august.thoughtify.space

and strippers make a living picking up money off the ground.

I emailed Patrick Healy, assistant managing editor for standards and trust at NYT, to ask why their story about a House report with new details of rape allegations against the President of the United States included neither those details, nor a single use of the word "rape." archive.is/1s9AM

Sadly, if this allegation is true, it wouldn’t be the first time Donald Trump was found to have raped a woman “the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally-in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did rape Ms Carroll”

For the fabulously wealthy, paying taxes is pretty much optional. They can borrow against their vast wealth, which is mostly an untaxed capital gain, without paying taxes. When they die, the capital gain goes to zero. And loopholes exist to bypass the estate tax too.

You can do the same thing, buying a house and borrowing against it—ha ha, just kidding, normal people get taxed annually on their wealth via property taxes, the "you can't tax wealth, the economy will collapse!" rule applies solely to the super-rich.

Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with Umar Kremlev, a Kremlin-linked Russian businessman who helped bankroll his wedding, the FT reports. The two reportedly tried to avoid being photographed together. meduza.io/en/feature/2...

Major press failure: treating Jared Kushner taking foreign bribes and shaping US foreign policy as less relevant than Hunter Biden not taking bribes nor influencing policy. Covering Kushner accurately was considered partisan, biased. Lies about Hunter or his minor actions treated as more important.

No rise in productivity due to AI, according to that great Luddite institute, Apollo Global Management. www.apollo.com/wealth/insig...

The whole push for this came from a dark money group formed in March. Big victory for tech companies selling overpriced bags, abusive & lecherous security staff, and school shooters. What I get as a parent is an unfunded mandate for my local school board and daily fears about Uvalde. Gee, thanks.

One of the most competitive House races in US is Wisconsin’s 3rd. Democrat, Rebecca Cooke, is ready to kick out incumbent and 1/6 insurrectionist, Derrick Van Orden. She joins me for the latest in her race, including Van Orden’s repeated use of AI-generated deepfake ads. youtu.be/vaWfahm9NLQ?...

New in PN: Living in the long, stupid shadow of the Big Lie "Elections where Trump — or any other Republican — wins are fine, but elections where Republicans lose are corrupt. The only solution, of course, is to let the DOJ intervene both before and after any elections that Trump has fixated on."

The only reason I can think of for this news not being absolutely everywhere is that large media orgs don’t want to be seen as putting their thumbs on the scales a week before election day. And that’s cowardly as shit.

“Every unhappy nation is unique. But the mood overlap between countries such as Hungary and Serbia, both of which have recently thrown out rightwing populists in corruption-dominated elections, and today’s America is striking.” My column as.ft.com/r/c8ced69e-f...

In the Floris case, DOJ filed what they call a "notice of superseding complaint," adding one obstruction charge, for which it adds speculation for proof of motive. But the new "complaint" is not signed: it may be a ploy to avoid today's preliminary hearing or to DQ Zia Faruqui.

👀 A Trump admin declaration in its lawsuit against California describes its process for flagging potential noncitizen voters but also indicates that the review is “ongoing” and that it discovered “minor data discrepancies” for 189 people it identified storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Trump’s bid to steal a DC public park and turn it into an elitist golf course has been blocked. When many institutions kowtow to the dictator, federal district courts are holding the line.

Damn, who could have seen this one coming?

the primary purpose of the department of justice now appears to be "repeated embarrassing failures to prosecute jim comey"

The vile attacks on Amy Acton need to be seen in the context of a party that *needs* people to believe women fabricating sexual assaults is common as rainwater. Because it’s pretty much the only way to evade the conclusion that the president is a rapist.

The minute Dems gain any power at all, watch them descend like locusts, hyping an endless series of fake scandals fed to them by the same RW slop machine that's been playing them for fools for decades. They can't wait.

The political media is visibly chafing at the current situation, where Republicans are glaringly awful, fucking everything up, running deviant candidates everyone hates, and Dems are just being normal & winning. The force is out of balance. They are viscerally eager to go after Dems about something.

Cheesecake Factory Gate got no traction, so the hunt goes on.

I don't care for how this has become almost a joke people throw in along with how he's old and fat and orange rather than a stomach-churning, existentially horrifying thing for a nation to know about its head of state.

I get they're inextricably intertwined but I kind of feel like leaning so much into how he was the longtime best buddy of the world's most notorious sex criminal has given it something of the feel of a political gotcha rather than the important part, which is that the president raped people.

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

Pretty grim footnote to West's career that he ended up serving the richest man in the world's successful attempt to restore white nationalism to the US government.

Two former Governors of South Carolina - one from each party - have endorsed Democrat Annie Andrews who is running against Sen. Darline Graham R-SC

FYI I don't think you included this, which is my new favorite corruption, which also implicates Blanche's tax immunity. www.forbes.com/sites/danale...

My second essay on how under Trump we’ve already gotten used to a level of fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption that would be unthinkable to us just years ago. Today: The corruption of the Justice Dept and *EIGHT* scandals on par with Watergate: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/trump-s-ty...

2/ She doesn't even pay herself a salary to do all this. Keeping furniture out of landfills and helping struggling families: repurposedlifeinc.com

1/ Holy shit, this woman who earns less than $50K is spending her nights and weekends finding furniture for NYC public housing residents, aka God's work www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

What a rock star. She aged out of the foster system and went onto a job with the city and finding everyone else the furniture they need

I find the prediction markets pretty much useless when it comes to “who is going to win” beforehand, because the sentiment is infected with the personal biases of the degen crypto sickos who participate what they are usually good at is doing math once the results start to come in

When the next US Congress investigates corruption, Trump's oil-deal-of-the-century with Alejandro Betancourt, the face of Venezuelan corruption, should be top of its list. Two kleptocracies working together. Brilliant essay by @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

HHS wants a new Medicare code that pays doctors extra only when they attribute a patient’s symptoms to a vaccine. Vaccine critics say doctors are paid to push vaccines. We aren’t. Under this code, we’d be paid to blame them. My new piece in @cidrap.bsky.social: www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

it is my deepest and most fervent wish that the tech oligarchs suffer consequences for openly allying with fascism the world over maybe we can extradite zuck in 2029

"Democrats have campaigned for two years on the claim that this is an emergency. If they win, they should act like it."

Info on the last offer, 30% accepted: www.geekwire.com/2026/microso...

*MICROSOFT TO OFFER BUYOUTS TO 60,000 WORKERS IN LATEST COST CUT

I had some thoughts on Katie Zacharia's brief tenure as press secretary, and the role of Fox News in pushing her off the stage.

It is both very unlikely Trump will personally succeed at establishing a full-blown dictatorship before he's gone, and also the case that Trump's tenure in American politics has massively increased the chance this country will have a full-blown dictatorship at some point in the next 30 or 40 years.

True, but many successful authoritarians (as in established a consolidated regime) follow in the wake of a less competent, less successful predecessor destabilizing the system, setting the precedents, evading punishment and repudiation. The next guy learns and adapts, they don't start from zero.

It's... also not particularly novel for Americans who DO follow this sort of thing to be happy when autocrats in other countries are defeated? I'm just barely old enough to recall the ouster of Pinochet being broadly celebrated in international coverage as a victory for human rights & democracy.

That this is in THE WASHINGTON POST is almost too much irony to bear.

I suppose I care a bit, but only because some centrists Democrats are still listening to him for some reason. Why do they do that? No idea.

NEW: A federal judge has now ruled that former SDNY prosecutor, Maurene Comey, was UNLAWFULLY fired by the Trump DOJ. He orders her retroactive reinstatement and back pay. Comey alleged in her lawsuit that she was fired for politically motivated reasons. www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/m...

Judge Furman rules that Maureen Comey's firing violated separation of powers. Orders backpay. Govt's arguments violate 2 centuries of SCOTUS rulings & would "unsettle the equilibrium established by this Nation's constitutional system." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...