Author: Jon Ponder

Times of Israel: Ambassador Mike Huckabee hosted a meeting at the US embassy in Jerusalem with Jonathan Pollard, the former spy who gave reams of classified American documents to Israel, The New York Times reported on Thursday…

According to the Times, it is unclear whether Huckabee got approval from the State Department ahead of the meeting. It said the meeting “alarmed” the CIA station chief in Israel, and the White House was not informed of it….

“It was a friendly meeting,” Pollard told the NYT. He said “a lot of things that came up in conversation,” while calling Trump a “madman who has literally sold us down the drain, for Saudi gold,” in apparent reference to the president’s recent decision to sell F-35 fighter jets to Riyadh.

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Lying liars lie about mail-in voting. After his disastrous peace summit with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, wannabe American dictator Donald Trump
announced on state regime TV that Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk. “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” after a nearly three-hour meeting between the leaders in Alaska. “He said there’s not a country in the world that uses it now.”

Did Putin really say that? We’ll never know. But whoever said it, it was a lie. According to a CNN fact checker, “Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.” But the clincher is that Russia legalized mail-in voting in 2020 in a law signed by Trump’s favorite dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Speaking of liars. Like Fox, its cohort in state regime media, Newsmax, has agreed to pay tens of millions in damages to Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. But while Fox paid Dominion $787 million, Newsmax will pay $67 million.

Fascist fashionista. The producer of the “Trump Show” – the daily reality clown show that masquerades as the U.S. government – has ordered Ukrainian Presiden Vlodimir Zelensky’s to wear a suit to their meeting in the Oval Office today. J.D. Vance, Trump’s lap dog, gave Zelensky an on-camera dressing down for showing up last time dressed as what he is – a war leader. But wait – some of us are old enough to remember when former Friend of Donald, fascist bilionaire Elon Musk showed up repeatedly for Oval Office press avails wearing sloppy T-shirts and jeans, accessorized by a nose-picking four year old. Obviously, hypocrisy is just part of the show.

MAGA sets Soviet-style show trials of prominent Dems for mid-term campaign season. The Trump regime is promising retribution for the Democrats’ investigations into Dear Leader’s multiple criminal activities – inciting an insurrection, stealing dozens of boxes of classified documents, fraud, etc. – by investigating prominent Dems based on rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation. It looks like MAGA’s Soviet-style show trials will be timed to broadcast during the campaign season next year.

Schwarzenegger goes MAGA. Since he left office in disgrace in 2011, former California Gubernator Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on a campaign to reinvent himself as a political moderate. While he may have fooled people in other states, Californians have had good reason to be skeptical. But now, at least for the moment, Arnold has revealed his true political self. He has come out against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to help save American democracy from fascism. He announced plans to campaign against a partisan gerrymandering plan Newsom plans to place on the November ballot. “He calls gerrymandering evil, and he means that. He thinks it’s truly evil for politicians to take power from people,” said a Schwarzenegger spokesperson.

Are Trump’s plan for LA Olympics modeled on Hitler’s 1936 Olympics? Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler made the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics a showcase for fascism and his own self-aggrandizement. That seems to have inspired Donald Trump to take control of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles – starting with plans to militarize the Games by deploying the National Guard. The risk to the Games is that with an internationally reviled racist despot in charge, foreigners and normal Americans will stay away in droves.

Making Healthcare Racist Again. RFK Jr. has taken a Trumpian Sharpie to the government’s healthcare operations. As Health and Human Services secretary, he’s purging experts, pushing junk science and reviving his racist claim that Black Americans need fewer vaccines based on a load of pseudoscience, not public health studies. Medical groups are suing, pediatricians are protesting and MAGA-controlled Senate hearings have turned combative over his racialized vaccine rhetoric. Kennedy cites “studies.” But there is no science, just dangerous fiction dressed as reform.

A loss for taxpayers; another win for corporate America. Trump just
axed the IRS Direct File program—a free, public tax-filing tool that threatened the profits of private software giants. Backed by industry lobbyists, the move kills a service that could’ve saved Americans $11 billion annually and delivered billions more in tax credits to low-income families. “It’s not about efficiency,” said Americans for Tax Fairness. “It’s about Trump and his billionaire allies making the system worse to pad the pockets of a predatory industry.”

Russia, Russia, Russia. Trump’s allies tried to rev up patriotism—and stalled out in Soviet nostalgia. The GOP’s official X account posted a MAGA-themed tribute to American cars, only to feature a Lada 2105, a relic of Russian manufacturing. The caption praised Trump’s “One Big Beautiful bill,” but eagle-eyed users—and X’s AI tools—quickly ID’d the vehicle as anything but American. “So close!” mocked Sen. Tina Smith. Rep. Swalwell added, “Don’t point out it’s Russian-made.” Too late. The internet already did.

The Trump regime staged another military assault on Los Angeles yesterday, this time targeting historic MacArthur Park. Not coincidentally, the park lies in the Westlake District, which is home predominantly to immigrants from Central America.

The primary, but unstated, objective of the assault, billed as “Operation Excalibur” was to produce deceptive video content for the Fox propaganda channel and its immitators.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein, who covers national security on Substack, spoke with National Guard members off the record and obtained leaked documents about Operation Excalibur, the assault on a park in a US city by the US military and the Trump Department of Homeland Security:

The news media is describing the operation as an ominous crackdown, but National Guard sources tell me that it was a botched laughingstock. The military aspect of the operation, codenamed Operation Excalibur, has not been previously reported.

The documents reveal that the erstwhile justification for the operation was to try to shut down the distribution of fake IDs. The mission of the 1st Squadron, 18th Cavalry is described as protecting DHS [Department of Homeland Security] “security points and blocking positions” while they undertook their assault. The Squadron was ordered not to “restrict pedestrian movement” and not to “conduct law enforcement activities.”) …

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How to talk to idiocrats, part 1. “He’s a tough guy, why doesn’t he do that? He knows where to find me,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Sunday, addressing Trump’s cartoon-villain border czar Tom Homan’s threat to arrest him. Newsom also spoke directly to Trump: “This is a serious moment, and it requires serious leadership, and it’s time for you to be a commander in chief of the United States of America, and I will have your back if you want to work in a relationship of trust and truth in the spirit of our founding fathers, but you come after poor kids. You come after families. We will do everything in our power to stand up and stand in your way … Where’s your decency, Mr. President? Stop. Rescind this order,” Newsom said. “It’s illegal and unconstitutional … It’s immoral. You’re creating the conditions that you claim you’re solving, and you’re not, and you’re putting real people’s lives at risk.” Newsom also announced plans to sue the Trump administration over the deployment.

How to talk to idiocrats, part 2. In an editorial on June 8, 2025, titled “Intimidation won’t make the Sentinel back down on Hope Florida story,” the Orlando Sentinel editorial board snapped back against Florida’s fascist governor, Ron DeSantis: “[We] received an unsigned letter from the Florida Department of Children and Families on Friday at 2:0 p.m. It was also posted on social media minutes later and reposted by Gov. Ron DeSantis on his X account. It demanded that Orlando Sentinel and reporter Jeffrey Schweers “cease and desist” reporting for a story about funding flowing through Hope Florida, the nonprofit spearheaded by the governor’s wife, Casey. This attempt to bully our newsroom away from a story is clearly intended to be chilling, but it won’t impact our reporting.

Today’s quotable idiocrat. GOP Representative Mary Miller — who once said that Adolf Hitler was “right about one thing” — wrongly identified a Sikh man as Muslim in a racist X post regarding who was allowed to lead prayer in the US House of Representatives. “It’s deeply troubling that a Muslim was allowed to lead prayer in the House of Representatives this morning. This should have never been allowed to happen,” she wrote on X over a picture of Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey who was welcomed to give the prayer by Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew. “America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it. May God have mercy,” she concluded.

“I often say that I serve in Congress with some of the greatest minds of the 18th century. With Rep. Miller I may need to take it back a few more centuries,” Democratic Representative Jared Huffman stated.

Idiocrats hate science. So scientists are leaving the idiocracy. Says Axios: “The great poaching: America’s brain drain begins.”

Magic 8 Ball says: “Yes, definitely.” To the question asked in a headline at Australia ABC: “Is Trump the antichrist? — and other hard questions Christians should be asking.”

Maybe Sesame Street could help? Oh, wait. Donald Trump has been briefed on national security issues just 14 times since he took office. The normal number by now should be around 60 briefings. It shouldn’t even have to be said but when presidents are up to date on world events, bad things can happen. Months before the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, our second stupidest president, dismissed a PDB on Bin Laden months by telling his advisor, “All right. You’ve covered your ass.” To counter Trump’s boredom with these critical issues, National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard has come up with a unique idea. She wants to produce the PBD to resemble a Fox News segment. Sesame Street would be an even better way to keep the babyman’s attention. Too bad he canceled PBS.

Elon’s Ketamine bladder. The New York Times and other sources have reported that during his time as co-president of the United States, Elon Musk’s Ketamine abuse was so excessive that it damaged his bladder. This has led to speculation that as a result the world’s richest man often peed in his pants. Excessive recreational use of the anesthetic drug causes Ketamine Bladder Syndrome. The number one symptom of KBS is not excessive urination. According to urologists, the symptoms are:

• Pain on passing urine
• Blood in urine
• Incontinence (having accidents)
• Needing to go to the toilet more frequently
• Feeling a sense of urgency to pass urine (even when it hasn’t been long since you last went)
• Needing to get up in the night to pass urine
• Pain in the lower abdomen and pelvis area

Pharmacy benefit managers. Writing in Salon.com, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a physician, suggests that Democrats should dismantle a ‘legal’ drug cartel: corporate pharmacy benefit managers.

These middlemen in the drug supply chain don’t discover new medicines. They don’t manufacture them. They don’t even physically dispense most prescriptions. Yet they rake in tens of billions of dollars each year by driving up costs for everyone else — especially patients battling cancer, HIV, heart disease, and autoimmune conditions.

In their report, FTC investigators documented how the PBM industry — which is dominated by just three firms, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx, that collectively oversee roughly 80% of all prescriptions dispensed nationwide — imposed eye-popping markups on generic drugs used to treat deadly diseases. The PBMs’ affiliated pharmacies charged hundreds — even thousands — of percent more than they paid to acquire drugs like the cancer treatment Gleevec and multiple sclerosis medication Ampyra.

Underpinning this is a universal misunderstanding about our approach to healthcare. U.S. healthcare delivery is not a “system.” It’s a legalized criminal racket. Private health insurance corporations, like pharmacy benefit managers, provide no service to patients or their providers. They are nothing more than paywalls that suck up working- and middle-class income to benefit billion-dollar corporations’ bottom lines. It’s a sickness at the heart of U.S. healthcare.

Justice deleted. Trump’s white supremacist Department of Justice is dropping negotiations for court-approved settlements in the murders in 2020 by police officers of both Breonna Taylor in St. Louis and George Floyd in Minneapolis. A spokseperson for the department called the consent decrees “unjustified.”

Taylor was shot by officers in her bed, and Floyd was murdered by an officer who suffocated him on a sidewalk with his knee. The two cases led to Black Lives Matter protests nationwide. To underscore the white supremacist message it means to send, the DOJ announced its decision just days before the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, on May 25, 2020.

As suggested in its Project 2025 manifesto, the Trump regime intends to instigate a new wave of protests this summer so that it can impose martial law on the country which could lead to delaying or canceling the midterm elections next year.

Joder y descubrirlo. MAGA rapper and Cuban immigrant Márquez Duany, better known as El Funky, has less than 30 days to leave the U.S. or face deportation and likely imprisonment in Cuba, where his music helped fuel the largest anti-government protests in Cuba in decades. “If I could vote, I would have voted for Trump,” he said recently. “He’s the strongest president when it comes to Cuba.”

Gonna need a bigger Sharpie. The Climate Change Denier-in-Chief has hollowed out the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just in time for the 2025 hurricane season. NOAA’s weather forecasting and hazard-warning branch – critically understaffed ahead of the hurricane season, several scientists told the BBC. Six to 10 hurricanes are predicted for the Atlantic and Caribbean region from June to November this year.

Trump’s deplorable speech on trophy wives. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) weighed in on Trump’s deranged commencement address at West Point on May 24.
“I don’t think that those who have gone through West Point expected to have their commander-in-chief address them and start talking about trophy wives or start talking [about] how he has so many investigations,” Crockett said. “It is time for Republicans to start calling him out and start questioning his mental acuity, and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally. We know when it comes down to his criminality, he is not qualified to serve, but this is just absolutely deplorable.”

Racism and lying in the Oval. Having been subjected to the Trump clown show for too long, we all knew he had to be lying about the purported white genocide in South Africa. Now fact checkers at Reuters have uncovered the truth. “Trump’s image of dead ‘white farmers’ came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa.” Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the office with photos of people handling body bags. He claimed the bodies in the bags were farmers who were massacred because they were white. In fact, Reuters learned, the photos showed humanitarian workers with bodies of victims of M23 rebels in the Congolese city of Goma in February 2025.

Best at being worst. Whether Trump will best presidents Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan to become the worst president in U.S. history remains to be seen. But four months into his second term, Trump takes the prize as the most brazenly corrupt chief executive the country has yet to produce.

According to Huffpost, “Trump is taking his efforts to use his office for personal enrichment — the very definition of corruption — selling face time to those who put money into his bank account by purchasing nearly $200 million worth of his branded souvenir crypto coins. Just four investors in the $TRUMP coin grift collectively own 2.7 million coins, worth a total of $38.3 million, based on the $14 price per coin that day.

In past presidencies, especially during the Warren G. Harding administration, the thieves were in the cabinet or the lower ranks. The current level of corruption is unprecedented, Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian, tells HuffPost. “Interestingly,” she says, “the real financial corruption in an administration is around the president, not usually the president himself.”

It’s not ‘deporting.’ In the latest outrageous act of kidnapping people and renditioning them to foreign sites, Trump goon squads have seized Vietnamese and Burmese migrants and flown them to South Sudan, violating a court order in the process and likely committing criminal contempt.

Everybody hates Elon. Trump’s circle is not holding back about their heart-felt dislike for former Pres. Elon Musk. From The New Republic:

Musk’s unceremonious exit from government followed widespread reports that several senior Trump officials practically hated the tech billionaire, finding him abrasive, unfunny, and pompous — with some describing Musk as the “most irritating person” they’d “ever had to deal with.”

“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” a senior Trump official told Rolling Stone last month. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

No, you’re out of control. Reacting to the nearly 40 nationwide injunctions against the administration in the past four months, Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, complained to the U.S. Supreme Court last week that the federal judiciary is out of control. “But another explanation is also available,” Adam Server, writing in “Trump Is Tired of Courts Telling Him He’s Breaking the Law,” in The Atlantic. “An out-of-control executive who ignores constitutional restraints on his authority also results in a lot of injunctions. Even accepting the premise that there are too many nationwide injunctions, executive—not judicial—overreach seems like the actual problem here.”

Fascist Idiocrat spotlight: Yale fascism expert Timothy Snyder puts Trump’s recently demoted U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in the spotlight:

Ed Martin is a major actor in Trump’s attempted regime change to authoritarianism. His particular role is to transform the law into a tool to intimidate Americans. After a stint as interim US Attorney for DC which was marked by unprecedented weaponization of the position, Martin will now continue his work for Trump as the official “weaponization czar.”

This is a new position within the Justice Department, designed by the Trump administration, to punish people who have committed no crimes. Martin was originally placed on the “weaponization working group” seemingly ex officio when he was a US Attorney; he will now continue as its chairman. On Martin’s account, his assignment will be to publicly single out Americans who have not been found guilty of anything, or for that matter even indicted. He says there will be “no limit to the targets.”

Mixed Signals. Yet more confusion at the top. On Tuesday, as Republicans were arguing, not about whether to cut Medicaid, but rather how deeply to slash into the nation’s healthcare system, Dear Leader did an about face, warning his House MAGA minions: “Don’t fuck around with Medicaid.” It’s likely Trump saw the KFF Health Tracking Poll in April that found that a whopping 76 percent of voters disapprove of MAGA’s cuts to Medicaid. That includes 79 percent of Independents and 55 percent of Republicans.

Rubio goes rogue: Secretary of State Marco Rubio has gone all in on the new authoritarianism. Marco Rubio Says No Judge Has Authority Over Him in Alarming Testimony.

What is DOGE hiding? DOGE, the secretive federal department that Trump and Elon Musk have deployed to destroy the U.S. government from within, has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to to declare them exempt from compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. The appeal is a response to an order by a federal judge to comply with FOIA in March.