Saturday Report 6-6-26 — Platner: Beyond the Scandal, There's a Harder Truth...

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— In eight days, the People’s House becomes a pay-per-view fight venue, and the symbolism is doing overtime. On June 14 — Flag Day, and not coincidentally Trump’s 80th birthday — promoter Dana White will bolt a UFC cage onto the South Lawn for “Freedom 250,” a seven-fight card sponsored by Crypto.com and Ram and headlined by Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje. There are no tickets for you or me. There are, however, $1.5 million VIP “sponsorship” packages for high rollers — one PR expert called it “pay-to-play dressed up as a birthday party” — with the President personally deciding which donors and allies get a seat, and Gulf money reportedly circling the way it circles everything in Trumpworld. Nobody’s sure where the money goes. Fighter Belal Muhammad looked at the guest list and compared it to The Hunger Games. Middleweight champ Sean Strickland says he was banned from the grounds for criticizing Trump and Netanyahu; apparently, he cracked, he’s not “Netanyahu-loving enough” for American Freedom 250. And just steps from the octagon sits the half-built ballroom whose corporate donors, a new Public Citizen report found, reaped more than $50 billion in fresh federal contracts in six months — Lockheed alone grabbed $43.8 billion — while their pending enforcement cases quietly got eased. That haul is larger than the entire GDP of Iceland. As watchdog Jon Golinger put it, these firms “aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts.” Forty-five years after Reagan taught Washington that government can become a vending machine for the rich, here’s the logical endpoint: blood sport on the lawn, billionaires in the skyboxes, and the rest of us watching the disgusting, Caligula-style spectacle in horror as millions of American children go hungry and lack healthcare or school lunches, all to pay for billionaire tax breaks.

— Fox “News” spent months hunting a Maine sexting story while ignoring a Texas crime spree, and that tells you everything. As Daily Kos lays out, the network treated Democrat Graham Platner’s consensual texting lapse — which he owned and his marriage worked through — as a national emergency, even mining old Reddit jokes for front-page outrage. Meanwhile Ken Paxton, the Texas AG and Republican Senate nominee, carries a 2015 securities-fraud indictment, a Texas House impeachment for bribery and abuse of office, a years-long FBI probe, a multimillion-dollar whistleblower settlement, and such awful serial adultery that his wife is now divorcing him “for Biblical reasons” — and seven Republican senators just co-hosted his fundraiser. Senator Roger Marshall explained that keeping the Senate majority makes Paxton “absolutely necessary.” One party forgives anything for power, including daily lies, convictions and adjudications for fraud and rape (Trump); the other puts its own candidates on trial before the voters even get a vote. And the seat Platner is fighting for is held by on-the-take Susan Collins, named among the nation’s most corrupt politicians; she’s the “concerned” moderate who cast the deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh and the billionaire tax cut that gutted Medicaid and SNAP. Democrats and progressive media: stop doing the GOP’s oppo for free!

— In the richest nation in human history, we have circled all the way back to pandemic-level hunger, on purpose. A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis finds “food insecurity” — hunger in America — back at levels not seen since the peak of COVID, driven by inflation at a three-year high and the SNAP and school lunch cuts Trump and congressional Republicans rammed through last summer, which stripped food aid from tens of millions. The Fed researchers describe “a remarkable increase in food insecurity,” concentrated among the poorest households and families with young children, even as the topline jobs numbers look fine. Household incomes are now falling year-over-year, collapsing fastest for the bottom 50% of us (who own 3% of the nation’s wealth while the top 1% own 38% of everything in America). So connect the dots from the story above: the same government writing $50 billion in contracts to ballroom donors is also deciding that hungry kids are a price worth paying for tax breaks for billionaires. That’s not a glitch in the system; after 45 years of Reaganomics, that is the system, working exactly as these GOP sociopaths designed it.

— The administration drew up plans to declare 2.7 million living Americans legally dead — and very nearly pulled it off. A 25-year Social Security executive, Jeremiah Schofield, has disclosed to the Senate that Musk’s DOGE crew schemed to dump 2.7 million living people — including U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, teenagers, and at least one widow collecting survivor benefits — into the federal “death master file.” If you’re on that file, your bank automatically closes your account (and no other bank can open one), no paychecks can be processed, you can’t get any government benefits or services, can’t fly, lose your drivers license and passport, and lose your home. The point was to prevent them from voting, freeze their bank accounts, stop their paychecks (processing requires an active SS number), and benefits so citizens would miss their vote this year or, if a legal alien, either “self-deport” or show up at a Social Security office where ICE could grab them. Agency lawyers warned it was flatly illegal; Schofield refused to do it, and says the call laying it out was the most disappointing of his career. But it’s entirely possible Trump will find somebody else to do it this October or November. For four decades the GOP has worked to “demolish” Social Security by starving and discrediting it while gutting our right to vote. This is the next stage: weaponizing Social Security’s most sacred database not to serve the living, but to erase them.

— For the first time in the internet’s history, bots now outnumber humans. Cloudflare reports that automated bots and AI agents have overtaken human web traffic — 57.4% bots to 42.6% humans worldwide, and a stunning 71.5% bots inside the United States. CEO Matthew Prince admitted the crossover “happened faster than I predicted,” years ahead of schedule. Odds are high that that person you’re arguing with on X or Facebook is actually a bot run by a rightwing-programmed AI program. The web that millions of us built is now mostly software talking to software, scraping the work of human creators for free to feed the next trillion-dollar AI valuation. We’ve seen this movie before: a thing the public makes gets quietly enclosed and monetized by the handful of oligarchs who own the pipes. The only question is whether anyone left is aware of the trend to notice.

— A heavily mutated COVID variant is spreading through 25 states right as Trump turns off the lights we use to see it. The BA.3.2 strain, nicknamed “cicada” because it lurked underground for years, carries mutations that help it dodge existing immunity and is showing up disproportionately in kids and teens. A Johns Hopkins virologist calls them “concerning mutations.” And the timing is almost too perfect: Trump’s budget slashes the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System from roughly $125 million to $25 million, with the money gone entirely after September 30. So at the exact moment a mutating virus needs watching, the early-warning maps go dark. We are about to fly blind into the next wave, not by accident, but by line item dictated by the Trump regime. And it’s not just COVID: they monitor for dozens of diseases, including bird flu, measles, polio, etc. As one fascism scholar warned back when Bob Kennedy first started canceling vaccine meetings: a sick population is an easier population to manage.

— Crazy Alert! The man who spent four years sneering about “Sleepy Joe” appears to have nodded off and started mumbling during his own 3 p.m. Oval Office event this week, a clip the press promptly dubbed “Commander-in-Sleep” as it went viral. Recall the years of stopwatch journalism over Biden’s gait and pauses? Jake Tapper’s near hysteria? Funny how the same outlets, handed footage of a tilting, drifting 80-year-old president, suddenly discover the virtue of looking away.

— Cult Alert! Trump bought his entire Cabinet matching $145 black Florsheim dress shoes — without bothering to ask their sizes — and aides told the Wall Street Journal they’re afraid not to wear them. To test the depth of their slavish devotion, a Slate writer walked ten miles in a pair and shredded his feet into “misshapen blisters.” Marco Rubio was caught on film swimming in oversized clompers, mocked on the floor by Rep. Sara Jacobs, and gamely insisted they “fit fine.” This is the same Cabinet that, per a new analysis, pathetically praises the boss roughly once every six sentences. As the Slate writer concluded: the emperor may have no clothes, “but he does have Florsheims.” And his ministers will mangle their own feet to prove their groveling, lickspittle status.

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:

Trump’s Masked Goons are a Criminal’s Dream

TRump like Hitler and Putin needs a secret police to terrorize the minority or minorities they deem inferior or in need of control, deportation or even murder. Hence tRump needs his masked men to terrorize the popularion. Ice is certainly the dictators tool for just that purpose and thus one needs to realizse the evil of our present day fascism.
~ S howard

None of this would happen if our Governors and mayors had the stones and ability to control the police and have them protect the citizens from these masked and armed thugs, but they don’t.
~ William Farrar

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