Breaking Fake News Update (v16)

 Fake News Broke on August 28, 2025!

Is there any surprise that we're using the National Guard not only for law enforcement, but also for mundane tasks that would normally be performed by municipal or federal employees? 

• There certainly shouldn't be, given that the National Parks Service, which used to take care of some of these tasks, now has a three or four hands full of employees in DC, compared to a couple of hundred pre-DOGE and pre-One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 
• There certainly shouldn't be, given that DC has seen federal funding slashed by Congress and the administration. 
• There certainly shouldn't be - after all, even FOTUS declared that crime was down 25% in DC this year alone, so no one should be shocked that there isn't a lot for the Guard members from DC and the red states of Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and South Carolina that gleefully ignore high crime in their own states to stand with FOTUS and start Making Restaurants Safe Again for lobbyists, lawyers and politicians. (Are those distinctions without differences?)

I would think, though, that seeing camo-wearing folks with weapons mulching flowers, picking up trash, and loitering in Union Station would be quite the thing in the US capital, wouldn't you agree?

As always, when fake news breaks, we'll be sure to keep you informed. 

TGIF 7/15/22

I'm sure there'll be more weeks like this one, when members of the Red Team make total fools of themselves on the issue of abortion. 

I mentioned a few in my Wondering on Wednesday post, including Rep. Jim Jordan, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, and Ohio AG David Yost. 

And let's take James Bopp Jr. According to this Alternet article, Mr. Bopp is "the top attorney" for the National Right to Life Committee," and he's on the bad week list for his grossly inconsiderate and tone-deaf comments about the 10-year old Ohio child who had a legal abortion in Indiana. Under legislation Bopp's promoting, a child rape victim would be banned from having an abortion.

She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child. 

Seriously? What "reason and ultimately the benefit" is there for a ten-year-old, traumatized, raped child to bear a child of her own? 

And there's Indiana's AG Todd Rokita, who stuck his landing on the bad week list, for going public with efforts to find out of the doctor who performed the child's medical abortion had timely filed the appropriate paperwork. From a Politico article,

...Rokita is threatening criminal charges against the doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape survivor from Ohio — a major escalation in the ongoing saga that has put the midwestern state on the frontlines of the post-Roe war.

In a letter dated July 13th, Rokita asked Gov. Eric Holcomb for help in getting info on the case. Here's what he's looking for, and the inflated urgency associated with his request:

In this case, the paperwork was filed - on time - and now the doctor's lawyer, Kathleen DeLaney, is speaking her mind, planted firmly on the good week side of the ledger. Her client

took every appropriate and proper action in accordance with the law and both her medical and ethical training as a physician. She followed all relevant policies, procedures, and regulations in this case... She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client.

Good for her, and for the doctor for stepping up.

Another good week representative? Attorney and podcast host Ken White was quoted in the Alternet article above about the danger of relying on "the exception to protect the life of the mother." He thinks it's "a grave risk for anyone involved in the abortion," as doctors will be dealing with frequently politically-motivated District Attorneys in these cases.

Speaking of the risk of prosecutorial bad judgment, it seems some hospitals in Texas are also not willing to take a chance they'll run up against one of those prosecutors. According to this AP article,

Some hospitals in Texas have reportedly refused to treat patients with major pregnancy complications for fear of violating the state’s abortion ban, the Texas Medical Association said in a letter this week. 

The association did not name the hospitals but said it’s received complaints that hospitals, administrators and their attorneys may be prohibiting doctors from providing medically appropriate care in some situations, The Dallas Morning News reported. 

In one case, a doctor was reportedly told not to treat a woman with an ectopic pregnancy "until it ruptured." This type of action "...creates a substantial risk for the patient’s future reproductive ability and poses serious risk to the patient’s immediate physical wellbeing." Immediate, as in, she could die. 

Why the fear to act, you ask? Here it is, in two parts: first the good week part, and then the bad week part. 

The Biden administration issued guidance this week that said hospitals must provide abortion services if the life of the mother is at risk. Texas sued Thursday over that guidance, arguing that the federal government isn’t authorized to require emergency healthcare providers to perform abortions. 

Also having a bad week? Efforts to positively impact climate change, as WV Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Yeah? Make Me!) announced another delay in his willingness to consider a big ugly bill covering climate change, among other things.

Democrats have struggled for months to pass a slimmed-down climate and energy package as part of a budget reconciliation bill that would require the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, including Manchin. He had previously said he could reach agreement on climate if legislation included elements helping both renewables and fossil fuels. 

But Manchin informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday that he wouldn’t support the investments in climate and energy ahead of the August recess, and his office pointed to his concerns about stoking inflation in a statement. 

Manchin said he hadn't walked away, he just wanted to wait for July's inflation numbers. 

Let's give Manchin a bad week mention, while we're at it, and a good week mention to Sam Ricketts of Evergreen Action, who said, after Manchin's decision broke, who said he struggled to think of a "single elected official in American history" who'll cause "more massive suffering."

...if you want to look decades out from now, this decision by this one senator from West Virginia is going to have repercussions that affect millions, if not billions. 

Speaking of millions and billions  - dollars, not people - there's this bad week list entry, brought to us by the Defense Department and its first mandatory report on Congressional defense appropriations: Congress "funded more than $58 billion worth of military projects that the administration did not request..."   

Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-MI, wrote the bill which requires the report, and gets a good week mention for that. And her fellow lawmakers in the House and Senate who added all this junk to the bill get the bad week mention. Some of it was 'reasonable' in some eyes - disaster aid, funding for Ukraine, and what not, but a lot of it was pork - pure pork, such as

more than $4 billion worth of unrequested warships, many of them built by the constituents of senior appropriators. 

And, the article notes, "a substantial portion of the money goes for programs of arguable utility to the US military, critics say."  There are examples included in the article, if you want to check them out. 

The upcoming fiscal year's NDAA is being debated now; it "would add $37 billion to the amount the president requested for all national defense programs..." And there's this.

On Wednesday, the House rejected an amendment by California Democrat Barbara Lee to subtract that $37 billion. And the House soundly defeated another Lee proposal to take away $100 billion from the authorized level... The House also rejected an amendment by Washington Democrat Pramila Jayapal to make the unfunded priorities lists optional, not mandatory. 

Yay, us, or something.  

Finally, a resounding bad week to those Secret Service employees and others in the Department of Homeland Security who are actively thwarting investigations by the Inspectors General of DHS departments. 

You're likely aware of the deleted Secret Service texts from around the insurrection. Some have said this was intentional (to protect pro-Trump folks, for example). Others say the deletions were part of a transition to different equipment. Yeah, right.

The Intercept is reporting some stonewalling on other investigations, not just on the insurrection. From the article, we learn that it's "not uncommon" for IGs, to face resistance. "Tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, inspectors general are not always welcomed."  And, on that last part, there's a scoop. A Customs and Border Protection official shared some info with the reporters.

A briefing memo produced by the agency for a leadership meeting with the DHS Office of Inspector General on July 7 instructs participants on how to push back against what it calls the inspector general’s “persistent” request for “direct, unfettered access to CBP systems,” as part of its “high number of OIG audits covering a variety of CBP program areas.” 

Again, yay us, or something...

Why do I feel like we're all having a bad week, courtesy of the folks who are supposed to be working in our best interests? 

TGIF, everyone.

The Update Desk: No True Supporter of Mine

One of last week's posts was about the president's well-known penchant for encouraging his supporters to be violent, and applauding them when they are.  I did the post to show that he doth protest too much when he says there's no room in MAGAville for violence, and that no true supporter of his would ever do anything like what his true supporters did on January 6th. 

The post cited a number of examples, including the one below, which were collected by folks at Vox.

December 2016: After Trump bullied then-Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly for months, Kelly said that Trump’s social media director was responsible for inciting the many death threats she was receiving. “The vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are not at all this way,” Kelly said, according to the Guardian. “It’s that far corner of the internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.”

According to this article in the NY Times, announcing his promotion to Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications last April,

Mr. Scavino, a constant presence whether the president is in the White House or traveling, flags content from the internet for his boss and is said to be the only aide with access to Mr. Trump’s personal Twitter account. He is one of the aides Mr. Trump trusts without reservation.

Scavino was such a crucial component of the president's social media activities that he was named in the lawsuit in 2017 when Trump was sued for blocking people from Twitter.  The NY Times tried to dig into what Scavino did, and found truth in what Megyn Kelly had said. Scavino was the "secretary of offense," the guy "whose job is to help @RealDonaldTrump stay unpresidential." And he was good at it. 

Now and again, Trump would enlist Scavino... to act as a proxy, attacking the campaign’s enemies from his own account. At other times, Scavino took the initiative himself... In March 2016, Scavino retweeted a conspiracy video purporting to demonstrate that Cruz was having an affair with a former aide, Amanda Carpenter. Carpenter, who is married with children, went on the air and heatedly denied any impropriety. She also condemned Scavino by name, calling his attack a “smear job.”

“It was a campaign, and they fight dirty, and they didn’t mind if I was collateral damage in the process,” Carpenter told me. “And they won. And no consequences. What Scavino did to me and what he still does to others would get any other professional fired. In Trump’s universe, it’s a qualification. A willingness to engage in lies and smears on behalf of Donald Trump is a sign of loyalty that Trump treasures.”

Now, why the focus on Scavino, you ask? Well, Scavino was honored by the Department of Defense last week. From his own Facebook page, we see that he was awarded the DoD Medal for Distinguished Public Service. 

The Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service is the highest award that is presented by the Secretary of Defense, to a private citizen, politician, non-career federal employee, or foreign national. It is presented for exceptionally distinguished service of significance to the Department of Defense as a whole, or a DoD Component or function, where recognition at the component level would not be sufficient for the service rendered.

Now, like all of these honorary awards, lots of people get them for things that we regular folk don't recognize as being exceptional in any way - and that's true across multiple administrations, it's not just a Trump thing. 

In light of Scavino's role as Secretary of Offense for the president, and of keeping Trump's social media accounts unpresidential, and of attacking any and all comers, for any number of made-up reasons, it's kind of hard to swallow this line from Scavino's citation:

As a result of his tireless efforts, the United States is safer, stronger and freer. 

Safer? Ask any of the Capitol Police officers who were injured during the insurrection. Ask the Vice President, Mother, and their daughter if they felt safe at the Capitol. Ask any of the members of Congress who were trapped, or ask their staffers, barricaded in rooms with Trump supporters banging on the doors trying to get in.

Stronger? I guess you could say we're stronger, in that we did not break, but there are rifts that may never heal and will never be forgotten.

Freer? With state and federal elected officials under constant threat, with election volunteers under threat, with DC in complete lockdown so we can inaugurate the next leader of the free world?

I'm sorry, awarding the attack dog for making us "safer, stronger and freer" is not "creating unity," as the Rs like to say. It's not "creating accountability," as the Rs like to say. It's the opposite of that, in fact.  

Not only that, but the citation says he was Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications from January 2017 to January 2021. That, folks, is untrue. 

Oopsie.