Category: Crime

So I’m Trying To Clear Some Tabs

because I’m somewhat compulsive about clutter, but everytime I finish one, I think, “I need to post that,” so I can’t close them. I’m going to do another multi-post here; links and a snip, but all are good/important/pertinent to our interests, so enjoy/read, anyway, these stories.

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Salient points in this one, and she’s not the only one to whom this has occurred:

Benghazi, Beirut or 9/11

Snippet:

<snip> So, the Bush folks felt ecstatic when they got the White House–finally! In 2001. After two long terms of the Bubbas! The grown-ups were in charge! And they pretended the little thing with the missing “W”‘s was a big old riot of Democrat malfeasing–

And they didn’t have their eye on the ball about the PDB that said Bin Laden was planning an attack on our soil. 

This is where I think the Trump people are. Trump is off-gassing about “owning” Gaza, He wants to ship about 2 million human beings who have already been through some major shit to Jordan or Egypt. These countries obviously don’t want to be responsible for about 1 million each refugees. Trump should know that, because he doesn’t want any kind of refugees, ever, here in the US. 

He’s taking out experienced foreign office and military professionals, He’s offending the hell out of our allies, and making the likelihood of sharing intelligence less favorable. He’s putting in naifs and flakes in important roles. 

And then says really offensive shit absolutely guaran-damn-teed to stir up some pot somewhere. 

It’s like he figured out antifa isn’t going do a Reichstag with any credibility, so he needs an international crisis to go create bizarre national powers for himself.  <snip>

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The Eyes Have It by Samantha Bee

What’s next? Read on Substack

<snip> Not to be all Cassandra about it, but a very big part of the problem is that we are incapable of anticipating what Donald Trump can whip up in his imagination.

Like you know how sometimes you wake up from a dream and you say “oh my god I just had the funniest dream that the dog wouldn’t stop laughing, and her laugh sounded like James Earl Jones!!” and everyone is just thinking “stop telling me about your dreams.”

I think he wakes up from his dreams and says “I am the boss of Canada now.” Or, he takes an elderly man’s nappie-poo in the afternoon, wakes up groggy, slurps a Diet Coke and muses “wouldn’t it be fun to do a WWE RAW in the Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center? The acoustics are huge.” “Or what about one of those cool political rallies where we all do this random gesture together because no one is capable of stopping us?”

Well, we better damn well figure out how to stop this mayhem, because we are learning that things change quickly and without warning. <snip>

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(This one’s just, well, holy-shit-what’s-happened-to-her-brain weird.)

Rep. Nancy Mace accuses ex-fiancé and associates of assaulting her and raping others in House speech

CHAPIN, S.C. (AP) — Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina on Monday used a nearly hour-long speech on the U.S. House floor to accuse her ex-fiancé of physically abusing her, recording sex acts with her and others without their consent, and conspiring with business associates in acts of rape and sexual misconduct.

Mace said she was speaking out because her home state’s top prosecutor didn’t take action even after she alerted investigators. That same prosecutor is likely to be Mace’s opponent if she runs for governor of South Carolina in 2026, which she is considering. <snip>

The AP wasn’t able to independently verify Mace’s claims. Bryant told AP: “I categorically deny these allegations. I take this matter seriously and will cooperate fully with any necessary legal processes to clear my name.”

Mace accused South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson of slow-walking any investigation of Bryant and the other men after she brought the photos and video to state authorities.<snip>

Mace, 47, won a third U.S. House term in November and has said that she is “seriously considering” a 2026 run for South Carolina governor. If she enters that race, she will likely face Wilson — in his fourth term and also the son of Rep. Joe Wilson — in the Republican primary. <snip-the whole thing makes better sense as a whole, but not a lot more sense.>

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And finally, a little statement for hope:

What Can Be Done?

Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, on setting realistic expectations and saving enough of the foundational bricks of democracy to be able to rebuild in the future:

The truth is that we will NOT be able to stop every terrible thing that this administration seeks to do. Elections really do have consequences – as many of us tried with tremendous urgency to make clear last year. But we can slow things down, win some battles, throw sand in the gears of others. If we save some lives, some jobs, some critical government agencies, some measure of press freedom, some medical and subsistence benefits, academic freedom for some schools and universities, and protect the dignity, safety and constitutional rights of some of our most vulnerable fellow Americans, it will be worth it.

And it will be from whatever remainder of democratic structure, values, and policies we are able to protect that we will have the space and platform on which to do the work of building an urgently needed new democracy in our country. So our fight today is worth it.

Some Justice

thanks to FOIA and Jason Leopold:

By Susie Madrak — February 11, 2025

The dismissal of criminal charges against the Yam Man for concealing classified records at Mar-a-Lago eliminated a significant barrier to making records about the probe public, a federal judge ruled Monday. Via Politico:

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said Trump’s election as president — which forced the end of the criminal case — combined with the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity mean Trump is effectively insulated from any criminal responsibility for his conduct. That means the FBI’s previous reasons for refusing to gather and disclose records related to the probe no longer apply, Howell wrote in a ruling in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by journalist Jason Leopold.

She noted that while the dismissal of charges against Trump may have reduced his criminal exposure, it “ironically” made him more susceptible to public scrutiny for his conduct. “With the far dampened possibility of any criminal investigation to gather evidence about a president’s conduct and of any public enforcement proceeding against a president, the [Supreme Court’s] decision … has left a FOIA request as a critical tool for the American public to keep apprised of a president’s conduct,” Howell ruled.

https://bsky.app/profile/plaintanjane.bsky.social/post/3lhu7clii5s2v

https://bsky.app/profile/luciecatnip.bsky.social/post/3lhu27ltj422c

https://crooksandliars.com/2025/02/judge-fbi-must-disclose-records-trump

ETTD

😀

Totally unrelated but really fun, so here it is:

I Really Like This.

I think you will, too.

What Does DOGE Really Mean?

Peace & Justice History for 2/10

February 10, 1961

Pirate radio ship
The Voice of Nuclear Disarmament, a pirate radio station, began operation offshore of Great Britain. It was run by John Hasted, a physicist, a musician, and a radio expert in World War II. He was active with mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell in the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, a group that practiced Gandhian an nonviolent civil disobedience.
February 10, 1964

Bob Dylan’s ”The Times They Are A-Changin’” was released. The album’s title song captured the emerging, principally generational gap in American culture concerning war and racism.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
watch video (1964)
the lyrics 
February 10, 2003
Iraq acceded to U-2 surveillance flights over its territory, meeting a key demand by U.N. inspectors searching for banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there.The 60 weapons inspectors in Baghdad and Mosul were under the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), led by Hans Blix, and the International Atomic Energy Agency under Mohamed El Baradei.
The U.N. had destroyed all of Iraq’s banned weapons by 1994, as well as production and development facilities later, though Saddam Hussein expelled the U.N. representatives in 1998.

U-2 spy plane.

Hans Blix gives his report at the UN as Mohamed El Baradei listens.
The economic and trade embargo during the inter-war period prevented resumption of the weapons programs. CIA and other intelligence estimates, however, insisted upon the existence of WMDs in Iraq. None have ever been found.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryfebruary.htm#february10

Peace & Justice History for 2/9

February 9, 1780
Captain Paul Cuffe, his brother John, two free negroes, and other residents of Massachusetts petitioned the state legislature for the right to vote.
A few years earlier, Cuffe and his brother had refused to pay local taxes, reasoning that there was a connection between an obligation to pay taxes to a government and the right to vote for that government.

Captain Paul Cuffe
Cuffe’s memoir available 
Cuffe’s career as ship captain, shipowner, African colonizer and generous citizen 
February 9, 1950
United States Senator Joseph P. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) accused more than 200 staff members in the State Department of being Communists, launching his anti-red crusade.
He made the allegation in a public speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, saying that state was infested with communists, and brandished a sheet of paper which he said contained the alleged traitors’ names.

“I have here in my hand,” he said, “the names of 205 men that were known to the Secretary of State [Dean Acheson] as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” The number changed repeatedly over the following months. Some years later, he confided the paper was actually just a laundry list.
Anti-Communist fear ran high in the U.S. at the time. Federal civil servant and Soviet spy Alger Hiss had been recently convicted, and a communist government had just come into power in China. Those accused by McCarthy and others often lost their jobs, regardless of the validity of the accusation of their connection to the Communist Party.
McCarthy’s career of irresponsible accusation 
Joe McCarthy’s Oversight Abuses (The Levin Center)
Released 50 years later, transcripts of closed committee hearings reveal more abuse
February 9, 1964
 
The G.I. JOE action figure made its debut as an 11.5 inch “doll” for boys with 21 moving parts, named after the movie, The Story of G.I. JOE. 

Puts you in the action!
February 9, 1965
President Lyndon Johnson ordered a U.S. Marine Corps Hawk air defense missile battalion deployed to Da Nang, South Vietnam, to provide protection for the key U.S. air base there. American military advisers had been in country since the defeat and withdrawal of the French in 1954, but this was the first commitment of combat troops to South Vietnam.There was considerable reaction around the world to this new level of U.S. involvement. Both the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union threatened to intervene if the United States continued its military support of the South Vietnamese government.
In Moscow, some 2,000 demonstrators, led by Vietnamese and Chinese students and clearly supported by the authorities, attacked the U.S. Embassy. Britain and Australia supported the U.S. action, but France called for negotiations.
A Marine HAWK missile launcher is in position at the Danang Airfield.
February 9, 2002
Ten thousand, organized by Gush Shalom (peace bloc in Hebrew), a coalition of Israeli peace groups, marched in Tel Aviv against the Ariel Sharon government’s increasingly brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians. The harsh tactics were part of Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank (of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip, territory beyond Israel’s internationally recognized 1967 borders.
February 9, 2003
Six weeks before the Iraq War began, Secretary of State Colin Powell on ABC-TV’s “This Week” dismissed the need for U.N. weapons inspectors to continue searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.
He said the administration saw no further need for ”inspectors to play detectives or Inspector Clouseau running all over Iraq.” Clouseau was the bumbling detective played originally by Peter Sellers (and lately Steve Martin) in the Pink Panther films.

Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau

U.N. weapons inspectors, left, and Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate members visit a Baghdad storage facility in this photo taken Feb. 5, 2003, just hours before U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at the U.N. Security Council to offer evidence of alleged Iraqi attempts to hide banned weapons.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryfebruary.htm#february9

Can Bedbugs Live There?

Trump’s looking to building another resort by Ann Telnaes

It certainly won’t be a holiday for the Palestinians Read on Substack

Unless Someone Somewhere Changes Their Mind/s Again…

Trump administration agrees to restrict DOGE access to Treasury Department payment systems

The agreement came in response to a lawsuit accusing Treasury of committing an “unlawful action” by giving private info to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

By Daniel Barnes, Dareh Gregorian and Zoë Richards

Attorneys for the Justice Department have agreed to temporarily restrict staffers associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing information in the Treasury Department’s payment system.

The agreement comes after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system — and the personal data housed in it — violated federal privacy laws.

The Trump administration filed a motion Wednesday night seeking to enter a proposed order that detailed the agreed-upon terms.

“The Defendants will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” the proposed order says.

The order would allow exceptions for two special government employees at the Treasury — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — saying they are permitted access “as needed” to perform their duties, “provided that such access to payment records will be ‘read only.'”

The restricted access would remain in effect pending a subsequent hearing on the lawsuit. The judge still needs to sign off on the proposed order.

The White House and the groups that filed the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (snip)

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-agrees-restrict-doge-access-treasury-department-p-rcna190898

Peace & Justice History for 2/6

February 6, 1899
Spain agreed to abandon all claims of sovereignty over Cuba, the cession of Puerto Rico and Guam, the cession of the Philippine Islands; and in exchange the U.S. agreed to pay $20,000,000 in a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate on this day.
The previous July the U.S. took control of Gantanamo Bay, blockaded Cuba’s other ports and destroyed the Spanish fleet at Santiago Bay.
The U.S. Army, landed at Guanica, near Ponce, Puerto Rico, and shortly took possession of the island with the exception of San Juan.
The Spanish Pacific fleet was destroyed and the U.S. took control of Manila, the capital, and Luzon, the main island of the Philippines a few weeks later.
February 6, 1943
The U.S. government required the 110,000 disposessed Japanese Americans forcibly held in concentration (internment) camps to answer loyalty surveys.

Some of the interned were U.S. citizens, and some volunteered to serve in the armed forces during the war with Japan.
The Nisei, as they were known, were kept in the camps until the end of World War II.

The Manzanar Relocation Center, a one of the concentration camps where Japanese-Americans were forced to live throughout World War II.
February 6, 1956
Autherine Lucy was excluded from classes just three days after becoming the first black person allowed to attend the University of Alabama. Her suspension “for her own safety” followed three days of riots over her Supreme Court-ordered enrollment.

Autherine J. Lucy and her attorney Thurgood Marshall
Crowds of students, townspeople and members of the Ku Klux Klan shouted, “Kill her!” among other things. It is unclear why the University did not suspend the students who were among the rioters.
Lucy had originally applied for graduate study in library science in 1952, and had been accepted until the University realized her race, and claimed state law prevented her admission.
A graduate of traditionally black Miles College, she was only admitted with the help of the National Association for Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund (NAACP-LDEF) and lawyers Thurgood Marshall (later a Supreme Court justice), Constance Baker Motley (future federal judge) and Arthur Shores (elected to Birmingham City Council).
Read more  
February 6, 1959
The United States successfully test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), known as Titan, from Cape Canaveral. It was a two-stage rocket designed to carry nuclear warheads.Titans were also capable of boosting satellites and spacecraft into orbit. Before the last was produced in 2002, they launched several two-man Gemini missions in the 1960s and launched the first spacecraft to land on Mars.

First test launch of Titan booster rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
February 6, 1961
The civil rights jail-in movement began when ten negro students in Rock Hill, South Carolina, were arrested for requesting service at a segregated lunch counter. They refused to post bail and demanded jail time rather than paying fines, refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy of the laws under which they were arrested.
More about Charles Sherrod 
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote to Charles Sherrod, Diane Nash
and the others in jail:
‘‘You have inspired all of us by such demonstrative courage and faith. It is good to know that there still remains a creative minority who would rather lose in a cause that will ultimately win than to win in a cause that will ultimately lose.’’
February 6, 1985
The Molesworth Common Peace Camp, just outside the Royal Air Force Base there, was evicted by the British Army. The 300 inhabitants and their many supporters had been nonviolently protesting the siting of nuclear-tipped U.S. cruise missiles at the base. Peace camps were established at several locations in Europe in the early 1980s to protest the destabilizing nuclear weapons buildup.

Molesworth Common peace camp

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryfebruary.htm#february6

Trans Journalist Guesting on ‘The Handbasket’

Guest Column: The Current ‘mindf*ck’ Of Being a Trans Journalist

Katelyn Burns explains the personal and professional toll of Trump’s anti-trans executive orders.

Author

Katelyn Burns
February 04, 2025

Source

A note from Marisa: Hi all. I’m proud to share the first-ever guest column on The Handbasket. It’s written by Katelyn Burns, a talented journalist and longtime internet pal of mine who has deeply covered trans rights and her experience as a trans journalist for nearly a decade. Trans people in this country are under direct attack by the Trump administration, and her perspective on navigating it all personally and professionally is crucial. Now I’ll hand it over to Katelyn…

I’ve covered trans issues for nine years now, going back to 2016. As a trans freelance journalist, I was there when the US right wing shifted from attacking gay marriage to attacking trans rights. I was there for the North Carolina bathroom bill and Trump’s first election. I covered every awful anti-trans policy introduced in the first Trump term in the White House, and I saw hundreds of red states pass bill after bill targeting people like me over the last few years.

But these first two weeks of Trump’s new term and the extensive executive orders removing nearly every right I have as a trans American have been by far the worst in all my professional years. Trump has already rolled trans rights back further than he did in his first term, and it’s only been two weeks. He sprayed the anti-trans firehose at us, obliterating the rights of my community immediately upon assuming office.

At the same time, I haven’t been this busy as a journalist since Trump was last in office. I’m hearing from editors who are looking for stories from me again. I’m sending my poor editors at MSNBC multiple column pitches each week, and my Patreon has hit a new record for subscribers. As I was writing about Trump’s new passport policy—one which will affect me when my own passport expires in two years—I noticed my Patreon broke 500 paid subscribers for the first time. Since then it has grown to more than 570 paid subsriptions and nearly 1,000 total subscribers. 

Watching my own civil rights disappear while my bank account and workload grow is a total mindfuck. 

I can’t help but feel guilt at profiting from the suffering of my community, while also feeling like I deserve to be fairly compensated for my work covering all of these horrible new policies—policies that I had predicted would come into being before the election (before being dismissed as “hysterical” by the centrist cabal of pundits that currently dominate American media).

I wrote a piece published the day before Election Day detailing all of the things I feared would happen should Trump get re-elected. In the piece, I said Trump would attempt to ban trans athletes from women’s sports, ban trans teens from accessing medically necessary transition care, punish doctors who administer that care, and crack down on trans inclusiveness in schools. 

“Beyond the executive branch, a Trump win and an accompanying Republican-controlled Congress would be likely to try to nationalize the anti-trans efforts that were previously undertaken at the state level,” I wrote in that piece. “Over the last several years, hundreds of anti-trans bills have been proposed and passed in red states.”

Little did I know how quickly those national attacks would crystalize. In Trump’s first two weeks, he’s already pushed through anti-trans executive orders on all the topics I predicted he would, and has quickly gone significantly further than I anticipated. 

It started on inauguration day when he signed an executive order defining male and female as “determined at conception” (a nod to the language used by anti-abortion activists). The order impacted trans people in two significant ways: trans women were now to be kept in men’s federal prison, where they would be subject to rampant prison rape; and the State Department would no longer allow gender markers to be changed on US Passports. 

The passport rules were clarified shortly thereafter to say that passports with an X gender marker would be invalidated, and any previously issued passport would be reverted to birth sex upon renewal. Since then, there have been numerous anecdotal reports of trans people having their passports confiscated by passport office personnel who refuse to reissue a new one—even with their birth sex. With no official word from the State Department, trans people right now could be experiencing a shadow travel ban.

Over at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), they stopped all anti-LGBTQ bias claims and declared that they would investigate employers who allowed trans employees to use the work bathroom of their gender identity. Last week, Trump re-instituted his trans military ban, an action that he took during his first term and one I’ve covered deeply. This time, instead of arguing that trans people are medically unfit to serve, the Trump administration has accused all trans service members of being untruthful and dishonorable in claiming a trans identity.

Later on last week, Trump issued yet another anti-trans executive order, this time about education. Not only did this order ban trans women from women’s school sports, it threatened to investigate and cut off federal funding for any school that allowed a trans student to use the bathroom of their gender identity, or even teachers who use a student’s names and pronouns consistent with their gender identity.

Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump will be signing his 10th anti-trans executive order since taking office. This one explicitly bans trans girls and women from girls’ and women’s school sports, and was perhaps the heaviest blow to me personally and to my career. I posted a thread on Bluesky of some of my most significant work on trans athletes, and it’s safe to say that coverage of trans athletes—more than any other issue—is what built my career as a journalist. It’s hard not to feel like my words have failed the trans girl athletes of this country.

In perhaps the cruelest order, last week Trump ordered that federal funding be denied to any medical facility that provides gender affirming care to anyone under the age of 19. In response, several major hospital systems suspended their trans-related practices, including NYU Langone in New York City and DC Children’s Hospital in Washington, DC.

I’d like to be running deep investigations on how each of these orders are impacting the estimated 1.6 million trans people in the US, but doing all of them at once is too much for just one person. There’s a common misconception pervading the editors in the American press industry that trans reporters are simply too biased to fairly cover trans issues, which means I am one of the few trans reporters who is able to actually cover national trans issues for mainstream press outlets. But that also means I feel the weight of my whole community. I want to cover every new problem with the depth my people deserve.

In the first Trump term, each new anti-trans action came months apart from each other, allowing me to cover one at a time with a much needed depth that I worry isn’t possible anymore. By piling all of these orders into a two week period, the Trump administration has effectively strangled the press from covering all of them.

By the time I finished my piece about Trump’s first anti-trans order of his second term, two more had been issued—and my editors didn’t have time to run a piece about the second. I managed to farm out a piece about the third executive order about the trans military ban to the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have a piece coming out soon about the puberty blocker ban. But the news hook on the education and employment orders is already expiring, and bigger problems within the Trump administration are taking up valuable journalistic time.

I will never stop covering the harm done by Trump’s anti-trans orders, but there is already so much of it. I learned in the first Trump term how to separate the personal from the professional, at least when on deadline. But once the draft is done, and edits are in the can, and I’m laying in bed at night trying to fall asleep, it all comes back to me:

Do I need to plan for a quick getaway if some Trump lackey decides the loudmouth tranny journalist needs to go? How do I prevent myself from burning out again like I did during the first Trump term? How do I deal with the guilt of not being able to cover everything? These are the thoughts that haunt me when I’m not pouring myself into work or whatever movie or video game I’m playing to distract myself.

During the first Trump administration, there were at least a dozen openly trans journalists scattered about the liberal online media covering trans issues. Now we are few and far between. The 19th has both Orion Rummler and Kate Sosin, two powerhouses of the trans reporting field, and beyond them, Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart are doing great work. So many of us are trying to make it on our own as freelancers or bloggers, but the headwinds are strong.

I worry about the future of my community, but there’s no time for that now. There are too many stories to write.

Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist and columnist at MSNBC. She’s co-host of the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast, and a co-founder of The Flytrap. In a previous role she was the first ever openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history. You can find her on BlueSky and Patreon.