Had to laugh at the latest mailer that Musk’s corporate lawyers sent out on behalf of Dan Cruce: “Showing Up For Wilmington When It Matters”. I take that to mean that he spends the rest of his time in his stately manse in Lewes. An almost identical mailer was sent out on behalf of Musk Crony #1 Krista Griffith. Both Cruce and Griffith are owned by the dark forces behind these mailers. All the free ice cream in the world can’t change that.
Freedom Isn’t Free. Neither Is Trump’s ‘Free’ Plane:
President Trump was entranced. It was a few weeks into his second term, and he was on the tarmac of the Palm Beach airport, getting a tour of a luxury Boeing 747-8 that had been flown from Doha for his perusal.
Mr. Trump’s February 2025 tour of the Qatari jet led to a frantic sprint inside the White House and the Pentagon. The administration sought to upgrade the plane in time to meet his demand for it to be ready by the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, with an accelerated retrofit.
An investigation by The New York Times found that the president’s push to get the luxury aircraft quickly led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features that potentially left Mr. Trump and others who travel with him on Air Force One vulnerable.
Among the findings:
Mr. Trump was personally engaged in making decisions about the retrofitting of the donated plane, giving the final approval on the features and security measures that would be included, according to people familiar with his role. They and others interviewed for this article described the sensitive information about the process and the plane on the condition of anonymity.
Several key security and safety features on the Boeing planes that have been used for decades as Air Force One are not visible on the upgraded jet, including a lower-level exit for high-risk situations, additional backup power capacity and an advanced antimissile system, public Air Force records and photographs examined by The Times show. The planes currently being built to serve as the permanent presidential fleet are all set to have such features, federal records show.
The 747-8 plane was overhauled on a compressed timeline of just about eight months. Experts said the jet would have needed several years for a full upgrade.
Because the Qatari jet was being pushed into service so quickly, some White House officials initially expected it would only be used for domestic travel or to visit allied countries with U.S. military bases.
The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.
Seriously, Why The Fuck Did They Reschedule That Correspondents’ Dinner?
The meandering speech he gave for the next hour inside the Waldorf Astoria, the former site of the Trump International Hotel, was full of ad hominem attacks against his political enemies, disproven election conspiracies, scripted jokes that fell flat and familiar refrains about the war against Iran and the construction of the White House ballroom.
As his speech reached its conclusion, The Times Shawn McCreesh reports, he pulled out a hat and with a theatrical flourish plopped it on his head. It said, “Trump 2028.” Some clapped. Others laughed. Most of the reporters just stared straight ahead.
Why Trump Can’t Quit Iran. I’m posting the entire piece b/c, as a subscriber to Talking Points Memo, I have their permission. I encourage you to subscribe as well:
The Journal has an article today about the increasing unreality of the strategy, if one can call it that, the U.S. is using to approach Trump’s war with Iran. The headline tells the story: Trump is Losing Patience Over an Iran War with No Clear End in Sight. The article appears to be based on accounts from various advisors who’ve been present at planning meetings with Trump. It’s filled with quotes about how he’s out of patience, mad, fed up, has lost confidence in diplomacy, etc. One advisors says he’s moved into “revenge mode.” He’s telling advisors he thinks he can “break the Iranians’ will through an aggressive bombing campaign.”
A constant through-line in the article (and based on this account of Trump’s private White House rants) is that the Iranians can’t be trusted and that Trump keeps making deals with them that they simply break. I certainly don’t see the Iranian government as very trustworthy either. But this whole set of claims is a fantasy. Trump has never had any agreements or deals with the Iranians. What he’s had is a series of notional ceasefires in which nothing of substance or consequence is actually agreed to — you might sum them up with the famous Bill & Ted’s maxim to “be excellent to each other.” The point of these deals has been to calm international oil markets and give Trump space to moonwalk away from his totally self-inflicted debacle. But since these ceasefires are only “deals” to begin negotiations the actual war aims and demands of each side eventually seep through. Then they go back to fighting. Each deal really amounts to a temporary or contingent U.S. surrender. Trump needs them to calm oil markets and lower the U.S. price of gas. Iran wants it to consolidate its gains and get a break for aerial bombardment.
As I’ve argued too many times by now Trump lost this conflict in its first days. Everything since then has been his struggle to deny that reality, either with bogus “deals,” more bombing or various threats. Indeed, in recent days, while Trump rants and continues bombing raids, it’s Iran which is opening meaningful new fronts in the conflict. Having the Houthis (an Iranian proxy force) menace the Red Sea sea lanes is tightening the stranglehold Iran has with it’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
If we take these internal accounts at face value — not at all a certainty — it seems like Trump isn’t getting honest accounts of what his aides are negotiating. (The rapid turnabout on his Saudi nuclear deal lends weight to that possibility even if they are different negotiations.) You’ll remember that during the lead up to the signing of the “MOU” the U.S. side was claiming that Iran was making side promises to absolutely definitely shut down its nukes program. It just wasn’t willing to put it in writing. End the war and we’ll totally do it, the Iranians were purportedly saying.
Whether these were straight up Iranian lies, wishful thinking by the U.S. side, or just happy talk Kushner and Witkoff were telling Trump almost doesn’t matter. If you believe something like that you deserve to be lied to. But in addition to dragging the country through months of war to avoid accepting his own failure, Trump seems to be coming up with new theories of betrayal within the negotiations themselves. Diplomacy failing; the Iranians lying, etc.
I saw a clip of Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) saying that of course diplomacy is failing because he’s got his doofus son-in-law Jared and Steve Witkoff handling the negotiations on the other side of the table from seasoned Iranian diplomats who’ve been negotiated with on the nuclear issue for decades.
Of course, they’re morons. They’re also corrupt. But as much as I appreciate the gotcha it’s actually misplaced. Effective war diplomacy can get you the best and most creative agreement that the circumstances warrant. But that last part is key. Kickass diplomacy is never going to get the side that won the conflict to agree to a deal in which they lost. But that is essentially what’s being asked of the diplomacy here.
Of course, much as he flounders Trump still controls the most powerful military in the world. He might be able to break the Iranians’ will with a ground invasion and a sufficient number of war crimes. But that means doubling or tripling down on a war that is already hugely unpopular and driving fuel prices through the roof. For all Trump’s bluster he almost never does something like that when the threat to his own popularity is so straightforward. But he doesn’t have any other way out.
ICE Agents’ Abuse Of Women And Children Is A Feature, Not A Bug:
On July 22, the advocacy group Ohio Immigrant Alliance released a list of 59 active and former ICE and CBP agents charged with sexual and violent crimes between 2007 and 2026. Brouillette is no outlier, said Lynn Tramonte, Executive Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance and author of the report. “But we have no way of knowing the full extent of the problem, because the agency doesn’t even look at family court records.” (Because they don’t want to.)
Fifty of 59 cases the group documented were sex crimes, many of them committed against children. And the problem, according to their research, is getting worse: “Cases documented in 2025 and 2026 alone account for 42.4 percent of the list — 25 out of 59 cases,” Tramonte wrote. “Compare that to 2020, the previous peak year, which had just 6.”
This is not the first report alleging systemic sexual abuse by ICE and Border Patrol agents. In May of this year, the Southern Border Communities Coalition and journalist John Carlos Frey compiled a list of over 170 instances of sexual violence by immigration agents over the past 50 years. Here at Mother Jones, journalist Erin Siegal McIntyre investigated one alleged rape at the Border Patrol Academy in 2024. The officer involved is still listed as a union representative on a National Border Patrol Council website.
The federal immigration policing force now includes about 50,000 agents spanning ICE, CBP, and other law enforcement agencies. And after ICE’s internal watchdog office was gutted, they’re operating with few guardrails and near-unlimited resources.
“ICE and Border Patrol agents have a disturbing track record of sexually and violently abusing women and children, including members of their own families,” said Tramonte of Ohio Immigrant Alliance. In her report, she calls on the federal government to freeze the immigration enforcement budget—which is now sitting at about $152 billion, according to the Senate Budget Committee. “These are not people who should be given guns and free rein to roam U.S. communities.”
Stating the obvious: DHS and ICE deliberately recruit agents with psychopathic tendencies.
What do you want to talk about?
I have an honest question because I just don’t know – “war criminal/war crimes”. Who is actually responsible for arresting and prosecuting these things?