Well this is fun

Straight up milking the market

youtube.com/shorts/g2RkH.... Fox is just enhancing the allure of Hassan Piker.

youtube.com/shorts/mWAp1.... Add to this the Reznick’s slimy tactics in gaining control of the Fresno water table and their repeated exacerbation of California droughts.

👀👀👀 “Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication….On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated…”

California Supreme Court disbars anti-LGBTQ+ lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn 2020 election www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/04/cali... <Eastman literally is an anti-lgbtq attorney. He decided a specialty in this specific type of hate would prove a lucrative meal ticket.>

The chair of Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission (RLC) just admitted that the administration does not believe in the separation of church and state. <So they are outright ignoring the basic text of the Constitution. This is simply stupid>

Trump official says separation of church & state is America’s “biggest lie” www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/04/offi...

GOP passes “Charlie Kirk Act” that could expel students who protest anti-LGBTQ+ speakers www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/04/gop-... For a moment I got worried but, besides this still being bad, the legislation is in TN.

Seditious conspiracy, he reminded viewers, “means you conspire to overturn the government or democracy or an election. It’s hard to think of a more fundamentally pernicious thing to do.” The Department of Justice is now trying to vacate those convictions.

“When you pardon people who tried to overturn an election, you really have eliminated the moral hazard and the safety net,” MacFarlane said.

Riggleman’s alarm is that the same network — Flynn, Powell, Byrne, Waldron — has simply moved from a hotel conference room to inside the White House, with more sophisticated tactics and no Pat Cipollone left to block them.

“Jamie Raskin likes to say the biggest indicator, the biggest symptom of a forthcoming coup is a recently attempted coup,” MacFarlane said.

The 2026 executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a federal Citizenship List, gives the Postmaster General uniform rule-making authority over mail ballots, and provides criminal prosecution authority over state and local election officials who do not comply.

The GOP’s midterm plan — run hard on the Trump tax cuts this spring — has been swamped by pump prices and grocery receipts.

“He doesn’t seem to have a real grasp on what his economy is doing to the everyday person,” Shalev said. MacFarlane’s harder point: “Trump’s running the Biden playbook. Which failed. It doesn’t work.”

At a Thursday press opportunity, Trump, asked how much longer Americans would pay high gas prices, replied, “Well, they’re not very high.”

“Gas prices go up by an elevator,” MacFarlane quoted his former CBS colleague Jill Schlesinger. “They go down by a slow spirally staircase.”

Crude prices tumbled on Araghchi’s announcement — WTI down roughly 12%, Brent down 10.5% — but gas prices at the pump are unlikely to deliver relief before November, and Republican campaign strategists know it.

His office moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of a dozen Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. And Blanche is personally overseeing an expanding criminal inquiry into former CIA Director John Brennan, with six or more witnesses queued.

Acting AG Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney, is converting the DOJ into a one-man enforcement arm, Shalev said. Blanche this week told his department to “move on” from the Epstein files while 2.5M documents remain sealed.

Trump Delusions: "The Strait of Iran"; Gas Prices "Not Very High"; Democrats Surge in Suburbs and Trump's Plan To steal 2026 open.substack.com/pub/narativ/...

Prosecutor Withdraws From Trump Team’s Investigation of Ex-C.I.A. Chief www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/u...

He advertises his plans to take over sovereign countries, he brags about kidnapping a head of state, he flaunts his disregard for human life, and, of course, he vows to take all the oil. The world’s most powerful man has made cynicism itself into a ruling ideology.

One war after another is unleashed without even the pretense of legitimacy. Trump doesn’t just announce genocidal intent on social media:

“The intermingling of corporations and atrocities goes back to the slave trade and colonialism,” she wrote. But one thing does seem new, at least as compared with other atrocities that have occurred in living memory. It’s the absence of pretense.

Time and again, governments have traded away corporate accountability for (perceived) strategic, economic and/or technological gain.”

last summer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, released a report that laid out the role of corporations in the genocide in Gaza with unprecedented clarity. (Albanese was immediately subjected to U.S. sanctions.)

Facebook (now Meta) could have acted to help prevent the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2017 but that it had chosen not to. The decision not to act, Hamilton wrote, had been driven by both the profit motive and a lack of interest in local context.

“Thus, by knowingly paying extremely large sums over many months to three terrorist organizations, Lafarge SA enabled them to expand their influence and fuel their deadly campaigns, ultimately leading to attacks committed abroad as well as on French soil.”

In her verdict, Judge Prévost-Desprez kept returning to the testimony of this witness. “I am trying to make you understand how choices made in your offices, thousands of kilometers away, turned into Kalashnikov bullets, into blood,” the judge said.

One of the prosecution’s witnesses was a survivor of the 2015 attacks at the Bataclan theater, in Paris, which along with coordinated attacks in other locations killed 130 people and left more than 400 injured.

The defendants had known, the judge concluded, that staying in Syria would require cooperation with terrorist groups. That made Lafarge complicit — not only in atrocities committed in Syria but also in acts of terrorism that the Islamic State carried out in France.

Documents showed that Lafarge executives knew they were paying groups classified as terrorist organizations by the US & international agencies. In an email introduced into evidence, Herrault observed: “You don’t need much research to see that, internationally, they are hard-core terrorists.”

All while their employer was financing the armed groups that terrorized Syrian civilians. The former chief executive maintained he hadn’t known where the company money was going.

Former employees testified that while their European colleagues were evacuated to safety, Syrian workers were forced to keep doing their jobs in a war zone, under bombings, frequently crossing through checkpoints under sniper fire, facing the threat of kidnapping.

the mujahedeen are asked to let this vehicle transporting cement from the Lafarge plant pass through checkpoints, following an agreement with the company for the trade of this material.”

They projected a slide of a travel document used by Lafarge drivers. It displayed the black Islamic State flag and the text “In the name of Allah the Merciful,

Prosecutors showed extensive email correspondence documenting agreements with terrorist organizations to help secure the Lafarge cement plant’s continued operations in Syria.

In another case, Lafarge is facing charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. If that case goes to trial and Lafarge is again found guilty, a new chapter in the prosecution of war crimes may begin.

Lafarge — now owned by the Swiss conglomerate Holcim — will have to pay about $1.3M in fines for the crime of financing terrorism and $5.3M for violating international sanctions.

The court had concluded that between 2013 and 2014, the cement maker paid about $6.5M to the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria, to facilitate the company’s operations there.

A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/o... For the first time in France, and possibly for the first time ever, anywhere, an entire corporation had been put on trial and found criminally liable for enabling terrorism.

Tesla. Disney. CVS Health. United Airlines. PayPal. Billions in profits. $0 in federal corporate income taxes. That money should be funding schools, healthcare, and public services. This is why people are mad as hell.

#Hogsbreath is too stupid to be the Secretary of Defense!

Live Nation CEO Sentenced To 10 Years In Online Queue — theonion.com/live-nation-...

In comments to Iranian state media, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said Tehran had rejected the option of transferring its enriched uranium stockpile abroad. The statement came after Trump told CBS News that Iran would cooperate with America to remove enriched uranium from Iran. (NYT)