Saturday Report 8/8/26 — Is That a Squirrel On Trump’s Head?
The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion
— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon.
— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November.
— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics.
— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster.
— America’s oligarchs and the Republican Party they own know how to hold onto potentially wayward members of Congress. People are scratching their heads in wonderment; after Trump trashed Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis to the point that all three are leaving Congress at the end of the year, all three ended up voting for Todd Blanche to continue the Epstein coverup and give Trump the $100 million the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade for his Chicago Trump Tower tax fraud. Why? former senators can be extraordinarily valuable to lobbying/government-relations firms because of their personal relationships with senators, senior staff, committee personnel, administration officials, donors and corporate leaders. Their intimate knowledge of how the Senate actually operates and the prestige/access associated with having been a senator are worth serious money: former senators often start at $5 million a year. But if their colleagues shun them because they’re afraid of retribution from Trump, that value vanishes. Do the math…
— The solar industry claims a scalp. Two, it turns out, can play at this game: a new political action committee (Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC) formed and funded by solar industry executives ran ads against Tennessee’s toxic MAGA congressman Andy Ogles, and then beat him in the primary, replacing him with a Republican who’s favorable to solar power. Now that five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our elections and politicians are for sale, the auctions have begun!
— Is Israel using rape, electric shocks, and beatings to discourage activists from bringing food and medicine to Gaza? It sure looks that way, according to The New York Times, reporting “numerous reports of physical abuse” as well as “deeply disturbing accounts of sexual humiliation and degrading treatment carried out by Israeli forces.” Israel’s openly racist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir even strutted around with the captives, making a degrading video that was so abusive and offensive that even US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a total suck-up to Benjamin Netanyahu, called Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions “despicable,” adding that he had “betrayed the dignity of his nation.” It’s time to end American financial support of this rogue regime that’s giving antisemites more than enough raw material to use in their rants against Jews and thus putting people at risk worldwide.
— Is that a squirrel on Trump’s head? The guy’s been totally bald on top for decades, as his daughter told us years ago, and his comb-over has been getting thinner and thinner. So apparently he’s taken to either hair extensions or a wig. The media is having a field day with it, with headlines like: Trump’s Suddenly Thick Hair Raises Eyebrows and Wild three days of ‘wig’ transformations. When I was a teenager working as a progressive rock DJ in Lansing, on a couple of occasions I DJ’d drag shows at a local gay bar. In the wig and makeup departments, Trump nearly beats some of the drag queens I knew…
Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
Who Is the “Third Way” and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans?
These people are highly destructive and I am deeply concerned about the damage they might do.
~ Mark Mansour
Thank you for highlighting this “third way” group. I hadn’t heard about it but it suddenly makes sense of the weak DNC and establishment democrats in congress. The dots are starting to connect up! We must not only fight off Trumps evil crime syndicate but the corporate democrats as well. Government for the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, not the oligarchs!
~ Dianne Walter
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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.
How corrupt is our government now that it can just give away the oil reserve to further enhance the oil industry's already record profits, while everyone else struggles to fill their gas tank or buy food? Imagine getting to live in a house rent-free for years, then selling it back to your landlord--that's what this is like.
ICE and immigration abuses happen and will continue because the Democratic party doesn't want to touch a hot stove, and that hot stove is immigration.
Trump is full bore on immigration, because that is what his base demands, and his base is supported by he media.
Trump's base is 35% of the country, and that 35% is dictating to the 65%.
Whether they admit it or not, the Democratic party, is running with that 35% limiting their actions and propaganda. Always cognizant and fearful of attacks from the right, whereas the right could care less of attacks from the left,and constantly press forwards as if they are on the moral high ground.