Adam Lynch

Appeals judges crush Trump’s 'unlawful' spending freeze

Law and Crime reports a federal court of appeals upheld a series of lower court orders barring the Trump administration from enforcing a "sweeping and unprecedented categorical" spending "freeze.”

In one 58-page opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit took a group of "consolidated appeals" of several different orders and mostly rejected the White House’s argument in favor of continuing the freeze. Judges found the Trump administration’s arguments unconvincing in one case and utterly ignored the administration’s argument in another.

“In one order from March 2025, the lower court extended a pause on the spending freeze – enjoining myriad federal agencies from slashing funds and directing them to pay out ‘awarded grants, executed contracts, or other executed financial obligations,’” reports Law and Crime.

In an additional two orders from April 2025, the lower court enforced the preliminary injunction against the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and then denied a reconsideration and stay requested by the Trump administration.

With this slate of decisions, the appellate court has joined a legion of courts dismantling President’s Donald Trump’s executive orders and policies, and it further complicates Trump’s effort to starve certain nonprofits and research.

One of the lawsuits against Trump, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleged the spending freeze violated several tenets of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), federal laws and the U.S. Constitution, which mandates the distribution of congressionally-appropriated funds.

James, who has won a landmark case against Trump for fraud, welcomed the 1st Circuit's opinion.

"This decision is a clear reminder that the president cannot treat congressionally-approved funding like a switch he can flip on and off," James said. “For more than a year, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to freeze critical funding that states rely on to serve their communities, and once again the courts have rejected that unlawful power grab."

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

'The truth hurts': MAGA’s freakout over Trump and Iran regime bromance raises eyebrows

Analyst and political commenter Joy-Ann Reid caused a small explosion on X after she dared to compare the hard right-wing fundamentalism of Iran to the hard right-wing fundamentalism of MAGA and President Donald Trump.

Reid’s claim, which currently had 970 reposts by late Tuesday — many from furious Christian nationalists and evangelicals — states: “I’m not saying that [Iran] regime is not bad, but … our regime is not good.”

“Our regime has secret police, they have secret police. Our regime is oppressing women, taking away abortion rights, taking away women’s rights, they also oppress women,” said Reid. “They have the highest rate of women who are in STEM careers, we’re kicking women out of the military, out of university, we’re saying DEI means women can’t be hired for high positions in the sciences. We’re marginally better and we’re doing it for Christianity, they’re doing it for Islam.”

MAGA slammed the claim, with one critic saying “Joy Reid claims the US is little better than Iran on women's rights. If unhappy, leave.”

“This is the unbelievable view of woke feminists on the left. No, it is not the same, Joy, who was even too extreme even for MSNOWNews,” posted another.

“Then move there,” raged still another. “I'm surprised she didn't say it was better for woman in Iran than here in the US.”

“You know, I mean, the truth hurts, apparently,” Reid responded on Wajahat Ali’s “Left Hook” podcast. “Especially on ex-Twitter, where the truth apparently is like, it's like throwing garlic at a vampire.”

“The people who are screaming the loudest are the people who are most eager to set up a Christian theocracy in the United States,” Reid added. “And by the way, they admit it. They say they are Christian nationalists. … So what you have are white Christian nationalists who admit that they are Christian nationalists, who say they want a country that is based on their reading of a Bible that doesn't exist because they have read into it a cruelty toward immigrants, a cruelty toward the poor, a hatred of women. And they want to consign women to one role. That's right. They've said it.”

Reid went on to cite examples, including J.D. Vance who lectured women for being childless and not spending their lives cooking for men.

“Or, you know, ‘you just want to whore around and you don't want to do what is your duty.’ The things they say sound just like what a theocrat would say. And they say they want the country to be based on their reading of Christianity. How is that different from Iran?” Reid demanded.

Ali pointed out that Project 2025, “the supervillain blueprint to destroy American democracy,” is co-authored by Russell Vought, “a self-described Christian nationalist who openly believes America should become a ‘Christian nation.’”

“He’s no longer an outlier. Before being killed by a young white man, Charlie Kirk said he didn’t believe in the separation of church and state, … which is clearly articulated in the Constitution by the founding fathers, who supported religious freedoms but didn’t want a theocracy.

Furthermore, Ali said Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “cosplays every day as a wannabe Crusader with Christian nationalist tattoos all over his body.”

“To avoid any subtlety, he even wrote a book called American Crusade. He belongs to Christ Church, co-founded by Doug Wilson, who described himself as a ‘paleo-Confederate.’ Wilson doesn’t believe in the 19th Amendment, says women should be subordinate to men, and has provided a Biblical justification for slavery. He was invited last month by Hegseth to lead a prayer service in the Pentagon.”

“Imagine if any of these people were Muslim, what would America do?” Alis said. “Oh, yeah, probably bomb them in an illegal war that has now escalated across the region, led to thousands of casualties, and choked off the Strait of Hormuz, leading to spiking oil prices.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Meteorologist attributes baffling Trump claim to 'the Sharpie in his brain'

Certified Broadcast and Consulting Meteorologist John Morales said he was thrown by President Donald Trump’s recent weather claims about Cuba.

The Miami New Times reports Trump told reporters on Monday at the White House that Cuba is not in a hurricane zone, beginning his remarks that Cuba was a “beautiful island” with “great weather.”

“They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change, you know?” Trump told reporters. “They won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week … I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor.”

Aside from a modern-day U.S. president declaring his plan to “take” a legitimately and internationally-recognized nation for his own, Trump’s claim about Cuba’s balmyalternet sharpie Trump

hurricane-free weather “was news to meteorologists everywhere and to his own administration,” reports the Times.

Stunned, Morales attributed Trump’s mind-boggling claim to “the Sharpie in his brain at work.

Morales was referring to Trump vandalizing an official government weather map in 2019, apparently with a Sharpie, to expand the range of projected impact for 2019’s Hurricane Dorian — just to avoid admitting he’s lied about the hurricane menacing the state of Alabama.

But even more astounding, the Miami New Times reports Trump appeared to have forgotten that just two months ago, his own administration had delivered $3 million in disaster relief to Cuba after Hurricane Melissa slammed the island last October.

“The Trump administration said it sent charter flights from Miami in mid-January to bring food kits, hygiene and water treatment kits, household items, and kitchen supplies to 24,000 people in the hardest-hit areas of Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, Granma, and Guantanamo,” reports the Times. “The administration was working with the Catholic Church to ensure ‘assistance reaches the Cuban people directly and without regime interference.’”

A January 26 U.S. Department of State press release even states that “The United States remains steadfast in supporting the Cuban people’s post-disaster recovery,” before declaring the aid “the first in a series of shipments of humanitarian assistance … designed to reach those most in need, bypassing regime interference, and ensuring transparency and accountability.”

Months before causing its own island-wide hurricane-style electricity blackout, Trump’s people declared “our humanitarian assistance is part of a broader effort to stand with the Cuban people as they seek a better future.”

In addition to its January aid, the administration followed up its generosity in February with the announcement of an additional $6 million in supplies because of the lingering humanitarian and energy crisis of Cubans affected by Melissa.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Trump admin's desperate scramble to replace fleeing staff will boomerang: expert

In its desperation to replace fleeing prosecutors and defectors, President Donald Trump’s DOJ is now loosening hiring requirements for federal prosecutors. Trump’s DOJ says new applicants no longer need have any attorney experience to get a job. They can be fresh out of college, and CNN Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent Paula Reid says Americans can probably expect predictable results.

“They have redesigned this agency to try to pursue MAGA priorities and in some cases, pursue the president's adversaries. And they've lost a lot of people in the process,” said Reid. “Some people have objected and walked out. Some people have been fired …”

Reid said the DOJ is undeniably having trouble managing its own caseload, with judges complaining about agency lawyers not meeting deadlines, as well as the shoddy quality of their work.

“That’s something you don't hear about with federal prosecutors. These are supposed to be the best of the best, which is part of why most offices have a rule that you need at least three years of experience before you can apply for a role,” said Reid, adding that new students fresh from school are not generally prepared for the workload or the court’s unforgiving requirements.

“The [Minnesota Civil Division] office has been inundated with these habeas petitions from folks who have been detained by ICE, a ton of work, a lot of criticism from judges,” said Reid. “As a recovering lawyer myself, that's a really sophisticated kind of situation to find yourself in with no legal or no courtroom experience. … But, again, this whole strategy at DOJ [is because] they want to remake this in Trump's image. But that has consequences.”

One CNN anchor pointed out that courts judges in Minnesota and Chicago are already dismissing DOJ cases because cases were brought too quickly or they weren't able to meet deadlines and requirements, and wondered if decreasing the level of prosecutors’ experience would make matters even worse.

“I talked to a lot of officials inside DOJ last year [during the firings]. I said, ‘are you confident you're going to be able to restock your lawyers here?’ And some of them said, ‘look, we only need a third of the number of lawyers we had before. I'll find people who will do it faster,” recalled Reid. “I think there was a lack of appreciation or respect for federal prosecutors federal workers in general.”

- YouTube youtu.be

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Revealed: 'Fringe activists' working 'behind the scenes' with Trump to overhaul elections

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports a network of far-right actors are working with President Donald Trump to derail elections in Georgia and cast doubt on any vote that removes Republicans from power.

“The meeting and the call recounting it offer a glimpse at how activists, once on the fringe of the conservative movement, are now trying to overhaul elections in Georgia and across the country,” reports AJC. “Now several are in the Trump administration, and Fulton County is firmly in their sights ahead of the 2026 midterms.”

For years, the AJC reports a “network of activists has cast doubt on Georgia’s 2020 election, questioning the integrity of the state’s voting machines and the voter rolls that determine who can vote.”

Legitimate election officials dismissed their challenges and investigators debunked their fraud claims, said AJC. But now several are in the Trump administration, “and Fulton County is firmly in their sights ahead of the 2026 midterms.”

The AJC reports a recent Zoom call revealed conservative activists eagerly sharing tips and tricks for election engineering, which they learned at a February summit in Washington with several Trump administration officials, including Kurt Olsen, Trump’s director of election security and integrity, who played a key role in the FBI’s January raid on an election warehouse in Fulton County.

“Kurt is leading a team and leading a charge of great people that are working together,” said Holly Kesler, a Georgia conservative activist, during a recent “election integrity” meeting of the Georgia Constitution Party, audio of which was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“It is a multiagency approach,” she said, reports AJC. “And there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes. I’ve been a part of some of that.”

“Others involved in the Election Integrity Summit included Brad Carver of the Georgia Republican Party; Marci McCarthy, a former DeKalb Republican official who now oversees public affairs at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert whose expertise was used by the U.S. Department of Justice to justify seizing troves of Fulton County’s 2020 election records,” said AJC.

The AJC adds that Carver currently leads the “Election Confidence Task Force” within the Georgia GOP and was one of the 16 Trump fake electors in 2020. More recently he called Georgia “the biggest topic” at the Washington summit and expressed frustration with people in the Trump administration who were not pursuing Trump’s attacks on elections with proper vigor.

“But some of those involved in efforts to overhaul elections have been careful about how much they reveal to the public,” reports AJC. “In the Zoom, Carver said meetings like the ones hosted by the Georgia Constitution Party and Signal group chats are helpful because they allow information to be shared without ending up ‘on the front page of liberal media.’”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Young pastor says entrenched conservatism 'made me question the whole system'

Rural Alabama pastor Daniel Rogers refused to give up the church after being ousted by his home denomination, but it wasn’t an easy journey.

Rogers is a member of the Church of Christ, but that segment can run the gamut from hard fundamentalist to progressive. The Daily Yonder reports the church Rogers grew up in “fell more neatly into the former camp,” with Rogers’ father, grandfather, and church elders teaching him “that only he and his fellow churchgoers were going to Heaven.”

“We were taught that everybody else is liberal, everybody else has gone away from Jesus, and we are the only ones who remain as faithful members of the one true church,” said Rogers, adding that the church’s belief system was better defined by “what it did not believe than what it did.”

His home church approached scripture the way a lawyer “might approach the law, trying to discern what is ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’” and occasionally making loopholes to defend certain policies.

“[The dominant scriptural] interpretation is the law. And if you don’t abide by it, you’re not in God’s good graces,” said Rogers.

Rogers became a pastor at 20 and joined his father and grandfather at the church he was raised in, but the relationship soured early as the young Rogers began questioning dome of the church’s enshrined doctrine. Church leaders repressed his questions when he voiced them, sitting him down and telling him, “if you don’t get on board with what we believe, you’re going to have to go.”

This clashed with the church’s own purported claims of considering good arguments behind scripture.

“I was told my whole life, if you ever change your mind on something and you can show us in scripture where we’re wrong, please tell us because we want to change too,” Rogers said. But given the church’s reaction to his inquiries, he realized the real motivation was more akin to: “you need to tell us when you’re changing your mind so we can get you corrected as quickly as possible.”

“When I realized that’s what it was about, that just made me question the whole system,” said Rogers.

Rogers’ father and grandfather tried to oust him from the whole denomination, sending letters to every local congregation calling him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” on a path of destruction, and a “false teacher” who had abandoned the gospel. The technical term for what happened to Rogers “[withdrawing] fellowship,” which is identical to excommunication in the Catholic Church.

But Rogers did not leave the gospel, reports the Yonder. He threw himself into studying scripture more than ever before, engaging a “deconstruction” of the beliefs he was raised with. His questions were not a rejection of his faith, he said, but a deepening of it. And he realized that the circle theology drove people to a “tiny bubble wherein everyone believes the same thing as the person defining it.”

“I was like, wait a minute. It’s got to go the other way,” Rogers said, adding that his

Years after Rogers was pushed from his home church he now has his own Alabama Church of Christ congregation, where he is “cultivating a faith community entirely different from the one he grew up in – one where people not only feel safe, but feel encouraged to ask questions about their faith.”

On “barn night” expect good food on the smoker, kids playing on the trampoline and conversations around the fire about more things than you would normally share on a random Sunday morning.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Voters in swing state force MAGA candidate to flee Trump's record

The Milwaukee journal Sentinel says Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany is having a hard time squaring his MAGA policies in a state that is steadily growing more blue with each unpopular policy President Donald Trump unloads.

“Republican candidate for governor Tom Tiffany sent mixed messages in recent days about whether he supports mail-in voting,” said the Sentinel. “In a March 12 interview with a conservative news outlet based in northwest Wisconsin, Tiffany said he doesn't believe ‘we should be doing mail-in voting’ when asked for his thoughts on the practice.”

"Many states have encouraged it and we've seen the results where you get these questions around elections. So I think it would be better if we did not have it," Tiffany told DrydenWire founder Ben Dryden in the interview.

Tiffany is the only major candidate running in the Wisconsin Republican primary for governor. The Sentinel points out that he has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, who has demanded the end of mail-in voting.

But the Sentinel added that Tiffany himself has voted absentee in a dozen elections over the past 10 years. And his state’s voters highly approve of mail-in voting while increasingly disapproving of the president who wants to end it.

When asked to clarify Tiffany’s statement that “it would be better if we did not have” mail-in voting, Tiffany spokeswoman Caroline Briscoe said the candidate “supports” the current mail in-system in Wisconsin.

"He does not believe universal mail-in voting should exist. He supports Wisconsin’s requested absentee voting system with safeguards to prevent abuse," she said.

But the Sentinel explains that the term "mail-in voting" is often used to describe the style of Wisconsin's system of absentee voting, which mails absentee ballots to voters who request them.

However, Briscoe preferred to split hairs over the differences between absentee voting systems and vote-by-mail systems — which appear to differ only in whether voters request their ballots beforehand.

But state voters are sensitive about keeping mail-in voting intact. The Sentinel reports that Madison, Wis. election officials are already being sued by voters whose absentee ballots were not counted during the 2024 election.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

A president killing for the 'fun' of it sounds 'like a serial killer': analysis

Zeteo political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng says a U.S. president bragging about mass-killing other nation’s populations and idly discussing demolishing a whole island “just for fun” is not okay.

The Trump administration is doing it its ‘best Ted Bundy impersonation,’ said Suebsaeng, citing President Donald Trump saying “We totally demolished Kharg Island, but we may hit it a few more times just for fun” to NBC News on Saturday in reference to his recent bombing of Iran’s oil-export hub.

“The prosecution of Trump’s war has been a massive, blood-caked scandal and crime,” said Suebsaeng. “Beyond the moral and practical abomination of the operation, the president and ruling party dove backwards into this without even the appearance of a clear mission or plan, and tried to sell the American people a pack of lies to justify the war. And as the bodies pile up, the White House is propagandizing about carnage as if it were nothing but a violent, nihilistic video game. The casual talk of mass-death and the meme-ification of a regional bloodbath underscore the advanced depravity that drives Trump administration policies, at home and abroad.”

And, yes, Trump indeed quoted the Zodiac Killer, who famously said “I like killing people because it is so much fun.” But it’s not just “one Mad King doing Mad King brain-rot,” warned Suebsaeng. His advisers are happy to join the “fun.”

“Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” former Fox host and current defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said at a March press briefing early this month. He also said Friday that he would allow “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” in what Suebsaeng considered “an apparent call to violate international law so that Americans may slaughter more freely.”

Even former House speaker and Trump advisor Newt Gingrich got in on the violence, posting on X that “Instead of fighting over a 21-mile-wide bottleneck (strait of Hormuz) forever, we cut a new channel through friendly territory. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.”

“To be fair, what Gingrich is proposing would less resemble serial-killing, and more closely resemble mass murder,” said Suebsaeng, “but tomato-toMurder, as the idiom goes.”

“To get serious again for a moment: the fate of the world is very much on the line, and the morally vacant gang running the US government and its blundering, ‘Fox-and-Friends’-ified war machine is waging its military onslaught as if it were directing a crudely improvised snuff film. It is easy to get numb to Team Trump’s artery-spray of corruption and bloodlust,” Suebsaeng added. “Don’t. None of this is okay.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

FBI agents 'aghast' by Trump team’s ineptitude: ex-agency supervisor

Michael Feinberg, former assistant special agent in charge at the FBI, says do not expect President Donald Trump appointees to realize how embarrassing they’re acting any time soon. For that, you need to be capable of shame.

“I would push back on the notion that this administration can be embarrassed,” said Feinberg, while speaking to MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace about FBI Director Kash Patel’s plan to invite UFC entertainment fighters to train his agents at Quantico.

“When FBI agents are training to fight … their goal is emphatically not to wrestle somebody to the ground and engage in three-minute rounds of ground fighting. Their goal is to momentarily incapacitate the subject, create space between them so that they can safely draw their weapon and apprehend the individual in the normal means of arrest,” Feinberg said. “… They're not trying to score points or entertain an audience. They're trying to get an important job done.”

Feinberg added that his sources inside the FBI are “aghast” at Patel’s proposal, and said Patel “has no idea what it's like to be in a fist fight.”

“Donald Trump has no idea what it's like to go to war, so they're basically just doing things that they think the cool guys who do this sort of thing would do. But I don't know anybody in the FBI who wanted to be an ultimate fighter. We wanted to protect our communities.”

Feinberg kept the lashing underway, pointing out that the administration, as a whole, is a mess.

“The price of everything is going up. We're enmeshed in a war of our choosing. We have alienated every ally in the world. The economy is not doing well. The DOJ is losing indictments at a rate that is historically more than notable,” said Feinberg. “Hopefully the average citizen, including those who originally supported this administration, is starting to wake up and see that … they couldn't even hit the side of a barn.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Ex-MAGA diehard name-checks Charlie Kirk, Vance and Gabbard in barn-burning anti-Trump rant

Former President Donald Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene had nothing but recrimination for the president in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.

Speaking on the 13 U.S. service members who have lost their lives from Trump’s invasion of Iran, Greene called out several members of the administration who have recanted their former opposition to deadly international wars.

“We voted for no more foreign wars, no more regime change, and we were told by many members in the administration throughout the campaign — JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard and others — that they believed that going to war with Iran would be a terrible idea," the former congresswoman said.

“It was something that [MAGA influencer] Charlie Kirk himself had said over and over again and President Trump — I voted for him three times, fought for him to become president, and I still want him to be successful — but he told Americans for over ten years and even longer that that he thought foreign wars and regime change was really a bad direction for America to go in, and we trusted and believed him that we wouldn't be doing this,” Greene added. “This was an unprovoked war, and Israel pulled us into it, pulled America into it. And so those are 13 lives that should not have been lost.”

Greene went on to blast the administration for the deaths of nearly 170 people — mostly girls — in the bombing of an Iranian school, which the administration initially tried to pin on Iran.

“The little girl's school is such an outrage. It's horrific,” Greene told Collins. “And Americans don't want to think of our military as being responsible of killing little children. This is absolutely something that Americans should not tolerate and we are owed answers. They keep saying that they're investigating, but it is such a serious situation.”

“I drove by an elementary school today and there were children out on the playground swinging on the swings and playing on the playground. And I thought to myself, I'm so thankful that our, our children are safe, but I can't imagine living somewhere where school children or people's children have been … Caitlin, we did not vote for this.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

'Everybody knew' what was happening on that island: ex-Epstein architect

CNN reporter Kyung Lah provided an exclusive interview with architect and interior designer Robert Couturier, who was hired by convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to work on his infamous island. CNN reports Couturier backed out of the project after a few months and then alerted the FBI of what Epstein had requested he build.

“There's no mistaking,” Couturier told Lah. “You don't put women on bunk beds. I'm sorry. Everybody knew what was happening on that island. Even his staff people worked for him.”

When Couturier first noted all the puzzling bunk beds he asked who they were for.

“There were bunk beds and I said to him, I said, ‘oh my god, are you expecting grandchildren?’ And he said, ‘no, these are for my — these are for the girls.”

Lah reports a former staffer said the main home had “many pictures of young girls, some topless, looking about 15 to 16 years old” in room after room of the island home.

According to CNN, files show “visible signs of something off,” including Epstein in his kitchen chasing girls or young women, which his staff noticed. A former chef, said Lah, claimed every hour Epstein would take a girl down to his master bedroom then order his maid to clean up. Another staffer worried about Epstein’s guests.

“He described seeing an unnamed man with girls who did not look 18, and they were all naked,” said Lah. “He also told the FBI he saw then Prince Andrew grinding against some young girl in the pool. UK authorities arrested Andrew last month saying they're reviewing claims he shared sensitive government information with Epstein.”

CNN reports Virgin Islands prosecutors say Epstein coerced girls as young as 12 into sexual activity.

“One victim said she was trapped on the island and tried to escape Epstein and the others by trying to swim off [the island] after spending the day being raped,” said Lah.

“The girls and young women went on the island were basic prisoners,” said Couturier. “You couldn't leave.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

White House advisors 'frantic' as 'global fiasco Trump created' takes shape

Daily Blast podcaster Greg Sargent says President Donald Trump’s advisors are panicking as creeping oil prices prepare to wreck voters and molly-whop the White House.

“The global fiasco that Donald Trump has created around the Strait of Hormuz is rapidly getting worse,” said Sargent. “An international agency says the closing of the strait is creating the largest global oil supply disruption in history. … [and] CNN reports that there’s rising alarm and urgency within the administration over it, and Trump just unleashed a bizarre tweet about the situation that underscores just how lost he truly is.”

International relations professor Nicholas Grossman told Sargent that there is no reason to believe Trump’s advisers did not warn the president that invading such a large Middle Eastern nation would cause a chain reaction that would impact not only gas prices both here and across the world, but also fertilizer and food costs.

“This was the explicit thing that we saw coming. By “we,” I mean the broad national security community,” said Grossman. “It is very likely that people inside the military and the national security establishment told this to the White House — whether Trump himself heard it, or didn’t listen, or others tried to tell him, who knows? But this was the exact reason why we said: Yes, confront Iran, but in smarter ways, as opposed to this one thing. This is their big leverage — don’t play into it. And now the U.S. has, and it’s not going to clear up soon.”

Sargent said reports reveal that officials themselves are starting to seriously panic all around Trump.

“The CNN report says those officials have ‘frantically’ sought ways to ease the crisis — they’re exploring a whole bunch of options, like getting oil companies involved, unleashing reserves, that type of thing,” said Sargent, but surmised that there was little Trump could do to stop the boulder rolling at this point.

Grossman agreed, saying “they ran into something that they can’t bull—— their way through.”

“This reminds me of COVID in the first term — although in this case it’s something of Trump’s own doing,” Grossman said.

Trump’s recent social media posts claiming that short-term price hikes are “a very small price to pay” said Sargent, are not going to get far with American voters. And his claim that the U.S. will make a lot of money when prices go up is equally unconvincing.

Grossman corrected that argument, clarifying that oil companies make money, not Americans, as foretold by the resulting slump of the U.S. stock market.

“… [I]f anybody claims anything definitive about what’s going to happen, they are wrong,” Grossman warned.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Iowa editor torpedoes 'sentient Monster energy drink' Joe Rogan for believing Trump

Author and former Cedar Rapids Gazette columnist Lyz Lenz battered popular podcaster Joe Rogan for being gullible enough to buy the lies of President Donald Trump prior to his election.

“Joe Rogan, that sentient Monster energy drink, spent part of his career hosting Fear Factor, where he made people eat s——; now he’s on a podcast spewing s——,” said Lenz. “But that Kermit the Frog-sounding over-roasted turkey apparently just learned how to read, because he’s kind of mad at Trump about the war in Iran. He feels furious. He feels betrayed.”

Outside of critical thinking, how could Rogan have known that the president who “indiscriminately used air strikes against many countries during his first term” would bomb countries during his second term, Lenz demanded.

In a similar bent, Lenz said Rogan invited Trump-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel on his podcast nine months ago, where Patel assured him that the FBI was on the up-and-up on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“And Rogan completely believed him. Patel’s whole argument was, ‘Trust me, bro.’ And Rogan, “the man who won't believe in vaccine science,” bought it. Now Rogan is calling the FBI’s claim of no evidence Epstein had clients “the gaslightiest gaslighting s—— I’ve ever heard in my life.”

But Lenz wondered what kind of intelligence can you expect “from a man who believes that 30 seconds on Google makes him more knowledgeable about apes than an actual primatologist?” Or that “turning your body into chuck roast isn’t a turn-on for women, and the FIFA Peace Prize was all a lie?”

This was, after all, the same chap “who became the face of horse dewormer during a worldwide pandemic, and whose podcast is Fixer Upper but for racist comedians looking to rehab their image?” said Lenz, while also blasting Rogan’s audience as “mostly people who wear sunglasses on the back of their heads and drive Cybertrucks and call women ‘females’ and owe $5,000 to DraftKings.”

“In Iowa, we just call them divorced dads on Bumble,” said Lenz.

But expect no repent or introspection from a man with a brain of “turkey jerky,” said Lenz. How does one think that deeply when their body “has the material composition of an owl pellet?”
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Noem snubbed from 'most powerful women' event as Trump orders staff to keep her 'away'

Rachael Bade reports that Trump is done with demoted Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.

“A week after ousting his Homeland Security secretary, President Donald Trump has made it clear to staff and associates: Kristi Noem is not welcome,” reports Bade on her “Inner Circle” substack. “The president has told confidants and staff that he doesn’t want to see Noem.

“He’s p——ed at her and Corey [Lewandowski], and did not want her at the event yesterday,” an anonymous source close to the White House inner circle told Bade.

The former Politico writer and ABC News correspondent reports the former secretary and her team have already been informed in recent days that she is “not on the guest list for a couple of events at the White House, including Thursday’s Women’s History Month celebration, as well as today’s event for rodeo champions.”

The snub allegedly arrived on the heels of that Thursday meeting Trump had with “the most powerful women in his orbit in the East Room” in relation to a Women’s History month celebration. Featured at the meeting were First Lady Melania Trump, Second Lady Usha Vance and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, among others. Even Attorney General Pam Bondi and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer were “spotted.”

Now that Noem is out, Bade reports her and Lewandowski’s detractors in the administration are leaking “unflattering stories” about them, “particularly regarding the dubious process used to award hundreds of millions in contracts.”

Bade notes that many of these leaks have skipped over left-leaning press and gone straight to right-leaning publications Trump frequently reads.

“GOP heavyweights are now circling,” reports Bade. “House Homeland Security Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) told the New York Post that he’s investigating how contracts were won under Noem’s tenure. So too is House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers on the Hill.”

But a Noem defender called the claim “fake news,” said Bade, arguing that Noem spoke to Trump as recently as Thursday night and “has been at the White House since her removal.”

“Still, the president’s message has been clear: Trump doesn’t want her around,” said Bade.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Defeat mounts as another judge tramples Trump’s 'shameful' attack on federal workers

The New York Times reports a Rhode Island federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore a union contract that President Donald Trump tried to bust with Veterans Affairs Department workers.

Doug Collins, the V.A. secretary, moved to nullify the agreement with more than 300,000 last August, as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to fire thousands of U.S. employees.

“In a 29-page opinion, Judge Melissa R. Dubose wrote that the union, the American Federation of Government Workers National V.A. Council, had made clear that the termination of the contract was retaliatory — and therefore in violation of the First Amendment — given the opposition to the Trump administration’s labor policies mounted by the union’s umbrella group, the American Federation of Government Employees,” reports the Times.

The decision to end the agreement, she wrote, “seems substantially motivated by the plaintiffs’ history and frequency of vocally opposing changes to labor policies.”

Dubose’s biggest argument for restoring the contract before the conclusion of the court case was the fact that the union was quickly shedding members after the termination of the agreement. That being so, she reasoned that waiting until the lawsuit was finished to restore the contract would cause painful losses for the union and its workers.

She ordered that the three-year contract, which was ratified in June 2023, be reinstated for the remainder of its term.

The Times reports the judge was convinced the Trump administration was acting in a deliberately retaliatory way thanks to Trump’s own words.

“A White House fact sheet on an executive order Mr. Trump’s executive order signed in March, which stated that ‘certain federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda,’” reports the Times. “And she noted various anti-labor statements by Mr. Collins, which she said demonstrated that the ‘laser focus’ of the agency’s leaders ‘was on the ways the V.A. perceived employee unions as frustrating the work and purpose of the V.A.’”

In a statement celebrating the news, National V.A. Council union President Mary Jean Burke, said the decision overcame the Trump administration’s “shameful and hostile attempts to silence V.A. workers.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

MAGA's new playbook exposed: How Trump voters rationalize abandoning their principles

Steven Greenhut reports in Reason Magazine that the MAGA world has three go-to approaches for jettisoning their so-called principals to follow President Donald Trump — but rest assured they will follow.

“First, they claim his latest notion is part of a 3D chess game even if, by all appearances, Trump would struggle to play one-level tic-tac-toe. Second, they distract our attention: Didn't Barack Obama do this, too? Third, they get with the program and shamelessly back whatever the president is doing,” said Greenhut. “Sometimes MAGA-supporting influencers with their own agendas and philosophies take issue with some Trump policy. But rank-and-file MAGA always follows the Dear Leader even if it means contradicting some Deeply Held Principle they espoused weeks ago.”

It’s a shocking pivot, said Greenhut, but it’s their reality. Before he invaded Iran, Trump once touted himself as the peace candidate. And JD Vance has always made the case for opposing America's endless international interventions.

“Trump warned that Joe Biden might start World War III. White House adviser Stephen Miller posted that ‘KAMALA WILL SEND YOUR SONS TO WAR’ if she won.

But Vance about-faced to serve a man he once called “America's Hitler,” despite his intelligence, and MAGA are truthfully “no friends of freedom and democracy,” said Greenhut.

“Their ‘peace’ stance in Ukraine aligns seamlessly with Moscow's, as they essentially argue the best way to stop the tragic killing is for victims to lay down their arms and submit to an invader,” said Greenhut. “Trump and MAGA have even blamed Ukraine and NATO for Russian aggression and warned that U.S. support could spark the next world war. At least I can contort their position, however muddleheaded, into some anti-war narrative. But Iran? A war of choice seems more likely to spark widespread convulsions.

Greenhut notes Trump’s ever-shifting rationale for invading a Middle Eastern wasp nest with 60 million angry people and a fist on the planet’s oil supply, but he says it doesn’t matter. Trump could have accused Iran of anything or fashioned any particular pretense. MAGA will stand with him nonetheless, despite the impending chaos that will come of Trump’s invasion.

“We can expect the usual: a destabilized region, years of unforeseen and negative consequences, billions of lost American dollars, and lost lives,” said Greenhut. “The one tiny potential upside of the populist movement was its apparent reluctance to plunge the nation into foreign debacles. That's gone now, but it shouldn't be a surprise given that MAGA isn't so much a political philosophy as a cult of personality.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Trump 'fever dream turns into a nightmare' as 'self-destruction' consumes White House

Left Hook creator Wajahat Ali and author/professor Jared Yates Sexton say President Donald Trump’s base is feeling the pain of tying themselves to him.

Sexton referenced FBI Director Kash Patel’s ploy to use UFC fighters to train agents at Quantico, saying “we are unfortunately at the whim right now of some of the least talented and least intelligent and least competent people we've ever seen.”

“And why? Because everything in this country was rigged for a very specific group of white, wealthy men who basically took over the economy and then they took over our politics and they are in charge of everything now in a way that not only are they over their heads, but they're too stupid to even understand that they're in over their heads,” said Sexton, a political writer with roots in Indiana and Mississippi’s white rural class.

Sexton added that the FBI “is so stupid” now that rich celebrities have to “go on TV and talk about a ransom to try and get their mothers back” because the FBI “can't even handle that” anymore.

Ali said the subservient white class that made the idiocy possible have now reached the stage of exploitation where the suffering Trump promised to other races is now reaching for them as it inevitably does.

“It ain't just going to be Black people and Muslims,” said Ali. “… This is going to drag us all in. And now you're seeing these white voters finally say, ‘wait a second, the price of my [food] and the price of my gas! Wait, you were supposed to bring it down. But you're making a $400 million ballroom.’”

“[Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is spending $93 billion on steak and a piano. Kash Patel is with his honeypot girlfriend going to friggin' Italy and chugging beer with the hockey Olympic team. Kristi Noem is banging Corey Lewandowski, allegedly, in a multi-million-dollar luxury jet. … [but here you are saying] ‘I have no money. I don't understand what's happening. And now you're telling me, literally, [Sen.] Lindsay Graham (R-Kent.), that I have to go die for Israel? I don't want to go die for Israel. And now what the F? My business is being hurt because apparently the Strait of Hormuz is choking off the oil.”

Sexton said the personality of the men exploiting the white underclass is easy to recognize.

“All of these people know [they’re insecure] deep down in their quietest moments, which is why … they have to get all the money. That's why they have to hurt people. They have to gain joy from crushing people. In their quietest moments, the voice that speaks to them, what you would call a conscience, it tells them, ‘hey, you're in way over your head and you have no idea what's going on.’ So, instead, they have to fill it up with all of this performance," Sexton said.

“[T]hese are the men who seek white supremacy because white supremacy gives them this ideology that their faith, the universe, God, nature or whatever made you supreme. You—by your very existence — are better than everyone else and the world belongs to you,” said Ali. “So if you're a broken person, if you're weak, if you're terrified of your own shadow because it's Black, if you're terrified of women, if you don't have any game whatsoever, if you're a loser who doesn't know how to court a woman properly, instead of saying, ‘there's something inside me I should fix,’ instead, you say ‘it's them. They're the ones who are wrong.’ … which is why this is such a seductive, but ultimately self-destructive fantasy, folks.”

“And we're seeing the self-destruction at play because … the fever dream has turned into a nightmare,” Ali added, “and now you're seeing it collapse. You're seeing it collapse in Iran. You're seeing it collapse with the economy. You're seeing it collapse with immigration. You're seeing it collapse with the gas prices.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Anonymous sources claim Pentagon recklessly cutting key officials out of decisions

The Atlantic reports internal sources are sounding the alarm on the Trump administration removing the military lawyers who would normally be warning against blowing up little girls.

“One of Pete Hegseth’s first actions after taking charge at the Pentagon was to fire top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force — senior officers who the defense secretary said functioned as ‘roadblocks’ to the president’s orders,” reports Sarah Fitzpatrick and Missy Ryan. “The former National Guardsman has a history of hostility toward military lawyers and the legal restraints they impose on the use of military might. They are known as judge advocates general. Hegseth calls them ‘jagoffs.’”

This week, the Atlantic reports Hegseth proposed a “ruthless” overhaul of the military’s uniformed and civilian lawyers, in a ploy for “maximum lethality.” But anonymous sources inside the Pentagon warn Hegseth is setting the U.S. up for heavy legal damage and major violations of international law.

“We just have no faith that this is a good-faith thing,” one anonymous source told the Atlantic, adding that Hegseth and his top advisers are committed to “absolutely cutting JAGs out of key decisions.”

But JAGs serve a vital oversight function on whether drone strikes are aimed at legally justified targets or whether to prosecute accusations of abuse inside the military. Attorneys were particularly stricken at the thought of twisting attorneys into weapons, and interpreted the message as a signal to pay less regard to the international laws of war, such as those enshrined in the Geneva Convention, to which the U.S. is a member.

“If you’re advising on operational law, your goal as a lawyer is not to increase lethality. If that were the goal, then lawyers would just say, ‘Yes, bomb everything.’ But that would be a blatantly unethical goal for a lawyer,” said Sarah Harrison, a former civilian Pentagon attorney.

When he’s not forcing out lawyers, sources say Hegseth is reassigning them to temporary duty as immigration judges and leaving military commanders without legal counter-advice to the Trump administration’s potentially unlawful commands.

Additionally, congressional staff say JAGs and other members of the military are contacting lawmakers with concerns that the Pentagon’s leadership is targeting or sidelining JAGs on purpose. One source warned the Atlantic that the administration “has shown that if there is an opportunity to seize greater control and power over lawyers, whether it’s civilian or uniforms, they will take that as far as they possibly can.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Pope officially declares war on 'Mar-a-Lago face': report

Political consultant and Letters from Leo editor Christopher Hale says Pope Leo XIV has had it with the Rubbermaid human masks and stretched skin that have drowned the White House in the years since President Donald Trump first slid down an escalator.

“In Washington, D.C., plastic surgeons report a surge in requests for what the industry now calls ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ — the sculpted, frozen, perpetually thirty-five-year-old look that has become a uniform among Trump’s inner circle,” reports Hale. “Severe jaws, razor-sharp cheekbones, lips that would make Mick Jagger blush. Axios reported the trend accelerating as Trump loyalists flooded the capital, bringing Palm Beach aesthetics with them. The look has become so recognizable that it functions as a political signal — a way of announcing, through your face, which team you play for.”

Now the Vatican has weighed in, and social media is on fire.

In a 48-page document titled Quo Vadis, Humanitas? [“Where Are You Going, Humanity?”] the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, with Pope Leo XIV’s explicit approval, has issued its sharpest critique of the cosmetic surgery culture turning D.C. into a legion of roving mannequins.

The commission is sounding the alarm on an insidious new “cult of the body,” marked by what it calls “the frantic pursuit of a perfect figure.” But the Vatican’s critique is more than just a light nip and tuck.

“It cuts deeper than aesthetics,” said Hale. “The theologians identify a painful paradox at the heart of the beauty-industrial complex: ‘The ideal body is exalted, sought after and cultivated, while the real body is not truly loved, being a source of limitations, fatigue, aging.’

The document slams the cult’s penchant for “reduc[ing] the body to biological material to be enhanced, transformed, and reshaped at will, with the dream of achieving living conditions that avoid pain, aging, and death.” The pursuit of surgical perfection amounts to an unhealthy obsession with “the attempt to escape what it means to be human.”

The opinion drew applause form many social media users and prompted The View’s Joy Behar to admit it was best not to invite the pope and the Kardashians to the same party. But Hale said the Vatican has identified a phenomenon that extends far beyond just Botox.

“Man is not an atom lost in a random universe,” the Vatican said, “but is a creature of God, to whom He wished to give an immortal soul and whom He has always loved.”

“In a culture where the president’s closest allies signal loyalty through matching cheekbones, where young men inject themselves with unregulated peptides to maximize their jawlines, and where aging is treated as a failure of self-discipline rather than a dimension of human experience, the Vatican’s message lands with unexpected force,” argued Hale. “Your wrinkles are not a deficiency.”

“God made you mortal, and that mortality is where the encounter with grace begins,” said Hale.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Trump obsession causing 'painful disarray' for Republicans

Semafor writer Burgess Everett reports that Trump is being throttled by the specter of calamitous midterm elections, and he’s taking his terror to his Republican enablers in the House and Senate.

“The Republican Congress is consumed by a daunting, nearly impossible task: Satisfying President Donald Trump’s desire for new federal voter ID legislation,” writes Everett.

Trump’s ever sinking poll numbers are plaguing him, and he’s acting as if the only way he can reverse impending November disaster is to exclude as many Democrats and Independent voters from the polls as possible.

But Trump’s latest ploy to block unwanted voters from the polls is the SAVE America Act, and his determination is twisting his party into pretzels as he threatens to stall all legislation unless his legislative salvation lands on his desk.

“Trump’s top priority is causing painful divisions among congressional Republicans, slowing down the bipartisan housing bill that could give him a cost-of-living victory to tout,” said Everett. Trump is also “heaping pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune” to overcome a Democrat block on the SAVE act by either killing the filibuster or forcing Democrats to hold the Senate floor for months with a ‘talking’ filibuster.

“GOP senators and aides described disarray behind the scenes this week as the party agonizes over how to take up the voter ID and citizenship bill next week while keeping Trump happy,” Everett said. “Republicans have a major math problem: Of their 53 senators, at least four are opposed to the talking filibuster, and even more oppose killing the filibuster.

Opposition is obvious in that if Republicans overhaul the filibuster Democrats will be sure to kick Republicans into the woods with the same overhaul when they take the Senate. Some centrist Republicans, or Republicans from swing states, don’t like Trump’s SAVE Act anyway — so killing the filibuster might deliver poor returns.

“[I]t is a mistake, in my judgment, to expand the bill to include any kinds of restrictions on state’s abilities to set the rules for absentee ballot,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told Semafor.

Two other Republicans, speaking anonymously for fear of angering the party’s vengeful leader, say Trump’s shortsighted crusade would backfire on Republicans. One told Semafor they worry the push to curtail mail-in voting: “would disenfranchise a lot of our elderly. A lot of Republicans use mail-in ballots.”

Another complained, essentially, that the ignorant are leading the blind on writing the thing.

“I don’t think they have all the right people in writing the bill,” said the second anonymous source. “They should have involved people that have actually worked in elections before,” this GOP senator said. “Some of the issues need to be resolved before we move forward with it. But the public’s demanding it.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Conservative delivers a blunt message to Trump: Your 'desperate' strategy is futile

Former GOP speechwriter Tim Miller says Trump and the Republican Party have some major tampering planned to save them from their collapsing poll numbers in November, but none of it will do them any favors.

Republicans are fighting to pass a controversial new bill, the SAVE America Act, which actually lays more onerous voting requirements upon voters and make it more difficult for many to vote. Miller did not have high expectations for the passage of the unpopular bill, but argued it still wouldn’t pull Republicans from their political morass.

“I'm not even sure that if this succeeded, it would help them in the midterms that much politically. And it also seems very desperate to me, doing some uncharacteristic positive spin on this. But look, they tried to … ‘rebalance’ the election in their favor with the redistricting. I mean, that's what that's what's the whole point of it. Like they were trying to help themselves by changing the rules in the middle of the game for redistricting, and it backfired,” said Miller who used to work for George W. Bush.

“That redistricting is probably going to cost them more seats than it helps them now, and it seems like they're kind of splashing around for other things to try,” said Miller. “[Trump advisor] Steve Bannon's like, ‘we're going to send ICE officials out to the voting booths. The administration had to backtrack from that, and I think even that might very well backfire because it motivates people to vote early and to mail in.”

Even if Trump and Republicans did manage to pass the SAVE America Act, blue states would challenge it in court, further driving up the unpopularity of both the legislation and the party that created it.

“You know, maybe it helps them in a couple of Senate races, but I think they're kind of getting pretty desperate looking for different tools for undermining the midterms,” Miller said.

- YouTube youtu.be

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Republican demands a 'rain' of subpoenas against 'blasphemous' Trump

Former George W. Bush strategist Steve Schmidt says there are 114 days until the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States, and 235 days until the midterm election. And every one of them must be filled with subpoenas.

“The first occasion will be desecrated by [President Donald] Trump’s brand, but it must also be a call-to-action against the MAGA obscenity that serves the whims of America’s Nero,” said Schmidt.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example, has disallowed still photography from his briefings because he objects to the images, said Schmidt.

“His vanity is as impaired as his judgement and morality,” said Schmidt, adding that “The hyped-up secretary of defense shares something in common with the Ayatollahs. Each is a religious nutter who believes the end times are within reach — and that that’s a good thing.”

Schmidt took particular offense at the “blasphemous image” of Trump staging a prayer in the Oval Office and the image of him dancing on a stage in Kentucky while US strikes kill girls in Iran.

“Watching Trump dance while America is at war is a sickening sight, but not so sick as what Trump is alleged to have done to young girls,” said Schmidt. “I cannot help but wonder about the abyss of his depravities and evil. [But] the truth about what he has done is moving closer. Inexorably closer.”

Schmidt worked on the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen John McCain (R-Ariz.) and said he smells defeat for the GOP in November. The Democratic Party, he said, “will have a sweeping victory,” and the new Congress must assert its power “fully and absolutely. “

“There must be oversight, rigorous oversight of every department, agency and decision. It must rain subpoenas,” said Schmidt, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. “… The victory ahead cannot be either deluded or empty. Democrats must begin to bring MAGA to heel. There can be no more appeasements.”

Schmidt complained of the young Americans put “in harm’s way,” by Trump’s self-imposed war in the Middle East, as well as the shockwaves headed for the U.S. economy with the possible rise of $6-$7 a gallon gasoline.

“The corruption is epic, but so great as the sheer stupidity and incompetence of the men in the Florsheim shoes,” Schmidt said. “Soon, it will be the beginning of the end, but the danger will only go up until the MAGA treachery is fully snuffed out by the American people. … We will always carry the shame as Americans, but we can take satisfaction knowing that we lit an end to what should never have been, and cannot be again.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

DC insider says Pentagon 'obviously covering stuff up'

The Pentagon is still tamping down press access even as President Donald Trump engages a chaotic war on Iran, and one Republican speechwriter believes he knows why.

“They're covering this stuff up,” said Bulwark podcaster and GOP strategist Tim Miller. “They've kicked [Politico Pentagon reporter] Paul [McLeary] and others out of the Pentagon. We live in a free country. It's ridiculous that reporters are being escorted in and out of the pentagon during wartime. Reporters should have access to other members of the military, not just the secretary spokesperson, who's a former TV host who wants to spin them.”

“The American people deserve to know what's actually happening in this war, and they're also obviously covering stuff up,” Miller told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace, and then cited how pertinent wartime information was getting fed to MAGA podcasters faster than legitimate media outlets with a history of complete and fair reporting.

McLeary confirmed to Wallace that he and other legit outlets are “not allowed in the building anymore, except for staged briefings.”

“We're escorted in and then escorted out right after, and Hegseth has generally been calling on his new favorite outlets — the new pentagon press corps, I guess you could call it — of conservative and right wing outlets that they've brought in and credentialed.”

Miller said the MAGA outlets who serve as the Pentagon’s new information disseminators are hardly reliable.

“They lied,” Miller said. “The president has lied several times about our complicity in the Tomahawk attack on the [Iranian] girls’ school, just lied to people's face. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing people that care more about their image, and they're lying to the American people.”

- YouTube youtu.be

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Terrified Republicans inoculate themselves against Dem takeover in red state

Horrified by the Democratic conquest of statewide offices in neighboring Georgia, Alabama Republicans are revamping their own division to assure their Republican governor will have majority control.

AL.com reports the Alabama Senate passed a bill Thursday that expands the state’s Public Service Commission from three positions to seven — but with the Republican state governor having the power to pick four members, giving the governor a clear majority on board decisions.

The commission monitors and approves rate increases from state power and gas companies, which hold monopolies in their representative territories. Proponents of the new law claim the expansion is all about keeping customers’ rates low.

“The people are fed up with paying high power rates,” said Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville. “We know we have inflation. We know things go up over time. And if our inflation for power was similar to our neighboring states, I don’t think we’d be talking about this today.”

The timing seems odd considering the state of Alabama currently ranked 28th lowest in power rates in 2024.

However, it makes more sense when considering that Democrats are ransacking PSC elections in the neighboring state of Georgia. Democrats delivered “a 26-point rout” in two usually low-profile races for the Georgia Public Service Commission last year after Democrats successfully seized on a crusade to lower voters’ costs — starting with utilities — as inflation booms under President Donald Trump.

Georgia’s all-Republican Public Service Commission had raised electricity rates for consumers six times in the last two years, adding an average of more than $40 per month to power bills on top of what people were already paying. This scored badly with voters dealing with similar increases in the cost of housing, groceries and other household necessities.

Politico reports Georgia resident Leila Meadows, who voted for Trump three times, “had never heard of Georgia’s Public Service Commission,” but cast her ballot for Democratic candidates Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard in last November’s special election after the candidates promised to halt rate increases in the state.

Votes likes this installed Democrats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission for the first time in more than 20 years. Alabama Republicans have apparently noticed, and are working to assure a majority Republican commission by giving state Gov. Kay Ivey the power to appoint four members of the new seven-member board.

An earlier version of the bill, which died under opposition, would have given the governor the power to appoint all board members, ending democratic elections for the board.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

MAGA attacks show how thoroughly Christian extremism has hijacked the GOP: report

Liberal Current writer Alan Elrod says Christian nationalists have commandeered the Republican Paty enough to now dictate their extremist messaging through the party’s mouthpiece.

On Tuesday, the official NRSC account on X, representing Senate Republicans, posted a clip of Texas Democratic candidate James Talarico, bashing him for portraying Jesus Christ as a figure of empathy and caring. The clip showed Talarico — a Presbyterian seminarian — saying: “Christ is the immigrant deported without due process. Christ is the senior deprived of their Social Security benefits. Christ is the protestor kidnapped in an unmarked vehicle by plain clothes officers.”

In essence, Christ was a gentle victim, which rather fits the image considering how his story ends.

But the purpose of the NRSC post was to make Talarico a target for the GOP’s Christian nationalist wing — and it worked.

“To be clear: This is blasphemy,” responded Christian nationalist William Wolfe below the post.

White supremacist and Christian influencer C. Jay Engel also chimed in, arguing that Talarico was “peddling a left-wing version of Christian nationalism where social justice issues dominate.” Colorado-based TPUSA Faith organizer Chris Goble had his own say, claiming “This is the dumbest, most patently absurd on its face drivel imaginable. It's also horrifically evil. If he does not repent, this man will one day face transcendent wrath. If we're dumb enough to fall for this crap, he will be our judgment.”

TPSU Faith claims it “exists to unite the Church around primary doctrine and to eliminate wokeism from the American pulpit.”

But Talarico has become “an object of intense scorn among America’s right-wing Christian extremists,” said Elrod. Josh Howerton, the pastor of Lakepointe Church in Dallas, describes Talarico’s promotion of an open, social justice–oriented Gospel as “an existential threat,” warning, “Progressivism will hollow out your religion and wear it like a skin suit.”

Howerton, by the way, is the same personality who labors to frame Jesus as a weapon-toting warrior, claiming “Jesus told people to buy self-defense weapons; Jesus was majority-culture in his region; Jesus only selected men for leadership positions,” among other descriptions.

But what shocks Elrod is how dedicated the Christian right is to twisting Christ into something he never was. Conservative mag Townhall editor Jeff Quarles, for example, positions extremist right-wing Christians as the subjects of state abuse, arguing that Christ is more like people “thrown in a cage even though they engaged in no violence on Jan. 6.” Quarles also inserts Jan. 6 rioters and illegal gun manufacturer Dexter Taylor into the ranks of the persecuted by comparing Christ to “people like Dexter Taylor, who is serving ten years in prison simply for manufacturing [illegal] firearms.”

“It gets at the core of the ever-stronger fusion between extremist right-wing Christianity and the Republican Party, and the renewed institutionalization of white nationalism and male supremacy as the doctrine of an entire party,” said Elrod. “The attacks on Talarico highlight just how far down that road we now are.”

“The Republican Party is wholly captured by this thinking, one that sees the Gospel as a story of masculine dominance and power and an authorizing narrative for a politics of misogyny, racism, and tyranny,” Elrod continued. “… [O]nly the heroes, the protagonists of the story, can ever be wronged. Their job is to exert their will, like cowboy crusaders, and it’s the world’s job to accede to this. This is how Christians become both persecutors and persecuted. It’s how the Gospel becomes a tool for exclusion. And it’s what this Republican Party seeks to impose on the nation.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Trump keeps taking punches as Joe Rogan scolds him: report

CNN reporter Aaron Blake says President Donald Trump is typically quick to strike back at the slightest offense or criticism, often resorting to name-calling in his online clapbacks.

But the president is meekly taking every blow that bro-MAGA influencer Joe Rogan is hurling at him with no response.

“Rogan has broken with Trump on several major issues since mid-2025. And polling shows the issues he’s picked happen to be some of Trump’s biggest political liabilities – including the war with Iran, the Jeffrey Epstein files and immigration enforcement,” said Blake.

On Tuesday, the popular podcaster lit into Trump’s ongoing assault on Iran, accusing Trump of breaking his promises to America First conservative voters who are sick of sinking U.S. cash into endless, overpriced wars.

“But it just seems so insane based on what he ran on,” Black quotes Rogan saying on his show. “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars, and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me – unless we’re acting on someone else’s interests, like particularly Israel’s interests,” Rogan added. “It just didn’t make any sense to me.”

Similarly, Rogan has blasted Trump’s secrecy and handling of the Epstein files, painting it as yet another betrayal of his young voters, particularly the young first-time Trump voters who took a chance on Trump in the 2024 elections.

Last month, Blake said Rogan called the FBI’s claim of no evidence Epstein had clients “the gaslightiest gaslighting s—— I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Days later, Rogan blasted Trump’s Justice Department over it’s suspicious redactions to the Epstein files, particularly the ones incriminating Trump.

“Like, what is this? This is not good. None of this is good for this administration,” Rogan said. “It looks f—— terrible. It looks terrible.”

Uncharacteristically, the combative president has yet to slam Rogan as he burns every other critic who’s invoked his name. Asked about Rogan’s criticisms last month by NBC News, Blake said Trump shows nothing but esteem for Rogan.

“I think he’s a great guy, and I think he likes me, too,” Trump said.

The explanation for Trump’s newfound meekness may be Rogan’s substantial audience, which Trump is leery of alienating, said Blake.

“If there’s one figure who epitomized President Donald Trump’s ability to cobble together a winning coalition in 2024, it might have been Joe Rogan — the influential podcaster who made big news by endorsing Trump on the eve of the election after interviewing him,” said Blake. On the flipside, much ink has been spilled about the Kamala Harris campaign not booking a date with Rogan’s podcast and the detrimental effect that might have had on her bid to become president.”

As long as Rogan’s audience remains large (and significantly male) Trump’s docility will likely continue, regardless of how hard Rogan hounds him.

“And, you know, liking me isn’t important,” Trump added to his response to NBC News. “What happens is that — I think we do a phenomenal job, but I don’t think we’re good at public relations.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Disgraced Trump appointee dumps husband and follows president to Mar-a-Lago

OK Magazine reports President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and senior advisor to Attorney General Pam Bondi, has officially divorced her second husband, millionaire businessman Gregg Reuben, and relocated to Palm Beach, Fla., near the president's Mar-a-Lago Club.

The split and move, reported by Daily Mail, follow her resignation as the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in December 2025, after a New Jersey judge ruled she could not serve unless her nomination was confirmed by the Senate.

In her post announcing her exit from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey, Habba argued that she helped make “New Jersey safer." She attributed her exit to the ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, but warned critics "not [to] mistake compliance for surrender."

"You can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you cannot take New Jersey out of the girl," she posted.

However, OK Magazine reports the 41-year-old has definitely removed herself from Jersey, having “quietly divorced” Reuben, the millionaire founder of the New York City-based parking management company Centerpark, in New Jersey in February.

The marriage survived five years, but sources claimed the couple has reached an "impasse," over Reuben’s reluctance to enter the public eye and Habba’s preoccupation and involvement in the "MAGAverse,” according to OK Magazine.

"She's widely successful, a rockstar mom, and I have no doubt she'll eventually find someone who celebrates her sparkle instead of trying to dim it," sources told Daily Mail. "Until then, she's doing just fine being a boss.”

Critic E. Jean Carroll, who successfully fought Habba in court to win a significant settlement for sexual assault by Trump, said Habba “didn’t know the first thing about law.”

Following the divorce, Habba purchased a home in Palm Beach specifically to be closer to the center of Trump’s political operations—possibly a response to journalist Chris Turner, who posted in December that it was time for Habbas “to get a real job.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Imperiled Trump appointee further endangers his own license: report

Mark Joseph Stern tells Slate that former interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin had to look hard, but somehow, he managed to find the “dumbest possible rake” to step on. Now the former Trump appointee is in even more trouble than he was.

“On Tuesday, the disciplinary counsel for the D.C. bar announced a formal complaint against Martin for professional misconduct,” said Stern. “The charges accuse him of violating his oath to the Constitution, then interfering with the investigation into his alleged malfeasance. If found culpable, he could be suspended from the practice of law or disbarred in D.C.”

Martin’s allegations of unconstitutional behavior are already a matter of public record, said Stern. But it’s what he did after receiving notice of the complaint that sets Martin’s arrogance apart from all others. Upon receiving the initial complaint, Stern said Martin “launched a pressure campaign against the D.C. Court of Appeals … to suspend the lead investigator on his case.”

This, it turns out, was a much more egregious violation of court process than what the D.C. bar was initially investigating him for. The initial complaint was all about Martin’s harassment of Georgetown University Law Center, when he sent a letter to then-Dean William Treanor warning the school to remove all traces of DEI or the Trump administration would not hire Georgetown Law grads. He even threatened that the school might lose federal funding.

But while Martin’s letter was “absurd and malicious,” Stern said it might not constitute a violation of his oath. There was even a chance that the Board on Professional Responsibility or the D.C. Court of Appeals would agree.

But instead of contesting the claim against him through the proper legal channels, Martin allegedly tried to quash the complaint by committing “a far more clear-cut ethical breach,” said Stern. “According to the charges, Martin refused to respond to the complaint, and instead wrote directly to the chief judge and senior judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals. In his letter, he requested a “face-to-face meeting with all of you to discuss this matter and find a way forward.”

The chief judge, Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, told Martin to go pound sand and follow standard procedure. But rather than take her advice, Martin reportedly told the disciplinary counsel that he was essentially “calling their manager” — and he copied Blackburne-Rigsby on the email.

Furious, the disciplinary counsel demanded Martin turn over his letter to the judges. But rather than comply, he wrote to the chief judge again, insisting “that you not only suspend Mr. Fox immediately to investigate his conduct, but also to dismiss the case against me because of his prejudicial conduct.”

“Unfortunately for Martin, the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct expressly forbid lawyers from communicating with a judge ‘unless authorized to do so by law or court order,’ which he was not,” said Stern. “There appears to be no serious dispute that Martin communicated with Blackburne-Rigsby ex parte not once, not twice, but three separate times, all in an effort to evade discipline against him.”

If proven, Stern said this behavior “is a textbook example of misconduct sanctionable by the bar. So, of course the D.C. bar’s disciplinary counsel charged Martin with violating that rule, as well as another prohibiting conduct that ‘seriously interferes with the administration of justice.’”

“The erstwhile interim U.S. attorney, then, is in a pickle of his own making,” said Stern. “Had he simply fought Fox’s complaint the right way, he may well have defeated the charges in short order. But because he allegedly tried to obstruct the investigation, he faces a separate set of charges on much firmer legal ground.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

'Lost all hope': Trump policies are crushing food industry in Republican heartland

Louisiana crawfish processors say it’s the height of spring season, but the Acadiana Advocate reports their crawfish processing tables are empty and money is vanishing out the door due to harsh new policies enacted by President Donald Trump.

“It’s a s——show,” said Charlie Johnson, owner of a crawfish processing plant in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. "We'd like to be processing. We prepped all offseason to make this work, but you can't do anything because you don’t have labor. And then also having to tell your farmers that you can't move their product."

“Nearly all of Louisiana’s 20 crawfish processors are unable to hire migrant labor because of the federal cap on temporary visas, Louisiana Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Mike Strain told [Louisiana] legislators last week,” according to the Acadiana Advocate.

“Without those workers, the crawfish don’t get peeled,” said Strain. “The plants will shut down, and either, one, those crawfish are not consumed, or two, as has happened in the past, they will fill up tractor-trailer loads of these crawfish, send ‘em down to Mexico, get ‘em peeled and bring ‘em back.”

But now normally bustling crawfish prep tables sit empty at the peak of spring season thanks to Trump’s onerous new process for legally hiring migrant workers.

Louisiana Crowley processor Alan Lawson says he has very little expectation of recouping his loss this year after his 125 migrant helpers failed to arrive this season. The Advocate reports his workers normally start in December, and his company is not eligible for the additional visas reserved for returning workers in January or for those entering a February federal admissions lottery. As of now, Lawson’s nearby refrigerating units — which are usually packed tight this time of year — hold only a few crawfish tail packages from last season.

"I've lost all hope. We would be happy going from 125 people to just give us 50. At least we can salvage (this)," said Lawson, standing in front of a crawfish sorter. "This machine doesn’t make us a whole lot of money when it's not making noise."

He told the Advocate that he has contacted several Republican officials, including Rep. Mike Johnson, who is the U.S. House Speaker, Gov. Jeff Landry and other contacts in Washington, D.C. But all he’s received is the assurance that they’re “working on it.” Louisiana residents overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

“This will cease to exist,” Lawson said about his processing plant if the issue isn’t resolved before next season.

In the meantime, the Advocate reports processing will likely shift to Mexican tables and push U.S. processors out of the picture.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Trump-loving farmers threaten 'to quit' as president’s war spikes fertilizer prices

Thanks to weather, rising inflation and the damage of tariffs, U.S. farmers were already faring badly under President Donald Trump. But after voting for him en mass in the 2024 election, single-family farmers are now eyeing the door as Trump’s new war inflicts itself upon fertilizer prices.

“It’s not just gas. The price of fertilizer is also climbing amid the us war with Iran, driving up costs for American farmers just before spring planting season, when fertilizer is needed most,” said MS NOW anchor Katy Tur, who then followed up her news with a flurry of ailing farmers considering selling the farm.

“There's been some predictions that fertilizer will go up another $100 a ton on top of losing money as it is,” said one farmer interviewed by Georgia News Channel 11Alive. “It's really sad that that the farming has got to the point where we're losing money to even to even be doing it. And, and then with things going on like it is, there's so much uncertainty.

“We're used to dealing with markets going up and down. But when we see such a large increase in such a short span of time, is what really what really makes it harder, harder to deal with,” said Mike Flinchbaugh, a Pennsylvania orchard grower.

“We have a lot on the line from day to day and at night time sometimes it can be hard to sleep,” a Virginia farmer told 13NewsNow.

A lot of guys have just said, ‘I'm done. We're going to quit.’ They're hanging it up. There are [farm] sales everywhere. Lots and lots of farm sales,” said another farmer in Iowa, speaking to Des Moines news channel KCCI. “Financially, it's causing a lot of mental health problems as well.”

CNBC Anchor Brian Sullivan told Tur that he used to be a chemical fertilizer trader and explained that fertilizer is not the horse manure it used to be, and it’s now more scarce thanks to Trump’s self-made war in Iran.

“These are chemicals,” said Sullivan. “They're like small gumballs or large BBs. They're round pellets. And it's one of the biggest markets in the world, and they're critically vital for growing food around the world. And while oil is getting all the headlines around the Strait of Hormuz, about 30 to 50 percent of either the fully produced fertilizers or ingredients in those fertilizers goes through the Strait of Hormuz.”

“We think, ‘oh, it's just an oil tanker going through.’ No, it's not. It is these large bulk carriers filled with these little pellets — which are critical. All the voices that you just heard from farmers here in the United States, are also [coming from] around the world. The price has gone up by about 30 percent in one week.”

- YouTube youtu.be

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web

Voters know Iran is about 'distracting' from Epstein: report

Iran may have finally diverted some online clicks from the Jeffrey Epstein case plaguing President Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean Americans don’t know Trump’s invasion is a ploy of distraction.

“A majority of likely American voters believe that Donald Trump launched the war on Iran at least in part to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that had engulfed his presidency, according to a new survey,” reports Zeteo.

An early March survey of 1,272 likely voters, conducted by Data for Progress and funded by Drop Site News and Zeteo, found a solid 52-40 majority of voters agreed with the statement that Trump was “motivated” to strike Iran to “distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.”

“The findings will come as little surprise to a public that has morphed Trump’s codename for the war, Operation Epic Fury, into ‘Operation Epstein Fury,” reports Zeteo writer Ryan Grium. “The belief that Trump is trying to knock Epstein off the front pages by going to war with Iran is most strongly held, unsurprisingly, by Democrats, who agree with the statement by an 81-14 margin. For those under 45, it is approaching an article of faith, with a 66-26 majority agreeing with the idea.”

But the survey discovered that “even a quarter of Republicans told pollsters that Trump launched the war as a distraction from Epstein.”

Zeteo reports the public is maintaining this stance despite the belief being branded as antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League and the Washington Post, which said the “viral claim” owed its popularity to a “pro-Iran propaganda network.”

“Pretty quickly after the conflict began, this conspiratorial rebranding of Operation Epic Fury into ‘Operation Epstein Fury’ started circulating on social media platforms,” ADL Senior Vice President of counter-extremism and intelligence Oren Segal told the Post. Grim said a timely ADL report also claimed the phrase “Epstein Fury” has been mentioned more than 90,000 times by roughly 60,000 accounts.

“The Post did not explain why it was antisemitic to believe that Trump launched the war to distract from the Epstein scandal beyond noting that Epstein was Jewish,” said Grim, adding that The Post recently laid off its entire Middle East team while claiming Iranians are “trying to undermine American support for the war by linking it to Epstein.”

The survey also discovered a majority of Americans to be “sour” on the war, and that overwhelmingly, voters believe the war will make their lives worse — despite the survey being underway before war-related fluctuations in the oil market inflated gas prices.

“More pressing for Washington, however, may be the public’s attitude toward politicians and candidates who support the war or support emergency supplemental funding for the war, which Trump has requested,” reported Zeteo.

The survey asked whether voters would be more likely or less likely to vote for a congressional candidate in 2026 or a presidential candidate in 2028 if they support the war or support new war funding. Results suggest voters would be less likely to support a congressional candidate who votes for war spending by 19 points.”

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
BRAND NEW STORIES

Appeals judges crush Trump’s 'unlawful' spending freeze

'Already failing': Former top foreign policy adviser slams Trump

'The truth hurts': MAGA’s freakout over Trump and Iran regime bromance raises eyebrows

'It can’t save Republicans': WSJ parts with Trump on this key issue

@2026 - AlterNet Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. - "Poynter" fonts provided by fontsempire.com.