John Day

The DOJ's attorney stood in federal court and told the judge there was "no national database being created" from the voter registration records his office was demanding from every state in the country. Judge Walker put that quote in a footnote. Then noted that an executive order directing DHS to compile a "State Citizenship List" from voter registration data was issued almost immediately after those reassurances were given at the hearing. That footnote is doing serious work. The DOJ is now 0-8 out of 31 lawsuits filed to obtain state voter rolls. Four of the eight judges who ruled against them were Trump appointees. The legal theory at issue - that the Civil Rights Act of 1960, passed specifically to fight racial discrimination in Jim Crow voting booths, gives the federal government the right to conduct line-by-line federal audits of every state's voter rolls - has not found a single judge willing to accept it, including the four Trump put on the bench. Thirty-one lawsuits. Zero wins. The record and the footnote are the whole story.

Tillis: "To call Paxton 'ethically challenged' is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder. He's gonna be an anchor on our caucus"

@moore_mich17692 @jason_kint @JDVance And each will receive a pardon

@jason_kint Folks, save this image and post as many times as possible EVERY time @JDVance lies about combating fraud. [Source @jason_kint]

NYT out with a jaw dropping investigative report on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 60 Minutes reported last Sunday on some of this, too. The NYT report is a must-read, the 60 Minutes report should then be watched. 1/3

How could President Biden have planted 274 agents at the January 6 insurrection when Trump was president then?

@EdWhelanEPPC The addendum makes it difficult if not impossible for the IRS to challenge the tax issues arising from the fund created the day before.

Baffling Sentence in Trump/IRS Settlement The settlement agreement between Donald Trump and the IRS states (in section IV.A): "The corpus of The Anti-Weaponization Fund’s funding [i.e., the $1.776 billion dollars set forth in Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s order] does not represent the value of any current claim by Plaintiffs [Donald Trump et al.], but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims, and accordingly the corpus of The Anti-Weaponization Fund’s funding is not taxable income as to plaintiffs, who receive no economic benefit from this Settlement Agreement." I find this sentence baffling in two respects: 1. The settlement’s declaration that the settlement amount “does not represent the value of any current claim” by Trump and the other Trump plaintiffs (Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization) sure seems like an admission that the settlement is collusive and in bad faith. 2. Why does the settlement assert that the funding amount “is not taxable income as to plaintiffs”? I’m no tax expert, but it’s not at all clear to me that this assertion is correct. The ordinary rule, as I understand it (and I’m happy to be corrected), is that you don’t avoid having a settlement payment treated as taxable income by redirecting it to a third party. Nor is it evident why basing the funding on something other than the value of plaintiffs’ claim would affect its taxability. (The word “accordingly” marks the passage as a non sequitur.) The evident purpose of including this provision is to attempt to foreclose the IRS from treating the funding amount as taxable, even if established principles of law render it taxable. That, I gather, is why the settlement agreement bears not only the signature of the Associate Attorney General (which would suffice to bind the United States, if the agreement is otherwise lawful) but also the signature of Frank J. Bisignano in his capacity as the IRS’s chief executive officer. Whether this seemingly collusive agreement would bind a later Administration on this point is a different matter.

Yes, one of many.

Source after source told 60 Minutes they fear today’s insider trading scandal about military secrets is tomorrow’s national security scandal. If market-watchers can spot irregular trades, surely enemies can, too. And they’ll make their war plans accordingly. cbsn.ws/4uVMNdv

“We spotted nine Polymarket accounts, all connected, who made, collectively,$2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. military operations,” says Nicolas Vaiman, co-founder of the small data analytics firm Bubblemaps. “And now here's the crazy part: 98% win rate.” cbsn.ws/4wwp0T7

This is corruption at industrial scale. It is the theft of $1,776,000,000.00 from taxpayers. Any Congress where there are functional spines should either stop it from happening—or get these illegal payments back.

NEW: President Donald Trump bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stock in tech companies and government contractors including Nvidia and Palantir. Some of those trades overlapped with regulatory decisions that were favorable to these companies. notus.org/money/donald-t…

George H.W. Bush kept his assets in a blind trust, as did Bill Clinton. Neither Obama nor Biden traded stocks or bonds while in office. 3,700 trades is probably more than all the trades of all the presidents until now. And he is trading stocks that are affected by his decisions. A walking conflict of interest, at the least, and perhaps insider trading. Just as members of Congress should not be able to trade stocks, so too the president. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A violation of the Hatch Act, among so many reasons that it’s a bad idea.

Does he know we can hear him?

The oath is to the Constitution, not to the Commander in Chief.

We’re so lucky to have a President who is always looking out for the American people.

President Donald Trump said he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation” when negotiating with Iran over a deal to end the war. A reporter asked Trump on Tuesday to what extent Americans' financial straits are motivating him to make a deal. “Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon.” Since the start of the war on Iran, prices including gas and groceries have risen sharply. A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll last week found 63% of Americans blame Trump for high gas prices. Trump spoke to reporters on Tuesday ahead of a trip to Beijing, where he is scheduled to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping and is likely to discuss Iran.

🦔A data center in Fayetteville, Georgia, drained approximately 30 million gallons of water through two industrial-scale hookups that the local utility did not know existed. One connection had been installed without the utility's knowledge, and the other was not linked to any account and therefore was not being billed. The discovery only came after residents complained about low water pressure. The campus is still under construction with completion projected three to five years out. A separate incident in Tucson last week saw Project Blue's contractor caught trucking municipal water out of a city that had explicitly voted against the project, with Tucson revoking the temporary meter and demanding two acre-feet of water credits to make the city whole. My Take Two unrelated data center water incidents in two weeks across two different states is a pattern, not a coincidence. The Georgia facility was running off an unmetered industrial hookup nobody at the utility had on file, which means either a contractor installed it without authorization or the utility lost track of a connection serving a major customer, and neither of those explanations should make anyone comfortable. The construction phase alone consumed 30 million gallons before operations even began, which gives you a sense of the water demand profile these facilities have once they go live. The bigger issue is that hyperscale data centers are being permitted under regulatory frameworks built for industrial users a fraction of their size, and the utilities responsible for tracking water use are not staffed for facilities this scale. A 30 million gallon discrepancy slipping through billing is not a clerical error, it is a sign that the infrastructure for monitoring these projects is being outpaced by the speed at which they are being built. Tucson caught their problem because a citizen made a phone call to a council staffer, and Fayetteville caught theirs because neighbors noticed their taps had lost pressure. Neither of those is a functioning compliance system, and the next community in this situation will probably not catch it at all. Hedgie🤗

Original post by @mcuban: "If insurance companies can deny care and call it 'medically unnecessary', why aren't they required to have malpractice insurance doe when they get it wrong and someone gets sicker or tragically dies ?" One of the multitude of injustices caused by ERISA

I used to make fun of this kind of thing when reporting in North Korea.