politics

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36434649

“Democrats chose genocide over winning in 2024,” one Palestinian rights advocate said. “When does this stop?”

Neither Jeffries nor Schumer has called for impeachment or removal in response to the threat. Their refusal to act is sure to ignite further fury as the Democratic Party still manages to garner worse approval ratings than Republicans due to widespread views that the party is ~~weak and ineffective~~ collaborators.

On Wednesday, Schumer, a longtime supporter of Israel, held a press conference criticizing Trump for the war and the ceasefire — making critiques not necessarily of the concept of war with Iran itself, but of the way that Trump is going about it.

The most plausible explanation for first lady Melania Trump’s out-of-the-blue address on the Jeffrey Epstein drama was that she was trying to make it go away.

But her stunning on-camera statement Thursday from the White House Cross Hall — the spot where her husband last week spoke to the nation about the Iran war — will almost certainly have the opposite effect.

“I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump,” she said, in a statement that was all the more remarkable since there had been no widespread public speculation about the matter in recent days.

It never is a drag queen.

I feel like there should be a lemmy about this. Is there a notadragqueen lemmy?

Former allies of Democratic contender withdraw support after accusations in San Francisco Chronicle and on CNN

Congressman Eric Swalwell, a leading candidate to be California’s next governor, forcefully denied allegations of sexual assault on Friday night, as he faced escalating calls to withdraw from the race from prominent supporters, rivals and his won colleagues in Congress.

In a video statement shared on his Instagram and posted by his official congressional account on X, the California Democrat vowed to fight the allegations with “everything I have”.

Earlier on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle published an account of a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by Swalwell on two separate occasions.

Thwump sabotages treatment for his ailment.

Calls are increasing inside Congress for investigations into the prediction market platform Polymarket after the latest instance where groups of anonymous traders made strategic, well-timed bets on a major geopolitical event hours before it occurred.

On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that at least 50 brand new accounts on Polymarket placed substantial bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire in the hours, even minutes, before Donald Trump announced the ceasefire late Tuesday on social media. These were the sole bets made on Polymarket through these accounts.

In January, an anonymous Polymarket user made a $400,000 profit by betting that Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro would be out of office, hours before Maduro was captured. In the hours before the start of the Iran war, another account made roughly $550,000 in a series of trades effectively betting that the U.S. would strike Iran and that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be removed from office.

A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.

“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”

She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.

Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.

Fox News Senior Medical Analyst Marc Siegel made some eyebrow-raising comments lamenting that birth rates are down among teenagers aged 15 to 19.

On Thursday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the U.S. fertility rate fell to another record low. The agency reported that the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age declined from 53.8 in 2024 to 53.1 last year. The latest figure represents a continuation of a decades-long decline in fertility rates.

Siegel joined Friday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, where Dana Perino said that while the continuing trend is not surprising, “the numbers might feel a little shocking.”

Let them eat cake?

Trump admin reportedly gets grand jury involved in attempt to identify Redditor.

The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

After failing to obtain information through a summons issued to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the information and appear before a grand jury in Washington, DC.

The Intercept described the subpoena today. “According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month,” the article said.

Donald Trump has promised to pardon his White House staffers, reported the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey in an exclusive report on Friday.

Dawsey, the veteran DC reporter, cited “people who have heard his comments” in the bombshell report revealing that Trump is asking his staff to operate with a sense of impunity.

“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump reportedly told staffers “in a recent meeting to laughs.”

Democrats in Congress have assiduously avoided talk of a third impeachment of President Trump, concerned that it would distract from their midterm campaign message. That tide seems to have turned.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58296515

Outrage from survivors follows first lady’s statement calling on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse

More than a dozen survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have accused Melania Trump of “shifting the burden” on to them after she called on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.

“Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” said a group of 13 people and the brother and sister of the late Virginia Giuffre, who was one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, in a statement. “Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility not justice.”

Their response came after the first lady delivered a surprise statement in which she denied that she ever had a relationship with Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. She also said that she was not a victim of Epstein, had no knowledge of his crimes, and said that the late convicted sex offender did not introduce her to her husband, Donald Trump.

there’s simply no way for the Pentagon to productively absorb that scale of resources on that timescale. Again, almost a 50% increase on a budget that is already massive in absolute and relative terms. If you think about what that scale of diversion means, you still won’t really quite grasp it, just as I’m not able to fully grasp it.

So who are they going to levy war against?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/63084048

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/42469014

Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.

They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America. They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.