Congress has let itself become irrelevant.

If I were religious that would say this is the mark of the beast.

I hope they gave him a blanket to fly home with.

More: An internal ICE financial ledger I obtained shows how the agency is turning local police departments across the county into a vast, decentralized immigration army. This includes payments if cops sign up to be deputized, reimbursements for transportation, salary supplements for cops who process migrant children, and per-arrest-style incentive payments.

All of this is taking place under an ICE program called 287(g), part of a 1996 law that granted the Attorney General (and later the Secretary of Homeland Security) the authority to enter into written agreements with state and local governments on immigration.

Turns out Pakistan is acting as a go-between for these negotiations that "aren't happening."

-------- Bull rolls off the tongue better

More: "These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump's super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane," Raskin said in the letter.

Raskin asked Bondi to tell lawmakers in a classified setting who was on the plane, what the map showed and which of Trump's various business interests were relevant to the documents. The letter includes an image of an aircraft manifest with a redacted passenger list from a 2022 flight from Florida to New York.

A grand jury indicted Trump in 2023 for improperly taking classified documents and obstructing a federal investigation. According to the indictment, the papers included "information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack."

The FBI determined some of the documents Trump withheld "would be pertinent to certain business interests" of Trump's, Raskin said, quoting from material he said the Justice Department gave the judiciary committee earlier this month. And a Justice Department memo said "classified documents pertinent to his business interests" established "a motive for retaining them."

Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the documents case as well as a separate criminal case against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, dropped the prosecutions after Trump won the 2024 election. Smith made a public report of the election case, but District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has blocked the release of Smith's report on the documents case.

"Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith," Raskin wrote, "you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss's conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon."

More: Ares Management on Tuesday opted to curb investor withdrawals from its $10.7 billion private credit fund, just a day after Apollo Global Management unveiled similar measures in one of its vehicles. Ares has capped redemptions in its Ares Strategic Income Fund at 5%, after withdrawal requests surged to 11.6%, according to a Bloomberg report.

Other managers, including Blue Owl Capital and Cliffwater, have also scrambled to halt or restrict withdrawals in recent weeks, as rising default fears spark an investor retreat from the sector.

Comparisons to the build-up to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis are now intensifying as concerns over underlying loan quality grow.

Morgan Stanley recently warned default rates in private credit direct lending could surge to 8%, well above the 2-2.5% historical average, with pressure concentrated in sectors vulnerable to AI disruption, such as software.

This not a good thing. More religious wackos in government is the last thing we need.

MAGA might have driven the final nail in the coffin but the ground work for this was laid decades ago by Limbaugh and his ilk. Trump doesn't deserve credit for the work of his predecessors, he just did the one thing he's good at and co-opted someone else's movement and ran it into the ground.

This is believable considering the Iranians weren't known to have any missiles that had a range long enough to get near anywhere near Diego Garcia.

The flight attendants should strike if they're serious.

I'm not a fan of Sen Fetterman but it's not up to the party if he stays or goes it's up to the people who vote for him. If the party wants him gone they need to run a better candidate, it shouldn't be very hard.

More: Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.

Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.

He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.

The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency's Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.

The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli's meddling. But the ICE official's willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally " even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role " reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.

More: "The most expedient thing to do for the people around me was to continue to fight, and if I had to ignore the truth at that moment for their expediency, I felt like it was the right thing to do," Robinson said. "We can deal with this on the back end, but I certainly don't want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election. Didn't want to cost anyone else their election."

Seriously?

Though he admitted feeling regret following his 2024 loss, Robinson said he does not regret lying and would make the same decision again. Instead, one of his "biggest regrets" was not changing his staff earlier in the campaign, because if he had, he would've won, he said.

This all seems to be a rather recent epiphany for Robinson, given that just eight months ago, Robinson appeared on a different podcast and denied CNN's report, calling it "fake news." Even if it were true, he said then, what's so bad about a grown man watching pornography in the privacy of his own home?

In that sense, yes, Robinson is right. But the reason why Robinson was unfit for public office, and the reason why he lost the election, isn't because he used to watch porn, or even that he lied about it. It's that he used the porn forum to say vile things, including "Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves" and "I'm a black NAZI!"

More: Other states, such as Texas, have already begun working with DHS to mass-verify the citizenship status of their voters through SAVE. Election officials cite this as a reason why North Carolina should join in. The problem is, many of those states have encountered serious issues with the database.

"After running its entire voter list " more than 18 million records " through the SAVE database, the office identified 2,724 potential noncitizens registered to vote in Texas," Executive Director Sam Hayes said in a press release.

That's only 0.015% of the state's registered voters. But the real number of noncitizen voters in Texas is even smaller than that, because the SAVE database keeps making mistakes, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. In Texas, the database incorrectly flagged hundreds of voters as potential noncitizens, with one county reporting an error rate of at least 14%.

Missouri had similar problems. In St. Louis County, the state's most populous county, around 35% of those initially flagged by SAVE were in fact registered at naturalization ceremonies, The New York Times reported. In Boone County, home to the University of Missouri, more than half the voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.

More: The Hong Kong-flagged Sea Horse, believed to be carrying some 27,000 tonnes of Russian gas, was headed towards the island after appearing to divert course last month. The ship is estimated to arrive in Cuba on Monday, Samir Madani, co-founder of maritime intelligence company TankerTrackers.com, told the FT.

The Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, carrying some 100,000 metric tons of crude " equivalent to 725,000 to 728,000 barrels depending on oil grade " was estimated to arrive in Cuba on April 4, Madani added.

More: Altogether, Powell said, central bankers see "a degree of stability" in the labor market.

"But the thing that I think a good number of people on the committee are concerned about is just the very, very low level of job creation," Powell said in a press conference following the Fed's decision to hold interest rates steady.

"Effectively, there's zero net job creation in the private sector," after accounting for revisions over the past six months, Powell said. "But actually, that looks like that's about what the economy needs, in terms of dealing with very, very low " nonexistent, really " growth in the labor force, which of course we've never had in our history."

All pre-war increases. March will be even uglier.

More: The joint US"Israeli strike against Iran in February 2026 has triggered intense debate among scholars and policy observers. Military conflicts in West Asia are not unusual, but this particular episode may carry consequences far beyond the immediate battlefield. Some analysts have drawn parallels with the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Britain and France attempted to seize the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalized it.

Although the operation initially succeeded militarily, it collapsed politically after the US forced its European allies to withdraw. The crisis revealed that Britain could no longer act as an independent global power and symbolized the end of its imperial dominance.

Today, Iran strike could represent a comparable geopolitical inflection point. For more than seven decades, the US has anchored the global order, not only through military power but also through institutions, rules, and economic arrangements that have structured the post"Second World War international system. Many countries, including emerging powers, expanded economically within this framework.

China's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse and Russia's growing integration into global markets both occurred largely within an economic system shaped by American leadership. The legitimacy of US leadership, therefore, rested not only on strength but on the perception that the system it created produced stability and shared economic benefits.

My hope is that this is a sign of things to come.

But what I suspect actually happened was that Evanston's sizeable Jewish population is educated on the realities of the terror, collective punishment and genocide Israel has unleashed in Gaza and elsewhere since 10/7 and has rejected AIPAC's preferred candidates because of it. We can't count on most of America to be that well informed.