The Jeffry Epstein-thing keeps rearing its ugly head.
Once again, Trump proves to be a pragmatist when it comes to dealing with the cost of food.
And the one thing the government shutdown has shown us is how corrupt it is. The Trump administration has decided to do something about it.
We Are Missing the Real Criminal
According to the Wall Street Journal:
The trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails released this week shed light on the relationship between the sex offender and his onetime friend Donald Trump.
Yet one of the more striking revelations from the thousands of pages of correspondence, the latest tranche of documents made public by a House committee, concerns the relationship between Epstein and another man: writer and reporter Michael Wolff.
A leading chronicler of Epstein, Wolff features prominently in the much-awaited email dump, appearing to serve as a kind of unofficial consigliere to him—and seeming to fulfill some people’s worst impression of the entangled worlds of power players and the press.
The two exchanged dozens of emails, illustrating a notably symbiotic connection between a writer and a source. At times Wolff comes across as a shrewd image-consultant, a canny crisis-communications manager and supportive friend to a scandal-plagued tycoon.
After the Epstein email cache was released, Wolff appeared on the Daily Beast’s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, where a top topic was what was inside Wolff’s head when he was writing these now-regrettable emails. In hindsight, he acknowledged, some passages were “embarrassing” and he would have worded them differently.
This Is What I Voted For
According to the Wall Street Journal:
President Trump on Friday moved to lower tariffs on beef, coffee and dozens of agricultural and food goods, marking a significant rollback of his so-called reciprocal levies as he looks for ways to address Americans’ concerns about the cost of living.
Trump issued an executive order modifying the reciprocal tariffs he imposed on virtually every trading partner in August, exempting more than a hundred common food items including fruits, nuts and spices.
The move continues a shift away from Trump’s maximalist tariff policy. When the president announced his reciprocal tariffs this spring, his economic team insisted there would be no exemptions to the levies. They later relented, removing duties on certain items not produced in the U.S., or available in sufficient quantities from domestic suppliers to meet demand.
The newly exempted products on Friday, however, include many products commonly produced in the U.S.—such as beef, which has risen to record prices in recent months. The tariff reductions are retroactive to 12:01 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13, according to the order.
The move is part of a shift from the administration to water down some of its so-called reciprocal tariffs in the face of both price increases for consumers and legal uncertainty following a high-stakes Supreme Court hearing this month. In their place, the administration has expanded other tariffs on individual industries like steel, aluminum and automobiles based on more established national security law—Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-implements-major-rollback-of-food-tariffs-f575c75d?st=R8u3aM
A Good Start
According to the Daily Wire:
The Trump administration is preparing to implement a sweeping and controversial overhaul of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps — an action officials describe as part of a broader effort to increase program integrity and eliminate what they characterize as widespread abuse.
At the center of this initiative is a major requirement announced by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins: millions of low-income Americans will be required to reapply for food-stamp benefits, regardless of whether they are already enrolled, have been long-term recipients, or have recently completed eligibility reviews at the state level.
Rollins outlined the plan during an interview on Newsmax, framing it as a necessary step to restore confidence in how federal taxpayer dollars are used. She said she plans plans to “have everyone reapply for their benefits, make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through … food stamps, that they literally are vulnerable and they can’t survive without it.”
Rollins has recalled that on the day she took office, she sent a letter to all 50 states saying that the federal government had never asked for the data before, but that it now needed the personal data, including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and addresses, of SNAP recipients. She said on X that she sent the letter “so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families,” adding, “The Democrat Party has turned its back on working Americans and built its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census.”
“29 states — mostly the red states — responded with their data sets, February, March, April; so the numbers that you’re talking through, those are numbers that we have been collecting and analyzing since early summer/late spring,” she said. “The fact that this spotlight shined on SNAP has allowed us to talk about it. But here’s the most unbelievable news I have [learned] really just over the last few days: That 5,000 dead people, that was just one month; the number is closer to 186,000 deceased men and women and children in this country are receiving a check.”
The administration argues that this mass reapplication process is essential to combating what it calls systemic fraud and error in SNAP. By reprocessing the entire recipient population, officials say they hope to remove ineligible participants, strengthen data accuracy, and reduce government spending.
By placing the mandatory reapplication requirement at the center of the reforms, the administration seeks to redefine SNAP as a program reserved only for those who can clearly demonstrate acute need, reflecting a broader shift toward stricter eligibility enforcement.
Weirdo on a Plane
According to the Daily Wire:
Photos posted online show Democrat Congressman Brad Sherman (CA) looking at what appears to be pornographic images of women on his tablet during a recent flight.
Sherman, who is fiercely anti-Trump, has denied that he was looking at pornography, while admitting to looking at the suggestive photos and blaming the X algorithm.
“If I see a picture of a woman, might I look at it longer than a sunset? Yeah,” Sherman told reporter John Bresnahan in the aftermath of the scandal. He also said what he was doing was “inappropriate.”
The images went viral after they were posted by an X account called @dearwhitestaff. With his mouth agape, Sherman is seen viewing four to five sexually suggestive photos.
“Why did California Congressman Brad Sherman feel it was appropriate to look at porn on his iPad during a flight today?” the post was captioned. “His district deserves better representation than this!!”
When interviewed about the images, Sherman “denied repeatedly that he was looking or pornography or has a problem with pornography,” Bresnahan said. “Sherman said these photos came up in ‘Twitter feed’ under the ‘For You’ heading.”
“This was on Twitter,” Sherman said. “These pictures came up on ‘For You.’ … I must’ve looked at more than 1,000 posts.”
A Song Feminists Should Listen To
Kelsea Ballerini – I Sit in Parks