Saturday, September 26, 2026

๐Ÿคฆ‍♂️

๐Ÿคฆ‍♂️๐Ÿคฆ‍♂️ Yes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.๐ŸŒณ  And we’ll use bees for money! And wear onions in our belts!

Meanwhile, watching Rick Steves visit Romania and talk about Ceauศ™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.๐Ÿ—ณ️ 

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.
Posted by at No comments:

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”? ๐Ÿ™‹๐Ÿ™‹‍♀️๐Ÿ™‹‍♂️
Posted by at No comments:

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.๐Ÿ—ณ️ 

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:
Posted by at 2 comments:

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.
Posted by at No comments:

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.
Posted by at No comments:

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!”

๐Ÿคก
Posted by at No comments:

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.
Posted by at No comments:

People Invited To The State Dinner

... and how they paid for it. Documentary for Melania. Fluffers for Trump. ๐Ÿค–  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.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Down The Rabbit Hole ๐Ÿ•ณ️

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.
Posted by at No comments:

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?
Posted by at 1 comment:

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.
Posted by at 1 comment:

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.
Posted by at 1 comment:

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.  ๐Ÿคฆ‍♂️
Posted by at 1 comment:

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.
Posted by at No comments:

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.
Posted by at No comments:

AI Is Wholly Amoral

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

And that’s the problem. ๐Ÿค–
Posted by at No comments:

“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.
Posted by at No comments:

The Kind Of Polling…

...that makes Democrats want to vote, because maybe everyone else will.
Posted by at No comments:

Suckers And Losers And Fake News

And elitist socialists. Nobody could have foreseen. That’s kinda the point.
Posted by at No comments:

We Finally Have The Constitutional Crisis We Were Warned About…

And nobody is noticing.

But the press is very concerned about itself.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)