I'm a little rusty on my Biblical curses, but isn't pestilence right up there with plague? Four Horsemen stuff?
Biblical Narratives: In ancient texts like the Torah and the Bible, pestilence (dever in Hebrew) is frequently described as a form of divine intervention or punishment, such as the fifth plague of Egypt targeting livestock. [1, 2, 3]
“When the powerful want you to forget a conspiracy, what they want you to forget most are the victims. The conspirators will try to demoralize you and demonize you. The conspiracy may frustrate and exhaust you. But the injustice the victims endure is straightforward. The victims are why the crime matters. To be human is to care about other people. To seek justice is to honor another’s humanity. To destroy elite criminal impunity is to gain equality. The purpose of deciphering a malicious conspiracy is to protect the victims and keep it from happening again.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent
[for context see :: Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files
They said that being feminine makes men "spiritual f**gots" who are "failing as a Christian."
Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:
Christian nationalist hate pastor Joel Webbon — a man who blames Jewish people for all social evils, thinks marijuana makes men “spiritually gay,” and thinks Adolf Hitler wasn’t so bad after all — and the co-hosts of his Right Response broadcast said in a June 9 episode that female public school teachers and childhood molestation turn boys into homosexuals. There is absolutely no proof backing up their claims.
First, the co-hosts discuss how feminine men don’t go to heaven. “Don’t be gay,” Webbon said, “There is spiritual gayness, and there is literal gayness… and you need to be avoiding both of those…. You will not inherit the kingdom of God if you are a literal sodomite, that’s true, but also if you are effeminate.”
[...]
They also claim that feminine men will use “blandishments of speech, by lightness of gesture and apparel, and other allurements,” including “soft, people-pleasing, effeminate, feminine sensibility speech,” characteristics which Webbon and his co-host attribute to certain politicians as well as pastors who want to reach female audiences. The men generally blame “a full embrace of feminism” for the existence of “more effeminate men in every single arena of our culture today.”
“We flatter women in the way that we exalt and esteem, and raise women to a status of superiority,” one of Webbon’s co-hosts says. “Because we worship women, we idolize women, we have to castrate men.”
“A man who is physically soft, who dresses soft, who speaks soft, who’s indecisive, soft in his decision making, soft in his work ethic, you’re not just talking about an effeminate man at that point — you’re talking about a bad man, he’s a bad man,” Webbon says. “He’s undisciplined, he’s not courageous, he’s not strong, he’s not zealous for the things of God. He’s not a protector. You’ve got to be strong, hard to kill, to be a protector.”
“This man, who dresses a certain way, and his little light in the loafers, and a little limp in his wrist, and a little lisp in his speech, he’s a spiritual f**got, and it’s indicative of who he actually is on the inside,” Webbon continues. “He is disobedient to the Lord. He’s failing as a husband, he’s failing as a father, he’s failing as a Christian.”
A proposed U.S. Postal Service rule, already facing court challenges, could throw the midterms into total chaos. And that’s by design.
Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:
Earlier this year, Rebekah Caruthers, president of the Fair Elections Center, made a clear prediction. She expected federal intimidation at the polls, with ICE agents stationed near voting locations and federal officers deployed to suppress turnout among minority voters. This was a reasonable fear. The Trump White House, after all, had spent the last year signaling exactly that kind of escalation.
She now thinks she was wrong about the weapon of choice: Trump has targeted the U.S. Postal Service as a vulnerable choke point.
“We can’t just look at this new post office rule in a vacuum,” Caruthers said recently. In her view, the defining threat to voting rights this fall isn’t federal thugs at the polls. It’s whether your ballot arrives in the mail at all.
The rule and the order
The weapon Trump has handed the USPS was forged from a proposed rule, published on June 2, implementing an earlier White House executive order. In March, Trump directed the agency to withhold mail ballot delivery from any state that refuses to hand over its voter rolls to the federal government. The rule was then drafted to comply with that directive.
There are two operative parts that concern voting rights activists.
DMM 705.24.4 provides,
[“States (including authorized election officials and their mail service providers) will notify the Postal Service of the individuals to whom they are mailing a mail-in or absentee ballot, along with the unique barcode applied to the outbound and return ballot mail envelope for such individuals such that the name and barcode of the voter will be included on a Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.”]
DMM 705.24.5 then states,
[“The proposed rule also implements a verification procedure for compliance with the proposed standards prior to acceptance by the Postal Service of the outbound ballot mailpiece and the blank return ballots included within such mailings. The verification process by the Postal Service would confirm that a state submitted a list consistent with the conditions laid out in the proposed rule, and that the outbound ballot mail, and thus the blank ballot that could be returned by mail, is destined to individuals on the list, by checking the barcodes.”]
If your eyes are glazing over, let me put that into plain English, with an example.
Under the first part, before any mail ballots go out, a state’s election officials must register with USPS and upload a list of every voter slated to receive one. That list must include not just the voter’s name and address but a unique barcode tied to that specific voter’s outbound envelope and the return envelope they would mail back. The list can be updated until the last day the state is legally allowed to send ballots out, but not after. On or about Election Day, USPS would provide the state with the compiled list as the official record of who was enrolled to receive a ballot.
Then, under the second part, before USPS accepts a filled-out ballot into the mail stream (meaning before it takes the envelope from the election office or mail vendor), a USPS employee would check two things: first, that the state actually submitted a compliant list; second, that the voter addressed on this ballot appears on that list, confirmed by matching the barcode on the envelope. If either check fails, USPS does not accept the mailpiece—and the ballot never enters the mail system.
Here’s an example of how it could block a mail-in ballot. Say a voter in Arizona registered to vote by mail and was properly added to the state’s mail voter rolls. Arizona uploads its participation list to the federal portal before ballots are scheduled to go out. But say the voter moved within the county before the upload and only updates her address with the DMV but not separately with the county election office because Arizona law allows DMV updates to carry over automatically.
The address update didn’t sync to the county’s mailing system before the list was uploaded. Her name is on the list, but the barcode on her envelope was generated from the old address record. When the county delivers its ballot mailing to the post office, a USPS employee scans the barcode on her envelope. It doesn’t match what’s on the federal list. USPS rejects the envelope. Her ballot is returned to the county office.
By then it’s days before the election. If the county catches the error, reprints the envelope with the corrected barcode, re-uploads a corrected list and resubmits, and if USPS processes the correction in time, she might still receive a new ballot. If any one of those steps slips, she won’t get one.
That’s just one example among many. In the wrong hands (i.e., someone intent on obstructing as many mail-in ballots as possible), the "federal list” could knock out millions of valid votes, with voters completely unaware of what happened.
In short, the rule would transform USPS from a neutral carrier of election mail into a federal gatekeeper. It would suddenly have the authority to decide, before a single ballot enters the mail stream, which voters are eligible to even receive one.
[...]
Why the obsession with mail-in votes?
Trump spent years convincing his own base that mail-in voting was a fraud-riddled scam. Enough Republicans believed him that the two parties now vote in fundamentally different ways. In 2024, 37 percent of Democrats voted by mail compared to 24 percent of Republicans—a 13-point spread. Trump built the asymmetry himself, and is now moving to exploit it. He knows that restricting mail-in balloting will suppress more Democratic voters than Republican ones.
That asymmetry explains both the urgency of his executive order and the White House’s willingness to absorb the legal and possible political costs of pursuing it. Mail balloting, at its current scale, represents a self-created structural disadvantage the administration has decided it can no longer afford.
On March 9, standing before a gathering of House Republicans, Trump told his party that passing the SAVE America Act—legislation that would, among other things, restrict mail-in voting with limited exceptions for illness, disability, military service or travel—was essential. “It will guarantee the midterms,” he said. “If you don’t get it, big trouble.”
He added, in the same breath, that he wasn’t doing it for that reason at all. Which, of course, meant he was.
The legislative push for the SAVE Act failed twice. It cleared the House 218–213 in February, then fell short of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate in March. Republicans tried an end-run through a process called reconciliation, where only a simple majority is required, but that effort collapsed too, after four GOP senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—joined Democrats to kill it earlier this month. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has acknowledged publicly that the votes simply aren’t there.
[...]
Practical implementation issues
There are significant practical obstacles that compound the legal issues. And in court, they may be just as important.
As discussed earlier, the rule’s core mechanism is a new federal registry—the “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List”—that states must populate before a single ballot goes out. At least 30 days before ballots are mailed under a state’s laws, each state’s chief election official must submit to USPS the names and addresses of every voter eligible to receive a mail ballot, along with unique barcodes tied to each outbound and return envelope. As the example earlier showed, any ballot that does not match the list—or whose envelope fails the new design standards—can be rejected before entering the mail stream.
Building such a system from scratch is no small burden. Even ballot envelope design can be costly and time-consuming. Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the Election Center and a former architect of the Postal Service’s own ballot-tracking barcode system, explained that a ballot envelope design is “way more complicated than one would ever believe it to be.” Even minor changes to envelope folding can affect how ballots are tabulated.
There is also a staffing shortage. More than a third of election offices nationwide lack a full-time employee. Some have no dedicated computer. Patrick said compliance will be impossible for many offices. “I haven’t seen much here that is giving me much confidence this can be done by the fall without creating a lot of confusion and potential chaos,” she said.
[...]
A third path—“partial compliance”—carries its own cost. Some election officials have noted that submitting voter lists to satisfy the rule would hand the federal government essentially complete mail-voter rolls, the same data the Justice Department has been trying unsuccessfully to extract from blue states through litigation. In universal vote-by-mail states like California and Oregon, that list would amount to a near-complete voter database. In other words, the rule creates a suppression mechanism no matter what states do.
Great column from Jay Kuo on how the USPS’s proposed rules on handling vote-by-mail ballots could create chaos in the midterms.
A federal judge ruled in May that President Donald Trump can't just slap his name on the building.
Sebastian Murdock at HuffPost:
President Donald Trump’s name was officially removed from the Kennedy Center on Saturday after a federal judge ruled the president can’t just slap his name on the building.
Workers put up scaffolding throughout Friday to take down Trump’s name and meet an 11:59 p.m. deadline. The Justice Department was later granted a 12-hour extension after it said thunderstorms in the D.C. area caused delays.
At around 3 a.m. on Saturday, workers added a large curtain to block the view of the removal of Trump’s name, disappointing a crowd that had gathered to cheer it on. Thousands more watched on a livestream.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled against Trump in May, saying only Congress can change the building’s name.
“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” Cooper’s decision said. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
Cooper also blocked the two-year closure of the Kennedy Center that a Trump-installed board voted to close down for renovations in December. Trump was predictably furious about the decision.
Donald Trump’s ill-gotten namesake has been removed from the Kennedy Center, restoring it to its proper name fully.
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