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It sure is nice having those Biden era fuel prices back now that everything is so affordable under this current administration that was supposed to make everything cheaper for Americans.
I wonder what's costing us more: the intervention in Iran or the extra money at the pump?
what's congress supposed to do? The only thing can do is pass things like paper ballots, allow audits, id laws, and hope everyone is playing fair.
Not true at all.
Congress can also turn their backs on the US and every citizen within it, selling us all out in support of a foreign country known primarily for mysteriously always being at the center of conflict and unrest.
For instance, this is an actual statement made by Republican US Senator Lindsay Graham yesterday, speaking on Fox News:
It's not been altered, taken out of context, etc.
Our elected representatives are really showing their true colors lately.
News:
"Good morning, C&C, it's Wednesday! Your roundup today includes: the FBI ran not one but FOUR secret spy operations against Trump spanning nine years and four administrations -- and buried the evidence in files that literally don't exist in searches; Bari Weiss's CBS commits actual journalism by finding a single LA building with 89 registered hospice companies (and patients who never seem to die); oil prices crash back under $90 just one day after CNN predicted doom, while Trump announces the first new US oil refinery in fifty years; and the Great Blue State Exodus accelerates as Washington passes a millionaires tax while Starbucks's founder posts his farewell to Seattle from the departure lounge."
This week, Washington State's House passed a 9.9% income tax on millionaires after a 24-hour legislative marathon.
Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks from a single Seattle storefront into an iconic global empire. He just moved his family office to Miami. The company is opening a new major corporate office in Nashville, Tennessee. Last week, the official line was "we're expanding, not moving." The founder just left town.
Independent media is having a moment. Remember Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the RussiaGate illusion Obama and Hillary cooked up that led to the Mar-a-Lago raid? Turns out it was only the beginning. Yesterday, John Solomon's Just the News broke the story as an exclusive, headlined, "Trump targeted by four FBI code-named counterintel probes that ensnared hundreds of Americans." Four! Corporate media completely ignored it, but early this morning (Q followers: at 12:57am, in case that means anything), President Trump reposted the story on Truth Social without comment.
Beginning in the summer of 2016, at the precise moment Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Obama's FBI launched a counterintelligence operation against him. They were having such a great time. The first operation was code-named Crossfire Hurricane, named after a Rolling Stones song with the upbeat lyrics 'it's a gas, gas, gas.'
Over the next four years of the Biden Autopen regime, the FBI ran three more domestic spying operations --using tools meant for terrorists and spies-- against Trump and Republicans. They were each called: Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost. The ops ran sequentially, each successive "probe" starting as the prior one concluded, so that the spying continued in a single glorious, uninterrupted arc from the summer of 2016 until the final hour of the Biden administration on January 20, 2025, literally right up to President Trump's inauguration.
Ten years. A whole decade of constitutional abuse. It wasn't really four different operations. It was one ten-year operation, code-named "Spy on Republicans."
Each successive operation swelled in size as the domestic surveillance increased. The final op, Arctic Frost, targeted nearly 400 conservative groups and thousands of Americans, including 1,200 persons specifically identified as being in "protected First Amendment categories" like lawmakers, defense lawyers, filmmakers, and journalists.
The article reported that "officials said the two middle operations, Round River and Plasmic Echo," which sound like names for Dollar Store scented candles, "are just beginning to be declassified so Congress can be fully read in, and may produce some of the most troubling abuses." These will be new, never-before-seen scandals.
At least a dozen members of Congress and their staffers were swept up in surveillance. Eight sitting Republican senators were surveilled. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called it "unconstitutional overreach that makes Watergate look like jaywalking." Trump's future White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, was targeted. A political consultant's emails were penetrated via a classified subpoena two weeks after joining the 2024 Trump campaign-- the subpoena captured, verbatim, "correspondence on The Trump Campaign's private strategies and deliberations."
Since the subpoenas were classified, the targets had no way to challenge them or even know about them. Judges signed off on them, too. (That's a whole different problem. According to various reports, between 1979 and 2023, the secret FISA court judges denied only 12 FBI applications out of forty-two thousand.)
Kash Patel himself was surveilled (ironically, by the same FBI that he now runs). At least 1,200 Americans specifically identified in constitutionally protected categories were subjected to warrants, wiretaps, phone record analysis, or grand juries. The ugliest part is that the records of the four operations were all stamped "prohibited access" and kept out of FBI computer systems (paper only), and hidden from most rank-and-file FBI agents themselves.
According to the article, Director Patel has assigned a small team of agents to hunt for the files and uncover abuses, assisted by a handful of senior executives who can navigate the bureau's Byzantine storage systems and unearth well-buried evidence.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told John Solomon that criminal charges are "indeed possible" under the Klan Act's conspiracy against rights charge, which she noted "dates back to the start of the Ku Klux Klan." The article noted that the FBI has been working with a grand jury in South Florida since last summer.
In 1975, the Church Commission found the CIA's "Family Jewels"-- hidden internal memos describing decades of unconstitutional abuse. That discovery led to the only major intelligence reform in American history: oversight committees, the (useless) FISA court, and a ban on assassinations. "Prohibited Access" is our generation's Family Jewels scandal-- except this time, the hidden files don't describe what the FBI was doing to foreigners.
They describe what the FBI did to an American president, his allies, his lawyers, four hundred conservative groups, and thousands of his fellow citizens. In 1975, Congress publicly investigated the CIA. In 2020, the FBI began secretly investigating Congress. The party in power --the Democrats-- weaponized the justice system against its domestic political opponents. If this story were about Turkey or Brazil, the New York Times would easily identify it as "banana republic tactics." If it bothered.
This kind of thing is literally the hallmark of authoritarian governance. It is a full-blown constitutional crisis. A lot of books will be written about this.
Matt Taibbi at Racket News broke the ugliest story: Prohibited Access files aren't just classified. They're ghosts. When an agent searches for them in Sentinel, the system returns a false negative-- it doesn't say "access denied," it says the file doesn't exist. The FBI confirmed this to Congress: "search terms that exist in Prohibited Access-status cases ... will receive a false-negative Sentinel search response."
That's not a 'security measure.' Don't make me laugh. It's a cover-up architecture.
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi uncovered that there are no written rules for transferring knowledge of these files between administrations. It's described as an oral tradition, passed down among senior officials, independent of agents below and political appointees above. An oral tradition! As though it were a family cookie recipe. For files that don't officially exist.
For nine consecutive years, the FBI treated an elected President of the United States as a national security threat. The operations ran through four administrations -- Obama, Trump's first term, Joe the Cabbage, and into Trump's second. That means the FBI maintained continuous surveillance of a sitting president during his own presidency. The executive branch was spying on the head of the executive branch. That's not a rogue operation. That's a parallel government.
Then someone buried those files in an illegal filing system to ensure nobody could ever find them. It would be funny if it weren't so offensive. The FBI's job is to find things, not hide them from itself.
Running off-books operations against Americans is a very strange way of protecting National Security. To say the least.
Calling it the "biggest political scandal in American history" feels inadequate since that phrase has been rendered meaningless by overuse. But for nine consecutive years, through four administrations and four code-named operations, the FBI treated the once and future President of the United States as an enemy of the state. Someone in the bureau stamped those files so nobody could find them. But we found them anyway.
Real investigative journalism is back. The nation is healing. Yesterday, CBS ran a long-form, 3-D, multimedia style article headlined, "CBS News Investigation: Hundreds of LA hospices have multiple indicators of fraud."
Remember when corporate media mocked Nick Shirley for doing exactly this kind of shoe-leather fraud journalism -- walking into buildings, knocking on doors, finding empty offices? Now CBS is doing it. The only difference is its new news editor, Bari Weiss.
Since Weiss took over at CBS News, something remarkable has been happening: a legacy network is once again committing acts of journalism. Weiss personally tweeted about the hospice investigation --"Incredible investigation today from @CBSNews"-- with 36,000 likes. Finally, a news CEO who isn't hiding from her reporters' work but rather showcasing it.
This matters because the hospice fraud story has been sitting in plain sight for years. Dr. Oz started shouting about it in January. The numbers were already public -- the explosive growth from 300 to 2,500 facilities, the billions in suspicious billing, the organized crime connections. Any news network could have sent a reporter to that building with 89 hospice companies in it. But only one did.
And it's the one run by the journalist who left the New York Times because she thought the paper had stopped doing its job.
CBS noticed that 18% of all Medicare home health billing in America comes from one California county. Los Angeles County has 1,923 hospice providers -- more than 36 other states combined. That's 33 times more than senior-seasoned Florida, despite Florida being America's retirement capital. One very hard-working doctor is listed as the clinical director for forty-five hospices.
"CBS News reached out to the 56 hospice offices whose state and federal data indicate they have five or more red flags," the article reported. "Many of the phone numbers were either disconnected or went straight to voicemail." It continued, "The CBS News analysis reveals that over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in LA County trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state."
CBS's reporter also found that, in many LA hospices, the patients are immortal. They never kick the bucket. Court records show hospices billing Medicare for 18 months or longer for patients who weren't terminal. The whole point of hospice is that the patient is dying. If nobody's dying, it's not hospice-- it's a subscription service.
When Dr. Oz pointed out Russian-Armenian organized crime involvement, Governor Newsom didn't prosecute the fraud; he filed a civil rights complaint against Dr. Oz alleging racism. Because this country's vile history of discrimination against Armenians is well-known.
It's still early. One investigation doesn't make a reformation. But if you want to know what it looks like when a news organization starts prioritizing reporting over narrative cultivation, these are the first baby steps: a CBS reporter standing in front of an empty office with dead phone lines and mail piling up on the floor, asking the question that billions in welfare fraud should have prompted years ago.
And not a damn thing will come of it. Until there are at least a few perp walks, it's just more noise.
Personally, I want to see some real consequences for once. I'm struggling to put the last $50k into investments so I can retire, and these shitheels have been stealing millions.
"When I initially read this bill, it did not even come to mind for me, either, as an advocate--but as I've looked at the bills, and as I've talked to my colleagues who are fighting these types of bills across the country, it's very clear to me that the language is very much mirrored in some of the laws that have been used to target members of our community because of who they are," Herod added.
Not who they are, bitch. For purposefully showing your dick to a little girl or boy.
Realizing that fact, and truly internalizing it, was one of those life-lessons which I credit with really making me a much happier person overall.
If you expect politicians to be held accountable for stealing from you and acting like they are above the law, you will generally tend to be disappointed.
But once you accept that pointing out one example after the next of fraud, corruption and abuse of power will never actually change the minds of people who worship their chosen political party in the same way that some people revere pop stars or athletes, life becomes much easier.
There was a time when I saw people in this state of mind, and dismissed them as ignorant or nihilistic. Now I realize that they were the enlightened ones all along.
Have you ever looked at a local politician who completely messed up and thought, "I really wish we could just lock them in a cage and dunk them in a freezing river..."
Me either. But apparently, many Italians have.
Each June, the city of Trento Italy throws a massive, week-long summer festival. And the absolute highlight of the entire week is a hilariously brutal tradition called La Tonca.
Back in the 14th century, "La Tonca" was a very real, very terrifying medieval punishment. If you were caught committing blasphemy, the city would lock you inside a metal cage and dunk you into the freezing waters of the Adige River.
Today, they’ve brought the tradition back.
A few days before the dunking, the city holds a massive mock trial in the public square. A fake judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney stand up and nominate the local politicians and public figures who committed the absolute worst, most embarrassing blunders of the year.
Nobody is safe. They have nominated governors for delaying hospital construction, public officials for messing up paperwork, and politicians who simply complained too much about a local pop concert.
The judge listens to the crowd, hands down a guilty verdict to the worst offender, and then... it's time for the cage.
On the final Sunday of the festival, the "winner" is ceremoniously locked inside a medieval cage, hoisted by a massive crane over the bridge, and dunked directly into the river as the entire town cheers.
Sen. Mullin is a member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, and two weeks ago was nominated to be the US Secretary of Homeland Security by president Trump, with whom Mullin claims to have a close relationship.
On Dec 29, 2025, Sen. Mullin purchased "between $15,001 and $50,000" worth of stock each in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and defense contractor RTX Corp., according to a recent disclosure. Notably, Chevron is the only US-based oil company with substantial operations in Venezuela.
Five days later, the US invaded Venezuela, deposed its president, and annexed its petroleum industry.
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