Politics is Stupid

general
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Trump’s media company lost several more hundreds of dollars this last quarter, pushing it to losing over a billion dollars. But whether you call it Truth Social, Truth Central, or as Trump himself once called it, “Troth Senchal”, he’ll keep using it, and he’s not going to be out of that money for very long because he just engineered an almost $2 billion payout that is likely to make its way into his pocket. It just needs to make a small detour first.

A few years ago, someone that worked at the IRS leaked Trump’s tax return that showed he only paid $750.00 dollars. The billionaire who brags about how well he knows U.S. tax code knows it so well (at least, until he said later that nobody knows how the tax code works) that he paid less than one thousand dollars that year. That same employee leaked other tax returns and was caught.

In the $10 billion law suit against the IRS that Trump filed on January 29, 2026, it says he was informed about the leak on January 29, 2024. This is exactly two years after he legally says it took place. Except, his lawyer, Alina Habba, appeared in front of reporters three months earlier, talking about what she learned in the trial and was upset that the IRS employee only had one felony count against him. That means Trump filed his suit after two years of being informed about it, which is past the two years that is the statute of limitations for this type of crime.

That error would have (and probably should already have) caused the suit to be tossed out, but it kept going. A couple of days ago, the IRS decided to reach a settlement with Trump. In exchange for him dropping the suit, the IRS will set a legal defense fund (“Anti-Weaponization Fund”) for the January 6 Capitol rioters with almost $1.8B of U.S. taxpayers’ money in it. Specifically, it is $1776 million, because, you know, it just obviously has to be a number associated with patriotism for the people who were expressing their patriotism.

It’s already been labeled as a slush fund, so exactly how much goes to those Trump has long said have been treated so poorly and so unfairly remains to be seen, and how much of the rest goes to other purposes. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?
 

This settlement comes less than two months of Todd Blanche being on the job as the Acting U.S. Attorney General. He got bumped up from Deputy AG to Acting AG after Trump fired Pam Bondi. Blanche is another of Trump’s personal lawyers, but he doesn’t seem to like being reminded of that.

Blanche, as head of the Department of Justice, added to the settlement what is effectively a lifetime “get out of audits free” card. The wording is broad enough that it doesn’t just cover past audits of Donald Trump by the IRS. It also covers future audits. And it doesn’t just cover Donald Trump. It covers “affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries”.

Translation: The settlement includes:

  1. Donald Trump
  2. the members of his family
  3. all of his companies and organizations
  4. any other company or organization associated with items 1-3 above

All of these will be exempt from all past, present and future audits.

It doesn’t stop there. Some lawyers are saying that this goes beyond audits and beyond the IRS. It could include any Federal agency for anything. If that interpretation is correct, then if the settlement is accepted by the courts, what we have is a person who is currently the President of the United States with the following:

  • Absolute immunity for “official Presidential acts”.
  • An in perpetuity exclusion against being investigated for financial or criminal acts or any acts of any kind.
  • Anyone and anything associated with him has the same in perpetuity exclusion.

That really doesn’t sound like a President any more, does it?

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I heard about that settlement and thought “America is even more f****d now”

I wonder if the next time Democrats are in power whether they’ll actually do something about the rampant corruption in this government or whether they’ll go all mealy mouthed about it like Biden did.

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I may have built my dream house here, but with the way things are heading, it’s still tempting to see if I can emigrate to NZ.

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Would like to invite you to our neck of the boondocks, but it being South Africa…

NZ may be a safer bet though.

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My money is them being mealy mouthed. They’re beholden to the same corporate overlords after all.

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OMFG!

The Mango Mussolini just had a press conference where he held up a poster comparing the reflecting pool with the height of skyscrapes.
The heading on the poster was “Our pool is bigger than skyscrapers”

I’m not kidding!

Someone actually made up a poster for this senile man-baby and let him loose with it.

Yeah, I know there are a lot worse things this moron has done (he still hasn’t given up on the 1.7B slush fund), but this just blew my mind with the infantilism.

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I’m so appalled at the amount of money he’s been spending on vanity projects. He cut healthcare, food assistance and education for this garbage and his war?

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The slush fund was so unpopular and faced so much backlash even among the GOP that it’s been declared dead. Except it’s not dead, or is it? No one knows, but the Senate wants to keep it around.

One of the earmarks of a government that is on its way to becoming authoritarian or any variation thereof is when it creates an enemies list. The previous example in the U.S. was Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Trump has had a personal enemies list for a long time that added political enemies when he ran for office.

Most of the time, the list is private and doesn’t become public until later. No need to wait until later to see what the current administration’s enemies list is.

If you go to whitehouse.gov and click on the menu at the left, hover over Media, there is a “Media Offenders” option. There, you can read about their “Media offender of the week”.

On the surface, this could be the administration’s attempt at debunking statements. I might agree with that if what was presented was just factual and didn’t include propaganda.

Right now, CNN is featured. The “offense” is reporting about Trump falling asleep during meetings, which the site refutes as “cherry-picked screenshots of President Trump blinking or reading”. It then deflects back to pointing at Biden’s health, bragging about Trump’s latest yearly physical by “one of the nation’s greatest doctors”.

Yeah, if you only had single pictures, that could be cherry-picked. But when you have several pictures one right after the other in something that’s called “video”, it’s easier to see if it was a blink, which typically takes less than a second, or if it was the eyes closing as part of falling asleep. As for “reading”, were there any papers in front of Trump to read while the other people were talking?
 

Scroll on down to the bottom. You’ll see a link about Stephen Colbert leaving “a Legacy of Leftist Lunacy”. Cick on Next Page and there’s Jimmy Kimmel. Under the “Leftist Influencers” link, there’s two people listed from YouTube: David Pakman and Bryan Taylor Cohen. (The links I added are to the individual pages for those individuals. Right now, the individual pages have the same info as the main page.)

For Pakman, the propaganda phrases include Trump was “commanding one of the most daring, complex military search-and-rescue missions in modern American history”, “deranged leftists”, “vicious, fabricated conspiracy theories”, “unhinged fringe accounts”, “collapsing liberal media outlets” and “completely ignoring President Trump’s ironclad leadership and the triumphant success of our troops”. Once again, that last one is bragging instead of just presenting facts. This section is tagged with the “Left-wing lunacy” category.

For Cohen, the propaganda phrases include “Bureaucratic bloat has taken root throughout the administration”, “President Trump continues to separate the wheat from the chaff”, and “bureaucracy-lovers on the left”. This section is also tagged with the “Left-wing lunacy” category.
 

If you take time to read any of these, you’ll see more propaganda phrases that all sound like they were written by Trump, such as “media bias plague” and “pathetically weak interview”. And back on the main “Media Offenders” page, under the “Offender Hall of Shame” section is another instance of Trump’s odd capitalization style: “A record of the media’s false and misleading stories flagged by The White House. Scroll for the Truth.”

Yes, Truth is so important it must be Capitalized. If you’re not getting enough Truth on the official White House website, be sure to stop by Truth Social, run by our very own outstanding media mogul, President Donald J. Trump Sr., where you’ll see so much Truth and so much Winning you’ll beg him to let you stop Truthing and stop Winning, but he won’t let you.

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Saturday evening, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina died after what was initially said to be a sudden but brief illness. The medical examiner put out a preliminary report today identifying it as an aortic dissection, where the innermost layer of an aorta is injured and tears. Blood begins pushing in between the layers. Further tearing occurs and the blood starts building up in that area.

Graham’s office confirmed the death and South Carolina has a month to hold a special election to find a replacement. What the Republican party lost with Graham’s death is a few things: he was a big war hawk, a skilled fundraiser, and someone made several media appearances a week to keep support going for Trump.

A report issued after the start of the war with Iran identified that he met with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, gave him tips on how to manipulate Trump, Netanyahu began doing that, and not long after, Trump made the decision to attack Iran. Without Graham to keep pushing Trump into keeping the war with Iran going, we’ll have to see if it finally ends for real shortly. If you’re keeping track, we up to almost four dozen times that Trump has said it was about to or had ended, and yet somehow, the most ended war in history hasn’t actually ended. So as per that report, Trump is responsible for starting the war, but Graham is actually the root cause of it starting. A different report said that after all of his advisors told him why attacking Iran was a really bad idea, Trump said, “I just want to do it.”
 

The quick confirmation of Graham’s death is in contrast to what’s happening with Mitch McConnell, Republican Senator from Kentucky. He’s had a history of falls, which isn’t uncommon for people in their 80s. But twice in 2026 about a month apart, he suddenly froze while speaking at a press conference for about 20 seconds. Both times, he said the next day he was fine and was cleared to return to work.

A month ago on June 14, McConnell was found in his home in cardiac arrest and was taken to the hospital. Initially, it was just a generic person that was reported as being taken there, but then it was confirmed as McConnell. His office hasn’t released many health updates and wouldn’t confirm a week ago if he was even conscious.

The lack of communication is raising concerns because of the midterm elections in November, so a special election may be needed. McConnell recently released a picture of himself in the hospital with his wife and a statement saying he fell, was briefly unconscious, plus has mild pneumonia. Two other Senators also said they spoke with him and both just happened to be for about the same amount of time of twenty minutes.

Another effect of the lack of communication is speculation like he’s brain-dead or already died. One video from today on YouTube, which I deliberately did not watch, has the thumbnail picture with a screenshot of asking a chatbot “Was the photo AI?” and Grok answering “Yes, the photo is almost certainly AI-generated.”

I find that interesting because Grok is Elon Musk’s chatbot which uses the Grok large language model for its processing. Musk keeps tweaking it so it generates answers more to his liking. In this case, it may have identified a false picture that hides McConnell’s current physical status. Or, its answer of the photo being fake could itself be false, in keeping with Musk’s leaning towards conspiracy theories and other false information, which hurts the Republican party because it then adds fuel to the “what are they hiding” conspiracies.

 
Then there was another Congressman who went missing for 3 or 4 months, and when he resurfaced, he said he was in the hospital being treated for depression. Good that he was getting treatment, but bad that no one knew where he was for so long.

These sorts of things are renewing calls to enact term limits and/or age limits so that we have fewer instances very elderly people serving so long that they end up dying while in office. Graham at 71 wasn’t as old as McConnell, but it was an age where a lot of people are usually getting ready to retire if they haven’t already.