Saturday Report - Crazy Alert! Trump having sex with “Bubba”?!?

The Best of the Rest of the News

— “Good for me, but not for thee.” That appears to be the mantra of the Trump administration, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said of California’s plan to follow Texas’s recent gerrymander: “California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process.” She added, without a trace of irony, “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.” This is the same Bondi who, as Attorney General of Florida for eight years while Epstein was raping and trafficking kids under her nose without her saying a word, replaced Matt Gaetz as Trump’s appointee for US AG after it was revealed Gaetz had allegedly paid an underage girl for sex so she could buy braces and books for school. Trump seems to have an affinity for “prosecutors” of a certain type…

— Trump’s new big lie: “There is no affordability” problem. After Zohran Momdani’s affordability-centered win in New York, Trump has been hitting rightwing media to insist that everything’s under control and people complaining about the cost of living are just whiny wimps. Even Republican voters don’t seem to be buying it, particularly after he cut off the food stamps that disproportionately sustain Red states and sent an even larger pot of cash to his rightwing buddy Javier Milei and ordered our government to buy Melei’s Argentinian, instead of American, beef. A half-million Americans died unnecessarily during Trump’s first term — disproportionately his followers — because of his incompetence, at the same time he’s twice cut taxes on himself and his billionaire buddies while forcing his voters to pay more (tariff) taxes on pretty much everything. While his son Eric is complaining about fees associated with money-transferring a half-billion dollars and low-income Republican voters struggle to pay the rent, the Trump family is laughing all the way to the bank.

— Against the orders of a federal judge, Trump/Bondi/Noem/Homan sent hundreds of immigrants to a hellhole torture center in El Salvador. Most had never even had a traffic ticket, and being in this country is a misdemeanor, not a felony, and now we’re learning that while they were in that prison many were subjected to “systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault” according to a new report from Human Rights Watch. And now we’re murdering poor fishermen off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia in violation of both American and international law, a crime so heinous that the UK and other allied countries are refusing to share some intelligence with the USA. You’d think after the Bush administration disgraced America by torturing, murdering, and abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan we’d have learned a lesson. But, no: this is how Republicans roll.

— So much for equal justice under law, the slogan carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court. Trump is now publicly demanding his prosecutors go after Democrats who knew Jeffrey Epstein as well as trying to throw Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell in jail (or at least break him financially) for “mortgage fraud.” Americans familiar with the law and US traditions were justifiably horrified when Trump publicly ordering Bondi to attack James Comey, Letitia James, et al, but he’s shameless, as are the people he’s surrounded himself with. This is exactly how banana republics and corrupt dictatorships operate, and the GOP appears hell-bent-for-leather to convert America into one.

— Throwing almost 200,000 families out of their homes? Just another day in Trump’s America. The administration of the disgusting degenerate who occupies the White House is now proposing to kill affordable housing grants that The New York Times notes “could quickly place as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people at risk of returning to the streets.” Are these Reagan’s phony Black welfare queens? No, the Times notes: “All are disabled — a condition of the aid — and many are 50 or older.” Republicans claim to be America’s best Christians, but Jesus was pretty explicit about what would happen to people who denied aid to “the least among us”: they go straight to Hell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

— Tax breaks for billionaires are more important to Republicans than tsunami warnings for the little people. So, of course, they’re cancelling funding for those very warning systems, the same way they’ve been gutting the National Weather Service, all to pay for Trump’s most recent $4 billion tax cut for himself and his friends. There is no time in American history when wealth inequality has hit the levels it’s at today, and the GOP is fully dedicated to keeping it that way, regardless of how many average Americans have to die to sustain it.

— The spike in bowel cancer diagnoses among younger people, particularly women, appears to be linked to eating ultra-processed foods (UPFs). The new study published in the journal JAMA Oncology finds a clear statistical indication that pre-cancerous polyps form at faster rates and in greater numbers among women under 50 who eat UPFs, and the more UPFs one consumes the greater the risk. These polyps are typically the precursors to the development of this deadly form of cancer. HHS Secretary Bob Kennedy once said he was going to do something about UPFs, but then the industry lobbyists weighed in and started leaning on Republican legislators and, well, you know…

— Crazy Alert! Trump having sex with “Bubba”?!? The internet erupted over a recent Epstein email suggesting Donald had oral sex with somebody named Bubba, a nickname commonly applied to Bill Clinton. Odds are it’s another Bubba, though; one younger and female, if Trump’s past comments are any indicator.. .