Wanna Know Why Gov. Meyer Endorsed Stellar Progressive Challengers Like Shay Frisby, Adrianna Leela Bohm And Rae Krantz? Listen here. (Endorsements begin around the 47-minute mark.) I also love his blistering of whiners like Debra Heffernan on their wasteful Legislative Hall funding. I also like Meyer’s challenging of Delaware Way insiders, including the odious Kim Williams. My take? Yes, he’s combative. But his bete-noir is the Delaware Way. Which in part informs his endorsements. He’s a bull in a china shop. But he’s trying to get shit done. Would anyone prefer John Carney? Or BHL? I’m tellin’ ya, this is a great interview. BTW, anybody upset at Meyer’s endorsements, didn’t John Carney do everything he could to drag BHL’s corrupt carcass across the finish line? Why the outrage now? Rhetorical question. Answer: The Delaware Way.
Overthrow A President, Take Their Oil:
President Trump said late Friday that the United States had struck a deal to take majority control of a huge portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, pointing to a sweeping effort to assert U.S. dominance over energy in the Western Hemisphere.
The agreement amounts to a highly unusual foray into another country’s oil fields through a partnership with a private company, the State Department said through a U.S. official. The deal would give the United States control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Mr. Trump said in a social media post. That is almost as much as all of the proven reserves in the United States, which is the world’s biggest oil producer.
The Trump administration deposed and captured Ms. Rodríguez’s predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, in January, transforming a country that had been an adversary into something resembling a client state. As part of the process, the administration made Venezuela’s oil central to its campaign to expand U.S. influence over energy in the Americas, where rising production has helped blunt the loss of oil coming out of the Middle East over the past six months because of the Iran war.
Previous U.S. leaders often shied away from any suggestion that gaining sway over another country’s natural resources was a primary objective of U.S. military and foreign policy, wary of the international backlash, doubts over the legality of doing so and the potential for such moves to generate security threats against the United States.
But Mr. Trump and some of his top advisers have made it clear that oil is an important part of their foray into Venezuela.
Even before the removal of Mr. Maduro, American officials bluntly claimed that the United States had created Venezuela’s oil industry and that the country’s government had effectively stolen U.S. oil fields through nationalizations.
Here’s what we know: Under Trump, what can go wrong will go wrong.
Speaking Of What Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong…:
The entirely unnecessary midterm convention that President Donald Trump decided to throw himself hasn’t even started yet, and it’s already a failure. Even Republicans are calling this thing a shitshow, and as more details emerge, things are only getting worse.
For Republicans, I mean. For us, it’s hilarious.
You see, they have a wee bit of a scheduling problem. Nothing big, just that both nights of the convention overlap with NFL openers on Sept. 9 and 10. But surely that won’t matter, right?
America does not cry out for a Super Bowl rematch between the Patriots and the Seahawks, set to air on NBC and Peacock for the first game of 2026.
But that’s only night one. Surely things will be better for night two, when the San Francisco 49ers play against the Los Angeles Rams in Australia, set to air on Netflix. Unlike broadcast NBC channels, at least some people won’t pay for Netflix, so surely they’ll tune in to hear Trump speak on night two.
Sad.
Making America Sick Again. Ranking RFK Jr’s Public Health Disasters. #1:
1) Bringing Back All the 20th Century Diseases
In extremely related news, preventable diseases, particularly measles, are on the rise. Two unvaccinated people died from measles in Pennsylvania just this week, some of the over 2,700 cases reported nationally this year — a 38-year high, per the New Republic. (RFK baselessly claimed that “hopeful staffers” in Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office “altogether fabricated” the two deaths, which is pretty repugnant.)
Declining vaccination rates are also expected to bring about a rise in diseases like mumps, whooping cough and meningitis.
More than a dozen local law enforcement agencies across the country have used opioid settlement money to procure Flock cameras and other AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs), an investigation by Mother Jones has found.
Settlement funds began flowing to states and localities in 2022, after major pharmaceutical companies agreed to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the industry’s role in the opioid crisis. Altogether, state and local governments secured more than $50 billion in funds, to be paid out over 18 years, from the various manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies accused of fueling the deadly epidemic.
Public health advocates hoped the settlements would provide lifesaving resources for historically underserved communities ravaged by opioid addiction. But as the money has been disbursed, local officials have come under fire for putting crucial dollars toward policing instead of prioritizing addiction prevention, recovery, treatment, and harm reduction services: KFF Health News found that police spent settlement money on Tasers, firearm silencers, drones, and more; in West Virginia, some rural counties used the funds to pay off their jail bills.But little attention has been paid to how police departments have used those opioid funds to build out AI-powered surveillance networks like Flock, whose ALPRs have become increasingly popular with police even as they’ve drawn intenseIn sum, Mother Jones found that 19 agencies in ten different states spent more than $920,000 in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs, a likely undercount given the inconsistency with which opioid settlement expenditures are tracked and disclosed across states and local jurisdictions.
The Trump presidency has often looked more like a post-Soviet or postcolonial regime than like a first-world democracy. The Trump post-presidency may look the same. Trump has abused his office to enrich himself and his family in ways that are completely unprecedented—not only in the United States but also in the history of almost any peer democracy. Only Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s notoriously lawless former prime minister, was in any way comparable, and Berlusconi was sentenced to prison.
Alberto Fujimori, who was elected president of Peru in 1990, entered office at a time of extreme national crisis. The murderous Shining Path insurgency controlled much of Peru’s hinterland and terrorized the capital, Lima. Inflation ran at nearly 8,000 percent. Food and electricity were in constant shortage. Fujimori stopped the inflation and crushed the insurgency, but his harsh and sometimes criminal methods included warrantless detentions and extrajudicial killings. Fujimori dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and rewrote Peru’s constitution to allow his own reelection in 1995. He won roughly two-thirds of the vote in a free, more or less, election.
But as Fujimori was doing things Peruvians wanted done, he was also presiding over a secret scheme of self-enrichment. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, operated a system of embezzlement and kickbacks that amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. When this deception came to light, just after Fujimori’s 2000 reelection to a third term, he fled the country and resigned from office.To claw back these funds, Peru created a special prosecutor’s office and worked closely with the countries that hosted these contested assets. Peru has since recovered about $200 million of misappropriated wealth from accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the United States, and Luxembourg, according to the database of the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative.Peru is not the only case of a former kleptocratic ruling family returning to power on a message of revenge and redemption. The Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos pillaged billions of dollars over two decades, from 1965 to 1986. After his ouster, his democratically elected successor, Corazon Aquino, created a Presidential Commission on Good Government to recover this stolen wealth. As of 2022, the PCGG had returned $5 billion to the Philippines, according to reporting by the country’s leading English-language newspaper.
The single most ambitious program of asset recovery has taken place in Nigeria. In the five years that Sani Abacha ruled the country as a military dictator, from 1993 until his death, in 1998, he stole perhaps $4 billion, stashing the funds in foreign accounts and shell companies. Revelations of his corruption discredited his military regime. In 1999, Nigeria returned to an elected government, which created a specialized unit in 2002, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, to reclaim these funds from Abacha’s heirs. This work received considerable help from the Swiss government, which agreed to freeze Abacha-related accounts, and from the United States, which cracked down on Abacha-owned shell companies. Nigeria got back about $1.5 billion, according to the World Bank’s tally.
What do you want to talk about?
