Clay Jones

Kill The Messenger by Clay Jones

Dictators fire people for bad news Read on Substack

Firing people for delivering bad news is a fascist move. It was popular with the likes of Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and dare say it, Adolf Hitler. Trump and Hitler both fired generals they didn’t trust.

Sometimes it would be a census taker telling Stalin that his famine was reducing the population. He wouldn’t just be fired, but shipped off to a gulag, or even murdered. The first thing to go in a dictatorship is a free press.

Yesterday, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, delivered a negative jobs report. Trump, our Dear Leader and Fascist in Chief, didn’t like those numbers, so Hair Fuhrer fired her.

TACO said, “I’ve had issues with the numbers for a long time. We’re doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony, like they were before the election, and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.” OK, Shitler.

Russia and China manipulate their economic numbers. Like Trump, they take apolitical agencies and politicize them. Yes, the BLS will now be politicized. People who don’t want to lose their jobs will only report happy news to Cheeto Mussolini. The government will be less informed. The American people will be lied to.

It will be like people in North Korea being told there is plenty of food while they’re staring at empty shelves in their markets. You’re not starving. Who are you going to believe, Kim Jong Un or your lying growling stomach?

Trump doesn’t want us to believe our lying eyes either. He’s lied about vote totals, crowd sizes, tariff formulas, and even weather forecasts. Remember when he tried to change a hurricane’s direction with a Sharpie. I can do a lot with a Sharpie, you’ve seen it, but I can’t move a hurricane with one. (snip-MORE)

Clay Jones

Stolen Women by Clay Jones

Trump thinks women are property…his property Read on Substack

If you are aware of a pedophile, and you enable that pedophile, then you’re as bad as a pedophile. So, what did Trump know? What did Trump do?

There is a video of Trump seeing a young girl going up an escalator in 1992, maybe she was a preteen, and he comments that he’ll be “dating” her someday. It’s creepy. It’s creepy like when he said he’d be dating his own daughter if they weren’t related. On another occasion, he said what he and Ivanka have in common is their love for sex. I just shivered.

I know relationships are different, but what father wants to talk to his daughter about his or her sex life? Ew. The most I ever talked to my mother about sex was shortly after my separation from my wife, and she said she hoped I wouldn’t fall in love with the first woman I slept with. I told my mother, “I haven’t fallen in love with either of them.” And she said, “TWO? TWO? I’m so ashamed and proud of you.” Unfortunately, my father wouldn’t shut up about his past exploits.

Trump is a creeper. When he endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate, he already knew about allegations of pedophilia against Moore. Trump’s defense was, “He said he didn’t do it.” That’s the same defense he used for Putin’s election meddling.

Whenever it’s a he-said-she-said situation, Trump will always go with he-said. (snip-MORE)

Some News Of The Day

Senate Democrats Estimate DOGE Caused Billions of Dollars In Government Waste by TPM
Read on Substack

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

What DOGE Cost Us

Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday released a jaw-dropping report attempting to document the scope and scale of financial waste, personnel upheaval, and human suffering caused by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s giddily uninformed strike force of Peter Thiel acolytes. In all, the Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal (CT), estimated DOGE cost the government $21.7 billion.

“DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan,” the report contends.

Major news coverage focused on the cost of the government paying over 150,000 federal workers who accepted the Trump administration’s deferred resignation incentives, under which they had to stop working but are continuing to be paid through September or even December. The minority’s report, which estimated that 200,000 workers took these buyouts, calculated that paying workers for not working cost the government $14.8 billion.

Neither the buyouts nor paying workers while on administrative leave (costing an additional $6.1 billion) increased government efficiency, as was always obvious and predictable. The report details many other costs, from the petty and pointless (millions of hours of wasted employee time writing the Musk-required email listing their weekly accomplishments) to the catastrophic (the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, “projected to cause millions of additional deaths globally while simultaneously endangering domestic public health by reducing essential medical staff and programs.”)

As it rampaged through the government, DOGE destroyed valuable assets, wasting money already set aside to be spent, or depriving the government of income-generating programs. Product spoilage of USAID supplies of food and medicines cost the government nearly $10 million. DOGE’s elimination of the Internal Revenue Service’s Direct File program, the report estimates, wasted a more than $33 million investment in it, not to mention that taxpayers no longer have a free electronic filing option. DOGE caused the loss of more than $263 million of interest and fee income by shutting down Department of Energy loans from a program to modernize the electricity grid. The actual cost of the mass cancellations of medical research grants at the National Institutes of Health has yet to be fully calculated.

This summary represents a fraction of the entire report, and much is still not even known about the scope of the DOGE destruction. Yesterday, Blumenthal wrote to the inspectors general at 27 agencies, requesting they “initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s activities within your agency in order to determine the full scope of costs that DOGE’s careless actions have imposed,” particularly “the financial impact of the reorganization of federal agencies through mass layoffs, the canceling of grants, contracts, and other projects for partisan reasons, and the stifling of income-generating activities.”

Is MAGA Turning on Trump over Israel?

I spotted two stories this week in the inside-the-Beltway press, one in Politico and the other in Axios, suggesting MAGA is turning on Trump because of his continued support of the Netanyahu regime and its assault on Gaza that even Israeli human rights organizations have called a genocide. The Axios piece even suggests a “GOP realignment” on the issue may be underway. The Politico piece is more measured on that possibility, but neither piece mentions the critical role of Christian Zionists — that is, evangelicals who vigorously support Israel’s far right, like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — in the Trump coalition.

It is hard to know now this possible coalitional split will play out. In the meantime, can we talk about how the MAGA figures turning against Israel are saying things that have gotten foreign students detained and universities’ funding cut off?

(snip-MORE, + other subjects)

Clay Jones, Open Windows

Henchman Pam Bondi by Ann Telnaes

who prosecutes on behalf of Trump Read on Substack

Bondi tweet:

(original hanging in the Hay-Adam’s Off the Record bar)

My colleague KAL has also a post about the coasters he, Matt Wuerker, and I created for the bar.

(Note from A: Click through on KAL’s-you’ll love it!)

Irritating Screechy Blowhole by Clay Jones

Look, Europe! Our president (sic) is a raving lunatic Read on Substack

It’s one thing for Donald Trump to display his deteriorating mental state here at home, like ranting about lightbulbs or batteries so heavy that they sink boats to waiting sharks, but it’s another thing for TACO to go overseas and reassure our friends and allies that the United States of America has an insane racist at the helm (he howled about immigration into Europe).

While sitting next to European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, Trump went on a rant about windmills…again.

Trump said in a long-winded rant, “And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas of the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place, it’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy; it’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them, they won’t let you. But the propellers, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land; in other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job.”

Keep in mind, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is fighting its own power to fight Climate Change. Talk about a con job. (snip-yadayada [Trump] I mean MORE)

And In Not What It Initially Appears To Be,

Charlotte Clymer with another interesting story about rightwingers.

Why Sydney Sweeney Needs to Be Canceled by Charlotte Clymer

Her career needs to end. Read on Substack

Actually, this has nothing to do with Sydney Sweeney.

I’ve seen some of her movies and shows. She’s a good actor. She seems nice. I have no real opinion of her beyond that.

The rightwing media ecosystem is currently obsessed with Ms. Sweeney, and per their usual outrage machine schtick, they’ve made her their latest vehicle for claiming Democrats are out-of-touch with America.

This week, Fox News and various other conservative outlets have spent considerable time claiming that Democrats are furious over a jeans advertisement featuring Ms. Sweeney—the details of their supposed outrage are too absurd to get into here, and I’d rather not insult your intelligence by pretending you should care.

But I figure tens of millions of Trump supporters are feverishly googling “Democrats” and “Sydney Sweeney” for that sweet, sweet hit of outrage to feed their addiction, and it occurred to me that a provocative headline could be a great opportunity to get them here and offer a read-out on what Democrats and progressives are currently, actually, passionately discussing.

I’m in approximately ~5,000 group chats with fellow Democrats (heavy sigh), give or take a few, and Sydney Sweeney has not come up once in any of them. Not a single one.

Here’s what we’ve really been talking about this week:

We’re pretty horrified by the ongoing horror in Gaza. Children there are starving-to-death, and the Israeli military has brutally slaughtered more than 1,000 innocent civilians attempting to get food assistance, almost all of which is being blocked by Netanyahu’s government.

All of our allies—including the United Kingdom—have been urgently pleading with Netanyahu to end the blockade and feed starving people in Gaza and please, oh please, stop shooting at them.

We’re wondering why Republican Christians in Congress would disregard Christ’s clear teachings on this matter. Pope Leo XIV condemned “the very grave humanitarian situation in Gaza, where the civilian population is crushed by hunger and remains exposed to violence and death.”

But hey, what the hell does he know?

We’re disgusted by the cover-up over the Epstein files, and it’s fairly obvious to everyone that Donald Trump is desperately attempting to conceal and distract from his involvement in a massive sex trafficking operation that targeted children.

Remember when the Republican Party pretended to care about pedophiles and sex trafficking and the so-called “Deep State” and Trump pandered to them for votes by claiming he would released the Epstein files and then he didn’t?

We’ve been talking all month about the fall-out of Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill and the fact that upwards of 17 million Americans will lose their health care coverage and millions will lose food assistance and a ton of rural hospitals are about to close down.

We have no idea how we’re going to help all these people when that legislation is fully implemented, and in discussing how to get medical treatment for the sick and food for the hungry, we don’t really care who these vulnerable folks voted for last year.

We’re considerably worried about the country’s total unpreparedness for natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and flooding and earthquakes because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have gutted the NOAA and the National Weather Service and FEMA.

We imagine a lot of people are going to needlessly die in flood waters and devastating cyclones because of Republican incompetence and cruelty, and again: we have no idea how we’re going to help these folks when that happens.

We’ve been talking a lot about the accelerating erosion of constitutional protections and the Trump administration openly forcing colleges and corporations to pay him a bribe in order to avoid being targeted by his dictatorial madness.

We’ve been talking about Trump’s efforts to silence Stephen Colbert and his other most prominent critics in pop culture, except, of course, when he’s too chickenshit to take on the creators of South Park.

We wonder how the Constitution will survive this era. We wonder how the courts can resist threats of violence. We wonder how democracy can endure when even the most concerned Republicans, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, have largely given up on their oaths.

Sydney Sweeney and which endorsements she’s landed and what ads she’s appearing in and what products she’s hawking to the public — none of that matters to us.

If anything, in regards to Ms. Sweeney, we’re embarrassed for the shamelessness of Republicans who are attempting to exploit her as a distraction from the death and destruction they’re causing and enabling.

Maybe if we got a hungry or sick child in a rural part of the country to record a video talking shit about Ms. Sweeney, that would be enough for Trump and Republicans to pay attention to their suffering. (snip)

Goon Is As Good A Term As Any

Goons of Justice by Clay Jones

Trump puts another loyalist goon on a federal bench for life Read on Substack

Oops! I forgot to put satire in this cartoon.

I do that sometimes. I’ll draw a cartoon that illustrates exactly what happened. What happened here is that Republicans confirmed Emil Bove as a federal appeals court judge, which is a lifetime appointment.

They confirmed Bove despite him serving as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the hush money case that found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. The appeals court is one level below the Supreme Court. A Trump loyalist will be on the court for life. He has more loyalty to Trump than to the Constitution.

He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Bove will be as crooked as the judge in Florida who dismissed his stolen document case.

After Trump reentered the White House in January, he quickly made Bove a top official in the Justice Department where he worked on the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and the investigation of everyone who investigated department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Bove has accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases.

It was bad enough to put a supporter of Trump’s white nationalist terrorists in the DOJ, but now he’s going to be a federal judge.

The whistleblowers provided evidence to the Senate that Bove lied during his testimony, and that he suggested the department should ignore court orders when it came to Trump’s illegal deportations. There’s an audio recording of Bove making statements about the Adams case that contradict his testimony, saying that whoever signed onto the dismissal would be rewarded.

Chuck Schumer said, “It’s unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice.”

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only two Republicans to vote against Bove’s confirmation, with Collins saying, “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

Collins isn’t always right, like the time she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, believing him when he said he wouldn’t overturn Roe. (snip-MORE, and it’s good)

(Note from A: I’m adding this photo, because Emil Bove reminds me of the photo)

A real bad night. What started out being a good one. Trigger warning

I went to bed about normal 7 pm for me. Surprisingly when I told Ron he said he wanted to go also. That was about 2 hours or earlier than he normally goes to bed. His normal time to go to bed is 9 or a bit later. But we went to bed together. Along with Tupac.

We cuddled several hours with me holding him and then us reversing and him cuddling me. We go back and forth during the night. We often fall asleep in each other’s arms, and I often get my most restful sleep while we cuddle. Which is going to seem strange with what I am going to write next.

After four hours of holding each other, I noticed Ron’s legs were fidgeting and fussing. I asked him if he legs were bothering him and he replied yes. I was a bit miffed he did not tell me before I noticed but I told him we needed to take some time off on our own sides and he asked if we could cuddle later to which I agreed.

At some point I started to have a bad memory nightmare. I know in the nightmare I was begging for help, I was screaming for help. Then I could hear Ron’s voice calling me begging me to wake up, but my fear / pain was too much and I still yelled for anyone to help me.

Then With Ron yelling next to me, as he knew better than to touch me when I am in that state, I started to hear him and even as I was still crying out for help I heard him beg me to follow his voice. When I came to he told me I was the loudest I had been in a long time, begging for help at one point I screamed out several times “help me, someone please help me”.

After he woke me I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. When I got back he asked if I wanted to talk. I said no. He told me Scottie that was bad, you were really upset and loud. I just got back into bed and faced away from him. He understood I was not ready to deal with it.

For the next couple of hours I lay there trying not to think of the memories I had just experienced in my nightmare. In the morning I got up early, when Ron got up he twice asked me to talk about what I went through. I told him I was not ready yet. I could see him wanting more but knowing pushing me would only cause me pain.

The memory / nightmare was a really bad hours long rapes by multiple people when I was a really young kid. I was young enough to think that screaming and yelling would get me help. As I got older I understood doing such things only brought more punishment. In the dream I was experiencing it as I did then, with all the pain, panic, desperation and then submission.

I have come to realize burdening Ron with these memories only causes him to feel pain thinking of what I went through with no way to stop it. Trust me my wonderful Ron would have killed to stop a child being abused. Yes he tries to be a grand husband to comfort me, but it is wrong of me to ask that of him I think. Is it transferring my pain on to him in the name of “sharing”, the same question could be asked of my sharing of it on the blog. But he can only take the pain and memories I share as I could only take the abuse. He is then stuck with them in his mind as I am with them in mine. Do I have that right? Is that not abusing my own husband the man I adore to do that, to ask that. Is that the same for when I share with everyone here on my blog. I am giving you my memories and pain with no way to stop it. Have I become a villain, an abuser?

Until I figure out if I am doing more damage than good I will have to keep telling him I just don’t want to talk. Better to suffer in silence than cause him a pain he can not rid himself of. Hugs

Four important clips from The Majority Report. Each video clip is a different subject

I knew Republicans Were Gonna End Up Trying to Pay Us Off

in regard to all the awful things they’re doing. Same thing W did when he looted the Treasury.

Sen. Josh Hawley introduces bill to send tariff rebate checks to Americans

First to NBC News: Hawley pledged to sponsor legislation after President Donald Trump expressed interest in sending out rebate checks last week.

By Allan Smith

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced legislation Monday to provide tariff rebate checks of at least $600 per adult and child to American families, similar to the stimulus checks the government distributed during the Covid pandemic.

Hawley, R-Mo., submitted his legislation after having pledged to do so Friday after President Donald Trump told reporters he would be interested in sending a tariff-related rebate check to Americans.

“Like President Trump proposed, my legislation would allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country,” Hawley said in a statement.

Hawley, who championed stimulus check legislation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during the Covid pandemic in 2020, put forward his new bill to echo that past effort. The program would be set up as a refundable tax credit, with the government sending checks this year should the bill advance through Congress and get Trump’s signature. The bill would ensure that each adult and dependent child would get at least $600. It would also allow a larger rebate per person should tariff revenue exceed projections.

The bill would reduce the rebate by 5% for joint filers who have adjusted gross income in excess of $150,000, a head of household whose income exceeds $112,500 and an individual taxpayer whose income exceeds $75,000.

The Treasury Department reported this month that customs duties totaled about $27 billion for June, an increase of about $4 billion from May. But June also saw inflation tick up slightly as Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs started to work through the U.S. economy. The independent Tax Foundation projected that Trump’s tariffs would raise $2.5 trillion in revenue over the next decade, but that, through price increases, they would effectively increase taxes on the average U.S. household by nearly $1,300 this year and nearly $1,700 in 2026, should they remain in full effect.

Hawley’s bill has a long road ahead of it before it could become law. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., poured cold water this year on different proposal to send direct checks to Americans. Johnson’s comments were in response to the idea of a “DOGE dividend” check, in which the government would send part of the savings created by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency directly to U.S. taxpayers. But DOGE fell far short of then-leader Elon Musk’s projection of as much as $2 trillion in savings, and Musk has broken with Trump after he left the administration in May.

A Couple From Clay Jones

Bribed War Criminal by Clay Jones

Netanyahu is a murderer Read on Substack

Israeli Prime Minister is such a liar that even Donald Trump is calling him out. Hell, Marjorie Taylor Greene is accusing him of committing genocide. Ouch.

Bibi denied claims that he’s starving Gaza, and said, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza. We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza – otherwise, there would be no Gazans.”

He’s a liar. Israel has bombed convoys bringing in humanitarian relief to Gaza, and it won’t allow aid from the United Nations to enter Gaza half the time.

The World Health Organization said Sunday there have been 63 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza this month, including 24 children under the age of 5, up from 11 deaths total in the previous six months of the year.

Gaza’s Health Ministry puts the number even higher, reporting 82 deaths this month of malnutrition-related causes: 24 children and 58 adults. Yesterday, it said that 14 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours. The ministry, which operates under the Hamas government, is headed by medical professionals and is seen by the U.N. as the most reliable source of data on casualties. U.N. agencies also often confirm numbers through other partners on the ground.

The WHO also said acute malnutrition in northern Gaza tripled this month, reaching nearly one in five children under 5 years old, and has doubled in central and southern Gaza. The U.N. says Gaza’s only four specialized treatment centers for malnutrition are “overwhelmed.” Children are going days without eating.

Palestinians want a full return to the U.N.-led aid distribution system that was in place throughout the war, rather than the Israeli-backed mechanism that began in May.

55 trucks from the United Nations’ food program entered Gaza yesterday, and they were all looted by starving Gazans. There are also food drops, but that’s not enough.

Witnesses and health workers say Israeli forces have killed hundreds by opening fire on Palestinians trying to reach food distribution hubs or while crowding around entering aid trucks. The Israeli Defense Force says it has fired warning shots to disperse threats. But as we’ve learned throughout this war, the IDF lies.

The UN needs the IDF’s permission to bring food into Gaza, and they claim the military denies them over half the time. The Hamas police would protect the trucks from being looted by hungry Gazans, but they stopped after being shot at by the IDF. (snip-MORE)

Island Cheater by Clay Jones

Kicking his tiny balls Read on Substack

While meeting with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Kier Starmer, Donald Trump said he had been invited to Epstein’s Island, but that he turned it down and “never had the privilege” of visiting the island. It was right then that PM Starmer realized he was sitting with a lunatic who is most likely a pedophile.

Trump deflected to other people, saying, “I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times. I never went to the island, but (former Treasury Secretary) Larry Summers, I hear, went there, he was the head of Harvard. And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them.”

That word salad makes you wonder how much Adderall Trump snorted before his meeting with Starmer.

There are no records of Bill Clinton ever going to Epstein’s private island, so I don’t know where Trump got the number 28 from when he can’t even find one visit. The thing is, Donald Trump is a liar and a golf cheat. More on that in a minute.

Trump said, “I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn him down. But a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island.”

All of Donald Trump’s moments are pretty bad, at least for other people. Saying you never had the privilege of visiting a pedophile’s island is not a good moment. Neither are the moments he flew on Epstein’s private jet, or the times he partied with Epstein while they were ogling young women. (snip-MORE)