The Hall of Fire

In July 2017, six months into Donald Trump's presidency, he traveled to Racine, in southeast Wisconsin, to announce that the technology company FoxConn would be opening a huge new plant there that would employ some 13,000 people. The state and federal government spent $500 million preparing the site...

A headline at AL.com , the collective website for three Alabama newspapers, the Birmingham News , Huntsville Times , and Mobile Press-Register : "Trump said he wouldn't be 'on the market' long if Melania left him over Stormy Daniels, Cohen testified." How will that land with Donald Trump's...

Self-aggrandizing too. That one of his books briefly made the New York Time best-seller list is a fact he never gets tired of mentioning.

(But despite all that, I noticed during the Mueller investigation that he and Marcy Wheeler via different paths often ended up at the same place.)

I'm pressed for time today and won't be able to read much about the testimony, but I wanted to note that I share this opinion of Michael Cohen that Seth Abramson expressed this morning. Before today's session started, Abramson noted that he has been a guest once on Michael Cohen's podcast, but: &quo...

I think it's worth noting that Donald Trump's assistant Madeleine Westerhout testified this week that Trump continued to manage his business from the White House, despite his promises not to do so. We knew that, but it's good to have it confirmed. He's incapable of putting country, or anything else,...

It was reported some weeks ago that convicted felon Paul Manafort was helping Donald Trump's campaign, but today the New York Times reports that he's out. As Marcy Wheeler notes (and she's not alone in this), the article ridiculously soft-peddles the facts of Manafort's criminal history and that of ...

From the Times of Israel: "IDF chief said to tell PM that army fighting again in parts of Gaza due to lack of strategy."

Because Netanyahu has no plan for what happens after the fighting.

I think that commentators are right to ask : why aren't Senate Democrats using their committee powers to raise awareness of Republican scandals in the way that House Republicans have been using their committee powers to raise awareness of Democratic scandals? Senate Democrats should already have sub...

There's new reporting from The New York Times (working with ProPublica ) today about the Chicago loan last mentioned in this post: Yes, it was something about a $50 million loan not being reported. Let me see if I can find it. ETA: [ Tweet from Roger Sollenberger: "Did Trump lie on financial di...

One of next year's Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions here at the International Congress on Medieval Studies is likely to be devoted to Tolkien's poetry.

From just a few days after the war started: This morning I saw an Israeli colonel interviewed on U.S. television say that proportionate to the two nations' populations, yesterday's attack was equivalent to the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks combined. Obviously there are lessons to be learned from bot...

Two days ago representatives of Donald Trump's campaign said that Trump's youngest son Barron, who recently turned 18, would be one of Florida's presidential delegates at this year's Republican National Convention. Today the office of his mother, Melania Trump, says that while he's honored to be so ...

So "indefinitely" turned out to mean a few days, because the State Dept. report I mentioned below has now been issued and finds that Israel may have violated international human rights laws using U.S. weapons, but "it hasn't violated terms of U.S. weapons agreements ... the State Depa...

Overheard on CNN just now: a reporter quoting Stormy Daniels explaining to Donald Trump's attorney that "the sex is real; that's why it's pornography."

CNN has started to release excerpts from today's interview with President Biden, including this clip which is relevant to this thread: https://twitter.com/YonahLieberman/status/1788339150610907570 Naturally one of the first replies still criticizes Biden as "Genocide Joe." It sounds like B...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's effort to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson has failed , 359-43. Voting to block this move were 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats. You may remember that Democrats did not vote to help Speaker Kevin McCarthy when a similar move was made against him several months ago. Only...

In a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said , "I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me." He identified the cause of these issues as mercury poisoning and, I'm not making this up and apparently neither was h...

It seems that President Biden is just taunting the New York Times:

CNN: "Erin Burnett will sit down with President Biden for an exclusive one-on-one interview tomorrow. Interview will air Wednesday at 7 p.m. (ET) on Erin Burnett OutFront."

And to temper my dismay: we have been here before, but we didn't know it. Richard Nixon probably didn't need to break the law to win the 1972 election, but that's what he did, with Watergate and other acts of election interference. Nixon probably broke the law in 1968 as well, by undermining the U.S...

At this time, most swing state polls show Donald Trump leading President Biden by several points. But one new swing state poll, from Quinnipiac in Wisconsin, shows that among registered voters, Biden leads Trump 50%-44%. However, that drops to a one-point lead if RFK Jr. is added to the mix: 40%-39%...