There is no incentive for them to end their criminality

A couple days ago I wrote of the fund the nasty guy (well, his Department of Justice) set up to award money to the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I wrote about the many ethics problems of the fund. Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday and had to face intense grilling from Democrats. Blanche sidestepped and did the usual muddying of the issues. And, as Einenkel concluded:

If you’re keeping score, Blanche declined to rule out payments for people convicted of assaulting law enforcement, political donors, and insurrectionists accused of sexually abusing children.

Oliver Willis of Kos reported Rep. Dan Goldman of New York told CNN on Monday night that creating the slush fund is an impeachable offense. He said when Democrats take back the House the fund will be one of many intensive investigations. Other Democrats criticized the fund. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the DoJ added an addendum to the Settlement Agreement, which is really an order. The “settlement” is between the nasty guy and the IRS because an IRS contractor revealed some aspects of the nasty guy’s tax returns. The settlement was not reviewed by a judge and is a “settlement” is in name only with the purpose of obscuring what is going on. On to the addendum. That’s also skeezy because the original agreement left a loophole to allow things to be added. This isn’t just any little thing.

Instead, we just got Blanche dashing off a single paragraph that, on behalf of the United States government, provided an entirely new waiver that says the IRS will never audit, investigate, penalize, or prosecute Trump and others for anything at all, known or unknown, for anything that happened prior to May 18, 2026. ... That sweet forever freedom from prosecution no longer just applies to the plaintiffs in Trump’s sham lawsuit: Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization. Now, it applies to “Plaintiffs or related or affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.” Yeah, that’s a lot more people, and a lot more protection.

A tweet by Ronald Brownstein included a tweet by Acyn of Meidas Touch. Acyn included a video of (Josh?) Shapiro, governor (of Pennsylvania?) and quoted a bit of the video:

Somehow, he can’t find the money to pay for healthcare, but he can steal from you to pay off the criminals who stormed the Capitol.

Brownstein added:

One of what will be many many examples of how easily Trump’s move to funnel taxpayer money to J6 rioters will fold into the core Democratic message for 2026.

Oliver Willis of Kos reported:

Two of the police officers who responded to the pro-Trump Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are now suing the administration after it revealed plans for a taxpayer financed slush fund to reward insurrectionists and other Trump allies. D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn filed suit on Wednesday. The suit seeks to block the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” created after Trump dropped his suit against the IRS and “negotiated” with his own officials to create the $1.7 billion slush fund. In the suit the officers allege that the fund “encourages those who enacted violence in the President’s name to continue to do so.”

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing in his own Substack:

At this point Trump and his MAGA minions have stolen so much, committed so many crimes — not just theft but taking America to war illegally, abusing ICE detainees, and much more — that if and when they lose power many of them will face personal ruin at best, years of jail time at worst. This would happen even if they stopped committing more crimes. So there’s no incentive for them to end their criminality, or to end the attempts to bribe others to go along. Either they succeed in destroying America as we know it, or they won’t. And until that’s resolved, they may as well engage in even more corruption and criminal acts.

Sherrilyn Ifill of her own Substack wrote:

It is by now widely understood that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, and protection from state interference with citizenship rights. The Amendment incorporates the concept of equality – racial equality – into our Constitution for the first time. In so doing the 14th brings our Constitution into harmony with the core principle of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” The drafting and ratification of the 14th Amendment constituted a stunningly ambitious act of constitutional repair and reconciliation. […] Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s grotesque scheme to reward January 6th insurrectionists with payouts from the federal treasury completes the Trump administration’s section-by-section effort to violate the 14th Amendment. Section 4 of the Amendment bars the United States from paying money to those who participated in insurrection. Congress, the branch of government empowered by Section 5 of the Amendment to enforce the 14th Amendment’s guarantees, must block this blatantly unconstitutional scheme from moving forward.”

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and independent pundit quoted a friend. If the nasty guy is funneling my tax money to people who attacked the Capitol, why am I paying my taxes? Why not cheat as so many acquaintances have? Hartmann added an explanation:

By the way, the entire frame — picked up and dutifully repeated by the corporate media — was a lie. Trump’s lawsuit was about to be thrown out by a skeptical judge, so he simply killed it. There’s no “settlement.” No “in exchange” for dropping the suit, none of that. Instead, Trump wants us to think that, but in reality — as Rachel Maddow pointed out — Trump is just forcing us taxpayers to give him a $1.776 billion slush fund.

I’ve heard NPR repeat the frame that the slush fund was a settlement. Hartmann added that nasty junior has created venture firms that have contracts with the Pentagon and other federal agencies. So in addition to being routed to an insurrectionist slush fund a man’s tax money is being routed to the private fortune of the nasty guy’s son. More corruption. The corruption and dismantling of democracy is happening while the nasty guy is breaking our alliances that kept the free world safe since 1945. And that is happening while Russia and China are cooperating in military efforts. How to stop all this? The mess deserves more than a shrug and can’t wait until 2029 or even 2027.

House and Senate Democrats should be holding shadow hearings right now, on the record, with witnesses named and a documentary record being built in real time, so that the day the gavel changes hands there is no two-year Merrick Garland-style delay while everyone studies their shoes. And the Blue states’ attorneys general, who answer to their own voters and not to Todd Blanche, should be opening criminal inquiries into the Trump organization’s conduct under state law, where no federal addendum and no presidential pardon can reach. Letitia James already showed in New York that state fraud statutes have teeth. There’s no reason the attorneys general of at least a dozen blue states couldn’t be coordinating that work this afternoon.

Hartmann says to call your senators and representative and tell them you want hearings on corruption, and do it now, not next year. Emily Singer of Kos reported Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky lost his primary to a guy endorsed by the nasty guy. The reason the endorsement didn’t go to Massie is he led the charge to release the Epstein files and voted against the One Big Brutal Bill. Massie’s lost came just after Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary. He had also displeased the nasty guy by voting to convict him in the 2021 impeachment trial. The nasty guy has also endorsed Ken Paxton over Texas Sen. John Cornyn, pretty much assuring Cornyn will soon lose his primary runoff. Add to that the five Republican state lawmakers in Indiana who lost primaries because they refused to go along with a mid-decade gerrymander. All that shows how much the nasty guy still controls his voters. Republicans who risk defying him could also be removed. These lawmakers have hurt feelings and have nothing more to lose. They could be problematic for the nasty guy. For example, Cassidy has flipped his vote on the war powers resolution Democrats have been bringing up repeatedly to stop the war in Iran. Kos of Kos wrote the nasty guy is winning the wrong battles.

But forcing Republicans into total submission comes with a cost. Every GOP candidate will now carry the weight of Trump’s 38% approval rating and disastrous economic numbers. There’s no room left for distance, nuance, or independence. Trump is making every contest on the ballot about himself, and Republicans can’t win that choice. After Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress this November, Trump will discover that less-MAGA Republican lawmakers, however much he may hate them, are more useful as allies than as enemies.

The more a candidate grovels to the nasty guy the easier a Democrat can win. An Associated Press article posted on Kos announced the death of Barney Frank. He was 86. He served in the House for 32 years, first elected in 1980, representing Boston suburbs. He was able to get a lot done because he recognized what could be accomplished and didn’t turn things that couldn’t be done into a litmus test. He was a pioneer of LGBTQ rights and in 1987 voluntarily came out as gay, rather than being outed. He is also well known for his work in response to the 2007 economic collapse, in what became the Dodd-Frank Act that enhanced consumer protections and strengthened banks. Alas, the nasty guy has worked to undo many of the Act’s provisions, saying they were too onerous. Having an unashamed gay guy in Congress way back in 1987 is pretty cool!

I worked all day and can’t feed my family

In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Leonard Pitts, of his own Substack:

In her 2020 book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson argues that those of us who have accused white people of voting against their own interests are defining those interests differently than white voters do. We assume those interests would be economic, particularly in financially straitened rural communities. But Wilkerson contends that those voters actually have no greater interest than to maintain white dominance. When you’ve got nothing of social value other than the tint of your skin, to what lengths would you go to protect it? As historian Taylor Branch, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner, observes in Wilkerson’s book, “If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” The answer, according to the last election: 57 percent. About 61 million people.”

Emily Singer of Kos reported:

But while Republicans may have a short-term high, their racist gerrymandering appears to be having the unintended and politically damaging consequence of boosting Black voter turnout in the midterms, erasing any gains the GOP made with the voting bloc in 2024. In Louisiana—where Republicans went as far as to throw out already cast ballots and delay the House primaries to redraw a new map more favorable to their party—Black voter turnout is skyrocketing.

Andrew Mangan of Kos wrote “the era of gerrymaxxing is upon us.” If both parties took gerrymandering as far as they could which party would come out on top.

If all states where one party controls redistricting were to maximize their number of safe seats in that same way, Democrats would walk away with 106 seats to Republicans’ 184. To win a majority in the House, Republicans would then need just 34 more seats out of the 145 that reside in states where redistricting is not under single-party control. Democrats would need 112.

Add to that five states – Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Washington – that have a separate redistricting commission but have Democrats in control of the government and could bypass their commissions. Republicans have only two states where this is the case – Idaho and Montana.

[That] would raise Democrats to 170 seats to Republicans’ 187 in states with single-party control over redistricting. That narrows the gap to 17 seats in favor of the GOP, which is seven better for Democrats than where things stand now.

This is theory. State laws might prevent the worst gerrymandering. Another way to win is for Democrats to control more state legislatures to reduce Republican’s efforts to rig maps. And there are places where Democrats are close, such in Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

It is a crime against democracy that this is what electoral politics in America has come to. But until partisan gerrymandering can be outlawed nationwide, Democrats must fight back. And hopefully, one day, they can gerrymander themselves into enough power to ban the practice forever.

Mangan also reported on a poll showing the net favorable opinion of the Supreme Court justices. The first important number is how many respondents chose “Don’t know.” That varies from 27% for Thomas to 44% for Kagan. As for net favorable, the three liberal justices all have a positive view, ranging from +7 to +11 and all six conservative justices have a negative view, from -4 for Gorsuch to -10 for Roberts.

Much of this difference is likely due to more highly educated Americans being more likely to have an opinion on the justices. For example, 43% of those without a college degree don’t know who Ketanji Brown Jackson is, while the same is true for only 25% of college graduates. And in general, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to have college degrees. So it would make sense that they, in turn, have a more positive view of the court’s liberals and a less sunny view of its conservatives.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a black man with a ballot being directed to throw that ballot into a trash can marked “Colored” instead of a ballot box marked “White.” The sheriff holding the trash can lid says, “It ain’t racism. It’s redistricting.” In Tuesday’s roundup Kev quoted Muflih Hidayat of the Australia-based Discovery Alert discussing the closed Strait of Hormuz on the availability and price of fertilizer. The quote includes a chart that shows the Persian Gulf share of the global supply ranges from 13% to 36% depending on the type of fertilizer.

These figures represent physical product that is no longer moving through global trade channels. Unlike a price spike that can be managed through substitution or efficiency, a physical removal of supply at this scale has no quick remedy. The world cannot conjure nitrogen from alternative sources on a growing-season timeline.

Fertilizer plants in the rest of the world will have trouble manufacturing the stuff because much of it is based on liquified natural gas and 20% of that comes from the Persian Gulf. That shortage will also lower the availability of fertilizer. Garrett Owen of Salon reported on how that affects American farmers.

The price of chemicals necessary to produce fertilizer — phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, among others — has risen sharply since the start of the war, putting even more pressure on the nation’s small and independent farmers and producers. When the Iran war began, fertilizer prices jumped from around $400 per ton in early February to nearly $600 per ton in early March. It’s only risen since then. This would be a problem in any other year, but this year is especially bad. Coming off of 2025, market volatility saw farmers across the country hesitant to buy their year’s fertilizer early, opting instead to buy it closer to the start of the spring growing season. What had been an expensive fertilizer became unaffordable for many, even after accounting for the Trump administration’s bailout to farmers. […] An April report from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 70% of the nation’s farmers cannot afford the fertilizer needed to operate another year. The problem is especially acute in the Southeastern U.S., where just 19% of farmers and producers pre-booked their fertilizer shipments prior to the Iran war. As such, a whopping 78% report being unable to afford all the fertilizer they need.

Bobby Ghosh of his own Substack discussed Iran’s efforts to charge ships for passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The closure of the Strait, in Tehran’s plan, is no longer a temporary act of war. It is the beginning of a permanent revenue stream and a permanent claim of sovereignty over the most important oil chokepoint on the planet. The pitch is aimed less at shipping companies than at the Trump administration, the Gulf monarchies and governments of countries that get their hydrocarbons through the Strait: Tehran wants them all to accept that this is the new normal. “We own the Strait now,” it is saying. “The world will pay.” It is a bluff. Iran threatened to close Hormuz for 40 years and never did it; there was a reason for that, and that reason has not gone away. I argued in a column for Foreign Policy a month ago that the surprise element of the Hormuz weapon was already spent — that the world would adapt and the costs Iran could impose would dwindle. The picture today is harsher than that for Tehran. The world is not adapting to Iranian leverage. It is dismantling it.”

Oliver Willis of Kos reported far right podcaster Ben Shapiro lashed out at other conservative media people. The division seems to be between traditional conservatism and the MAGA movement. Willis wrote:

But what’s happening is even more contentious than simple infighting. Right-wing media had a sense of unity and purpose under Democratic presidents, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But in Trump’s second term, they’re finding it hard to keep up the sustained attacks against Democrats while also making excuses for Trump’s increasingly unpopular policies. ... The right-wing media world is fundamentally based on decades of grift, where a willingly receptive audience is sold falsehoods, smears, and bigotry—where they’re constantly told to buy this product or donate to this campaign, all with the purported goal of defeating the left. ... The increasingly extreme beliefs among the right—and the need to constantly one-up each other—have reached a natural end point...

Willis reports that New York Mayor Mamdani has opened the first of five city owned grocery stores. At the opening he said:

“I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th President Ronald Reagan. He famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” Mamdani said. He continued, “It’s a good quote. But I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’ We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table.” Mamdani’s statement was a direct rebuke of the right’s consistent attacks on government help that became mainstream orthodoxy following Reagan’s presidency.

One of the single most corrupt acts in American history

My Sunday movie was Twilight’s Kiss, a love story between two senior men, both with families. One scenario is two men who realize late in life that they are gay. That’s not the case here. Pak, 70, appears to have been cruising for quite a while. Hoi, 65, is a member of a group of senior gay men petitioning for a gay nursing home. Figuring out the setting of this film took me a while. Pak drives a taxi and doesn’t want to retire. In addition to “TAXI” on the side of the car there are Chinese characters. But he drove on the left, so this isn’t China. But their speech didn’t sound like Japanese. I realized what it was only a moment before the movie confirmed it – it’s set in Hong Kong. Pak has a wife, a daughter about to be married, and a son with his own daughter. Pak picks the girl up from school and they all frequently eat together. He doesn’t want to lose all that. Hoi, newly retired, was divorced a long time ago and raised a son on his own. That son, with wife and daughter, is now a member of a conservative Christian church. Hoi doesn’t want to lose that either. Pak meets Hoi in a park. Hoi wants more than a quick release. They become lovers, hiding it from their families, taking time together when they can. It’s a tender story. I enjoyed it. I finished the book We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian. I bought the book because I heard it had the same setting as the author’s book You Sound Be So Lucky which I read and discussed here. At the time I didn’t recognize that book is the sequel and still didn’t until I was done with this book and reread the opening of the other and saw character names I recognized. As in many series like this – a gay romance, well any romance – additional books in the series focus on a different couple with the main characters of one story serving as side characters in the next. The setting is 1958-1959 New York. As in the other book one of the characters is a reporter or writer for the New York Chronicle newspaper. In this case it is Nick. He’s there when the owner’s son Andrew III shows up and is assigned to the news room, where Nick works. Andy looks so lost and inept that Nick befriends him and serves as mentor. Their friendship deepens. When Andy can’t stand to live in his deceased mother’s apartment anymore Nick offers his spare bedroom. Nick is deeply closeted (this is a decade before Stonewall). That his older brother Mike is a cop only makes that worse. When Andy, who was engaged to a woman before she called off the wedding, begins to realize he is queer and has fallen for Nick, there are a lot of issues to work through. Andy is about to inherit the paper, though he feels he’s not cut out for the job. Will Andy being Nick’s boss work? Can Nick allow himself to love and consider a future when the society is so homophobic and he could lose so much? But this is a romance. It follows the formula, complete with happy ending. I enjoyed it, though I’m souring on romances and their formula in general. Sabrina Haake of the Daily Kos community lists the huge amount of grifting the nasty guy has been doing, from the “astonishing” number of stock trades quite likely based on insider information to the gilded phone he offered that now has updated terms that say thanks for your deposit but the phone may never actually appear. He’s even more corrupt than the infamous New York Tammany Hall. Emily Singer of Kos reported on those stock trades.

Financial disclosures released this past Thursday show Trump’s investment portfolio included over 3,600 stock trades made in the first three months of 2026. Wall Street experts say that the trade volume is so large that it looks more like a hedge fund’s balance sheet than that of a singular trader—especially the president of the United States. It also raises serious questions about insider trading. Trump’s stock portfolio is not in a blind trust, and many of the stocks he bought and sold were from companies whose leadership he has worked closely with in his capacity as president, including Intel, Nvidia, and Oracle. “I’m baffled,” Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance, told Bloomberg News. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

So, of course, the nasty guy is against passing a law that would ban members of Congress and the president from trading stocks. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy dropped his lawsuit against the IRS, where he demanded $10 billion for leaking tax returns. There is all kinds of wrong with that lawsuit, including he was essentially suing himself. Instead, he “settled” for a $1.776 billion (yeah, we know where that number comes from) “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate those who attacked the Capitol back in 2021 and were jailed for their crimes. Other grifty aspects of this deal: The money is to be disbursed by a committee and the nasty guy has control of the membership. The deal was not reviewed by a court. There will be no reporting of how much was given to whom, so fraud is almost guaranteed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Democrats do it too and this deal is just like an Obama-era settlement. Needham documents the important differences that show why one is legal and the other is pure corruption. NPR host A Martínez talked to reporter Carrie Johnson about the case, giving more detail than Needham had supplied. NPR host Leila Fadel spoke about all this with former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick.

FADEL: I'm curious if you agree with the assessment we just heard from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that this is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history. SANDICK: I do agree with it broadly. Nothing like this has ever happened before. For a president to sort of reach with his, you know, with one hand as the litigant and with another hand as the person who controls the government. And to take almost $2 billion and intend to use it, with almost no controls, to provide, you know, settlements, I guess is what they'll call it, to people who were engaged in the January 6 insurrection. So there's - I've never seen anything like this before.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman’s Substack:

This is what Democrats so often lack: Not something they can talk about today, not a proposal they can make, not a failure of the other side they can point to, but a big idea that helps voters understand and articulate both what the problem is, and most importantly, who is to blame. It’s the corruption, stupid. Trump’s corruption? Yes, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s a system, a rot, a disease, an explanation for nearly every complaint voters have. Corruption is why you can’t afford health care, why prices are too high, why there aren’t enough good jobs, why the government keeps failing at the things it’s supposed to do, and so much more. This is the big idea Democrats have been looking for.

Alas, a problem is that Democrats, by taking donations from billionaires, have been corrupted. Katie Rogers tweeted a link to an article in Vulture with the title and subhead:

The Feed is Fake That “viral” song, movie, influencer, and celebrity drama you scrolled by recently was likely the result of a stealth marketing campaign.

Rogers added a quote from the article

Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds — which is most of them, most of the time — can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.

A week ago Kos of Kos discussed a comment by the nasty guy made at a time when his approval ratings are quite low as voters blame him more and more for the bad economy.

President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter Tuesday, “To what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” It’s a fair question, right? ... “Not even a little bit,” he answered. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran: they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Kos says though the statement seems ludicrous it is among the most honest things he’s said. It’s also a gift for Democrats In Friday’s pundit roundup Dworkin quoted John Stoehr and his Editorial Board:

In the run up to the midterm elections, the Democrats accuse Donald Trump of broken promises. Among other examples, they cite rates of inflation that have wiped out wage gains. But the president kept his promise. A majority of voters wanted whiteness to be dominant again. That’s what he’s doing. The problem is that whiteness causes ruin, even for those who vote for it. You can’t have one without the other, but they didn’t believe it, because, to them, whiteness is prosperity. What they’re mad about now is their own desire backfiring on them. If the Democrats win in November, which seems likely, the leadership will have incentive to control everything rank-and-file Democrats say for the purpose of seeming reasonable to these voters, therefore retaining hopefully their support in advance of the 2028 election. The problem is there’s no way to seem reasonable to Americans who desire freedom from consequences.