It's called conflict of interest...

Trump crypto empire looms over Senate showdown

The fate of a major crypto bill remains unclear ahead of a Senate vote Tuesday afternoon.

By Jasper Goodman

A landmark effort to remake the architecture of American financial regulation to incorporate the cryptocurrency industry is poised for a dramatic showdown Tuesday on the Senate floor.

Senators are set to vote at 2:15 p.m. on whether to advance the Clarity Act, a 600-plus-page bill that crypto companies have spent years — and hundreds of millions of dollars — lobbying Congress for, in hopes of locking in legal certainty for their business models and legitimizing digital assets.

The outcome remains up in the air. Democratic negotiators are pressing for changes to new text rolled out by Republicans late Sunday, setting the stage for an eleventh-hour scramble for the two sides to strike a deal that would unlock the bipartisan support necessary to advance the bill past a first procedural hurdle on the floor.

Democrats want concessions on several parts of the bill — but most importantly, they say a government ethics provision included in the latest GOP text doesn’t go far enough in restricting President Donald Trump’s ability to profit off his family’s crypto ventures.

The Trump-approved language “leaves a lot to be desired,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who sent a previous ethics proposal to the White House with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), told reporters Monday evening. “If they think this is a final deal, it’s not their call.”

The vote will be a pivotal test for a group of about a dozen Democrats who have said they are open to supporting a crypto bill. They face the competing pressures of a left flank that is increasingly motivated against crypto and a massive crypto super PAC war chest that threatens to hurt Democrats if they stand in the way of the industry’s agenda.

Republicans, who characterized the new text they released Sunday as a final offer, hailed their ethics provision, which was blessed by Trump, as a historic concession from the president. It would allow state attorneys general to sue the Justice Department and crypto exchanges for not enforcing the provision — a key Democratic demand — but would not force the president to divest from his crypto ventures.

Democrats sent a counteroffer covering outstanding issues to Republicans late Monday after meeting earlier in the evening in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office.

But it’s unclear how much appetite Republicans will have to negotiate. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican who is leading the charge for the bill, wrote on X Monday: “The time for negotiating is over. Let’s vote.”

At least one Democrat who has been a long-time supporter of the crypto industry wants to advance the bill: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is urging other Democrats to vote “yes” Tuesday. Doing so could force Republicans to confront their own whip count challenges — and show good faith to the crypto industry, which controls a massive pile of super PAC money that it is preparing to deploy in the run up to the midterm elections.

But Democrats are increasingly confronting the reality that voting for the bill — even on a procedural step — risks enraging the left. Progressive senators and outside groups are warning against supporting a crypto-backed measure, and saying it must crack down hard on Trump.

Demand Progress Executive Director Sean Vitka took aim at Gillibrand in a statement to POLITICO, writing that the New York Democrat “is supposed to be helping lead opposition to rampant corruption in the Trump administration, yet she’s instead using her position of power as [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] Chair to push other Senate Democrats into supporting bad crypto industry policy that will enrich Trump’s family — and her own.” A Gillibrand aide responded that, rather “than surrender to that status quo, Senator Gillibrand would relish the chance to debate real ethics reforms on the floor — in full view of the public, seven weeks out from the midterms.” (Gillibrand has also previously said she has no involvement in a crypto-adjacent financial exchange that her son is launching.)

The crypto bill is also facing its own challenges on the right, as banks continue to lobby hard for changes that would crack down on crypto companies’ ability to offer rewards programs that pay annual percentage yield to stablecoin holders. Bank trade associations said in a joint letter Monday that they were unmoved by the latest text, and American Bankers Association President Rob Nichols called on every bank CEO in the country to reach out to their senators about the issue.

The GOP supporters of the crypto bill are hopeful that most Republicans will vote to advance the legislation Tuesday. But if they succeed in clearing the first procedural hurdle, they may quickly start shedding GOP support.

“My sense is that most — not all, but most — Republicans are going to vote to get on the bill, and I would include in that number those who have reservations about it and would likely ultimately vote ‘no’ without changes,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “But I don’t know what my Democratic friends are going to do.”

Uncle Tom and Stupid Smiley of course bent over for him...

Trump lashes out at Supreme Court after mail ballot loss

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to block Trump’s mail-in ballot plan on Monday, Trump said the justices he initially nominated are a "shell of their original selves."

By Elleiana Green

President Donald Trump attacked the Supreme Court over its decision to block his mail-in ballot plan on Tuesday, sharply targeting his three nominees on the bench and saying “these are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”

In the ruling Monday night, none of Trump’s three picks for the court from his first term — Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett — indicated support for his attempt to implement mail-in voting limits during the midterms.

“[The justices] are merely a shell of their original selves, a court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings,” Trump said in a Truth Social post, also citing other recent high-profile losses on tariffs and birthright citizenship.

He added, “It is not easy for me to write this criticism of the United States Supreme Court - it will likely cost me dearly for years to come.”

Monday night’s mail ballot order preserves lower court rulings that block the U.S. Postal Service from implementing the new requirements in the weeks before the election, but the ruling may not necessarily be the final word on the directive should the Trump administration pursue implementation in future elections.

Election officials said in the weeks before the decision that the proposed changes threatened to disenfranchise millions of voters by not having their ballots delivered and were “not feasible.”

Trump signed the executive order to control mail-in voting in March, claiming the need to combat widespread election fraud, without evidence. In August, USPS released a final rule which would require states to provide lists of eligible voters and adhere to approved envelope styles.

In a brief concurring opinion, Kavanaugh said in his view that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

“Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-in voting ‘disaster,’” Trump said in the post.

Last week, the Supreme Court handed Democrats another victory in Missouri’s gerrymandering battle. The decision blocked a GOP push to use a map likely to give Republicans another House seat.

But despite the high-profile losses — and Trump’s anger about it — the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has remained a fairly reliable ally in expanding presidential powers elsewhere, including the ability to hire and fire federal agency staff.

They can't help saying the racist shit they think....

Texas Republicans are scrambling after Bo French’s outburst

GOP operatives fear Bo French’s rhetoric could undermine the party’s recent gains with Hispanic and Asian American voters.

By Samuel Benson and Mike Lee

Texas Republicans were already fretting about slipping support with voters of color. Then Bo French got on X.

The Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner posted a photo of a crowd of University of Texas football fans, most of them people of color, saying, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The Sunday morning comments, which appeared to target South Asian students, sent Lone Star Republicans into a frenzy, worried about the impact the rhetoric could have on GOP candidates up and down the ballot, including Attorney General Ken Paxton’s high-profile Senate race and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s reelection fight.

A number of Republican lawmakers, including some in tough races, quickly denounced the post as racist, as others squirmed with carefully worded statements. And GOP operatives winced at the potential electoral backlash — in a year that’s already looking tougher-than-normal for a party that has dominated the state for decades. Still, no one explicitly called for him to drop out of the race.

“His post on social media is profoundly unhelpful if his goal is to see Republicans win statewide races in a tough political environment in 50 days,” said Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based GOP consultant who advised Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) unsuccessful primary campaign against Paxton.

Cornyn condemned the post, asking whether other GOP officials would “condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.”

Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), who is facing a tough reelection fight in a Hispanic-majority district, told POLITICO in a statement she’s willing to “condemn racism” wherever it comes from.

“All I see in that photograph is a group of kids celebrating a Longhorns win. What can be more Texan than that?” De La Cruz said, before taking a shot at her Democratic opponent, Bobby Pulido, for his past racial comments.

And Karl Rove, a longtime adviser to former President George W. Bush, called French a “bigot” at a private lunch event and said he’s voting for French’s Democratic opponent, The Texas Tribune reported. Meanwhile, state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, the Democrat running against French, said he had his best fundraising day of the cycle after French’s post.

French didn’t respond to requests for comment. He repeatedly stood by his comments since Sunday morning. During a local radio appearance Monday, he said he didn’t have any personal animosity against the students at the football game, but said that it is “not racist to point out that we should be favoring Texans over foreigners” and that his fellow Republicans are afraid of being called racist.

The divide emerging among Texas Republicans over the social media post — and Democrats’ eagerness to capitalize on it — show just how precarious the party finds its position this cycle. Texas Republicans were already worrying about losing support from Hispanic and other minority voters amid a tough economic environment and President Donald Trump’s unpopular immigration agenda. They need to hold onto or improve the incremental gains they made over previous cycles with voters of color in a fast-changing state where non-Hispanic white people now only make up 37% of the population. The stakes are high this cycle: Most polls show Paxton slightly trailing in a Senate race that could determine control of the upper chamber; Abbott appears to be in the toughest of his four election fights; and the state is home to several key House races.

“I don’t think [French’s post] independently and universally sours voter sentiment. But it contributes to GOP declining numbers with Hispanic voters particularly in the South Texas congressional races which we hope to win,” said Alfredo Rodriguez, a Dallas-based Republican strategist, who called on French to “stop the petty political theatrics.”

The blast radius of French’s posts was wide enough to garner carefully worded responses from the top of the ticket. Abbott said in a Sunday statement that French’s post “is not my message,” before noting unity “doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities.”

Two of the students in the photo told the Dallas Morning News that they’re U.S. citizens. Most UT students are Texans — state law requires that 90% of each freshman class come from in-state — and there is no evidence that the students in the photo French posted are foreigners.

Some Republicans weren’t thrilled about Abbott’s response.

“This had nothing to do with illegal immigrants,” said Anang Mittal, an Indian American national GOP strategist, of Abbott’s comments. “These were students at a college game. They’re not H-1B. If they’re students, they’re on a student visa. … It’s pretty damn disgusting of Greg Abbott to say, ‘I condemn racism, but also, like, we’re keeping all the Indians out.’ That’s essentially what that tweet read to me.”Democrat James Talarico called Paxton out on social media, asking if he would follow Cornyn’s lead in denouncing French’s post. The GOP nominee replied that he condemns “racism in all its forms” — and then claimed Talarico had a “history of dividing Texans by race.”

Spokespeople for Paxton and Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Republicans were less willing to fully denounce French’s comments.

“I don’t really know the guy. I heard he said some not so pleasant things,” said Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), who said he hadn’t seen the posts — but launched into a criticism of immigration nonetheless. “I am concerned about the number of people living in this country, and we don’t even know who they really are,” he said. ”Shut the border down for 10 years, and then let’s try to figure out who we got in this country because we don’t even know.”

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who campaigned with Talarico in Houston on Sunday, said French’s posts came up in conversations with every Asian American voter he met.

“Everyone was talking about it,” Kim said. “Every single Asian American that I was with yesterday raised this with me. They were saying this is an example of, ‘Not only are they not courting us or engaging with us, but they’re actively demonizing us, actively being xenophobic and racist towards us.’ We need leaders that stand up against this.”

The political damage could also extend — potentially for years — to Texas’ small but growing Indian American population, the demographic group French appeared to target in his posts. Both Dallas and Houston have significant Indian American populations. In 2019, an event at a Houston stadium headlined by Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew over 50,000 attendees.

French’s comments could alienate those same voters, said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican consultant in Austin.

“He just irritated a bunch of people, many of whom could be supporters and could be Republicans,” said Steinhauser, a University of Texas graduate. “I’d be willing to bet a lot of those kids that he was posting a photo of are probably, you know, their parents might be Republicans, or they might be Republicans, or conservatives, or independent-leaning conservatives.”

If French is elected, he would sit on a commission that regulates Texas’ powerful oil, gas and mining industries — which has little to do with immigration or social issues. But French, a longtime provocateur in Texas political circles, has a history of incendiary statements. Just last year, Republicans were calling on French to resign as chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party after he published an online poll asking whether Muslims or Jews were “the bigger threat to America.” He deleted the post and said he regretted it, adding “antisemitism has no place in the Republican Party.” This spring, he unseated a well-financed Republican incumbent for Texas Railroad Commission.

French isn’t the only politician in Texas who has made singling out Muslims part of his political brand. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has made “preventing Shariah law in Texas” one of his legislative priorities. Patrick didn’t respond to a request for comment. Abbott, Paxton and Cornyn have all called for investigations and other government action to stop development of a commercial and residential development being built by the East Plano Islamic Center, a mosque outside Dallas. And just last month, Abbott threatened to withhold funding from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport to block plans for ritual washing facilities for Muslim travelers in the airport’s terminals. There’s little difference between French’s attacks and the other politicians’ actions, said Yasir Qadhi, an Islamic scholar at the Islamic center.“It is the same mindset,” he said in an interview. “What we’re witnessing is really an unprecedented and increasingly brazen form of racism. It’s unfiltered, it’s unapologetic, it’s even stripped of even the pretense of political correctness. You know, this is a type of racism we’ve never seen in our lifetimes.”

When French unleashed a string of inflammatory social media posts in 2025, several GOP officeholders — including Patrick, the lieutenant governor — called on him to resign as county GOP chair. But Republicans now refuse to tell French to drop out now “because that might mean that there would be a Democrat elected statewide,” said Glen Whitley, a Republican former Tarrant County judge. “That’s the bottom line.”

“That’s part of my frustration with the Republican Party altogether: They talk about being Christian, but they get up every morning to talk about who they hate,” said Whitley, who still identifies as Republican but endorsed Talarico for Senate.

See that bridge... It's for sale, $50 it's yours... Orange fuck going to give you money???

Your Deadbeat President Is Never Giving You $5,000

But the pledge reveals an increasingly frantic midterms strategy.

Inae Oh

The year is 2026, and by now, you know, with clarity, that Donald Trump is a brazen liar with an unusually impressive record of promising free cash—only to rarely ever fulfill those lofty pledges. It is the personality of a deadbeat that long precedes his entry into politics. But in between flashing “meat pics” of Hasan Piker and a surprise video appearance by John Fetterman, rabid cheers greeted the president’s offer to hand out $5,000 checks to every adult in the United States if Republicans win both the House and Senate in the November midterms.

“It will be called the Trump Dividend,” he said at Wednesday’s GOP convention in Dallas, as a beaming Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, applauded along.

The plan, as many have now weighed in, would cost at least $1 trillion and arrives just as alarm bells are clanging over a ballooning national debt and everyday expenses continuously get more expensive. But Trump’s latest pledge is as fantastical and mendacious as many of Trump’s previous promises of free cash: $2,000 checks from supposed tariff revenue, $5,000 checks from all that money we never saved from DOGE, etc. This time around, though, some on the right don’t appear to be buying it. Here’s Fox News cautioning against believing Trump:

The rare caveat by Fox News comes amid signs that Trump’s frantic midterm strategy—which has involved a whole lot of lying, efforts to feign indifference, and impossible Iran war predictions—isn’t agreeing with Republicans, as more appear to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular president. But at Wednesday’s convention, the first of its kind for the midterms, Trump continued to demand attention to the one person Republicans could afford to hear less from these days. “Pretend that I am running,” he told the crowd.

It isn’t a coincidence, then, that also on Wednesday night, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel announced that his interview with James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, would no longer air on broadcast television after new threats from the FCC. As Kimmel told the audience, Trump’s “FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations—based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.” The announcement, which follows a similar move by the FCC when Stephen Colbert interviewed Talarico in February, reveals more of the same chaos ahead of the fast-approaching November elections, as well as a president desperately using every lever of political power to keep the spotlight on himself.

National Security

Trump Keeps Using “National Security” to Do What He Wants

From the “war on terror” to the war on trumpets and wind turbines.

Sophie Hurwitz

President Donald Trump has a favorite justification for everything he does: “It’s a national security matter.”

After 9/11, the United States built a vast, powerful, and generally unchecked national security apparatus. Twenty-five years later, Trump is using agencies and emergency powers that sprung up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks—and have never been abolished or repealed—to threaten domestic dissidents and anyone else he views as an enemy, claiming that those who oppose his policies constitute threats to America.

Of course, American presidents have been using “national security” as an excuse to expand surveillance and start wars since before the smoke from the Twin Towers cleared, and Trump is no exception. In his first term, his long list of national security “threats” included Japanese cars, Chinese telecom equipment, and briefly, the gay hookup app Grindr.

But in his second term, Trump—whose constantly shifting stories about his own actions at Ground Zero defy credulity—has taken this tactic to even more absurd, and sometimes catastrophic, extremes. Here are some highlights.

Threatening to annex Greenland: Trump has periodically obsessed over “acquiring” Greenland, and, in various Truth Social posts, he has made his case for annexation. “The National Security of the United States, and the World at large, is at stake,” he wrote in a series of early-morning Truth Social posts in January. “The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security. It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building. NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!” Trump renewed his threats to annex Greenland at the NATO summit in July.

Targeting ICE protesters as terrorists: Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 formally designates “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. Following that directive, dozens of ICE protesters across the country have been taken to trial as national security threats—some of them over things as small as moving a box of zines or wearing a shirt that says “I’m antifa.”

Halting offshore wind development: Since late 2025, administration officials have framed offshore wind turbines as a national security threat. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said a classified report from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proves offshore wind is a national security threat—but has never exactly explained how. The administration has also used national security concerns as a pretext for keeping coal plants online past their planned retirement dates and restarting a problematic California oil pipeline over fierce state and local opposition.

Building more hyperscale data centers: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” Trump, who has invested millions of dollars in companies that build data center infrastructure, wrote in a 2025 executive order.

Constructing a $400 million ballroom: After a federal judge in DC ordered Trump to halt construction on his unsanctioned White House ballroom, he unleashed a tirade on social media pitching the project as a military-grade command center. The ballroom wasn’t just a ballroom, apparently, but a “desperately needed National Security structure for the people of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in mid-August. The Supreme Court has, at least for now, allowed construction to move forward.

Stripping union protections from nearly a million federal workers: In a March 2025 executive order, Trump designated more than a dozen government agencies as performing “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” thereby robbing about 950,000 federal employees of their collective bargaining rights.

Putting tariffs on musical instruments: The Department of Commerce announced in early August that it plans to implement a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments—including trombones, trumpets, and tubas—citing national security concerns about America’s purported overreliance on foreign copper alloys. The National Association of Music Merchants has condemned the move.

Letting xAI pollute Memphis: NAACP lawyers contend that Elon Musk’s xAI should pay more than $100,000 a day in civil penalties for violating the federal Clean Air Act by operating unpermitted gas turbines in Memphis to keep Musk’s Grok chatbot—a.k.a. “MechaHitler”—online. This past June, the Department of Justice intervened in the case, not to safeguard Memphians, but rather to protect Grok. “Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security,” the filing said, especially “in the event of armed conflict”—noting  that the Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

Protecting the US drone industry—and his sons’ pocketbooks: Last week, Trump proposed slapping tariffs of up to 100 percent on foreign-made drones, calling reliance on foreign drone components a “national security threat.” His older sons, Eric and Don Jr., have sizable holdings in the US drone industry, so this is probably great news for them.

Excluding trans people from public life: In May, the Trump administration released its latest “counterterrorism” plan, which labels transgender people a threat to the nation’s safety. Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka told reporters at the time that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

THERE IS NO ELECTION ISSUES!

States Already Have a Good Way to Ensure Election Integrity—and MAGA Hates It

The rejection of ERIC by GOP officials has, ironically, undermined their own voting systems.

Michael Mechanic

In January 2022, at an event hosted by one of the scores of local “election integrity” groups inspired by Donald Trump’s fraudulent assertion that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin made a big announcement: His state was leaving ERIC.

This was puzzling because, amid all the Republican pearl-clutching over election integrity, ERIC was the single organization best equipped to help states ensure exactly that.

And suddenly MAGA Republicans wanted nothing to do with it.

ERIC is short for Electronic Registration Information Center. It’s a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition established in 2012 by elections officials from seven states—then four red, three blue—who joined forces to bulletproof their voting processes. This, of course, was before the right twisted the term “election integrity,” much as they’d previously usurped the word “patriot,” as a partisan identifier somewhat opposite from its original meaning.

And what does ERIC do? Well, member states submit voter registration and vehicle registration data through secure channels, allowing for cross-referencing. That’s valuable because people frequently move within and among states. Young people become eligible. Noncitizens become citizens. Former felons have rights restored. Newly incarcerated people lose them. And lots of people die.

ERIC helps its members track voter moves and purge their lists of duplicate registrations (Michael Mechanic vs. Mike Mechanic) and dead people (hopefully neither of those). It identifies people who are eligible yet unregistered. And after a national election, if requested, ERIC will produce reports flagging any signs of potential illegal voting—of a person casting ballots in two or more states or casting more than one ballot in one state, or voting on behalf of a recently dead relative, for example.

“These are all laudable, uncontroversial goals that have made our voter registration rolls more accurate and our elections more accessible and secure,” Jonathan Diaz, an executive with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, wrote in an article extolling ERIC’s virtues.

ERIC attracted more new members every year. By the time of Ardoin’s announcement, it had 31 member states, plus DC, and was respected on both sides of the aisle as a powerful tool to help keep voter rolls in shape, improve access, and flag potential fraud. John Merrill, Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023, recalls that ERIC had more Republican-run than Democratic-run states at the time. “Its integrity has been intact from its creation,” he told me.

And yet his state was next to fall. In January 2023. Merrill’s successor, Wes Allen, withdrew Alabama from ERIC as his first official act. (“Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me,” he stated in his announcement.) Allen was followed by a parade of red-state officials, some echoing baseless conspiracy theories, such as a bogus claim that ERIC got funding from George Soros. David Becker, a nonvoting board member who’d helped establish ERIC but is no longer involved, also came under attack.

“Conspiracy theorists targeted ERIC. Apparently, it was working too well for them,” Becker, also the founder and director of the “fiercely nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research, recalled at a CEIR press briefing on Friday. “They spread lies about me,” he said, and “They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works. We continue to see that.”

Trump himself piled on: “All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” he wrote on Truth Social in March 2023, showcasing his complete ignorance of ERIC’s role.

Red-state officials played along. After Alabama came Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia, then Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. By 2024, nearly a third of the member states had bailed, though a handful of reliably conservative states (Alaska, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Utah) remain. Officials from the departing states “succumbed to that disinformation, even as they admitted that they knew it was false, and within days of leaving, were proudly trumpeting voter fraud investigations and prosecutions they did that came solely from ERIC,” Becker said. “We saw this in several states.”

“I think that the people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” Merrill told me. “I don’t know anybody that had a factual basis for removing their state because of an exposed vulnerability, inconsistency, or irregularity that they felt was a problem for ERIC’s integrity—and if they did, they never shared that publicly. Never. And I have a problem with that.”

In 2022, the year Louisiana bailed, ERIC flagged some 2.4 million interstate moves, 7.3 million intrastate moves, 203,210 duplicate listings, and 65,437 dead voters. Four years later, post-exodus, those numbers were much reduced: roughly 604,000 interstate, 881,00o intrastate, 61,000 duplicates, and 17,000 dead. To boost election integrity, Republicans officials might well have considered recruiting more states to join ERIC instead of taking their ball and going home.

Member states do have some obligations. They must agree to use ERIC’s list maintenance reports to keep their rolls accurate. They must review all potential cases of illegal voting that ERIC flags and refer the credible ones to law enforcement regardless of which party benefitted. They also must, and this is another reason some red states soured on ERIC, use its “Eligible but Unregistered” report to offer basic voter registration information to the people it identifies.

Part of any secretary of state’s job is, or should be, to encourage voter participation. But apparently they don’t make ’em like they used to.

Merrill, who now runs a consultancy called Morning in Alabama LLC that sometimes works with voting groups, has experienced pushback for his outspokenness. “I’ve had conservative ideologues who have said, “Oh, you, you embrace the liberal agenda,” he told me. “I’m like, ‘What? Where’s the agenda?’ I never saw an agenda. I used ERIC as a tool, just like we use the Kansas Interstate Crosscheck System, to multiply our efforts in Alabama to ensure that we had the best election administration system that we could have.”

If anything, he says, withdrawing from the compact has damaged election integrity in those former member states, including his own.

Becker concurs. Those states, he said, “have really kneecapped their own ability to maintain accurate voter lists and potentially combat fraud, and all in service of conspiracy theorists who seem more concerned with raising money and diminishing American election integrity than actually contributing anything substantial.”

The red-state ERIC exodus isn’t a new story, but it’s timely again as Trump’s Department of Justice ramps up attacks on states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the feds. In its effort to obtain those lists, the DOJ has taken 30 states to court—and lost in 23 of the 23 cases decided to date. Administration officials have even threatened to prosecute election officials for ill-defined missteps, and have hinted, also vaguely, that they could dispatch ICE or federal troops to polling places. (“This is not going to happen,” Becker said on Friday.)

Most recently, and egregiously, the administration has made moves to monkeywrench postal delivery of ballots in those blue and purple states unwilling to hand over their lists—to a government, mind you, that has obliterated any presumption that it will play fair, and that it won’t weaponize state voter data for partisan advantage.

On Friday, Becker said he didn’t believe the Supreme Court would allow Trump to interfere with mail voting so close to the midterms. “I don’t think there are five justices,” he said, “who want to own the chaos that would ensue and, in some ways, the chaos that might affect Republican voters worse than Democratic voters.”

But if the administration’s purpose is to undermine public confidence in an election in which Trump’s party is expected to fare poorly, then they’ve already succeeded.

Letting Data Centers Make People Sick

Former EPA Officials: Trump Is Letting Data Centers Make People Sick

“Families shouldn’t have to pay for the AI boom with their health.”

Sophie Hurwitz

While tech oligarchs grandstand about the existential danger AI superintelligence poses to humanity, former Environmental Protection Agency officials say we should be worried about a more immediate threat to our health: the data centers that power those AI models.

The former EPA researchers, now working with the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, are warning in a new report that since January 2025, Donald Trump’s EPA has embarked on a systematic weakening of pollution safeguards, permitting processes, inspection norms, and other guardrails—at least 30 different actions—that could increase the health risks associated with the data center boom.

There are currently about 3,000 data centers in the United States, and more than  1,500 new centers are in the planning stages. But as developers build out this vast, energy-hungry infrastructure, the country is losing the government regulatory safeguards that are needed to ensure that expansion is done safely, the ex–EPA officials say.

Dan Costa, who spent 35 years at EPA studying air pollution, noted that for decades the environmental agency, which was established in 1970, had a large and committed cadre of researchers who investigated emerging sources of pollution and new environmental threats.

“Over the decades, toxicologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, modelers and engineers worked in concert with academic colleagues on behalf of the American people—not on behalf of industry,” Costa said in a press briefing last week. “We wanted to carry out EPA’s mission of protecting people’s health from industrial air pollution.”

Now, though, that work force has been gutted. The Trump administration has dismantled EPA’s main research office, and the agency’s priorities have shifted away from strict enforcement of pollution standards. “Transforming the nation’s energy system, while diminishing its scientific capacity to understand what the impacts are going to be, makes no sense,” Costa said.

But that appears to be the direction the country is heading in. President Donald Trump is “positioning America as the global leader in AI,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a memo last year. The agency is “committed to bolstering” those efforts, Zeldin said, by “cutting heavy-handed regulations to ensure America can build and power the data centers essential to Making America the AI Capital of the World.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, data center developers have seized the opportunity to expand at a rapid pace, helped by the administration’s moves. In some cases, that deregulation has involved keeping old coal-fired plants online past their planned decommissioning times in order to power data centers; other times, it has meant easing regulations on the use of onsite fossil-fuel-powered turbines to power hyperscale data centers like xAI’s Colossus.

The agency has proposed a rule change that would let developers begin constructing data centers and their associated power plants before they get air pollution permits. And it has directed the agency’s enforcement staff to avoid any action that could “unduly burden or significantly disrupt” energy production or power generation.

According to one study the former EPA researchers cited in their new report, pollution associated with the AI boom may lead to 1,300 additional deaths per year.

Physician and former EPA administrator Lynn Goldman said some health impacts of increased data center pollution might be felt quickly—for example,  heart attacks or premature births associated with particulate exposure. Others, such as cancer, might take years to emerge. “The AI industry’s race for advantage should not be a matter of life or death,” Goldman said at the press conference. “Families shouldn’t have to pay for the AI boom with their health.” 

And who would that be????

Trump suggests AI doesn’t need any more guardrails, only a ‘STRONG AND SMART’ president

By Kevin Liptak

President Donald Trump on Monday all but rejected calls from AI industry leaders for more government regulation on their cutting-edge models, making clear he considers outpacing China a higher priority than addressing growing public concerns.

Trump asserted in a social media post that a “SICK conspiracy” was afoot to undermine AI, and claimed his oversight alone was enough to prevent models from going rogue. Others inside the administration, including Vice President JD Vance, cast doubt on the motivations that led executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, to call for more government oversight.

The stance has placed the White House at odds with growing public skepticism of AI and wedged vulnerable Republicans in a tough spot as they work to show voters they take the concerns seriously. Even some White House officials privately say they are worried about Trump’s apparent lack of concern about AI’s dangers — a position he’s held for months and has been seemingly unmoved by any industry warnings.

Over four consecutive days, the president has continued to downplay the need to apply new safety checks. He said Monday the US already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, where he frequently posts AI-generated images and videos of himself.

He said the administration had already prevented AI companies from doing “bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’” and singled out Amodei for “now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’”

Trump has long espoused the benefits of AI, and many industry leaders have contributed financially to some of his priority projects, including his inaugural fund and the ballroom he is building at the White House.

AI’s meteoric growth has also led to major stock market gains and buoyed the manufacturing sector through data center construction, both of which Trump points to as evidence of a strong economy under his watch. He called AI “the golden goose” in a second social media post Monday.

Yet fears about AI’s potential to eliminate jobs and data centers’ impact on communities have led to a souring in public sentiment. Recent warnings about security concerns have amplified calls for new guardrails.

Speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Vance cast doubt on calls from industry executives for more AI regulation, warning it could amount to a “trojan horse” by companies that could benefit from new restrictions.

“There are obvious risks to AI, there are some benefits to AI,” Vance said. “I have to say, personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them.”

Still, Vance acknowledged the new technology comes with risks and said he hopes the White House and Congress would work together to develop new guardrails.

“I don’t think Americans should be scared of anything. I think we have to be mindful that there are risks, there are downsides to anything, and that’s certainly true of AI,” Vance told reporters before boarding a plane for a campaign swing.

White House officials said there would likely be meetings set up this week with administration experts on AI and cybersecurity to discuss potential new regulations on the technology. House Speaker Mike Johnson, speaking Sunday, said he hoped to convene talks with Trump, lawmakers and AI executives to plot a path forward.

A new effort was also underway among US officials to beef up planned discussions about AI with Chinese President Xi Jinping when he travels to Washington for a state visit next week. Trump has been eagerly preparing for the occasion, including by finishing up renovation work on the North Portico and a new helipad on the South Lawn.

When the two men last met in Beijing in May, they discussed AI guardrails but produced limited results. Last week the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said the two leaders had agreed to set up an intergovernmental dialogue on AI.

Another BAD first for orangutan....

10-year Treasury yield hits 5%, critical threshold for US economy and markets

By John Towfighi

The rise in bond yields hit a critical threshold on Monday, with the 10-year Treasury yield rising to 5%, a level briefly touched in 2023 and otherwise not seen since 2007. The move in the key benchmark could mean higher costs for Americans who want to buy a home, finance a car or take out other loans.

The 10-year yield extended a recent surge that has pushed up borrowing costs for consumers, businesses and the US government. Yields have climbed despite efforts by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to quell concerns in the bond market.

The global bond market, dominated by the almost $32 trillion US Treasury market, has sold off as investors grapple with a mosaic of concerns, from soaring energy prices and expectations for central banks to raise interest rates to uncertainty about the war with Iran and unchecked government spending amid mounting debt.

Yields on government bonds across the globe have touched multi-year and multi-decade highs this year, raising the cost of borrowing money. It’s compounding concerns about affordability, adding to unease about governments’ enormous debt burdens and threatening to weigh on the stock market.

Yields rise when bonds price falls. The bond market sell-off this year has pushed prices lower and sent the 10-year yield toward levels not seen in nearly two decades. The 10-year yield is now at its highest level since October 2023 and just a whisker away from its highest level since 2007, which was the last time the 10-year yield rose firmly above 5%.

The 10-year yield entered the year trading at 4.15%, and dipped below 4% in February. After the start of the war with Iran, yields sharply reversed course and started climbing – and they’ve yet to stop. The 10-year yield hit 4.5% in May before hitting 5% on Monday.

What 5% means for you

Higher bond yields translate into higher interest rates, making borrowing money more expensive.

The 10-year yield is the benchmark for borrowing costs across the economy. Rising yields can push up the interest rates people pay on their mortgages and other loans.

The housing market is where higher yields can really sting. Mortgage rates closely track the 10-year Treasury yield. As the 10-year yield has surged this year, the average 30-year mortgage rate has climbed to its highest level in more than a year.

The rise in yields has sent mortgage rates climbing. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.76% last week, up from 6.15% at the start of the year.

What 5% means for stocks

Higher bond yields can impact analysts’ calculations for companies’ future earnings and stocks’ value. Higher yields on trustworthy government bonds can also draw investors away from riskier assets like stocks.

A rise in bond yields can put pressure on stocks, but it depends on the context in which yields are rising and how volatile the moves are.

When yields spike dramatically or volatility rears its head, it can send shocks through the stock market. That was the dynamic in April 2025, when President Donald Trump’s tariffs rocked financial markets. The 10-year yield spiked, the dollar dropped and stocks took a dive.

Yet yields this year have steadily climbed, and the S&P 500 is still up more than 10%. When stocks are soaring because of strong corporate earnings, that can outweigh nerves about higher yields.

Markets might be able to handle steadily climbing yields, especially if economic growth is robust. But higher borrowing costs do create more risks for stocks. If earnings were to take a hit, higher yields could become a bigger problem for stocks.

The 10-year yield at 5% “is seen by some as a threshold above which financial markets might go into meltdown,” John Higgins, chief economic adviser for financial markets at Capital Economics, said in a note.

“While we aren’t convinced that 5% is that ‘magic’ number, higher Treasury yields would certainly pose a risk to the sustainability of the US’ public finances as well as threaten equities,” Higgins said.

‘Normal for longer’

The rise in global yields isn’t entirely surprising, analysts say, and could signal that the era of ultra-low interest rates is over, with rates trading at levels more typical of past decades.

After the 2008 financial crisis, central banks across the globe lowered interest rates to ultra-low levels.

Now, global markets are moving on from that era. That shift started in 2022, when central banks hikes rates to tamp down inflation sparked by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The 10-year yield traded at 1.3% five years ago. Now, it is at 5%.

“What we’ve been communicating to our clients is ‘normal for longer,’ meaning these factors are here to stay,” Luis Alvarado, co-head of global fixed income strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told CNN.

There’s been a sustained push higher in yields across the globe this year, which picked up after the start of the war with Iran. Ten-year yields in Germany, France and the United Kingdom are all at levels not seen in more than a decade.

Yields are rising as higher energy prices push central banks to raise interest rates to tamp down inflation. The European Central Bank raised interest rates last week, its second hike this year.

In the backdrop, investors are increasingly skeptical of governments’ bloated budgets and mounting deficits.

Is this what we look like?

Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, the Southern Pinwheel. Still, reddish star forming regions that dot this cosmic pinwheel's spiral arms have suggested another nickname, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. A mere 40,000 light-years across, smaller than the Milky Way, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp, groundbased telescopic view also features foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies.