We Need The Mystery, Inc. Gang! (Scooby Doo!)

Succinctly and well written.

Pretty Weird by Charlotte Clymer

[takes very deep breath]

Pretty weird that Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving 20 years for her involvement in a sex trafficking operation that was all in service to one man and no other clients and that man is now dead and the Department of Justice and FBI falsely claimed they released “raw” surveillance video of the area near his jail cell the night before he was found dead, which was later discovered by Wired to have been spliced and edited and inexplicably missing three minutes of footage and that man was a close friend of Trump for 15 years and Trump is actively trying to block Maxwell’s SCOTUS appeal on her conviction under a non-prosecution agreement that was previously reached with a U.S. Attorney who later became Trump’s Secretary of Labor and Trump now claims the whole thing is somehow a Democratic hoax perpetrated by Obama and Comey even though both of Epstein’s arrests by federal authorities happened under Republican presidents—the second one under Trump himself—and yet, the entire Republican Party—including Trump—and the rightwing media apparatus supporting them were somehow tricked by Democrats into specifically campaigning LAST YEAR for transparency on the Epstein scandal and pledging to release the files on the operation and his attorney general said the client list is on her desk and under review just a few months ago but now claims the client list never existed, which prompted the most intense infighting in the MAGA movement we’ve ever seen last week and it’s really anyone’s guess at this point why this is so but for some reason, Trump has no interest in releasing the files to clear his own name and the Republican Party have collectively decided to forget they’ve spent the past six years raising a ruckus over this very thing and House Republicans—again, many of whom have campaigned for transparency on this—just unanimously voted against releasing the files, without any real justification, except for the nine House Republicans who curiously declined to vote on it and refuse to offer a credible explanation for that decision while House Democrats unanimously voted for releasing the files despite being the party that’s behind said hoax.

Pretty weird.

Local News That Is Pertinent To All Of Us, At Our Local Levels

Republican “states’s rights” … (this was on at 4PM yesterday, still awaiting a vote, but the story wasn’t on the site to grab a post until this morning, but including the final vote. If you prefer video, the newscast video is right there when you click through.) Meanwhile, it’d be a sound scheme to check in on what your own cities are doing, and weigh in with the governing bodies, because this not only in blue big cities, but everywhere.

Wichita City Council votes to suspend DEI policies to protect $100M in federal funding

Lily O’Brien Jul 15, 2025 Updated 13 hrs ago

WICHITA, Kan. (KAKE) – The Wichita City Council voted in favor of compliance with the White House after realizing a risk they estimate could leave the city without $100 million in federal funding.

It’s a debate facing city governments across the nation: eliminate some diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or risk federal grant money.

“There’s a lot of grants that we get from the federal government that are very important to the citizens in Wichita,” said Vice Mayor J.V. Johnston.

Tuesday’s resolution on the matter moved to authorize the Wichita City Manager to ensure compliance with federal grant requirements.

“What this resolution allows us to do is temporarily suspend enforcement of ordinances when they’re deemed in being in conflict with the federal requirements,” said Robert Layton, Wichita’s city manager. (Emphasis mine- A.)

The motion comes with the Trump Administration’s push against so-called DEI programming.

Councilmember Brandon Johnson began a statement with the definition of fascism, criticizing the federal government and citing constitutional concerns.

“Without elaborating, whether you agree with my inference or not, you undoubtedly know exactly what and whom I’m referring to. That alone speaks volumes,” said Johnson.

Johnson later adds that the nation, founded with checks and balances, is seeing that fabric stretched.

“The executive branch of the United States government continues to push the boundaries of settled law and the Constitution, infringing upon our God given rights simply because the current occupant disagrees,” said Johnson.

Cities, like Wichita, are also asked to cooperate with immigration enforcement and certify that they do not maintain non-compliant DEI programs.

It was estimated that $100 million in federal grant money was in jeopardy depending on the vote result.

Councilmember Dalton Glasscock clarified the risk, asking what it would mean for the Wichita community to go without that federal funding.

“We’ve got $100 million at risk. If Wichita doesn’t have $100 million, we’re going to have a lot of holes in what we provide all the way from transportation to housing to roads,” said Johnston.

Faced with that decision, the City Council voted 4-3 to approve the resolution.

Alongside the vote came a pause of Wichita’s advisory board on diversity, inclusion, and civil rights.

“It’s important we don’t lose that perspective on the Council, because we can’t personally represent every demographic in Wichita, and they help us to hear from more folks in our city,” said Councilmember Maggie Ballard. (Emphases mine- A.)

Grant recipients across the country are having to certify they are in compliance with the administration’s interpretation of federal anti-discrimination laws.

If the city didn’t comply, it wouldn’t get the money for critical services to Wichita, including police, fire, transit and housing.

NPR: A refugee deported to Bhutan by the U.S. finds himself stranded and stateless

A refugee deported to Bhutan by the U.S. finds himself stranded and stateless
Once deported to Bhutan, some Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees say they are told to leave. Many have since disappeared, while others are homeless and stateless, according to immigration advocates.

Read in NPR: https://apple.news/Auip9P-onR6W01v1fljhY7g

Shared from Apple News

Best Wishes and Hugs,Scottie

Clay Jones, Open Windows

SCOTUS flunks Separation of Powers again by Ann Telnaes

Supposedly only Congress has the power to abolish the Department of Education Read on Substack

This is the result by the majority Supreme Court’s expansion of presidential power and a Congress who long ago failed to uphold its constitutional oath of office.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, is quoted in the Economist that there is “no rhyme or reason” in these rulings other than “enabling lawless behaviour by the Trump administration”. Vladeck has a substack about the U.S. Supreme Court I recommend following.

==================

Tanks For Nothing by Clay Jones

SCOTUS says Trump can dismantle the Education Department and Grok goes to war Read on Substack

It’s frustrating to watch Trump get everything he wants, from media outlets settling bogus lawsuits, to social media caving into his demands, to FIFA giving him a trophy while making the winners celebrate with a duplicate (he was even caught stealing a medal), to FIFA (again) renting office space in Trump Tower to kiss his ass, to the Supreme Court of the United States allowing him to deport whoever he wants and destroy any federal agency he wants.

Congress created the Department of Education by law, and Trump acted to destroy it. He was sued, and a lower federal court paused it. Now, SCOTUS ruled, 6-3 as usual, that Trump can continue to destroy it as the case makes its way through the lower courts. Even if SCOTUS says Trump can’t destroy the department by the time the case returns from the lower courts, it will probably be too late.

It will be like reversing the death penalty after the execution.

These rulings are partisan. When the Biden administration asked SCOTUS to unpause a lower court’s freeze on forgiving student loans, SCOTUS refused. But for Trump, they’re bending over backward. SCOTUS is officially saying, “It’s OK if a Republican does it.”

I thought SCOTUS was on a break. They are, but they figured it was an emergency, so they came back to help Trump destroy education. This shit doesn’t make America great again. They wouldn’t have done this for Biden, nor would they have ruled that Biden is immune from prosecution.

Hmmmm, what else happened yesterday? Oh, yeah. Grok, Elon’s AI product, has been given a $200 million contract with the Defense Department. This came one day after Grok went on an antisemitic rant on Twitter/X. Of course, only Elon could teach a robot to be a Nazi.

It’s bad enough we got Drunky Hegseth leading the department while spilling classified information and pausing arms shipments to Ukraine, and now we’re going to trust Artificial Intelligence.

The Pentagon also gave contracts to Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The federal government is hiring robots while the Education people are being dumped.

Did none of these bozos watch The Terminator? At what time does Skynet become self-aware? We’re all doomed. Doooooomed, I tell you. (snip-MORE)

From AnnieAsksYou-

This Strong Institutional Guardrail Doesn’t Get Enough Attention

Some clips from The Majority Report dealing with Racism in the US and Israel and ICE.

More Republican Dis-Representation for LBGTQ+

After Axing the Word “Transgender,” Stonewall Monument Website Quietly Cuts “Bisexual” Too

Erin Reed reports the “.gov” removed several mentions of bisexuality in favor of “gays and lesbians” or “the Stonewall community.”

By James Factora

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 30: People stand outside Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center during the 2024 NYC Pride March on June 30, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)Noam Galai/Getty Images

The Stonewall National Monument website seemingly erased most mentions of bisexuality from its website right before Pride month. This comes after the site erased all mentions of trans people from the same “.gov” earlier this year.

The changes appear to have been made on May 27, according to the website itself, which notes the date that each page was last updated. But they largely went unnoticed until independent journalist Erin Reed reported on them on Thursday in a post on her Substack. As of July 11, the homepage on the website, which is run by the National Parks Service (NPS), reads, “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.”

But a version of the homepage from May 26, accessed via Wayback Machine, reveals a previous version of that same statement: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement.”

Similarly, the “history and culture” page on the website was also updated to remove references to bisexuality on May 27. Where an archived version of the page from May 26 uses the acronym “LGB” numerous times, the most recent version of the page says “gay and lesbian,” and even uses the euphemism “the Stonewall community” in one instance. However, the “virtual fence exhibit” page on the website, which was updated on May 13, still uses the “LGB” acronym, as does the education page. (Though only time will tell how long those mentions will stay.)

As previously reported by Them, these changes come after NPS removed most mentions of trans people from the Stonewall National Monument website in February.

In June, the NPS also told activist Steve Love Menendez, who has been installing hundreds of Pride flags at the monument annually since 2017, that he should only install rainbow flags this year, and that they would not be covering the cost of trans or progress Pride flags, as they had done since 2023. (Visitors brought their own trans flags to place at the monument anyway.)

Though it’s unconfirmed whether the Trump administration is directly responsible for these changes, they are in line with the anti-trans executive orders that the President issued earlier this year, which sought to redefine gender as binary and determined at birth on all federal websites, among other anti-DEI efforts.

People stand outside Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center during the 2024 NYC Pride March on June 30, 2024 in New York City.

The National Park Service Has Removed the Word “Transgender” From the Stonewall Monument Website

The letter “T” was also removed from instances of the acronym “LGBTQ+.”

In a statement emailed to Them, Stacy Lentz, the co-founder and CEO of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, took care to note that neither the bar itself nor its affiliated charity are associated with NPS. “That said, we find it deeply troubling that any government agency would erase bisexual people from their public-facing materials,” she said. “Stonewall has always welcomed and celebrated the full spectrum of our community — and that will never change.”

Kurt Kelly, owner of the Stonewall Inn, told Them, “The erasure of bisexual people from federal websites is not just a digital oversight — it’s a deliberate act of invisibility that harms an already marginalized part of our LGBTQ+ community.”

“We must unite as a community to always fight to ensure every identity under our rainbow is seen, heard, and protected. Bi visibility matters. Lives depend on it,” he added. “The fact they continue to do this on the Stonewall National Monument website is even more troubling knowing what Stonewall means to our community around the globe. “

Them has reached out to the National Parks Service for comment.

(snip)

Please Join Me!

Writting and calling the US Senators about this. We’ve already paid for this money to be disbursed, with the understanding that it will be. This recission is UnAmerican.

Rescission Package Would Sabotage Recent Funding Deal, Cripple Future Ones

July 15, 2025, 1:47 pm

President Trump’s proposal to rescind $9.4 billion in previously approved spending, which the Senate is expected to vote on this week, is a bad idea for several reasons, as noted in a recent CBPP report. The rescission package would significantly damage life-saving global health programs, peacekeeping efforts, and economic development abroad, and would hurt domestic community TV and radio stations supported by the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. It also builds on the Administration’s broader effort to illegally impound funds, which includes withholding for months the spending that was ultimately included in the rescissions package prior to the formal request and unlawfully delaying or blocking billions of dollars for other programs from going out.

What’s less obvious but no less important, the package — combined with the Administration’s broader campaign of illegally impounding funds — could also make it far more difficult for Congress to fund the government in a bipartisan way in the future.

Here’s why:

Most of the funds in the rescission package were enacted in March legislation that was passed by Congress — including on a bipartisan basis in the Senate — and signed into law by the President to fund the government for the rest of fiscal year 2025. To provide the 60 votes required to avoid a Senate filibuster, at least eight Democratic senators needed to join with 52 Republican senators to invoke cloture on the funding bill.

But presidential rescission requests operate under different rules and require only 51 votes to pass the Senate, so no Democratic votes are needed. If the Senate approves the package (which passed the House on a party-line vote), this would show that Republicans could quickly revise on a partisan basis, with merely 51 votes in the Senate, a bipartisan funding agreement reached only a few months earlier that required support from no fewer than 60 senators.

Nothing has changed about the provisions in the package since the funding was approved in March. They are simply policies President Trump has long opposed and doesn’t want to carry out. But that is not a justification for a rescissions request. After all, it’s typical in an appropriations deal that no one gets everything they want. That means congressional negotiators may get more or less funding than they prefer for a given agency; it also means the Administration may be required to implement programs it does not support.

But if Senate Republicans go along with the Administration’s efforts to simply remove spending they had earlier agreed to as part of the March deal, this would undermine the ability to strike future deals. Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has also indicated that the Administration “will strongly consider” sending further rescissions requests to Congress. And of course, the trust needed to make these deals is further undermined when the Administration also chooses to withhold money illegally without even submitting a rescissions package.

The result would likely be lasting damage to our ability to fund the government in a bipartisan way, and the consequences will become clearer in just the next few months. Enacting appropriations for fiscal year 2026, which starts October 1, will require Democratic senators to join with Republicans to reach the needed 60-vote threshold. This Democratic support may not materialize if Democrats believe the President and congressional Republicans will later undo, by rescission or impoundment, any agreement they sign onto.

More generally, there’s little reason for the minority party in Congress to agree to a deal when the Administration and the majority party can strip away funding they don’t like in a purely partisan way, or if the Administration may attempt unilaterally — and illegally — not to implement it at all, with no pushback from the majority party in Congress. As a result, it would be far more difficult to reach the bipartisan agreements necessary to fund the government on time and with the resources required to serve the country’s needs.

Senators should keep those consequences in mind as they consider the President’s current rescission request.

Topics:

Federal Budget

Busy Day In Peace & Justice History, from Crusaders Sacking Jerusalem To Strikers To Nukes, & More:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july16

Political cartoons / memes / news I want to share 7-16-2025

Image from It seemed like a good idea at the time...

I think it's more patriotic to notice the flaws in your country and want better for it than to ignorantly claim its great and disregard major problems that need fixing.

— Alyssa (@pooroldkilgore)