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Two states, one storm
Only one got disaster aid
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news...-relief-again/
how are blue states are supposed to keep paying into a system that deprives them of the agreed upon benefits of being in that union?
Trump is convening an ad-hoc, appointed by him star-chamber to fire Lisa Cook after the Supreme Court said Trump firing her would be improper
More cargo-cult tyrant bull
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/1...ation-01113667President Donald Trump established a committee of inquiry to investigate whether Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook made “false statements in connection with one or more mortgage instruments,” his latest effort to remove her from the central bank.
“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump wrote in a memo.
Last edited by Winehole23; 3 Weeks Ago at 09:24 AM.
Two states, one storm
Only one got disaster aid
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news...-relief-again/
how are blue states are supposed to keep paying into a system that deprives them of the agreed upon benefits of being in that union?
private meetings, official corruption, invasion of privacy, regulatory capture
https://www.alternet.org/medicare-ar...-intelligence/A cadre of elite techies, financiers, and high-level Trump administration officials have spent a year quietly charting an extraordinary and rapid campaign to persuade Americans to use apps and other artificial intelligence-powered tools to manage their healthcare and medical records.
As that campaign has unfolded, administration officials have granted tech companies an unusual opportunity to nudge the nation’s health department toward a loosely regulated future for AI health apps in which the government reimburses them for services as it does medical professionals.
In February, federal health officials invited those businesses — including tech giants Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple, and Google — to a listening session on conversational AI products for patients, such as chatbots. Representatives from at least 35 industry organizations attended the meeting held by the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for regulating health apps as medical devices. Companies were prompted in advance to explain their AI products and how they access patients’ sensitive medical information.
...
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has not formally announced the chat room through federal regulatory channels, though CMS officials have talked about it at industry conferences. Legal experts said the chat room resembles a federal advisory panel, which would be required to operate in public view.
KFF Health News reviewed thousands of Slack messages, meeting transcripts, and video recordings that reveal how the Trump administration has granted the industry a direct line to top government officials — including former head of the Department of Government Efficiency Amy Gleason.
But the meeting did not appear on the FDA’s public calendar or regulatory notices, nor was the public invited. Rather, the invitation for a select group to help shape federal policy governing AI in healthcare was extended in a chat room on the messaging service Slack.
“This is a great opportunity to support HHS’ goals and share your state-of-the-art understanding of safe Conversational AI development and monitoring to help FDA shape future guidance,” CMS senior policy adviser Morgan Taylor wrote in the Slack workspace.
special interests playing in the government sandbox
“We wanted to give industry a chance to play in the sandbox of government-supported healthcare,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said in September at the public launch of an initiative that allows health apps to bill Medicare for AI services such as wearable device tracking. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of AI in healthcare, claiming it is “much better informed than any doctor in the country.”
Meanwhile, HHS staff even promised that a recently launched Medicare App Library would serve as a lucrative pipeline for those businesses to get new users. The library's webpage currently promotes only two dozen commercial apps to millions of American seniors and those with disabilities.
Doctors, meanwhile, are increasingly worried about how patients use and share their medical records with the nascent technology.
“Some of these tools just aren’t ready for primetime,” said John Whyte, CEO of the American Medical Association. “We don’t have enough data about them. We don’t understand how they work, how they’re using the information. There’s no liability if these tools get things wrong.”
CMS officials declined to answer several questions about the Slack workspace, including about its legality.
netted out, FDA and Dr. Oz are letting AI companies reshape Medicare regulation and policy, and letting them play with Americans' healthcare data
maha my ass
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-food-analysisThe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to expand a controversial loophole to allow some of the world’s most toxic chemicals to be added directly to food without a safety review.
The “threshold of regulation” (TOR) exemption currently allows dangerous compounds to be used without review in food contact materials, such as packaging or processing equipment, if they are not carcinogenic, and are added at levels below 0.5 parts per billion (ppb).
But campaigners say many chemicals, especially hormone disruptors linked to brain damage and reproductive harm in children, are considered dangerous at levels far below 0.5ppb. Even in its limited form, the loophole has already raised alarm. One TOR exemption that allows the rocket fuel chemical perchlorate to be used in grain bags dramatically increased the amount of the compound found in kids’ cereal, which advocates say could cause brain damage.
The new proposed TOR expansion would allow companies to use the chemicals as an ingredient added directly to food, as flavorings, preservatives, emulsifiers, processing aids, enzymes, stabilizers and binders, and for myriad other uses, in ultra-processing.
The revelation comes after Robert F Kennedy Jr and the FDA claimed victory and declared “promises kept” in August for “closing” a different controversial regulatory loophole called “generally regarded as safe” (Gras), which over the decades was used to send ingredients to the market that campaigners said could sicken, injure or kill people
taxpayer funded political propaganda despite a court order to stop
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/live-...b064943475fea4After a coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the ads – arguing they cons ute taxpayer-funded “propaganda” – the Department of Homeland Security said in a Saturday court filing that the ads wouldn’t continue past Sunday. President Donald Trump had also said campaign funds would be used to pay for future ads.
In a Sunday order, Judge Jennifer Rochon wrote the administration must “cancel or cause to be cancelled” any such ads from airing starting Sunday evening, and that the government is banned from “using, disbursing, or transferring” DHS funds to develop and distribute the videos.
But according to the advertising data, two of the ads aired multiple times during various shows after Rochon’s deadline passed, including on “ABC World News Tonight” and CBS’s “60 Minutes.” The ads, which were paid for using DHS funds, included one resembling a Trump 2024 presidential campaign video and another of him and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth advocating for the Iran war.
government by special birthday boy
private donations funding projects the president controls is corruption
https://www.washingtonpost.com/inves...umps-ballroom/Some donors on the list obtained by The Post cut large checks, while others created installment plans that are still being paid off, the additional records show. The list does not include in-kind contributions.
The Post’s reporting does not establish a connection between the donation commitments and favorable actions by the Trump administration. But the do ents show that the vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government.
Companies or executives of firms that have had contracts with the federal government during Trump’s second term accounted for about half of the total, The Post found.
routing government funding through a presidentially controlled nonprofit org is super shady
The ballroom donations are routed through the Trust for the National Mall, a D.C.-based nonprofit whose mission is to restore and preserve the National Mall and the White House grounds. Nonprofits are not generally required to disclose their donors.
Prospective donors were sent a “pledge agreement form,” a copy of which was obtained by The Post, for giving toward the “Donald J. Trump Ballroom.” The form lists Meredith O’Rourke, the top fundraiser for Trump’s 2024 campaign, as the main contact.
political appointee calls off CFTC insider trading probe
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...gulator-probe/Billions of dollars’ worth of futures contracts were bought 15 minutes before Trump announced his U-turn in a post on Truth Social. The U.S. CFTC began an investigation of insider trading, which was halted after the intervention of a Trump-linked advisor.
slush fund for partisan snitches
quite the vision of civil society
"People will make millions of dollars by turning others in"
wildly illegal
Comey prosecuted on supposed 2016 espionage act violation
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/comey-...iminal-chargesOn October 5, the DOJ filed a criminal information in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. A criminal information is not an indictment — and this distinction is critical to understanding this debacle.
An information is a charging do ent, written and signed by the prosecutor, without going to a grand jury or a judge. For misdemeanors, which carry a sentence of less than a year in jail, that's enough to start the case.
But the Fifth Amendment says that no one may be "held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury." And so, to charge a defendant with a felony, prosecutors have to convince a grand jury to vote for indictment by demonstrating probable cause to believe that a crime occurred
The sole exception is when the defendant "in open court and after being advised of the nature of the charge and of the defendant's rights — waives prosecution by indictment," in which case he "may be prosecuted by information." So, in the case of a plea deal, the parties can just walk into court with an information and not bother with a grand jury.
Obviously, that’s not what happened here. And, when pressed, prosecutors pointedly refused to confirm that they weren’t about to get a grand jury indictment and show up to arrest him. So Comey’s lawyers filed an emergency motion for a hearing before Judge Trevor McFadden hoping to head off a public arrest.
In court on October 9, the government admitted that it had planned to do just that, taking Comey into custody after close of business to ensure that he’d remain locked up through the holiday weekend. Deprived of the the handcuffed perp walk they so clearly desired, they eventually agreed to hold off for 30 days while the court considers Comey’s motion to dismiss the case.
Last edited by Winehole23; 1 Week Ago at 01:07 PM.
DOJ attempt to stiff-arm probable cause hearing, pre-election Comey perpwalk denied
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-hunte...85747eb0045b52A federal judge on Monday dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about Hunter Biden, saying the investigation that produced the charges was rushed, overtly political and dogged by “critical mistakes.”
“What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a scathing ruling from the bench that dismissed the case against former officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides.
He noted that the investigation was opened a day after a primetime speech by President Donald Trump in which he rehashed grievances over his 2020 election loss and that it was mandated and closely tracked by FBI Director Kash Patel. He also pointed out that the Justice Department could have brought the case, which arises from statements made in 2023, at any time but opted to do so two weeks ago, in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm voting.
“I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend that I cannot read a calendar,” Faruqui said.
wut
DOJ making up inflammatory bull about defendants in splashy public announcements isn't going over well in Florida
Trump's DOJ has a pattern of smearing defendants publicly, pre-trial
A federal judge is demanding answers from the Trump Justice Department after prosecutors' splashy announcement about a fraud case went sideways.
In an order issued Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Daniel Irick directed the government to name the people who wrote and posted a press release falsely claiming all 13 defendants in a Florida immigration fraud case were foreign nationals, according to a post on X by court records researcher Seamus Hughes. Those people must then explain in writing why they should not be sanctioned.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida put out the release Monday under a headline touting "13 Foreign Nationals Charged." Its opening line said the defendants were from Brazil and Cuba.
"That press release appears to both contain a false assertion and be in violation of Local Rule 3.11," Irick wrote. "In fact, all thirteen Defendants are not foreign nationals. Based on the hearings that occurred yesterday, the Court knows that at least one of the Defendants is a United States citizen. Others might be United States citizens as well."He also aimed at the release's final paragraph, which ties the case to a Homeland Security Task Force created under President Donald Trump's executive order led "Protecting the American People Against Invasion." That paragraph lists crimes of violence and crimes against children, none of which are charged in the case."There is no basis to provide incorrect or false or materially misleading information about the nationality of any criminal defendant in a public statement, especially when the information concerning foreign nationality is included for the purpose of aggravating the description of the charges," Irick wrote.
He added that the release came on the heels of the prosecutor named in the press release "providing what appeared to be incorrect information concerning a Defendant" at Monday's hearings.https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other...it/ar-AA2gHuASIrick reminded counsel that they are bound by the Rules Regulating the Florida Bar, citing a local rule that allows the court to "disbar, suspend, reprimand, or otherwise discipline" lawyers who appear before it. The government has until Thursday to name those responsible, who must respond by the same day.
no data, no problem
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/1...-data-01151704The Trump administration has stopped disclosing natural disaster data that has shown President Donald Trump favoring Republican states in awarding federal aid.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency last week removed from its daily operations briefing an official list of pending disaster requests that it has published since at least 2012. The publicly available briefing is emailed to thousands of federal employees, and state and local emergency management officials.
...
FEMA removed the information the day after POLITICO reported that Trump fast-tracked Florida disaster aid approval just before the midterm elections — while taking no action on earlier requests from other states and from tribal nations.
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