Is Trump even stupider than I thought?

Some details of the search of Trump’s Florida residence have been released. It appears that FBI agents did find documents marked ‘Top Secret’ after all at Mar-A-Lago.

The most sensitive set of documents removed from Trump’s post-presidency home in Florida were listed generically as “Various Classified/TS/SCI” – the abbreviation for top secret/sensitive compartmented information – the warrant shows.

FBI agents retrieved a total of 11 sets of classified documents, some of which were marked top secret, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Federal agents also took away four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents, the receipt showed.

The search warrant receipt did not provide any further detail about the substance of the classified documents. Other materials removed from Mar-a-Lago included binders of photos, information on the “President of France”, and a grant of clemency for the Trump political operative Roger Stone.

Caught at the center of a rapidly escalating controversy, Trump lashed out at the justice department on Friday, saying in a statement that he had declassified all of the records in question. “It was all declassified,” Trump asserted.

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Jordan Klepper visits MAGAland again

This time he goes to Waukesha, Wisconsin that held its primary elections on Tuesday. He seems to never run out of total nutters who are willing to go on TV and say the most outlandish things. Of course, they themselves clearly think they are being perfectly logical and factual.

By now, any reasonably politically conscious person would be aware of Klepper and that they would look foolish when the clip is broadcast. My guess is that they only read and watch right-wing media and hence still have no idea who he is or what he does. But you would think that word would have at least spread through the MAGA grapevine to avoid talking to the very tall comedian who is not Conan O’Brien and who is followed by a camera crew

This time he spoke at some length to a woman who seemed enamored of something called Gematria in order to interpret political events. I had not heard of this before and so looked it up. It seems to be a species of numerology.

Gematria is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher which is used.

Hebrew alphanumeric ciphers were probably used in biblical times, and were later adopted by other cultures. Gematria is still widely used in Jewish culture. Similar systems have been used in other languages and cultures: the Greeks isopsephy, and later, derived from or inspired by Hebrew gematria, Arabic abjad numerals, and English gematria.

Here is Klepper.

Attorney General tries to counter Mar-a-Lago search paranoia

We are living at a time when conspiracy theories abound and where over-the-top reactions to the most routine of events have become the norm. A perfect example of this has been the reaction among Trump supporters to the execution by the FBI of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, the current home of Donald Trump. While searching of the home of a former president is undoubtedly unprecedented, everything else about the process was perfectly ordinary. In fact, the department of justice seemed to have gone out of its way to do this by the book because of the its unprecedented nature.

The FBI first went all the way to the top and got approval from the Attorney General to ask for the warrant and then went, as required, to a federal judge claiming that they had probable cause for the search. You ca be sure that since a former president was involved, there was a high bar that had to be cleared in order to get the warrant. They then carried out the search with little fuss and with the cooperation of the Secret Service agents guarding the premises and with the president’s representatives apparently also present. There was no raid, no pre-dawn breaking down of the doors by armed agents, and the other kinds of things that ordinary people might be subjected to at the hands of law enforcement. In fact, no one knew about the search until Trump blasted out the news in his usual hyperbolic fashion that he was being persecuted. And as usual in their knee-jerk reaction, his loyal cult members in Congress and the nation at large responded hysterically, comparing this action to Nazi Germany and the Gestapo. They have even gone to the extent of suggesting that the FBI planted evidence at the site, a charge that they will repeat if any damning evidence is revealed. Planting of evidence by law enforcement undoubtedly happens but it seems unlikely in this case.
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Puzzles over the FBI search of Trump’s home

As is almost always the case with Trump, he exaggerates things. On Monday evening, he announced that his Mar-a-Lago home “is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents”. It is not clear if this was, in actual fact, an FBI ‘raid’ in the usual sense. Those usually occur in the pre-dawn hours where armed agents break into a house, the surprise supposedly necessary to prevent the destruction of evidence. According to this report, what happened was far less dramatic.
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Alex Jones text circus goes on

During Alex Jones’s trial, it was revealed that his lawyers had inadvertently sent all the text messages on his cell phone over a two-year period to the lawyers of the people who were suing him. The texts revealed that Jones had lied while under oath during a deposition.

I wondered at that time what other damaging information might be on those texts, given Jones’s reckless nature. It seems that he had also sent nude photos of his wife to Trump advisor Roger Stone. It is not clear if his wife had consented to this act. If she did consent, then the story ends there. If she didn’t, she can take action against Jones depending on local laws since it is a crime in some states to disclose intimate photos of someone without that person’s consent. In 2021, his wife was arrested for domestic violence against him so the relationship seems fraught.

Jones is not happy about this latest development.

And now that his lawyer in these current legal issues appeared to have accidentally released two years’ worth of information from his phone, Alex thinks she is going to use it against him with his kids.

“I know the texts and information on his phone will be evidence of all the nefarious, truly conspiratorial things said between him and his employees in their plans to keep my kids from me,” Alex told Insider, per Yahoo! News. “It’s not even about my kids, it’s about control. Controlling me.”

It is a bit rich for Jones, the baseless conspiracy king, to complain that these texts will be used to create ‘nefarious’ conspiracy theories about him.

The congressional committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 has requested the Jones text dossier as part of its work so now all this information will be in their hands as well. Jones’s ex-wife is also suing him over custody of the three children they had together and she may seek these texts as well to support her claim that he is unstable and should not have custody.

I suspect that it is only a matter of time before these texts leak to the media. I hope they do not publish the photos of Jones’s wife. They have no value other than to satisfy prurient interests.

Health care provisions in the IRA legislation

Health care in the US is a mess because of its dependence on an employer-based insurance model and the adamant opposition of the health care providers (insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, and other providers) against a national single payer system that would streamline the system and cut costs. Since all those interests lobby heavily against any changes and are willing to pour money into politicians’ campaigns, what results is a tinkering of the system in order to smooth out some of the roughest features. Obamacare was one such effort and the latest legislation that is due to be passed later this week known as the Inflation Reduction Act also makes some progress.
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Trump’s home raided

Donald Trump says that the FBI has raided his home in the Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago.

The FBI executed a search warrant around 6pm ET at Trump’s residence, which appears to have been related to an investigation into Trump unlawfully taking White House documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency, according to a source familiar with the matter.

“My beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a bitter statement lashing out at the raid, adding: “They even broke into my safe!”
…

In a furious statement, Trump compared the FBI raid to “Watergate” and blamed it on “Radical Left Democrats” who he said “desperately don’t want me to run for president in 2024 … who will do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming midterms elections”.

Even at a time like this, Trump has to describe himself and his stuff grandiosely, referring to his ‘beautiful’ home.

I must confess that I did not expect this. I am puzzled as to what documents he would have thought he needed to remove.

Another bizarre report has photos that show Trump’s toilet with papers stuck in them, supporting allegations that his toilets used to get blocked because he would try and destroy official documents by tearing them up and flushing them down the toilet.

Remember our toilet scoop in Axios AM earlier this year? Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about former President Trump will report that White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher.

Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal.

That raises the question: Who goes around taking photos of Trump’s toilets? Is this part of their official duties? If so, how much do they get paid?

Can the Trump presidency get any weirder?

UPDATE: There is a livestream of the street in front of the gates of Mar-a-Lago where pro and anti-Trump people are hanging out.

The religious tax exemption boondoggle

The Family Research Council is a think tank that promotes right-wing causes that are consistent with a christian nationalist viewpoint. the investigative journalism outfit ProPublicareveals that it, along with other right-wing groups, has claimed to be a church to escape from paying its full share of taxes.

Forty members of Congress on Monday asked the IRS and the Treasury to investigate what the lawmakers termed an “alarming pattern” of right-wing advocacy groups registering with the tax agency as churches, a move that allows the organizations to shield themselves from some financial reporting requirements and makes it easier to avoid audits.

“FRC is one example of an alarming pattern in the last decade — right-wing advocacy groups self-identifying as ‘churches’ and applying for and receiving church status,” the representatives wrote, noting the organization’s policy work supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its advocacy for legislation seeking to ban gender-affirming surgery.
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Huge job gains last month

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its monthly report and says that a whopping 538,000 jobs were added last month, about twice the expected number. They also revised upwards the jobs gains for the previous two months. This means that all the jobs that were lost during the pandemic have now been regained. The unemployment rate also edged down to 3.5%, another low number.

Since the GDP had declined for two straight quarters, there had been concerns that the economy was entering a period of recession. But this robust job growth contradicts that idea since in a traditional recession, people are thrown out of the labor market on a large scale. It also contradicts the idea that employers are finding it hard to get workers.
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Kyrsten Synema works for the venture capitalists

Thanks to the 50-50 balance in the US Senate, Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have much greater leverage over legislation than they deserve and are thus able to force their priorities into legislation that needs to be passed. In the negotiations over the major legislation called the Inflation Reduction Act, what they demanded in return for their support is revealing about whose interests they really care about and it is clearly not the ordinary people of their respective states.

For Manchin it is the fossil fuel industry that he obeys, so he demanded, and got, Biden administration approval for a huge natural gas pipeline in his home state that has been blocked by courts.

For Sinema, it is the venture capitalists that she kowtows to.

In the statement, Sinema indicated that she won several changes to the tax provisions in the package, including removing the provision that would have tightened the carried interest loophole, which aimed to raise the taxes paid by hedge fund and private equity managers. That proposal would have raised $14 billion. She also suggested that she won changes to Democrats’ plans to pare back how companies can deduct depreciated assets from their taxes — a key demand by manufacturers that had lobbied Sinema over their concerns this week.

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