is not really working out. The ordinary people who thought they’d win, at least here in Texas, are finding out tuition is only part of the cost of private school. Those vouchers are going to the people who don’t need them. It’s an issue in the governor’s race; and Abbott is not winning. Thinking is hard! Most people can’t be bothered to really do it. Which, no disrespect to AOC, is why we think AI is cognitive. Oh, she’s right about why we are told AI is inevitable (by the people trying to sell it to us), and that AI actually a form of intelligence (will someone please tell me, concretely, what that is?). I even agree that AI (not Trump’s fantasy factories, which are NOT bringing manufacturing back to America, where the costs would be so high no one would buy what the factories made. We like cheap labor. It means cheap stuff. Ask Walmart.) is the bubble supporting the financial bubble of the economy. But mortgages did that once (see, e.g., “The Big Short,” and we survived only because Herbert Hoover was proved decisively wrong, and Keynes decisively right). It’s gonna happen again, with AI. We’re stupid like that. But not stupid enough to accept the need for a data center in every pot. Or backyard. So “pop” go the weasels.

Let’s let go, this time. I don’t think they’re going to take our housing market with them. Just their power, which we’re taking back from them, anyway.
AOC: What the elite want—and they’re already planning for it—is to hoard all of the resources for themselves as the world gets more and more physically unstable.

And in an environment of AI, they want to wipe out all of our livelihoods. They want to make sure none of us have jobs, and they want to keep all the spoils of those riches while consuming and burning energy at a pace that is completely unsustainable.
The whole concept is unsustainable. The story is that Henry Ford paid his workers enough to afford his cars. Nobody would believe that story about Elmo. The rich ride on our backs. Every once in a while it’s a good idea to shake them off. They need us far more than we need them. In the end, this is Omelas. We all depend on the misery of at least one other person, somewhere in the world, to keep our society going. Except, unlike Omelas, we don’t even acknowledge that. Until we do, we’re going to just keep going around and around in this circle.

But that doesn’t mean we have to. Thinking is hard, but we can reasonably reason our way out of this.
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Not Making “Fetch” Happen

“Mr. Trump’s cabinet of curiosities wears matching $145 Florsheim Oxfords, gifted by the president himself. They’re reportedly eating the same “living diet,” which consists almost entirely of hunks of meat and globs of sauerkraut. (Adherents are said to include: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Vice President JD Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself). Mr. Trump’s favorite aide, Ms. Harp, passes the president positive news coverage and good polls like she’s the “Mean Girls” gossip Gretchen Wieners. Other White House staffers and cabinet members have begun to emulate the president’s leggy blond echo chamber cultivator, so much so that the White House has been overtaken by a kind of sycophancy Olympics; members of Trump’s inner circle never miss the chance to praise him in televised cabinet meetings.”
Nothing for, or against, Florsheims, but $145 was an expensive shoe back in the day (Trump is stuck in the ‘70’s). It’s the price of cheap sneakers, today. 

Of course, this is a guy who invited a basketball team to the White House, and fed them cold McDonalds food. So that seems pretty on point.

My only question is: why do these people want their jobs this badly? Is the White House just filled with sociopaths and losers? Is is shockingly low self esteem, covered by a thin shell of braggadocio and sheer ignorance?
"At long last, sir, have you no shame?”
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And Paying More…

And paying more for housing and gasoline and food and everything….
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Does It Involve Journalists At The White House?

No? Sorry, not interested.—American TeeVee News
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But It’s NOT A Political Ad!

It’s just selling Trump’s tired talking points and vague generalities nobody’s interested in anymore.

Except on Fox News. Which is just preaching to the choir. Even Abbott ran an ad denouncing Hinojosa on MTP this morning. Talarico has offered to debate Paxton on Fox News.
Now, why the fuck is the American government paying for this shitty stab at propaganda?
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We Need A Constitutional Catch-22

Wow -- a haggard-sounded Blanche crashes and burns on ABC while trying to defend Trump's ban on the free press

RADDATZ: The president said nothing about national security when he announced this ban, and clearly you're very interested in what the press says and how they say it

BLANCHE: What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security

RADDATZ: Give us an example

BLANCHE: You cannot be asking me that!

RADDATZ: But the judge decided this was not based on national security

BLANCHE: It is a privilege not a right to be in the White House
Ever so much more so:
“What [the media outlets] say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security,” Blanche told Raddatz.

Raddatz then bluntly asked Blanche to provide an example of how the media outlets’ reporting had jeopardized or threatened national security — a question Blanche sidestepped by interpreting it to be referencing general inaccurate reporting.

“I’m sorry, give you an example of when CNN doesn’t report accurately? You cannot be asking me that!” Blanche said.

“At some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue, and it’s not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it!”

In an apparent attempt to gain insight on how the Trump administration may address the supposed national security threats from media outlets’ reporting, Raddatz asked how the matter might be handled.

“So are you saying you’re going to screen people before they get on a flight coming to the White House?” Raddatz asked.

Blanche was not pleased with Raddatz’s question.

“I did not say that!” Blanche snapped. “You don’t get to put words in my mouth, that’s not the way it works! I didn’t say that. You said I said something that I didn’t say!”
When the press accurately reports on what the administration says, it threatens national security, and that overrides the First and Fifth Amendments.* 🤷‍♂️ Blanche knows that’s not how it works, but he’s compelled to say it anyway. He likes his job too much.

Which alone is a reason for him not to hold it.



*No, Blanche’s “argument” is not even vaguely sound. Except in a “L’etat, c’est moi” system of government. And we don’t have that. 
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So He’s An Appalling Boor…

 … and a racist and a xenophobe …

Leavitt told the story on "Hang Out with Sean Hannity." Hannity had asked how "brutally honest" Trump is with world leaders.

"With Starmer, I remember we sat down for lunch," Leavitt said. She said she couldn't remember whether it was Windsor Castle or "the place where Keir Starmer lives," and noted that the trip was "a year ago today," because the memory had come up on her phone.

"We were sitting around the table and enjoying lunch in this beautiful place. The president began attacking him because of his policies," she said.

According to Leavitt, Trump told Starmer, "Your policies here are extremely stupid," and "You need to close your borders."

"He says it exactly like that," she said. "'You must deport these people who are in your country.'"

She said Trump told the prime minister that  the British people "hate what you do." Leavitt also pointed out where the scolding happened.
... abroad as well as at home. And he has his finger on his own pulse, and thinks he’s the vox populi, wherever he goes.

Good to know. Thanks for sharing.
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Saturday, September 26, 2026

The White House Insisted This Wouldn’t Happen

The booth conversation was hard to make out for several minutes. At one point, Fowler could be heard telling Herbstreit to stay quiet while technicians worked on the problem. Earlier, while Rutledge was speaking, ABC aired a graphic explaining "electromagnetic deconfliction" and the coordination of radio frequencies with the Secret Service protecting Trump as he moved around the stadium.

...

The broadcast issues came days after Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian claimed Trump's presence disrupted the College Football Playoff national championship in January. During a Thursday press conference, Sarkisian explained that whenever the president moves through a stadium, all communication has to be shut down. That includes links between coordinators in the booth and the sideline, as well as players' in-helmet communications.

Sarkisian said Miami head coach Mario Cristobal, a friend of his, told him that Miami lost communications on its final drive against Indiana because Trump was leaving the game early. Indiana won the title game 27-21.
The White House insisted that didn’t happen, either.
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All The Polls Say So

I’m very confused as to where the fraud is. And all insurance pools rely on people who pay the premiums but don’t use the coverage. This is why your auto insurance rates go up if you use it, but down (or at least not up much) if you don’t. Not using health insurance just means you don’t need it yet. Right? One way to make that happen. Or you can be like Trump, and hate everyone who isn’t just like you. All the polls say so.
amazing -- Karl Rove lists Ken Paxton's scandals: "You've got a guy who has multiple girlfriends and $200,000 worth of home improvements from a corrupt business guy for whom he does favors. My personal favorite is the Uber account in the name of David P. Since he drives around in a car that has [state] license plates, it made it a little difficult to have assignations with one of his mistresses, so the corrupt business guy gives him a fake Uber account and the records of that are now in his impeachment proceedings, so we know how often he went to have sex with Laura Olsen. I mean, can you make this shit up?"
Trump’s endorsee. And having inconvenienced everyone in the stadium with the requisite security measures: Laura Ingraham, but not CNN. Walls. Falling in.
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🤦‍♂️

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ Yes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.🌳  And we’ll use bees for money! And wear onions in our belts!

Meanwhile, watching Rick Steves visit Romania and talk about CeauÈ™escu's grand, and now empty, palace. And how his vanity projects led to his execution in a rebellion against his egotistical and oppressive rule.  Which somehow seems appropriate now. Not the revolution in the streets; but the one likely to happen at the ballot box.🗳️ 

The exchange unfolded Saturday as Trump spoke with reporters before departing the White House, according to video of the gaggle posted by the White House.

"Do you only want outlets that support you to be a part of the press corps?" the female reporter, who isn't visible on camera, asked.

"No, I want real news, not fake news like you," Trump replied, pointing a finger at the reporter as she tried to ask a follow-up question. "I want, listen, I want real news. I love an open, free press. What I don't like is a fake press where a group like CNN, you people watching, or MSDNC."

...

He continued his jab at MS NOW, saying, "They changed their name to 'NOW,' but you know why they changed it? Because their ratings were so bad."

While Trump tried to continue his rant about "fake news," reporters tried to jump in to ask another question. The female reporter he was answering started to ask, "Do you not want --" before Trump leaned in and told her "quiet" while holding a finger out at her.

"What I don't like is fake news," Trump went on. "And they're fake news, 100 percent. In two years, I doubt they did one good story, and I won the election in a landslide."

He then ended by saying, "What we don't want is we don't want," before pausing to extend his arm all the way out and point directly at the female reporter, and finishing, "fake news."
The walls aren’t closing in; they’re coming down. What Trump wants is for his narcissistic fantasy to match up with reality. Unfortunately for him, that’s not going to happen. Except it’s going to be made clear that Trump is on the ballot.
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ETTD

There’s a correlation here, but undoubtedly some causation, too. Either way, it eventually becomes so apparent you have to pay attention and reconsider your choices. Recognizing the demographics is difficult, but other issues are as hard to see, too; mostly because these issues are complicated; and Trump is a simple-minded man.

Consider Venezuela’s oil. Start with the claim that the Pentagon is vested with ownership of the oil. The idea is to reassure oil companies that America is protecting the oil fields of Venezuela so the companies will send people back in to work there. But there’s more to it than that. The question of security in the field is real; but what about the security of the investment? Oil production is a long term project, and a long term investment. So how does the American government have an ownership interest? The answer from the administration is: the Pentagon. But is it?
The Pentagon ownership has been one of the most puzzling parts of the deal, because the idea that the Department of Defense could own more than a third of a Venezuelan oil company, or any oil company, would have been unthinkable in any previous US administration. Prior to Trump, the defense department had never operated like a private equity fund that could directly own percentages of foreign companies.

But the Pentagon has been transformed. The OSC is under the authority of the deputy defense secretary, Stephen Feinberg, a powerful billionaire who wields the real financial power in the Pentagon and has surrounded himself with former employees from the private equity giant Cerberus, as the Guardian has reported. Feinberg installed a former Cerberus employee, David Lorch, as the head of the OSC.

The Trump administration is using a 1950s law called the Defense Production Act to allow the Pentagon to become a kind of giant investment fund. “It has turned them into a vehicle for ownership of substantial domestic and international companies,” said the former official.

A former Pentagon official familiar with the project said Feinberg and Lorch structured the financial end of Trump’s Venezuela deal. “It is absolutely a Feinberg project,” said the former Pentagon official.

However, the law that created the OSC actually didn’t authorize it to make equity investments, and the Pentagon’s spokesperson told Reuters: “The Office of ​Strategic Capital (OSC) ⁠does not take equity stakes in private companies” in August.

“Congress clearly doesn’t believe that it has given the power to OSC to make equity investments,” said Ashley Deeks, the vice-dean of the University of Virginia law school, who has written about US government ownership stakes in companies for the Harvard National Security Journal.

Since the OSC is not authorized to invest in shares of private companies, the Nabep ownership will be held by an entirely different Pentagon office, called Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (Ibas), according to the former Pentagon official.

But the mission of Ibas has nothing to do with oil. Its job, as it says on its website, is solely to “strengthen the US Defense Industrial Base”.

That incongruity is just one of the reasons major oil companies and investors privately say they are keeping clear of this deal, said Phil Gunson of the International Crisis Group, who has been briefed on the problem. “They are concerned about the irregularities. They are concerned about the terms of the deal. It’s the opacity of the agreement that has serious investors concerned,” he said.

“Whether the Pentagon has the authority to act in this way is debatable,” he added.
So the Pentagon owns the oil because Trump says so? Or somebody does? And that’s good for as long as Trump is in office? Or until Congress objects? Or it’s all a fiction? Who’s on first, here? All oil companies do know is that I Don’t Know’s on third.

"If foreign buyers learn that American diesel comes with a political cancellation clause, they're going to go looking elsewhere," he said.

He said the damage won't end with lost sales. Countries hurt by the ban could look for ways to hit back, and China already has one. Beijing has restricted exports of rare earths and other critical materials during past trade fights. Those minerals end up in "our cars, our semiconductors, our advanced weapons," Wolfers said.

"China's not going to need to cut off every shipment to make its point," he said. "It just needs to remind American firms that two can play at this game."

Wolfers compared the ban to the first round of Trump's trade war. In that round, U.S. import restrictions led other countries to retaliate with restrictions of their own.

"Now we're restricting exports," he said. "The end game of all this is we may not get the supplies we need."
Remember the farmers who lost soybean contracts to China because of Trump’s tariffs? Did they all get those back? How much did that cost them? Why don’t we do that again?

It’s popular to blame Trump voters for this. But Trump has really been even stupider, and surrounded himself with more incompetent people, than really could have been imagined. Well, by some people. It really doesn’t pay to be smug about “I told you so.”

Right now, the difficulty is to realize just how damaging Trump is. Because no matter how bad you think it is, it’s always worse. And nobody deserves this.

And a fourth example:
Who thinks a Democratic Congress is going to stop this stupid “war”? 🙋🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️
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Friday, September 25, 2026

With A “B”

Trump said he’s “on the ballot” only because he fears the inevitable: being a lame duck. Which he will be, starting the day after the election.🗳️ 

Although really, he is now. And his plummeting approval ratings and appeal to voters is just one more sign of his feral cunning.
This one never ceases to surprise me. Did they think Trump was right? Did the entire GOP collectively go dark in the attic, and think tariffs would bring in free money from foreign countries? That’s really the only conclusion I can draw. That, or they really are that dumb. With a “b”.

I would pay money to see Sen. Foghorn Leghorn on a TeeVee news set with any of those he mentioned. They’d lead him around like a dog on a leash. It’s not like he’s any smarter than Bill Maher:
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Every Word Is A Lie, Including “And” And “The”

About that 65 million barrels in Venezuela Trump keeps talking about:
Rystad Energy models Venezuelan crude output reaching 1.6 million bpd by 2028 and 1.8 million bpd by 2030 if capital, rigs and services scale up.

Chevron, Eni, Repsol, Shell and new entrants like GeoPark, Hunt Oil and NABEP are expanding under revised contracts, with NABEP's Lake Maracaibo output already jumping from roughly 90,000 bpd to nearly 200,000 bpd.

Venezuela had just two active drilling rigs as of August, far short of the roughly 50 rigs needed by 2028 and the Hydrocarbons Ministry's 93-rig target.
As well as the millions he says he’s already taken.

The Permian Basin currently produces over 6 million bpd. So Venezuela won’t be up to that level anytime soon. Or ever.
The success of the Trump administration’s blockbuster Venezuela oil deal is riding on fields that are aging, degraded or expensive to access.

The agreement last month with Alejandro Betancourt, an energy mogul with a controversial history, includes 17 fields and gives the US majority control of a huge amount of Venezuela’s oil wealth. Betancourt’s North American Blue Energy Partners has said it aims to more than double crude production, adding about 300,000 barrels a day in just over two years. But conversations with more than a dozen industry executives and analysts suggest that the company will struggle to reach that goal. The names of the 17 fields were identified by Bloomberg News but haven’t been officially listed.

A few legacy sites in the Lake Maracaibo region in northwestern Venezuela, the cradle of the country’s oil industry, have the best chance of rapid output gains. The rest are in the Orinoco Belt in central-eastern Venezuela, an area that’s difficult to drill because it’s remote and produces heavy, tar-like crude that must be extracted using specialized equipment.

Betancourt’s company is under pressure to deliver a quick boost to help calm oil markets upended by the Iran war, and generate enough revenue to win support on the ground. The deal with the US faces blowback from both sides of the political aisle in Venezuela, with some describing it as an abdication of sovereignty. But the Trump administration is betting that the pact will spur other producers to plow money into oil reserves that are now firmly within the US sphere of influence.

“Venezuelan oil production could help diversify away from other geopolitical hotspots, but growth will likely be too gradual to be the only solution given the extent of the Middle East supply disruptions,” Luisa Palacios, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said in an interview.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said the Trump-Venezuela oil pact “will greatly benefit both the United States and Venezuela for years to come. This historic deal marks a major step toward stabilizing Venezuela’s economy after years of hyperinflation and almost no new investment, while more than doubling the United States’ oil reserves.”

Among the 17 fields, a handful near Lake Maracaibo — the region that helped turn Venezuela into one of the world’s biggest oil producers and exporters by the middle of the 20th century — could add roughly 200,000 barrels a day in about two years without requiring massive investments, according to industry estimates. That’s still shy of NABEP’s target, and even some of the most promising assets will require rehabilitation after decades of neglect.
BTW, Venezuela produces about 1.2 million bpd. So 1.8 in two years is not a massive increase.

If Trump tells you it’s raining, go outside and see if you get wet.
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So, That Happened…

 First, calm down. The Supreme Court opinion is bad, for reasons the dissent lays out. I will warn you, it’s a legal argument, which means it’s technical. Two of the primary points are statutory interpretation, and equitable relief. You really don’t want me to give you a tutorial on those subjects, do you? Suffice to say I think Professor Vladeck got it exactly right:

This is a bad ruling for all of the reasons Justice Jackson’s dissent make clear. But as both the majority and dissent point out, it’s not likely to have major effects *this* cycle because we’re inside the 90-day NVRA purge window.
So, bad ruling, but what else do you expect? The majority doing the government’s bidding? What else is new? But this one can be corrected by Congress. As I said, it’s statutory interpretation, not a constitutional one. The Congress can more easily change the statute; and should. 

As the dissent points out:
Since 2005, States have used a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) to ensure that registered voters are American citizens. For most of its life, SAVE consisted almost entirely of immigration records from DHS. In 2025, however, DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA) decided to connect SSA’s database of master files, including all its sensitive information, to SAVE. A group of organizations sued, arguing that the modifications to SAVE violated various federal privacy laws, and that the staleness of SSA’s citizenship records risked disenfranchising recently naturalized U. S. citizens. After months of litigation, the District Court agreed and vacated the modifications.
There’s a shadow docket critique there; a sting in the tail. It’s in the last sentence: the trial court went through months of litigation. The Sinister Six issued a per curiam order without arguments or briefs. The order stands until the case rises back on regular appeal. In, you know, a couple of years.

As Jackson says, this is not how the Court is supposed to work. But aside from that, DHS had the SAVE database for 20 years; until Trump decided to “weaponize” it and fuck it up. Reason enough to support the trial court ruling; but that’s an extrajudicial matter in this context. The issue here is that statutory interpretation depends on the statute. And Congress can change the statute to tell the Supremes that they got it wrong. Especially when Trump has fucked it up this badly.

I have serious questions about the authority of the Feds to oversee voter rolls.  I understand the value of a database for the states; but this database has proved wholly unreliable. The real issue is: how much authority does Trump try to exert over state election laws? He can’t do it except by going through the courts, and even the Sinister Six aren’t going to give Trump authority the law and the Constitution don’t give him. Not over elections, anyway. They didn’t do it in 2020, after all.

So the real harm of the decision is ultimately to the Supreme Court. Which is a serious problem. Just not the one anyone is looking at; although they should be.
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Checking In

Thanks, Trump—Texas Democrats
A super PAC backed by Senate Republican leaders has booked $117 million in ads to help Paxton and could spend as much as $200 million before Election Day, Punchbowl reported. The group, Texas PAC, is run and partly funded by the Senate Leadership Fund.

Republican spending in the race has reached $160 million, according to Playbook.

Senate Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars backing Cornyn in the primary, hoping to avoid spending hundreds of millions to carry Paxton through a general election, the report said. Meanwhile, Cornyn allies spent $90 million in the primary and runoff reminding voters of Paxton's ethical issues, from a messy divorce to a federal corruption probe.

Paxton emerged from the primary "deeply battered and broke," Punchbown observed, and Republicans now need the same voters to back him.
Paxton won the primary with Trump’s endorsement. Voters are more aware of Paxton’s corruption than ever before, thanks in large part to those primary ads. Talarico is leading in each of the last 10 public polls. And Paxton, it turns out, is a terrible campaigner. Trump in 2026: Speaking of dinner: Speaking of the future: Because the anti-Christ will have come by then? And finally, the Republicans winning message: “But! Joe Biden!”

🤡
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I Thought The Problem Was, The Immigrants Were Eating All Our Beef

But obviously the leopards eating faces, were supposed to eat only the faces of bad immigrants. Not the ones working in the cattle industry.
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People Invited To The State Dinner

... and how they paid for it. Documentary for Melania. Fluffers for Trump. 🤖  Roberts and Coney Barrett were also invited, as judicial bluffers for Trump. Which warrants a few words from Justice Jackson:
 "If we're not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively," she said, according to The Times. "Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the court's attention?"

She contrasted the current court with its predecessors, who she said "understood that very little good comes from taking an institution that is supposed to be operating outside of the political realm and routinely steering it into the fray."

The present court, she said, "has been noticeably less restrained, especially with respect to pending cases that involve controversial matters."
At this point, for this court, appearance at a state dinner is a political statement.
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Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

So:
MS NOW's Jonathan Lemire told "Morning Joe" that the 80-year-old president seemed confused Thursday that the press pool wasn't on the premises despite ordering crews from MS NOW, CNN and Politico banned from the White House, and two reporters from CNN and another from MS NOW were turned away from the state dinner arrivals despite a judge ordering their reinstatement.

"You know, a couple days ago when we had said that banning media outlets would only hurt the president, I mean, here's a perfect example of it," host Joe Scarborough said. "You had some hero shots that he could have had coming out of the White House – video, great video, you know, yeah, state dinners, red carpet. Yeah, but it just hasn't happened, and it hasn't happened because, well, he banned the media."

Lemire offered additional insight based on his sources at the White House.

"His impulsive decision a few days before not consulting with aides to ban three media outlets," Lemire said, and he agreed with Scarborough's assertion that aides disagreed with that move. "Right, no, because they understand that, first of all, he needs the media like he needs oxygen, like, so he would be the one to miss it. In fact, even yesterday I am told he was asking aides, 'Where are the cameras,' because there was no pool camera, and here's why."

"Just to refresh your memory, so yesterday we woke up to the news that the judge had ruled that CNN, MS NOW and Politico should have access restored to the White House, and it took a few hours for that to happen," Lemire added.
A) Trump is losing the thread in real time. He’s giving orders, and then forgets he’s given them.

B) Trump’s staff is doing what they want, without direction from Trump.

These are not mutually exclusive conclusions.
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Thursday, September 24, 2026

Does Trump Even Know What’s Going On In The White House?

Trump: "CNN and MSDNC’s Ratings have dropped considerably. The primary reason is NO CREDIBILITY! They only write badly about a man who won the Election IN A GIANT LANDSLIDE, winning all 7 Swing States, the Popular Vote, and 86% of the Counties, etc., and whose Popularity has grown because of the unprecedented SUCCESS our Country is having on both the World Stage, and at home. CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng. The event was magnificent — Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP,” they refused to be there. That’s why they have such poor Ratings. Tonight’s State Dinner at the White House, for President Xi, will be spectacular! The Media will be in attendance. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Or is his short term memory that bad?
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Petulant Toddler With A Shotgun

There are more serious problems with this administration; but this does seem to be a violation of the court order. On some as yet unknown technical point.

Although I fail to understand what part of “procedural due process” they continue to misunderstand.  (For the non-lawyers, essentially the court ruled there is a procedure that must be followed, and that obviates any imperious decision by the President made without notice or chance to appeal.) Again, this is more important for its apparent contempt of the court order than for how it inconveniences CNN.

The effect is to cut off the pool coverage (CNN was providing that feed). Maybe Trump decided this:
Video of rich people coming to a state dinner with the Chinese President was not a good idea, after all. Not while voters can’t afford groceries.

Not a good reason to ignore a court order, though.
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Impeach Todd Blanche

He needs to be at least disbarred:
A three-judge panel for the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals last week sided with a lower court judge who had found the Trump administration violated the law in attempting to deport migrants to countries other than the one they are from, determining they have a right to meaningful opportunity to contest and raise concerns.

But after their victory, lawyers for the migrants had to return to court to block one of the deportations at issue in the case.

Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said ICE “plainly stated that they were treating the decision as if it wasn’t in effect.”

“We filed that in response to the fact that they were clearly moving forward with third country removals, notwithstanding the 1st Circuit’s order and opinion on Friday,” she told The Hill.
Removing persons to third party countries where they have no connection is a clear violation of law, according to the trial court and the First Circuit. According to the DOJ, they could deport one of the parties because the First Circuit ruling hadn’t taken effect yet.
An email from a Justice Department attorney offered a more technical explanation: While the appeals court upheld Murphy’s ruling, it did not specifically lift their initial stay barring it from taking effect during trial.

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals “granted the government’s motion for a ‘stay pending appeal.’ An appeal does not conclude until the mandate issues under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 41 returning the case to district court,” that attorney wrote.

It’s a confusing claim, as the day the ruling was issued the case was remanded back to Murphy’s court.

“They kind of refused to acknowledge that they lost in court, so they came up with this technical point, and then the 1st Circuit took that excuse out from under them,” Realmuto said.

An emergency filing from Realmuto on Wednesday night was swiftly responded to by the court, who at 11:30 p.m. wrote that “consistent with this court’s September 18, 2026, Judgment, the March 16, 2026, stay pending appeal is dissolved.”
The legal term of art here is: “too cute by half.” Although that should be in law Latin (almost Latin), or law French (almost legal, but sounds Continental). 

It was the 11:30 p.m. rebuke of the DOJ that prompted Blanche to show such blatant disrespect for the court. Which is grounds for at least an ethics complaint to the appropriate Bar Association. Especially since he’s the Attorney General of the United States.

He’s making me miss Ed Meese.
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It’s All About Definitions

"Barbarians? Are they at the gate? Is the empire imperiled? Is Israel the only source of civilization in the Middle East?

“Barbarian” comes to us from the Ancient Greeks. It was a demeaning term for non-Greek speakers, comparing their languages to baby talk. The Greeks were civilized, the non-Greeks were…not. See, e.g., “Medea.” Euripedes knew the score. Greece v. the world. How’d that work out for them?
  I’ve seen tweets from people protesting the presence of Muslims in this country. They would happily persecute Muslims here. Trump is happily persecuting anyone here who’s non-white. Is that better because we’re “civilized”? Or because Trump went to war against Iran for Israel? Is it Bibi’s argument that the ignorant racists in this country are “civilized”?
A plug for Elmo, another white supremacist. Birds of a feather, I guess. Punching down and defining the slaughter of innocent people as a defense against genocide. I’m pretty sure that’s what the Nazis told themselves. It wasn’t a defense then, either. War is peace. And Israel needs lebensraum so it can have peace. Or it just needs to define its boundaries very broadly. And pick which of its neighbors get to…live.  🤦‍♂️
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Too Low For Zero

September 15:
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office separately said it had referred 117 cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General’s Office for investigation. It also confirmed that 578 other registered voters flagged last year as potential noncitizens by a federal database are, in fact, U.S. citizens.
BTW:
Update, Sept. 21, 6 p.m.: On Friday, Sept. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an additional arrest made in Texas. Mexican national Monica Carzoli, 46, a lawful permanent resident, “admitted to registering to vote and then voting in the November 2024 election. Carzoli was arrested on criminal charges in Del Rio,” according to a news release by federal officials.
No word on whether or not she voted for Trump, which would probably make it okay.

So, Nevada: 16,000 down to 185 down to zero. Texas: 2274 down to 117 down to…? 8 illegal voting cases, and 117 undecided. 8. And who did they vote for?

Meanwhile, the DHS “system” for finding non-citizen voters…sucks. Why do we have the DHS, again? Confidence in their work is so low it’s underground, now.
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When Someone Tells You Who They Are…

... believe them.

The man who says the whole world is lying, and only he is telling the truth, is not a man on the side of truth.
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AI Is Wholly Amoral

Without some idea of ethics, all ideas are equally contentless.

And that’s the problem. 🤖
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“I Am Holier Than Thou”

Go figure. No wonder Trump listens to this guy. I guess this is why the Ambassador from Israel wants Mamdani arrested.
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The Kind Of Polling…

...that makes Democrats want to vote, because maybe everyone else will.
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Suckers And Losers And Fake News

And elitist socialists. Nobody could have foreseen. That’s kinda the point.
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We Finally Have The Constitutional Crisis We Were Warned About…

And nobody is noticing.

But the press is very concerned about itself.
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