There’s no context for this audio of Tom Emmer speaking at some sort of private meeting as found by clip guy Aaron Rupar. But it’s unmistakably the House Majority Whip’s voice telling donors or whoever that imposing work requirements is the GOP’s not- all-that-roundabout way of cutting back the enrollment expansions from the Biden Administration, saying that this was Trump’s idea to not give Dems something to run on but they needed to find the savings somewhere.

Emmer’s whiny voice makes it difficult to discern the tone, as in whether it’s confident or defensive, but it’s interesting because either way it sounds like someone who’s arguing against his future self after a potential timeline in which Republicans get absolutely mangled in 2026 and 2028, that the voters were wrong to see the work requirements as exactly the way he pitched them privately.

This week’s Economist/YouGov national survey finds a large plurality/near-majority of respondents at 46 percent said yes when asked “Do you think that Donald Trump was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Jeffrey Epstein?” versus just 32 percent who do not and 23 percent unsure.

That just a third of Americans overall are sure their president did not rape teenage sex-trafficking victims just barely loses out on the headline against what his own voters said: Freaking 10 percent of them said yes, another 20 percent aren’t sure, and the remaining 69 percent, apparently rounded downward, are sure that he did not rape teenage sex-trafficking victims supplied by Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s job approval among overall respondents is 40 percent, or 8 percent higher than the number who are certain that he did not rape teenage sex-trafficking victims on Epstein’s private island.

The Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office, based in Oklahoma City, the capital of you already guessed which state, is investigating far right Superintendent Ryan Walters over last week’s fuckup in which he had some sort of footage of naked women that was probably porn but nobody’s really sure running on a TV screen in his office during a meeting with other education officials, NBC reports.

It’s not clear what if any statute Walters is accused of violating by playing whatever the hell it was he played. It doesn’t sound like it’d be illegal so much as a fireable offense. But other top Republicans in the state, even ones that had been considered allies in the past, have been sick of Walters’ clownfuckery for a while now and were just waiting for an excuse to delegitimize him so might as well exploit one he just handed to them on a silver platter during a goddamned official meeting.

“Any suggestion that a device of mine was used to stream inappropriate content on the television set is categorically false. I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing,” the dipshit tweeted.

The Orange God Emperor is en route to an airport where he’ll depart his mother’s home country and possibly say more stupid and incriminating shit to reporters before stepping onto Air Force One.

“Dalton Rice is a city official with very, and I mean very little, if any, experience in emergency management. Don’t let the phony news media distract you from the core of the problems. There was no warning system and they were warned 12 hours before by the National Weather. ‘Complacency rules’…..The area has a long history of flooding. That’s why it’s the Guadalupe River.”

“Rivers by nature handle run-off from storms, some better than others. Sometime others need human help to do a better job. But it’s still in Mother Nature’s hands. Stop trying to pack the blame on someone, that doesn’t resolve anything. Move on and devise a way for lessen the severity of these catastrophes” – Top comment on the Fox News article “Texas local official caught mocking DHS Secretary as ‘Homeland Barbie’ after deadly floods,” posted Monday afternoon.

Now let’s just play along and assume that the commenter is familiar with the region, lives or has lived in the area, had heard of Dalton Rice prior to this month, and so on. That the post at least in that regard is informed of Rice’s role and seems to speak to an awareness that, during that presser with “Barbie,” he had said “the storm that caused the deadly flash flood dumped more rain than what was forecasted” by the National Weather Service, thus pointing to what at that moment was in his mind a failure by the government led by convicted felon President Trump but a function outside of Kristi Noem’s portfolio as the NWS is under Hustlin’ Howard Lutnick’s Commerce Department.

At least 38 of 56 people abducted in March and held hostage since then were executed by their captors in northern Nigeria last weekend after collecting the equivalent of $36,680 or $655 each in ransom for their return, the BBC reports on a lesson certain American entities finding themselves targeted for extortion by an illegitimate president and his criminal regime might want to internalize.

As for what happened in Nigeria some of the details are a little too disturbing to reprint here but at least sixteen of the known survivors were accounted for in hospitals, recovering from the ordeal.

Last night, we stood shoulder to shoulder for the dignified transfer of Police Officer Didarul Islam.

A husband, a father, a son. He leaves behind a city in grief.

Officer Islam died as he lived: a hero. pic.twitter.com/lhO8AnfT4O

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) July 29, 2025

“I have been briefed on the tragic shooting that took place in Manhattan, a place that I know and love. I trust our Law Enforcement Agencies to get to the bottom of why this crazed lunatic committed such a senseless act of violence. My heart is with the families of the four people who were killed, including the NYPD Officer, who made the ultimate sacrifice. God Bless the New York Police Department, and God Bless New York!” posted convicted felon President Trump on Tuesday morning, responding to the death of 36 year-old NYPD Officer Didarul Islam, a Bangladeshi immigrant and father of two who was off-duty when sick asshole Shane Tamura shot him and four other people dead with an AR-15 on Monday during a rampage at a Manhattan building.

You might have noticed that missing from the post was “Officer Islam,” a stark contrast from last year following the murder of Officer Jonathan Diller, whose name appears in two Trump Truth Social posts plus a third “retruthing” MAGA influencer Steve Gruber gloating “NY Gov Kathy Hochul was asked leave the wake of fallen NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller just minutes after arriving on Friday afternoon. Several cops waiting outside the funeral home then clapped as she walked away.”

Trump was welcomed at that wake in the very MAGA Long Island bedroom community, holding a lengthy press conference outside the funeral home. It was a useful campaign stop while Donald was pitching himself as pro-law and order because “The ‘thug’ in question has 21 prior arrests and just recently got out of prison – he NEVER should have been let back out on the streets.”

“While the election is still more than a year away, this August in-district work period is an opportunity to go home and sell your work to your constituents. With the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law by President Trump just a few weeks ago, this is a critical opportunity to continue to define how this legislation will help every voter and push back on Democrat fearmongering. As you head back to your district, the NRCC has prepared the following guide to help you ensure you maximize your time,” says a memo from the NRCC to members urging them to not use the time off relaxing and going on vacation and shit but trying to help sell a bill that they didn’t actually want to vote for. This is about five months after they told members to stop holding town halls, lol.

The memo’s pretty long but there’s some funny shit in it, like these bullet points all linked to a May 9th Breitbart article about poll-tested pablum continuing to test well in internal NRCC polling, nearly two months before the bill was fully written and passed. Almost like they understood that more recent polling over the bill is not so great and in fact fucking terrible. “Democrats are fearmongering about Republican efforts to strengthen Medicaid, but we can’t let them control the narrative. Voters back Republicans’ commonsense reforms: • 86 percent support removing deceased/ineligible recipients • 72 percent support work requirements • 71 percent believe there is widespread fraud in Medicaid… The playbook is simple: focus on President Trump and House Republicans’ efforts to improve voters’ everyday lives and show the contrast with out of touch Democrats.”

“Junior’s Restaurant and Bakery, the iconic New York institution known for serving the ‘World’s Most Fabulous Cheesecake,’ is going big for National Cheesecake Day with sweet deals for fans everywhere. On Wednesday, July 30, cheesecake lovers can celebrate with major savings across Junior’s restaurants, bakeries, and online store: In-Restaurant: $5.00 off any slice with the purchase of a breakfast, lunch, or dinner entrée (dine-in or take-out),” says a press release from the “iconic” diner on Flatbush Ave in Downtown Brooklyn where the food actually sucks worse than at some of the dumpiest Greek-owned places in Astoria. And yet everyone’s under this collective delusion that allows the place to justify charging $9.25 a slice of a goddamned cheesecake that you may be surprised to learn does not, in fact, cure metastatic cancer, despite the implications.

“National Cheesecake Day is our Super Bowl. We wanted to go big this year, give back to our fans across the New York area and around the country, thank them for 75 amazing years, and make it easy for everyone to enjoy a slice of what we do best,” the press release quotes “Alan Rosen, third-generation owner of Junior’s,” and yeah this is what he and his staff do best: marketing a sub-mediocre diner into mythic status and charge fucking $17.50 for a burger for the privilege of paying $5 less for a slice of cheesecake you could mistake for Sara Lee in a blind taste test.

My first time riding an Argentinian bred horse— her name is “Abundance”— she reaffirmed that no hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle! pic.twitter.com/M6BfFeaSo2

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) July 29, 2025

The above tweet is not directly relevant to the quotation in the headline. It’s not irrelevant either, however. KSAT in San Antonio this week obtained via public records requests a set of text messages between Kerrville, Texas officials from the immediate aftermath of the early July 4th flash flood disaster that killed at least 140 people statewide, 110 of them in the larger Kerr County, many of them trapped at summer camps and campsites in the normally arid region’s maze of gullies and streams. “Just saw you met Homeland Barbi, how is she?!?!?!” one Kerrville staffer texted City Manager Dalton Rice after dog-murdering DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s July 5th press conference.

“Beahahaha basically homeland Barbie,” Rice responded, indicating that the contempt for the plastic surgery-ravaged former South Dakota governor – more commonly referred to as “ICE Barbie” on left-leaning blogs and news sites – has percolated even among officials in deep red areas of the country.

Rice, who at the presser had at the very least hinted that fault for the disaster lay with the Trump Regime’s depleted National Weather Service, received praise from his counterparts in municipalities across the state. “Dalton, great job at the press conference. Steady, factual, clear. I know we sent crews up very early this morning and have more on the way,” San Antonio City Manager Erik Walsh wrote in an email to Rice on what KSAT says was just before noon July 4th, but that timeline doesn’t totally add up since it was just hours after the flood. Might’ve been an error in the article.

“The Fake News is reporting that I am SEEKING a ‘Summit’ with President Xi of China. This is not correct, I am not SEEKING anything! I may go to China, but it would only be at the invitation of President Xi, which has been extended. Otherwise, no interest! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” posted convicted felon President Trump early Tuesday.

At least four people are dead – an NYPD officer included – after a man identified as Shane Devon Tamura of Las Vegas opened fire in a Manhattan building housing the headquarters of the NFL, Blackstone, KPMG, and other major companies on Monday evening, the New York Post reports.

Tamura also blasted himself with the high-powered AR-15 he used in the attack, so technically it’s at least six dead, but fuck him. The crazy asshole’s motive is unknown but the targeted location is extremely unlikely to have been chosen at random given the tenants of the building.

A third whistleblower has come forward against creepy looking weirdo former Trump defense lawyer-turned Justice Department official-turned federal circuit court nominee Emil Bove, claiming that the far right shitbag had lied about an unspecified matter during his confirmation hearings, the Washington Post reports without getting into what exactly the lie was other than saying it was something completely separate and apart from Bove encouraging subordinates to defy court orders.

Dem former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost to Senator Bernie “M4M” Moreno last year by 3.9 percent – which isn’t all that bad considering former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the Buckeye State by 10 percent – met last week with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hopefully not to just catch up on old times, Axios reports on a good candidate set coming together for the Donks.

Every Senate map is bad for the Dems. There are no good ones. They all fucking suck. When you string 2026 and 2028 together however you can see 50 if not 51 seats as gettable. Defense of held seats will be (relatively) easy at least. Tops is North Carolina, which you can start feeling cautiously bullish about, Maine, which Susan Collins is a weasel but if a good Dem steps up, maybe. Then Wisconsin in 2028, where RonAnon may just dip out. The thing with Brown in Ohio is that if it comes to a point where he’s clearly ahead of Jon Humpsman or whatever that scrub’s name is then it’s probably a national environment in with Texas and even Kentucky are winnable if, again, there are strong Dems in contention. The more likely path is that it’ll be where it’s a tossup until the bitter end and then one of them wins by like 5 percent and fucking Nate Silver will be able to say the data that none of you plebes were paying attention to had pointed to that outcome all along.

“Apple’s iOS 26 update introduces aggressive message filtering. Political texts-even from verified and compliant senders-will be treated as spam by default, silently sent to an ‘Unknown’ inbox with no alerts or notifications. That change has profound implications for our ability to fundraise, mobilize voters, and run digital campaigns. It’s important to understand: Apple isn’t just targeting cold outreach or spammy actors. Every political message – shortcode, long code, doesn’t matter -gets pushed into the dark. The only workaround-getting a voter to reply-is increasingly rare and entirely at the mercy of Apple’s unclear rules. How will a voter reply if they never get the message? Here’s the shift in practice. Today, a voter with an iPhone gets our message just like a normal text.”

“In iOS 26, unless that person has already replied, our message is silently sent to the ‘Unknown’ inbox. No ping, no badge, just buried in an inbox few people ever check. We’ve spent years complying with rigorous standards – providing full documentation, opt-in proof, and message samples via Campaign Verify and The Campaign Registry-yet Apple ignores that. Carriers respect it. Apple doesn’t. Estimated prospecting losses: NRSC alone could see a $25M+ revenue hit. Since 70 percent of small-dollar donations come via text, and iPhones make up 60 percent of US mobile devices, the macro effect could be over $500M in lost GOP revenue. But this isn’t just about money-it’s also about the impact on voter contact. GOTV messages, voter persuasion texts, rapid-response messaging, election day reminders-these are time-sensitive, critical communications. iOS 26 breaks all of that,” says a memo from the National Republican Senate Committee’s central fundraising crew.

Huh. Interesting how it’s “OMG we gotta stop this!” and not like “Well that sucks, but it’ll even out because the Dems send out the same exact kind of text messages.” Almost like they’re admitting they rely on spamming the kind of people prone to responding to random texts asking them for money.

The video from which this still image was captures is as of 2:39 PM EDT on Monday, July 28, 2024, still up on the “Mike Collins War Room” Twitter account, which was stealth launched on Sunday before the Georgia MAGA Congressman officially announced his bid Monday with the obnoxious trucking-themed campaign to take on incumbent Dem Jon Ossoff because term-limited Governor Brian Kemp didn’t want to risk losing even though polling showed him formidable.

The official launch against a primary field shared only with fellow MAGA House member Buddy Carter came just an hour or so after NOTUS reported Kemp and convicted felon President Trump butting heads yet again after another quasi-detente and yes it’s about who’s going to run for Senate, with Kemp trying to recruit former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley. What’s funny and completely unsurprising is that it’s not that Trump is necessarily opposed to Dooley so much as unfamiliar with him and far more annoyed at Kemp grooming him to run for the seat. “People are pissed. Trumpworld is pissed,” one minion says of the way Kemp has handled it.

Even funnier is this quote from a “source close to Trump”: “You think in Georgia they would’ve learned their lesson with someone tied to football. But apparently they haven’t,” referring to Herschel Walker. This as if it was Kemp who went out of his way to recruit the CTE-brained Walker to run against Raphael Warnock in 2022 and not, you know, Trump himself. Fucking assholes, lol.

What was obviously going to happen when convicted felon President Trump and his pedophile-protecting Attorney General Pam Bondi began trying to find some loophole to keep idiot Acting US Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba has happened as Politico reports the defense attorney for some gangbanger asshole facing gun and drug charges has filed a challenge against his pending trial as the case would proceed under “questionable legal authority” given Habba’s non-legitimacy.

“I got the idea over the weekend because my trial was imminent and I thought it was an important issue that needed to be litigated,” said attorney Thomas Mirigliano, who did not further elaborate on the setting of where he got the idea. Which invites speculation that he was sitting behind the wheel, staring into space while waiting for a red light, realizing he was looking at a sign that said “PARK HERE: $11.99/HOUR” and thought to himself “Hah, wonder if Habba Blabba’s going to go back to that line of work now th- Oh motherfucker! She’s still the US Attorney, right?!?”

Chinese EV auto manufacturers Neeta, Zeekr, and several others that sound like you can order them on Temu and/or could be the original designers of the Trump T1 mobile phone have been juicing their sales numbers recently by requiring a vehicle be insured before a sale in order to inflate their sales numbers in an absolute clusterfuck of a market with 100+ brands, Reuters reports.

The net effect is not like in Fargo where Jerry was ripping off GMAC by filling out loan applications for nonexistent vehicles let alone Enron. It is however a symptom of what appears to be a serious bubble in the country’s chaotic auto industry at this late stage of capitalism under a false imprimatur of communism. The housing market’s considerably worse. Shit, don’t even get started on it.

Last week the Bulwark’s Jonathan V Last put together a pretty compelling if conspiratorial hypothesis that Jaydee’s subtly undermining the fat fuck when it comes to the dead sex-trafficker, closely scrutinizing every one of his statements on the matter, pointing in particular about how, in responding to the birthday letter story that the veep kind of gave away the game, writing “There are plenty of ways Vance could have defended Trump. He could have said that the letter was fabricated; or that it was genuine, but meaningless. He could have said that these sorts of letters were ghostwritten by Trump’s staff. Vance chose the one defense that is falsifiable and then invited the media to demolish it. That’s probably not an accident,” and yeah it’s hard to see how neckbeard isn’t continuing to follow that same script in the above clip. If it is the script.

“Plaintiff President Donald J Trump (‘Plaintiff’ or ‘President Trump’), by and through undersigned counsel and pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 26(d), 30(a)(2)(A)(iii), and 32(a)(4)(C), files this Motion to Compel Expedited Deposition De Bene Esse of Defendant Keith Rupert Murdoch (‘Motion’). In support, President Trump states as follows: SUMMARY OF MOTION The Court should grant this Motion and enter an Order compelling the expedited deposition of Defendant Keith Rupert Murdoch (‘Murdoch’) for at least three reasons. First, Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York. Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial. Second, mindful that there presently is no current scheduling order given the recency of the commencement of this action, the parties have not yet conducted their Rule 26(f) conference, and initial disclosures have not yet been served, the requested discovery sought in this Motion is limited solely to Murdoch.”

“Third, Murdoch has an advantage over President Trump as Murdoch is able to defend himself because he has access to all the information and documents related to the below-defined malicious and defamatory Article, and the decision behind deciding to publish it. On the other hand, President Trump has very limited information related to the Article. For these and other reasons that follow, Murdoch would not suffer any prejudice significant enough to outweigh the good cause that exists to grant this Motion,” write convicted felon President Trump’s lawyers in the motion requesting an expedited deposition of Old Man Murdoch in the fat bastard’s insane lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal’s article about the Epstein birthday letter.