We are all familiar with Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, as a peaceful protest objecting to a “rigged” and “stolen” election. Even now, Trump continues to try to seize state ballots to prove that he beat Biden in 2020.
The election wasn’t even close, neither in the popular vote nor the electoral college. Trump was in charge of the federal government. Republicans in Georgia recounted the ballots three times. More than 60 courts turned down Trump’s demands because he had no evidence of fraud.
One of the most prominent election deniers was Tina Peters in Colorado. Trump gave her a federal pardon, but she was convicted in a state court.
Tina Peters was County Clerk of Mesa County in Colorado from 2019 to 2023. Mesa County conducts a bipartisan audit after elections to assure there were no irregularities. Peters signed off on the audit. However, she met with individuals who insisted the results were rigged, and she allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s Dominion voting machines and copy their hard drives. She was arrested, charged, and found guilty of seven charges, four of which were felonies.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis just commuted her sentence but did not pardon her.
Tina Peters, perhaps the most prominent 2020 election denier who remains behind bars, is set to go free after Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, commuted her sentence on Friday.
The remarkable development cuts short the roughly nine-year sentence that Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was given after being convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election. Ms. Peters had tried to prove that the machines had been used to rig the contest against President Trump.
In an interview at the Colorado State Capitol, the governor said his commutation was not an attempt to placate Mr. Trump, who has leveled a barrage of funding cuts and policy attacks at Colorado in a hostile effort to free Ms. Peters.
Instead, Mr. Polis said he believed that Ms. Peters, a nonviolent first-time offender, had received too harsh a sentence because of her embrace of conspiracy theories about Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“She committed a crime; she deserves to be a convicted felon,” said Mr. Polis, who noted that he was not pardoning Ms. Peters. But, he added, “she was given an unusually harsh sentence.”
Mr. Polis called Ms. Peters’s beliefs about the 2020 election “dangerously incorrect,” but said they should not have been an element of her original sentencing.
“I think it’s an important message we send out, that supports free speech in our country,” he said.
Ms. Peters will be released on parole on June 1, the governor said.
Her impending freedom is the latest example of the steady erosion of efforts to hold supporters of Mr. Trump accountable for attempts to overturn the 2020 election. On his first day back in the White House last year, he granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Investigations into his actions, by both federal investigators and local law enforcement officials in Georgia, quickly collapsed.
But forcing the release of Ms. Peters, who was convicted of a state crime and not a federal one, had proved to be more challenging for Mr. Trump, who issued her a symbolic pardon. Her continued imprisonment undercut the president’s sweeping attempt to rewrite the history of the 2020 election.
The commutation by Mr. Polis was one of the most agonizing decisions about justice and punishment he has faced in his two terms as an against-the-grain Democratic governor. He has previously irked fellow Democrats by supporting the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and by vetoing dozens of bills passed by Colorado’s Democrat-controlled legislature.
Polis and Senator John Fetterman are both against-the-grain Democrats.
Trump is apparently willing to drop his demand for $10 billion from the IRS, which wouldn’t pass the smell test in a court of law (unless the judge was Aileen Cannon), if the Treasury sets up a $1.7 Billion fund to compensate anyone who was “wrongfully” prosecuted during Biden’s term.
That means that all of the MAGA crowd that attacked and defaced the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, will get not only a pardon but a payoff for their efforts to overthrow the Constitution. Also, the friends and allies of Trump who collaborated to nullify the 2020 election will be rewarded.
President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.
In addition to a public apology from the IRS, the compensation fund is believed to be the main condition for Trump to drop a series of legal actions he filed against the federal government, including the $10 billion lawsuit related to the 2019 leak of his tax returns as well as $230 million in legal claims related to the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and the Russia collusion investigation he faced during his first term in office, sources familiar with the ongoing deliberations said.
The settlement terms are expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims, sources said.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for President Trump’s legal team told ABC News, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment when contacted by ABC News. Representatives for the IRS and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment
This a great article that will uplift your spirits!
Jennifer Rubin is a journalist and lawyer who was hired by The Washington Post to be its conservative columnist. But Trump radicalized her, and she became a leading voice for liberal policies. After Jeff Bezos decided to placate and woo Trump, she resigned her job and started a new and wildly popular blog called “The Contrarian,” where she and other brilliant writers gathered to critique the madness of MAGA.
She recently posted an optimistic analysis of American politics. Despite the gerrymandering, despite horrible court decisions, Democrats are in a great position to wash the MAGA stain out of the nation’s government.
It’s the most optimistic piece I’ve read in a long while, and I think you will enjoy it too.
Rubin writes:
In a span of less than two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court (contravening the text and intent of the post-Civil War amendments and decades of court precedent) and the Virginia State Supreme Court (overturning the will of Virginia voters and inventing a new definition of “election”) have bulldozed through the electoral landscape to slant the 2026 midterm playing field in Republicans’ favor.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court demolished 60 years of progress in voting rights, robbed Black and Hispanic communities of the power to elect representatives of their own choosing, and aimed to decimate the ranks of non-white U.S. House members, state legislators, and local officials. This is nothing short of an attempt to reimpose white supremacy.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation…. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters.
As infuriating, partisan, and legally unsound as these rulings are, they are not the final word on either the midterms or the future of our multi-racial democracy.
The Midterms
Even with the loss in Virginia, Democrats’ five-seat pick up in California should more than counteract the original Texas re-redistricting (where two of the five seats Republicans sought to steal may well go to Democrats). And despite the Virginia decision, Democrats may still pick up one to two more seats under Virginia’s old map. The net pickup for Republicans currently is less than ten before Democrats pursue their own redistricting in New York, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland.
However, even with the advantage of, say, a dozen rigged seats, Republicans are unlikely to keep the House majority. Since 2024, Democrats have swung the electorate substantially in their direction, over-performing in comparison to Kamala Harris in 193 of 226 state legislative races, by 20 points in some cases. On average, Democrats are doing more than 10 points better than they did in 2024. (Brookings’ William A. Galston wrote: “In the six special elections for the House conducted in 2025-2026, the swing toward Democratic candidates averaged about 15 points, while the swing toward Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia averaged 14 points.”)
More than 20 Republican House seats were won by less than 10 points in 2024; 43 Republicans won by less than 15%. Given the electoral shift, Democrats’ list of targeted seats expands each week.
The New York Times reported that gerrymandering “tells only part of the story” about the midterms. While “Democrats could end up losing at least half a dozen safe seats, and possibly more,” depending on new maps drawn in Southern states, Republicans face gale-force “headwinds” thanks to Donald Trump’s atrocious approval numbers, his reviled Iran war, soaring gas and other consumer prices, snatching away healthcare coverage from millions, disaffection of Hispanic voters, and rampant corruption.
In short, gerrymandering, however outrageous, will not be enough to save Republicans if Democrats generate huge turnout, especially among those voters enraged that they have been stripped of voting power. (As Hungary demonstrated, a determined opposition can overcome a raft of unfair impediments imposed by a corrupt, unpopular regime.)
Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans know that the MAGA cult has no message — which is why MAGA lawmakers and courts must rig the election to cement white supremacy. That’s all they’ve got.
Democrats have their targets
The enormity of reversing 60 years of progress on voting rights necessitates a new era of intense organizing and public education — a new civil right movement to counter MAGA’s court-imposed Jim Crow. That effort kicks off with a grassroots National Day of Action on Saturday, May 16, in Alabama. Organizers declared, “The dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that we have unfinished business. The fight is ours and we are going to finish it.” Scores of democracy groups, faith-based organizations, and civil rights organizations will rally to oppose Jim Crow redistricting and to support multi-racial democracy.
The goal: Democrats must win, and win big, in 2026 and 2028. Senate seats, governorships, and other statewide offices cannot be gerrymandered. A massive registration and turnout-the-vote operation must expand deep into Republican areas, appealing to disgruntled independents and Republicans while firing up the base. Democrats will need a broad, inclusive electoral coalition to pursue bold reform. As former attorney general Eric Holder likes to say, progressives “need to be comfortable with acquiring power and using power.”
What then? If Democrats come out of the 2028 election with House and Senate majorities, and the presidency, they will have all the motivation and tools required to reverse the slide into Jim Crow, beginning with substantial reform of the discredited Supreme Court. The MAGA justices’ willful misreading of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution to concoct a “color blind” interpretation of voting rights (coupled with their monstrous expansion of executive power and abuse of the emergency docket) should unify democracy defenders on the urgency of Supreme Court reform through court expansion, term limits, revised appellate jurisdiction, and ethics reform.
The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy. If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people. They will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself.
With the election of aggressive Senate Democrats running in 2026 and 2028, Democrats should have little trouble carving out a filibuster exception, especially if they win by large margins that affirm voters’ rejection of MAGA assault on pluralistic democracy.
Though the tools to sustain multi-racial democracy may be different from those employed in the 1960s, Madeleine Greenberg of the Campaign Legal Center reminded us: “Every generation has faced attempts to restrict access to the ballot box, and every generation has pushed back.” If Democrats win elections decisively and fully exercise the power they obtain, they can fix what MAGA white supremacists have broken. Only then can we fulfill the promise of pluralistic democracy.
The midterm elections of 2026 are approaching. Start working now to reclaim our democracy! Our time is now.
Jan Resseger is a careful researcher in Ohio who tracks education issues with careful attention to facts, details, and context. In this post, she notes that public schools have become the targets of ideologues in state legislatures and even the U.S. Department of Education. All too often, politicians use the public schools as a punching bag, but know nothing of their work or their accomplishments. werethe fsmiliar with the work and the accomplishments of teachers, she believes, state and federal officials would thank teachers instead disparaging them.
In recent local elections, voters in nearly 2/3 of school districts turned down relatively small property tax increases to fund the schools, usually repairs and physical upgrades. Legislators said this proved that voters are not happy with public schools, but Jan believes the election results reflect the squeeze of inflation and affordability caused by Trump’s policies and by the state’s failure to fund public schools adequately as it continues to expand charters and vouchers. Ohio has a Republican supermajority in both houses of its legislature, and they are eagerly funding charters and vouchers despite disappointing results.
As Jan writes, if the critics were familiar with the daily work of teachers, they would be champions of public schools, not critics.
She writes:
Attacks on the nation’s public schools fill the news. After last week’s May primary election in Ohio, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee reportedly blamed public schools for a statewide property tax revolt: “(T)hrowing money at schools stuck in an old way of thinking won’t solve any problems.”
And at the federal level at the end of April, the U.S. Department of Education, by amending federal guidance, stopped defining public school teachers and administrators as professionals by setting formal regulations that will mean graduate students in education cannot borrow as much money to pay for graduate school as others the Trump administration defines as professionals. Education Week’s Evie Blad reports that a new federal regulation finalized by the U.S. Department of Education would “exclude education from a list of ‘professional’ graduate degrees subjected to higher loan limits… The final rule lists the following graduate degrees as ‘professional’: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology, and clinical psychology.” The new rule will make it harder for educators to afford graduate school by setting “new limits on federal student loans” for teachers and school administrators seeking advanced degrees to enhance their content knowledge and meet requirements for licensure.
The Department of Education must publish in the Federal Register new rules that are being proposed, and receive public comments prior to making the new rules final. In the case of redefining graduate programs in education as non-professional, there was considerable pushback from the public. Secretary McMahon’s department ignored the comments. For K-12 Dive, Anna Merod and Ben Unglesbee report: “Commenters told the department that impacted degree programs include master of arts in teaching, master of education, education specialist, master of library sciences, and doctor of education… The department’s final rule said the agency received many public comments calling for including education as a professional degree or to otherwise allow higher borrowing levels for students pursuing advanced education degrees. In their arguments, commenters cited teacher shortages and the importance of graduate programs for licensure advancement… Additionally commenters noted that career changers who want to enter the profession pursue master’s degrees in education for certification, especially in high-need areas.”
Many of us value public education, but increasingly we take these institutions for granted. While schools are essential to our neighborhoods, our communities and our children, most of us have not been inside a school for years due to lockdowns during our society’s epidemic of gun violence. Constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black recently shared some statistics which ought to remind us why public schools are so essential and at the same time so vulnerable to politics: “(A)s the largest government institution in the United States, public education is an obvious potential target of those aiming to undermine faith in government institutions. Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.”
The Attack on Public Schools
The late Mike Rose, who devoted his long career at UCLA to preparing future members of the teaching profession, worried about what has, since the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, been a political attack on the nation’s public schools: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here. Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination…” (Why School? 2014 edition, pp 203-204)
Rose responded with a three year series of visits across the United States to the classrooms of excellent teachers identified by academics, by their peers, and by school district leaders. In the book which grew out of his school visits, Possible Lives, Rose described teachers at work and reflected on what school teachers do: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost. It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)
What do teachers do?
Here instead, however, is what those three years showed Rose about school teachers and the complexity of their work: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.” (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)
In a comprehensive 2014 summary, Rose defines what teachers do: “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”
Reacquainting ourselves with Mike Rose’s thinking is one way for us all to consider the complexity of public schools as institutions and the challenges faced by the professionals who spend six or seven hours every day working with our children. I fear that few of the state legislators and federal officials who deride teachers, who insult teachers by denying their professional status, and who chronically underfund public schools have recently spent much time visiting a public school.
Duaa Eldeib, health reporter for ProPublica, reports that parents who refuse the vitamin K shot normally administered to babies, are putting their infants’ lives at risk. Influenced by the anti-vaccine rhetoric that started during the pandemic, some parents no longer trust the standard of care developed and validated over decades by scientists and doctors.
How many children will RFK Jr. kill before he is either fired for incompetence or has four full years to discredit necessary medical care?
They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.
Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.
Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.
None of it was enough.
At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.
Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.
Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.
Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.
The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.
In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.
Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.
“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.
“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. “Vitamin K at birth,” the spokesperson added, “remains the standard of care.”
Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.
Nearly a century’s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.
Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic member of the board of the Federal Comminications Commission (FCC) took the unusual step of writing a letter to the CEO of ABC to warn him about the federal government’s goal of censoring the media. Early on in the second Trump administration, Trump sued ABC because one of its hosts, George Stephanopolous, asked Trump about “rape” charges in the E. Jean Carroll case, when Trump denied the charge and even denied the charge of defaming her, of which he was convicted. ABC paid Trump $16 million to persuade him to drop the lawsuit.
But the payoff did not buy peace. The FCC has now opened an investigation of ABC because of its talk show “The View,” which it accuses of bias.
ABC has been a victim of a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” by the Trump administration, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez told Josh D’Amaro, chief executive of Disney , the network’s parent company.
The FCC under Republican Chairman Brendan Carr has been weaponized to pressure “a free and independent press and all media into submission,” Gomez wrote in a letter sent to D’Amaro on Monday and viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The lone Democratic commissioner, Gomez has been an outspoken critic of many of Carr’s actions, which she has alleged are aimed at pressuring broadcasters for political purposes.
The letter to D’Amaro comes in the wake of several investigations into Disney and ABC initiated by Carr’s FCC, including whether the talk show “The View” should continue to be granted certain exemptions as a news program…
Gomez told D’Amaro that these investigations and incidents, along with an FCC decision to reinstate a complaint into ABC’s moderating of a 2024 debate between then-candidate Donald Trump and opponent Kamala Harris, are “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions….”
The FCC is also investigating whether Disney has engaged in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that run afoul of the agency’s equal-employment-opportunity rules….
Gomez said the administration’s attacks on the network began in earnest with a defamation lawsuit against the network and “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos that ABC settled for $16 million, including legal fees.
“That settlement did not buy you peace,” Gomez wrote, adding “you cannot buy this Administration’s favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up.”
In her letter, Gomez pledged to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”
While Gomez is a frequent critic of Carr, it is highly unusual for a government regulator to tell a company under investigation that the probe is without merit.
The investigations, Gomez said, are unlikely to succeed but that is not the point.
“The threat is the point. As sitting Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently reminded us by invoking Justice Thurgood Marshall: ‘The value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs, not that it drops,’” she wrote.
Trump must spend a lot of time redesigning the nation’s Capitol. Tearing down the East Wing, without asking anyone’s permission; building a “triumphal arch” that will tower over the area; paving over the Rose Garden installed by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy; turning the historic White House Treaty Room, where important documents were signed, into a guest bedroom.
He is treating the White House as if it were his private property, when in fact he has a four-year lease on a historic home.
His latest project is to drain and repaint the reflecting pool that connects the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. He decided that the pool should be painted swimming pool blue. It’s been drained and the painting has begun.
The contract was awarded without competitive bids. Trump chose a swimming pool contractor who worked on the pool at one of his clubs.
Trump seems to think that he can do whatever he wants, without regard to law, tradition, or rules. Not for him!
The Justice Department alleges in the criminal case brought last month that the Southern Poverty Law Center — which has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump and other Republicans for labeling right-wing organizations as hate groups — defrauded donors by not informing them of secret payments to hate group members to act as informants.
The Justice Department alleges that SPLC has funneled $3 million to hate groups like the KKK, Unite the Right, and the Aryan Nations. SPLC also listed Moms for Liberty as a hate group, and M4L said that SPLC should be shut down.
One of the specialties of SPLC is compiling a list of hate groups and individuals who spread hate.
The odd thing about the suit is that SPLC paid infiltrators, not the groups themselves.
This is a brazen assault on a significant civil rights group that has tangled with hate-groups for more than 50 years.
It is also a demonstration of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department, turning it into a partisan cudgel.
Some large corporations have paused their charitable gifts to SPLC, including a division of Schwab that manages charitable gifts, Fidelity, and vanguard.
It was noted on Twitter that Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy advisor, is in the SPLC list of extremists.
There are moments in history when legislation stops being merely controversial and becomes openly barbaric. Tennessee’s House Bill 570 is one of those moments. Proposed by two Republican lawmakers, this bill seeks to classify abortion as homicide punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, or even the death penalty. There are no exceptions for rape. There are no exceptions for incest. There are no exceptions for the health of the mother. This is not a policy debate. This is a war on women, and it is being waged in broad daylight. But Tennessee is not an outlier. It is a preview.
The good news is that the Republican-dominated legislature killed the proposal. They would not go along with the insane idea that a woman should spend her life in prison or get the death penalty as punishment for an abortion.
A Tennessee House committee rejected an anti-abortion bill Tuesday that would have criminalized women for seeking abortion procedures, potentially allowing them to be charged with murder.
The bill failed for lack of support and didn’t come to a vote in the Population Health Subcommittee, leading supporters to sing hymns and protest in the Cordell Hull Legislative Building…
Groups such as End Abortion Now and the Foundation to Abolish Abortion that supported Barrett’s bill blasted the Republican supermajority legislature for claiming to be “pro-life” but refusing to support the legislation. They expect to revive the bill in 2027..
Kevin Cullen, a columnist for The Boston Globe, lambasted the Washington press corps for inviting Trump to be their speaker. What did they expect he would say? Did they want to be insulted as “enemies of the people” and “fake news”?
Sure, it’s customary to invite the President. But did anyone expect Trump to forget about his hatred of the media? Cullen thinks they should be more careful in choosing a speaker, like picking someone who appreciates the First Amendment.
The biggest one being: Why was Trump there in the first place?
Like all fascists, Trump hates a free press and has done his level best to humiliate, intimidate, harm, cancel, and even prosecute journalists and news outlets. Like all authoritarians, he has tried to limit press scrutiny of himself and his administration.
So what on earth were the White House press corps thinking when it invited this guy to their annual dress-up party?
It’s like inviting your obnoxious neighbor to a family barbecue after he relieves himself in your pool.
It’s like inviting a jackal to a tea party for a bunch of cute little bunny rabbits.
In 2017, after a Republican congressional candidate in Montana assaulted and body slammed a reporter for The Guardian, Trump voiced support for the attacker, saying, “He’s my kind of guy.”
In 2020, after MSNBC’s Ali Velshi was hit by a rubber bullet during a protest after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump called it a “beautiful sight.” Trump misidentified Velshi as being with CNN, but, hey, all the fake news is all the same to Trump anyway.
At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in November 2024, Trump stood behind bulletproof glass and reassured his supporters he was safe, noting that anyone who tried to shoot him would have to shoot through a bunch of journalists standing in front of him, adding, “I wouldn’t mind that so much.”
Even more recently, after Saturday’s attack, Trump insulted CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and questioned her professionalism, calling her a “disgrace” for asking a question about the gunman’s manifesto.
If you’re noticing a pattern here, Trump really doesn’t like women journalists who question him.
I could go on — and I haven’t even mentioned the shakedowns of all the networks, and Trump using his influence so Edward R. Murrow’s storied CBS News becomes more like Fox News Lite — but you get the point.
So what did the Washington press corps think was going to happen when it gave Trump a platform at its shindig?
Did they think he would have some Jeffersonian conversion, pronouncing that if given the choice between a government without journalism or journalism without government, he would choose the latter?
Trump hates a free press for those very same reasons. He doesn’t want the public to know about his cons, about him using government to enrich his family and his cronies. He can’t stand the idea of the press, or anyone, questioning his judgment, or pointing out the folly of his ways, about him starting a needless war when he ran for president claiming he would never start a needless war.
Trump resembles not Thomas Jefferson, but George Jefferson, the TV character who hated everyone and everything. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest Trump is more familiar with George Jefferson than Thomas Jefferson.
Why give Trump a platform to spew his fascist hatred of a robust, free press?….
