Peter Solarz
KIROKAZE
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
JBB: An Artblog!
taylor price
AnasAbdin
pixel skylines
⁂
DEAR READER
will byers stan first human second
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
blake kathryn
Discoholic 🪩
NASA
d e v o n
art blog(derogatory)
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
we're not kids anymore.
seen from Türkiye
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Taiwan
seen from Türkiye
seen from Netherlands
seen from Indonesia
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from South Korea
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Netherlands
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@misfitwashere
Glitter
“All journeys end when we reach our destination but the journeying remains a thing apart, unique unto itself. Most of us make life’s journeys without understanding that the journeying is a separate thing.”
Bob Hoover - The Grendel Saga
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R.
June 12, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 13
READ IN APP
Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for Donald Trump’s name to come off the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center.
In his ruling of May 29, Cooper noted that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” and Congress stipulated that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.
As soon as he took office in early 2025, Trump replaced trustees on the Kennedy Center board and appointed himself a trustee as well. Now weighted with loyalists, the board elected Trump chair and then replaced the president of the Kennedy Center. Then the board voted to change the center’s bylaws to concentrate their own power. Then, in December, the board voted to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center,” and the name went up over the Kennedy Center portico the next day.
Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who as an ex officio member of the center’s board had been sidelined, sued to stop the renaming and won. Cooper ordered Trump’s name to be taken off the building, all signage, stationery, merchandise, and so on, before midnight tonight.
At first, the Kennedy Center seemed willing to comply, removing Trump’s name from its website and YouTube page, but that cooperation changed yesterday, when the board voted to launch a last-minute appeal to the removal order. Hours later, the lawyers from the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal. They asked for a stay on the judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building, saying the board would be “forced to squander time and money” if the appeals court decides in its favor and that it “would be incredibly confusing for the public” if, in the end, Trump’s name went back up after coming down.
Cooper decided against them, saying they had not shown they would win their appeal on its merits. He said staying the order “would not be in the public interest, which is rarely served by the ‘perpetuation’ of ‘unlawful’ governmental action.”
Late this afternoon, the board of the Kennedy Center filed an emergency appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, asking for a stay in the order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. It was, perhaps, hasty work. Legal analyst Liz Dye called it “bonkity-bonkers, while lawyer Norm Eisen of The Contrarian went for “batsh** crazy” and noted that Trump “clearly wrote big pieces himself.”
For the first time, the board alleged that “The Bylaws of The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation state, unequivocally,” that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on it. Dye notes: “If the bylaws were amended, they were amended since Judge Cooper issued his order—prob[ably] yesterday. This is the Board choking off funds and saying ‘you have to let us break the law, or we’ll lose all the funds.’”
According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Washington National Opera, about $17 million of the money Trump appears to be claiming from the Kennedy Center belongs to the Washington National Opera. For fifteen years, the suit says, the opera and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship, in which the center managed donations to the Washington National Opera for the opera’s benefit.
“By the second half of 2025, the Kennedy Center stopped performing many of its obligations under the governing affiliation agreement, including marketing, fundraising, and administrative support, as well as timely reporting on the growth of WNO’s funds,” the suit says. “Despite repeated requests from WNO, the Kennedy Center did not remedy its non-performance. Instead, it proposed that the parties end their long-standing affiliation. That affiliation came to an end in January 2026.”
And then the Kennedy Center refused to return the WNO’s money, instead using it as collateral for its own line of credit.
Yesterday Toni Aguilar Rosenthal of the Revolving Door Project and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen did a deep dive into Trump’s determination to turn other people’s money to his own service.
They note that Trump and his allies seized the funds Congress appropriated for celebrations to honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and have “awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants…to politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies”—nearly 80% of the $126 million of funding for the semiquincentenary celebrations. Private funding, including from corporations with issues in front of the administration, have also poured money into Trump’s events.
Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the administration is hoping to complete Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch before he leaves office. To do so, they are anticipating keeping work going 20 hours a day. They say they do not need congressional approval. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has asked officials from the National Park Service to explain and to justify why they are ignoring normal rules for federal contracting and instead handing out no-bid contracts, saying the project is “urgent.”
Yesterday Ashleigh Fields of The Hill reported that federal agencies and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) are putting at least $60 million toward the White House cage fight on Trump’s 80th birthday Sunday. That money has paid for the fighting arena on the South Lawn of the White House, as well as paying up to 900 workers since May 20.
A political activist and military veteran from Virginia tried to stop the event from proceeding, calling it a “deeply corrupt” event that uses national monuments to shill for private businesses, in at least one of which—UFC’s parent company TKO Holding Group—Trump owns significant amounts of stock. They noted that although Trump used the 250th anniversary to justify ignoring environmental review and congressional approval, the event is clearly designed not for the nation’s birthday, but for his own.
Today Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the lawsuit, saying that the Virginians did not have standing to challenge the UFC fight and that the time and money invested in the event outweighed any temporary harm they suffered.
On social media today, Trump posted images of the horses statues behind the Lincoln Memorial being freshly gilded, and wrote: “Re-gilding of the massive Arts of War sculptures, located between The Lincoln Memorial and site of The Triumphal Arch, rapidly continues. The sculptures will be fully regilded by July 3. The photos were taken yesterday. The Gilders’ Studio has flown in Gilders from around the Country to perform this work!”
Yesterday Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times reported on how former prime minister of Hungary Victor Orbán used architecture to reinforce the idea that his government was rebuilding former glories, while new prime minister, Péter Magyar is contrasting the palaces Orbán built to the crumbling hospitals and children’s homes around the country, where there was no money for toilet paper. The contrast between the gilded palaces of Orbán and his cronies and the poverty in which everyday Hungarians lived was key to the popular uprising that toppled Orbán’s government and put Magyar’s in place.
Today Elon Musk, who poured more than $290 million into the 2024 election to elect Trump and other Republicans, became the world’s first trillionaire—on paper, at least—when shares of his rocket company SpaceX were offered to the public.
Tonight the appeals court denied Trump’s emergency motion. Observers waiting at the Kennedy Center noted that a rainbow broke out over the building shortly after the decision. Although the letters for Trump’s name went up in hours, attached by workers on scissor lifts, taking them down involved so much scaffolding and so many hours that the United States government missed the court-imposed deadline.
The Department of Justice said the letters would come down “in the early hours of the morning of June 13,” presumably when there would not be the huge audience that has been watching the removal all day either in person or on livestream, and asked the court for twelve more hours to comply with the court order.
—
Art Car
elefant
Did Trump Promise "No Wars" If Elected? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/did-trump-promise-no-wars-if-elected
Friends,
Sometimes I provide you with information that I hope you’ll find helpful in making arguments with others. I don’t expect that what I share with you will change the minds of committed Trumpers, but the facts and the evidence may have some sway with Republicans and independents who are wavering about whom to support in the midterms.
One of the main reasons Trump was elected was his pledge to keep the United States out of wars, especially the kind of “endless” wars America has fought in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Obviously, he broke that pledge. We’re now well into the fourth month of a war he said would be four or five weeks at most.
In addition, the war he initiated in Iran was a war of choice — Iran did not attack the United States, and most specialists in foreign policy say Iran was not close to devising a nuclear weapon at that time. (It’s likely to be closer now, or at least more committed to making one.)
Yet in a lengthy interview with Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which aired Sunday, Trump was once again trying to rewrite his own history, He claimed:
“I didn’t guarantee no war. So when you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.”
In fact, Trump repeatedly and unequivocally promised during the 2024 election campaign that the U.S. would not have any wars during his second presidency.
Herewith, some examples.
In a June 2024 social media post, Trump described the election as “a choice between STRENGTH or WEAKNESS, COMPETENCE or INCOMPETENCE, peace and prosperity or war and no war.”
In one of the highest-profile speeches of his campaign — his July 2024 address to the Republican National Convention — he said, “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.”
He made the promise again and even more directly during an August 2024 rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania, saying: “Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.”
Trump reprised the same pledge in an August 2024 interview with Adin Ross, an online personality. After saying there were no wars during his first administration, he promised, “And we won’t have wars again.”
At another rally that month in the hotly contested state of North Carolina, Trump approvingly cited Viktor Orbán, then the prime minister of Hungary, as supposedly having said, “Make sure that Trump gets reelected president, and you’re not going to have any more wars.” Trump reiterated moments later, “No more wars. No more disruptions. We will have prosperity, and we will have peace.”
Trump told versions of the Orbán story at numerous other events. For example, in the swing state of Wisconsin in October 2024, he said, “Viktor Orbán said, ‘If Trump comes back, you won’t have any wars. You won’t have any wars.’ And he’s about as tough as they get, and he said it loud and clear and he said why. But you won’t have any wars.”
Finally, in his victory address in November 2024, Trump made a clear promise that he would not start a war — even when he no longer had to persuade voters to elect him. He said in that high-profile speech: “Four years, we had no wars, except we defeated ISIS. … They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”
In reality, of course, Trump has been one of the most bellicose presidents in modern American history.
His failing war in Iran and his campaign pledge not to start any wars should be held against Republicans in the House and Senate. They’re partly responsible. They have repeatedly refused to stop his wars. They have repeatedly enabled his aggression.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Have a Far-Out ‘MonKeeCule Monday’ my Friends
🍄🍄🍄
Reblogged for the missing in action @flinda
elefant
it's friday
They don't want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble https://robertreich.substack.com/p/they-dont-want-you-to-know-the-real
Friends,
The trustees of the Social Security fund said Tuesday that the fund will be depleted by late 2032, a year earlier than the trustees’ projection last year of 2033. If nothing is done, benefits will automatically be cut six years from now.
The common understanding is that Social Security’s shortfall is due to the huge postwar baby boom, now retiring, and to America’s increasing life expectancy. The usual recommended fix is to reduce Social Security benefits or raise the age of eligibility. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, warned Monday, “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed.” He said Republicans will introduce a plan to do that. Brace yourselves.
I used to be a Social Security trustee, and I call bullsh*t.
The baby boom can’t be blamed for Social Security’s shortfall. The Greenspan Commission, which in 1983 recommended the reforms that Congress then made — raising Social Security payroll taxes and also raising the eligibility age for collecting Social Security benefits — knew all about the baby boom and figured it into its calculations. (Early boomers like me can now start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 have to wait until they’re 67 to collect full benefits.)
Americans’ increasing life expectancy isn’t at fault, either. While wealthier Americans are living longer, that’s not the case for lower-income Americans. The Urban Institute estimates that life expectancy in the top 20 percent of income-earners is 91 years for people born in the 1990s, four years more than people born in the 1950s. Yet the life expectancy in the lowest 20 percent of income-earners is fewer than 80 years.
So what’s the real cause of the Social Security shortfall? What did Greenspan’s commission fail to predict? Widening inequality.
Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain cap. This year, that cap is $184,500. Earnings at or below this amount are taxed at 12.4 percent. The cap rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.
Back in 1983, the cap was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of total income in America. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Greenspan commission assumed that, as the cap rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.
Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 83 percent of total income in America. It went from 90 percent to 83 percent because a steadily larger portion of the nation’s total income has gone to the top.
In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today, the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.
This year, someone earning $1 million in wages stopped paying any Social Security payroll tax at the beginning of March. Jeff Bezos probably stopped a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Elon Musk, a few seconds after midnight on January 1. (In point of fact, Bezos, Musk, and other robber barons of this Second Gilded Age get all the cash they need by borrowing against their fortunes, rather than bother with pesky wages, so they probably pay a pittance in Social Security taxes.)
Logically, then, to get back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax has to be raised.
If all income in excess of $400,000 were subject to the Social Security payroll tax, Social Security’s solvency would be guaranteed forever. We could also expand Social Security benefits.
So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical and necessary response is simply to raise the cap, Mike Johnson and other Republican shills for the oligarchs to the contrary notwithstanding.
Share
Additional background:
Social Security is America’s most effective anti-poverty program. Last year, it lifted 23.5 million Americans out of poverty, including 16.5 million seniors. Before its creation, about half of our nation’s seniors were living in poverty. Today their poverty rate is just 10.3 percent. Without Social Security, nearly 4 in 10 seniors would have had incomes below the official poverty line.
Hollowing out of private pensions makes Social Security all the more important. One in 5 Americans 50 and older have zero retirement savings. Meanwhile, the average Social Security benefit at the start of last year was $1,975 a month ($23,700 annually).
Social Security is also the federal government’s biggest children’s benefit program through its disability and survivors’ benefits. In 2024, 1.7 million children received Social Security benefits, and the vast majority are eligible to receive survivors’ benefits if a parent were to pass away. Additionally, millions more children are part of a household where all or part of the household income comes from Social Security. Social Security is estimated to lift close to 1 million children out of poverty each year.
Other fixes that have been introduced in Congress:
1. The Social Security Expansion Act
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have introduced this plan for several Congresses. (It is cosponsored by Budget Committee Members Merkley, Whitehouse, Van Hollen, and Padilla.)
The bill imposes Social Security taxes on wages above $250,000 and applies the same 12.4 percent rate to capital gains and business income. That would boost benefits for almost all retirees by $200 per month, using a more generous measure of inflation to calculate the cost-of-living increase, and setting a minimum benefit at 125 percent of poverty. When estimated in 2023, it achieved 75-year Social Security solvency solely by increasing taxes on incomes above $250,000.
2. Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act
Sen. Whitehouse and Rep. Boyle introduced this bill starting in the last Congress. Budget Committee Member Van Hollen is a co-sponsor. It adopts the tax increases of the Sanders bill, adjusted to start at $400,000. The bill has no benefit increases, so it significantly overshoots solvency, and there would be extra revenue. The bill achieves 75-year solvency for both Social Security and the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund.
New experiment!
Reblog if you platonically say I love you to ur friends, comment or like if you think that's weird!
All the time.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
At 8:22 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, an
June 11, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 12
READ IN APP
At 8:22 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT. At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”
Later, he called into the Fox News Channel to say: “Look, my preference has always been take Kharg Island…. I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest with you. You know, make a fortune, but I don’t know that America has the stomach, I think they’d like to see us come home, but we did it with Venezuela, Venezuela has worked out great for everybody. We’ve taken millions and millions of barrels of oil out of Venezuela. We brought them to Houston and various other places. Louisiana, uh, where, where, you know, refineries that we have that are incredible. They’re going 24 hours a day. Making a fortune, and, um, you know, I like that in this case, too, but I’m not sure that America has a long time, you know, it’s, uh, it’s a little longer process. Something that’s a guarantee if I want to do it…. I am not sure the country has the appetite for it.”
There’s a lot in this statement, even aside from the fact that Trump still has not gotten congressional approval for his actions in Iran, although the 60-day time limit for exercising military action against an “imminent threat” provided by the 1973 War Powers Act expired on May 1.
Aside from that—which is huge—experts assess that taking Kharg Island, an island in the Persian Gulf that acts as the hub of Iran’s oil exporting sector, would require sending in ground troops. That idea is, indeed, extraordinarily unpopular, even for a war that has been unpopular since it began and is becoming more unpopular.
But, as John Knefel of Media Matters noted Tuesday, Fox News hosts are urging Trump to increase U.S. military involvement in Iran, claiming that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.
In this morning’s conversation with Trump, host Ainsley Earhardt boosted Trump’s claims that he has destroyed Iran’s military, and then told him that when Iran sends missiles at U.S. targets, “we have to fight back. So when you say you don’t think America has the appetite to do what we’re seeing tonight, I think we do.”
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews reacted to Trump’s post by noting, “Normally you wouldn’t increase the likelihood of US casualties by announcing something like this ahead of time, unless you are bluffing to use it as a negotiating ploy, you are stupid, you don’t really care about the troops, or all three.”
Meanwhile, Iranian media affiliated with the state says that Iran is now including in its list of potential military targets “all interests associated with the economic holdings managed by Elon Musk in West Asia, including those located in Arab countries and the occupied territories,” in retaliation for the U.S. use of Musk’s Starlink and X to target Iran. It noted that Starlink has ground stations in Israel, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, while Abu Dhabi investment funds support Space X infrastructure.
Trump also told the Fox News Channel hosts that Iran has “no defense…. The only thing they have is fake news…. They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly…. They’re really in submission. They just don’t know it yet.”
Trump’s comparison of Iran to Venezuela is also important. Clearly, he intended his strike on Iran to mimic January’s rapid strike on Venezuela that enabled the U.S. to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, leaving Maduro’s second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez to run the country. Rodríguez has been willing to do what the Trump administration asks, and the Trump administration has eased sanctions against her, allowing her to work with U.S. investors in Venezuela’s oil sector. Late last month, Joshua Goodman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Jim Mustian of PBS reported that the Trump administration quietly told federal prosecutors in Miami to back off on long-standing criminal investigations of Rodríguez for drug trafficking.
Although Venezuela’s high court ordered that Rodríguez could fill Maduro’s position for only ninety days, there is no sign that elections are happening any time soon.
Instead, as Trump suggested this morning, the U.S. appears to be controlling Venezuela’s oil exports. Sanctions expert Roxanna Vigil of the Council on Foreign Relations reported on June 3 that “almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.” Vigil notes that the Trump administration maintains this arrangement benefits both countries, but “it has not publicly disclosed how much Venezuelan oil it has sold, how much revenue it has collected, or how it has used those funds.”
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress that the U.S. was using a “short-term” account in Qatar and that the administration would provide an audit of that account, but it has not done so, declining to report “how the funds were spent or what safeguards were in place to prevent corruption and money laundering.” Vigil adds: “The administration has also not released the written agreements it has entered into with the Venezuelan government, traders, buyers, banks, and other entities involved in the process.”
Vigil notes that this hidden arrangement involves not just oil, but also gold and other mineral exports.
Democratic lawmakers have sent a formal request to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asking for an audit of the system and have also introduced legislation, the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act, to require an independent GAO audit, but so far it has not passed in either Republican-dominated chamber of Congress.
Kevin Liptak, Natasha Bertrand, and Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious that the U.S. media and Iranian officials don’t view U.S. military action against Iran as powerful enough, and his threats now are designed to force Iranian leaders into a deal.
Dasha Burns and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that the mood inside the White House is “angry, insular, grievance-driven and increasingly shaped by a group of loyalists with direct access to the president.” Trump’s determination to force Republicans to do his bidding shows not just in his extreme demands last night that the Republicans pass an additional $350 billion for his military buildup and the SAVE America Act to suppress voting, but also in his insistence on making loyalist Bill Pulte acting director of national intelligence for the time period spanning the 2026 midterms.
Pulte has no experience with national intelligence, which the law requires for a director, but he does have a track record of weaponizing the government to attack Trump’s political opponents. Putting him into the DNI position would enable him to use information from the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies not to protect Americans from foreign threats, but to undermine Trump’s political opposition.
Lawmakers are facing a deadline to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires tomorrow, but critics are concerned that the law currently does not have sufficient safeguards to protect American citizens. Putting Pulte in charge of it exacerbated their concerns, and Republicans asked Trump to nominate a permanent DNI rather than try to put Pulte in as an acting DNI. Instead, he doubled down on Pulte.
A MAGA operative close to the White House told Burns and Wren that as opposition to his slush fund, funding for his ballroom, and resistance to his demands for new laws mounts, Trump is “increasingly frustrated with everyone, from his own team to the Senate…. He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative said. “He does not like being put in a box,” the operative told Burns and Wren. “When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”
Today nineteen Republicans joined all but seven Democrats to reject a measure to extend FISA, suggesting they did not trust Pulte to oversee the program. Under the fast track House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) used, the measure would have required two thirds of Congress to agree to it, but it failed by 218 to 198, not even reaching a simple majority.
Both CNN and the Washington Post reported today that oil executives have warned the White House that U.S. oil reserves, which they have been releasing to keep oil prices down, are running dangerously low, despite Trump’s boast that Venezuelan oil is flowing through the U.S. They say they expect prices to soar just as peak summer travel season kicks in.
This afternoon, Trump’s social media account posted: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others. The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized—Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly.”
Later, Trump told reporters: “The strait is open. But the straits have been open for a number of months already and you just didn’t know about it.” This evening, Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham noted a CNN chyron that read: “TRUMP CANCELS STRIKES, CLAIMING FOR 39TH TIME THAT A DEAL IS NEAR.”
This afternoon, Trump said he would nominate Walter Joseph “Jay” Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to become the next director of national intelligence. Like Pulte, Clayton lacks national security experience. But he has another attribute that might be attractive to Trump: he has been part of the slow-walking of the release of the Epstein files.
Warning: Trump's Rolling Coup Is Already Underway https://robertreich.substack.com/p/warning-trumps-rolling-coup-is-underway
Friends,
I received the following from Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri in the United States House and Senate from 1977 to 2005 and served as House Democratic Leader from 1989 to 2003, and Tim Wirth, who served in the U.S. House and Senate from Colorado from 1975 to 2003 and as the first U.S. Secretary of State for Global Affairs.
I have worked with both and know them quite well. Neither is an alarmist, but they did want me to help spread this alarm. Hence, I’m sharing with you what they wrote to me. (Research is from Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan NGO focused on fair elections.)
***
Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these, and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture.
Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration but few have taken a step back and connect the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision or a single day.
On September 25, 2025, President [Trump] signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence’).
Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American”, “ anti-capitalist”, “ anti-Christian” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”
No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway. It tasked the FBI, the IRS and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.
Soon thereafter, the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from ten federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified [that there was] a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of U.S. citizens and non-governmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.
Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey.
The President’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a “fifth column,” and Trump himself amplified this by declaring “Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all… But first, Barack Obama.”
On May 6, 2026, the administration’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names “violent left-wing extremists,” “anti-fascists,” and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States.
Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named. The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion dollar budget to do the targeting. The President’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel have preauthorized the use of domestic force.
Meanwhile the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Tom Homan, the President’s “border czar” has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of American citizens without an act of Congress.
In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, U.S. forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly sixty strikes on small boats designated as “narcoterrorists” without indictment, trial or judicial review. The commander of U.S. Northern Command has said publicly he would “definitely” execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil.
The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against U.S. citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while Trump has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations.
Trump is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents, to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter roles and ballots.
[The U.S. Senate recently passed a $70 billion supplemental funding bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The legislation is on track for an upcoming U.S. House vote. The funds aim to finance these agencies through 2029.]
[Another piece of the puzzle: Over the last year, the Justice Department has sought voter roll data from most states; sued those that have declined to comply; opened a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., a state Trump narrowly lost that year; and demanded ballots from the 2024 race from Wayne County, Mich.]
Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter roles, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents. These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” which is currently underway.
Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.
Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial — we are not deploying the military domestically, we are not declaring an emergency over elections, we are not coming for citizens.
Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.
The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.
So what is to be done?
Congress must reassert its Article I authority over emergency powers, military deployment on U.S. soil, and the Office of Legal Council’s power to rewrite statute by memo.
Governors and state attorneys general must adopt the protective measures that civil liberties lawyers have already drafted to shield citizens, non-profits and election workers from NPSM-7.
Newsrooms must report the rolling coup architecture as a single big picture story, because that is what it is.
And each of us — in pulpits, in classrooms, in podcasts, in union halls, at work and around kitchen tables — must call this by its name out loud, while there is still time and there is still room.
***
Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a Presidential declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent implementation of the emergency measures, not authorized by law but drafted and implemented without any Congressional oversight.
We took the same oath of office that every member of the military and every federal officer takes — to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The obligation in that oath does not end when one leaves office. We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not, but time is short and the challenge is urgent.
— former U.S. senators Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth
Please avoid any underpasses. ANY underpasses.
AI Wagen
Musk's Galactic Ripoff https://robertreich.substack.com/p/musks-galactic-ripoff
Friends,
Elon Musk’s SpaceX goes on the market tomorrow. Rather than provide a range and then price the deal based on demand, as is customary in Initial Public Offerings, Musk has set a take-it-or-leave-it price of $135 per share.
He anticipates that the resulting corporation will be valued at $1.77 trillion. That’s an extraordinary amount for a company that generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year and recorded an operating loss of $4.2 billion.
In other words, Musk is offering SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This is ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals. But it’s a great deal for Musk. He comes out of it with nearly a trillion dollars.
Granted, it’s difficult to predict the value of activities that don’t yet exist, such as SpaceX’s stated mission to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” Interstellar space travel and interplanetary habitation are inherently speculative endeavors. But before tomorrow’s giant I.P.O., capitalism had never before put a price tag on something nearly as speculative and as large.
Let’s be clear. SpaceX’s IPO is basically nothing more than a show of faith in Musk. After all, much of SpaceX’s value comes out of a deal Musk negotiated between Space X’s and his Artificial Intelligence startup, xAI. Musk essentially made that deal with himself, setting the relative valuations by himself, closing the deal by himself, and unilaterally deciding the value of his own transaction. A magic trick, out of thin air!
The closer you look at the SpaceX IPO, the more it looks like Musk’s ill-fated DOGE. It also bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s takeover of the U.S. government. All of it is arbitrary, based on the will of one man with a giant ego and an insatiable thirst for money and power. It’s built on self-dealing. There’s no accountability. No checks. No balances.
Musk will have total control. Shareholders won’t have any voice whatsoever. Each share held by Musk will have ten times the voting power of a share offered to the public. SpaceX’s board of directors will engage in a pantomime. They’ll have no meaningful authority. As the editorial board of the Financial Times put it, “traditional governance checks are almost entirely absent…. [Musk] will have a virtually unchallenged grip on voting rights and the board.”
None of this would be particular cause for concern if investors could decide for themselves whether the downside risks and potential upside gains from buying SpaceX stock were worth the price. That’s called a “market.” Caveat emptor.
But many of us, if not most of us, with any savings parked in major stock indices (yours truly included) won’t have any choice. We’re going to end up investing in SpaceX whether we want to or not. That’s because the major indices have been rigged.
Normally, major stock indices have a waiting period before they plow their investor’s money into a newly-formed company. in order to test whether that company is worth it. But SpaceX has lobbied index funds to change the rules.
On May 1, for example, the Nasdaq 100 implemented a new “fast entry” rule that will include companies valued among the top 40 most highly-valued companies — which will almost certainly include SpaceX.
Presto! A big chunk of American’s retirement savings and pensions will automatically be tied to SpaceX’s market value. At the same time, all that automatic infusion of investment will artificially jack up the value of SpaceX, at least in the short term.
But here’s the real kicker. SpaceX insiders — such as Musk and, reportedly, senior Trump officials — will be able to sell their shares sooner than is usually the case with an I.P.O., because that’s the way the I.P.O. has been organized. Which means they can enjoy the stocks’ upward tide as the major indices force millions of investors to buy it, and then they can exit SpaceX before the tide goes out.
If this sounds to you like a Ponzi scheme, it does to me, too. Even worse, it’s a Ponzi scheme that’s been rigged by Musk, with the acquiescence of Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission, to require that I and probably you put some of our savings into SpaceX.
Speaking of the S.E.C, Senator Elizabeth Warren has raised many of these concerns with Paul Atkins, Trump’s S.E.C. chair. She’s even asked him to delay the I.P.O to determine whether index funds are adequately protecting investors — warning of “a disastrous scenario where retirees’ and families’ investment accounts take a hit if SpaceX’s valuation falters, with little recourse for any corporate misconduct, while the wealthiest man on earth becomes even wealthier due to a lack of oversight.”
But SpaceX’s takeoff is happening tomorrow, regardless. It’s likely to make Musk a trillionaire, but also shaft a lot of innocent people, perhaps without them even noticing. It will be a huge redistribution from most of us to Elon and his buddies.
I don’t want to sound cynical, but this is the sort of thing that brings out the cynicism in me. It’s the story of American capitalism in this Second Gilded Age.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of
June 10, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 11
READ IN APP
Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April. The Federal Reserve likes to keep inflation at 2%. Energy costs are the biggest driver of that inflation, with fuel oil up 59% and gasoline up 41% over their costs last year. Airline fares have risen 27%. Fruits and vegetables are up 6% over their cost a year ago.
At a signing event for the budget reconciliation measure Republicans passed to add an additional $70 billion in funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protect (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, a reporter in the Oval Office asked President Donald J. Trump if he was concerned about the inflation number. Trump answered:
“No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?”
And then his speech slid into a fantasy rewriting of the history of his war on Iran and his decision to launch it.
Trump claimed that he was telling reporters—and Iran—for the first time that the U.S. was secretly taking oil from Iran. “Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil?” he asked. “Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, ’cause they don’t have any radar, ’cause we blasted the crap out of it. We took out, that why oil’s $85 a barrel.”
As Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times report, Trump appeared to be referring to the well-known U.S. operation to help dozens of commercial vessels traverse the Strait of Hormuz. So far, the journalists report, the U.S has guided more than 200 ships through in a little more than a month. Before the war, about 3,000 ships a month traveled through the strait. The reporters say they could not confirm Trump’s claim that the effort had enabled more than 100 million barrels of oil to reach the market.
Then Trump segued into a rewriting of why he started the strikes in the first place in order to suggest the dramatic hit the economy has taken from the war was part of his plan all along. He claimed he had deliberately made the choice to hurt the economy to stop Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, which he claimed—contrary to his own intelligence officers’ assessments—it was going to have “very soon.”
“I said, look, the one bad thing will be, we hit the best economy we’ve ever hit,” Trump claimed. “And I said to my people, I had [Treasury Secetary] Scott [Bessent], I had [Commerce Secretary] Howard [Lutnick], I had [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], I had all—I had [then–deputy attorney general] Todd [Blanche] in the room. I said, The one thing we have to do now, we had just hit the highest stock market in history. Highest 401Ks in history. Everything was going well, and I said, I hate to do this to you guys, but Iran’s gonna have a nuclear weapon very soon. We have to go and attack.”
In fact, in his video announcing the strikes and in comments in the early days of the war, Trump emphasized that the U.S. intended to end the Iranian regime, which he claimed had been at war with the U.S. for 47 years, and he urged Iranians to rise up against it. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions would come from the regime change he advocated.
In any case, he said today, oil was not nearly as expensive as the $250 a barrel people had said it could reach, so its current level is “pretty amazing.” And the stock market, he said, remains high. He went on to say that his strikes on Venezuela were “a great success” and that Venezuela has “become a happy country,” and that “we went to Iran and essentially we’ve done the same thing.” He claimed Iran’s military has been destroyed and all the Iranian leadership is gone.
When a reporter finally brought him back to the question about inflation coming down, he said that when the war is over, “it’s gonna come down like a rock.”
Meanwhile, John Knefel of Media Matters noted yesterday that Fox News hosts, many of whom supported the initial strikes on Iran, are now arguing that Trump should start bombing again. Their mantra is that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.
Trump’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news as New York Times White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have a book on the Trump presidency coming out, detailed how desperately worried the White House was last summer over the Epstein files. They searched desperately for a way to look as if they were being transparent to appease the MAGA base, while also making sure the files stayed hidden.
The write-up of the story distances Vice President J.D. Vance from the files, suggesting he was “panicked” by them and wanted them released. This position, attributed to him by White House officials, is good for him politically, as he will want to pick up MAGA voters unhappy about the Epstein cover up by 2028, at least—or before, should he need to take the mantle of the presidency from Trump, who will turn 80 on Sunday.
Vance is in the news this week as he seems to court MAGA in other ways, as well. On Monday he announced he would refer Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to the Department of Justice for an investigation of criminal fraud. The claim that Somalis in Minnesota are engaging in social services fraud while Democrats look the other way is a driving factor behind MAGA politics.
Raquel Coronell Uribe and Tara Prindiville of NBC News report that Walz has called Vance’s attacks on him a “campaign of retribution” meant “to punish blue states like Minnesota.” Ellison told the reporters the allegations were “unfounded” and a “political stunt.” “It is deeply troubling to see official powers and public resources diverted away from serving the people and instead aimed at pursuing political adversaries,” he said. “That is not what government is for, and it diminishes public trust in our institutions.”
Vance has also jumped aboard the unfounded accusation of Trump and his loyalists that the slow counting of ballots in California suggests the election is insecure and the Republican candidate is being cheated. Election denialism is increasingly a hallmark of the MAGA Republicans as they argue any election they lose is fraudulent.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, when caught lying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, Vance admitted he felt it necessary “to create stories so that the…media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”
Yesterday, an Iranian drone downed a U.S. helicopter, although a U.S. official told CBS News it was not clear that the strike was intentional. This evening, Trump launched new airstrikes against Iran, saying they were “self-defense strikes” “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression,” after the slow progress of negotiations for an agreement to end the war.
U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces “launched strikes on Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran. U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”
Christoph Koettl and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times confirmed reports from Iran that U.S. strikes destroyed what appears to have been a drinking water facility. They note that targeting civilian infrastructure can be a war crime under international law.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded to the U.S. strikes with their own strikes against U.S. targets in the region and announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz completely and would attack any vessels trying to cross it.
With the renewed strikes, the price of oil jumped more than $1 a barrel.
Tonight, Trump posted on social media a demand that Republicans in Congress give the U.S. military an additional $350 billion and pass the SAVE America bill that would suppress voting. “No games, no delays, and no weak compromises! Do this ASAP,” he wrote.
“This is a GENERATIONAL Investment in our Military, even bigger than President Reagan’s,” he wrote. The “$350 Billion Reconciliation Bill,” which could pass without any Democratic votes, “is the ONLY path to the full $1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR Military Budget our Warriors need in order to build THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM.”
He also demanded Republicans pass “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT” requiring proof of citizenship to vote and an end to mail-in ballots “EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!” in order to “protect our Elections for Generations to come” and “to secure the NATION for our children and grandchildren.”
Then he added “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION SURGERY FOR OUR CHILDREN,” then concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
—
It's Worse Than Ever https://robertreich.substack.com/p/its-worse-than-ever
Friends.
Either he knows he’s lying — in order to further undermine confidence in our elections and as a prelude to attacking the outcome of the midterms — in which case he needs to be impeached and convicted.
Or he doesn’t know he’s lying — he really believes that our election system is “crooked” and that the major media are “crooked” — in which case he’s seriously and dangerously mentally ill, and the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked to get him out of office.
Now.
