That is evil third world banana republic crap.
Army plans for a potential parade on Trump's birthday call for 6,600 soldiers, AP learns
Detailed Army plans for a potential military parade on President Donald Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and potentially a couple thousand civilians.apnews.com
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I'm here, am I allowed to scream about any President’s mental capacity? Or is this one of those whataboutisms that 'checks notes' aren't allowed around here.
Wow! Celebrating the Army's 250th birthday is pretty cool. But doing it on a draft dodger'sArmy plans for a potential parade on Trump's birthday call for 6,600 soldiers, AP learns
Detailed Army plans for a potential military parade on President Donald Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and potentially a couple thousand civilians.
birthday is a horrible idea.
Agreed. Especially when you are studiously scrubbing away all the parts of Army history that were made by anyone other than straight white males for being too woke/DEI.
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As the White House prepares to release its budget proposal Friday, the impasse over DOGE reflects a looming challenge for the administration’s vision of a sprawling overhaul of federal agencies. With both the courts and Congress refusing to provide legal cover to spending cuts that Musk forced through, the administration is running out of options for ensuring that its unilateral reductions take effect — potentially limiting DOGE’s lasting impact despite the disruption it brought to the government.
“None of the activities of the DOGE have heretofore had any impact on the budget, the debt or the deficit. Until Congress acts, those savings don’t really become real,” said Robert Shea, a Republican who served in senior political roles at the White House budget office.
The administration initially floated sending $9.3 billion of DOGE cuts to the Hill, which would encompass DOGE’s elimination of the main agency providing foreign aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as zeroing out some money for public broadcasting.
This week, however, lawmakers began to raise concerns about even that smaller effort, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) telling colleagues she would have trouble supporting cuts to PEPFAR, an effort to combat HIV/AIDS abroad that other foreign-policy minded senators also support.
“I think it depends what’s in it precisely,” Collins said of the package’s chances of passing in the Senate. “For example, the $8.3 billion in foreign aid cuts, if that includes the women’s global health initiative as is rumored, if it cuts PEPFAR as it may, I don’t see those passing.”
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Donald Trump Calls for Republicans to Expel Democrats from Congress after Some Dems introduce Impeachment Moves
What To Know
In his Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump said the Democrats had "got two 'No Name,' little respected Congressmen, total Whackjobs both, throwing the 'Impeachment' of DONALD J. TRUMP around, for about the 20th time, even though they have no idea for what I would be Impeached."He continued: "The Republicans should start to think about expelling them from Congress for all of the crimes that they have committed, especially around Election time(s). These are very dishonest people that won't let our Country heal! Why do we allow them to continuously use Impeachment as a weapon against the President of the United States who, by all accounts, is working hard to SAVE OUR COUNTRY."
On Monday, Thanedar introduced seven articles of impeachment accusing Trump of obstruction of justice, abuse of executive power, usurpation of appropriations power, abuse of trade powers and international aggression, violation of First Amendment rights, creation of an unlawful office, bribery and corruption, and tyrannical overreach.
Thanedar linked this bid to what he said was the Trump administration "defying" a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling instructing it to "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a mega-jail in El Salvador. The White House insists Garcia is a member of the MS-13 criminal gang, which his family denies.
Three House Democrats—Representatives Robin Kelly of Illinois, Kweisi Mfume of Maryland and Jerry Nadler of New York—were initially listed as co-sponsors of the impeachment bid but later asked to be removed. According to The Hill, Kelly and Mfume both made this move after finding out the impeachment effort was not backed by the Democratic leadership. This left Representative Schakowsky as the only remaining co-sponsor.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Representative Pete Aguilar, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said he didn't support the impeachment effort as "we don't have any confidence that House and Senate Republicans would do their jobs, and so this is not an exercise that we're willing to undertake."
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Trump's top spy chief Tulsi Gabbard blasted as Raw Story exposes 'crazy' cash grab.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is open for business — on social media at least.
Gabbard has been DNI since February, yet a Raw Story review of her social media presence reveals her personal X account is still offering subscriptions at $5 a month.
But that’s not all. On Gabbard’s personal Substack, it appears anyone, anywhere, foreign or domestic, can send unlimited donations.
“That’s not normal,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Raw Story, while walking to a vote in the Capitol. “It does become an interesting conflict of interest, though, if it’s a violation of ethics rules.
”That is crazy," said Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), a former Army intelligence officer. "There's so much corruption, it's sort of like, where do you focus?"
Other members of Trump’s cabinet use platforms Gabbard uses but do not appear to offer subscriptions. This week, for just one mundane example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the State Department’s Substack account to pen his thoughts on Trump’s first 100 days in office. It was free to subscribe.
The Trump administration has already suffered embarrassments over high-level officials’ unguarded internet habits, notably including now ousted National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seeing unguarded Venmo accounts picked over for embarrassing details.
Requests for comment from spokespeople for Gabbard and the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community were not immediately returned.
Gabbard was a Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii for eight years, from 2013. After an unsuccessful run for president in 2020, she left the Democratic Party and launched herself as an author, commentator, and podcast host. Drifting far from her formerly progressive positions, she endorsed Trump and campaigned for him before being nominated to be DNI.
As DNI, Gabbard’s official X account has a little under 570,000 followers. Her personal account has 3.7 million. Her personal account regularly reposts tweets from her official page. “Get bonus content when you sign up,” the personal account promises, offering $5-a-month subscriptions. “Look forward to sharing more with you here!”
On Substack, Gabbard has not posted since October. Nonetheless, the subscriptions page for her personal account offers subscriptions at $6 a month, $60 a year or, in a special founding member tier, a minimum of $1,000. There doesn’t seem to be any ceiling on how much can be donated.
'Alarming lapses in judgment'
Plenty of Senate Republicans had misgivings about Gabbard when it came to her confirmation process, especially over her past support for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information then fled to Russia. During her confirmation hearing, Gabbard refused to call Snowden a traitor.But former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was the lone GOP senator to oppose Gabbard for the DNI role.
At the time, McConnell said: “The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment.”
With the Trump administration continuing its frantic, norm-upending pace, even some Democrats brushed aside questions about whether the director of national intelligence should have live social media pages offering paid subscriptions, at least on first blush.
Told about Gabbard’s subscription offers on X and Substack, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a member of the armed services and oversight committees, said the issue might seem peripheral compared to “all the things we have to worry about in this country.”
But, Khanna said, it was “a fair point” to see the director of national intelligence soliciting for payment on social platforms might represent an instance of “the degradation of norms” under the Trump administration.
Ocasio-Cortez said: “We also see that a lot of cabinet level positions are being turned into reality TV regularly, and so I don't think it's a small thing, I think it's a big thing.
“Ensuring that people aren't kind of setting up side businesses off of their public appointments is incredibly important.”
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Email mistake reveals secret plans to end research on Head Start and other child safety net programs
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — The Trump administration could gut research on the effectiveness of child welfare programs, with plans to terminate dozens of university grants studying improvements to Head Start and child care policy, according to a spreadsheet mistakenly made public this week.The document listed more than 150 research projects under consideration for termination by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It covered grants funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, which says it “builds evidence to improve lives” by helping policymakers evaluate programs that help low-income children and families.
“These grants are aimed at learning how to make programs more effective at pursuing goals like healthy child development, reducing abuse and neglect and promoting economic self-sufficiency,” said Naomi Goldstein, who led the office for nearly two decades before she retired in 2022. “It's hard to see why they would want to cancel these efforts.”
The grant cancellations would add to deep cuts already enacted at HHS' Administration for Children and Families, which plans to close five regional offices and abruptly fired hundreds of workers one month ago. Its staffing has dropped from approximately 2,400 in January to 1,500, former employees say, and the administration has said it will fold ACF into other parts of HHS.
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Marshall
Musk former PayPal Co-Owner wins No Bid contract to build a Sophisticated People Tracking system for ICE. This tracking system should raise privacy concerns for all Americans
DENVER ‒ Federal officials are building a sprawling new database system they're calling "ImmigrationOS" to track and target millions of people living illegally in the United States
A $30 million no-bid contract with GOP megadonor Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies will help Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents build a sophisticated system to prioritize people for deportation, including accused gang members and people who have overstayed their tourist visas. The contract with the Denver-based company calls for rolling out a prototype this fall.
Thiel, the founder and chairman of Palantir, is close to Vice President JD Vance and DOGE head Elon Musk, with whom he launched PayPal.
The ImmigrationOS project reflects the approach DOGE has brought to the federal bureaucracy under Trump, as Musk's deputies seek technology-focused solutions to make government more efficient. Palantir already runs the ICE system used for Homeland Security investigations, and the new ImmigrationOS will merge data from multiple databases from the government and private sources.
"These transnational organizations' ongoing campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally are extraordinarily violent, vicious, and similarly threaten the American people," ICE officials said in justifying the no-bid contract with Palantir. "They present an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States."
Palantir's existing contract with ICE has already topped $88 million, and the new ImmigrationOS system will cost another $30 million, according to contract details reviewed by USA TODAY. Several of Musk's DOGE deputies have previously worked at Palantir, according to postings on LinkedIn and other social media sites.
The system will also track people who "self deport" or leave the United States voluntarily, to help prioritize ICE enforcement against those who remain. Trump wants to deport 1 million people annually, a dramatic increase requiring a vast, sophisticated and expensive targeting, detention and removal operation.
System could be repurposed to track Americans
Civil liberties groups warn systems like ImmigrationOS pose significant risks to the general public, in part because it's unclear how the system would be limited only to people living illegally in the United States. Such a system, they warn, could easily be expanded to target any American.Trump has suggested that he wants to remove not just immigrants but U.S. citizens if they're deemed dangerous, and said he's ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate.
Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist with Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, said Palantir's work has long raised concerns by so effectively collating public databases with things like Facebook tracking and even shopper reward cards.
While the federal government collects and retains vast quantities of information about individual Americans, the computer databases have typically been kept separate from each other to preserve personal privacy. In April, USA TODAY reported that the IRS had agreed to give ICE agents access to taxpayer data, including data about people who filed taxes without a Social Security number,
ICE agents could use ImmigrationOS to figure out where a targeted person lives and works, when they're likely to be home, who they live with, the kind of car they drive and even what restaurants or shops they frequent.
Quintin said a system designed to target people living illegally in the United States could easily be repurposed to target the president's political enemies.
"What they have built is a really, really capable engine for analyzing big data, linking it together and picking out parts of it. That gives you the ability to collate this data on somebody and go looking for a reason to prosecute them," Quintin said. "Even if you think you're safe for now, you might not be safe for long."
When did he say this? I can't seem to find it online.
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Trump Crypto Corruption Intensifies as Eric Trump announces Abu Dhabi Firm to Invests $2 Billion in the Trump Family Stable Coin weeks after top 200 investors in Trump stable coin were invited to private dinner and tour of the White House with the POTUS.
Donald Trump and his family continue to cash in on cryptocurrency from entities looking to curry influence with the president and his administration - which is simultaneously working to deregulate the industry.
At a crypto conference in the United Arab Emirates, Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff announced that the Trump family's stablecoin - World Liberty Financial's USD1 - will be the vehicle for the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX to invest $2 billion into Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange.
The announcement comes weeks after Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao claimed he had "no discussions of a Binance US deal with … well, anyone."
The transaction comes with a host of ethical baggage. For starters, World Liberty Financial (a decentralized exchange "inspired by Donald J. Trump"), is co-created and managed by Trump's family - as well as that of Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been functioning like a shadow secretary of State -and will now have direct financial ties to Binance, which in November 2023 pleaded guilty to financial crimes including money laundering, sanctions violations, and unlicensed operations. The exchange was slapped with heavy restrictions on operations within the U.S. On top of that, the transaction involves a foreign government with clear political interests in the United States. Much like Trump used his hotels as vehicles for foreign entities to court favor with the presidency, the signal being broadcast by World Liberty Financial is that the Trumps are open to investments.
While the president himself does not technically hold a position in World Liberty Financial, he is clearly involved in his family's crypto ambitions. Days before his inauguration, Trump announced the launch of $TRUMP, a meme coin that made him billions overnight and then crashed within days. Last month, the president announced that he would be hosting an exclusive dinner for about 200 of the coin's biggest investors at his Mar-a-Lago golf club.
According to an analysis by The Washington Post, the announcement of the dinner led to a more than 30-percent surge in the price of $TRUMP, with the largest investor dumping over $24 million into the coin. Several dozen buyers were willing to dump seven-figure sums into the coin, possibly in exchange for direct access to the president. Over at World Liberty Financial, the pattern is being repeated not just with individual investors, but nations.
According to an investigation by The New York Times, World Liberty Financial has raked in over $550 million in sales of their stablecoin and WLFI token. The Times found that in their pitches to potential investors, World Liberty Financial stressed their connections to the president.
"They kept telling us, ‘We're like, we're super close to Trump,'" Mike Silagadze, chief executive of the crypto startup Ether.Fi, told the Times. Dominik Schiener, the founder of a German crypto group who was also approached by World Liberty Financial, added that they found their pitch to be "very dishonest."
Nevertheless, some took the offer. World Liberty Financial has established lucrative partnerships with crypto companies based in Hong Kong, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, among others.
"Obviously [they] think they're going to make money because it's the officially endorsed Trump project," SonicLabs Founder Andre Cronje told the Times of a pitch they rejected from the company. "It's a black spot on our industry."
Lawmakers in the United States are taking note. As the president takes drastic steps to deregulate crypto, it's hard to ignore how the industry's domestic growth will benefit him and his family directly.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) reacted to the news that World Liberty Financial would be participating in the Binance deal by writing on Thursday that "a shady fund backed by a foreign government just announced a $2 billion deal using Trump stablecoins. The Senate is gearing up to pass stablecoin legislation that will make it easier for Trump's family to line their own pockets."
"This is corruption. No senator should support it," she added.
Earlier this week, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) wrote that Trump's connections to World Liberty Financial - as well as his other crypto ventures - was the "biggest corruption scandal in the history of the American presidency."
"You probably don't have to scratch very deep to find an instance where the President has received an enormous infusion of cash to his crypto coin from a CEO or foreign oligarch who is then asking for a favor from Donald Trump," the senator told MSNBC.
"A president of the United States should not be running a back door bribery scheme - the equivalent of posting your cash app on the White House web page - then we should make it crystal clear that that's illegal," Murphy added. "If we were doing our job, we would pass legislation saying that no president can monetize the White House by owning a crypto coin that he uses the official channels of the White House to sell to the public, to CEOs, to Saudi princes and anybody else who has business before the United States Congress."
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Marshall
This is what Authoritarianism looks like. This is removing 100% of the power of the People and the US Voter. Trump says your voice doesn't matter, only people who support him should be in Power and that HE and HIS SUPPORTERS get to pick and chose who can be in Govt positions.
This is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution was trying to prevent from happening
Link
This is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution was trying to prevent from happening
Trump dubs Dems 'out of control,' suggests GOP consider kicking them out of Congress for 'REAL crimes'
Link
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Marshall
Just forget about that Pesky Constitution
We now have a State Run "Religious Liberty" wing in the White House that only investigates Christian Related issues
The SCOTUS is about to approve Public Funds for a Private Catholic School in Oklahoma
And now your POTUS is up there telling everyone this.
We now have a State Run "Religious Liberty" wing in the White House that only investigates Christian Related issues
The SCOTUS is about to approve Public Funds for a Private Catholic School in Oklahoma
And now your POTUS is up there telling everyone this.
Donald Trump says America should “forget about” the separation of church and state
link
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