...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Just six months after its chaotic launch, it looks as if Donald Trump’s social media network could be on the verge of collapse. As first reported by Fox Business, Truth Social allegedly owes about $1.6m to RightForge, the internet infrastructure company that hosts the app. Paying that back might be tough since Truth Social doesn’t seem to make money and is facing a number of problems, including declining traffic and the recent denial of its trademark applications. Trump Media & Technology Group, Truth Social’s parent company, is also embroiled in a federal investigation about whether it violated securities laws.
[...]
On Monday, the former president said that rumours of Truth Social’s demise are greatly exaggerated. And, to be fair, while multiple reputable news outlets have reported that Truth Social hasn’t paid RightForge since around March, the CEO of the hosting company – which targets its services at conservatives – hasn’t publicly confirmed these reports. Instead, Martin Avila told Fox Business that RightForge “believes in the mission of President Trump’s free speech platform”. Believing in free speech can be very expensive, I guess.
[...]
A 2016 USA Today investigation found that Trump has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades – a large number of which involve small contractors, who say Trump or his companies refused to pay them. Rather than being embarrassed about avoiding his contractual obligations, Trump wears his stinginess like a badge of honour. He has told reporters that he will frequently refuse to pay bills in an attempt to negotiate them down. For normal people, reneging on debt ruins your credit and gets you in a lot of trouble. For the likes of Trump – who has called himself “the king of debt” – it’s a money-making technique. “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing,” he has boasted.
Guardian
I don't think I can make myself watch the documentary. These people make me want to wretch.Trump documentary filmmaker Alex Holder has said that Eric Trump is scared of his older brother Donald Trump Jr.
He said former President Donald Trump seemed to be “a very insecure man who depends on external adoration and can’t comprehend why he doesn’t get it. He also wears a huge amount of make up”.
“I think he finds it difficult to understand that there are people who actually don’t like him. This bothers him a lot. He is fine with people not liking him if he doesn’t like them first ... but other than that he thinks he should be loved by everyone.”
[...]
Mr Holder had unparalleled access to the Trump family in the lead-up to, and for a period after, the 2020 election, which Mr Trump still falsely claims he won.
The filmmaker said Mr Trump “is incapable of believing anything other than him being a ‘winner’. He cannot accept that he lost and convinces himself that he won. It’s pretty extraordinary to witness up-close”.
[...]
“Eric is probably least like his father but I say this only because Don Jr and Ivanka are very similar to their old man,” Mr Holder said during the AMA.
[...]
One Reddit user asked what he thought the former president’s intentions were for the hundreds of classified documents that he was found to have brought to his private Florida club Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.
“I think he just wanted them because he thinks they belong to him!” Mr Holder said.
[...]
“How much did you get the sense that controlled chaos was a well-crafted strategy, or was it truly a s**t show with every day a new, unplanned catastrophe?” one user asked Mr Holder, who said it was a “total s**t show”.
When asked how he was treated by the Trumps and their staff, Mr Holder said, “it’s interesting, they are a real estate family from New York – so they are good at the charm and schmooze, but to be honest it’s pretty transparent”.
Yahoo Money
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar and former GOP state legislator Anthony Kern must pay $75,000 in attorney’s fees to a former Democratic state lawmaker they sued after a judge said the lawsuit was “primarily for purposes of harassment.”
In February 2021, the three Republicans filed a lawsuit against Charlene Fernandez, then a Democratic legislator from Yuma, accusing her of defaming them by making disparaging remarks, connecting them to the violence of Jan. 6 and conspiring against them.
The lawsuit was a reaction to a letter sent by Fernandez and other Democratic lawmakers asking the FBI to investigate Finchem, Kern and Gosar’s connections to the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C.
The trio did not sue the 43 other Democratic legislators who also signed the letter.
[...]
Judge Levi Gunderson dismissed the case and said its defamation claims were baseless and Fernandez’s comments and the letter she signed were clearly protected by the First Amendment.
On Monday, Gunderson said that Finchem, Gosar and Kern must pay Fernandez’s legal fees because the lawsuit “was groundless and not made in good faith.”
In a scathing order, the judge wrote that the lawsuit — which included passages about the national political scene that are unrelated to Fernandez — was “written for an audience other than” the court in which it was filed.
Az Mirror
So, while Trump and his right-wing allies squeal constantly about the horrible "raid", his attorneys, realizing there's nothing to complain about there, are instead trying to get back some docs before the DOJ can use them against Trump. Does that not sound like fear of something truly negative about Trump in the documents becoming public?The U.S. Department of Justice apparently has a lot to say in response to former President Donald Trump’s request that a special master handle the materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago residence and resort.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Monday granted a request from Juan Antonio Gonzalez, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, to submit a brief of up to 40 pages “in order to adequately address the legal and factual issues raised” Trump’s lawyers’ 21-page motion seeking the appointment of a special master, rather than the standard 20 pages. Trump’s team didn’t oppose the request, which Cannon granted not long after it was filed.
[...]
A hearing is scheduled Thursday at 1 p.m. before Cannon at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida.
[...]
Trump’s lawyers, include Lindsey Halligan, a solo practitioner in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, James Trusty of Ifrah Law PLLC in Washington, D.C., and M. Evan Corcoran of Silverman Thompson Slutkin & White in Baltimore, Maryland, haven’t challenged the actual search but are instead seeking the return of some property as well as the special master appointment.
Law & Crime
Trump doesn't want anyone at DOJ to see something. So, besides truly negative, that sounds like something dispositive of criminal activity.But the Department of Justice also has an internal process for handling such material, known as the privilege-review team or filter/taint team.
Link to letter of recommendation.The documents at issue in the Mar-a-Lago search, however, go well beyond attorney-client privilege issues and into top-secret national security issues, described by the National Security Counselors as an “exceedingly esoteric corner of the law.”
Leaders of the nonprofit law firm [National Security Counselors] on Monday submitted the names and curriculum vitae of four potential special masters they described as “uniquely qualified” and willing to serve, while caution the group is “not advocating for or against the appointment of a Special Master and take no position on that question.”
Whatever.According to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who serves on the [January 6] panel, committee members have stressed their desire to speak with Ornato and he has retained private counsel. It’s not clear whether Ornato will end up testifying related to the claims from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Sources told CNN that Ornato had been eligible for retirement since earlier this summer, and he had been discussing leaving the Secret Service since before Hutchinson’s testimony.
CNN
[...] just two days before his planned interview with January 6 investigators.
[...]
Ornato had finally agreed to an interview with Department of Homeland Security investigators on August 31 after multiple attempts to arrange one. According to a memo sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the head of the Secret Service, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and DHS general counsel, the inspector general had been attempting to interview Ornato since June 29 and spent all of July and much of August following up.
[...]
Ornato has indicated that he still intends to attend the interview, according to an email obtained by The Intercept, but since Ornato will be a private citizen, investigators won’t have testimonial subpoena authority to compel his cooperation.
Intercept
You should be worried, Lindsey. You're deeply implicated.“If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle… there’ll be riots in the streets,” Graham told former South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, who now hosts Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America.”
Trump shared a clip of the interview on Truth Social later Sunday evening.
[...]
Graham expressed concern that Trump is treated with “a double standard” and repeated his warning of riots regarding the Georgia special grand jury investigating attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
Graham himself has been subpoenaed in that probe in connection with phone calls made to Georgia election officials seeking to change the election results in the state.
[...]
“I’ve never been more worried about the law and politics as I am right now,” he added.
The Hill
Maybe high tuition should be addressed in a complementary plan.Raising living standards or adding fuel to inflation?
[...]
People whose payments are cut or eliminated should have more money to spend elsewhere – maybe to buy a car, put a down payment on a house or even put money aside for their own kids' college savings plan. So the debt forgiveness has the potential to raise the living standard for tens of millions of people.
Critics, however, say that additional spending power would just pour more gasoline on the inflationary fire in an economy where businesses are already struggling to keep up with consumer demand.
[...]
Debt forgiveness is not like the $1200 relief checks the government sent out last year, which some experts say added to inflationary pressure. Borrowers won't suddenly have $20,000 deposited in their bank accounts. Instead, they'll be relieved of making loan payments over many years.
[...]
The White House also notes that borrowers who still have outstanding student debt will have to start making payments again next year. Those payments have been on hold throughout the pandemic.
Restarting them will take money out of borrower's pockets, offsetting some of the additional spending power that comes from loan forgiveness.
Helping lower income Americans or a sop to the rich?
[...]
Some believe that transfer effectively penalizes people who scrimped and saved to pay for college, as well as the majority of Americans who don't go to college.
They might not mind subsidizing a newly minted social worker, making $25,000 a year. But they might bristle at underwriting debt relief for a business school graduate who's about to go to Wall Street and earn six figures.
[...]
The White House estimates 90% of the debt relief would go to people making under $75,000 a year. Lower-income borrowers who qualified for Pell Grants in college are eligible for twice as much debt forgiveness as other borrowers.
But individuals making as much as $125,000 and couples making up to $250,000 are eligible for some debt forgiveness. Subsidizing college for those upper-income borrowers might rub people the wrong way.
[...]
Helping those in need or making college tuition worse?
[...]
For years, the cost of college education has risen much faster than inflation, which is one reason student debt has exploded.
[...]
"People are going to assume there's a likelihood that debt is canceled again and again," Goldwein says. "And if you assume there's a likelihood it's canceled, you're going to be more likely to take out more debt up front. That's going to give colleges more pricing power to raise tuition without pressure and to offer more low-value degrees."
The old rule in economics is when the government subsidizes something, you tend to get more of it. And that includes high tuition and college debt.
NPR
I wouldn't limit that to people with college degrees. In fact, there are millions of people with college degrees who are working low-wage jobs or are still looking for work. I'd instead simply call it people with money.Even the somewhat more sober macroeconomic critics are letting their rhetoric get the best of them. Jason Furman attacked Biden's plan as "reckless," saying it would pour "half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning." But when he finally got around to talking numbers, he informed us that he expects just 0.2 - 0.3 percentage points of inflation from the plan.
[...]
Marc Goldwein from the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget is also really fuming about the inflationary impact, but when CRFB looked at student debt cancellation in 2020 and 2021, they dismissed it as a feeble measure that would do next to nothing to stimulate the economy. Last year, student debt relief wouldn't juice the economy enough, this year, it will juice it too much. It's hard to escape the conclusion that many of the economic impact claims are just being invented on the fly.
[...]
And of course the government subsidizes middle-class people all the time. It’s the central promise of nearly every political campaign.
So why all the vitriol over student debt? When we argue about student debt, we aren't really debating credit policy, inflation, growth or the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution. All of these avenues of discussion are elaborate detours around the central issue: the structure of the American social order.
In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren't just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They're less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities.
[...]
The less there is to go around, the better it is for the people who have it. And so the more people we exclude from higher education, the more secure people with college degrees will feel about their place in society.
Substack
Also...the quiet part out loud:After World War II, millions of new college students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees.
[...]
We've been democratizing college ever since, of course, but there was a genuine explosion in enrollment in the first decade of the 21st century, when the total number of students in school each year jumped by more than 35 percent -- more than triple the rate of increase over the prior decade. This is also when the volume of student debt began to skyrocket, more than doubling between 2006 and 2012.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.The U.S. Army wants a 500,000 active-duty force by the end of this next decade, about 25,000 more than today. And preying on low income high schoolers is apparently how they intend to do it.
This past month the Army announced that they have already surpassed their recruitment goals for 2019–with three months still to go. That a big change from recent years’ where unsuccessful recruiting outcomes have been the norm. So what changed?
Recruiters are no longer using patriotism as their main marketing strategy. And wars in the Middle East are not on the talking points either.
Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, head of Army Recruiting Command, stated this past month that discussion of the endless wars and their potential outcomes “was not really part of the discussion” recruiters are having with high schoolers. Today, recruiters have found a new niche to meet their 2019 goals: the national student debt crisis.
Courage to Resist October 23, 2019
Are you kidding? Every person at Mar-a-Lago with knowledge of the location of the documentation, including Trump, had access to it.In a letter obtained by POLITICO and dated Friday, [Director of National Intelligence Avril] Haines told House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) that her office will lead an “assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents.”
[...]
It’s [...] the first known acknowledgment by the intelligence community of the potential harm caused by the missing documents, which prosecutors said Friday included human-source intelligence and information gathered from foreign intercepts. Top lawmakers have been clamoring for details about the substance of the documents since the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, but so far neither the intelligence committees nor congressional leaders part of the so-called Gang of Eight have been briefed.
[...]
The intelligence community’s review is likely to encompass whether any unauthorized individuals had access to the highly sensitive documents.
Okay, that's well and good, but I do not want to hear Trumpies saying, "See? No harm" after the assesment. What he did was illegal as fuck, potentially damaging to national security, and he needs to be held accountable for once in his disgusting, unaccountable life.The Senate Intelligence Committee has also asked the intelligence community to conduct a damage assessment related to Trump’s handling of the documents [...] . The panel’s chair, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), and vice chair, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), both signed onto the request.
[...]
The Justice Department previously raised alarms about the lax security of the records within Trump’s estate. That question could also bear on the criminal probe, as Justice Department counterintelligence investigators determine whether the highly classified records were compromised in any way.
Politico
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Texas schools have started receiving posters of the national motto "In God We Trust" that they will be required to display in accordance with a new state law.
The big picture: Those opposed are sounding the alarm about the law, arguing it imposes religion on students and flies in the face of the expectation that schools be secular.
The law, which was passed last year, says elementary and secondary schools must "display in a conspicuous place in each building of the school or institution a durable poster or framed copy of the United States national motto" if the signs were donated to the school district or bought with private donations and given to the district.
Axios
