Donald Trump is doing victory laps over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension this week, using it as yet another excuse to threaten TV broadcasters who dare “hit Trump.” From Air Force One, he basically said: nice FCC license you got there, shame if anything happened to it. Which, yes, is completely illegal, but legality has never exactly been this guy’s love language. Jon Stewart, back at The Daily Show, roasted the whole thing, mock-saluting “our great father” Trump and lampooning the new state-approved media vibe we’re apparently living in now. Between Stewart’s monologue and the protests outside Disney studios, you can feel the country realizing we’re one FCC vote away from turning late-night TV into Live From the Ministry of Truth. Stephen Colbert, writers’ unions, the ACLU, and even Barack Obama are waving the giant red flag, calling the suspension what it is: unconstitutional government pressure.
Dems Asked to Canonize Charlie Kirk or Get Dragged: House Democrats are staring down a GOP resolution that both condemns political violence and canonizes Charlie Kirk, which is basically like being asked to light a candle for the guy who spent his career setting fires. Some Dems, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, are flat-out refusing to play along, saying there’s nothing “honorable” about Kirk’s crusades against civil rights and queer people, while others are arguing that passing it might turn down the national rage machine a notch. Leadership is letting everyone vote their conscience, which means half the caucus is about to get smeared as pro-violence, and the other half will look like they just co-signed a Turning Point USA recruitment poster.
11 Dems Arrested for the Crime of Asking ICE What the Hell They’re Doing: Federal officers arrested 11 Democratic officials (city comptroller, public advocate, the whole crew) for trying to see what’s happening inside ICE’s holding cells in Manhattan. And when ICE told them to beat it, they did the most New York thing possible: sat on the floor, started chanting, and busted out a giant banner until DHS showed up and zip-tied them like it was WrestlePalooza. And the kicker is, a judge already said those cells are probably violating the Constitution.
RFK Jr.’s CDC Turns One Vax for Kids Into Multiple, Because Chaos: A CDC vaccine panel voted to split the MMRV shot into two separate jabs, one for measles, mumps, rubella and another for chickenpox, because apparently we needed to make it even harder for parents to keep up with their kids’ vaccine schedules. The panel also voted to push back the age that these shots are approved for: from 12 months old to four years old. These moves come as RFK Jr., who continues to run HHS like his own wellness podcast, fired the old panel and stacked it with advisers who either have no vaccine background or openly hate vaccines. Public health experts say this will tank compliance and actually make kids less protected, but sure, let’s pretend this is about “safety” instead of politics. The kicker? The change doesn’t even apply to the free Vaccines for Children program, leaving everyone, including some panel members, wondering what the hell just happened.
Trump’s Approval Rating Tanks Again: Trump’s approval rating just belly-flopped to 39 percent, the lowest of his second term, and 57 percent of Americans are officially giving him the presidential middle finger, according to the latest YouGov/Economist poll. His net approval sits at a grim -18, the second-worst of his presidency, though pollsters politely remind us it could “bounce back,” like that sad inflatable clown you punched as a kid. Sure, the MAGA die-hards are still chanting his name, but nearly two-thirds of independents and moderates are looking at his job performance and saying, “Hard pass.”
Senate Turns Into Trump’s Fast-Track Rubber Stamp: The Republican controlled Senate gave Trump a giant rubber stamp, ramming through 48 of his nominees in one vote under new rules that make it easier to stack the government with loyalists. After months of Democrats slowing things down, Republicans cut the brakes entirely, turning what was once a deliberative process into a conveyor belt for Trumpworld appointments. Democrats warn this is one more step toward a Senate that exists purely to greenlight the president’s agenda, no questions asked, and Republicans are already licking their chops for the next batch.
Lisa Cook vs. Trump’s Hostile Takeover of the Fed: Trump has asked the Supreme Court for permission to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee, a respected economist, and the first Black woman to ever sit on the Fed board, in what looks a lot like a hostile takeover of the central bank. The White House is leaning on thin, unproven mortgage fraud claims to oust Cook while quietly stacking the Fed with loyalists like Stephen Miran, who immediately voted for even deeper rate cuts. It’s a direct shot at the Fed’s independence and a warning flare for anyone who thought Trump’s second term wouldn’t involve turning every neutral institution into an arm of Trump Inc.
Turning Point’s Memorial Tour Kicks Off in MAGA-chella: Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, is stepping in as CEO and board chair of Turning Point USA after his killing last week, keeping the far-right pipeline running without skipping a beat. TPUSA cast the move as a divine mandate to finish Charlie’s culture-war vision, vowing to make his project “more powerful and enduring than ever.” A public memorial-slash-political rally is planned for September 21 in Arizona, with Trump and other MAGA all-stars expected to show up.
Here Comes the Sun (Day): If you’re seeking some direct action, more than 450 Sun Day actions are set to pop off this Sunday, with climate legend Bill McKibben leading the charge and basically saying, “Enough of Trump’s fossil fuel fan club.” From solar panels on Habitat homes to electric school bus rollouts, these events are a nationwide clapback to an administration hellbent on torching climate protections and hand-feeding Big Oil. For folks near Seattle, the closest action will be at the Bainbridge Island Public Library.
And now to local news, where, believe it or not, things are mostly good, which in 2025 feels like spotting a unicorn on the light rail.
Decker Manhunt May Be Over: Authorities say they’ve likely found the body of Travis Decker, the former Army Ranger accused of murdering his three daughters, in the backcountry south of Leavenworth after a summer-long manhunt. The case, which horrified Washington state, started when Decker didn’t return the girls after a scheduled visit and ended with their bodies discovered near a campground in June. DNA testing will confirm the remains, but for now officials believe the manhunt is finally over.
Washington AG Tells Bikini Barista Mogul to Cut the Creepery: Washington Attorney General Nick Brown dropped a legal hammer on Jonathan Tagle, the guy behind the Paradise Espresso bikini barista chain, accusing him of running a decade-long nightmare factory of harassment, retaliation, and straight-up wage theft. The lawsuit says Tagle coerced women into sexual acts to get or keep their jobs, groped them, withheld wages and tips, and created a workplace so toxic it pushed employees out. The state wants him banned from ever doing this again, forced to pay back every stolen dollar, and held accountable for turning a coffee stand into a trauma machine.
One Tiny Heart, One Big Middle Finger to a Broken System: Nine-year-old Katja de Groot, who lives in Maltby, WA, is finally home after a summer so intense it makes most prestige TV look boring: heart failure, a pricey cross-country medevac, and a partial heart transplant so rare she’s basically a medical journal cover girl now. She survived thanks to what her mom calls a “domino effect” of donors, doctors, and random kind humans stepping in where America’s busted healthcare system clearly wasn’t going to. The family is begging folks to become organ donors, because in a country where getting lifesaving care can feel like buying a scratch ticket, community might be the only thing that keeps the whole row of dominoes from crashing down.
Even with suppression and censorship doing their worst, the sun still showed up today, and hope? That’s a team sport. So let’s kick it off with this:
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You’ve got to be impressed. It’s not hard to see that Trump has committed more impeachable offenses in the first eight months of his presidency than all other presidents combined in the prior 236 years of our constitutional republic. Yes, and that includes Trump 45. And it’s probably multitudes as many impeachable offenses as all his predecessors combined.
It’s like Stephen Miller and the Heritage Foundation guys spent the Biden interregnum reading all those best-selling books about authoritarian takeovers in other countries–and reading them not as a warning but as a user manual.
Hey, happy Friday!
We’re at the point of V for Vendetta where they start silencing the talk show hosts… wish we could skip to the end part a bit faster.
The reason the parody fell flat is that it’s a dead-on description of the role Stewart (along with Kimmel, Oliver, and Colbert) embodied every single day under Democratic presidents. They have lived this satire in earnest already
by choice.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/pierce-county-homeowner-fatally-shoots-attempted-intruder/
A good guy with a gun story for Barth @4.
@2 hey, political violence is NEVER ok, when your country gets take over by authoritarians– VOTE!
@6 Do you think they’ll let us faggots send in our mail in ballots from the concentration camps? Trump Jr just said that trans people are as dangerous as the taliban. They’re coming for me and Coolidge next. He’s just far too dumb to understand that.
“thee Best S*E*X
I EVER HAD
was @the
Gulag!”
–@anonymous
“If EVERY-Thing you DO
is a ‘crime’ then there
IS N O CRIME!”
–also @Anonymous
take a fucking
Number.
how
Long til
thedjt and
his Thuggery
arrive Here @tS?
before
fucking
Christmas?
before
fucking
THANKSGIVING?
(how
’bout
Halloween?)
@7: Maybe for you, not for me. I have connections.
@9. You have always been a fuck you I got mine type.
@9… That sounds spot on for you.
@10… You beat me to it, but yes, exactly.
@9 lol no they still hate you, you’re what we call a useful idiot
Coolie on the Titanic:
“I have a child!”
More like “i just threw a child overboard so there’s room for me!”
Oh please, I couldn’t resist throwing a little drama to the queen.
Queen Elizabeth? She’s dead. Or are you talking about Camilla?
@9 Nick Fuentes won’t save you.
@16: The queen in aisle 7.
This canonization of Charley Kirk is positively Soviet. I halfway expect to have a Lenin’s Tomb situation develop.
But here’s the thing about dead people. The rest of us lose interest sooner rather than later. They should just bury him before he starts to stink.
so
Sorry
Kkkoolie
but it’s ‘GUILTY as
HELL, by Association’
Q. did You Ever
Participate in that
Wretched Hive of Scum
and Villainy globally Known as tS?
A. well, Yeah, I Did
but it was merely to
Troll the Homos! I SWEAR!
ok.
but Cadet
Bonespurs’s OUT-
LAWED Swearing. sir.
Adios!
@19
that was Thirty
Years ago,
@19. Catalina “Dances on Graves,”
Dear, we should indeed expect an imposing memorial built in tribute to him. And I expect that you, in due course, will be among the first to place flowers at it. In fact, I will go so far to say that those who openly expressed their joy at his demise desperately wish he were still alive – they/you just don’t know it yet.
Like Thein Greyjoy who found himself praying for death on the cross of the flayed man, the kinds of people who rejoiced in his death most are the same kind of people who feel the most pain as the slow grinding backlash crushes forward. It will all be meticulously reported here at TS – no more need for the daily weather filler. TS might as well run a new bulletin – the Kirk backlash report.
I do not know how many days, weeks, or months of it will break you, but rest assured you will. The last week was only an appetizer. And perhaps that was already enough for you dearest Cat.
So can you say “I wish Charlie was still alive.” It’s a simple cut and paste. Anyone?
@19: So jaded and callous, and so Catalina.
@22. Can it with the veiled threats you old psychotic bastard. You keep getting weirder and less coherent with your posts. Now a GoT referencr on top of all the other bizarre anecdotes you have spammed here about all the places you have been in your life. And now this dreck. Quit being such a doomsayer and go have a beer.
“The progressive epistemic bubble is getting really bad. Maybe not worse than the MAGA bubble — but bad, and progressives often rationalize bad behavior by saying whatever the other side is doing is worse. This has already had serious consequences, such as denialism about Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition last year, which they blamed on unfair media coverage. Kimmel is a relatively mainstream figure, so if this sort of misinformation about Robinson is making its way to him — and in scripted remarks, not off-the-cuff comments like Dowd’s — that suggests the bubble is expanding, slowly devouring the reality-based community, and that formerly rational commentators have trouble escaping it once they’re past the event horizon.”
-Nate Silver
@22: Good lord child you need to save that stuff for Tumblr or your journal. Calm down already before you succumb to priapism.
If he is remembered for anything a few weeks from now it will be for saying things like black people were better off under slavery, school shootings are worth having lax gun laws, and jews control everything. Until then, it’s too soon to be honest about who he actually was, so we have to pretend the guy whose fans are getting people fired for quoting him verbatim was passionate about free speech.
@22 You sound like you should be dancing around in front of a church holding a rattlesnake.
@27 My personal favorite Charlie quotes are the ones about how black women don’t have the brain power to be taken seriously and that abortion is worse than the holocaust.
Coolidge and Biped would probably line up to buy shirts with these amazing quotes on em, right?
@25,
What specific “scripted remarks” is Silver referencing that constitutes misinformation? I’ve read the infamous monologue now like six times, and have no idea what he could be referring to here. The most oft-quoted line from folks on the right seems to be the one where he noted that Trump was doing everything he could to paint Robinson as a lefty, which is objectively and demonstrably true.
Nevermind, I copy/pasted the quote and found the broader context for it, which came from this post…
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-political-mood-feels-like-911?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share
…and this seems to be relevant portion
“The remark that got Kimmel in trouble was this: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” This is not merely “insensitive”, in which case I wouldn’t have Kimmel on this list. Rather, from the best evidence available, the implication that “the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk” is MAGA is false. You would call it “misinformation” if that term weren’t usually deployed so one-sidedly…”
I generally respect Silver, as he seems to be pretty hell bent on commenting in strictly objective terms, though I think he pretty obviously misfired here. Kimmel wouldn’t be so dumb to suggest Robinson is MAGA when so little was known about him. His point, that I agree with was kinda the opposite, that Trump was immediately politicizing the shooting before anything was known about Robinson’s motivation or ideology.
@31 I suppose that’s a possible interpretation, but it’s difficult to imagine Kimmel’a next line being anything like “and he’s correct because the shooter isn’t MAGA” given the context, and how many people believe that.
@29 Kirk never said “black women don’t have the brain power to be taken seriously”. This os not a real quote. Can’t say I’m suprised you fell for another fake one.
with the “leader”
of the Free World
uttering utter LIES with
Every utterance, is it any
Wonder ‘The Truth’ is so Elusive?
not to Mention
those Russian Bots sewing
Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation
on (anti-!) Social Mass fucking Media.
good Thing @tS
is Immune,
eh?
@22: Have you completely lost your mind? Mrs. Catalina @19 wrote nothing bad about any dead man. She merely noted his followers seem intent on building a deceptive cult around his memory, and everything we’ve seen so far supports her in that. (Her jab about it being a “Soviet” style cult was a nice touch!)
Charlie Kirk said shooting deaths are the price we pay for a free society. Absolutely none of his followers now celebrate him for having said this. Wouldn’t his followers’ strange refusal to honor his memory make for a more fertile ground of inquiry, rather than berating folks here for statements they clearly have not made?
@34: A coarse paraphrase of what he said with followed with an even weirder narrative about his supporters.
Don’t mind me though, I find this pile-on fascinating. Do continue.
@29, say what you will about charlie but it takes genuine nerve for a community college dropout to accuse a supreme court justice of lacking brain processing power because she’s a black woman. We’re laughing now but if these people get their way wearing that on a t-shirt will be the only thing keeping your ass out of the gay gulag.
@36
wtf!?
will there be
a Gulag for Cissies, too?
thekossack dear, I do wish that Charley Kirk were still alive, because if he were, more and more people would have learned what a completely odious person with profoundly anti-American views he was. As it stands, we’ll all be subjected to a month or so of glurge about him, with a few things named for him in the more “basic” areas of the country, and then he will be swept into the dustbin of history.
Who knows? With time, he might have had a realization of how very wrong he was. Although I doubt it. With a very few exceptions, once a horrible person, always a horrible person. And everyone knows that Republicans are horrible people.
As for the rest of your post, I’d prefer that you leave me out of your ineffectual masturbatory fantasies. I have a feeling that you are one of those people (I believe your term is “beta cuck”?) who cry after climax, or when unable to achieve climax, and that’s just not the “scene” I wish to be associated with.
@35: “A coarse paraphrase of what he said…”
Please enjoy the real deal:
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”
[…]
“…having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.”
(https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-it-2nd-amendment-1793113)
“…followed with an even weirder narrative about his supporters.”
Are they now lovingly quoting his words, above? If they are, please provide some examples.
@38: Speaking of such a scene….
https://youtu.be/r0ka9fhb_fw
@39: Yes, that’s the real deal. Which essentially accept the reality there there will be gun deaths unless there’s a complete and total ban. It’s a moot point actually, because murder is already illegal.
It’s quite stunning, actually, that when the philosophical concepts that frame our constitution are distilled into the vernacular – leftists and people like you are horrified.
@6 what about throwing throwing knife violence tho? If we were all relegated to throwing knife violence it might be ok and kinda cool
I had never even heard of Charlie Kirk before he was shot.
I’m sure as hell not going to Google him now.
Evidently one of the “influencers” the kids today are into.
@41: I’ve already written my complete rejection of that line of logic, and you never did tell me about the freedoms we have which, say, the British and Japanese lack. (Carriage of KNIVES longer than 6cm is illegal in Japan, Swiss Army knives not exempted.) If you could get to that, I’d appreciate it.
“Live From the Ministry of Truth”
You’ve never actually read “1984”, and it shows.
@41
No, we’re not.
The SA gave the 5 southern states freedom to have militias, because they were afraid the 7 northern states would not allow this. (Delaware straddled the Mason-Dixon Line)
Well-regulated militias -slave patrols – were there to guard against uprisings.
Self-defense against government intrusion was a secondary consideration, as the right to bear arms was a collective right.
However, I will grant the late Mr Kirk this; in a nation where there are roughly 340 million citizens, and 400 million guns, gun deaths are going to be inevitable. Let’s face it, the genie has left the bottle. Just pray to God that you or your loved ones won’t be the next victims.
@41: “Which essentially accept the reality there there will be gun deaths unless there’s a complete and total ban.”
It does more than just that, though. If you believe that gun deaths are the price we pay for liberty, then it immediately follows you also believe Mr. Kirk’s death pays some small part of that price, that you believe there was something — no matter how slight — good and right and just in his death. It doesn’t need be much, certainly not anywhere near enough to justify the suffering his family, friends, and followers now experience — but something. Whereas, I truly believe nothing good came from his death. His death can have absolutely no justification at all; zero, zip, zilch, nada. It was pure murder, completely premeditated and completely unjustifiable. He didn’t deserve to die, and his death benefits no one.
think of the
Undertaker, the
Monuments Makers
the Stone Quarrymen
as Josey
once said,
Buzzards gotta
Eat, same’s worms
(no offense).
@3 Let’s not rewrite history. Jon Stewart waged an unrelenting months-long campaign of mockery and derision squarely aimed at driving Biden out of the race that began with his very first return episode and infuriated Biden supporters who for some reason assumed Stewart would poke the same kind of gentle, harmless fun at him that Colbert did. That’s just not how Stewart rolls. He’s an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to presidents, and if you watched the Daily Show for any length of time you’d know that.