Release the files!
Review the files!
There are no files!
Move on from the files!
They exist but they’re fake files!
Only losers care about the files!
So what if Trump is in the files!
Shit, WSJ called.
Russiagate! New files!
BLOCK THE FILES!!!
>>You Are Here<<
www.cnn.com/2025/07/21/p…— Jared Holt (@jaredlholt.bsky.social) July 22, 2025 at 12:39 AM
Following up on Betty’s morning post… It’s not as though he’s suffering pangs of conscience (since he has none), but the MAGAt furor over the Epstein files revelations are making Pastor Johnson work harder than whatever shadowy reicht-wing cabal has figureheaded him this far promised. I hope the mental exhaustion is keeping him awake nights:
Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday said he does not plan to allow votes on any measures related to the Jeffrey Epstein case in the House’s final week in Washington before a weekslong recess, despite intense pressure from some of his own GOP members to go on the record on the issue.
Some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress have been pressing party leaders to allow for a vote to show they support transparency around the Epstein saga — an issue that continues to animate the MAGA base even as Trump has repeatedly sought to blame Democrats for fanning the flames.
The House forcing the Trump administration to turn over materials against its will would represent a remarkable rebuke of the president by his base. But the push has shown little forward momentum among the party’s leadership on Capitol Hill…
“There is no daylight between the House Republicans … the House and the president on maximum transparency,” Johnson said, adding that Trump wants “all the credible files” on Epstein to be released and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce grand jury testimony related to the case and “all of that is in process right now.”
Still, a bipartisan group of House members — led by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie — is seeking to circumvent Johnson and force a vote on a separate bill calling for the release of the files. Massie will need a majority of House members to sign on to what’s known as a discharge petition to force a floor vote…
Ten House Republicans have now signed onto Massie’s measure – a level of GOP support that would trigger a full vote by the GOP-controlled House on the measure if all Democrats supported it, as expected. But don’t expect a new tranche of documents to immediately be made public.
A vote to compel the full House to consider the effort can’t come until after Labor Day at the earliest when lawmakers return from their five-week summer recess. That’s because Massie and California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna are using a discharge petition.
That procedural maneuver requires seven legislative days before House lawmakers can formally collect the necessary signatures. Once they prove they have support from 218 members, it would force party leaders to bring it to the floor. ..
“Why do we think President Joe Biden or President Barack Obama’s names are being invoked because Donald Trump is running scared, and the Trump administration is running scared. What are they hiding from the American people, release the files so that the American people can make a decision on their own,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters during a press conference Monday…
i really hope whomever dropped a dime to the WSJ has more coming, because it would be great to have another explosive story break while they’re not around to deflect it
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) July 21, 2025 at 8:01 PM
===
the FBI and the DOJ are both run by some of the most obsequious toadies in US federal history, if they can’t concoct some kind of cover for trump on this, it’s not unreasonable to suspect it’s because his name is all over the place *everything* and too many people know
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) July 21, 2025 at 8:23 PM
===
it’s not *just* that they are stonewalling, it’s that they’re throwing out every right wing fever swamp tidbit they can think of from the last 30+ years to try to distract
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) July 21, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Baud
The UFO people anxiously waiting for the Area 51 files to drop.
Deputinize America
ROFLMAO
Jeffro
personally, I wanna see all this evidence of Obama and Biden criming and framing poor Mr. Innocent
those dirty dogs! to drag Donald J. Trump through the mud like this!!
LOLOLOLOL
dmsilev
@Baud: Won’t happen. Those files include the original photograph that became this cartoon.
Librettist
Speed running Project 2025 with Donald J. Trump as front man was a choice, and not one “the Democrats” forced them to make.
Steve LaBonne
Pray harder, Pastor Johnson.
Steve LaBonne
Meanwhile the mediots are covering themselves in glory as usual.
brendancalling
The GOP flailing reminds me of Jake and Elwood in the sewer.
bbleh
@Librettist: true, but as a front man — and both an incredibly stupid one AND a lame duck — he is and always was disposable.
If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else. But they got their loyalists installed, they’ve got a lot of wreckage accomplished, and they got their big-ass upward wealth transfer. At this point, they likely mostly don’t care if he crashes and burns
Steve LaBonne: as observed … somewhere I don’t remember, this was a story they wanted to write. Bannon just provided the necessary quotes. If it hadn’t been him it woulda been somebody else.
MattF
Rs who have signed the discharge petition:
I might possibly almost be feeling a twinge of sympathy for Johnson. But that could just be breakfast stirring in my stomach.
Jeffro
@MattF: the orange dementia patient’s tweets about these folks are going to be EP. IC.
“Alexa, order ALL the popcorn!”
Betty Cracker
Here’s some fuckery that bears watching:
Source: Politico.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, the striking the way all four MSM outlets simply cut and pasted the same release from Bannon. Feels like the Dems really need is some Super Campaign strategist who’s real job is getting inside the Beltway presses mind’s and writing their articles for them.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Deputinize America:
Everybody in the EV world has been pointing this out from the gitgo. Tesla is a meme stock, it’s toady board treats the company like a meme stock when, if it wants to survive, needs to transform into an automobile company.
The only way they’ve been able to keep it at the meme stock level is thru the carbon credit sales. Should those go away (meaning the GOP doesn’t concoct another carve out just for that), there will be a lot of wailing and rending of garments.
The other thing that doesn’t get talked about is Tesla’s self-driving car distaster-in-the-making. They’ve stuck with cameras as the guiding force in that because Edolf insists it be that way. It’s a proven loser and won’t get much better whereas car companies like Ford that have focused on LIDAR-based self-driving technologies are having more success and in all probability, that’ll be the way forward.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker: As Max said earlier “who is the audience for this?” The Conspiracy theorist will never accept that Maxwell is telling the truth.
Albatrossity
Fake Christians like Pastor Johnson have lots of experience covering up for pedophiles. Should be no sweat at all/
XeckyGilchrist
Upcoming executive orders:
me
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: She could perjure herself by exonerating Trump then get pardoned. That could blow up in his face though.
Edit: I guess that is what you meant, I misread your comment.
Steve LaBonne
@XeckyGilchrist: Cleek’s Law is a hell of a drug.
bbleh
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: @me: or perhaps more simply, they just barber what she says and release that publicly. Or if you wanna get darker about it, she could say what she’s told to say so that she doesn’t, ah, follow Epstein down a path of understandable despair. (And they may or may not dangle a pardon, but who would believe any of them?)
oldgold
@Betty Cracker: Absolutely. My guess, for a statement exonerating Trump, Maxwell receives a pardon right after the midterm elections.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@me: that is what I thinking, The MSM so they have an excuse to pretend Trump is exonerated? The Beltway press does have this desperate need to have access to a president to feel important, and if Trump was in office but so damaged he was irrelevant that would take all the fun away for the press.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@bbleh: They could try that, but conspiracy theorist would still accuse Trump. Everything is proof of the conspiracy in their minds.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@XeckyGilchrist: You forgot
This is Trump after all.
Hungry Joe
I’m finding it difficult — make that, impossible — to come up with a satisfactory finale to Epsteingate.*
Suppose the files are released, and Trump’s stubby fingers, as well as his stubby other parts, are smeared all over them. 1) Would the Pastor Mike-led House impeach him? 2) Could the ossified Senate dredge up 67 votes to convict? Answers: 1) Extremely unlikely. 2) Oh, come now.
So … what is the worst-case scenario for Trump? Won’t he just persist — damn the torpedoes, and keep on rage-postin’ on, no matter what?
*Why is Epstein immune to the “-gate” suffix? Is it in fact, finally, at long last, worn out?
Baud
@Hungry Joe:
I think the only realistic positive outcome is that the Republican Party no longer feels pressure to rubber stamp everything Trump wants and there’s more factional give and take that can help us push back on some of the worst policies.
danielx
I remain surprised that Ms Maxwell is still upright and breathing.
bbleh
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: oh for sure, the tinfoil-hat crowd won’t care. But as observed, the MSM probably would take it and run, and enough people who WANT the whole thing to “just go away” would be satisfied.
The MSM really are the wild card here. They’ve been paying almost Biden-is-old levels of attention to the story. I think the real question is, do they — as perhaps indicated by the Bannon story — now want a Redemption Fable to put a bow on it? Or is the Bannon story just another episode-ending cliffhanger, to be followed by yet another damaging twist?
Be nice if they had some agenda other than entertainment. (Also be nice if the Dem “leadership” had some sort of strategy for dealing with this, but I digress.)
suzanne
@XeckyGilchrist: Hey, you forgot about mandatory plastic bag use and a forced return to Freon!
Baud
@XeckyGilchrist:
@suzanne:
Sexual harassment now considered protected speech.
The Audacity of Krope
Read as “we’re still trying to figure out how to release this without implicating Trump or having our conspiracists notice that what we will have released looks like Swiss cheese that went through a food processor twice.
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, like the DOJ forgot to ask Maxwell what she knew. These guys don’t even bother to fake it anymore, they know how fucking stupid their supporters are. If this latest stuff shows anything, it’s the utter contempt they have for their supporters.
Belafon
Including a thousand FBI agents now.
prostratedragon
Prof.Christina Pagels:
🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website!
I tried it out — pretty nifty.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@danielx: Maxwell can be bought.
Well, obviously
MrPug
I like to think I’m pretty savvy, but the Epstein thing has surprised me because I just thought it was tiny background noise. In my defense is because I haven’t steeped myself in the insane brew of conspiracies that MAGA the last infinity (Republican insanity goes back a very long way). To whatever degree I did think about it I assumed they would just dump all of the nasty shit about anyone they believe is liberally/Democratically aligned (the notion that Bill fucking Gates is any sort of liberal is poppycock of the highest order – unless just trying sometimes to help people not die makes you a liberal squish) and nothing about anyone who is conservative/Republican aligned. But, maybe they, indeed, can’t because Trump and many of his current pals are so implicated that it’s impossible to do enough redaction.
Mr. Bemused Senior
“Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
As for Mike Johnson, he has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Good luck to him in September [not].
Hoodie
@bbleh: The media laps up the whole WWE theater of Trump because it’s a constant generator of attention-generating content that makes careers for talking heads and corporate management. It doesn’t even have to be particularly entertaining, just tuned to drive engagement and not cause problems with corporate deals that make execs richer. Boring old politics doesn’t do the former and real entertainment can be bad for the latter.
Deputinize America
@oldgold:
“Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Spanky
@The Audacity of Krope:
And they’ll be released just as soon as they’re done writing them, too.
sab
@MrPug: I am still having a tough time believing that all these misogynistic Republicans actually care about a sex trafficking ring exploiting girls.
Trump’s administration has pretty much shut down even the minimal efforts we were making on sex trafficking, because it detracted from our efforts to deport elderly gardeners, elder care workers and nannies.
Baud
@Spanky:
“Why is Bill Clinton’s name written in crayon in the files? And spelled wrong?”
jonas
@Deputinize America: No worries. Musk has assured investors that by this time next year, all American vehicle transportation will exclusively employ Tesla robotaxis so who gives a shit about EVs or whatever.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud: not crayon, Sharpie. And the file printed in Comic Sans.
Shalimar
@me: I don’t see why they would ask Maxwell about Trump at all. They want her to name a few Democrats so they can give MAGA what they have been looking for and make all of this end. That is all she has to do.
p.a.
@Betty Cracker: reposting from previous thread
Deputinize America
@jonas:
Cathie Woods is eagerly awaiting her moment to reassure her investors how brilliant Elon Musk really is.
Shalimar
@jonas: Musk has also promised the humanoid robots will come off the assembly line starting next year. Not sure whether we will get that or the full self-driving he has been promising is 6 months away since 2015 first.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@p.a.: I would hope her lawyers would advise her not to lie.
sab
I am very much hoping that when all of this is over ( talk about hope!) Pam Bondi loses her law license. Forlorn hope since she is licensed in Florida. But there isn’t an ethical standard that she hasn’t breached.
jonas
@Albatrossity: Step 1. Smear victim as slutty cocktease whose uncovered hair and ample bosoms led a godly man into temptation and sin.
Step 2: Claim perpetrator has sought counseling and his family has forgiven him, so it’s all good now. If Step 2 fails, move to…
Step 3: shuffle them off to some other Bible camp or church and pretend nothing happened. During the process, repeat Step 1 as often as necessary.
Once the muscle memory kicks in, it’s remarkably easy.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I’m thinking of the quote from All The President’s Men: “These are not smart people, and things got out of hand.”
The ham-handed handling of the Epstein case is of a piece with how Paramount decided Stephen Colbert had to go: they were simply stupid about it. Paramount basically took the guy who gave the “rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg” riff right in George W. Bush’s face, and gave him a year on a prominent platform, with a ton of free publicity and no hoots left to give. And Bondi’s work was so bad that Captain Renault of Casablanca would have been embarrassed to go public with it.
Plus I get the impression that the various factions of the GOP cult are lying to one another about what the actual situation is. I doubt there’s anyone in the halls of power who’s capable of getting the truth out of the First Felon, and when people base their actions on a lie, and then the truth comes out, they end up caught flat-footed and flailing.
There was a book I read once, dealing with a defamation lawsuit, in which the plaintiff’s lawyer said in simple words: “Don’t lie to me. You can lie to your wife, lie to the press, lie to yourself, but if you want me to be able to effectively represent you, you cannot lie to me. I need to know the truth, even if it’s bad, so that I can prepare to defend you against the bad stuff they’ll throw at you to smear your character.”
My shorthand for that is “lawyers do not like to be surprised, especially by their own clients”, but it also applies in a broader context. If you want people to defend you, they need to know in no uncertain terms what they’re defending you from, and they need to know the truth so that it doesn’t surprise them when it surfaces.
Trump’s defenders? They don’t have the truth. Or if they do, they can’t defend it, can’t spin it, or just plain can’t handle it.
Deputinize America
@p.a.:
Shades of the days when Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher (a Republican, natch) pardoned everyone involved in a systemic plot to circumvent the state merit system and to base all hires on political loyalty, all the way down to the janitorial level. Then, when called to testify before the grand jury, he took the fifth while everyone else in this conspiracy to obstruct justice still clammed up on the possibility of Federal indictments which would never occur in the W administration. It was bad, and a big part of why a D came in next.
jonas
@sab: Unlikely. Alina Habba still has her law license, ffs. Nothing matters anymore.
Sister Golden Bear
@sab:
They care about it as much as they cared about women’s sports before it was a cudgel to bash trans women/girls with.
anotherlurker
Pastor johnson sure gives some seriously creepy vibes. Like, don’t leave him alone with your kids. (or anyone else’s kids)
matt
Johnson is 100% a guy with the kind of profile that fits ‘protect elite pedophiles’.
zhena gogolia
I can’t believe I’m listening to the entire Hunter Biden interview. (Between work projects here.)
Another Scott
Does anyone under 60 know what “drop a dime” means anymore??
American English is weird – and changing all the time.
Best wishes,
Scott.
p.a.
Incompetent =/= criminal
Being glib: I don’t know enough of her to know about probable crimes, I do know she’s bad at her job.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Another Scott: I picked it up and I’m still shy of 55. But I think I picked it up from slang, rather than its origins (I think payphones were already up to a quarter the first I knew of them).
suzanne
@zhena gogolia: I hear he’s funny and spicy enough that he should have a podcast.
suzanne
@Another Scott: I don’t. Is it similar to, uhhhhh, dropping a deuce? I know what that means.
zhena gogolia
@suzanne: He’s very compelling.
Most of the interview is not studded with F-bombs. That’s reserved for Clooney and the pod save bros.
sab
OT I love that photo that WG posted down below of the angry old white woman with low expectations that weren’t met. That could be me.
Radio Dave, Lurker
@prostratedragon:
Uber Thanks to Prof. Pagels & her team for producing this magnificent resource, and you p-dragon for introducing us to it. Mrs. Radio and I love it already! Loads of inspirations for signs to carry during the weekly rallies every Saturday morning in our small Central FL town.
zhena gogolia
@suzanne: Public pay phones on the street corner used to cost a dime (ten cents) for a call. So if you were calling the police from a pay phone to snitch on someone, you were “dropping a dime” on them.
sab
@Sister Golden Bear: The difference is that they strongly disapprove of all women’s sports. It’s not ladylike. But I don’t believe they have a problem with sex trafficking young girls. It’s why God made girls.
Bill Arnold
@anotherlurker:
A Tool of Satan, he is.
jonas
@Shalimar: If there were a bunch of famous liberals named in those files, we’d know by now because Trump would have released them immediately and been crowing about it 24/7.
Afaik, the only even remotely prominent Democrat who has been identified as having possibly done anything inappropriate with one of Epstein’s victims was the late NM governor Bill Richardson and his name’s been out there for a while already. Not a nobody, but also not exactly a vast liberal elite cabal imagined by the QAnon nutters.
suzanne
@zhena gogolia: Ah. Teenage Suzanne remembers making many calls from pay phones, but they were a quarter. Then came cellphones.
Old Man Shadow
As a good white Evangelical, Pastor Mike is well versed in covering up child abuse.
jonas
@p.a.: She fraudulently claimed to offer unbiased legal advice to a former employee of Trump’s Bedminster Club without telling the client that she was actually working for Trump and trying to get the woman to drop her sexual harassment suit (against one of the club’s managers). That’s pretty fucking unethical.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Google, will Epstein be Trump’s undoing?
Magic 8-ball says
wait and seeask again later.Deputinize America
@suzanne:
I remember dime calls – I also remember people being butthurt about the increase to a quarter.
zhena gogolia
I just did a vintage NYT puzzle from 1996 with the quotation by George Jean Nathan: “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”
jonas
@suzanne: I recall that between coin-operated pay phones and the widespread availability of cell phones, you had prepaid phone cards, which seemed like a fancy technological leap for some reason.
Ah, the 90s. Ask me sometime about how I weaseled out of my Columbia House CD club membership!
Mr. Bemused Senior
@jonas: Every record ever recorded! I’m Don G. O’Vanni and I represent the Musical Surplus Heritage Society of Hong Kong.
Belafon
@Another Scott: I wonder how many people truly contemplate that “that sucks” and “that blows” have nothing to do with vacuums.
RevRick
@Steve LaBonne: White Evangelicals are the literal or spiritual descendants of the churches that vociferously defended slavery, advocated for secession and Civil War, and supported Jim Crow and its violence. Pastor Johnson’s religion is shit, not Jesus, no matter how often his name is invoked.
p.a.
@jonas: There were briefly video pay phones. Don’t know if they worked over POTS (plain old telephone service copper, or, much more probably, digital T1 or ISDN/HSDN circuits). Costs would have varied. IDK if they were offered by the baby bells or were a thing after divestiture hit the coin ecosystem (which was a bit later than the AT&T breakup.)
jonas
@Shalimar: Has Musk ever explained what his robots will do that robots currently can’t/don’t do? As far as I can tell, the only thing is that they’re humanoid as opposed to just a computer with an articulated arm that does stuff. The other day, Tesla premiered a “Tesla Cafe” in LA that was run by the robots. Well, ok, “a” demo robot was on hand. To hand out bags of popcorn. Everything else was being done by people. Oh, including making the popcorn.
The fact that news media were on hand to gush about what was essentially a large charging station with a burger stand staffed by regular people like some common Carl’s Jr. and a robot distributing popcorn 50% more slowly than a person could have done was pretty funny.
Belafon
@jonas: IIRC, the robot was remote controlled by a human, unless that was a different stunt by him.
tobie
@zhena gogolia: I haven’t listened to the whole thing but I’ve watched some excerpts. He’s right on the money when he talks about the establishment that kicked Biden out of the race…but it’s not moderates. It’s urban, millennial, wealthy opinion makers like the PodSaveBros, Michelle Goldman, Jen Psaki and Ezra Klein. They’re all smart but they’re all also convinced they know the electorate better than anyone else. I’ll take a Neera Tanden over these people any day when it comes to both policy and political strategy.
Doc Sardonic
@sab: It could happen if the bar complaint against her came from the right people. Ms. Bondi is not well liked in Florida, up until she botched the Zimmerman prosecution, she was on the fast track to potentially become Florida’s first woman governor. She is where she is now because Trump bought her for $25,000 and an attempt to rescue her governor ambitions, in exchange for making the Florida investigation into Trump University go away.
frosty
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I never connected “Drop a dime on him” to using a pay phone. Of course!!
Like you, I know it from the slang usage.
Belafon
This is similar to are there people under 30 who understand what the save icon is on apps.
RaflW
Nominating this for today’s You Won the Internet
Baud
Wait, so it had no connection to dime bags?
jonas
@Belafon: Couldn’t tell here, but wouldn’t surprise me. Getting robots to do tasks that require a combination of small tactile and visual cues to complete correctly is really hard (folding a shirt is one famous test). In this case, it would have been a million times easier just to have the popcorn machine deploy a bag and dispense a premeasured amount of popcorn, vending-machine style. Bada bing! What was the bloody point of having a humanoid robot do it?
I guess so the ABC affiliate would send a reporter and crew out to cover it. Musk doesn’t appear to know shit about robots, but he does know how to keep the media wrapped around his finger.
Harrison Wesley
@Shalimar: Thinking of Musk-designed robots reminds me of the old SF story Fondly Fahrenheit.
Baud
Kirk
@jonas:
You did as my spouse did – take the free open, took the 2 or 10 specials, then canceled?
schrodingers_cat
Saw a Tesla while grocery shopping yesterday. It had a sticker that said, now I drive this in shame.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Harrison Wesley: reet!
Sister Golden Bear
Trump take menu.
Restaurants Are Trying to Tariff-Proof The Menu
Make America Bland Again
Spanky
@schrodingers_cat: Shame, Massachusetts?
u
Imagine having a well-paying job with great benefits (and plenty of opportunities for bribes and insider trading) where everybody goes home on July 22nd, and nobody comes back to work until September 9th. That’s a pretty good job.
JML
@Kirk: basically. amazingly, BMG and Columbia House still made money on those clubs. No matter how many time I took my “8 for the price of 1” deals and then cancelled. The best was starting it in your dorm, cancelling by the end of the semester, joining from the home address, cancelling when you went back to school and continuing to cycle…
u
catclub
Yep. The only thing that really matters to the Qanon dupes is that Trump appears to be protecting the swamp. They don’t care if his name is in all the documents. “He was acting as double agent to bring down the liberals” will wash with them.
I can hope Trump has a hard time realizing this.
sab
@Baud: Back years ago when I lived in Las Vegas I worked with a guy who bought a used pickup truck from the military at area 51.
He said it was a good purchase because he could always find it in parking lots at night because it glowed in the dark. //
Captain C
@sab:
I suspect a nontrivial number of them just want in on it.
prostratedragon
Funny from xkcd: New business model.
laura
@Kirk: swear to dog, yesterday I took a photo of a guy wearing a I still owe money to Columbia House tee-shirt. IYKYK
Captain C
@Baud: You could drop a dime on the person who sold you a bunk dime bag.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: Time to dust off those 18th century cooking skills.
Seriously, this actually a fascinating YouTube channel by a couple historical re-enactors who recreate18th century recipes using historically accurate ingredients and methods.
Great relaxation TV, with some fun facts—e.g. meat pies were created to help prevent the meat inside from spoiling for a couple days, so the crust was considered mostly a container rather than something you ate.
Plus some of the recipes sound tasty enough to make using modern methods.
Sister Golden Bear
@Baud:
Sexual assault and statutory rape are now considered protected speech.
jonas
@Kirk: See you couldn’t just “cancel” your membership before you had bought the requisite number of regular-priced CDs. That was part of the deal. The loophole was that if you sent a postal change-of-address notice to the company requesting that all future orders be shipped to an overseas address, they would drop you. They couldn’t process international shipments, so had to cancel the subscription. In my case, I actually was moving abroad for an exchange program, so I wasn’t trying to weasel out of anything, but it was an intriguing development that a number of friends and acquaintances subsequently took advantage of.
The Audacity of Krope
But that’s bad. And people would actually notice it’s bad if Dems did it.
Kirk
@JML: They made money for the same reason “free introductory offers” still make money. People forget at least one month. Depending on how shallow the haircut is and how much effort it takes to cancel they can wind up not bothering to cancel for years (see fitness centers).
prostratedragon
@sab & @Sister Golden Bear:
Not only that, but I think notions of property rights affect how they view both children and grown women. They can understand it and be outraged by it as someone interfering with “their” girls.
prostratedragon
@Radio Dave, Lurker: And it appears she plans to update it regularly — daily would be asking a lot, even with grad assistants!
...now I try to be amused
@Deputinize America:
A memorable line from Professor Kingsfield (John Houseman) in The Paper Chase:
“Mister Hart. Here’s a dime. Go call your mother and tell her there is very little chance of your ever becoming a lawyer.“
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You mean like automation and robots after been a thing in manufacturing since the 80s, as Musk should know since the Tesla Fremont plant uses them.
The Audacity of Krope
Augmented. No charge.
...now I try to be amused
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Those who sell out to Trump are writing blank checks to a man who has closets full of skeletons. It strikes me as a huge risk, but then I’m risk-averse by nature.
Sister Golden Bear
@sab:
Absolutely, in fact pedocon-ism is rooted in the basic politics of the reactionary right.
We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory:
jonas
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: As far as I know, Musk had absolutely no hand in developing the robots used in his Tesla plants. For some reason, though, he thinks if you take those chips and servos and put them in a humanoid form so that they work 10x slower and usually only with human remote control, it’s, like way cooler. Or something.
Ramona
@sab: They don’t care. The Q-Anoners fancied themselves as knights in shining white armor while vehemently believing in a vast tightly coordinated conspiracy of elites participating in a pedophile network run by Epstein. Part of this unassailable belief is that the evidence for this is in the Epstein files. Some days ago Martin, a commenter here on BJ, explained how in 2021, Trump explicitly turned to the Q-Anoners for support and began to fan the flames of this Epstein files centered conspiracy. This segment of the electorate voted for him in the expectation that he would make public the large amount of evidence gathered by the DOJ from Epstein’s properties. They feel betrayed by the DOJ letter flatly refusing to release anything.
Ramona
@sab: They don’t care. The Q-Anoners fancied themselves as knights in shining white armor while vehemently believing in a vast tightly coordinated conspiracy of elites participating in a pedophile network run by Epstein. Part of this unassailable belief is that the evidence for this is in the Epstein files. Some days ago Martin, a commenter here on BJ, explained how in 2021, Trump explicitly turned to the Q-Anoners for support and began to fan the flames of this Epstein files centered conspiracy. This segment of the electorate voted for him in the expectation that he would make public the large amount of evidence gathered by the DOJ from Epstein’s properties. They feel betrayed by the DOJ letter flatly refusing to release anything.
zhena gogolia
Favorite quote from Hunter Biden interview so far (aside from the Clooney stuff):
HB: Did you hear that quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Interviewer: No, but that’s a cool name. I wish that was my name.
The Audacity of Krope
Putting form over functionality is always trendy among idiots.
Ramona
@Sister Golden Bear: Exactly! I wish I could make a point as succinctly as you!
sab
@Sister Golden Bear: How did they cook when they had none of the basics: no baking soda, no yeast in a jar, no boxed broths, only seasonal veggies and fruits?
me
RIP news.sky.com/story/ozzy-osbourne-dies-just-weeks-after-farewell-show-13400248
Trollhattan
@me:
Ozzy, nooooooo!
r.i.p. You maniac.
mali muso
I read an interesting article this morning that made the case that pedophilia is the logical endpoint of reactionary conservatism. Link here.
ETA: Sister Golden Bear beat me to it.
sab
@Sister Golden Bear: Yes, exactly.
Ramona
@Sister Golden Bear:
Wow! That is a powerful observation! Thank-you for this!
Ramona
@The Audacity of Krope: They are all cargo cultists!
The Audacity of Krope
@Ramona: I miss when cargo pants were trendy.
RaflW
@Sister Golden Bear: An early episode of British Bakeoff went to a mining area of England and did a segment about the origins of meat pies. The crust was pretty much meant to be tossed. It wasn’t flavorful or flaky, far from it. They didn’t have wax paper back then, so the coal dust and other grime coated the pie. Peel and discard and eat the filling!
(I wish Bakeoff had continued to do those field trips. They were interesting!)
prostratedragon
Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami rode yesterday with fellow KofC bikers to the Everglades detention camp. They are still trying to get permission to visit the detainees.
MazeDancer
Powell resigns.
zhena gogolia
@MazeDancer: Oh, shit.
JoyceH
@Ramona: I continue to be gobsmacked by how thoroughly the Trump administration has botched the Epstein business! They had a thousand FBI agents to go through ALL the files and flag the Trump mentions? Uh, they haven’t had time to hire a thousand MAGA true believers for the FBI. (Most of the MAGA hires are going to ICE.) So if there is horrible evidence about Trump in there and they try to bury it, there are plenty of decent insiders who know about it.
And where else might the breaking news come from? How about the victims? I’d be willing to bet there are more Epstein Ring victims in the US today than there are violent criminal undocumented aliens. And I suspect more than a few of them are getting a bit irked by how little of the news coverage has been about them.
There’s whole volumes of information still out there that could feed a continuing story. People will just get bored and move on and the story will die down? That’s what Nixon told himself. How many times did he declare we were past Watergate? The break-in happened in June of ‘72. Nixon resigned in Aug of ‘74. Scandals can last longer than a couple weeks so long as the story keeps developing.
prostratedragon
@Trollhattan: The next thread is for him.
Jackie
VOMIT
What a sad day for the formerly known Kennedy Center Opera House.
lowtechcyclist
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
And Haldeman, Ehrlichmann, Mitchell, Colson, etc. were geniuses compared to this crew.
JoyceH
@Jackie: Geez, has Melania Trump even been to an opera once in her life?
me
@MazeDancer:
No one is reporting this? Closest I can find is trump saying he’ll be gone soon but isn’t going to fire him. cnbc.com/2025/07/22/trump-backs-away-from-firing-powell-hes-going-to-be-out-pretty-soon-anyway.html
prostratedragon
@Jackie: My god, I just skipped a couple of heartbeats!
schrodingers_cat
@Spanky: Yep.
zhena gogolia
@me: I’m not finding it either.
zhena gogolia
Yeah, we’re in Nazarbayev / Kim Il Sung territory.
Anyway
@Spanky: CA friends have a “Vintage Tesla: Pre-Madness Edition” sticker on theirs.
MazeDancer
@me: Mike Lee posted a letter.
I fell for it. Vast apologies.
JoyceH
@me: Powell’s term as chair expires in May of 26. Plenty of time for Trump to crash the economy before the midterms.
lowtechcyclist
@Jackie:
Naming anything in the Kennedy Center after Melanoma reminds me of these Dr. John lyrics from his version of Milneburg Joys:
My friends thought my woman was an actress, the way she would act
She made her living on a mattress, flat out on her back
sab
@schrodingers_cat: My hairdresser bought a Tesla back before we knew about Musk. He can’t give it away now. He is a good guy. I don’t want him shamed for buying the only EV on the market back then.
There needs to be a better bumper sticker.
MazeDancer
BIG APOLOGIES!!
Cannot believe a US Senator would post a fake Fed Chair resignation letter. On the correct letterhead.
Cannot believe I fell for it.
sab
@MazeDancer: Mike Lee is a very special guy. WTF is wrong with the LDS that they vote for this guy?
mrmoshpotato
@Sister Golden Bear: If you like Townsends, check out the Glen and Friends Cooking Old Cookbook Show playlist.
New episodes every Sunday iirc.
The Audacity of Krope
@sab: In my neighborhood I see the occasional “Anti-Elon Tesla Club” bumper sticker. Also Mass.
The ones I see in person have nice designs, though I’ve seen other designs for the same message online that weren’t as good.
The Audacity of Krope
I can understand the confusion. Republican Senators are a notoriously responsible group of people…
David Collier-Brown
@Sister Golden Bear: Old version of the unitary executive theory
David Collier-Brown
@JoyceH:
Or they’ve all been threatened into silence, disappeared or paid off
sab
@sab: LDS is a cult, but their cult leaders didn’t used to be in a different cult
12 apostles of LDS are all MAGA? I never saw that coming.
WTFGhost
@Steve LaBonne: You know… I think *GOD*, Himself, just might have… selected Pastor Mike, for a very special job that He had for a real johnson like Mike: showing strong Christian fortitude while rotting in a prison cell.
Seriously, it could happen, right? “See, Pastor Mike doesn’t mind being in a prison cell with 31 other Republicans and four toilets that are going to clog; he is thinking of the Lord Almighty, and how he has a very special job to do, showing that even the mighty can be laid low, through hubris, injustice, evil, and a whole passel of outright stupidity.”
@brendancalling: Only, this time. Carrie Fischer is *not* going to be put off by some puppydog eyes, we hope. (What? Can’t we imagine her coming back as a vengeful revenant, just to slaughter a bunch of Republicans who think they’re the Lords of Sith? *I* can!)
@Hungry Joe: Call it “pedo-gate” if you want. The MSM might pick it up.
@JML: They’re producers; they’re only spending the cost of pressing a record/CD, or recording a tape, and in the days before e-mail was popular, you always had a big mailroom anyway. That’s why your favorite artists tour – there’s little money for them in selling albums – that goes to the producers.
Ruckus
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
The First Felon has zero idea what the truth is. Or when he is lying.
He opens his mouth and whatever nearest to the outlet is leaked out. There is no there left in that lump called his brain. (Actually hasn’t been for quite some time, likely 75 years or so…) He’s a human that was given nearly everything he’s ever had and has never actually earned even a stick of gum.
Gravenstone
@MazeDancer: Check out the “seal” on the presumed letterhead. Utter gibberish.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Jackie: Well, go back a hundred years, and most actresses and female opera singers were basically high end prostitutes. So maybe think of naming it after Mrs. Trump as a way of honoring that tradition.
Kirk
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Minor objection – they were all /presumed/ to be high end prostitutes, and some (most? all?) who just wanted to act had to be that as well.
One more time and place men (and upper class women) slutified women who dared to be more than servants.
Trivia Man
@sab: i like the examples of replacing the Tesla logo with one from a honda, buick, benz, jeep or something else.
Trivia Man
@sab: my granny wouldnt support the John birch Society because they were too weak on Communism. True story about a rabid mormon.
JoyceH
@Kirk: It also seems to me that throughout history the performing community lived more like modern folk than was acceptable for the time. Having sexual relations with someone you weren’t married to doesn’t even raise an eyebrow anymore, or having the kids and then maybe getting married. Geez, Ingrid Bergman was denounced from the floor of the Senate in the mid-20th century!
JoyceH
BTW, can anyone point to an example of Melania Trump “promoting the arts”? Heck, this term she only shows up to WH events a few times a month.
rikyrah
@Hungry Joe:
I’m still at the point where I just don’t understand why this is so important to that crowd. They don’t give two shyts about the young women destroyed by Epstein. They just don’t.
Miss Bianca
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: *Ahem*. They were *perceived* to be prostitutes, whether they actually were or not. In other words, much like models and actresses today, they were expected to put out for wealthy and well-connected men, whether they actually wanted to or not.
hueyplong
@rikyrah: It’s possible that concern should be reserved for moments when you think you actually understand something they’re thinking or saying.
Princess
@MazeDancer: Sounds to me like Mike Lee wanted to buy on the dip.