Checks & Imbalances: How Ivanka Trump Lied

As Don Jr. and Eric Trump take the stand, we continue our coverage of Donald Trump’s ongoing trial in New York. Follow along now with live updates from inside the courtroom.


Ivanka Trump Helped Her Dad Lie About His Net Worth

Ivanka Trump is expected to testify soon in a $250 million fraud case that the New York attorney general is waging against her father and his associates, reports Dan Alexander. That’s bad news for Ivanka, who tried to get out of taking the stand. But it might be even worse news for her father, who employed Ivanka in his years-long con to convince the world that he had more money than he actually did.

The attorney general will have plenty of questions for Donald Trump’s eldest daughter. Ivanka helped lead the acquisition of two assets at the center of the lawsuit, the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. and the Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami. She also lived in another property caught up in the proceedings, a condo building named Trump Park Avenue in New York City.

But to fully understand Ivanka’s involvement in her father’s deceit, it helps to get inside the room where the lying took place. That’s exactly where three Forbes journalists were in September 2015, when Donald Trump hosted them in Trump Tower as part of his quest to climb higher on The Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people. Trump spouted off all sorts of nonsense that day, claiming his properties were more profitable, spacious and valuable than they actually were. In the middle of his pitch, the Republican frontrunner received a phone call. “Ivanka,” said Trump, “my little Ivanka.”

Nine minutes later, she entered the room: “Hiiii!”

MORE FROM FORBESIvanka Trump Helped Her Dad Lie About His Net Worth

Tracking Trump

Trump-Linked SPAC Spent $10.8 Million On Legal Fees Amid Regulatory Probes

The company planning to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Truth Social, spent $10.8 million on legal fees related to government investigations in 2021 and 2022, according to an amended financial statement Digital World Acquisition Corp. filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. Those legal fees comprise about 46% of the company’s total expenses over that two-year period.

MORE FROM FORBESTrump-Linked SPAC Spent $10.8 Million On Legal Fees Amid Regulatory Probes

How Much Money Has Michael Cohen Made Hating On Trump?

Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified last week in the New York fraud case. Trump’s legal team immediately set out to discredit Cohen, asking him how much money he has made from hosting podcast episodes and writing books relentlessly criticizing Trump.

“It’s irrelevant,” Cohen said, clearly reluctant to get into specifics on his personal finances. But when asked whether he had monetary incentives to criticize his boss, Cohen conceded the point. “Yes,” he responded in open court.

How much money has Cohen earned from his media ventures? It’s hard to say exactly, but it does look to be a solid revenue stream.

MORE FROM FORBESHow Much Money Has Michael Cohen Made Hating On Trump?

This Is What Trump Is Actually Like In The Courtroom When Cameras Aren’t Allowed In: Reporter

Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander, who was in a Manhattan courthouse covering the fraud case against former President Donald Trump, joins Brittany Lewis on “Forbes Newsroom” to discuss.

From The News Desk

Senate Democrats Plan To Subpoena GOP Megadonors—Including Harlan Crow—Over Reported Gifts To Supreme Court Justices

Senate Democrats announced plans to subpoena two GOP megadonors and a conservative judicial activist, seeking details about their reported role in paying for lavish gifts and luxury trips for conservative Supreme Court justices that triggered calls for an ethical code for the judges serving on the court, reports Siladitya Ray.

MORE FROM FORBESSenate Democrats Plan To Subpoena GOP Megadonors-Including Harlan Crow-Over Reported Gifts To Supreme Court Justices

Billionaire Says Glenn Youngkin Could Declare Presidential Run Next Week

Thomas Peterffy, the billionaire founder of Interactive Brokers, has made no secret of his desire for Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin to become president, reports John Hyatt. He has given $3 million to Youngkin’s political action committee since April and publicly urged Youngkin to enter the race.

Youngkin, a former private equity investor, has previously insisted he’s “wholly focused on the Commonwealth of Virginia.” But Peterffy, in an interview with Forbes, says Youngkin may reconsider if Republicans take control of Virginia’s senate in next week’s state election. “His hope is that…the Senate will flip Republican, and that would give him a platform on which we could say, “Look, I turned an all-blue state red, and I can do that nationwide. So please vote for me,’” says Peterffy.

MORE FROM FORBESBillionaire Says Glenn Youngkin Could Declare Presidential Run Next Week

By The Numbers

$1,371,800

The sum that Nirmal Mulye, the CEO of Nostrum Laboratories, has donated to candidates for federal office since 2003. On Monday, Nostrum and Mulye agreed to pay the government at least $3.8 million in fines “to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by knowingly underpaying Medicaid.”

$15,000

How much Donald Trump has been fined for violating gag orders.

$2.6 billion

Donald Trump’s net worth, according to Forbes’ estimates.


Road To 2024

On “Forbes Eye on Iowa,” former 2024 Republican presidential candidate Larry Elder spoke with Sarah Muller about his endorsement of former President Trump, his campaign, the future of the Republican Party and more.

Quiz

Which of the following is not a figure Ivanka Trump gave for the amount of meeting space at Trump National Doral?

  1. “75,000 square feet”
  2. “over 90,000 square feet”
  3. “a hundred thousand square feet”
  4. “150,000 square feet”

Check if you got it right here.

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#Checks #Imbalances #Ivanka #Trump #Lied

If You Took Away White MAGA Dudes’ Masculine Insecurities, They’d Have Nothing Left

We mean every word of that headline.

This article is about Charlie Kirk, but you could say the same for all the Daily Wire guys and Donald Trump Jr. and pretty much every other white conservative MAGA dude these days. We’ve long noted it about Tucker Carlson. (Who just got finished doing an interview with creep Andrew Tate that was pretty much just Tucker drinking Tate’s bathwater, something he’s clearly been pining to do. Tate of course has been charged with rape and human trafficking, something conservatives are tying themselves in knots trying to pretend they care about at the moment.)

Some of them would be left with a husk of creepy, stupid religious beliefs, but even those are tied up in their masculinity issues.

Charlie Kirk gave the weirdest demonstration of this yesterday on his show. We are not even sure where to start making fun of this clip, but did you know that nobody who has become strong as a result of going to the gym is a liberal? Or rather, did you know that’s something Charlie Kirk’s psyche needs to believe for some demented and sad reason?

Kirk was bitching about some MSNBC article from last summer, about how there is a trend within white fascist male (read: masculine insecure) communities that ties their political beliefs in with mixed martial arts and boxing, groups that pull in white supremacists and Nazis and more. But of course, Charlie Kirk doesn’t have much formal education, which might be why his stated comprehension of the article is poor.


Which must be why he said:

CHARLIE KIRK: A society that is eating well, eating clean, intermittent fasting, not taking processed foods, has their testosterone rates properly balanced, understands their hormones, taking supplements, is properly hydrating, is pushing themselves physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, that makes tyranny harder to become popular. A society that is individually full of millions of strong people, a tyrant — how, how is Gavin Newsom or J.B Pritzker going to take control of their lives, it’s like screw you!

Yes, indeed, a society that does intermittent fasting and drinks enough water is fully equipped to fight back against, ahem, Gavin Newsom. Sure thing. Totally regular and normal thing to say right there.

Kirk said he thinks men are working out right now because there’s a “tribal signal that’s subconsciously going off” because society is falling apart. You know, because of the “moral and societal decay” and the “open borders.” It’s sending the young men to the gym, in a tribal signal way. You bet.

It got weirder, because Charlie was still mad about the article that talked about how Nazis are using MMA and boxing to recruit. He was upset about lines in it that say things like, “The intersection of extremism and fitness leans into a shared obsession with the male body, training, masculinity, testosterone, strength and competition.” (LOL show us the lie. These fucking weirdos are literally obsessed with testosterone levels,sperm counts and ball tanning these days.)

Tucker Says Low Testosterone Matters And Size Matters And Big Things Are Very Scary

And Now For The Sperm Report, With Tucker Carlson!

Alex Jones So Excited Tucker Shot Part Of His Little Weenus-Tanning Documentary On His Property

And Charlie had another theory, about what the Left wants men to do. Did you know the Left does not want people to work out? Did you know the Left wants people to be weak? Did you know that Charlie is misunderstanding the MSNBC article he’s mad about, either intentionally or not, to mean that MSNBC is saying that all fitness is a right-wing thing, and the Left is the opposite?

He made a crack about how the “gay mafia” is definitely more obsessed with the male body than the Nazi weirdos who make up the American conservative movement these days, and then he made that face above. And then he said:

KIRK: They want men to become metrosexual betas of low testosterone that are androgynous consumers that sit on their tail all day long that have no muscle mass, no desire, no purpose. They want you depressed, they want you weak, and they want you easily controlled.

LMAO, amazing. Again, it’s hard to figure out where to start making fun of this.

Aside from the fact that he whined about low testosterone five seconds after making a juvenile crack about the “gay mafia,” we can note that he used the term “metrosexual,” a word no normal person has used since 1995. The only people who still use that word are white shut-in conservatives who are furious that homophobes are now societal rejects. It’s literally a word that was invented to give straight men a pathway to take baths, trim their pubes and wear clothes that fit without being called gay. It simply has no cultural relevance in 2023. (And it never meant “weak.”)

Yet here is Charlie Kirk saying it to other milquetoast lunatics who probably also say it.

Kirk babbled and babbled about the Left wanting people who don’t ask questions and don’t resist tyranny, and continued:

KIRK: The Great Reset relies upon the masculine firewall, the masculine bulwark, to be obedient or abolished. So they label it as toxic masculinity.

LMAO, okeydoke.

If only men like Charlie Kirk stand up and shake around their testosterones, the Left’s evil plans could be thwarted! The masculine firewall! The masculine bulwark!

Charlie babbled some more about testosterone rates (but remember, only the “gay mafia” is obsessed with the male body). He whined that men who point out dropping testosterone rates are labeled as extremists. He made fun of the author of the MSNBC article and said “she looks like a wonderful wife.” (You know, because women are nothing but property to white Christian fascists.) He said she looks like a “feminazi on steroids.” He just kept performatively talking about how physically repulsive the woman was. “Ugh!” he said.

Yep, the crooked face and mangled forehead of Charlie Kirk said those things about another human’s appearance.

He continued:

KIRK: Weak men are necessary for the totalitarian takeover of America. […] Nobody who has gotten strong in the gym believes in the lies of liberalism. When you take hours a week in the gym, all of the sudden a government getting in your ear to say to get something for nothing falls — it is incongruent with your practices. When you’re in the gym you don’t believe the lies that people are just helpless victims of circumstance.

Y’all have to watch and see how mad he was saying this stuff. He was furious, his voice rising as he explained that people who are physically fit are happier and healthier, and the Left DOESN’T WANT YOU TO BE THAT WAY!

And we are just over here uncontrollably laughing at the idea that nobody at the gym is a liberal.

Funny story: When we first saw this article yesterday, we were still sweating because we had just come back from the gym, where we, a liberal gay homosexual, meet with our personal trainer for hours per week, on top of many more hours of strength training, cardio, yoga and more. Uh oh, Charlie! Are we at a risk of going brain-stupid and becoming admirers of you, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump?

Bless his heart.

Where does this sniveling weenus think Instagram gays get their perfect bodies? And Instagram straights? The people who keep gyms open 24/7 in big cities? Does he think they’re secret Trump voters?

And it’s so funny because we know guys like Kirk go to the gym and lift and stuff. Maybe even a couple of the 4-foot-11 Daily Wire host dudes. A few of these guys are cut! (Definitely not all of them.) But their self-worth is so tied up in these masturbatory fantasies about how this somehow adds to their godly virtue, and also that they have been chosen to use their strong conservative man bodies this way to own the libs.

Whereas normal people are out there getting strong and healthy and looking great for … normal reasons.

As we said, if you took away these freaks’ masculine insecurities, you’d have nothing left.

[Media Matters]

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Donald Trump Knew Exactly What The Hell He Was Doing.

What’s in the indictment of Donald Trump in Manhattan, may it be the first of many? And what kind of information can we learn from reading it?

Well first of all, hot tip, ladies and gentleladies: Don’t do crimes. And if you happen to be running for president and there are all these people out there saying “Extra! Extra! Read all about my porn peener hallelujah funtimes with the presidential candidate!” do NOT engage in major criminal schemes to organize payoffs to all those people and then lie about it in business records.

Just a life hack for you, courtesy of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.

All the 34 felony counts are for falsifying business records. That document is boring to read. Click it to verify that we’re not foolin’ ya about it being boring, but then move on. It just says “these are the crimes.” They are felonies instead of misdemeanors because DA Alvin Bragg and the grand jury assess that Trump falsified those business documents in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to pay off Stormy Daniels to keep revelations of their sex story from damaging Trump’s presidential prospects.

Considering the tiny margin by which he “won,” and considering how Russia saved him from the “Access Hollywood” tape literally minutes after it broke, by dropping Anthony Podesta’s emails through Wikileaks, concealing that story absolutely could have moved the needle. That’s why this matters.

(For the record, he pleaded “not guilty,” for the record, we don’t believe him.)


The document you’ll want to read is the statement of facts, and it’s an easy-peasy quick read. Why, we even think your average Fox News viewer could figure it out, if any of them were ever inclined to check Fox’s work. (Which is why it’s too bad they probably haven’t actually heard about the Dominion lawsuit texts that show that Fox News characters knowingly and willingly lie to them, like all the time.)

The statement of facts tells the whole entire story, not just the part about Stormy Daniels. It tells the story of how Trump and his loyal pals worked a whole scheme to keep naughty porny stories about him from coming out, thereby influencing the 2016 election. If you’ve been reading Wonkette and/or following American politics pretty closely since that election, a lot of this will be familiar to you.

Read it yourself, but the document describes:

1. How Michael Cohen, at the direction of Trump, paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence, by borrowing the cash from his HELOC, routing it through a BS consulting LLC he created, and then Trump and the Trump Organization engaged in all kinds of hinky shit to pay Michael Cohen back and make it look like legal fees. (He was not on retainer.) They even paid him back far over and above $130K, so that once he paid his taxes he would end up square.

2. How there was a whole “Catch and Kill” scheme/agreement with the former publisher of the National EnquirerDavid Pecker! — whereby they’d make sure to get the “rights” to a person’s exclusive story, and then, like, never publish it. For instance, Karen McDougal, the Playboy model! And remember … the doorman? We had almost forgotten about the doorman.

Here are some words:

[I]n or about October or November 2015, the [American Media, parent company of the Enquirer] CEO learned that a former Trump Tower doorman (the “Doorman”) was trying to sell information regarding a child that the Defendant had allegedly fathered out of wedlock. At the AMI CEO’s direction, AMI negotiated and signed an agreement to pay the Doorman $30,000 to acquire exclusive rights to the story. AMI falsely characterized this payment in AMI’s books and records, including in its general ledger. AMI purchased the information from the Doorman without fully investigating his claims, but the AMI CEO directed that the deal take place because of his agreement with the Defendant and Lawyer A.

When AMI later concluded that the story was not true, the AMI CEO wanted to release the Doorman from the agreement. However, Lawyer A instructed the AMI CEO not to release the Doorman until after the presidential election, and the AMI CEO complied with that instruction because of his agreement with the Defendant and Lawyer A.

“Lawyer A” is Cohen, if you didn’t figure that out yet. The “Defendant” is Trump, if you are a big dumb who needs everything spelled out.

3. In the section about Karen McDougal, Bragg underlines that arrangements were being made there because “The Defendant did not want this information to become public because he was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy.” You know, in case Trump really wants to try the “Melania defense” with any of this, arguing that he did all these things because he so very much didn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings.

4. Once it gets to the Stormy Daniels section, it sets the scene, starting with the “Access Hollywood” tape on October 7. It talks about how worried Trump and his campaign were that it would hurt his candidacy. And it talks specifically about how Trump encouraged Cohen to wait as long as possible to actually make the payment to Stormy Daniels, because maybe once the election happened, it would be a moot point. (See again: “Melania defense” is bullshit.)

The Defendant directed Lawyer A to delay making a payment to Woman 2 as long as possible. He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public. As reflected in emails and text messages between and among Lawyer A, Lawyer B, and the AMI Editor-in-Chief, Lawyer A attempted to delay making payment as long as possible.

But then they paid her.

From there it goes into great detail about exactly how they falsified the business records, and who-all’s grubby paws were on those checks. (Donald Trump Jr., oh hey.)

And it details alllllll the witness intimidation of Michael Cohen — Trump’s efforts to keep him from cooperating with the feds, and how that one lawyer Robert Costello whispered sweet nothings in Cohen’s ear about how he was so close with Trump’s lawyer and he could be a “back channel” between Cohen and Trump and “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”

It goes ahead and copy/pastes Michael Cohen’s guilty pleas too:

[O]n or about the summer of 2016, in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office, I and the CEO of a media company at the request of the candidate worked together to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information. After a number of discussions, we eventually accomplished the goal by the media company entering into a contract with the individual under which she received compensation of $150,000. I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election. […]

[O]n or about October of 2016, in coordination with, and at the direction of, the same candidate, I arranged to make a payment to a second individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign to keep the individual from disclosing the information. To accomplish this, I used a company that was under my control to make a payment in the sum of $130,000. The monies I advanced through my company were later repaid to me by the candidate. I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election.

So much of this was in the criminal information in federal court for Michael Cohen, and of course a lot of it we know from reporting and congressional testimony and just wherever else.

Cohen went to prison for this shit.

Now Donald Trump should too. He knew exactly what the fuck he was doing.

[Trump criminal information]

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Wowwww Everyone Saying Wokey McBankFace Gave Black Lives Matter $73M Is A Goddamn Liar

We guess this is their attempt to make the halfwit “woke bank” lie more intellectual racist. Because to appeal to the kinds of people who vote for Republicans and consume rightwing media with the voraciousness of Ron DeSantis fingering a pudding cup, your talking points need to make sense jam at the white supremacist G-spots inside their bottoms.

We first heard it on Tucker on Wednesday night, so there’s a huge shock. In the middle of his fuckbonkers monologue, which was really nothing more than interactive bingo for those aforementioned G-spots, he said that “according to amazing new analysis from the Claremont Institute, Silicon Valley Bank — brace yourself — spent more than $73 million on donations to BLM and related organizations.”

LOL “Claremont Institute.” There’s your first clue this is some absolute full-of-shit nonsense. OK actually the first clue was Tucker’s mouth was moving and he was making those high-pitched yipyap sounds that always come out when he talks.

SEVENTY-THREE MILLION DONATIONS TO BLM! (And related organizations asterisk shhhhhhh.)

Friends, does it make sense that Silicon Valley Bank donated $73 MILLION TO BLACK LIVES MATTER (and related organizations asterisk shhhhh)?


That would be a very big sponsorship, if so!

Anyway, this wasn’t just something that was written on whatever Tucker had stuck up his butt that night. The entire rightwing media has latched on. Donald Trump Jr. pulled the $73 million number out of his pants and played with it on Twitter. On Fox News, Jesse Watters said Tuesday night that Wokey McBankFace gave $74 million to BLM. He’s also said $75 million. (The number is jumping around a bit, which is fine, because it’s all lies.) Ainsley Earhardt repeated it on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. Larry Kudlow pegged it at $75 million. (Guess that was one of the WOKE ROMPINGS he’s been accusing the bank of this week.)

Everybody on Fox News said it.

Look, a video.

www.youtube.com

Friends, would you like to know how much money Wokey McBankFace donated to Black Lives Matter?

Zero dollars. The answer is zero dollars.

Several sites have done extensive debunkings of how Claremont Institute put together its “amazing new analysis” that ended up manufacturing this fake lying amount of donations for lying rightwing fascist pundits to piss into their followers’ receptive gullets. Josh Marshall has a good one at Talking Points Memo. The link we posted above — and will post again right now — from Judd Legum and his pals at Popular Information is extensive and detailed.

The key to the damned fucking lie is that it’s including “pledges to groups that are associated with Black Lives Matter.” Wait, that’s not the key to the lie. Wokey McBankFace gave all those related orgs zero dollars.

The key to the damned fucking lie is that it includes “organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda.” And what are some aspects of BLM’s agenda? Well, Claremont says it’s to — hold on to your funny bones for this one — “undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.” These people are such fucking shut-in bigots, Jesus Christ.

But that’s not even how Claremont calculates it, as Legum explains. We’re just going to copy/paste you four paragraphs, because it’s not like we did the research:

In 2021, SVB made a pledge to spend $50 million over five years on an internal initiative called Access to Innovation. The program sought to connect women, Black people, and Latinos with startup funding, networking, and leadership development in the venture capitalist ecosystem. Integrating marginalized groups into the venture capitalist community seems like an odd way to “undermine capitalism,” the purpose of BLM, according to the Claremont Institute. And since the program was to last five years, most of the money has probably not been spent. Nevertheless, the $50 million represents more than two-thirds of SVB’s alleged support for BLM.

The other major contribution by SVB that the Claremont Institute says was BLM-related was a $20 million donation “to support additional COVID-19 relief” and establish a “full-ride, needs-based University Scholarship program to students at Arizona State University, Florida A&M University, Tulane University, and Xavier University.” (The $20 million represented the fees SVB collected for processing loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.) It is unclear what COVID-19 relief and college scholarships have to do with BLM.

The Claremont Institute database also says that SVB spent another $1.2 million on the Access to Innovation program and $1.6 million on “causes supporting gender parity in innovation” in 2020. According to the sources cited by the Claremont Institute, these expenditures actually occurred in 2019. They also have no apparent connection to the BLM movement.

Rounding out the Claremont Institute database is a 2020 “2:1 matching campaign for employees who donate their money or time to social justice organizations, which raised nearly $400,000.” The identity of these groups is not disclosed, but the Claremont Institute assumes they must be related to BLM. In addition, the database includes $250,000 of donations from the SVB Foundation in “corporate donations to the NAACP, ACLU, National Urban League and other organizations.” (These donations may overlap with the matching program.) The Claremont Institute considers the NAACP and the ACLU to be “BLM partners.” In reality they are two of the oldest and most respected civil rights and civil liberties organizations in the United States.

And that, friends, is how the rightwing white supremacist sausage party lie is made. If you’d rather read it in more bite-sized form, Legum made a Twitter thread.

Why do they get away with this? Because Claremont and every rightwing piece of shit repeating the lie know with 100 percent confidence that the idiots who get their news from them are too stupid and gullible to check the information for themselves, and too racist to notice the fact that THE LIE DOESN’T EVEN FUCKING MAKE SENSE. These morons have been buying “WOKE BANKS!11111!” this whole week, they’re the stupidest people in the entire world.

Remember how the Dominion texts are showing us how Fox News knowingly and intentionally lies to its viewers for fun and profit?

Yeah.

[Popular Information]

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Woke NTSB Says ‘Overheated Wheel Bearing’ Derailed Train, Doesn’t Even Call Secretary Mayor Pete Gay

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report yesterday on its investigation into the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The report says the train’s crew knew one car on the train had a badly overheated wheel bearing, and had already begun slowing the train just before the derailment.

Weirdly, the NTSB didn’t place any of the blame for the February 3 crash or the subsequent toxic chemical spill on President Joe Biden, Transportation Secretary Mayor Pete Buttigieg, or on transgender kids in American schools forcing others to acknowledge their preferred pronouns. That’s sure to come up on Newsmax.

Buttigieg was in East Palestine himself yesterday, where he didn’t buy McDonald’s hamburgers for anyone, unlike Donald Trump, who was there the day before and personally fixed everything. While Buttigieg was there, he acknowledged the rightwing media complaints that he hadn’t personally visited the site sooner, saying he’d “do some thinking” on whether he should have gone sooner. Oh for your sake, Pete! You really do over-intellectualize things a bit, but that’s how you do:

“What I tried to do was balance two things — my desire to be involved and engaged in on the ground, which is how I am generally wired to act and my desire to follow the norm of transportation secretaries allowing NTSB to really lead the initial stages of the public facing work,” he told reporters. “I’ll do some thinking about whether I got that balance right. But I think the most important thing is, first of all, making sure that the residents here have what they need.”

For all his introspection, Buttigieg got a Fox News story headlining how he’d gone on MSNBC last night and cruelly pointed out Donald Trump’s rollback of safety regulations, what a monster. Fox News also ran a fun story rounding up rightwingers on Twiitter mocking the “leather dress shoes” Buttigieg had worn, because what real man goes to a muddy disaster site in anything but steel-toed work boots?


So there’s your payback for the liberal media making fun of Ron DeSantis’s weird white hurricane boots, haw haw. Maybe Pete left his high heels in the car, replied one wag, because you know he is an effete gay homosexual who never wore boots, certainly not during his combat tour in Afghanistan. That’s him, second on the left, in a campaign photo. Those look like boots!

Jesus, you see how easy it is to get sucked into this stupid performative macho shit? Anyway, if Buttigieg had worn gnarly steel-toed work boots, wingnut media would have accused him of fakery because does he really wear Thorogood American Heritage steel-toed work boots around his soft office job? He does not, and how dare he spend $250 on boots just for a photo op? Damn him to hell!

So yes, the NTSB report.

Among the top findings were that the train crew appears to have acted appropriately; the train was traveling 47 miles per hour, a bit below the maximum speed for that area of 50 miles per hour. It was already slowing a bit when automated trackside monitoring equipment detected that a wheel bearing on the twenty-third car of the train was dangerously hot, 253°F above the ambient temperature of 10°F. (When car 23 passed two earlier detectors, they picked up temperatures that were rising, but well below the temperature threshold that would trigger an alarm.)

The detection equipment “transmitted a critical audible alarm message instructing the crew to slow and stop the train to inspect a hot axle,” and the engineer began slowing the train down, but then “an automatic emergency brake application initiated,” which Axios explains may have resulted from train cars separating from each other.

Once the train stopped, the crew “observed fire and smoke and notified the Cleveland East dispatcher of a possible derailment,” and with permission from the dispatcher, set the hand brakes on the first two cars and uncoupled the locomotives to move them a mile away for safety. The report does not note whether the train crew said “Whew!”

Thirty-eight cars of the 149-car train derailed; among them were 11 tank cars carrying hazardous chemicals. Fire broke out and also damaged 12 cars on the train that hadn’t derailed.

Axios notes that first responders who arrived on the scene got the initial fire under control, but Ohio authorities were concerned about five derailed tank cars carrying vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic chemical used in making PVC plastic. Temperatures inside one of the cars kept rising, “suggesting the chemical was undergoing a polymerization reaction and could explode.”

That prompted local responders on February 6 to evacuate a larger area around the crash site, then vent the five cars and burn off the chemicals, which took several hours. The NTSB report is careful to point out that the agency wasn’t involved in that decision, or in testing air and water quality following the crash. Please take your questions to the EPA and to Ohio GOP Governor Mike DeWine, who authorized the chemical burnoff after advisers warned him of the high risk of an explosion. (OK, fine, the NTSB didn’t specify DeWine, just that it wasn’t the feds’ decision.)

The NTSB will focus its ongoing investigation on:

[T]he wheelset and bearing; tank car design and derailment damage; a review of the accident response, including the venting and burning of the vinyl chloride; railcar design and maintenance procedures and practices; NS [Norfolk Southern] use of wayside defect detectors; and NS railcar inspection practices.

We should also point out that nowhere in the report does the NTSB examine the crucial railroad safety thoughts of Donald Trump Jr., who on Wednesday night went on Newsmax to explain that nobody in the Biden administration knows what they’re doing because Pete Buttiieg is gay and that was his only job qualification.

The son of the former president, who has never held a real job outside his daddy’s business/crime organization (or gigs in rightwing media resulting from that nepo baby status), claimed Joe Biden “doesn’t give a crap” and “couldn’t care less” about the people of East Palestine. You know, unlike his father, master of empathy Donald “have a good time” Trump.

Then it was time for the full-on gay-hatin’.

Newsmax host Carl Higbie started Junior off with the sage observation that “You know, Pete has no business in that position,” and the failson was off and running:

But, you know, he’s the guy who had no business running for president but they let him do that cause he was gay and they check off a box and then he didn’t win, so “he’s the gay guy, so we gotta give him something, let’s make him transportation secretary,” what does he know about it? NOTHING! His failure, after failure, after failure are truly affecting the American people.

Just to make clear that Buttigieg is a feminine not-man, Junior also came back to the rightwing meme about Buttigieg’s paternity leave after adopting twin babies, mocking “the time he spent chest-feeding while we were in the midst of a supply chain crisis.” Haha, can you just imagine that little unmanly wimp trying to feed a baby?!

MORE: How Donald Trump’s Sociopathic Parenting Made Donald Trump Jr. The Winner He Is Today

As we all know, real men subject their children to emotional abuse so they’ll learn how to be manly, and that’s why the train crashed, the end.

[NTSB / Axios / NYDN / Insider]

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