Jeanmarie Grimsley @grimss2

The Kennedy Center was a beloved Washington institution, enjoyed by millions of people. It has been destroyed for no real reason. Just vanity, carelessness, indifference. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/…

Here's how many stock trades presidents have made: Clinton: 0 GW Bush: 0 Obama: 0 Trump's first term: 517 Biden: 0 Trump's second term: 24,000+ Trump is the only President who has traded stocks while sitting in the Oval Office. He's rigging the system in real time.

For over 10 years, Trump has delegitimized elections through propaganda and lies. We must not fall for his antics as we get close to the midterms. The most important thing any of can do is reject his lies and turn out loudly and proudly.

CHART OF THE DAY: The cost of hiring an oil tanker on the industry’s benchmark trade (Middle East to the Far East) route has topped $1 million a day for the first time -- a year ago, it was less than $100,000 a day. h/t @alexlongley1

U.S. Homes are now the most unaffordable in history 🚨 🚨

@rafichicago @trackingcosts Actually, in this case, it means the OP won’t be able to refinance to a fixed rate. They are stuck floating because the house won’t appraise for what they owe.

Trump has pardoned the following people charged with fraud: —George Santos, wire fraud —Ross William Ulbricht, fraud with identification documents —Rod R. Blagojevich, 8 counts of wire fraud under color of official right —Brian Kelsey, conspiracy to defraud the United States —Devon Archer, conspiracy to commit securities fraud; securities fraud —Trevor Milton, securities fraud; 2 counts of wire fraud —Jason Galanis, 2 counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud; securities fraud; investment adviser fraud —Ozy Media, Inc., conspiracy to commit securities fraud; conspiracy to commit wire fraud —Carlos Roy Watson, conspiracy to commit securities fraud; conspiracy to commit wire fraud; aggravated identity theft —Michele Fiore, 6 counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud; wire fraud —Scott Howard Jenkins, conspiracy to commit bribery concerning programs receiving Federal funds, honest services mail fraud, and honest service wire fraud; honest services mail fraud; 3 counts of honest services wire fraud —Julie Chrisley, 5 counts of conspiracy to commit bank fraud; bank fraud; wire fraud; conspiracy to defraud the U.S. to obstruct and impede the Internal Revenue Laws —Todd Chrisley, conspiracy to commit bank fraud; 5 counts of bank fraud; wire fraud; conspiracy to defraud the U.S. to obstruct and impede the Internal Revenue Laws —Lawrence S. Duran, conspiracy to commit health care fraud; 11 counts of health care fraud; conspiracy to defraud the United States and to receive and pay health care kickbacks — Michael Gerard Grimm, aiding and assisting in the preparation of false and fraudulent tax returns —Marian I. Morgan, conspiracy to defraud the United States; 7 counts of wire fraud; 5 counts of transfer of funds taken by fraud —John G. Rowland, conspiracy to defraud the United States —Charles Overton Scott, conspiracy to commit securities fraud; securities fraud —Glen Casada, conspiracy to defraud the United States; 4 counts of honest services wire fraud; use of a fictitious name to carry out a fraud —Cade Cothren, conspiracy to defraud the United States; 6 counts of honest services wire fraud —Robert Henry Harshbarger, Jr., health care fraud —Joseph Lewis, conspiracy to commit securities fraud; 2 counts of securities fraud —David Gentile, conspiracy to commit securities fraud; conspiracy to commit wire fraud; securities fraud; 2 counts of wire fraud —Jacob Deutsch, conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud —Adriana Isabel Camberos, conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud; 7 counts of wire fraud and aiding and abetting —Andres Enrique Camberos, conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud; 7 counts of wire fraud and aiding and abetting —Julio M. Herrera Velutini, 2 counts of honest services wire fraud —David Levy, conspiracy to commit securities fraud; securities fraud —Hollie Ann Nadel, conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud —Mark T. Rossini, honest services wire fraud —Wanda Vazquez Garced, honest services wire fraud —Terren Scott Peizer, securities fraud —Timothy S. Smith, conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service —Stephen E. Buyer, 4 counts of securities fraud —John Dougherty, 24 counts of wire fraud; conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and federal program bribery; 7 counts of honest services wire fraud —Joshua L. Davis, conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate the Clean Air Act —Matthew Sidney Geouge, conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate the Clean Air Act —Adam R. Kidan, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud; wire fraud —Spade K. Bailly, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Clean Air Act

Headquarters @HQNewsNow

4 days ago

Trump's Attorney General Todd Blanche: There has never been a President in American history more serious about stopping fraud and protecting the American taxpayer than Donald Trump

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“The world is moving to a post-American order because of affirmative choices made by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. None of this was caused by external events or dialectical forces.” open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark…

The self-inflicted Middle East oil crisis continues to be the main driver of inflation.

Once again, what happens in Florida never stays in Florida. & if we don’t stop Amendment 3 here— it’s coming to your part of the nation, too. And as it says - “states can’t afford these cuts.” No kidding. It’s $46 Billion from local communities over 5yrs with no plan to backfill

Regular reminder that, in February, CBO projected that it would take at least 30 years for the 10-year Treasury rate to surpass 4.4%. Seven months later it hit 5%. That's what happens when a president launches a war, blows up deficits, and then demands to borrow $1.3T more.

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57 years ago

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American foreign policy for sale. A must-read by @NewYorker. On Ukraine, Trump’s family has been offered a quid pro quo of business deals for selling out Ukraine. With the Saudis, they invested billions with him despite numerous objections. On and on. Total insanity.

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The New Yorker @NewYorker

4 days ago

Read Dexter Filkins’s Profile of Jared Kushner: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

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Who's the guy who bankrolled Don Jr's wedding in the Bahamas? Umar Kremlev didn’t exist in 2009. A guy named Umar Lutfulloyev did. Late 20s, Serpukhov thug, two convictions — extortion in 2004, beating the shit out of people in 2007. Taxi work, construction, “security.” The usual starter pack. Then he walks into a registry office in 2010 and becomes Umar Kremlev. Cleaner last name. Cleaner paperwork. Convenient. He hangs with the Night Wolves, Putin’s favorite biker gang, and lucks into a friendship with Alexei Rubezhnoi — the man who runs the president’s personal security. That’s the whole origin story. Not a brilliant businessman. A guy who found the right bodyguard. Rubezhnoi puts him in charge of the Russian Boxing Federation. Then Kremlev takes the International Boxing Association, the one the IOC kicked out of the Olympics for being a dumpster fire. Gazprom money shows up. Prize pots get huge. Everyone pretends not to notice the smell. Meanwhile the real money arrives. Putin’s government hands him the sports betting market. His companies end up behind Fonbet, Pari, Liga Stavok. His outfit becomes the single accounting center for every legal bet in Russia. National lottery too. That’s not hustle. That’s the Kremlin picking a guy with a rap sheet and giving him an entire industry because he’s useful and loyal. He even said it out loud: unlimited opportunities thanks to one person, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. So when this guy drops six figures on a private island and fireworks for Don Jr.’s wedding, it’s not “a generous friend who loves boxing and hunting.” It’s a twice-convicted Putin cutout buying access to the president’s kid.

Some details: Kremlev, the Russian who sponsored Don Jr's wedding, is a former member of the Night Wolves biker gang, went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children

ProPublica @propublica

4 days ago

New: Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses at Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding, including renting out a private island and paying for the fireworks show. propub.li/4xTBcxt

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I read through some of this report and holy hell are we way past the point of no return… A few things that stood out to me: One guy helped build a surveillance system capable of monitoring ~25 MILLION SIM cards. And “monitoring SIM cards” undersells it. The system could collect calls, texts and voice, recognize the same person’s voice EVEN IF THEY SWITCHED SIM cards, flag people using VPNs, create watchlists, connect people to government records, and generate intelligence reports on basically any phone number…… They even removed the warrant requirement. And this was apparently ONE Claude subscriber using AI as his engineering team. The really crazy part is the finished system runs locally on his machine. Anthropic banned him, but they can’t just switch the system off now that it exists………..and if that’s not bad.. A group in Yemen was using Claude like a team of missile engineers. They had different Claude instances doing different jobs like coding, researching, another checking the work etc. while they worked on guidance systems for rockets and missiles. They actually fired a guided rocket. It failed. So they went back to Claude hours later to figure out why. That is the part that gets me. AI isn’t just giving someone information from the internet anymore. It can sit inside the actual computer and → test → fail → fix → test again until their rocket works. Then … it gets worse somehow ..Russian hackers are starting to automate almost the entire hacking process. Finding targets. Phishing them. Stealing passwords. Getting inside systems. Pulling out data. And when security software detected their malware, AI agents could modify it, rebuild it and try again until it stopped getting detected…….That completely changes the game because historically defenders could discover malware, block it, and force the attackers to spend time rebuilding everything. Now the rebuilding can happen automatically. So cybercriminals basically had AI doing the hacking for them. Anthropic says in one operation, AI agents performed “nearly all” of the work. One company went from initial access to massive data theft in hours. In another case, one stolen developer credential turned into full control of a company’s cloud storage in around 3 hours. So you no longer necessarily need a giant sophisticated hacking team. You need a person who knows what they want done + agents capable of figuring out the details. K… then…Governments are already using AI to industrialize propaganda too. Anthropic found Iranian state operations using Claude to create fake personas, rewrite government messaging so it looked like it came from independent sources, translate it across languages, and distribute it across social media. Basically the old propaganda machine, except now you can generate thousands of believable “people” and pieces of content for almost nothing. And then there’s biology……. Anthropic found people using its models for research involving bird flu adapting to mammals, toxin redesign, and other stuff that has legitimate scientific uses but could also become extremely dangerous. Some were actively finding ways around Anthropic’s safeguards. One system would literally send prompts Claude refused to ANOTHER AI model that was more willing to answer them. Anthropic is very clear that this does not mean all of those researchers intended harm. But that almost makes the larger problem harder..the same knowledge that could help prevent the next pandemic can potentially help someone create one. I think this is the actual takeaway from the entire report is that AI doesn’t have to invent some completely new form of evil. It just has to make things that previously required 50 engineers, hackers, intelligence analysts, or scientists possible for 1 person. And models are getting cheaper, more autonomous and way better at running offline where nobody can shut them off. THAT is what I think people should be paying attention to.

Anthropic @AnthropicAI

a week ago

We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date. It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them. We disrupted every operation in the report,

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Here are quick fact checks on 16 of President Trump’s claims last night. 1) He claimed, “Food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.” Not even close to true. Federal figures show overall prices keep rising, food prices keep rising, and far more products are getting more expensive than getting cheaper. 2) He claimed, “Every single promise I made you as a candidate, I’ve delivered on.” Clearly not . The war in Ukraine didn’t end within 24 hours of his inauguration, inflation isn’t dead, Mexico hasn’t paid for the wall. Etc. 3) He claimed “over $20 trillion” has been invested in the US this term. This figure is fiction even the White House can’t justify. The White House website says “$11.2 trillion,” and even that is a wild exaggeration. 4) He claimed he "won the presidency three times,” then explicitly said he won in 2020. Just lies. 5) He claimed his ballroom will use “zero tax dollars.” The final breakdown is unclear, but the Secret Service has acknowledged that public dollars will be used at least for security measures related to the project, which includes an underground complex. Some Senate Republicans tried this year to get hundreds of millions in public money allocated in part to project-related security. 6) He claimed the ballroom project is “under budget.” There is no actual public budget for it, and cost estimates have steadily increased – from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million to $600 million. 7) He claimed that former NC governor and now Senate candidate Roy Cooper released the man who went on to kill Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte in 2025. But NC’s corrections department has explained that the man served his full robbery sentence and was not released early. The man's release, in 2020, happened months before the state's 2021 lawsuit settlement over pandemic-era prison conditions that resulted in some other offenders getting released sooner than expected. 8) He claimed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was seen wearing a mask just “a few months ago.” No evidence of this; other Republicans have mocked Talarico for masking in 2022, four years ago. Trump also claimed, in what mayyy have been a joke, that Talarico was recently spotted running away and throwing up after eating meat at a barbecue. Clearly didn’t happen. 9) He said gas prices were just $1.85 per gallon in Iowa when he visited before the Iran war. The Iowa average that day was $2.57, per AAA, and GasBuddy found just four stations that day under $2 – at $1.97, to be specific – out of 2,036 stations it tracked there. (Maybe Trump was referring to the E85 ethanol blend only some cars can use, which was around $1.85, but he certainly didn’t say that.) 10) He said the US has the lowest drug prices in the world. Experts say that is not true as a general claim, and the White House hasn’t substantiated it. 11) He boasted that more Americans are working than ever before. That’s true, but it’s a basically meaningless stat because the number of people working rises over time as the population rises. Better ways to measure the labor market show that it has been far from historically strong this term. 12) He claimed “zero illegal aliens” have crossed the border over the last 15 months. Not true; state and federal authorities have acknowledged some migrants evaded apprehension during that period. The Trump administration says it hasn’t “released” any migrants into the country after apprehension, but that’s different than having zero people crossing at all. 13) He claimed “25 million” migrants poured into the country under Biden. This is another fictional figure. Through the last full month of Biden’s term, the government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants…including millions who were rapidly expelled. Even counting “gotaways,” which the House GOP estimated at under 2.5 million, it’s not 25 million people. 14) He claimed Biden or Democrats allowed “11,888 murderers” to enter the country. This is a gross distortion of federal data about non-citizens who entered the US not just under Biden but over the course of multiple decades, including during Trump’s first administration, and were convicted of homicide at some point, usually in the US after their arrival, but remained in the US because they were still serving prison sentences or their original countries wouldn't take them back. 15) He claimed he’d achieved “no tax on Social Security.” His 2025 law created an additional temporary deduction for seniors, expiring after 2028, but the administration has acknowledged millions of Social Security recipients will continue to pay taxes on their benefits. 16) He claimed “trillions of dollars in tariff revenue have come in.” It was in the hundreds of billions, not close to even $1 trillion, even before the big refunds prompted by the Supreme Court decision that ruled some of the tariffs illegal. More details here: cnn.com/2026/09/09/pol…

Horrific though unsurprising report from @propublica: Ectopic pregnancy deaths have basically doubled since the end of Roe propublica.org/article/ectopi…

10 years ago: 30-yr mortgage rate was 3.4% & median existing home price in the US was $240k Today: 30-yr mortgage rate is 6.8% & median existing home price is $429k Result: $38k increase in down payment (assume 20% down) & 163% increase in monthly payment (from $851 to $2,237) Video: youtube.com/watch?v=TT9ajz…

It is a broken Christianity that desperately looks for Jesus returning in the clouds but refuses to recognize him in the faces of the poor, the sick, the homeless, the immigrant, the bombed, the starving, the marginalized, and the oppressed.

The Atlanta Fed calculates that as of May, a household would need income of $124,674 a year to afford a median-priced home … that is 45% more than the median household makes @WSJ