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/

Whatever you do, avoid NORDVPN.  The app sucks.

I fell for their ads, subscribed, and after three days I deleted it, removed it from all my devices, and cancelled my account.

From the start I was not able to access some of my favorite sites.  Then, on Sunday night, Feb 23, the whole thing went to hell.

I could connect to my wifi but could not connect to the Internet.  I live in an apartment and at first I suspected a local area problem.  Checked with a couple of neighbors, neither of them had a problem.  I booted up one of my laptops that did not have NordVPN installed and it worked fine.

After restarting my computer a couple of times I was able to uninstall NordVPN and the system now works perfectly.

The New Republic reported this week that accusations made by a woman who “credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein,” appeared to have been removed from the Epstein files.

TNR reporter Edith Olmsted wrote that “A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens,” Olmsted wrote. “When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984.”

The report went on to say that Sollenberger found the interview records “in a separate database of documents downloaded from the government’s public files on Epstein.”

The FBI recorded the first interview on August 9, 2019 — “the day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell,” Olmsted wrote.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/articles/woman-credibly-accused-trump-sex-220809049.html

Trump Demands Netflix Fire ‘Racist’ Susan Rice after Ex-Obama Ambassador Slammed Companies That ‘Take a Knee’ to POTUS

Source: MEDIAite

Feb 21st, 2026, 7:43 pm

President Donald Trump on Saturday called on Netflix to fire Susan Rice after the former National Security Adviser said it is “not going to end well” for corporations that “take a knee” for the president. Trump went off on Rice in a post on Truth Social:

Netflix should fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences. She’s got no talent or skills – Purely a political hack! HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what??? Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT

Rice has served on Netflix’s board of directors since 2023, following an initial stint that ran from 2018 to 2020. His post included a link to an X post from Laura Loomer that showed a video clip of Rice bashing companies that are kowtowing to Trump, in her view. Rice — who served as the NSA and as an ambassador to the U.N. during ex-President Barack Obama’s time in office — said those organizations will be “held accountable” once Democrats are back in power. Here is a key slice of her statement:

When it comes to the elites — the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media… it’s not going to end well for them, for those that decided that they would act in their perceived, very-narrow self-interest — which I would underscore is very short-term self interest — and take a knee to Trump.

I think they’re starting to realize, ‘Wait a minute, this is not popular.’ Trump is not popular. What he is doing, whether on the economy and affordability or on immigration now, is not popular. And that there is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they’re going to be caught with more than their pants down, they’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-demands-netflix-fire-racist-susan-rice-after-ex-obama-ambassador-slammed-companies-that-take-a-knee-to-potus/

” She’s got no talent or skills , , , ”  I thought he was describing Laura Loomer.

MAGA’s Reaction to the Epstein Files Reveals Total Moral Collapse

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/epstein-maga-trump-morals/

No paywall link
https://archive.ph/boBCI

I’m not sure we’re terrified enough about the American right’s scrapping even its own scant moral boundaries.

Every segment of the Trump-backing right wing—America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists—has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he were “officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.” Crime is legal, where right-wingers are concerned, however heinous the crime is.

At least, for themselves. The right still has morals for days when it comes to Black folks, immigrants and trans people. Its moral code has always been selective and conditional; rigorously enforced and mercilessly punitive toward “outsiders” and “others,” but generally indifferent to even the worst acts by those on the right side of whiteness and power. Wilhoit’s Law—coined by music composer Frank Wilhoit in a now-famous 2018 comment on a political science blog—neatly captures this truth. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition—there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Now it’s ditching even its in-group protections.

The right’s reaction to the Epstein files disclosures is the clearest evidence of this. For the better part of a decade, conservatives lurched from one pedophile-focused moral panic to the next, proclaiming themselves the true saviors of children. They didn’t mean all children, of course; these are the same people who gifted a white woman with $750,000 just for calling a 5-year-old autistic Black boy the N-word. Their concern was always reserved for the white children they saw as fully human. They insisted pedophiles were hiding in pizza parlor basements; obsessed over Q drops and waved signs calling us to “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking”; and pushed anti-LGBT “groomer” hysteria alongside anti-drag bills. Roughly half of Trump voters said they believed elected Democrats were running child sex rings in surveys from 2020 and 2022; a majority of 2020 Trump voters told pollsters that Trump was actively working to take down “an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats.” White lives mattered to conservatives, especially the youngest white lives. At least in theory.

And at least as long as they thought their political opponents were responsible. But the more we know about Epstein, the less they care. The nearly half of Republicans who said the Epstein files mattered at least “a little” to how they assess Trump’s presidency in July 2025 dropped to just 36 percent by November. (That figure is 64 percent for Democrats.) Faced with at least one allegation in the files that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl and well-documented associations between their leader and Epstein—as well as other alleged sexual predators—the right isn’t just overlooking the implications; they’re abandoning the principles. The right has “gradually de-emphasized” the Epstein issue, CNN writes, choosing to “largely move on.” It was all political calculation.

From Marc Elias’ blog, Democracy Docket.

The Republican Party has always had a problem with its lawyers.

On the one hand, there were the big-firm lawyers who supported smaller government, a balanced budget and federalism. They generally avoided the deeply ideological causes of the right — restricting abortion rights, attacking civil rights and promoting guns.

When it came to elections, these lawyers were prepared to argue constitutional claims that limited voting but would not involve themselves in the really dirty work — challenging voters at the polls and openly advocating for the disenfranchisement of minority voters.

They also stayed away from crazy conspiracy theories. Big-firm Republicans might be willing to argue that the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, but they were not prepared to claim that a Venezuelan leader rigged the 2020 election.

After the 2020 election, I was proud to help lead the Biden campaign’s litigation efforts against Trump’s attacks. At the time, I was at a large law firm — and the firm was happy to do the work. So were a half-dozen other large, prestigious law firms.

By contrast, one of the defining storylines of that period was the Trump campaign’s inability to retain top-tier lawyers. Even the big firms that had represented his campaign seemingly bowed out rather than help him overturn the result of a free and fair election.

Standing on the other side of this historic divide within the GOP were the true believers — everything the big-firm lawyers were not. They sought out legal fights over social issues. They were often the lawyers on the ground, at polling places and in ballot-counting offices.

Most importantly for Trump, they relished the conspiracy theories. They were more than happy to embrace the most outlandish claims he advanced.

Still, they were largely kept on the margins of the party. Now they run it.

The result is that even as the GOP faces increasingly favorable courts, it continues to lose at an astounding rate.

Part of this is because of the positions they advocate. But another, less easily quantified factor is the clownish and disrespectful behavior they bring to the courtroom. It is one thing to have Donald Trump shouting lies in the White House; it is another to have his lawyers doing the same in the courthouse.

Consider the sheer number of misstatements DOJ lawyers have made to federal judges. Add to that the disrespectful spectacle Attorney General Pam Bondi created at a recent congressional hearing. Then listen to nearly any lawyer who represents Trump speak about the courts and judges.

There is a style to how Republican lawyers increasingly write and speak that is not just insultingly hyperbolic but alarmingly disconnected from reality. Earlier this week, for example, I read a brief that led me to conclude with certainty that the Republican Party has completely lost its mind.

It all started when the Department of Justice demanded that the Wisconsin Elections Commission turn over the state’s personal voter files. After the Commission filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the Wisconsin Republican Party filed an amicus brief in support of the DOJ.

The brief opens by quoting the late Zig Ziglar in all-caps, bolded font: “WITH INTEGRITY, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE.”

I will admit I was not familiar with Mr. Ziglar’s work. However, a helpful footnote informs the reader that he was “a prolific American speaker and author of over 30 books who inspired millions, including world leaders, with his simple but critical life-guiding principles.”

The brief then proceeds to read like a rant your senile uncle would deliver while watching Fox News. Its thrust is that Democrats are bad, Wisconsin is hiding something, and the DOJ’s request “is honorable.” But the brief’s crowning achievement is this line: “Like Alabama in the 1950s, Wisconsin attempts to use state law to obstruct the Attorney General’s investigation today.”

Having read the brief several times, I am confident that no aspect of this case hinges on anything Zig Ziglar might have said — no matter how motivational. I am even more certain that, whatever your perspective, Wisconsin’s effort to protect its citizens’ sensitive voting data is not the equivalent of Alabama’s commitment to preserving Jim Crow laws.

I have no illusions that the Republican Party cares what I think about the quality of its attorneys. Nor do I expect its lawyers to take my admonitions to heart. Frankly, as far as democracy is concerned, that is probably for the best.

In the midst of the post-2020 election litigation, Lou Dobbs chastised Stephen Miller over the quality of the Trump campaign’s lawyering and suggested the Republican Party pay me $500 million to stop defeating them in court.

I can’t be bought — and in any event, it would be a waste of money. You don’t need Zig Ziglar when you have the law and the facts on your side. The Republican Party’s lawyers are still looking for both.