Did you catch Kash Patel’s claim that there is “no credible evidence” that Jeffrey Epstein ever trafficked girls and young women to anyone but himself? If so, one wonders how Epstein was indicted and Ghislaine Maxwell, his primary accomplice, convicted? And what about all the survivors who described themselves being trafficked to many men so compellingly? Not credible?
Raise your hands if you suspect the exchange in the video above was scripted and directed by Trump.
Patel dropped this bomb, or what should have been a bomb, in a Senate hearing yesterday. The news about it has been surprisingly muted. So Trump finally found an issue — the shooting of What’s-His-Name — that really has distracted people from Jeffrey Epstein.
Patel mentioned that there are three court orders that limit what he can release about Epstein. I can find only two — the one from a few weeks ago involving Grand Jury testimony and a more recent one that denied a request to unseal the names of two individuals who were mentioned in court documents but not charged. One, nobody cares about the bleeping Grand Jury testimony. Two, the two individuals were women who may have been Epstein enablers but, as it says, have not been charged. Their names are sealed for their safety. So redact the names.
What the third court order might be I do not know.
Again, what really disturbs me is that I’m not seeing headlines about this. Maybe it’s being talked about on cable news — I don’t watch television during the day. It was reported on the MSNBC shows last night. But anywhere else? I can’t tell.
Pam Bondi is getting more attention today. After the Attorney General threatened to prosecute “hate speech” she got slammed by other Righties. The Right has spent too many decades defending its right to speak hatefully to toss it out overnight. The general principle — with which liberals agree — is that speech is not criminal unless it incites violent or criminal behavior or maybe causes a dangerous panic — the shouting “fire” in a crowded theater thing. Usually where there’s disagreement it’s about where the “incitement” line is crossed.
Bondi also has a problem with an Office Depot employee who refused to print some flyers about a vigil for the late Mr. Whozits.
“Businesses cannot discriminate,” she told Sean Hannity, saying that she’d already referred the Office Depot case to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“We can prosecute you for that,” she said.
Wait a minute — what about the gay wedding cake controversy? The Right steadfastly supported the right of a baker to refuse to decorate a cake for a same-sex wedding. There was even a Supreme Court case about it. The case was decided on “free exercise of religion” grounds, which may not apply to the Home Deport employee — who was fired, btw. But I’m seeing commentary on right-wing sites (example) that criticized Bondi about this. The Right generally supports the right of a business to refuse service if doing the service would violate the beliefs of the business owner or employee. Think right-wing Christian pharmacists who won’t fill prescriptions for birth control or abortion pills.
A few days before the recent murder of a well-known right-wing political activist, the DoJ announced it was looking into possibly banning trans people from owning firearms. This was apparently a reaction to the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis. The apparent shooter was a trans woman. A web search told me that since 2018, four of the nation’s mass shootings have been perpetrated by trans people. They appear to all have been transitioning from male to female, although it’s a bit hard to tell from news stories, so I could be wrong. There is no official count of how many mass shootings there are in the U.S. — it depends on how one defines “mass shootings” — but since 2018 there have been at least a few hundred, possibly more. It’s probably a safe guess that less than 1 percent of mass shooters are trans. About the only statistic nearly all mass shooting data-gatherers agree on is that at least 97 percent of mass shootings are perpetrated by men. And the whopping majority of those men are heterosexual and not gay or trans.
But Pam Bondi’s DoJ wants to jump in and ban trans people from having guns? Nearly immediately the gun rights groups let their opposition be known. If, as they claim, the Second Amendment protects an individual right of gun ownership (which is not how the 2nd is understood by everybody), then the government cannot take that right away from a group or class. If Trump’s DoJ can take the right from trans people, then a future DoJ might ban all those heterosexual men who are doing most of the shooting from owning guns, too. Oops!
So is the DoJ admitting that gun ownership is not a protected individual right? One suspects even now the issue is being quietly re-thought.
Anyhoo — while Trump may be the undisputed leader of the Right and the Republican Party at the moment, it seems he and many people loyal to him are oddly out of step with some issues that have been important to movement conservatism for some time.
In related news — a bunch of Red states recently have passed various anti-trans laws and are eager to get them reviewed by the Roberts Supreme Court. See New Supreme Court Term Will Go All In On Anti-Trans Panic by Kate Riga at TPM. And AI is telling me that approximately 1.0% of Americans aged 13 and older identify as transgender. I seriously think we have more serious things to get into a panic about.
Update: I’m just now hearing that the Regime has had Jimmy Kimmel yanked off ABC. See Disney’s ABC pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ after FCC chair criticizes the host’s Charlie Kirk comments.
So Trump finally found an issue — the shooting of What’s-His-Name — that really has distracted people from Jeffrey Epstein.
For awhile. But it won't last. Moreover, as people penetrate into What's His Name's actual words and into his killer's actual words, there's going to be some awakening going on.
Bear with me, I like what this psychic – a lifelong Utahan and former Mormon – says: the "red team" implosion has been fortold, and it's none of our business. She's living among large numbers of people who are waking from their delusions.
I truly hope so. We can't go on as we are.
What is not to like. She makes more sense than most of the members of fearless leader's cabinet. Much more than Kash Patel. Let the implosion happen. Some bubbles need popping.
You know times are bad when one in the role of psychic provides optimism.
I love the reception the Brits are giving Trump. A projection on the side of Windsor Castle of Trump standing next to Epstein. A huge banner of Trump and Epstein unfolded on a lawn along the route Trump was expected to fly by helo, (I think to Windsor) No, it's not going away.
Pam Bondi overplayed her hand with threats of prosecuting people for exercising free speech. She amended to say she's only concerned with threats of violence. It's poor politics to say you're happy CK caught a bullet, but it's not a crime. While some froth at the mouth, snarling that the government can now disband liberal groups for being violent, even some on the right are balking at the presumption of violence with no proof, beyond opposing Trump.
Totally my opinion, but Miller was ready to unleash cops and roll tanks against Code Pink and ActBlue, they seem to have caught the memo from legal in time. The forum where the Nazis, I mean MAGA, is having the most problems is the courts. With no evidence of a crime, it will be embarrassing how fast that assault gets shut down.
"And AI is telling me that approximately 1.0% of Americans aged 13 and older identify as transgender. I seriously think we have more serious things to get into a panic about."
It's my understanding that about 1% of Americans are Muslim. My daughter is. I don't expect the Democrats to build their platform around Islam, but we can't ignore institutional religious bias. Or discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Yes, when we defend these statistically insignificant groups, the GOP will pounce on every statement.
The response by every Democrat should be that we WILL defend, for example, Justice Clarance Thomas and his marriage to a white woman, even if we are disturbed by his USSC decisions. We will defend Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter and her right to love who she loves. We in the "majority" by not falling into a minority class are concerned with attacks by fascists that always occur first on the marginalized before they morph into demands that all support the tyrant under threat of persecution, imprisonment, or execution. Defending the 1% is essential to defending us all.
It should be noted as the right tries to ramp up the myth of violent transgender people that 2021 set a record number of trans Americans who died in violence -57. 2024 was down to 35. A few of these committed suicide after being beaten, harasssed, and/or ridiculed in school. There's video from Central America of a naked trans person who drowned in a river after all her limbs were broken and the gang who did it threw the live victim off a bridge and prevented anyone from helping.
So I am not in agreement with the political experts who say defending minorities like trans or Muslims in America is a bad strategy until we have a clear majority. I do agree that the DNC needs to concentrate on issues that will resonate with voters, like big money in politics. But Democrats do better at raising corporate money in many places than the GOP does. So expect the Dems to take the money and talk about the high pirce of eggs.
FREE KIMMEL !!!!!
I've been looking for what Kimmel can do. It appears he has a clear First Amendment case, and maybe contractual remedies against ABC.
I see this as another nail in the coffin for legacy media, who are all big corporations, with a fiduciary duty to make $ for their shareholders.
The future is in streaming platforms (YouTube is an early version of this), with production costs a fraction of what legacy media incurs. The more that legacy media becomes untrustworthy (worthless), the more individual content producers will shine on YT.
YT is a flawed platform (it's owned by Google, another big corporation), but I'm sure there will be successors. Just as Bluesky succeeded Twitter/X, there will be successors to YT. Big names like Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel could lead the way. I have often thought – as an engineer – what this would take.
I read that the decision to pull Kimmel's show was made by Bob Iger, the Disney CEO (Disney owns ABC). He didn't mind the content, but was concerned about "shareholder value", and capitulated.
When I lived in LA, I used to drive by the Disney / ABC Animation building in Burbank, along the 134 freeway. The black ABC 8-ball logo, mounted high atop one of their main buildings, always seemed menacing to me.
The networks have bigger problems than Trump:
Analysis from the Hollywood Reporter published last year found that ABC had a median primetime viewership age a bit lower than CBS in 2024 — 65.6 years versus 67.8. The youngest audience that tuned into ABC’s primetime lineup was for “NBA Primetime,” which enjoyed a youthful median age of 57.1 years.
Their audience is aging out and dying off. Their future, if there is one to be had, is in younger viewers. Viewers they might get if they stood up to Trump. People don't like cowards and suckups.
Russia's example is instructive. There, only the old people watch state TV. Anyone younger than a certain age gets their information from social media.
Consequently, Russia's old people are the most propagandized.
Coming to a country near you.
"Kash Patel and Credibility"
Three words that should never be spoken in the same sentence!
So what's his name gets gunned down and our corporate media gives endless coverage for about a week now, yesterday five cops are ambushed three killed two badly injured by some loon and it is barely a blip on the radar. I guess "police lives" don't really matter all that much?
The endless coverage the media is giving is not so much on the shooter and the case, but on the hysterical right wing canonization of Kirk, and all the "reporting" they're dong to whitewash his legacy; on people getting fired for just telling the truth about the things he said, etc. In fact, we've heard very little facts about the shooter, other than the initial BS made up by the right that turned out to be not true.
But there's a reason for that, and its the same reason they're doing their damndest to ignore the three police officers ambushed and killed. The shooters in both cases were white men.
MAGA!
I don't get technology, personally. At 72, my tech-savvy days ended with 8-track tapes. But a friend of a friend told me you can watch all the Disney/Paramount stuff for free on Stremio.com. But there is a problem – your ISP can detect it and get all legalistic 'n stuff. But, and this is all hearsay, if you hook up through a Virtual Private Network, like NordVPN.com , it's undetectable. I'm not sure what encryption is.
I'm not advising anyone to pirate stuff, although the US Revolutionary War was won by pirates, but the history books call them "Privateers." Is it illegal to take stuff from an ally of a fascist? (Seems like that was the backbone of the Disney miniseries 'Andor.') If you try this, and it works, don't tell me. I don't get this stuff at all. But you can pass it along privately to your friends.
The author presents a compelling critique of current political and social trends, highlighting the hypocrisy and division in society. The commentary feels insightful yet critical, resonating with those disillusioned by the political climate.
Wow, AI comments. We can replace doug, uncledad and the gang with smooooth, in-context banter about how dear leader is so wonderful.
Oh course Patel was correct. /sarc.
People pay out millions of dollars in charity.
https://sonar21.com/almost-1-billion-is-not-a-hoax/