Category Archives: Grey Lady

Epstein Eve in the Grey Lady

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Wow. Check out what the NY Times published on the eve of the deadline for the DOJ [partially, conditionally, grudgingly] complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, unanimously passed by Congress (but for one diehard MAGA representative) and signed into law, thirty days ago, by Trump himself:

The article (which Trump surely regards as a treasonous, false, witch hunt hit job) begins:

Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.

The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.

Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.

But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.

Read all about it

In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement: “This fake news story, which is not worth the paper it’s printed on, is just another stale regurgitation of decades-old false allegations against President Trump. The truth will remain the same no matter how many times The New York Times tries to change it. President Trump did nothing wrong, and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”

And one last bite (from the article), with the classic Trump assessment of a guy he now claims to have hardly known:

In the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein — now extraordinarily wealthy and well connected — seemed to grow less content with the anonymity he had carefully drawn around his life and business. In 2002, practically inviting public scrutiny, he arranged to fly with former President Bill Clinton and a celebrity entourage on a humanitarian trip to Africa. Details of the trip were soon shared with The New York Post’s Page Six. Not long after, New York magazine published the first major profile of Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump provided the headline quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Editors do not have the right to edit, only Trump does

Trump Files $10 Billion Suit Against BBC Over Documentary

The New York Times reports on another sickening MAGA attempt to intimidate media that reports unflatteringly on the historic ugliness of their dictatorial leader.

Trump, after shaking down ABC for $16,000,000 with a frivolous lawsuit over an on-air comment that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape (the judge in that case said as much, it is only an idiosyncrasy of New York State law, he explained, that differentiates “sexual assault” — no penis in vagina proved — and “rape”) and CBS for the same amount for doing what every TV station does — editing an interview, has also sued the NY Times and, the other day, the BBC.

The faltering, insanely litigious president ridiculously claimed, through his army of low rent Roy Cohns, that the BBC unfairly and viciously edited segments of his infamous January 6th speech to a crowd that stormed the Capitol moments later to make it falsely look like he had urged them to storm the Capitol.

Here are the highlights of his long harangue to the rioters on January 6th. You be the judge if there is a way to edit this incendiary speech where he is not telling the crowd he’s riled up for over an hour, with detailed lies about a “stolen election” he knew he had lost, to hit the Capitol, he promised he was going down there with them, “and we fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.”

You have to love the generally spineless NY Times’ last line in its report on this Hitlerian move on the part of Putin’s pliable puppet, Donald J. Trump, now suing the British Broadcasting Corporation, an outfit almost as despicable in his squinty eyes as our own Public Broadcasting Service. Here’s the Times, at its best:

The president also has a defamation lawsuit pending against The New York Times, which accuses the news organization of trying to undercut his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation. The Times says the lawsuit has no merit.

Handmaidens of fascism — Grey Lady edition

For American Nazism to take root in the United States, the hateful message Nazis must spread needs to come from everywhere, particularly from trusted, mainstream news sources. The New York Times has long been regarded as a trustworthy source of even handed news and opinion. Even as Trump rails against the Grey Lady and her fake news, she always curtsies respectfully, except when writing hard-hitting exposes, like the long one about his psychopathic father’s decades-long illegal tax avoidance scheme. This was the plan that paid Donald $200,000 a year, tax-free, from the time he was two years-old (and the president of a fictious tax avoidance corporation). What we read in the Times carries a certain amount of weight. It is alarming how often we find the call for fascism coming from inside the house, in a variety of insidious ways.

I really don’t understand what the journal of record gains from printing their brand of political reporting/editorializing. The following is from their chief political analyst (accent on the anal), Nate Cohn. The Times published this on October 9, 2025, during Trump’s government shutdown, before Schumer orchestrated the shameful Democratic capitulation that ended it. Cohn’s political orientation, or larger vision for the future of American democracy, is anybody’s guess (though it’s not a hard one). Like I say, these fuckers are handmaidens of fascism, which can’t succeed without unified support from super-influential mainstream straight shooters like Nate Cohn of the New York Times. FOX news or the NY Times? You be the judge (and jury).

. . .Health care hasn’t been front and center for years. In the final New York Times/Siena poll of the 2024 campaign, less than 1 percent of voters said health care was the most important issue to their vote. To the extent there’s a political battle over health care today, it’s mostly because Democrats forced a government shutdown over it.

That’s not to say there haven’t been major developments in health policy. The Republicans’ spending bill this summer derived most of its savings through health care cuts. And an expiration of Obamacare subsidies will affect millions of people. . .

. . . Not even this government shutdown is really about health care. The Democratic Party’s activist base demanded a shutdown because it wanted Democrats to do something to oppose Mr. Trump, not because of particular concerns about expiring health care subsidies. Only 1 percent of Democrats said health care was the most important issue facing the country in last week’s Times/Siena poll. This shutdown is “about” health care only because congressional Democrats redirected the energies of the party’s base onto an issue they deemed electorally fruitful.

According to the top political analyst for the NY Times, there’s a battle over health insurance not because health and death prevention are important to us all, not because the MAGA-headed GOP slashed $1,500,000,000,000 from health insurance programs and tax subsidies for healthcare to give that money to our greatest billionaires.  Not at all, it’s because “activist” Democrats forced a government shutdown over it… 

The paltry 1% concerned about health care were probably distracted by issues like a criminally insane president deploying an American gestapo in US cities and the Supreme Court’s shredding of our Constitution.   Ask directly about opposition to slashing health insurance and subsidies, closing rural hospitals, mandating tens of thousands of annual preventable deaths for lack of health insurance, and I think that 1% number goes up well over 70%, probably 100% of people of average intelligence.

This year’s Medicaid cuts were mostly obtained through the politically palatable means of adding work requirements; Democrats have not focused on trying to roll back those cuts during this shutdown fight. . .

[The “politically palatable means”, you fucking fuck?]

. . . For a long time, Democrats succeeded politically by promising to protect postwar prosperity against conservatives who would roll back Medicare and Social Security, or against unfair trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. With Mr. Trump promising to protect entitlements and campaigning against free trade, this winning Democratic playbook is gone.

A compulsively lying, obsessively vengeful, criminally insane kleptocrat, with advancing dementia, promising to protect what Democrats value — I guess that’s check and mate, Nate.

I hope I wind up in the same cattle car as this deluded fuck, give Nat a piece of what’s left of my mind on the way to Camp Trump… 

2% of humans are psychopaths, corporations close to 100%

I wonder how high that percentage goes among human billionaires. The current examples we know suggest a high correlation of the major traits of psychopaths with the best of the best and most deserving of the deserving — ruthless focus on self-interest, manipulativeness, exploitativeness, zero empathy, no capacity for remorse.

It is beyond question that the alter egos of billionaires, the immortal American/global “persons” known as corporations, are almost 100% psychopathic. Here’s the list of their traits from the excellent documentary The Corporation. (watch it for free on YouTube, highly recommended)

Picture any member of Trump’s billionaire cabinet, or the fabulous CEOs who line up to kiss their asses —  Jeff “rent Venice for my next wedding” Bezos, Elon “virtually human, kill millions of brown children” Musk, Mark “go to the mat — and fuck democracy–  for my  right to be richest man in the world” Zuckerberg, etc.   Now, imagine them embodied in an entity of eternal life, the vampire that is the modern corporation.  This “person” owes allegiance to nothing but pathological greed and the compulsion to maximize and hoard profit.  

Starting in 1971, when a group of worried very wealthy psychopaths hired tobacco lobbyist Lewis Powell (soon thereafter placed on the Supreme Court by Nixon) to draft a game plan for ensuring their eternal dominion over puny human persons, we can draw a straight line to Project 2025, featuring corporatist John Roberts and his morally deformed reactionary five on the Supreme Court.   Here’s the most condensed version I’ve seen of that story:

You don’t have to be a psychopath, of course, to raise prices by 100% two years in a row. You only need to be shamelessly greedy and able to do it. If you are a corporation, any amount of money you need to spend to make laws that allow you to double your prices every year is money well-spent. A cost of doing business! And psychopath is such a judgmental word!! How about just “successful” and stop with the judgement. Like the NY Times does:

 

An illegally appointed US attorney illegally “continuing as US Attorney” becomes not a matter of law — her appointment was ruled constitutionally invalid by a federal judge — but the object of criticism from judges who are “critical” of an illegally appointed DOJ official being kept in office after the federal court ruled the appointment illegal.

You see what the New York Times is doing here?  Innocently sanitizing a fascistic disregard for American law and a good old fashioned ass-wipe with the Constitution. Why not? All the points of view that are fit to print.

Bravo, Grey Lady, another bullseye.

Robert Caro, whose lifelong interest as a writer and researcher is understanding power, how it is acquired and how it’s used, wrote that to see what someone will do with power, study what they did as they climbed to power. These Project 2025 fascists were once the “lunatic fringe” John Birch Society, rabid anti-Communist segregationists who made no attempt to hide the foam on their lips. Today, after a long, relentless, fantastically expensive climb to power, they control all three branches of our government. The “Trump White House” released a document, the 2025 National Security Strategy, traditionally used to announce US foreign policy, that says a forthright fuck you to the rest of the world and shits on anything but the business interests of America’s wealthiest. Read all about it, from Heather Cox Richardson.

Quickly forgotten atrocity by the deadly dotard in chief

Trump rage posted this in response to a viral short video in which elected veterans of the armed forces and intelligence services reminded serving members of their oath not to follow illegal orders.

The video was difficult to find on the YouTube search engine or any other search engine I tried.  Fortunately I had it in my history from viewing it the other day:

In fairness to the NY Times, a paper that regularly publishes important investigative pieces and blurs crucial lines with equal frequency, it ran this article yesterday.

Here are a few recent favorites of mine from the front page of the journal of record for the United States of America, but first:

You go, girl.

Gray Lady puffing up a grifting pinhead

The Grey Lady:

Trained in the bare-knuckle arts of New York City real estate, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff think of themselves as deal guys working for the ultimate deal guy. Their approach is simple: Get to a yes first, and hash out the details later. The two have spent a lot of time together over the past few weeks, crisscrossing Miami, then the country, and now the world, in pursuit of peace. The rebuilding of Gaza is also in their sights.

“The experience that Steve and I have as deal guys is that you have to understand people,” Mr. Kushner said. “You have to be able to kind of get the bottom line out of them, and then see who do you think is playing games, and how much room do you have to push things?”

He added: “A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats. It’s just different being deal guys — just a different sport.”

I have no idea why the New York Times is suddenly blowing this corrupt nepo-baby clown, and it’s frankly a bit sickening, but watch the fabulously rich boy genius’s brilliant bit of whining as he snippily answers questions about the last time he and his genius Nobel Prize recipient father-in-law made permanent peace in the Middle East, in spite of facing, according to the seasoned, streetwise “getting to yes” diplomat/deal maker, the recalcitrance of angry, self-pitying, deluded Palestinians perennially too stupid to act in their own best interests (compare — MAGA voters), presumably why they did not participate in the negotiations.

Here’s one of America’s greatest arrogant super-wealthy mediocrities (no offense to the mediocre intended) humbly bragging about having made lasting peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords. The first few minutes of this asshole’s responses are priceless, made hilarious by the chyrons that contradict his every talking point.

Why the New York Times took this opportunity, with everything else going on at the moment (including the scandal of peace-loving DJT not winning the Nobel Peace Prize!), to daintily fellate pardoned felon/Ambassador to France Charles Kushner’s well-born son Jared, you’d have to ask the editorial putz who approved the article. Could it have been a friend of Bari Weiss, new $150,000,000 CBS editor-in-chief?

A happy, healthy 5786 to my Jewish readers (and to everyone else)

Jewish new year starts at sundown on September 22nd this year. The day before, slain highly influential MAGA promoter Charlie Kirk’s life and work were celebrated by MAGA nation.

Shortly after Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered, the NY Times published where he stood on various issues. They republished it yesterday, when thousands of the faithful are lined up to pay homage to this martyred Christian champion of free speech (to hear some tell it) at a mega-MAGA-rally celebrating his life and work.   Look how mercilessly the super-judgmental New York Times smeared him for exercising his First Amendment rights to express a tiny bit of arguably antisemitic rhetoric! (The preceding sentence is an example of irony).

Antisemitism

Mr. Kirk was repeatedly accused of antisemitism, including by fellow conservatives.

He was a proponent of “replacement theory,” a once-fringe conspiracy theory positing that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants. That ideology motivated the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

Mr. Kirk also accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country,” he said on his show in 2023.

Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Allies of Mr. Kirk often sought to defend him against accusations of antisemitism by citing his support for Israel. Mr. Kirk defended Israel’s actions in Gaza. After his death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel mourned him as “a lionhearted friend of Israel” who “stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.”

Heh, takes one to know one, eh, Bibi?!

Read the article for more of the lionheart’s highly commendable free speech views:

Grey Lady cracks wise

Every few years the NY Times, without breaking character, cracks me up with their deadpan delivery. Here is the latest example, from their recent article on being sued by Donald Trump for the paper’s allegedly “deranged hatred” of Donald Trump. The distracting temper tantrum packaged as an incoherent $15,000,000,000 lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge for lack of an actual legal theory. Here’s the Grey Lady, from the day she was sued:

The complaint also took issue with the endorsement of Kamala Harris by the editorial board of The Times in September 2024, describing it as “deranged” and criticizing the editorial board’s arguments.

Mr. Trump has sued The Times on a previous occasion, without success.

In 2021, Mr. Trump sued the paper over a series of articles that investigated his finances and tax records. (Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner were two of the reporters who wrote them.) The suit was dismissed in 2023 and Mr. Trump was ordered to pay The Times’s legal expenses.

In addition, in 2020, his re-election campaign sued for libel over an essay in the Opinion section titled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.” The lawsuit was dismissed in 2021. . .

In an effort to prove “malice” against Mr. Trump, the lawsuit cited more than a dozen articles from The Times dating back to his first term in office that it claimed “maliciously and falsely portray him as dishonest, erode public trust in him and tear down his achievements.”

The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”

source

The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”

Indeed.

Hatred is fine, according to the Hater-in-Chief, unless you oppose, or even question, anything about him, in which case you are hating in a deranged way. Rare to get this level of clarity from the boss.

Nepo baby Trump attacks Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hiring by Black president of conservative Virginia university; kills eleven “suspects” on boat in international waters

George Mason University, the home of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, for fuck’s sake, home base for the Heritage Foundation, with professorial chairs endowed by Charles Koch and friends. Black president, Dr. Gregory Washington, is being pressured by Trump’s minions to apologize for comments he made about the importance of diversity hiring in 2020 and 2021. You see, the Civil Rights Act was racist, according to the persecuted U.S. president (and his boiling “brain”, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller), presumably because it failed to recognize that only rich white men can be true victims of vicious, systemic racism. You can’t make this shit up, as one of Trump’s supremely flexible appointees stated in chastising the school president in a recent official statement:

The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, upped the pressure in a statement last month, saying Dr. Washington “waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful D.E.I. policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” the statement said, adding, “You can’t make this up.”

Read all about it.

Unfortunately, you can’t make this up. However, everywhere you look our low IQ, increasingly demented mad leader is making himself less and less useful to the billionaire tech fascists who put him into power. How do you like this headline?

First another reminder: there is absolutely no connection, beyond years of purely superficial, 100% transactional friendship between Donald Trump and convicted procurer of underaged “prostitutes” Jeffery “Hoax!” Epstein. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Suspected drug smugglers, you get that? I think you’re a drug smuggler, you make me suspicious, I’m a very stable genius, I can kill you and everybody around you, who I also suspect is a drug smuggler. I’m Duterte! [1] I will kill you! This is a turn on Alan Dershowitz’s incoherent defense of the big guy at one of his impeachments (subsequently written into US law by the Koch Six): if the president truly believes he has a good reason to violate the law, he can’t be punished for that.

Note the NY Times characteristic Nazi-tolerant delicacy in framing this obscenity — the issue in their subhead is not, God forbid, that this is clearly the alarming claim of a dangerously unhinged, murderous, dictatorial psychopath. The last guy who did it is in front of the International Criminal Court. We, at the Grey Lady, note that it appears to be problematic to treat criminals (who have been convicted after a trial) as enemy combatants, although, admittedly, the power the Orange polyp claims is to treat suspected criminals (no trial, nothing but my suspicion and your death!) as wartime combatants — and summarily kill them, as he did to eleven people on a boat the other day.

We are living in the shit, boys and girls, and the NY Times is innocently helping. For every important article highlighting grotesque fascistic excess by this desperate regime, we get several mealy mouthed headlines like this, to keep things fair. To not piss off an obviously insane, revenge-twisted maniac to take some kind of profit crushing retaliatory action, one supposes.

[1] Mr Rodrigo Roa Duterte, born on 28 March 1945 and a national of the Republic of the Philippines. President of the Philippines, Mayor of Davao City, and allegedly the founder and head of the Davao Death Squad (‘DDS’), at the time of the relevant conduct.

Arrest warrant issued on 7 March 2025

Allegedly responsible for the crime against humanity of murder, committed on the territory of the Republic of the Philippines between 1 November 2011 and 16 March 2019 in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ campaign. . . On 12 March 2025, Mr Duterte was surrendered to the International Criminal Court after being arrested by the authorities of the Republic of the Philippines in accordance with the warrant of arrest.

link to indictment

Nice bit (hic) from Jair Bolsonaro

Jair Bolsonaro, who managed, with the help of right wing judges, to have his popular opponent jailed for fake corruption charges right before former insurrectionist Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, (“lock him up! lock him up!”) lost his reelection bid after one term (to the man he locked up). Then, advised by Steve Bannon, he tried a January 6 style overthrow of the election results, and immediately (while still president) fled to the US for health reasons. He’s now on trial for his crimes against the constitution of Brazil. Courtesy of the Grey Lady:

He didn’t appear in court because of poor health, his defense team told reporters outside the courthouse. Ahead of the trial, one of his sons told a Brazilian news site Mr. Bolsonaro had been suffering from debilitating hiccups that the former president attributes to complications from a stabbing attack on the campaign trail in 2018. [1]

Trump’s “illegally” (subject to unsigned shadow docket order by the Federalist Six) imposed 75,000% tariff on Brazil when it stubbornly refused to halt the totally unfair persecution of democratically elected Hall of Fame hiccupper Jair Bolsonaro who had the presidency illegally stolen from him by communists and intellectuals in 2022 and didn’t do anything Trump and his people didn’t also do, literally, perfectly, legally, in the months prior to, and on, the Day of Love, January 6, 2021. Many people, billionaires and poor people alike, love dictators!

[1] 

Mr. Bolsonaro, 70, has been under house arrest, wearing an ankle monitor, for weeks. Then, over the weekend, Brazilian authorities tightened security measures, placing police officers around his home amid worries that he may try to flee and possibly seek refuge at the U.S. Embassy near his home.

Prosecutors accuse Mr. Bolsonaro and seven members of his inner circle of overseeing a vast conspiracy to cling to power after his defeat at the polls in 2022, seeking to overturn the results, trying to enlist the military in their plot and drafting plans to poison Mr. Bolsonaro’s rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is now Brazil’s president.

Mr. Bolsonaro and the other defendants face criminal charges, including the “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law” and “coup d’état.” If found guilty, Mr. Bolsonaro could be sentenced to more than 40 years in prison.

source

Note, the scrupulously fair to Nazis NY Times (see my upcoming post for more chilling details) presently does not allow me to easily attach a “gift” link to their articles.  This is a new innovation, I was able to attach a gift link yesterday. If you have a subscription to the NYT, you can read the rest of the article, perhaps now you can even without one.   The gist of the article is in this footnote.