While I detest the end song he plays I love Mark’s take on issues. He doesn’t pull his punches and lays out the facts. In this case it is important to watch to the end where he elaborates on the current attempt to genocide trans people by making them illegal as Russia has. Now requiring that no business, event or medical facility that takes any government money can allow any kind of support or positive affirmation of trans people. He talks about how important it is to let trans youth socially transition and live as the gender they identify with, and to get puberty blockers to not go through the wrong puberty. He mentions trans children figure out their gender the same way and ages that cis kids do. Hugs
Panic over the existence of LGBTQ+ people is becoming so ridiculous it’s almost impossible to tell if it’s satire or not. In this video we’ll look at some of the most ridiculous examples of right-wing hysteria over queer people. Well also talk about how conservatives have successfully weaponized their outrage against queer people and how culture influences politics.
The Humanist Report (THR) is a progressive political podcast that discusses and analyzes current news events and pressing political issues. Our analyses are guided by humanism and political progressivism. Each news story we cover is supplemented with thought-provoking, fact-based commentary that aims for the highest level of objectivity.
Today, this cartoon was challenged on Facebook by a couple of MAGAts.
One wrote, “One would think with the superior ‘intelligence’ of liberals, they could do a little better job at convincing the masses they’re right than grade school cartoons and hyperventilated delusions…….”
The other argued, “More dumbass dumbocrap shit.” Thank God, Donald Trump told him there’s a B in dumb.
The Trump regime and Iran have a peace deal to have a peace deal in 60 days. Donald Trump said that he digitally signed the deal on Sunday in Washington, and today, an administration official said Trump signed it in Versailles on Wednesday. We are not sure if Donald Trump signed it twice, or if he lied about signing it on Sunday, or what. Later, Trump said that he had signed it in Versailles. This regime that can’t even clean a swimming pool has not been straight about anything. Wasn’t this supposed to be the most transparent administration in American history?
Did they or did they not take Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center last Saturday? The Kennedy Center says they have, but we can’t be sure because the tarp is still in front of it.
It wasn’t until today that anonymous US officials read the language of the memorandum on ending the war to journalists after days of secrecy. The Trump regime blamed Iran for the secrecy, saying that’s how they wanted it. Who’s calling the shots here?
The terms of the agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, outline a $300 billon plan for Iran’s reconstruction, and lift restrictions on the country’s oil exports. It kicks the can down the road on Iran giving up its nuclear material. It calls for Israel to end its attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite the fact that Israel is not a party to the MOU, the Memorandum of Understanding.
The MOU is a 60-day extension of the ceasefire. It outlines that Iran and Oman will manage the Strait of Hormuz and that there will not be a toll for ships to pass through during the 60-day ceasefire. There’s no mention of there not being any tolls in the future.
This agreement is different from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by President Obama, which Trump ended, which eventually led to this war. The JCPOA was broad in detail and was working in preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while Trump’s Iran deal is about as vague as that peace treaty he signed with North Korea several years ago.
As you may recall, the so-called peace treaty with North Korea didn’t obligate North Korea to do anything. And this so-called peace deal with Iran achieves none of the goals that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth laid out at the start of the war. But remember, Donald Trump is the greatest negotiator in the world.
This deal does not accomplish regime change in Iran. It doesn’t end their missile program. It does not end the persecution of its people. And Iran does not surrender unconditionally. What it really does for Donald Trump is that it gives him an out from this war, so maybe he can focus on his next conquest, Cuba.
Iran walks away from this conflict with more power and more money. The United States walks away with nothing it set out to do, and after spending billions of dollars.
Senator Bill Cassidy said, “Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive,” Cassidy said, “Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped.”
Cassidy found his spine after losing his primary reelection bid after Trump endorsed his challenger, and is now free to openly criticize Donald Trump. “This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” he said.
Senator Ted Cruz, who doesn’t even have a spine, said, “Giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea. I think the president, unfortunately, is receiving bad advice.”
He also said, “Setting up Iran to be in charge of the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity and to charge tolls is not in America’s interest. In my view, the Ayatollah should not reap a single penny from the free transit of the seas.”
What does it tell you when even Republicans are not happy with this deal?
Creative note: Right after I finish the lettering in this cartoon, news broke that some anonymous administration officials had read details of the agreement to reporters. So I almost shelved this. But after talking to Laura and another friend, they convinced me that I should still go with this, so I did. But while building up to that decision, I wrote two more ideas that I like, and I plan to do them over the next couple of days.
A pair of hearings on Tuesday highlighted the extreme nature of DOJ’s requests — and the speed with which DOJ has moved to try and get the invasive patient data in recent weeks.
The Trump administration’s actions aimed at making it more difficult for transgender minors to receive gender-affirming medical care regardless of state policies allowing or even protecting such care are facing strong pushback. And while the Justice Department has described a “nationwide” investigation into the care, it was those challenging DOJ who prompted hearings on both coasts on Tuesday.
The Justice Department’s efforts to obtain information about patients who received gender-affirming medical care by way of administrative subpoenas and, more recently, grand jury subpoenas are extreme — and lawyers say, unprecedented.
The pair of hearings Tuesday highlighted the extreme nature of DOJ’s requests — and the speed with which DOJ has moved to try and get the invasive patient data in recent weeks after nearly a year since the first requests went out in July 2025.
The administrative subpoenas have been blocked when challenged, leading a set of patients to seek a class-action order quashing the patient-specific requests in all of the administrative subpoenas.
At 10:00 a.m. ET Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Julie Rubin held a hearing related to that request at the Edward A. Garmatz U.S. District Courthouse in Baltimore.
Rubin, a Biden appointee, was one of the judges who had previously quashed the patient-specific requests, as to those who moved to quash the administrative subpoena issued to Children’s National Hospital (headquartered in D.C. but with locations in Maryland as well), finding that the “Subpoena lacks a legitimate purpose.“
The bulk of Rubin’s questions to Rachel Berg from the National Center for LGBTQ Rights on Tuesday related to whether Rubin could certify a class in a motion to quash an administrative subpoena and, if not, how far relief could go.
Ultimately, Berg acknowledged that, if Rubin did not certify a class, relief could only reach those with a connection to Maryland. In their filing, they had noted that “[a]t least two Movants currently reside in Maryland and four families received services from Children’s National Hospital in Maryland.“
That would, however, not accomplish what the litigation is seeking to do — stop DOJ from getting any of the patient-specific information in response to any of the administrative subpoenas. As such, if Rubin denies this request, there likely would be a further effort to accomplish that goal.
At the same time, Rubin pushed DOJ’s Scott Dahlquist on the opposite side nearly as strongly as she’d pushed Berg. When he insisted that the patients were seeking “sweeping, nationwide” relief, Rubin asked how that’s different from any class-action litigation. Dahlqust’s response was, essentially, that you can’t get class relief for an administrative subpoena.
On rebuttal, though, Berg responded that, though the patients’ request to the court might be without a perfect match from past litigation, the reason that is so is because there is no precedent for the Justice Department’s actions here.
Although it is not clear how Rubin will rule, the relevance of the administrative subpoena fight could be taking on less importance in short order. As Law Dork has covered in depth, DOJ’s apparent move to grand jury subpoenas issued in the Northern District of Texas in May is reaching a head — with at least two grand jury subpoenas having initially had a return date of Wednesday, June 10.
Over the past week, patients ofLucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford have made efforts to block the grand jury subpoena issued to Packard. After a first attempt to block Packard from turning over the information — in a lawsuit filed only against Packard — was rejected over the weekend, the patients filed an expanded lawsuit on Monday. In that, they added the Justice Department and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as defendants and asking for class-action relief for all who received gender-affirming medical care as minors in California and, specifically, Packard patients (similar to litigation in New York City). They also filed a request for a temporary restraining order barring DOJ from receiving patient-specific information, given the forthcoming return-date deadline.
At 10:00 a.m. PT Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts held a conference related to that request. Pitts was presiding over the remote hearing from his courtroom at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in San Jose.
The hearing before Pitts, another Biden appointee, ultimately, was less adversarial — for now — than the Baltimore hearing.
Late Monday, Pitts had issued a temporary order blocking Packard from turning over any more documents to the government and blocking DOJ from taking any further action to enforce any grand jury subpoenas that would affect the would-be class here while he considered the matter.
Everyone, more or less, was OK with keeping that status while taking up the TRO request on a slightly less rushed timeline.
Although it took a few minutes at the status conference for everyone to agree that everyone was on the same page, ultimately John Wollman, the assistant U.S. attorney from the Northern District of California representing the government at the hearing, while not acknowledging any grand jury subpoena, agreed to push back any Packard subpoena response date to June 25 to allow time for briefing and arguments on the patients’ request.
Although the parties need to submit a briefing schedule to Pitts for how to proceed, the outcome is similar to that reached temporarily as to the grand jury subpoena challenge in New York City, where the next hearing is set for June 22.
In short, the grand jury subpoenas that are known to have been challenged are on hold for now by agreement of the government while the litigation is considered.
Despite that, though, the return date was June 10 on both published grand jury subpoenas, so it is possible that others are out there that have not been challenged and will lead to productions on Wednesday. (Of course, it is also possible there are other challenges that have just flown under the radar.)
Regardless, and as NCLR’s Berg detailed Tuesday in Baltimore, this is an unprecedented, multi-pronged attack on a small handful of children. What’s more, given the way DOJ is going about this, they and their families might not even know that their records might be turned over to the government — or if their provider has even been subpoenaed.
Law Dork will continue to cover this story. If you know about any previously unreported subpoenas, other related DOJ efforts, or other challenges to those efforts, please reach out. Chris Geidner is available on Signal at crg.32 for more secure communications.
The Human Rights Campaign has reached a historic high of 4 million members and supporters thanks to people like you. With our rights and freedoms under attack, our job at this moment is not simply to defend ourselves. We must rewrite what it means to be free in America. Because freedom must belong to all of us.
So this Pride Month, as we head into marking this country’s 250th birthday, the LGBTQ+ community and allies are showing up loud and proud — we’re reclaiming this country and its freedoms as our own. We say with our full chest: Pride is Patriotism.
Pride is Powerful
Real change doesn’t come from the top down — it rises from the streets, from our communities, and from people like you. With 4 million voices already united under the Human Rights Campaign, this movement is fierce, fearless, and growing. Together, we can ensure that our voices are heard and our rights are protected.
At a military retirement ceremony unlike any other in modern American history, five transgender service members stood before their families, colleagues and country to mark the end of careers defined by excellence, leadership and sacrifice. They were not retiring because they failed to meet the standard. They were retiring because the standard was changed to exclude them.
“Trans servicemembers … are the frontline canaries in the coal mine of our democracy as to who can be seen as not just American, but among the best that America has to offer,” said Shawn Skelly, former assistant secretary of Defense for Readiness and member of HRC’s Board of Directors.
In addition to providing the official welcome on behalf of the HRC Foundation, Cmdr. Skelly provided a powerful keynote during the morning session and panel focused on military benefits and the future of service for our communities.
HRC’s Equality Center proudly hosted this event on Jan. 8, 2026, to officially retire Col. Bree Fram, Cmdr. Blake Dremann, Lt. Col. Erin Krizek, Chief Petty Officer Jaida McGuire and Sgt. 1st Class Cathrine Schmid. Together, they represent more than a century of service across the Armed Forces. These heroes were also a proxy for the countless more whose stories we have not yet heard but whose service has helped shape a safer, stronger more honorable military and nation.
Photo Credit: Laura Hatcher Photography
“This ceremony is unprecedented,” said retired Maj. Gen. Tammy Smith, who served as master of ceremonies. “Not because their careers fell short in any way, but because they shined so brightly in a military that cast them aside as unworthy.”
As former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall observed, what stood out to him was “how similar these read to those of all other retirees, and to others still serving.”
The difference, he noted, is that this group was not allowed to continue wearing the uniform. “It is a huge injustice, and an enormous loss to our nation.”
The ceremony was presided over by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose remarks were as direct as his reputation for leadership.
“This isn’t complicated,” McChrystal said. “We’ve got to leverage every bit of talent that this nation has.” Excluding people who meet every standard weakens readiness and undermines the values the military is meant to defend, he said. (snip-MORE; each retiree gets to share, too)
This clip was with a reporter detailing the abuses in ICE detention facilities and the illegal actions of ICE agents and for profit prison staff. Profit over people as these ICE and prison staff do not see the detainees as humans like themselves. What is concerning is ICE is learning how to use existing laws to make the local law enforcement work against the will of the people. This young man wont admit he was attacked by ICE agents instead saying he thinks he hit a tree limb in the confusion but I showed Ron the video and he said the guy looks to him like he was hit repeatedly and hard in the head and possibly the body as well. When will we as a people see that these abuses are so very similar to the abuses suffered by the minorities in 1930s Geermany. Hugs
I read the article linked below. To show how badly these papers were done one paper used reports made in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to find what he said were “unusual patterns and safety signals highly suggestive of a causal relationship” between vaccination and Sids. VAERS is a vaccine safety monitoring program where anyone can submit a report about any suspected adverse health event that happens after a vaccination. Morgan McSweeney, a scientist who posts on social media as Dr.Noc said of the people running the CDC “They have a strong opinion about what is true. And then they go looking for whatever scrap of low-quality evidence they can find to support that opinion,” McSweeney said. “If that finding supports the story that they believe, they’re willing to overlook data points from hundreds of thousands or millions of children and go with the one that fits their story.” “This was a low-quality, very small study that was not replicated. So yeah, the CDC page now says that some studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities,” McSweeney said in the video, which now has more than 5m views between Instagram and TikTok. “And maybe that’s a little bit true, because the studies they’re showing here are worth less than a fart in the summer breeze.” Hugs
Remember this is a Christian nationalist who wants to push his version of religion on everyone else. He has denied promotion to women and black people. He is a radical religious crusader, which I know because he has a crusader tattoo. Years of trying to make the US military of which I was one and my dog tags read pagan for religion more inclusive are being destroyed by an administration that is filled with people who are driven to promote and push a religious domination on the military and country. It has long been known that religious zealots infected the Air Force Academy and were pushing the evangelical version of the Christian religion. In Germany I had to spend an uncomfortable 8 months when a fundamentalist religious group in our unit decided that as it was an open secret in the unit I was one of the gay members of the unit that was more open about it they needed to save me from my sins. Every time I went to the chow hall one of them cornered me at a table and started to preach at me. Not talk to me, not to offer friendship, but to tell me all about hell and how horrible I was and that their god hated how I was and that I was in willful disobedience to their great deity. They could save me from their already determined fate if I just joined them and gave my life to their god instead of the heathen sin some demons had infected me with.
I got so damn frustrated with them. Then my friends who had started eating with me to drive them away came up with a plan. We created a religion based on greek mythogoly that we called the “House of Aphrodite”. We drew up a few tenets of the region, one of which was that it was a sex religion and to worship everyone needed to do so with each other nude. The last time they saw me at the chow hall and several of them tried to sit with me and my friends, my friends sprung the trap. They told the guys we would gladly go to their church meetings and pray with them but only if they went to one of our religious meetings first. They did not know we were religious they claimed but we assured them we were very devout. Thinking we were talking about a “liberal” church they readily agreed and then my friends sprung the trap. They told them about our religion The House Aphrodite and the tenets. My friends emphasized how we all worshiped in the nude and some rituals enacted required people to touch each other even on their sexual organs to honor the goddess. My friends played it up and I could hardly keep from laughing at the horrified looks on their faces. Needless to say they declined our invitation to join us in worship. But after that they never bothered me again. Hugs
During congressional testimony, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, which his J6 insurrectionists/terrorists could have applied for, is dead. In the Oval Office today, Donald Trump said that he doesn’t know if it’s dead. He is lying.
The one thing that we do know for sure is that the immunity for Trump and his family from IRS audits is still alive and well. But more on that tomorrow.
The slush fund was not popular, even with Republicans, with one calling it “stupid on stilts.” Another unpopular thing, even with Republicans, is the appointment of Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte is currently the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
When asked if he has concerns that Pulte would “weaponize” the position, given the role he has played during Trump’s second term in digging into mortgage records to see whether Trump’s political adversaries have committed fraud, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said: “We don’t need a weaponized DNI; we need professionals there.” (snip-MORE)
Recently I posted a cartoon after reading this Propublica story about the connections between a Don Jr. linked company and a $620 million Pentagon loan. We haven’t heard as much in the news during the second presidential term about the Trump family and their various grifts (probably due to Trump taking the oxygen out of the room with his various vanity projects), so I’m posting some cartoons from the first as a reminder the entire Trump family is in it all for themselves.
Andrew Paul Johnson was one of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He pleaded guilty to multiple nonviolent charges for breaching the Capitol, and was just a few months into his year-long sentence when Donald Trump gave him a pardon. Last March, he was sentenced to life in prison after a Florida jury found him guilty of five criminal charges, including molestation, lewd and lascivious exhibition, and transmission of material harmful to a minor.
Police reported that Johnson, 45, tried to keep the children quiet by telling them he would share millions of dollars in restitution money he expected to receive from the Trump regime in connection with his Jan. 6 case. Don’t worry, kids, he told them. Uncle Donald will take care of you. (snip-it’s disgusting that there is MORE just like this)
Scottie's Playtime 