As oil prices soar due to the US attack on Iran, Iran's response, and the widening conflict -- that is a gift to Saudi Arabia, other Middle East petrostates, Putin, and US oil barons. Not to mention distracting attention from the Epstein coverup....

Rewriting other people's original reporting and clickbait-wrapping the "new" story is not new. But a scumbag operation called "The Daily News Today" is doing it at AI-juiced scale. Alexios Mantzarlis, one of journalism's expert observers of this stuff, explains here:

CBS "News" = Fox "News"

A reminder that the Trump regime and its supporters are racist to the core.

The Epstein files coverup could be the cause of a new -- and final -- world war.

A reminder that Molly White (mastodon.social/@mol...) is, by far, doing the best job of covering the endlessly corrupt cryptocurrency "industry" -- her latest newsletter post, replete with Epstein Class dot-connecting, should make you furious. www.citationneeded.n...

Sigh, the New York Times gives a massive amount of op-ed space to an AI founder who (surprise!) loves-loves-loves the technology.

So it looks like Larry Ellison's going to be pulling the puppet strings at CNN, not just CBS "News" -- another domino falling in the right-wing extremists' war on honest journalism. Neither of those outlets has been remotely perfect in the past. But they're heading toward Fox Lite status now.

"A.I. Isn't People" Another brilliant newsletter post by Rusty Foster: www.todayintabs.com/... "I don’t need to know what mechanism underlies human intelligence to rule out the possibility that it’s the same as what a large language model does."

Michigan's Muslim voters were (rightly) pissed at Biden administration's Gaza policy, so many voted for Trump, whose anti-Islam bigotry was well known, and helped give him the state's electoral votes. And now they're shocked, shocked to discover how self-defeating that was.

All corruption, all the time in Trump world. The family of one of Trump's most vile apparatchiks -- Lutnick, who lied about his ties to Epstein -- stands to make hundreds of millions, or billions, on the likely refunds of the tariffs the regime illegally collected.

America is awash in gambling, and the "prediction markets" industry invites insiders to cheat everyone else, thereby making the situation even worse. Media organizations that make deals with this industry are begging to be shunned by honest journalists.

As Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall makes clear, the Roberts Court's tariff ruling may be the right one, but it doesn't even begin to remove the court's stink of corruption.

Germany's leader wants to end anonymity online, demonstrating ignorance of both technology and the manifestly good reasons for anonymity (e.g. person with views govt doesn't like, whistle-blowers, etc.). He, like so many before him, wants you to get a license to speak.

Do read Joe Costello's sharp takedown of (among other things) the unaccountable New York Times' laughable pearl-clutching over the "Unaccountable Elite" connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

There is no one I admire more than Cory Doctorow, an extraordinary author, activist, and person. In his 6th anniversary post at his Pluralistic blog, he gives you a sense of the hard work that goes into his work. pluralistic.net/2026...

George W. Bush uses extremism-friendly platform to pretend to throw shade at Trump. Another con from the second-worst president in American history. archive.ph/hJGdx

Marisa Kabas is doing some of the best reporting on the Trump regime's abuses of law and people. In this case, she explains the chicanery involved in a massive program to build new concentration camps -- in warehouses. (Big Journalism hasn't noticed, of course.)

Here's a useful guide to voting on California's proposed wealth tax. The massively corrupt cryptocurrency "industry" and (of course) the state's billionaires absolutely hate the idea. That is a key reason why I'm voting for it, and urging everyone I know in California to do the same.

This story needs context. Namely: Big Tech owns Ireland's government. If that "sovereign" nation does any serious regulating of Musk's company it will be because other tech companies ordered it to do so.

Federal judges keep ruling that Trump's violent, masked goons are illegally arresting and jailing people, but the regime goes right on doing it. How close are we to outright fascism? This close. www.reuters.com/lega...

Columbia University is notorious for its repeated, pathetic capitulation to Trump's fascism. But apparently there IS at least one ethical line it's willing to draw.

The Trump regime is routinely telling US judges to go screw themselves -- ignoring and violating court orders, and flagrantly spitting on people's constitutional rights. So far, not even one regime apparatchik has been held accountable in any serious way.

So many evil aspects of the Trump regime, but normalizing sexual abuse of minors by rich white men has to be near the top.

Totally sick of pearl-clutching legacy-media journalists discovering -- to their amazement, it seems -- that Trump really hates the press and dissent, and runs a regime that is doing everything in its considerable power to stamp out speech it doesn't like.

Gallup polling organization joins the quislings, announcing it'll stop doing presidential approval surveys, not coincidentally just when Trump's negatives are super-high. thehill.com/homenews...

Trump's absurdly named "Board of Peace" is a plot to replace the United Nations, and its members are all run by despots. www.epc.eu/publicati...

Californians need to know that a "Democrat" running for governor is basically a tool of the worst tech barons. Gil Duran explains.

If you have a Ring (Amazon) camera, you are -- or will become -- a tool of the surveillance state. Is that really what you want to be?

Trump has so thoroughly brought Big Journalism to heel that NBC makes a transparently hollow denial that it covered up the Olympic audience's booing of JD Vance. The denial is a pathetic but telling lie. It tells us a lot about the network's disintegrating integrity.

Dave Farber, R.I.P. en.wikipedia.org/wik...

The New York Times has done as much as any Big Journalism organization to badmouth San Francisco in recent years. Now it pretends to discover -- by quoting visitors -- that the image isn't the reality. No doubt, the doom-loop crap will return soon.

Trump is -- and always has been -- a vile racist. But journalists do -- and always have done -- keep publishing his denials that he is a racist, in the face of the obvious.

An example of why I've come to despise Big Journalism: This NBC News story -- Trump saying he's not involved in Warner Bros. Discovery takeover contest -- is pure stenography. It never mentions that Trump lies about absolutely everything, or that he's already been involved.

Hungary's fascist leader, Viktor Orbán, didn't have as easy a time bringing media under his control as Trump is doing in America -- but he also didn't have a few massive technology oligarchs on his side. Not a hint on the Washington Post's homepage that it just gutted key parts of its news staff.

Cory Doctorow: "America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets." pluralistic.net/2026...

Speaking of Wolff, his "I know things about Trump that you don't but which would curl your toes if you did" routine is getting super-tedious.

Epstein, Bannon, 4chan, Trump, Russia -- a cauldron of boiling evil.

Ethics-wise, Trump and author Michael Wolff look like peas in a pod:

Chapter and verse of Big Journalism's epic failures in the Trump era -- and what's most disheartening is that our top "news" organizations have made it plain they have zero interest in even admitting, much less repairing, the damage they have caused to our nation.

ICE/CBP are criminal agencies, staffed by violent criminals, and gleefully dispatched against Americans by a vicious president and his apparatchiks. It's far worse than most of us understand. Garrett Graff has done the homework and lays it out here: www.doomsdayscenario... Read and share it.

Trump has been a deadbeat for decades, so no surprise that his regime is stiffing the UN on legally required dues payments, putting the entire organization into danger of folding.

Molly White is a peerless observer and explainer of the infinitely corrupt cryptocurrency "industry" and its political schemes. You really should subscribe to her superb newsletter.

Totally unsurprising that Big Journalism is reacting to the arrests of two journalists with ponderous, "balanced" stories that rely on third-party quotes to note that the Trump regime is shredding what's left of freedom of the press. This isn't a both-sides issue, and this coverage is malpractice.

Yet another blatantly obvious coverup from the Trump regime, this time in DHS's shape-shifting story about prison videos it now claims never to have recorded. Remember: You should always presume these people are lying.

Cory Doctorow explains why -- and how -- Canada can counter the Trump regime's political and economic attacks: Become the nation that turns back the enshittification overwhelming average people to further enrich the tiny few who control most of the wealth. pluralistic.net/2026...

Does anyone know a way to donate (online) to a Democratic candidate without going through Act Blue? I don't trust it anymore. Please don't tell me why I should trust Act Blue. For me, that ship has sailed. This is about alternatives.

Please note that the Trump regime continues to flagrantly, illegally withhold the Epstein documents and plainly has no intention of releasing them (at least until the apparatchiks can destroy/doctor the incriminating stuff).

Pathetic Democratic leadership tells members of Congress to be chickenshits and not go to Minneapolis to support the people standing up to Trump's fascist goons. archive.ph/jQH9B

Trump regime invades Atlanta elections office. This has nothing to do with investigating voter fraud. It is entirely about the regime's expanding campaign to rig this year's elections.