Saturday Report 7/5/25 — Wild Killer Whales are More Empathetic than Trump & MAGA

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Dorothe from Pixabay

My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.

— The toadies’s Trump has installed to run our federal agencies, in this case Social Security, are apparently just as good at lying as is Trump himself. The commissioner of Social Security himself sent an email — I don’t know if it only went to Social Security recipients or to everybody in the country (I am a recipient and received it) — blatantly lying, suggesting to people that Republicans had essentially ended the income tax on Social Security. There is no exclusion for Social Security taxation in the billionaire tax cut/construct concentration camps bill that passed Thursday. Trump had made that as a campaign promise, and it was offered as an amendment in the original version, but it does not exist in the Senate version which was voted on and passed this week. Raising the standard deduction — just until 2028 — may slightly reduce the income taxes people on Social Security pay, but it has nothing to do with Social Security itself. The income tax on Social Security, it’s worth remembering, was put into place by Ronald Reagan as part of his Social Security and income tax “reforms” for billionaires that screwed — and continue to screw — average people while exploding our nation’s debt. Here’s the header on that disgusting email that proves Trump has succeeded in politicizing the federal bureaucracy, something no president before him has ever tried to do:

— Republicans are suing to stop American citizens from voting. When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we learned that we could vote by mail in our home state and that most of the Americans we met over there — having seen the world — were voting as Democrats. I even addressed the Democrats Abroad group once; they’re active in virtually every European country. So, now Republicans are suing in Arizona and North Carolina to prevent Americans from those states who live in Europe from voting. Their voting suppression efforts just never end.

— Trump and DOGE/Musk gutted the National Weather Service and now people in Texas — including children camping — are dead and missing. Just weeks ago, all five living former directors of the NWS wrote an open letter essentially begging Republicans to reinstate funding in the Big Beautiful Bill; Republicans refused. And now, as a result, we can expect to see more and more Americans die as severe weather increases, warnings vanish, and Trump redirects FEMA money into building concentration camps.

— Never forget that this is that most catastrophic bill passed in our lifetimes: no Republican who voted for it should get reelected or forgiven. Congressman Warren Davidson (R-OH) claims that he changed from voting against the Billionaire Tax Cut/Build Concentration Camps bill in May, but changed to a “Yes” vote to own the libs. He told the press: “Democrats’ reaction helped me persuade that, wow, maybe this bill does, does do some really good things.” Brilliant. Apparently he doesn’t realize he’s also “owning” the MAGA base, who will be hit harder than Democrats with the provisions that gut Medicaid and Food Stamps/SNAP. Not to mention creating the largest militarized secret police force in the history of America, larger than every other police agency combined.

— Trump continues his regular phone calls with Putin, who’s obviously now giving him instructions. The orange felon asked Putin to back off on Ukraine and got blown off: Putin started raining bombs, drones, and missiles on Kiev as they spoke on the phone. Trump obediently stopped the delivery of US weaponry to Ukraine after the call, dealing a devastating blow to the physically largest democratic nation in Europe. And, to add insult/threat to injury, Putin additionally said that he may not stop with Ukraine. NATO is officially facing a crisis and this moves the entire world closer to WWIII. Meanwhile, the 12th Russian oligarch — this time a bigwig in the oil industry — fell to his death from the 14th floor of a Moscow apartment building. One has to wonder if the billionaire American oligarchs who are supporting Trump realize that Putin was brought to power by morbidly rich Russian oligarchs, and then, when they started waffling on supporting his destruction of democracy in that nation, many ended up dead or in prison. Somebody might want to drop a note to Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al.

— CBS/Paramount paid an extortionate bribe to Trump to seal a billion-dollar merger deal and Senator Ron Wyden wants them prosecuted for bribery. Wyden is dead serious about this, although I can’t imagine that any of the suckups Trump has installed at the DOJ will take on the case; maybe a state Attorney General will consider it? As Wyden noted: “Paramount just paid Trump a bribe for merger approval. When Democrats retake power, I’ll be first in line calling for federal charges. In the meantime, state prosecutors should make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court, today.” Amen. This is the most corrupt president, and the most corrupt administration, in American history.

— The Six Republicans on the US Supreme Court are now officially complicit in Trump’s corruption and destruction of American democracy. Their most recent abomination is allowing Trump to deport people who came to America seeking asylum to war-torn South Sudan. I was in that country, both in Juba and up on the border with Darfur, a few years ago and it’s a disease-infested hellhole. And the people Trump’s sending there aren’t even Sudanese or Africans; most are Asians. After ruling that Trump can commit felonies with complete impunity, that Republicans can purge voters who fail to return a junk-mail-appearing postcard, that billionaires can buy and bring politicians, and stopping federal judges from blocking Trump’s illegal executive orders, these six on-the-take ideologues have destroyed the reputation of the Court, weakened our constitutional guardrails, and prove the need for the next Democratic president — if there is one — to expand the Court and impose term limits on its justices.

— Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is looking at prosecuting local and state election officials if they think too many Democrats are getting elected. As The New York Times noted: “The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Instead, it is driven by the unsubstantiated argument made by many in the Trump administration that American elections are easy prey to voter fraud and foreign manipulation, these people said.” This appears to be laying the foundations for a Russian-style election-rigging scheme and should shock and alarm us all.

— “Kill them!” A convicted (and pardoned) January 6th rioter is now helping the DOJ investigate Democrats who Trump alleges tried to “weaponize” the Justice Department when they prosecuted him. Jared Wise, a former FBI agent who was convicted of rioting and explicitly encouraging rioters to “kill” Capitol Police officers, is now working with “Weaponization Working Group” head Ed Martin and AG Pam Bondi to investigate and prosecute former FBI agents and others involved in going after the traitors who tried to end our democracy on that horrible day. It just gets more and more bizarre as Trump and his toadies drive America into lawlessness and oligarchic fascism.

— Challenging the idea of free speech and the distribution of publicly-available information, Trump and his minions are investigating Joshua Aaron, the young man who created the ICEBlock app for smartphones that crowdsources details on ICE raids. “I knew what I was signing up for,” Aaron told the press, although this sort of legal action could well destroy him financially (through legal fees) if they don’t end up tossing him into jail. So much for the First Amendment, which was already under assault when Trump’s lickspittles started arresting student protestors who simply criticized Netanyahu’s genocidal Gaza policies. Meanwhile, a US citizen who was arrested for filming an ICE raid at a Home Depot is suing the feds for a million dollars for false arrest and imprisonment. Keep an eye on this; if the feds win, we’ll have moved much more deeply into police state territory.

— Wild Killer Whales are more empathetic than Trump and MAGA. A new study has discovered that “Wild killer whales have been documented offering food to humans 34 times across four oceans, waiting to see how people respond before taking the items back. Scientists believe this behavior represents ‘generalized altruism’ — whales being kind to humans with no obvious benefit to themselves, possibly driven by curiosity and intelligence. The behavior spans all whale age groups and populations that hunt near the surface…” Now if Republicans could just pick up on the value of altruism, empathy, and compassion…

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World:

Neurodivergence and the Climate Crisis: Are ADHD Brains Wired to Save the Planet?

— Wisdom School:

The Lost Gospel of the Kingdom: Why Jesus Was a Revolutionary, Not a Mascot