Very Bad Behavior At A School Board Meeting

No, it’s not feisty attendees, it’s a Board member, and geez. I really hope he’s prosecuted.

Tennessee student stands up to school board with fiery speech after a member called her ‘hot’

“I believe that you are all cowards.”

An April 2 Washington County School Board meeting in Tennessee took an uncomfortable turn after high school student Hannah Campbell finished delivering her remarks. Seated with the board and directly next to the superintendent, Campbell confidently participated in a discussion with members after presenting research she had conducted on other schools.

That’s when the board member seated next to her, Keith Ervin, reached over, put his arm around her, and said, “God, you’re hot, you know that? Where do you go to school at?”

What happened next

The comment is not a baseless allegation. The interaction was caught on video. A few people in the room laughed, Campbell herself quickly brushed off the comment, and the meeting continued as scheduled. Any viewer watching the meeting in person or on YouTube could clearly see what happened.

To many, it was clear that a line had been crossed, and the mood in the room was tense afterward.

The board chair, Annette Buchanan, called an emergency meeting the following week, where members voted to censure Ervin—a public rebuke meant to show that they did not support his comments. But otherwise, as an elected official, Ervin would keep his position on the board.

For his part, Ervin issued a statement apologizing for the incident but insisting that he had not meant any harm.

“I understand why people are reacting the way they are. But that’s not the full conversation, not even close,” he wrote. “When I mentioned she was hot, I meant she was on a roll. It was nothing to do with her appearance.”

The board’s response was not good enough for Campbell, who was also unconvinced by the apology statement.

Student boldly appears at another board meeting to speak up for herself

Campbell refused to shrink or hide. Instead, she returned to a school board meeting on May 7 and confronted not just Ervin, but the entire board, in a courageous four-minute speech.

“I do not forgive you,” she said to Ervin, adding, “The failure to act on the board’s behalf was and is equivalent to his actions, and it has hurt me just as much. To watch the chairperson be so quick to bang her gavel, to control the public, yet not use it once to control her own peer was disgusting … I believe that you are all cowards.”

She sarcastically thanked the board at the end of her speech for showing her that she would do well not to trust adults and authority figures to stand up for her—that she would have to do it herself.

The student’s brave stand earned the support of the community

Campbell was wrong about one thing: There were others in the community who were willing to stand up for her.

One irate father vowed to raise enough money to oust every single board member should they fail to act. “Would you want your kid around that guy without a camera around? I wouldn’t,” he said.

Meanwhile, an online petition calling for Ervin’s removal from the board, along with Superintendent Jerry Boyd’s, has collected nearly 7,000 signatures.

Even more enraging to parents, students, and community members is the fact that Ervin has been accused of inappropriate conduct before. According to WCYB-TV, records show that in 2009, Ervin made a “lewd, juvenile gesture of a sexual nature” in front of students and teachers at a school. He was censured then and barred from school property unless accompanied.

Campbell’s willingness to use her voice may be the difference between a censure and something that makes a real difference for all the students who come before the board after her.

Dumb In The Afternoon

I ran an errand, and am sitting down to a little snack of popcorn, looking at emails to keep or delete. Interestingly, it looks as if I can do a little post of links to news that seems stupid. Have a giggle or two while you get some information!

First, this one is not stupid; it’s the Naked Pastor’s YouTube channel link. Naked Pastor is the artist who draws inclusive toons and art, including the one with the trans sheep who was not lost. (This is also a note from me; if I turn it red, the link doesn’t show. -Ali)

I could not resist this one!

Trump Unwittingly Breaks Chinese Taboo Against Napping Facedown In Soup Bowl

FWIW. “VIP Snorkel” intrigued me.

Emails show FBI Director Kash Patel’s Hawaii trip included ‘VIP snorkel’ at a Pearl Harbor memorial

He’s ba-aa-ack …

Rudy Giuliani Seen A Ghost

Look who’s all better!

Evan Hurst

Could be joyful, rather than stupid, but stupid is as stupid does, yes?

Ag Sec Brooke Rollins Sued By USDA Employees Just For Doing A Little Christian Nationalism

No one told her this wasn’t a theocracy, I guess.

Robyn Pennacchia

And this does not conclude our stupid for the day, I’m just certain. But, it does conclude this post. Thanks for stopping by!

Open Windows, Clay Jones

Trump Think

Donald Trump is not thinking about you

Clay Jones

Donald Trump is not thinking about you. Don’t take my word for it, take his.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” Trump told us last June that he obliterated Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon. Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if he hadn’t torn up the nuclear agreement that Iran had with the United States and five other nations, which the Obama administration had crafted.

Trump said this to reporters as he was boarding a plane to China. And on that plane were billionaires like Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Stephen Schwarzman, Larry Culp, and Larry Fink. Other executives on the trip included Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Visa’s Ryan McInerney, Mastercard’s Michael Miebach, Illumina’s Jacob Thaysen, and Coherent’s Jim Anderson.

Trump said on Truth Social that he would ask Xi to “‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.” Their financial situations, he thinks about. Your financial situation, not so much. (snip-MORE)

Speaker Johnson sees nothing

which isn’t surprising, given where he is.

Ann Telnaes May 13, 2026

It’s easy to only be focused on Trump’s ever increasing unhinged behavior but his Republican enablers in Congress haven’t changed their tune. And they are the main reason he’s still in office.

From My Friend, Brian Arbenz, A Meme For The Season

sigh

Reflecting Pool Repairs to Cost $13.1 Million. Trump Had Promised $1.8 Million.

The Interior Department added $6.2 million to the no-bid contract for repairs to the Lincoln Memorial pool late last week.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

By David A. Fahrenthold and Luke Broadwater

Reporting from Washington

May 11, 2026Updated 11:42 a.m. ET

President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.

The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.

On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to repair the landmark because the firm had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Va.

The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. The government has not publicly said what that injury would have been.

Instead, it has cited Mr. Trump’s desire to get the work done before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.

Public contracting records do not say why the contract’s cost increased so sharply on Friday. Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said that the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.

But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contract’s current value matches, down to the dollar, an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings in the middle of last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, the documents show.

Competitive bidding laws aim to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors.

Image

“Every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered,” a lawsuit filed Monday said.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

The contractor was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”

The pool has also been troubled for decades by leaks and algae blooms that turn its water green.

On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.

The foundation, based in Washington, said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”

David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.

Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.

The Word Of The Term Is Corruption

I’d run across this article linked somewhere earlier this past week. But, I couldn’t read it or post it, because it was behind a paywall. Well, thanks to Punctuated.Equilibrium over on MPS Friday night, here it is! Well, a goodly snip of it. Give ’em a click to read it all, because they lifted the paywall so that everyone who wants to know can read it.

The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.

I’m pleading with you to look at the president’s self-dealing.

1 May 2026 Written by: Isaac Saul

(snip-skipping a bit at the top)

During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.

Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.

Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.

I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?

Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.

Let’s start with the cryptocurrency.

Perhaps the largest vehicle for Trump’s self-dealing has been his foray into cryptocurrency. This is a complicated space that I will try to make as straightforward and simple as possible.

In 2024, the Trump family launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial. Trump is listed as a “co-founder emeritus.” By December of 2025, they had profited roughly $1 billion from proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold cryptocurrency tokens, amassing a fortune larger than their entire real estate portfolio. At the same time the president was pushing his family’s new crypto venture, he was cutting crypto regulation, touting the potential of private digital currencies to help the U.S. economy, and promising to unleash the industry he and his family were simultaneously profiting from.

But the president wasn’t only directly making money in an industry he was deregulating; the Trumps benefitted through intermediaries, too. Last summer, World Liberty Financial bought a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy its own cryptocurrency, WLFI. The Wall Street Journal tepidly described this setup as an “unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller” that could net the Trump family an additional $500 million.

Essentially, the Trump family launched a cryptocurrency firm while deregulating the crypto industry, then bought a separate firm that it used to buy its own cryptocurrency while also raising three quarters of a billion dollars from investors to buy that same cryptocurrency.

Just days before he was inaugurated, Trump also launched a personal “memecoin” called $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies made about internet jokes, pop culture moments, or viral trends. They have no underlying value or technological purpose; the value of the coin is driven entirely by social hype. Trump created hype for his memecoin by launching it months after being elected and just three days before being inaugurated. He promoted $TRUMP on social media and, while president, even held a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin at one of his golf resorts in Virginia. He held another one at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. The initial coin offering released 200 million tokens of its billion-token supply to the public on the first day. The price skyrocketed 300% overnight and hit an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, right before Trump’s inauguration. $TRUMP has since cratered, losing 97% of its value (for context, if you had bought $1,000 at its peak, your $1,000 would now be worth about $30).

Trump, naturally, profited. The exact figures are hard to pin, but The Financial Times estimated that the scheme netted him personally about $350 million, while Trump’s holdings of the coin through a separate partnership could be worth billions more. It wasn’t just the president, either; First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin, which also skyrocketed in value before a massive sell-off that she profited from (what people in the industry call a “rug pull”). Most of the people who bought and held the coin based on the hype the Trumps created ended up losing most of their money, but the coin’s creators got rich (or, in this case, richer).

This cryptocurrency foray hasn’t just been a vehicle for self-enrichment, but also a vehicle for quid pro quos. Perhaps the most obvious and overt involved Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who was being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Sun, in the midst of his investigation, bought $75 million of WLFI — the World Liberty Financial coin — and then became an adviser at the company. Shortly after that investment, the SEC backed off its investigation and settled with him for $10 million, a small fraction of the expected penalties he was set to pay (on top of potential prison time). Of course, it’s possible that the SEC, an organization now openly being influenced by the president, just happened to back off its investigation in the weeks following Sun’s $75 million investment into Trump’s crypto firm.

It’s also possible that the two events are related.

The crypto story, though, hardly ended there. In late April, CBS reported that Sun was suing the Trump administration’s World Liberty Financial, alleging fraud. That’s right: Sun, whose initial case has since concluded, has now turned around and sued the Trump family, alleging that the president and his sons are illegally blocking him from selling his digital tokens that are worth as much as $1 billion. Sun also claims that World Liberty Financial tried to pressure him into investing in its stable coin, and that the company froze his tokens after he refused to commit more money to the business.

It’s hard to identify the villain.

Sun’s apparent quid pro quo to get out from under government oversight is just one example. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was pardoned by President Trump shortly after Zhao helped boost WLFI’s prominence by allowing the currency to be traded on the crypto exchange Binance, which Zhao started. After the pardon, Zhao became one of the Trumps’ business partners, boosting the family’s crypto empire while skating serious charges that he allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, and child abusers on his platform.

If that’s not enough, more shocking news broke this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, World Liberty Financial inadvertently partnered with two men the U.S. government had sanctioned a month before for helping run a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars from Americans through online scams. To repeat: Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against a transnational criminal syndicate for stealing billions of dollars from Americans in online scams. A month later, two of the men it sanctioned partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.

The evidence of crypto investments from foreign nationals operating as de facto bribes doesn’t end there. Consider the story of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president and one of the most powerful politicians in the Middle East (he’s served as the UAE’s national security advisor since 2016). He stewards an empire of wealth worth roughly $1.5 trillion, and a firm closely tied to him secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in WLFI worth $500 million — including $187 million paid upfront to Trump family entities just days before Trump’s inauguration. Shortly after Trump took office, the administration undid a national security block that would have prevented the UAE from getting up to 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips.

Some right-wing writers, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, have been brave enough to take this story head-on — but many have ignored it.

Sometimes, the favors happen en masse. The crypto industry as a whole was a top donor to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and the SEC then dropped or paused over a dozen cases against crypto firms, or simply handed them huge access to government-directed crypto entities. Several of those cases, like Sun’s, were tied directly to donations. Coinbase donated $1 million; its lawsuit was dropped. Ripple ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their tokens added to the national Digital Asset Stockpile.

I want to pause here to remind people that we spent all four years of the Biden administration talking about Hunter Biden’s alleged $50,000 a month salary while working at an energy firm in Ukraine, and the possibility that he was setting up some business deals for his father after he left the vice presidency. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment alleging Biden “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits—including financial compensation—from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”

Conversely, the final tally of investments from parties with conflicts of interest into crypto assets personally managed by the Trump family safely enters the range of billions of dollars — a scale of thousands of millions, in just one sector and in just over one year, while the president was actually in office.

It’s not just cryptocurrency.

(snip-MORE. It reads just as quickly on the page)

Clay Jones, Open Windows

So much winning

Trump keeps claiming he’s won the war

Ann Telnaes

And Don’t Call Me, Shirley

Surely Donald Trump should not be allowed around children

Clay Jones

Anytime Donald Trump is accused of being a pedophile, his base runs to the rescue as if they were personally slapped in the face. Currently, there are over 80 comments on this cartoon on my Facebook page, with the bulk of them being MAGAts demanding “verifiable” evidence that Trump is a pedophile. Of course, the same people who are demanding “verifiable” evidence are posting memes with fake quotes about Joe Biden and his daughter.

But how is this for verifiable evidence? Donald Trump went on the Howard Stern show in 2005 and bragged about walking into dressing rooms for teenage contestants in his beauty pageants. He bragged about it as if he had just won Michigan.

Here’s a small portion of that conversation: (snip-MORE; go read it!)

Pete Hegseth’s Far-Right Pastor: “Immodestly Dressed Women Are Sluts Who Just Give It Away To Every Slob”

Pete Hegseth’s Far-Right Pastor: “Immodestly Dressed Women Are Sluts Who Just Give It Away To Every Slob”

The Times of London reports:

A week before the US went to war with Iran, Pete Hegseth, the war secretary, invited the head of his church to lead prayers at the Pentagon. From his pulpit in Idaho, Doug Wilson, a 72-year-old ultraconservative pastor, preaches that homosexuality is a sin, women who dress immodestly are “sluts”, and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the “silliest thing in the world”.

Despite Hegseth’s evangelising, Wilson says the Trump administration is far from morally pure. He says the president is “not someone I would call a godly Christian man”, and disagrees with Trump’s appointment of a gay man, Scott Bessent, as his Treasury secretary because homosexuality is not just a sin, it is “a bad one”.

Of all his gripes, however, Wilson is most indignant about the 1960s sexual revolution, a moral catastrophe that he condemns frequently in his blog posts, sermons and books. He thinks women should dress modestly. But what is modest dress? “Not what they’re doing now,” he says. “I could pick on yoga pants.” He continues: “Men know what they think of hookers, which is not very much. When you’re just giving it away to every slob on the bus who wants to look, you’re degrading the currency.”

Does that mean Wilson and his followers sympathise with the dress codes enforced by Shia clerics in Iran? “No, because wrapping them up in a bedsheet is another way of degrading them. It is possible to be modest and attractive — attractive without attracting. Bundling them up the way really conservative Muslims do is a different kind of degradation. Like you’re not a person. But for a woman to dress like a slut is a different kind of degradation. Both kinds of degradation play off of each other.”

Read the full article. It’s quite the deep dive.

Wilson appeared here last month when he called for criminalizing homosexuality and outlawing all LGBTQ events.

In March, Wilson declared that under his Christian nationalist theocracy, all non-Protestant public events – such a Catholic parades that venerate the Virgin Mary – would be banned.

Also in March, a separate pastor at Hegseth’s church prayed for God to kill Senate candidate James Talarico.

Pete Hegseth’s pastor: ‘Women who dress immodestly are sluts’

— The Times and Sunday Times (@thetimes.com) 2026-05-05T11:45:51.187Z

FL Man Arrested On Felony Hate Crime Charges For Brutally “Beating The Gay Out Of” Five-Year-Old Boy

FL Man Arrested On Felony Hate Crime Charges For Brutally “Beating The Gay Out Of” Five-Year-Old Boy

West Palm Beach’s CBS affiliate reports:

A Florida man is facing life felony charges after allegedly brutally assaulting a defenseless 5-year-old boy in an act of hate-fueled child abuse. “This was a brutal and hateful attack on a defenseless child. There is absolutely no excuse for it. We will make sure justice is served and these children get the safety and support they deserve,” Sheriff Grady Judd said.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office said that on Sunday, May 3, 33-year-old Andre Brown Jr. from Davenport was arrested for child abuse. According to officials, this charge has been categorized as a life felony because it is considered a hate crime.

During interviews with the children in Browns care, it was revealed that Brown had been physically abusive toward a 5-year-old boy, specifically targeting him because he was “mad at him for being gay.” Brown reportedly told deputies that he abused the child because of his sexual orientation, claiming he would “beat the gay out of him if possible.”

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

The boy told authorities he was afraid of Brown and did not want to talk much about what happened. He had the worst injuries of the three: marks and bruising on his legs, arms, back, and stomach; a fracture to his right wrist; and a contusion to his forehead. He had marks all over his body consistent with being hit by a belt, the sheriff’s office said.

When deputies attempted to remove Brown from the scene, he pulled away, became loud and began yelling slurs, the sheriff’s office said. He continued yelling and pulling away once placed in handcuffs, according to the release, and also was charged with resisting arrest.

Brown has a lengthy criminal history, including domestic battery strangulation, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, kidnapping with intent to commit a felony, home invasion robbery with a firearm and battery on a law enforcement officer, the release said.

He’s being held without bond.

Clay Jones, Open Windows

World Press Freedom Day

Defend the free press and our democracy

Ann Telnaes

It’s World Press Freedom Day, I celebrated with a great conversation on The Andy Borowitz Show with Andy and director Laura Nix about free speech, and the predictions made in the film DEMOCRACY UNDER SIEGE that have come true since its release.

Catch the podcast video along with the film for free on the website through May 4.

Starting May 5, you can find the film on Kinema.com for home and group viewing, as well as gifting to friends and family who would like to see it.

In the evening of May 5th there will be a Kinema Launch Event hosted by The Media and Democracy Project, 7 pm ET. Join an online screening, live conversation and Q&A with special guests discussing the threat of media consolidation in light of the upcoming media mergers. Free tickets are limited, sign up for the event here

Court blocks mailing of Mifepristone

An early Mother’s Day wish

Ann Telnaes

Because grown women couldn’t possibly make their own reproductive decisions without courts and politicians.

MAGA Malaise

Gas prices and Trump’s approval ratings are going in opposite directions

Clay Jones

Today, the national average gas price is $4.43 a gallon. That’s the national average. If you are in California, a gallon of gas will cost you more than $4.43. If you’re in a place like South Carolina, it will probably be a little less. At any rate, it’s much more expensive than it should be, all because of Donald Trump.

One whatabout that MAGAts use is that gas prices were high when Joe Biden was president, at least for a minute. What they leave out is that Joe Biden didn’t do anything to cause high gas prices. When gas prices were high under Biden, they were high internationally, and again, not because of any negative policies inflicted by President Biden.

Today, gas prices are also high internationally, and it’s all because of Donald Trump. Donald Trump chose to start a war that didn’t need to be started. Trump is trying desperately to get a deal with Iran and get them to the negotiating table, which is where they were before he started dropping bombs on them. (snip-MORE)