Saturday, June 21, 2025
The example most detrimental to U.S. and U.S. presidential stature is Two Weeks Trump's ridiculous coddling of Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine for two months
... Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.
On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: "You can ask that question in two weeks, and we'll see." He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.
Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, "I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can't say yes or no."
Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.
"I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know within two weeks," Trump said. "We're going to find out whether or not he's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks." ...
Last Wednesday marked three weeks, and still bupkis from Trump.
It's been two months, not two weeks.
More.
Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is
... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
Friday, June 20, 2025
The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not
... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion.
Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense.
The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...
Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.
“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...
LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.
“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...
Meanwhile, known corporate welfare, in the form of tax abatements and subsidies by states and localities to attract businesses to come and bring jobs, is presently estimated at in excess of $417 billion. The real total is probably far higher given that local data is poor relative to state disclosures.
The data, incomplete as it may be, shows just ten states where we're talking about only "hundreds of millions" in lost tax revenue and tax loss expenditures. In the rest we're talking about billions, even tens of billions.
It ain't over, but 3 judge panel of Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals votes unanimously to let Trump keep control of California National Guard troops
Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles
... In its decision, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals unanimously concluded it was likely Trump lawfully exercised
his authority in federalizing control of the guard.
It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters. ...
Thursday, June 19, 2025
So, a White House official supposedly told FOX News that use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian nuke facilities is not off the table
The idiot who did this map didn't know that B-2 Spirit Bombers are based at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri.
Also, the idiot from the White House should be an ex-official.
These guys want to talk about the 802k foreign born who left in April, not about the 1.6m who arrived in January lol
That said, the January surge is probably more about the revisions of the data for the previous year than about anything else.
Elon Musk's hair sample for fentanyl, ketamine, etc. comes up negative
George Floyd wouldn't have died with such results.
Only five months in lol
To be fair, only Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz worked in an official capacity, and they remain in official positions.
In 2017 seven people got the ax by June, eighteen by the end of the year.
This report sounds like there's wiggle room for Israel to take out Iran's Supreme Leader after missile strike on Israeli hospital
... Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to hit back even harder at Iran following the strike.
“We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran,” he vowed in an X post.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, backed up Netanyahu’s threat.
“These are war crimes of the most serious kind — and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes,” he tweeted.
“The Prime Minister and I have instructed the IDF to increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime.” ...
And there it is:
Real Clear Politics runs post by a comedian telling us Iran never invaded anybody and Donald Trump would ruin his presidency by starting a war against it
In Rob Schneider's world Iran never funded Hamas which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, never built and launched wave after wave of ballistic missiles at Israeli civilians, never enriched enough uranium to build over a dozen nuclear weapons, never promised over and over again death to Israel and death to America.
Truly hilarious.
The world's population of everyday normal millionaires heh since the year 2000 has more than quadrupled to 52 million
... There is not much data on individuals in the $50 million to $1 billion range, which distorts the picture, according to Mazeau. He also said the wealth growth among middle and lower wealth brackets is underappreciated. For instance, the number of individuals with $1 million to $5 million, whom UBS dubs “everyday millionaires,” has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52 million.
“They have more wealth collectively than all the billionaires in the world,” he said. “It is often overlooked how much wealth is rising and is going towards the middle of the pack.”
The middle of the pack. Yeah right.
It takes $33 million in 2025 to be a 1913 millionaire.
More in "The U.S. added a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024: Report".
Meanwhile . . .
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
What Kristi Noem's "allergic reaction" incident did was focus attention on yet another lab shutdown at Fort Detrick, apparently on-going since April 29th
What we have here is a DHS secretary who on her own admission can be incapacitated by an allergic reaction, which doesn't seem very "secure" to me.
Maybe we need someone else on the job.
And what we also have here is yet more drama from the actors at Fort Detrick. Somebody needs to clean that place up once and for all, or shut it down permanently.
Will that someone be RFK Jr.?
Kristi Noem discharged from hospital as ICE Barbie's sudden illness sparks conspiracy theories
... According to its website, the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick studies viruses 'causing high-consequence disease' like like Ebola or COVID.
One of its major focus areas is to 'mitigate major public heath events related to emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases or biological weapons attacks.'
But Kennedy's Department of Health and Human Services ordered an indefinite work stoppage at the facility in April.
'NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick,' HHS officials said at the time.
'This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause.'
They added: 'During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.'
Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.
Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed to Fox News that the shutdown came after one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'. ...
Lying whopper from Newsweek, says Fort Detrick was created and built by DHS as a federal response to anthrax letter attacks in 2001
I mean, holy crap.
The 2001 anthrax letter attacks CAME from anthrax STORED at Fort Detrick, which was the government's bioweapons research facility from way back in 1943 during WWII, until it became politically suicidal to say that and they snapped their fingers and presto!, it became a biodefense research facility.
The researcher there responsible for the anthrax attacks committed suicide as investigators finally got close to him.
James Comey and Robert Mueller infamously tried to frame the wrong guy for the crime. You know those guys, the guys who relentlessly went after Donald Trump.
DHS didn't even exist until March 2003.
I mean, c'mon Newsweek.
Fort Detrick is also suspiciously close to the location of a facility where elderly people came down with an unknown respiratory illness and died in summer 2019, which I think might have been a precursor to COVID-19. Most people now believe the Chicom lab at Wuhan was the lab from which coronavirus leaked, but I think Fort Detrick and Wuhan were cooperating at the time because bioweapons research was technically forbidden in the USA but they farmed it out to Wuhan on the sly, perhaps through Peter Daszak and Ecohealth-Alliance which got grants connected with Anthony Fauci. I speculate something leaked into the USA in summer 2019 from Fort Detrick.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people in America and abroad that there was a very severe flu-like illness already on the loose in the second half of 2019 which they commonly describe as the worst flu they ever had.
Meanwhile Fort Detrick has been perennially notorious for failing inventory protocols for the HAZMAT stored there, for shoddy maintenance and record keeping, and for leaking waste water into the local environment.
That ICE Barbie fell ill after a visit to Fort Detrick is really one hell of a coincidence.
Kristi Noem Visited Biohazard Lab Day Before Allergic Reaction
Mad King Ludwig restarts agricultural deportations, says the real illegal alien problem is the criminal ones in the big cities
Trump yanks brief reprieve for immigrants he said are ‘good, long time workers’
The Trump administration has reopened arrests of immigrant workers at hotels, restaurants and agricultural businesses, backtracking on the brief reprieve they got after President Donald Trump stated they were necessary, good, longtime workers whose jobs were almost “impossible” to replace. ...
The announcement backpedals on Trump’s statement last week on social media that “changes are coming” after farmers and hotel and leisure business employers had complained that “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Just six days ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement paused arrests at worksites in agriculture industries, including fisheries and meatpacking plants, restaurants and hotels, according to an internal policy memo obtained by NBC News last Thursday. ...
Asked about the change during a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from the G7 summit, Trump said: “We’re going to look everywhere. But I think the biggest problem is the inner cities.” ...
Trump said cities are where “the really bad ones are, the murderers.”
“We’re going to get them out,” Trump said. “There are far more in the inner cities, Democrat-run cities, sadly, and I’m just giving you, there’s far more in there than you have on a farm or someplace.”
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Daily Beast reporter demotes Stephen Miller to deputy press secretary, still can't spell feud after correcting story lol
The White what?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-and-ice-barbie-kristi-noem-in-bitter-west-wing-civil-war-over-round-ups/
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