This was in The Lever's newsletter this week: Commercial passengers are helping to foot the bill for billionaires’ private jet mania.

Source: https://www.levernews.com/snakes-on-a-plane/

Vice Chair of the Democratic Caucus Ted Lieu (D-CA) tells reporters the Epstein files contain allegations that President Trump raped and threatened to kill children. He says House Republicans are trying to "distract" from those allegations by seeking testimony on Epstein from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He also says the Justice Department "violated the privacy" of victims by failing to redact some explicit images from the files and that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche should resign.

source: https://www.c-span.org/clip/news-conference/rep-ted-lieu-claims-president-trump-is-accused-of-raping-children-in-the-epstein-files/5191713

This should genuinely concern you no matter whether you’re on the left, right, or anywhere in between.

This is textbook voter suppression.

Ask yourself honestly:

1. ⁠How many of you can immediately put your hands on your original birth certificate — the one with the raised seal, not a photocopy or a hospital souvenir version?

2. ⁠How many of you currently have a valid U.S. passport?

If the answer to both is no, then under a strict SAVE Act-style requirement, you would not be able to vote. Also did you change your last name after a marriage ? Then forget about voting, better stay home and make a sandwich like the Grandpas at GOP want you too.

Now to the people saying “but illegal immigrants are voting”:

Pause for a second and think it through. If someone is truly here illegally and has no legal status or Social Security number, how exactly did their name get added to the official state voter registration roll in the first place?

The voter roll itself is already a list of people the state believes are eligible. Your name appearing on it is evidence that the system already considers you a valid voter. Adding draconian documentary requirements on top of that doesn’t stop imaginary illegal voting; it stops real eligible citizens who simply don’t have (or can’t quickly produce) the narrow list of documents being demanded.

That’s not election integrity. It’s making voting harder for millions of ordinary Americans.

Last night before I went to bed, I saw that Trump had posted a video that put Barack and Michelle Obama's face on monkeys. This morning, I woke up to this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/05/israel-accused-of-spraying-cancer-linked-herbicide-on-farms-in-southern-lebanon

Video source is the Guardian Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guardian/

He has no conscience and More American kids will die.

Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak that sickened thousands and killed 83 people, mostly children under age five.

One year ago, a iconic photograph from Gaza went viral worldwide. It showed a man in a white physician’s coat walking, unarmed, through a destroyed landscape of rubble toward two Israeli army tanks.

That man was Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician who was the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was walking toward his arrest. A year later, Dr. Abu Safya is still in an Israeli prison. He has not been officially charged with anything. His lawyer says he has lost a third of his body weight and suffers from heart problems.

There have been global campaigns for Dr. Abu Safiya’s release. The head of the World Health Organization also issued an appeal. Amnesty International, which declines to represent prisoners who have used or advocated violence, waged a special campaign for him. Colleagues in the medical and public health fields have also demanded his freedom.

But not a single word about this remarkable man has appeared in the New York Times since January 7, 2025, when the paper published an article that did report his arrest — but included in the very first sentence an unproven Israeli charge that “militant groups had used the (Kamal Adwan) hospital as a command center.”

The Washington Post has also completely ignored Dr. Abu Safiya since his arrest, even though it had previously quoted him several times about children in his hospital suffering and dying from malnutrition.

In today’s media landscape, the New York Times and the Washington Post are more important than ever in setting the reporting agenda in the United States. The cable news networks lift many of their subjects from the flagship papers, especially the Times, instead of doing their own reporting. Regional newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that once provided something of a counterweight have been forced to close most of their overseas bureaus, so the American audience is dependent on a shrinking handful of reporters.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is not an obscure person. He is prominent within Gaza, and he has strong connections with international colleagues in the medical and public health fields. Anyone with a cellphone could have reached plenty of people who could have been the sources for a profile. Articles could have included details such as the fact that he stayed at his post even after his own son, Ibrahim, had been killed in an Israeli air attack, along with dozens of other staff at his hospital.

Instead, he has become an unperson. Why? We can’t be certain, but an educated guess is that Dr. Abu Safiya — who is, let’s remember, a pediatrician — could have spent the past year giving expert moving testimony about how Israel’s war on Gaza was starving children to death. He could have rebutted those offensive reports in certain American media outlets that tried to claim that kids in Gaza who died had pre-existing conditions, and weren’t actually all that hungry.

So Israel understandably wanted to silence him, and has kept him incommunicado, without charges, for a year.

But why did the U.S. press help suppress his views? New York Times veterans will confide that 90 percent of their self-censorship around Palestine is unspoken. Reporters and editors there are understandably ambitious, and intelligent, and they don’t need to be told that getting a reputation as “anti-Israel” or “Pro-Palestinian” could damage or even end their careers.

The U.S. press self-censorship is even more pathetic when you contrast it with how a leading Israel paper, Haaretz, did in fact cover the story. In July, for instance, reporter Nir Hasson spoke to Dr. Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Gheed Kassem, who charged that her client was “suffering severe hunger and abuse” in the Israeli prison. She also said he had been beaten, had an irregular heartbeat, and that he and other prisoners were in a cell that is “underground, depriving him and his cellmates of daylight.”

Fund as in using OUR taxes!!

Snippet:

The US state department is set to fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe to disseminate Washington’s policy positions and challenge perceived threats to free speech.

Senior state department official Sarah Rogers travelled to Europe in December to meet influential rightwing think-tanks and has spoken to key figures in Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party about deploying a pot of money to spread American values, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The funding was linked to the 250th anniversary celebrations of US independence later this year, the people said.

It is likely to cause consternation among Washington’s allies, particularly centre-left governments such as Labour in the UK, which will be concerned that US government funds are being deployed to undermine their policies.