Watch this incredible short video that filmmaker David Ambrose (who has a great Substack newsletter) just produced about the crisis of corporate personhood and how we got here. It mentions my new book Who Killed The American Dream as well, and is an incredible bit of film-making crunched into a tight 11 minutes that you’ll want to share with others.
— Trump just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, because apparently the First Amendment now needs his signature to be valid. Yesterday afternoon, the man who refused to put his hand on the Bible when he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution just announced on his Nazi-infested failing social media site that those three news outlets will no longer be allowed into the White House Press Room. He added that, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” Back in his first term, he tried this by banning CNN’s Jim Acosta but a federal judge ordered Acosta’s press pass restored. So far this term courts have stopped him fully 75 times from violating the First Amendment’s provisions about a free press, something both Trump and his mentor and owner Putin hate and do everything they can to destroy. This ban came the same day our news media caught Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon lying to America about how many soldiers we’ve lost in Israel’s and Trump’s stupid war against Iran and CNN revealed that we almost got into a shooting war with China because an AI program hallucinated. Every news agency still allowed into the White House Press Room now must make a decision: do they defy the anti-American autocrat or roll over and pretend this is just the new normal? Stay tuned…
— More American soldiers have died in Trump’s Iran war than Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is willing to admit. Six different officials close to Pentagon casualty numbers tell The Washington Post that at least 22 service members have been killed by Iran with Russian targeting help, rather than the dozen dead that this administration acknowledges. This is the second time Whiskey Pete and his slobbering, testosterone-amped sycophants in the so-called “War Department” have been busted lying to us about casualty figures to make Trump and his stupid, illegal, criminal war look good. Back in July it was The New York Times that discovered Whiskey Pete had quietly dropped the casualty numbers from 18 to 14, claiming that the other four died during a Trump-declared “cease fire” and therefore weren’t “wartime casualties.” The Pentagon tried to bullshit the press and military families, who deserve an honest count. Congress has subpoena power and oversight responsibilities here: they damn well better use them.
— Armed federal agents at polling places is a felony crime and has been for more than a century, but Trump’s people keep floating it. Our laws that make it a federal felony to place any armed person in or near any polling place date back to the end of the Civil War, so yesterday Democracy Forward filed suit in federal court arguing that the Trump regime’s constant hints and suggestions that they’ll do just that are, themselves, an unlawful form of voter intimidation and voter suppression. Meanwhile, NPR reports a whistleblower says DHS’s so-called “Unlawful Voter Initiative” and ICE’s involvement with it are both racing ahead on junk data and flagging American citizens. Denver’s election clerk, Paul López, a plaintiff in the suit, has a plan if agents show up to intimidate his voters, telling NPR: “They’re going to face prison sentences.” We need more local officials with that kind of spine. Check your registration this week, make a plan, vote early if your state lets you, and bring a friend.
— Senators Markey, Merkley, and Sanders are trying to stop Trump from shipping 5,000 one-ton bombs to the Saudi crown prince who had a Washington Post columnist dismembered. While Trump shipping tens of thousands of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel got a lot of press this week, Orange Caligula is also trying to help out his Saudi buddies who gave him millions for his golf tour and gave billions to his slumlord son-in-law. The three senators introduced a resolution of disapproval this week against a $5 billion sale of JDAM kits and 2,000-pound bombs to the kingdom; these are “privileged resolutions” and thus can force every senator to vote on the record. The same day, while still refusing to provide munitions to Ukraine, Rubio’s State Department moved forward an additional $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35s to the Saudis. And then there’s the once-unthinkable Saudi nuclear deal: Trump sent Congress a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with the kingdom but classified two side letters that alter what the deal actually does, something no administration has ever done before. Even Republican Senators Rand Paul and John Kennedy signed the letter demanding to see them. Markey, noting the $2 billion the Saudis handed Jared Kushner, called it what it is, saying: “This is not diplomacy; this is corruption at the expense of U.S. national security.” I’m proud of my senator, Jeff Merkley, and his colleagues. Call your own senators and ask how they plan to vote on bombs for Mohammad bin Bone Saw.
— Trump’s war of choice is about to come home to every oil tank in New England, so of course he spent last weekend at his shabby golf motel in Ireland. Heating oil inventories in the American northeast are the lowest they’ve been in the modern era and winter is approaching; one family-owned Vermont fuel oil company just sent a letter to their customers warning them that after a quarter-century of buying fuel futures they could only nail down about 25% of what they’ll need this winter. A former OPEC economist told ABC TV station WMUR that inventories are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years. Then Exxon’s Joliet, Illinois refinery, which turns out around 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day for the Midwest, went down last Sunday and still hasn’t restarted. AAA says regular was at $4.47 a gallon yesterday, and diesel is pushing ten bucks a gallon in some parts of the country. Governors and legislatures in the Northeast are freaking out…although the Republicans are reluctant to say anything out loud that might piss off the man-baby in the Oval Office.
— Saudi Arabia just told Europe there’s no oil for them next month. October oil deliveries to Europe, contracted for months ago, are not going to be delivered according to the Saudis because Trump’s insane war against Iran has led to their pipeline and pumping stations being knocked out by Iranian-allied militias in Iraq. Iran has managed to shut down both the Saudi’s front door for deliveries (the Strait of Hormuz) and now both back-doors via the Red Sea and their east-west pipeline. As of June, Europe was importing 577,000 barrels of Saudi crude a day. Aramco says they hope to be back at full capacity in six weeks, and in the meantime they’re prioritizing their Asian customers including China while Europeans scramble for more North Sea oil. Fossil fuel billionaires and Putin are making a fortune off this disruption from Trump’s and Netanyahu’s criminal war and, if Reagan hadn’t shut down Carter’s Solar Bank program we may well have been out of the fossil fuel loop altogether by now: nobody has ever blockaded the sun or sent a drone after the wind. Countries that spent the last few decades building solar, wind, and batteries are insulated from this, but we pissed it away by letting fossil fuel billionaires and their Republican lickspittles write our energy policy.
— Poland’s prime minister says Putin is planning rocket and drone strikes on NATO countries, so Trump wrote Putin’s alibi for him. Polish Premiere Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament Thursday that intelligence shows Russia is planning to amp up their hybrid attacks on countries that support Ukraine, including Poland. Putin will pretend they’re all accidents, Tusk said, to “paralyze or at least weaken” NATO’s willingness to invoke Article 5 and respond with military force. In just the past week there have already been four Russian attacks at Poland’s border crossings with Ukraine, and Germany says Russia was definitely behind the attempted bombing at the Leipzig airport. The Telegraph and Metro have more details. Let’s not forget that a year ago this month, when 19 Russian drones flew into Poland, Trump covered for Putin saying that it all “could have been a mistake.” Putin obviously heard that loud and clear. Europe is rearming on the assumption that Trump is now wholly-owned by Putin. Meanwhile, Congress could still pass Ukraine aid and sanctions with veto-proof majorities if only enough Republicans remember which side their party was on when Reagan was alive. I’m not holding my breath.
— Crazy Alert! A chatbot made up a nuclear smuggling plot, and Pete Hegseth’s military scrambled planes to board a Chinese ship over it. Seriously, an AI chatbot’s hallucination could have provoked World War III. Now that Whiskey Pete has integrated Musk’s Grok and other AI products into our military, an analyst at Special Operations Command Pacific asked an AI chatbot to determine what was going on with a suspicious Chinese cargo vessel in the Middle East. The bot mashed together open-source stuff and speculation on the internet and social media together with classified signals intelligence and concluded the ship was carrying parts for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then had the AI chatbot write up the “analysis” as if it were a standard intelligence report and sent it up the chain of command. As a result, American military aircraft were in the air and armed troops were preparing to board the Chinese ship before somebody thought to check the work and found it was pure fiction. One source admitted to CNN’s reporters that the incident nearly started a war. This is what we get when the guy who purged the nation’s most competent generals orders three million personnel to “unleash experimentation” with software that confidently invents things. In addition to impeaching Whiskey Pete now, Congress must require a human being to sign off on any intelligence that could put Americans in a firefight with a nuclear power before the next hallucination gets any further than this one did and the results are truly disastrous.
— Medicare for All isn’t dead, it’s waiting for us to do our part. Nancy Altman runs Social Security Works and knows more about how America built its social insurance system than just about anybody alive. She has a new book out, The Road to Medicare for All. Americans have been fighting for national health insurance for more than a century, and we won real ground with Medicare and Medicaid. Altman argues that the time is finally and truly here for the program that would replicate what most other democracies already have had for decades. We pay more for healthcare than any other country on Earth, all to make insurance company fatcats richer so they can kick back bribes to Republican legislators. As I also laid out with The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, we have to fix this and the next few years are going to be critical.
Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
Did Trump Just Make an Offer That Could Land His Lickspittles in Prison?
My recollection is that SCOTUS extended presidential immunity only to “official acts”. I question whether solicitation of bribes can be shoehorned into that category.
~ Allan Marain
The message being sent is that crime is okay if it pays, you aren’t caught or you are immune. A lot of MAGAts would love to slide through life the way the felon in chief, his family and cronies and puppet masters are doing.
~ Roy Schultz
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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club
The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.
This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.
Thom, this is what we have, when Putin is really running things here in our country. Thom, everybody in charge knows absolutely nothing about anything. This really is a time when we need smart, people to solve the serious problems, at hand now Thom! They are really dumb heads, all of them, Thom!
From what I could find out about Augustine of Hippo, he was well-known for defending his vision and version of Christianity with words, not with swords. But there were many groups in his day, some Christian, some not, who fashioned from their faith a justification for violence. It is still done today. But the beginning of modern-day Christo-fascist imperialism began with the papal bull of 1452, Dum Diversas, issued by Nicholas V.