To understand last night’s raving, deluded, ignorant “State of the Union” message, we must start with a photo taken a few hours before. Awkwardly sitting together on a gold couch, David Ellison and Sen. Lindsey Graham give a thumbs up to the camera.

Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is currently trying to use his father’s vast fortune to build an entertainment empire. He has already purchased Paramount, which, among other entities, owns CBS.

Virtually all of the capitulation at the once-proud news outlet started when Ellison first sought to acquire the Tiffany Network. It is impossible to know what political views, if any, he actually holds, but in an age of weak-kneed corporate collaborators, Ellison is a poster child for the cause.

So there he is, sitting alongside arguably the most pathetic man in the U.S. Senate, paying homage to Donald Trump.

Trump’s actual address to the joint session of Congress was tedious, low-energy and filled with the expected lies. Trump is most effective when he ignores the teleprompter and script.

Last night, he largely followed what had been written for him, and it showed. For nearly two hours, he droned on, occasionally appearing to read words he had never seen before and barely understood.

That does not mean the speech was without its glaring moments. His dystopian vision of a crime-ridden country with murder around every corner was jarring. His insistence that everyday Americans are wrong to think prices are too high and the economy is faltering was tone-deaf. His claims about international affairs and foreign policy were, at times, laughable.

Most critical for democracy were his words aimed at free and fair elections.

He began by reiterating his strong support for the SAVE America Act, a Republican voter suppression bill that he falsely claimed will “stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections.”

Trump’s lies about our elections are nothing new, and tying them to noncitizen voting has become standard fare — but that does not make it any less corrosive to democracy.

Trump did not stop at describing what is actually contained in the bill. He again targeted mail-in voting by insisting that Republicans ban all “mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military or travel.”

Nor did he let up on the growing calls within the GOP to bring Congress’s other work to a complete halt while Senate Republicans embark on a doomed strategy of requiring a talking filibuster to pass his voter suppression agenda — insisting it should happen “before anything else.”

One could sense the dread coming over Republican Senate leader John Thune as he listened. He knows he cannot deliver what Trump was proposing, but he is too spineless to push back.

Trump knows this, too, which is why he turned to his supplicant leader and said, “And we’re going to stop it. We have to stop it, John.”

As he did throughout his speech, Trump used the opportunity to vilify Democrats and lie about their motives. He demonized them for failing to support his disastrous policies and attacked them for refusing to stand and applaud him.

In this section of his speech, however, he was even more autocratic, claiming that Democratic opposition to voter suppression was because “they want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

The State of the Union is supposed to be an opportunity for presidents to fulfill their constitutional obligation to “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union” and “recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

However, in recent decades it has also become a display of presidential and congressional unity of purpose, even as disagreements on specific policies remain. The fact that the president must be invited by the Speaker to give the address, that he travels to their chamber with their officers sitting on the dais behind him and members of Congress in the audience, is intended to display Congress’s primacy at the event.

This year, the entire affair — starting with David Ellison’s photo — was a display of raw presidential power. Trump wanted everyone to know that he was in charge, and Republicans in the audience were happy to oblige. Seated behind him, the Senate President, Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson failed to display Congress’ leadership. They gave the aura of nothing more than his fumbling footmen.

When the event concluded, Speaker Johnson told an interviewer what was really at stake during the nearly two-hour speech: “If we lost the midterms — heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House — it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect.”

Trump knows it. Lindsey Graham knows it. Cowardly business leaders like Ellison know it. For once, I’m grateful to Mike Johnson for being willing to actually say it.

Trump showed how desperate he was tonight

At 9 pm, Donald J. Trump began what would become the longest State of the Union address in American history. For one hour and forty-eight minutes, he stood in front of the country and delivered a speech that was not about the state of our union at all, but about the state of his own power, and how desperate he is to hold onto it as it slips further and further out of his control. It was full of deliberate lies from start to finish, packed with racist talking points, made-up statistics, twisted grievances, and the kind of unhinged rhetoric that made clear just how afraid he is, not only that the truth about his ties to Epstein will finally come out, but that the full impact of what he’s done to our economy, to our international alliances, to the rule of law, and to the basic systems that hold this country together will finally catch up to him.

And if there was still any doubt about what this night was really about, he erased it himself with this: “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. Amazing. We’re lucky we have a country. With people like this, Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we?” That’s what the President of the United States said tonight, into the microphone, on national television, in between demands for applause and pauses to catch his breath.

“This is the golden age of America,” he said, through mouth breathing, while leaning on the podium for support. And that’s when the lies began. He said the economy was bad before he took office, and now it had a “stunning economic turnaround”, the “biggest in history.” And then he launched into one of the most bizarre moments of the night: “People are asking me: Please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.” No one is saying this. No one has ever said this. This is a man constructing a fantasy in real time and then responding to it as if it were a conversation he actually had. And the room clapped for it.

Then came the line he always circles back to, the one that slipped out again tonight without hesitation: “So in my first year of the second term, it should be my third term, but strange things happen.” He said it like a joke. But this isn’t a joke. This is the President of the United States once again suggesting that the two-term limit doesn’t apply to him. That what happened in 2020 was somehow stolen. That the rules are optional when he doesn’t like the outcome. Is he saying he had no plans to leave? That he still doesn’t? We can’t pretend these moments don’t matter. Because he keeps saying it out loud. And the danger is pretending he doesn’t mean every word of it.

Criminal act’: FBI scrambles as leak reveals Kash Patel’s ‘long segments of leisure time’

Source: Raw Story

February 25, 2026 8:44AM ET

FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Italy that culminated with him chugging beer with the U.S. hockey team was revealed Wednesday to have included “long segments of personal and leisure time” after the leak of an internal schedule, a leak that the FBI condemned as a “criminal act,” The New York Times reported.

Patel has defended his trip to Italy during the Olympic games, with the FBI telling the Times that the trip was focused on “strengthening joint counterterrorism coordination” with America’s European allies.

After the Times obtained an internal schedule for Patel’s trip, however, it was revealed that long stretches of time were earmarked for things like “personal time” or “cultural activities.” In response to the leak, the FBI vowed to hold the leaker accountable.

“The leaking of his minute-by-minute schedule is a criminal act that jeopardizes security and will not be taken lightly,” said Ben Williamson, the assistant director for the FBI’s Public Affairs office, speaking with the Times.

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/kash-patel-2675331855/?utm_source=superhead

If he’s running around getting shit-faced at parties in a foreign country, the HE becomes a jeopardy to the nation’s “security”.

https://www.rawstory.com/judge-cannon-jack-smith

US ambassador to Paris banned from meeting French ministers after no-show

Source: The Guardian

Donald Trump’s ambassador to Paris has been banned from meeting French government ministers after failing to show up for a meeting at the foreign ministry to explain US comments about the killing of a far-right activist.

Charles Kushner, whose son Jared is married to the US president’s oldest daughter, Ivanka, was summoned to the 7pm meeting by the foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, after the US embassy in Paris reposted state department comments about the case.

Diplomatic sources told French media that Kushner, a real-estate magnate with an estimated net worth of $3.2bn (£2.4bn), cited personal commitments as his reason for not attending and sent a senior official from the embassy in his place.

“In light of this apparent failure to grasp the basic requirements of the ambassadorial mission, the minister has requested that he no longer be allowed direct access to members of the French government,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/us-ambassador-to-paris-banned-from-meeting-french-ministers-after-no-show

The Guardian does note Kushner’s extensive criminal record and 14 months in prison. A reason to not meet him may be something they’ve long wished for.

Tennessee Republicans propose bill that would allow the death penalty for women who have an abortion

Source: The Independent

Monday 23 February 2026 13:26 EST

Republicans in Tennessee have proposed a bill that would allow women who have had an abortion to be sentenced to death.

House Bill 570 allows for the death penalty to be imposed on women who have abortions, as well as charging women “involved in the homicide of her own unborn child” with homicide. It was co-sponsored by state Rep. Jody Barrett and Senator Mark Pody, who sponsored the bill, though it is not yet on the calendar for consideration, according to The Tennessean.

The legislation would allow prosecutors to charge women who obtain abortions with fetal homicide. This crime is punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, and in some cases, the death penalty.

Tennessee has some of the strictest abortion laws in the U.S. since its “trigger ban” took place in 2022. The Human Life Protection Act prevents all abortions from fertilization and there are no exceptions for rape or incest.

Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/tennessee-death-penalty-abortion-b2925988.html

The bearded, sloppy thug in the center, guzzling beer, is Kash Patel, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He took a private government jet to Milan, Italy, where we taxpayers also paid for his ticket to the Winter Olympics’ final men’s hockey game after which he celebrated with the US team.

Meanwhile, the government of Mexico killed the leader of the biggest drug cartel in Mexico, which was followed by widespread violence — looting, burning, all caused by cartel members.  US citizens in Mexico were trapped.

Hitler’s Greenland Obsession (the Atlantic)

After creating an economic mess with ill-advised tariffs, Hitler looked north in pursuit of resources and national security.

Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior.

By April 1934, Hitler’s government had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimos, 3,500 Danes, and 8,000 sheep, as well as the world’s largest deposit of a strategic natural resource—cryolite, a mineral essential to American aluminum production. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted countless economic wounds on his country over his five years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was part of a broader effort to remedy one of them.

In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/hitler-greenland/685984/