Saturday Report 8/16/25 — California Democrats Light the Fuse: Gerrymander Bill Rocks the GOP...

The Best of the Rest of the News

Vlad gets red carpet, and Trump gets Epstein off the front pages. A submissive, groveling, obsequious Donald Trump was humiliated yesterday afternoon by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The American president, accused by multiple women and teenage girls of raping or sexually assaulting them, joined the indicted war criminal and Russian president who has kidnapped over 100,000 children from Ukraine and sold most of them into God-only-knows-what in Russia. It was a disgusting, pathetic display of the moral collapse that is Donald Trump. As Senator Richard Blumenthal said: “[M]y stomach turned when I heard the president of the United States characterize Vladimir Putin as his fabulously good friend. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. He has directed soldiers to kill women and children and bury them in mass graves. He’s kidnapped children as we speak. The reality on the ground is that people are bleeding and dying all around Ukraine because Putin is continuing to bomb them. And at the front, he’s continuing to pummel the brave Ukrainian soldiers who are defending the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the town of Pokrovsk.” But Trump did succeed in getting Jeffrey Epstein off the front pages for several days. Will a discussion of the possibility that Trump was joining Epstein in raping young girls return to media prominence? Or has Trump succeeded in making it “old news”? Meanwhile, Putin gets a status boost all around the world as America is once again placed in the gutter by Donald Trump.

— Fascism is all about “performances of strength” and masked ICE agents just blew it outside Gavin Newsom’s press conference. Thursday night — when Newsom held a press conference to call Trump “weak” and “broken” and announce that California will be putting gerrymandering/redistricting on the ballot this November — Trump’s new masked secret police force showed up to try to intimidate the governor. Instead, he ridiculed them and called them out. Finally, Democrats are standing up to the fascist actions Trump and his minions are taking. Now, if more Democratic states will join the fray maybe we’ll take this country back. Will they? Or will they wimp out like Harry Reid used to regularly do and Schumer has so often? Maybe if enough of us reach out to them to encourage them, they’ll find their spines the way Newsom seems to have done. The number for Congress’ switchboard is 202-224-3121. Also, today is the day that Indivisible has called for people to show up in the streets to protest (with a much larger protest planned for Labor Day). See you there!

— California Democrats light the fuse: gerrymander bill rocks the GOP. Newsom’s proposed legislation to allow California to gerrymander is called the “Election Rigging Response Act,” and it has a few Republicans terrified. California Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA), whose seat would be gerrymandered in a way that will cause him to lose to a Democrat in the next election, is now arguing with his own GOP leadership. He mentioned on MSNBC that he’s reached out to House Speaker Mike Johnson to ask for help in convincing Texas Republicans to abandon their plans. Odds are, though, that no such thing will happen: word has it that the Texas Democrats are now planning to return to their home state to allow a vote on redistricting so things like flood aid can get done (Republicans are holding it hostage). Once that law passes, Newsom promises to take his campaign for Democrats to “bring a gun to a gunfight” nationwide. Keep an eye on this…

— Is the lid coming off inflation? Wholesale prices for last month just came out Thursday and the Producer Price Index went up .9%, equivalent to an 11% annual inflation rate. Vegetables are up 38.9%, most likely because so many crops are rotting in the fields because farmworkers are afraid to show up for work. Ground beef is up 13% in just the past six months. These are wholesale prices, so they’ll start showing up at your local store in the coming weeks or months. Trump’s economic madness is coming home to roost and it may well provide Democrats with the gas they need to power next year’s elections.

— The hostile takeover of DC is seeing cracks. The Washington Post is reporting: “D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb has sued President Donald Trump over his executive actions asserting control over the D.C. police department and attempting to install an emergency police commissioner, one of the most extraordinary exertions of federal power in the city’s half-century of home rule.” And now perpetually-drunk (or at least that’s how she usually appears) former judge Jeanine Pirro, now DC’s federal prosecutor, has authorized major prison time felony assault charges against a former DOJ employee who threw a Subway Sandwich at federal officers. Over-the-top law enforcement reactions are characteristic of fascist regimes, and Trump’s isn’t skimping. They’re similarly trying to go after Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other former Biden and Obama officials based on largely specious, made-up allegations including some provided to them, according to reporting from The New York Times, provided to them by Russian intelligence. Trump now has control of the legislature, the courts, most of the press, most major universities, and multiple major lawfirms. This is getting very, very dangerous to what’s left of our democracy.

— Trump tries to strongarm Norway into giving him a Nobel Prize. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Reuters is reporting: “OSLO (Reuters) -When U.S. President Donald Trump called Norway's finance minister last month to discuss tariffs, he also told him he wanted the Nobel Peace Prize, Norwegian business daily Dagens Naeringsliv reported on Thursday.” Hillary Clinton has actually proposed Trump get the prize if he could end the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine without having Ukraine surrender any of their land. The chances of Trump standing up to Putin in that way, however, are pretty damn close to zero. This is just pathetic.

— Weird Alert! More Than Two Dozen People Linked to Jeffrey Epstein Have Died Under Mysterious Circumstances? That’s what The National Enquirer is reporting, and they appear to have the receipts. “Financier Steven Hoffenberg,” the Enquirer reports, “confessed in a final account before his death to the Enquirer’s Doug Montero that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted pedophile’s now-imprisoned recruiting madam, were ‘taping’ honey-trap videos of sleazy VIPs with underage girls for a cabal of deep-state blackmailing power brokers.” Of all the things that have Trump in a tizzy, this appears to be at the top of the list, particularly since Politico published a transcript of the lawsuit where a girl accused Trump under oath of violently raping her at Epstein’s place when she was only 13. The Feds are sitting on terabytes of data and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of videotapes seized from Epstein during his last arrest. How many feature his “best friend” Donald Trump? Inquiring minds, as the saying goes, want to know.