It is sickening to realize that the US, our beloved country, is now aligned with Russia and Putin. It is sickening to realize that when the UN took a vote to condemn Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. voted “no,” allied with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It is sickening to realize that the U.S. is now in cahoots with the enemies of freedom and democracy.
It is sickening to see the Justice Department turned into a weapon for Trump’s personal revenge. It is sickening to see Trump’s vicious assault on higher education and academic freedom. It is sickening to watch the arrest and detention of immigrants by masked men without ID without a semblance of due process. It is sickening to see the massacre of civilians in Gaza. It is sickening to see the Trump family scoop up billlions in real estate deals, crytocurrency and other ventures. It is sickening to see the Republican Party pass a budget that cancels the health insurance of millions of low-income Americans to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.
One man is responsible: Trump. He worries about Putin’s feelings, not about Russian bombs hitting Ukrainian schools, playgrounds, hospitals, homes, and its energy supply. He plays with tariffs as a way to humiliate other countries, carelessly wiping out the life savings of people who trusted him. Was it by accident that he excluded Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Cuba from his tariff threats? Trump jokes about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of demanding an end to the war. The cruel budget that takes from the poor and gives to the rich was his budget. It is his massive ego that has turned the Department of Justice into his personal revenge and retribution machine.
Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the university of Massachusetts and a specialist on dark money in education, exposes the rightward shift of Democrats for Education Reform, as well as its continuing disintegration. DFER spent years cheerleading for charter schools and test-based teacher evaluation, but its pretense has dissolved. Cunningham said it is now closely aligned with rightwing groups.
Cunningham writes:
Democrats for Education Reform, the front operation for billionaire privateering of public education, has gone all-in for right-wing policies. This likely reflects two factors: the collapse of DFER nationally, and an opportunistic pivot to Trump’s MAGA regime.
DFER was established upon the premise, according to its hedge fund co-founder Whitney Tilson, that it would spend lavishly as part of an “inside job” to turn the Democratic Party away from teachers unions and public education and toward charter schools. Its CEO Jorge Elorza has just announced the organization will race even further to the right: DFER will now “Explore innovative funding models such as education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax credit programs.” (emphasis in original). This is the program of billionaires Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos–and Donald Trump.
Judging by the number of high-level staff fleeing from DFER, Elorza has been driving the operation into the ground. Jessical Giles, who served for six years as Washington, D.C. executive director recently resigned because DFER’s policies “no longer align with my values and vision.”
Other DFER leaders have complained of the group’s gallop toward political extremism. In a complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, former Massachusetts executive director Mary Tamer wrote that Elorza retaliated against her for “inquiring about Mr. Elorza’s decision to join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission.” The right-wing coalition seems to be the No More Lines Coalition, which includes not only Koch aligned organizations but Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Childrenand the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Elorza has been a guest speaker at the Charles Koch Institute. Tamer is seeking damages against DFER, and the allied Education Reform Now and Education Reform Now Advocacy for gender and age discrimination.
Tamer’s complaint alleges a number of defections by key DFER leaders. Within months of Elorza’s arrival COO Shakira Petit left, and CFO Sheri Adebiyi was fired. Board Chair Marlon Marshall and Charles Ledley, a co-founder, resigned. The complaint further alleges that “Ms. Tamer is one of several women in leadership positions who have been terminated or pushed out by the Defendants.” That list includes Connecticut state director Amy Dowell and Jen Walmer of Colorado, a close adviser on education to Governor Jared Polis and one of DFER’s most effective advocates.
Despite the name, DFER has raised millions over the years from Republican-backing billionaires. The Walton Family Foundation, the non-profit corporation of the notoriously anti-union family that owns WalMart, has sustained DFER. Rupert Murchoch, who regards K-12 education as a $500 billion market gave DFER at least $1 million, apparently in the hopes the operation would help his ed tech company.
Elorza’s announcement of DFER’s shift leans on the “market-based solutions” language of neo-liberal privateering, but the reality is that neo-liberalism is not where the action is in 2025. Families for Excellent Schools, at one time a privateering powerhouse, collapsed in 2018. In 2011 Stand for Children president Jonah Edelman boasted his organization had nine state affiliates and would grow to twenty states by the end of 2015. In 2025 Stand for Children is hanging on in seven states.
Since its 2007 founding, DFER has claimedchapters in nineteen different states plus D.C. and a teachers group. By February 2025 only four chapters remained. In January 2023, DFER listed thirteen national staffers. By February 2025, it had only four. As of May 2025, the “States” and “National Staff” links on DFER’s webpage have disappeared. An Elorza biography lives on.
The action now is with extremist organizations like the Koch and Leonard Leo aligned Parents Defending Education and Heritage Foundation offspring Moms for Liberty.
Self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis accurately sees that DFER has joined with the far right on education privateering. DeAngelis was the face of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children until he was fired after revelations he had starred in gay sex porn films. He is now a “senior fellow” at the American Culture Project, which is tied to the Koch network through the Franklin News Foundation. DeAngelis is cheering DFER’s embrace of the Republican education privateering platform.
What has DFER really joined here? The end game was spelled out in a 2017 memorandumfrom the secretive Council for National Policy to Trump and DeVos: abandon public education in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.”
That is your “choice.”
DFER has never been a membership organization—there are few real Democrats involved. To be sure, it has gotten donations from charter favoring Democratic billionaires as well as an array of Republican privateers, plus millions of dollars in untraceable dark money. DFER’s organizational drift and rank political opportunism have now cemented its bond with Trump’s MAGA regime.
Jeff Tiedrich is a graphic artist who writes a popular blog called “Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion.” He is irreverent, profane, outrageous, and very funny.
The College of Cardinals must have been conclaving the shit out of their search for a new pope, ’cause it only took those honchos two days find their boy.
meet Robert Prevost. he’s an American, born in Chicago. he roots for the White Sox. he’s 69 years old, and he’ll be popin’ up a storm as Leo XIV.
“According to his X/Twitter feed (@drprevost), the newly selected pope trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”
the diaper-fillers are not entirely wrong — the current top-most thing on Robert/Leo’s not-twitter feed is a retweet taking Donny Convict to task for disappearing Venezuelan migrants off the streets and fuckity-byeing them into a Salvadoran slave-labor gulag.
furniture molester/eyeliner model JD Vance now has the distinction of being called out for shithead behavior by two consecutive popes— which I believe is a world record.
Heather Cox Richardson recounts the important exchanges between the new Pope, Leo XIV, and JD Vance, on the subject of immigrants. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, described Catholic doctrine and was quickly rebuffed at the time both by Pope Francis and by the future Pope. So, JD Vance has the dubious distinction of being rebuffed by two Popes!
Today, on the second day of the papal conclave, the cardinal electors—133 members of the College of Cardinals who were under the age of 80 when Pope Francis died on April 21—elected a new pope. They chose 69-year-old Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago, thus making him the first pope chosen from the United States. But he spent much of his ministry in Peru and became a citizen of Peru in 2015, making him the first pope from Peru, as well.
New popes choose a papal name to signify the direction of their papacy, and Prevost has chosen to be known as Pope Leo XIV. This is an important nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903 and was the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He called for the church to address social and economic issues, and emphasized the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalized individuals.
In the midst of the Gilded Age, Leo XIII defended the rights of workers and said that the church had not just the duty to speak about justice and fairness, but also the responsibility to make sure that such equities were accomplished. In his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, translated as “Of New Things,” Leo XIII rejected both socialism and unregulated capitalism, and called for the state to protect the rights of individuals.
Prevost’s choice of the name Leo invokes the principles of both Leo XIII and his predecessor, Pope Francis. In his own lifetime he has aligned himself with many of Francis’s social reforms, and his election appears to be a rejection of hard-line right-wing Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere who have used their religion to support far-right politics.
In the U.S., Vice-President J.D. Vance is one of those hard-line right-wing Catholics. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love,” articulated by Catholic St. Augustine, claiming it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and suggesting it justified the mass expulsion of migrants.
Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” When right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, who is Catholic, posted Vance’s interview approvingly, Vance added: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”
On February 10, Pope Francis responded in a letter to American bishops. He corrected Vance’s assertion as a false interpretation of Catholic theology. “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoristhat must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
“[W]orrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote. He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants, noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The next day, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who said he was “a lifelong Catholic,” told reporters at the White House, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope…. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”
Cardinal Prevost was close to Pope Francis, and during this controversy he posted on X after Vance’s assertion but before Pope Francis’s answer: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” After the pope published his letter, Prevost reposted it with the comment: “Pope Francis’ letter, JD Vance’s ‘ordo amoris’ and what the Gospel asks of all of us on immigration.”
On April 14, Prevost reposted: “As Trump & [Salvadoran president Nayib] Bukele use Oval to [laugh at] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident [Kilmar Abrego Garcia], once an undoc[ument]ed Salvadorean himself, [Bishop Evelio Menjivar] asks, ‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?’”
The new Pope Leo XIV greeted the world today in Italian and Spanish as he thanked Pope Francis and the other cardinals, and called for the church to “be a missionary Church, building bridges, dialogue, always open to receiving with open arms for everyone…, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love…, especially to those who are suffering.”
As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “[o]pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash against those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added.
ProPublica revealed that Ed Martin, Trump’s choice, for the high-powered job of U.S. Attorney in D.C. is ethically challenged. We already knew that Martin was a strident defender of the January 6 insurrectionists and represented some of them as their attorney. We also knew that Ed Martin has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories.
We learned only a couple of weeks ago that Mr. Martin has appeared on Russian state media more than 150 times between 2016 and 2024, a detail he initially forgot to share with the Senate Judiciary Committee vetting him. The Washington Post reported, “In early 2022, Martin told an interviewer on the same arm of RT’s global network that “there’s no evidence” of a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders, criticizing U.S. officials as warmongering and ignoring Russia’s security concerns. Russia invaded nine days later, igniting a war that continues today.”
What we didn’t know is that in one important case, he was coaching someone else to attack the judge hearing the case.
Trump has chosen many unqualified people for high positions. Ed Martin is one of his worst choices.
The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”
Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).
At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.
In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin’s career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group’s board fired Martin. Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization.
After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider.
Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin.
ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more “organic.”
Ed Martin exchanged emails with Priscilla Gray, who had worked in various roles for Phyllis Schlafly, about how to attack Judge John Barberis. (Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica)
“That is not justice but a rigged system,” he urged her to write. “Shame on you and this broken legal system.”
“Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,” Martin continued.
Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. “Go slow and steady,” he advised. “Make it organic.”
Gray appeared to take Martin’s advice. “Private messaging him that sweet line,” she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture.
Gray told Martin she would direct message Barberis after she was blocked from commenting on his Facebook page. (Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica)
Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin’s conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin’s behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney.
Martin appeared to be “deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. “That’s not OK.”
Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Martin’s legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all.
His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his “willful disregard” of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori.
Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged.
Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves….
As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor.
A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes.
Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases.
Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government “discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”
Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,” says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.
A Trump loyalist wrote an article in Politico blaming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for chaos and dysfunction at the Defense Department.
Before he was confirmed by the Senate, critics warned that the FOX News host had minimal administrative experience and was completely unqualified to lead one of the nation’s largest bureaucracies. He had run two small veterans’ groups into the ground and was fired from both.
In addition, the media reported that Hegseth conducted yet another Signal chat about bombing targets that included unauthorized people, including his wife, his brother, his personal lawyer, and a dozen other friends.
In the following article, John Pullyer predicts that Trump will replace Hegseth swiftly.
John Ullyot is former chief Pentagon spokesman and led communications at the National Security Council and the Department of Veterans Affairs in President Donald Trump’s first term. He resigned from the Pentagon last week. He was a senior communications adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.
The latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks. On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his most loyal senior staffers — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense. In the aftermath, Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month.
Yet none of this is true. While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test. In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.
Hegseth is now presiding over a strange and baffling purge that will leave him without his two closest advisers of over a decade — Caldwell and Selnick — and without chiefs of staff for him and his deputy. More firings may be coming, according to rumors in the building.
In short, the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.
