Friday ‘News’ Drop!!!…
“trump is a rat” does not really seem like the message this white house would like to socialize, but, sure, speaker johnson, happy to agree that trump’s a fucking rat
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 5, 2025 at 6:01 PM
‘Doing undercover research’ was, of course, Trumpworld’s original explanation for his long-term friendship with Jeffrey Epstein (and a go-to excuse for every Repub caught raping children). His hardcore Base will (claim to) believe it, but then, those are the people who also believe Trump never even met Mr. Epstein, and that all evidence to the contrary indicates a deep-state Democrat plot. And from what I’m seeing on social media, many of the original QAnon KKKrazies aren’t buying what Pastor Mike is trying to sell.
Then — as per WaterGirl & Leto, earlier today — James O’Keefe III has joined the chat…
I do think "by a known liar with a track record of manipulating this kind of video" needs to be added to this before we all get excited
— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 7:20 PM
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Should I not have published the acting deputy chief of the DOJ Special Operations Unit saying they’re going to redact Republicans from the Epstein list?
DOJ says “personal comments.”
I think the most unethical thing is not publishing this, to bury it.
DOJ confirmed he said it
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) September 4, 2025
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“the acting deputy chief of the DOJ was just going by what has been publicly reported about the DOJ when he was caught on a hidden camera during a second date with a woman he met on hinge saying an epstein client list would be redacted to hide all republican names” is an entirely accurate statement
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 4, 2025 at 6:00 PM
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did she get him with the video sunglasses?
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 7:10 PM
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I'm sorry but if you are a middle-aged man with one of those Gen X shaved heads in a sensitive national security position you are not allowed to believe a Georgetown au pair swiped right.
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motherfucker is lucky she was just one of O'Keefe's interns
Best part of this story, as far as I’m concerned, are the rumors that Trump is gonna have to publicly dump RFK Jr as his next ‘distraction’. Clip below is from last night… and ‘I didn’t see it, but I think he’s a very good person’ is usually what Trump says shortly before throwing his latest hapless minion to the wolves.
Q: Do you have confidence in what RFK?
Trump: "I didn't get to watch the hearings today, but he's a very good person. He means well. He's got some different ideas…I heard he did well today, but it's not your standard talk — and that has to do with medical and vaccines…I like that he's different."— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) September 4, 2025 at 8:13 PM
As the Sunday morning TV bookers ask themselves, Will it happen in time for this week’s show?…
Today Is Henry’s Birthday!
Scout211
Wow, AL. A whole array of cranks, crazies and criminals of the Trump administration. Nice.
twbrandt
The rest of the world is looking at us and saying wtaf is wrong with these people???
satby
I feel like I should take thorazine before trying to even keep up with this insane administration. Maybe enough would make sense of it all.
Scout211
Most of the stories I am reading describe Republican pols being unhappy with Kennedy’s “chaos” which seems like an easy out for them and for Trump as well. They would never
fire himask him to step down based on his dangerous quackery, but “Kennedy chaos” is a firing offense.Gin & Tonic
O’Keefe speaking of ethics? Sure, Jimbo, pull the other one.
satby
And yeah, pitching RFKjr overboard would be a distraction we’d all welcome, though all the competent people are gone now and his department will still be a dumpster fire.
NotMax
Lie low and snitch.
Westyny
@twbrandt: *It’s complicated
Splitting Image
I’m tired of having the worst people in the world say things I agree with.
As was brought up in the other thread, the fact that the guy said this to a random person on a date, whether he was telling the truth or not, is a five alarm fire. As O’Keefe says here, the ethical thing to do is to publish.
I guess that if O’Keefe was holding out hope that there was a job waiting for him at the New York Times or at Bari Weiss’s new See-BS operation, he just blew it.
piratedan
our brave ICE agents, boldly placing themselves in harms way….
forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/09/05/south-korea-raises-concern-after-hundreds-are-detained-in-i…
Scout211
Upvote!
Also too, I’m stealing that.
Shalimar
@twbrandt: I have been saying that since December of 2015 when it became obvious that none of the 17 other Republican candidates were capable of beating Trump.
J. Arthur Crank
@satby:
If that doesn’t work, there is always the hit-yourself-in-the-head-with-2-by-4 option, and if that doesn’t work, try both treatments together?
Scout211
. . .
Looks like it could be sooner rather than later that the era of Kennedy ends. So much chaos, so much turmoil.
Shalimar
@Scout211: Trump’s early childhood was in a world where there was no polio vaccine. Everyone who lived through it understands how life-changing it was. RFK, Jr. has no memories of that world.
JML
Confusion to the enemy.
(and may Taur Urgas, aka Donald Trump, grow boils on his behind. 5pt to anyone who gets the reference!)
pieceofpeace
Another interesting episode today(?) was a gathering of tech guys. Trump casually mentions to Zuck (sitting to T’s right), that this is his first (foray?) into politics. To which Zuck immediately responds “No, it’s not.”
Perhaps not, but to my ears, T. was informing Zuck that he is indeed a part of politics, in the way that T. likes to convey he now ‘owns’ someone.
A huge side problem with chip-making and even worse for data storage is the amount of water needed, and I don’t see much mention of what this will do to water needs, which could become a much bigger problem for future generations rather than oil needs.
Is it a coincid
tobie
@Splitting Image:
Did you come up with this? It’s brilliant. Thanks for making me laugh!
prostratedragon
@J. Arthur Crank:
Example
Ishiyama
Lenny Bruce on the crying need for vice enforcement:
“The cop can be out there every night, spending $100 getting laid, and if anybody asks: “I’m investigating.” And if you ask the hooker, she’ll say: “I didn’t get a nickel!” The cops going to say: “Whaddaya expect from a whore?” Maybe she didn’t get that $100…
Balconesfault
And this shit is why the media outside of MSNBC largely buried talking about the wildly unpopular Project 2025 last year.
Biden was so boring that they had to make shit up or repeat the dumbest GOP attacks to get clicks.
Trump lights up the boards multiple times a day.
Contrary to Hollywood, most career whores aren’t looking for love. They’re looking for more greenbacks.
But at least they’re largely honest about it, unlike our news media.
prostratedragon
@Shalimar: He was born in 1954, so he should have some memory, including people near his age who had it. I’m just twobyears older and clearly remember those things, and how downright overjoyed my parents and other adults around me were as the vaccine became more widespread.
Chetan Murthy
@Shalimar: @prostratedragon: Secy Brainworm has -erased- his memories of that world, b/c it’s profitable for him to have done so.
ETA: even when he was a baby, there was much (5x) more infanty mortality than there is today: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNIMRTINUSA
Captain C
@J. Arthur Crank: Similar to the Jeff Spicoli option.
Marc
@prostratedragon: I was born in 1954, that was nearly the end of the polio cohort in the US. In my elementary class there was one kid with a brace and a few others would could walk reasonably well without. The kids who suffered major disabilities would not have been in regular schools at the point.
Marc
@piratedan: Hmm, I need to think. What possible benefit is it to anyone to disrupt the work of an EV battery manufacturer trying to start production in the US? How very odd…
drdavechemist
@JML: David Eddngs. Would have to look up exactly which part of the Belgariad/Malloreon series.
danielx
That would be Trumpese for “the president has complete confidence in secretary so-and-so” as a euphemism for “start packing up the pictures on the i-love-me wall”.
Sandia Blanca
@prostratedragon: trump was born in 1946.
NotMax
Oh joy.
Hurricane Kiko (currently category 4) supposed to pass near north of the islands next week.
Of course, track, intensity and speed all subject to change this far out.
Lamh47
Ugh.
I truly believe that Single employee with no children or employee with no spouses are discriminated against when it comes to PTO. At this point I feel like single employees should create fake dependents so we can also call in cause our child is sick🤨. And ya wonder why folks mar up dead or dying relatives
Gretchen
I was born in 1953 and don’t remember pré-polio vaccine, but I did know people slightly older who limped or needed braces.
I didn’t understand my mother’s fear of taking small children out into the public or crowds until covid – she raised kids before a lot of these vaccines, and her over-caution (it seemed to me) suddenly made sense.
That video Anne Laurie posted yesterday about how moms in the old days spent all their time keeping things clean and trying to prevent infection really hit home – and how scary to think you could lose all your children in a week if they caught diphtheria or whooping cough.
When Kennedy goes on about how people back in the day were healthier, I think, like your Aunt Rosemary? They just hid her away in a home so that nobody knew they had a disabled child. There are more disabled kids visible now because they don’t die young and aren’t sent away to horrible institutions.
rikyrah
AL,
Thank you
rikyrah
@Lamh47:
I hear you, lamh😠😠
SpaceUnit
So trump was an FBI informant? Great. Then release the fucking files.
eclare
@Gretchen:
Good point about Rosemary, I had forgotten that.
I spoke with my 94 yo aunt today, who although not MAGA, is Republican. She watched some of Brainworm’s testimony and couldn’t believe how arrogant he was. She is also a firm believer in childhood vaccinations. She remembers having measles, and she was kept in a dark room for at least a week with curtains pulled. Just agony.
NotMax
@eclare
Ditto.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Me too, at least 5 days. Missed more than a week of school, and was still pretty wobbly first couple of weeks back. If the vaccine had existed, I’d have had it. Failing to vax one’s kids against measles is child abuse.
prostratedragon
eclare
@prostratedragon:
Agree 1000% that anti vax is child abuse.
Gretchen
@eclare: Me too, with a week in a dark room at age 8. I nearly went mad with boredom. You couldn’t read or watch tv or have a light on to play. Just lay in a dark silent room for days.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@SpaceUnit:
Right? Johnson publicly claimed that Trump was supposedly an FBI informant, so what’s the point of redacting his name in the files if that’s the reason? It doesn’t wash at all
eclare
@Gretchen:
My Aunt mentioned that, she couldn’t even read a magazine. And my grandma fed her nothing but pot likker from turnip greens with some crumbled cornbread the whole time!
sab
@Shalimar: Nonsense. He is my age and I remember that world. I remember the polio vaccine sugar cubes quite clearly. I know people slightly older than me who survived polio.
His cousin Caroline said his own children have been vaxxed. He is not ignorant. He is a predator.
Gretchen
The Salk injected polio vaccine became available in 1955, when RFK Jr. was one and Trump was 9. The Sabin sugar cube vaccine came out in 1961. So RFK would have no memory of the fear of infection that was rampant before 1955.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
My drug use never went beyond marijuana and hashish, but if I was going to try psychedelics to make sense of the world, this would be the time.
lowtechcyclist
@sab:
As a fellow early 1954 kid, I remember the polio sugar cubes clearly (the sugar cube was purple, and we took it at the nurse’s station at our elementary school, just before the school year began I think), but I don’t remember from my childhood anybody who had had polio. Vaccinations were already a normal part of childhood (e.g. diphtheria) and this one, at least you didn’t have to be stuck with a needle.
Kids born a few years later than us were lucky, they got vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox. I had chicken pox, my (born 1953) sister got the mumps, and all this stuff being mentioned in this thread about dark rooms confirms my impression that I had rubella (called at the time by names such as “German measles” or “three-day measles”) rather than measles because I could at least have the light on and read in bed.
Speaking of which, what was the point of the room being dark if you had measles? Was one’s skin that sensitive to light while having the measles? Certainly spending a week or so without even being able to read would have been awful.
prostratedragon
@lowtechcyclist: In my case, I felt so sick that the arkness didn’t matter. The idea might have been to support complete rest. I was very exhausted in the early days. Maybe also a bit light-sensitive.
Shalimar
@sab: He is definitely a predator. And a profiteer, making money from lawsuits over vaccines. He’s also a nut, not anywhere near the clear thinker he believes. But just because he remembers the vaccine very clearly doesn’t mean he was old enough to remember all the people who had polio pre-vaccine*.
He said the other day that banning DDT when he was 18 is what eliminated polio. Latching on to that stupidity means he really doesn’t remember a time when polio cases went down significantly. It just happened magically at some point in his mind.
*edit: by which I mean he remembers polio survivors being all around him, but the time when people truly feared they or a close friend would get it was already over when he turned 5. He got vaccinated, but he could have been the kind of child who wondered why we were bothering.
Scout211
I remember having to be in a dark room and also having to place a cold compress on my eyes because they were so sensitive and sore.
Just googling it now, photophobia can be a symptom of measles but back in our childhood days, some thought the light could cause blindness. But that turned out not to be true.
My worst memory was chicken pox. I was so sick and so miserable, plus I still have some scars from it.
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: Measles can cause photophobia (light sensitivity) and people at the time thought that in itself caused eye damage. There is no evidence that the dark-room treatment did anything.
Measles can cause blindness–it was a major cause of childhood blindness–but that’s due to nerve damage, which isn’t caused by light exposure. (Edit: except, of course, very high intensity, especially UV, not just normal household exposure.)
Currants
@Scout211: 😂 Yes!!
WTFGhost
Wow. So Johnson wants us to believe, Trump called the FBI on Epstein, but, when his boys decided to meet with reps from Russia, Trump insisted, over and over, that no one ever calls the FBI, who would ever call the FBI?
So: either Trump is a friend of the FBI and should have had an FBI trap waiting for any Russian agents, or, Trump never talked to the FBI about anything, and certainly not about Epstein. There’s no possible third option, here, except that Johnson is a lying turd that will do anything to cover up for murderous, hateful, bullying, filth, like Trump #NotAllMurderousHatefulBullyingFilth
Trump, being mobbed up
lowtechcyclist
@Shalimar:
Yeah, I was born in 1954 and grew up in a world where nobody got polio anymore. It’s easy to see how banning DDT in 1972 could have caused that. //
If Trump doesn’t fire him, the brain worm needs to hurry up and eat the rest of what passes for his brain.
WTFGhost
@twbrandt: “at least Hitler had to serve *time* for trying to overthrow the government, before the government shackled the neck of every German – Trump didn’t even have to go on trial!”
@Splitting Image: Keep in mind, O’Keefe is a third party blackmailer – rather than get paid not to release, by the victim, he gets paid elsewhere, *to* release the information.
Blackmail that ends up (by chance) being in the public interest is still blackmail – that O’Keefe defends his blackmail using bad faith statements doesn’t mean that you agree with him. In fact, you only agree with the words, if applied to ethical situations, I’d imagine – not with his words as a statement about his *actions*.
It is true: such an awful abuse of power should have been reported to numerous attorneys, with cross referenced times and dates, and yes, it should have been reported on – not plied out of some guy flexing on a date.
Hey, do you think Republicans will bother to cover up this revelation, or will they just ignore it, figuring the political journos won’t bite on what really is likely the biggest DOJ scandal since the existence of the DOJ?
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: It’s consistent with what Leatherface at least professes to believe. He confuses “miasma theory” and “terrain theory,” but his claims are mostly about “terrain theory.”
So in this completely pre-scientific/pseudoscientific view, a “healthy” person doesn’t get sick. To RFKJr, “bad health” comes from “toxins” which interfere with your immune system. DDT is a poison so it caused vulnerability to polio. QED.
In the real world, of course, polio is transmitted most commonly through contaminated water or food.
Snarki, child of Loki
“Trump was doing an undercover investigation for the FBI” is
the WORST fortune-cookie+”between the sheets”, ever.
Anonymous At Work
The importance of James O’Keefe is being under-stated. To people in Rove’s “reality-based community,” he’s a liar, manipulator, deceptive editor, and all-around untrustworthy @$$hat. To the MAGA right, he’s a ground-breaking journalist and scourge of the Deep State.
Also, just the RUMOR that any slant towards more Democrats in the released Epstein files is a sign of deceptive editing by the Deep State of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel is enough to call what is released into question and help Democrats keep the issue alive in right-wing outlets for longer.
lowtechcyclist
@pieceofpeace:
Dead thread, but where is George Washington Hayduke when we need him?
JetsamPool
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
If he was an informant, the FBI had something incriminating on him and was willing to cut a deal if he ratted out his co-conspirators. Let us not forget.
evodevo
@lowtechcyclist:
No…had to do with fear of the blindness that was a definite side effect of the measles virus – I had it when I was six, and remember being confined to the dim room at my grandmother’s for a week, at least. She read me fairy stories to counter the boredom…
Paul in KY
@satby: Try Haldol. Might work better.
Paul in KY
@piratedan: I guess TACO and Apartheid Clyde must have made up.
Paul in KY
@prostratedragon: Our citizen soldiers (including USSRs in here) whupped their asses! My dad (fought in Patton’s 3rd) did say that the average German soldier was much better trained, etc. He was so proud that our guys beat the crap out of them.
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: I remember us lining up in mid 60s to get the sugar cube one. Was about 7 years old.