A group of Republican lawmakers went to an immigrant detention facility in Texas. Donald Trump had sent them there, supposedly to dispel reports of awful conditions that had been coming from so many different sources. The video below shows vice president Mike Pence, and senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis and possibly other senators visiting a detention center where men were housed in severely overcrowded cages and the guard wear masks to presumably avoid the stench of a large mass of people who have been denied basic sanitary facilities.
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Another leaked memo from the departing UK ambassador to the US Kim Darroch says that Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in order to spite his predecessor Barack Obama who had negotiated the deal.

Donald Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal to spite Barack Obama, according to a leaked memo written by the UK’s former ambassador to the US.

Sir Kim Darroch described the move as an act of “diplomatic vandalism”, according to the Mail on Sunday.

It says the memo was written after the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appealed to the US in 2018 to stick with the nuclear deal.
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The newspaper reports that after Mr Johnson returned to the UK from the US, Sir Kim wrote that President Trump appeared to be abandoning the nuclear deal for “personality reasons” because the pact had been agreed by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
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The paper reports that Sir Kim wrote a memo to Mr Johnson, saying: “The outcome illustrated the paradox of this White House: you got exceptional access, seeing everyone short of the president; but on the substance, the administration is set upon an act of diplomatic vandalism, seemingly for ideological and personality reasons – it was Obama’s deal.”

We knew this. The insecure and petulant man-child president’s main agenda has always been to reverse anything that was done by Obama.

Readers of this blog may be concerned that it has become all Jeffrey Epstein, all the time. The reason for my spending so much time on it is that the money aspects of this story might blow the lid off the seedy underbelly of the wealthy class in the US who have got so used to thinking of themselves as immune to any consequences of their actions, however awful. Anything that strips the veneer off them and shows them as they really are is something I am going to help move along in any way I can.

Let’s review what we know about the facts of the case. Epstein lived the life of a very wealthy person but it is murky as to exactly how wealthy he is and good reason to suspect that he was exaggerating it. Although he claims to be a hedge fund manager, it is not known how he earned his money and he has only one named client. Celebrities were constantly in his presence and attending his parties and otherwise socializing with him. Epstein is clearly a pervert who preys on young, underage, girls and seems to have them around all the time. And yet, these same celebrities claim to have not been aware of his perversions, with some even claiming not to have noticed any young girls around, despite their constant presence. And even after he was convicted in a sweetheart plea deal in 2008 and the scandal blew wide open recently, many of these celebrity friends not only did not condemn him, they only mildly distanced themselves from him, with some even claiming that they did not believe the charges against him.
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The first casualty of the new Jeffrey Epstein prosecution came about when labor secretary Alexander Acosta resigned this morning. The resignation followed the usual pattern in the Donald Trump administration, first of defiance and great expressions of support from Trump, to a resignation a couple of days later. Apparently Trump told Acosta on Tuesday to hold a press conference on Wednesday and get ahead of this story. Acosta duly obliged and gave a conference where he stated that rather than giving Epstein an unbelievably generous sweetheart deal in his earlier prosecution in 2008, he had actually got the severest sentence he thought possible. Trump then expressed his great confidence in Acosta. But that did not end the controversy and this morning, with Acosta at his side, Trump announced his resignation.
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My favorite fake British journalist Jonathan Pie says that after being given an extension by the EU until October 31 and advised not to waste that time but to come up with a workable plan because there would be no more extensions, the country has done nothing really about what to do next on Brexit. Instead they have been spending much of their time choosing between whether foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt or former foreign secretary Boris Johnson will replace Theresa May as Conservative party leader and hence become the next prime minister. (Language advisory because it is after all Jonathan Pie.)

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Writer Jesse Kornbluth at one time moved around in the same social circles as Jeffrey Epstein and he describes his personal experiences with Epstein and his entourage and the rich people who enabled his behavior.

My wife-to-be was then a military historian, with a book about to be published. Interview Magazine photographed her in a buttoned-up military shirt, with a taut khaki tie. A witty photo of an attractive woman. But not a sexy look. Jeffrey Epstein had chatted her up at a few parties. The military look fooled him not at all.

The night before our marriage, Epstein called. “It’s your last free night,” he told my wife-to-be. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”

That was how, in June of 1987, Jeffrey Epstein became dead to me.
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UK residents who read this blog may have felt that I have been rather harsh in my criticisms of successive UK governments who proudly speak of having a ‘special relationship’ with the US when all it seems to mean is that they feel obliged to go along with anything that the US does on the international stage, even into its disastrous wars, and getting little in return. What is worse is that this subservience likely contributed to the other nations in the EU seeing the UK as less than committed to a common European cause.
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Now that the spotlight has turned with a vengeance on the odious Jeffrey Epstein, journalists are looking into shady aspects of his life other than the sex trafficking charge he currently faces and his previous convictions for abuse of minors that has resulted in his mow being a convicted sex offender.

He is described in the media as a billionaire or a multi-millionaire but the specific label is unimportant. The fact that he has mansions in pricey locations like Manhattan and Florida in addition owning an entire Caribbean island with yet another mansion, and that he flits between them in his two private jets, means that he has plenty of money and likes flaunting it and entertaining all manner of prominent people in his homes and on his planes. These include politicians (the Clintons and Donald Trump to name three), academics (like Steven Pinker and Lawrence Krauss), and lawyers (like Alan Dershowitz),.
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The title of this post is from the song Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. I was reminded of it when reading news reports that Iran announced that it has exceeded the amount of low-enrichment uranium that they had agreed to under the deal arrived during the Obama administration between them and the US, Russia, China, UK, France, and Germany. Iran later announced that they were also going to enrich the uranium to higher levels than specified under the agreement.
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