Completely Unfair

It appears that as sick of SecDef Pete Hegseth's Pentagon staffers are, they find his overbearing wife Jennifer even more aggravating that Captain Cirrhosis.

It's gotten to the point that she is widely referred to as, "Yoko Ono." 

Pentagon insiders are sounding the alarm over the “mess” engulfing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s department — as his wife reportedly tightens her grip on both her husband and his public image.

“She's like his parole officer and PR agent all at once,” one source told the Daily Mail, which detailed Jennifer Hegseth’s unusually powerful but unofficial presence inside the Trump Pentagon.

“Now there's a woman with an extremely tight leash on the man she married,” another source told the outlet Thursday.

Staffers have reportedly nicknamed Jennifer Hegseth “Yoko Ono,” comparing her to John Lennon’s fiercely protective wife. She has accompanied her husband to meetings with foreign defense officials, reportedly taken notes and photos during some discussions, and was included in a sensitive Signal chat about U.S. military operations.

This is completely unfair ……… to Yoko Ono.

Now there is a sentence that I could not have imagined ever saying just a few years ago. 

Fascists Gotta Fascist

A judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cannot threaten prosecution of people who criticized them.

The fact taht they needed to have a court tell them this is f%$#ed up beyond belief.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may no longer issue a “warning notice” – threatening prosecution against a US citizen – for criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal judge in Washington DC ruled on Tuesday.

Judge Rudolph Contreras sided with David Streever, a New York man who accused DHS officials of violating his first amendment rights when they showed up first at his home in June with a “warning notice”, claiming he made a threat against former ICE director Todd Lyons, and then to a hotel where Streever and his young daughter were staying.

The notice and visits were in response to an email Streever sent Lyons in January, after federal agents fatally shot two US citizens amid an immigration crackdown in Minnesota. In the email, Streever called Lyons a “monstrous human being”, compared him to Nazi and warned him that his own conscience would “eat himself alive”.

Contreras ruled the notice “practically shouts that Mr Streever may be prosecuted if he continues to engage in his political speech”.

“Americans have long voiced their displeasure with their government. The Declaration of Independence itself is a list of grievances between Americans and the British government. And Americans have not always indulged in the elevated prose of the Declaration. Government officials have long endured ‘vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks.’ Today is no different,” Contreras wrote.

The court order is limited in that it prohibits the DHS, its secretary, Markwayne Mullin, or ICE from issuing another “warning notice”, making similar threats or pursuing prosecution for his speech while Streever’s case continues in court.

These mooks need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

My Latest Attempt to Get Banned from Twitter

The use of the term, "Murdered," here is 100% accurate.
His shutdown of USAID was part of a felony conspiracy to conceal his corruption, and the deaths were foreseeable, which makes it first degree murder.https://t.co/c7Pl2u4ges

— Not the Apartheid Emerald Heir Pedo Guy/MG Saroff (@40_Years) July 12, 2026

Roll Tape!


A Backup Screen Shot

It appears that Elon Musk finds it highly offensive when people blame him for the deaths of thousands of children as a result of his Jihad against USAID.

I made the obvious point he did not kill thousands of children, he murdered them with premeditation.

It's felony murder.  He corruptly shut down USAID because they were investigating his ties to fraud and human trafficking in the Ukraine.

The underlying felony (felonies) are things like obstruction of justice, think about how Martha Stewart went to jail for altering her appointment calendar.

It was foreseeable that this had a high likelihood of causing deaths in exactly the same way that robbing a bank with a firearm had a high likelihood of causing a death.

Let's look at the relevant statute, 18 U.S. Code § 1111 (a):

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.

Any other murder is murder in the second degree.

  

I know that my quest to get banned from Twitter is a bit quixotic and a little bit silly, but I gotta be me.

Adjusting the Facts to Match Their Ideology

The Trump administration is dismantling a network of ocean sensors that monitor conditions related to anthropogenic climate change, because if they plug their ears and close their eyes, there is no problem.

Attempting to suppress information about an ongoing planet-wide catastrophe will not end well.

The Trump administration is targeting one of the world’s most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data—the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times, ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.

In a statement dated May 21, the OOI confirmed that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had begun a “descoping” process, including removing all in-water infrastructure from four of the OOI’s five deployed arrays. “This plan includes the removal of all in-water infrastructure from the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance and Pioneer Arrays, subject to ship scheduling and other operational constraints,” the OOI said in the statement. This covers instruments stationed in the Pacific, as well as others in the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast and Greenland and Iceland. The initiative was originally meant to run for 25 years.

In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the intention was not to cancel the OOI but to transition to a “nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

The NSF statement is best described as an attempt to get a, "Bullsh%$ bingo," win.

The suppression of this data, which is literally right out of the Project 2025 playbook, will cripple climate science for decades.

Yes

In response to the question, "Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?" the answer is, "Yes."

DOGE killed the programs fighting the flesh eating maggots, because they all are flesh eating maggots.

New World screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that burrow in healthy tissue of cattle, deer, horses and other warm-blooded animals, was discovered in La Pryor, Texas.

The case is the only one that has been identified in the country so far, according to the USDA, but a wider outbreak could severely impact already-suffering cattle numbers and put even more of a strain on ranchers as they spend money on treatment and prevention.

In turn, the price of beef—which has gone up roughly 75% since December 2020—could continue to rise.

The U.S. cattle herd is already at its lowest level in 75 years, and a major screwworm outbreak would cause more calves to die, adult cattle to lose weight and limit what animals are suitable for sale, meaning fewer pounds of beef reaching the market.

Even without a major outbreak, containment efforts may cause the government to implement widespread cattle movement restrictions, limit border crossings or impose quarantine on certain herds, all of which would further impact the nation’s cattle numbers.

The return of screwworm comes after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, launched by the Trump administration, last year cut funding for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.

The funding was axed days before the U.S. ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).

Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.

If the next Democratic President does not prosecute the sh%$ out of these folks, they will have betrayed their obligations at the most basic level.

So Much for Judicial Independence

The Trump administration just fired a number of immigration judges after they followed the law when making their decisions.

That seems just a little bit ……… Fascist.

It's certainly an explicit attempt to intimidate judges into breaking the law. 

The Trump administration has fired two immigration judges who dismissed high-profile deportation cases against international students who had advocated for Palestinians.

The firings of the judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, marked the latest efforts by the Trump administration to reshape the country’s immigration courts.

The administration has dismissed dozens of immigration judges and, according to those on the bench, has put judges under pressure to deny asylum claims and order deportations. Unlike federal judges in the independent judicial branch, immigration judges work for the Justice Department and are hired and fired by the attorney general.

The two judges, who were terminated alongside four colleagues on Friday, oversaw two high-profile cases filed by the government against the students, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi.

 If there is an election in 2028, and if the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) doesn't shoot itself in the foot again, every one of these bastards, from Trump, to Miller, to Bondi, to Blanche, to Rubio need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

………Which Would Be Replaced by Something Even More Bizarrely Inexplicable

I am referring, of course, to the fact that Markwayne Mullin has been confirmed as the new Secretary of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi "Ice Barbi" Noem.

I did not think that it would possible to find someone worse than Noem.

I was misinformed.

The Senate confirmed Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Monday to serve as the next secretary of Homeland Security, putting the Oklahoma Republican in charge of immigration enforcement, one of President Trump's biggest priorities in his second term.

Mullin won the confirmation in a 54-45 vote. He will be the second secretary to lead the department during this Trump administration, replacing Kristi Noem. He comes to the helm in the midst of a shutdown that has left 100,000 of the department's more than a quarter-million employees working without pay.

Reality exceeds my capability for cynicism yet again. 

Good News

US Judge Brian Murphy has struck down the decision by HHS to remove vaccines from their recommendations.

This is cause for hope, at least until the Supreme Court overrules with a tersely worded shadow docket ruling. 

In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a federal judge in Massachusetts on Monday blocked the government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the last year by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The ruling also reversed, at least for the time being, all decisions made by the panelists that Mr. Kennedy appointed to the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on which vaccines Americans should take. The court decision will prevent the committee from meeting later this week, as it was scheduled to do.

The judge’s ruling brought an abrupt halt to the major changes that Mr. Kennedy, who has long been skeptical of vaccines, had set in motion, upending national vaccine policy and making sweeping revisions to the recommendations for what shots are given and when. Those included cutting down the number of diseases covered by routine immunization, and restricting access to Covid vaccines, two pillars of Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda.

In his decision, Judge Brian Murphy, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, noted that the vaccine committee has historically made decisions through careful review of scientific evidence, “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements." But, he added “unfortunately, the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

………

Judge Murphy made the ruling in a lawsuit brought by six medical organizations, that contended Mr. Kennedy and his appointees had made “arbitrary and capricious” changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, bypassing the careful, evidence-based practice that in the past has underpinned the recommendations.

"Arbitrary and capricious," pretty much defines RFJ, Jr,s whole life.

Today in What the Fuck

When I see a headline like, "Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog,"  I knew that I had to click through.

Law enforcement has quickly embraced AI for everything from drafting police reports to facial recognition.

The results have been predictably dismal. In one particularly glaring — and unintentionally comedic — instance, the police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog.

As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

Gee, I wonder what happened.

OK, I don't.  The headline was a spoiler. 

Neither Eric Arthur Blair nor Franz Kafka Would Be Surprised

What can you say about the fact that Halliburton filing an ISDS (Investor–State Dispute Settlement) complaint against Venezuela to revover their damage from US sanctions.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know." 

This is functionally identical to murdering one's parent and then asking for mercy as an orphan. 

The ISDS is an administrative secret court that allows for private investors to sue governments for engaging actions that might negatively effect their profits.

In this case Halliburton is suing because the Venezuelan Bolívar was devalued and they had to leave the country because of US sanctions.

On December 11, as the Trump administration was escalating its military campaign against Venezuela by trying to impose a total siege on the country’s oil and gas sector, the US oilfield services company Halliburton quietly filed a suit against Venezuela at the World Bank’s international arbitration court, ICSID.

Long-standing readers are well-versed on investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), a topic we’ve covered in depth over the past decade or so. As Yves pointed out in a recent post on Russia’s decision to use ISDS to go after the EU’s attempts to permanently confiscate Russian assets, the judgments made in these dispute settlements overwhelmingly benefit investors:

These treaties, designed to override the laws and regulations of states in order to give protected status to investors, make a mockery of national sovereignity. ISDS disputes draw on a small community of arbitrators, many of whom were involved in drafting ISDS treaty provisions, with hearing held in secret and typically not appealable. The rising (and correct) perception that the rules were gutting labor rights and environmental protection was instrumental to stopping their reach being extended further in the US. But it seems no existing ISDS provisions have been unwound.

What makes this case particularly pernicious is that a large part of the losses and foregone profits Halliburton is seeking to claw back stems from Washington’s economic sanctions on Venezuela. What’s more, the case was filed at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, to which Venezuela has not even been party since 2012.

To say that this is Orwellian or Kafkaesque would be an understatement.

………

There is currently very little information available on the ISDS case filed by Halliburton. The following is an excerpt of a firewalled article published by the Global Arbitration Review that was translated into Spanish and posted by the Madrid-based legal firm Bullard Falla Excurra on its LinkedIn page (translated back into English by yours truly, emphasis also my own):

On December 11, 2025, Halliburton filed a claim against Venezuela with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) under the Barbados-Venezuela Bilateral Investment Treaty. The case will be processed under the Additional Facility Rules, given that Venezuela withdrew from the ICSID Convention in 2012. The dispute stems from Halliburton’s gradual withdrawal from the Venezuelan market between 2016 and 2020, after reporting losses of approximately US$199 million. These losses were attributed to the devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar and the deteriorating economic and political conditions in Venezuela, which affected its ability to meet payments to its clients, including PDVSA, the state-owned oil company. Halliburton also notes that changes in the Venezuelan government’s exchange rate and US sanctions further complicated the viability of its operations in the country. Halliburton, which had operated in Venezuela since 1940, was forced to cease operations in 2020 [by US sanctions], although it maintained local assets and equipment in the country.

It seems to me that filing an action in a court that has no jurisdiction in response to actions that were taken by a party not a party to the action is fraud, and perhaps attempted extortion.

While Venezuela does not have much in the way of foreign reserves, it seems to me that they do have a court system to charge the people involved, including the members sitting on the ISDS panel with fraud and extortion, and then offer rewards in the low 6 figures for their delivery to Caracas.

Well, That Explains His Outrage at the EU

As the reader(s) of my blog are no doubt aware, I am not a fan of the EU, but I am even less of a fan of Elon Musk, who just got fined €120 million for violations of the Digital Services Act.

Short version, the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™'s blue check-mark plan is deceptive and facilitates fraud.

Whoocoodanode that the biggest bunco artist of the 21st century could be facilitating fraud?

Elon Musk’s X became the first large online platform fined under the European Union’s Digital Services Act on Friday.

The European Commission announced that X would be fined nearly $140 million, with the potential to face “periodic penalty payments” if the platform fails to make corrections.

A third of the fine came from one of the first moves Musk made when taking over Twitter. In November 2022, he changed the platform’s historical use of a blue checkmark to verify the identities of notable users. Instead, Musk started selling blue checks for about $8 per month, immediately prompting a wave of imposter accounts pretending to be notable celebrities, officials, and brands.

Today, X still prominently advertises that paying for checks is the only way to “verify” an account on the platform. But the commission, which has been investigating X since 2023, concluded that “X’s use of the ‘blue checkmark’ for ‘verified accounts’ deceives users.”

This violates the DSA as the “deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors,” the commission wrote. 

For Elon, it's just professional courtesy for fellow professionals in his field. 

Interestingly, the commission concluded that X made it harder to identify bots, despite Musk’s professed goal to eliminate bots being a primary reason he bought Twitter. Perhaps validating the EU’s concerns, X recently received backlash after changing a feature that accidentally exposed that some of the platform’s biggest MAGA influencers were based “in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world, often linked to online scams and schemes,” Futurism reported.

Again, this is a feature, not a bug.

Although the DSA does not mandate the verification of users, “it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place,” the commission said. X now has 60 days to share information on the measures it will take to fix the compliance issue.

Expect no compliance, followed by malicious compliance.

X’s fine also included DSA violations due to the lack of transparency and accessibility of its ad repository. The DSA requires platforms to make certain details about ads public so that researchers and users can “detect scams, hybrid threat campaigns, coordinated information operations, and fake advertisements.”

Rather than making that information accessible, X apparently was guilty of “excessive delays in processing” when researchers sought access. And once the data was shared, X excluded “critical information”—”such as the content and topic of the advertisement, as well as the legal entity paying for it.”

That makes it harder to determine who’s paying for what ads. In the context of election ads, X’s failures risked obscuring the origins of false or misleading claims in ad campaigns, EuroNews reported.

Again, a future, not a bug.  If it weren't for fraud, Ecch would not be selling any ads at all. 

If there is any justice in the world (spoiler, there isn't) Elon would spend the remainder of his life in prison, as would Ellison, Zuckerberg, Andreeson, Trump, etc.

Self Regulation is to Regulation as Self Importance is to Importance

Case in point, the Virginia Bar, which has refused to investigate a complaint against not-interim-US-Attorney for flagrant violations of legal codes of professional conduct.

When you have lawyers policing lawyers, you have no policing nor any legal professional standards.

In case anyone was wondering whether state bars would step up to hold anyone accountable if the Trump administration sends cronies to cosplay as U.S. Attorneys and fire career prosecutors so they can file bad faith criminal cases, the Virginia State Bar has helpfully answered: LOL, no.

Last month, the Campaign for Accountability filed ethics complaints in both Virginia and Florida against Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer serving as the Interim-But-Not-Legally-Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging she’d violated multiple rules supposedly governing members of the bar. In response, Virginia sent a polite letter explaining that it would pass on looking into allegations of a pattern of misconduct and would rather leave it to the courts. “Whether criminal indictments were obtained through material misrepresentations of fact and done for political purposes falls within the authority of the court to determine and not this office.”

………

In fairness to the Virginia State Bar, the most egregious allegations — the ones involving Halligan’s illegal actions as a squatter pretending to be a U.S. Attorney and her shady effort to ramrod through a falsified indictment in a desperate bid to beat the statute of limitations — may well have been properly within the court’s purview. While every adult with a frontal lobe already suspected that the judge would find that Halligan’s misadventures compromised the cases, there’s nothing wrong with the state bar exercising prudence and steering clear of those allegations until the court acted. For the record, the federal judge presiding over these matters has since confirmed that Halligan possessed no more authority than “any private citizen off the street — attorney or not” and kicked the indictments as void.

The problem with the “we have to defer to the courts” excuse from the Virginia Bar is that the ethics complaint raises more issues beyond the status of the indictments. Issues that explicitly fall outside the authority of the court to determine. By shrugging off the whole complaint over the limited issue of the indictments, the Virginia Bar created a troubling zone of unaccountability.

The purpose of a state bar, much like it is for other private professional groups with authority to supervise their members is 2 fold:

1. Protect their members from accountability.
2. Ensure that these professional organizations retain their power and prestige.

 

Bullet Dodged ……… For Now

So, despite RFJ Jr.'s attempts to stack the deck with anti-vax nut jobs, Hepatitis B vaccination for infants was not rolled back by his pet committee.

My guess is that right now Captain Brain is quoting Max Bialystock right now, "Where did I go right?"

The vaccine advisory panel newly reconfigured by Robert F. Kennedy is delaying its decision on whether to continue recommending that children universally receive their first dose for hepatitis B vaccination at birth.

In a surprise move Friday morning, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) tabled its scheduled vote over the merits of universal hepatitis B vaccination starting at birth—a policy first enshrined by the ACIP over 30 years ago. Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others strongly pushed back on the change being debated by the ACIP, which would have recommended children whose mothers test negative not receive the vaccine until at least one month of age.

They still opened up the door for a massive explosion in Measles, because they voted to move from the MMRV vaccine to 2 separate shots, which will doubtless result in more missed vaccinations and greater incidence of the diseases.

Quote of the Day

We Already Have an Economy Which Largely Floats on Scams. I’m Not Sure How Important Accurate and Timely Inflation Data Really Is!

—Atrios, on the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is delaying an important report on inflation.

He's right about our economy.  The American economi, "floats on scams," and rent seeking, and other generally non-productive activity.

The Cruelty is the Purpose

It turns out that providing WiFi internet hot spots to poor kids is pretty popular, so Ted Cruze could not get a bill killing it through Congress, so he and FCC Chairman Brendan Casrr are conspiring to kill it administratively.

This is all about being cruel for its own sake:

Last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.

The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny.

Enter Ted Cruz, who recently tried to kill the program based on a bunch of lies and gibberish about how the program was somehow “censoring Conservative viewpoints.” Cruz’s proposal didn’t make it through the House of Representatives, but Trump’s extremist lackey at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now picking up the campaign:

“Today, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr asked his commission colleagues to vote on two items that would reverse the agency’s unlawful, Biden-era decisions to expand COVID spending programs,” Carr’s announcement said. “Those FCC decisions spent scarce taxpayer dollars on funding unsupervised screen time for kids without accounting for the significant attendant risks.”

………

Again, this program helped kids in poor, rural communities do their homework via portable hotspots doled out at the school library to folks out of range of traditional broadband access. There are no “significant, attendant risks.” It was not “illegal.” These are completely fabricated lies to feebly justify the pointless destruction of a useful program that didn’t cost taxpayers an additional cent.

This reminds me of that Wisconsin school board that refused a 100% state funded free lunch program because they wanted to hurt the poors.

Evil rat bastards. 

Damn, This is Stupid

So, Donald Trump wants to rename the Defense Department to the War Department.

Yeah, this is really f%$#ing stupid and really f%$#ing silly.

Also, given the vagaries of Pentagon procurement, the cost for changing the letterhead, that's going to cost at least a billion dollars.

Also, it appears that the name was set by statute, so there is that as well,

We live in the stupidest timeline ever. 

He's F%$#ing Broken the F%$#ing Post Office!

Most of the postal services in Europe have stopped shipping parcels to the United States, as have Japan, Australia, and Taiwan.

In addition, shipping giant DHL has suspended shipping parcels as well.

In most cases this only applies to their lower cost shipping services from commercial entities, typically items from private people listed as gifts are still being shipped.

The customs process has become too much of a headache.

You have to f%$#-up hard to kill postal service without resorting to armed conflict.

Will Not End Well

Dollar drops sharply (this one is USD/JPY

Breaking news: *TRUMP REMOVES FED'S COOK EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY pic.twitter.com/YlrREpdSUA

— David Ingles (@DavidInglesTV) August 26, 2025

The markets did not take this well

In his continuing quest to fire black women from anything resembling a position of authority, Donald Trump has announced that he will be firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

There is a vague allegation of wrongdoing on a mortgage application that is being used as a justification.

As an aside, mortgage fraud is criminal, and a Baltimore mayor was convicted of such, but this is awfully weak tea:

President Trump said on Friday that he would fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, if she did not resign her post, as he looked to leverage new allegations around her past mortgage applications in a bid to remake the top ranks of the nation’s central bank.

Mr. Trump issued his latest threat, which would most likely face severe legal obstacles, two days after Bill Pulte, the federal housing director, accused Ms. Cook of falsifying records to obtain favorable loan terms. Mr. Pulte referred the matter to the Justice Department, a representative of which said the case “requires further examination.”

While the two men have criticized Ms. Cook for her actions, and Mr. Pulte has insisted his primary goal is to root out fraud, they have each done so in the context of an expanding campaign to oust officials on the Fed’s Board of Governors, including its chair, Jerome H. Powell.

By forcing out sitting governors, the president could appoint a set of loyalists who share his desire to lower interest rates, which the central bank has kept steady in response to persistent concerns about inflation. Mr. Trump has already announced one nominee for the board, tapping Stephen Miran, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, for the spot that Adriana Kugler abruptly vacated this month. Ms. Kugler's term was initially set to end in January, and Mr. Miran, a critic of the Fed, will need to be confirmed by the Senate.

I expect another stern letter from Chuck Schumer.

I'd rather see a Schumer letter from Howard Stern. 

Gee, Ya Think?

Federal Judge Matthew Brann has ruled that there is no legal authority allowing former parking lot attorney Alina Habba to serve as the US Attorney for New Jersey.

What?  You mean that the Trump Administration is breaking the law?  Again?

Well, knock me over with a 1953 baby blue Chrysler Imperial:

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that Alina Habba had been serving as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney without legal authority for more than a month, thrusting the state’s already paralyzed federal court system deeper into disarray and potentially placing limits on the president’s power to choose his own top federal prosecutors.

“Faced with the question of whether Ms. Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not,” the judge, Matthew W. Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, wrote.

“Because she is not currently qualified to exercise the functions and duties of the office in an acting capacity,” he added, “she must be disqualified from participating in any ongoing cases.”

But the judge delayed the practical effect of his own decision, including an order disqualifying Ms. Habba from participating in ongoing cases. The pause will allow the government to fight on Ms. Habba’s behalf in a federal appeals court.

It should be noted here that Habba should not be a lawyer, because she was representing Donald Trump, and misrepresented herself to someone suing him over sexual harassment allegations at Mar-a-Lago in order to tank their case.  (She got them to ditch their lawyer and sign a completely unfair settlement)

She should have been disbarred for that. 

Gee, What Do They Have to Hide?

It appears that the Department of Homeland Security has been routinely deleting text messages since April, in violation of the Federal Records Act.

I'm sure that Chuck Schumer will write a strongly worded letter to Donald Trump.

The Department of Homeland Security rebuffed a request for public records related to the National Guard deployment in Los Angeles this summer, saying that the agency had not maintained text message data among top officials since early April, according to its communications with a nonprofit watchdog group.

A July 23 letter from the Homeland Security Department’s public records office, in denying the request from the nonprofit American Oversight, said that “text message data generated after April 9” was “no longer maintained.” The group had requested all messages received and sent by top department officials related to the deployment of the National Guard in the Southern California city, which President Trump authorized in response to protests over immigration raids.

The agency gave a similar response on Thursday to a request for communications about the migrant detention camp in the Everglades called “Alligator Alcatraz,” telling American Oversight that it was “unable to locate or identify any response records” since the agency “no longer has the capability to conduct a search of text messages.”

Under the Federal Records Act, government agencies are required to preserve all documentation that officials and federal workers produce while executing their duties, and they have to make federal records available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act unless they fall under certain exemptions. 

I am sure that Schumer's letter will be particularly strong.

It would be nice if the opposition was not a bunch of delusional octogenarian cowards.