SATURDAY A WEEK LATER

Sorry for the repost - I have an excuse, this week...

There’s143 days to the mid terms.

Finally, maybe, possibly? Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif revealed this morning that a peace deal between the United States and Iran was imminent, and that mediators were already preparing to electronically certify the agreement between the two nations. “We are closer to a peace deal than ever before,” Sharif said in a statement published on social media. “With finalisation likely expected in the next 24 hours, Pakistan is preparing for the electronic signing of the peace deal immediately after, followed by technical level talks next week.” Of course, Dilbert couldn’t leave well enough alone. This morning he shitposted on Lies Anti-Social, “Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly. If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again!” This certainly sounds like he’s bringing up nuclear weapons again. Citing sources within Maladministration II, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh claimed this week Trump had previously “raised the issue of using low-yield nuclear weapons” against Iran out of desperation amid his deeply unpopular war that had failed to achieve any of its objectives.

Both chambers of Congress on Thursday failed to pass bills to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) through July 2 amid outrage from Democrats about Bill Pulte being tapped to lead the intelligence community. The unprecedented expiration of the nation’s warrantless spy powers has plunged the country into legal uncertainty over the extent to which it can surveil foreigners located abroad. Each then left town, allowing the spy powers to lapse after they expired at midnight. Democrats refused to reauthorize Section 702 over objections to Pulte being tapped to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), noting his history of using his role leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency to make criminal referrals of alleged mortgage fraud for four Trump foes. Trump somewhat backed away from the pick, nominating U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to lead the office. Pulte, however, is still slated to serve as acting director of intelligence on June 19, and Democrats have said they won’t give him even one day’s access to 702.

After much hooing and hawing and huffing and puffing and pissing and moaning, Trump’s name is noi longer on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. While it took a mere few hours, using scissor lifts, the his name to go on the build back in December, this time it took ten hours to erect scaffolding, while a festive crowd gathered and remained - happy and peacful, celebrating the first blow against our would-be dick-tater. Minutes befpre tjhe midnight deadline to see the name removed, the TrumpDOJ requested 12 hours, citing weather delays and safety concerns. The pathetic excuse got asll the respect it deserved when the judge denied the request; then the Appeals Court denied the emergency request. Trumpty-Dumpty was about to have his great fall. Then the real plan came into view. The scaffolding hasd not been put up to help workers remove the name; it was a framework for the tarps that were hung across the facade to keep all those in attendance from seeing the removal. The event became a perfect metaphor for Trump: compliance behind a curtain. The court was obeyed; the letters came down. But no one was allowed to see the biggest blow to Dilbert’s tiny, fragile ego since he lost the 2020 election. The name was gone by 0400. Jim Acosta posted on-scene video showing him walking close to the façade and looking into the narrow gap between tarp and wall, confirming what was later treated as fact: behind the tarp, Trump was gone. It’s still a victory for Us and a big loss to the psychologically-destroyed 5 years old the moron portion of the electorate placed in an office he has no business being near, let alone in. When we get the veto-proof majority next year, we’ll confine him to his room till December 2028, then impeach and remove him. Letting his body slowly twist in the wind is nothing he doesn’t deserve.

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts scorched Trump’s Interior Department on Friday for orders to remove all exhibits pertaining to race, sexuality, and climate from national parks, and issued an order to reverse all of it. She went into painstaking detail about the significance of the exhibits being torn down under the so-called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, wrting: “The National Park system ... serves as a cornerstone of public learning, providing rich and informative signs, exhibits, and interpretive waysides on topics ranging from civil rights to environmentalism, citing “the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry ... the genesis of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument ... [and] the retreating ice of Glacier National Park.” The park system, she continued, is sometimes called “America’s largest classroom,” and to that end, “the Government’s stewardship of these park sites ... carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments.” Unfortunately, she continued, “Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.” All of these removals, Kelley wrote in her opinion, add up to “government-sanctioned erasure and rejection of their histories. It strips the sites of the context that gives them meaning. It degrades the public’s trust in the government, as the Executive Order ignores congressional directives and carelessly razes decades of efforts in the pursuit of its unilateral agenda. These harms are, in all senses of the word, irreparable.”

David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, promised to give “60 Minutes” more editorial independence during a call, Lesley Stahl told the NYT. Along with Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, Stahl is one of the last journalists sticking with the iconic “60 Minutes” despite recent firings and a Trump-friendly takeover.

The TrumpDOJ sure got a lot of whackin’ applied to its ginormous posterior by federal judges this past week: The judicial branch’s response to the Trump rampage has been slow but there are signs that it’s gathering steam. The more judges that dispense with the government’s presumption of regularity, the wider the door opens to investigating irregularities. The pace is halting and often hard to visualize because it comes in so many different flavors across so many different courts. Thursday and Friday saw a flurry of examples of judicial pushback against Maladministration II that offers a good snapshot of the emerging moment: In Florida: U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek of Ft. Myers, a Trump appointee, issued an apoplectic order in a habeas case after the Trump administration failed to abide by his order to give an ICE detainee a bond hearing. The TrumpDOJ originally conceded that the detainee was entitled to a bond hearing in front of an immigration judge. “What happened next borders on the surreal,” Dudek wrote in an order. The immigration judge refused to hold a bond hearing, the administration went along with it, waiving its right to appeal, and then came back to Dudek saying its original concession “was in error.” Dudek was not having any of it: “The Government was right the first time. And its request for a do-over here is not just legally unsupportable, it is a masterclass in litigation cynicism. A federal court is not a testing lab where the Executive branch can pilot a concession to get a case closed, stand by silently while its own administrative process flouts the resulting mandate, and then stroll back in demanding a clean slate. Give me a break.” Rather than just re-order a bond hearing, he ordered the detainee released within 48 hours “because the Government has shown a complete inability to follow judicial directions.”

In Rhode Island: Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. popped the Trump administration for not immediately complying with his order to resume making asylum decisions and restart immigration processing. “It should almost go without saying—but the Court will say it anyway for the sake of ‘clarify[ing]’ the Government’s ‘current obligations’ — that court orders vacating and setting aside agency policies have immediate effect once they are issued,” McConnell wrote.

McConnell gave the administration 24 hours to file a status report on the “specific steps” it’s taken to comply with his order: “There is no excuse this time; the Government has an obligation to immediately comply with this Order.”

In Illinois: After a federal judge ordered an evidentiary hearing into possible grand jury improprieties in an unrelated fraud case by the same prosecutor implicated in grand jury misconduct in the Broadview Six case, the TrumpDOJ folded. It moved to dismiss charges against two defendants in the rather serious fraud case rather than see its prosecutors, including potentially Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, hauled to the stand to give sworn testimony about the grand jury proceedings.

In D.C.: Chief Judge James Boasberg rejected a revisionist move by the TrumpDOJ to vacate his earlier order quashing grand jury subpoenas in the politicized investigation of the Federal Reserve and its then-chairman Jay Powell. In revisiting his earlier ruling, Boasberg colorfully summarized it thusly: “This Court found that the subpoenas were meant to harass Powell and to pressure him to truckle to the President’s policy preferences.” It also concluded that the Government had no good-faith basis to believe that Powell was guilty of any crime other than displeasing the President and that the Government’s justifications were mere pretexts.” As he rejected the latest move, Boasberg dryly called it “a creative way to clear its loss from the books.” “This Court found that the subpoenas were meant to harass Powell and to pressure him to truckle to the President’s policy preferences. It also concluded the Government had no good- faith basis to believe that Powell was guilty of any crime other than displeasing the President and that the Government’s justifications were mere pretexts. As he rejected the latest move, Boasberg dryly called it “a creative way to clear its loss from the books.”

Elmos net worth surged past $1 trillion on Friday as SpaceX presented its Pump-and-Dumb fraud, er, I mean IPO, prompting global revulsion and calls for an aggressive wealth tax to rein in out-of-control inequality. Igor Volsky, director of the Tax the Greedy Billionaires Campaign, said: “Musk became the world’s first trillionaire because our tax system shields the wealth of the ultra-wealthy from taxation while requiring working to people pay taxes on every paycheck. Today’s milestone should serve as a wake-up call to us all.” He went on: “Unless we plan to cede control and agency over our future to a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, lawmakers must pursue bold tax policies that actually meet this moment- not just slowing the accumulation of extreme wealth, but reversing it. That means passing taxes on billionaire wealth ambitious enough to make the ultra-wealthy less wealthy, reduce the stranglehold they have over our economy and democracy, and restore the ideal that no one in America gets to buy their way to unchecked power.”

Friday, the TrumpDOJ approved the Paramount-WBD merger; Paramount Skydance now has a clearer path to acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion. Maladministration II had leverage over Paramount Skydance CEO and MAGA ally David Ellison, who sought to clear the deal through the DOJ. While the deal dangled in uncertainty, Paramount’s networks like CBS and CBS News made controversial moves to end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and fire “60 Minutes” correspondents like Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley.

Behind the scenes, TrumpDOJ and other Maladministration II officials have quietly assured allies that plans for some form of payout to the J6 Seditionists remain on track. TPM’s David Kurtz reports: “I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.”

Thursday morning and Friday morning Trump called for Rep. Jamie Raskin to be expelled from Congress because the “bum” wants to launch impeachment proceedings against him. In a now-standard-issue Midnifght meldown, sundowning Gramps a 195-word tirade against Raskin while sharing an X post from Fox News host Mark Levin demanding Republicans “move to expel” Raskin from the House. It is unclear what exactly set Levin and Trump off on their rants against Raskin. The longtime nemesis of the president has frequently hinted that Democrats will launch impeachment proceedings against Trump should Democrats retake control of the House in the midterms, as they are widely expected to do. Dilbert wrote: “Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History.” He also desperately suggested Friday morning that Raskin would “be in jail right now” if former President Joe Biden hadn’t issued sweeping preemptive pardons just before leaving office. “Something should be done about people like this who do bad things, but always come up on the short end because of their illegal or unscrupulous behavior, and hurt our Country in the process,” Trump continued. (Yes indeed, something should be done to you, Dilbert.) “I agree with Mark Levin when he says to, EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this, who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), casting their vote of HATE!” In an interview on All In with Chris Hayes, Raskin responded to Trump’s Lies Anti-Social post by suggesting the president is “having nightmare flashbacks about impeachment.”

A commercial airline pilot received a baffling response from the FAA after Trump’s UFC lights blinded them while landing Friday night. The pilot spoke anonymously about how powerful lights from the UFC octagon on the White House South Lawn filled the cockpit during a landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It was “10 times worse than any laser illumination event.” FAA personnel told the pilot to contact the White House about the safety concerns. The pilot’s reports “raise questions” about how well the fight’s organizers coordinated with aviation authorities, considering the illuminated UFC setup’s proximity to the “busiest flight corridors.” The FAA recently recommended blinking red lights for Trump’s triumphal arch because of how close it is to busy D.C. flight corridors.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explained in his Friday morning nesletter, and later on Ari Melber’s show, why the SpaceX IPO valuation that just made tech tycoon Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire stinks to high heaven, calling deal deal a Ponzi Scjheme and Musk’s whole career a Ponzi Scheme. After all his other cons like The Boring Company, Mission to Mars, self-driving Teslas, and everything else have failed, Space-S is what he has left. “What’s left? What is SpaceX? It’s a medium-sized satellite launch company? That’s an okay business, but it’s not a huge business, attached to a really bad AI model. Grok is, by all accounts, terrible ... and that in turn is bolted to what’s left of Twitter, which has been turned into a, you know, a right-wing, Nazi-infested wasteland.” It defies belief, Krugman continued, to imagine that company is “worth almost as much as Microsoft, you know, which is are supplying the software that, you know, like it or not, the world runs on. So this is crazy, the valuation. There’s no conceivable way.” Ultimately, he said, “this is all it really is a Ponzi scheme,” but unlike most Ponzi schemes where all the suckers have to choose to opt into it, “People are being forced effectively to buy into SpaceX because the indexes are including it, even though by the normal rules they should not,” and there are now even “universities that have 10 or 15 percent of their endowment invested in SpaceX.” The bottom line, Krugman concluded, is that “this is a rigged system ... this is genuine rigging. Clearly the the system has all been tilted into producing this absurd valuation that makes the world’s first trillionaire.”

It does seem, after more than two months of lies and deceptions that the USA and Iran are closer to a deal than they ever have been before. Not just Trump is saying it (he has lied about this repeatedly) but the Iranians and other states in the region are claiming that a deal actually is close. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi went on television to say that an agreement is in the works. As for the terms of the agreement we must still wait and see. However the first signs are not at all positive for the USA securing anything of value and indeed point to a humiliating result for what was, until recently, the world’s only superpower. Credible reports are coming out that not only has the US already supported the return of $3 billion to Iran, but that a total of $20 billion might soon be on its way through the UAE. VP JD Vance tacitly endorsed this scenario by saying that the USA would not be sending money to Iran now (using the present tense, a sure giveaway that what happens in the future might be different) and furthermore talking up the prospect of the USA actually supporting the long-term legitimacy of the Iranian regime. Iran seems determined to maintain the principle that it can still charge tolls for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and when it comes to any Iranian nuclear deal, it seems the terms on offer are probably worse than those agreed by the Obama administration under the JCPOA of 2015.

Losing wars tends to be unpopular for Americans, and Trump will have done so obviously - with the mid-term elections looming. Politically the timing could not be better. I agree with Phillips O’Brien, who wrote last night: “If this happens, we are staring at a pretty comprehensive US strategic defeat. The US would have used up a large percentage of its most advanced weaponry, would have bombarded Iran at will for more than a month and would be in a worse position than when the war started. More worryingly, countries in the region and around the world have now had a first hand opportunity to see what the US has become, a blowhard of a power with no real partners, which regularly betrays those who thought they were its allies. The USA has revealed that it is strategically illiterate, with a decaying military and a decrepit political system. Add it up, and this war should weaken the US markedly in the region and internationally while highlighting the reality of American decline. A defeat would be good for this country. It will clear the air. It can make Americans realize just how the US military has declined and is deteriorating. This performance of the US military has been poor militarily and ethically in this war. The US has not adjusted its military to meet modern war-fighting conditions, still relying too much on expensive, exquisite systems, and the US officer corps has clearly been purged of much of its talent and intellectual ability. The US military will need total rebuilding after this and losing a war so quickly and decisively can lead to such a rebuild. Now, nothing can actually be done on this while Trump is commander in chief and the DOD is led by someone as completely unfit as Pete Hegseth, but it does mean that going forward, the whole Pentagon structure will need to be cleansed.

“The implications of the destruction of the US foreign policy making structure is now undeniable. This has not received nearly the attention that it deserves in the US, but America’s ability to conduct foreign policy, let alone influence other states, has been crippled by the gutting of the US diplomatic corps. The US has not only driven away vast number of its best diplomats, it is not even filling most of its ambassador positions around the world. Basically the country is led by a crook/con-man and a handful of incompetent sycophants. They have lost this war and hopefully people will see that killing expertise is not some game or a way to “own the libs” but is actually a development that is weakening the country.

“For decades the US has achieved nothing in the region except making things worse for itself and those who live there, and at monstrous, eye watering cost. It is time for the people of the Middle East to take responsibility for their own destiny without the US playing this hyper-militarized role. Yes, there will be a much more developed piece on this once/if any deal is signed. However if losing this war leads to a US drawdown in the region, I will be standing in the cheering section.”

Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times. Regardless of what you may feel right now, act as if you believe that and redouble your efforts.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” - Abraham Lincoln

Tim the turtle

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