Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. Scott says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 09:48

   Oh, boo hoo.

   From the Roger Taney of the 2020s:

   John Roberts decries heated criticism of the Supreme Court

   As the Supreme Court weathers another intense round of criticism for a Voting Rights Act decision that is roiling Congressional elections in several states, Chief Justice John Roberts insisted Wednesday that the court is above the political fray.

   “I think [people] view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do,” Roberts said at a judicial conference here. “Certainly, those aspects are open to debate and people should talk about them, but we’re not simply part of the political process and there’s a reason for that and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.”

   7
2. Scott says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 09:55

   Today’s Letter from an American

   It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.

   An understatement.

   Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.
   …
   the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people.
   …
   “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”

   Corruption.

   Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.

   I find Heather Cox Richardson’s daily email a good summary of the daily issues.

   4
3. drj says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:03

   @Scott:

   I find it highly typical of today’s conservative movement that Roberts is very much offended by the fact that some of us dare to stand by what our eyes and ears tell us to be true.

   8
4. drj says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:11

   Also, this deeply principled jurist calling balls and strikes is actually a shameless, inveterate liar.

   Nobody is that dense without very actively wanting to be that dense.

   6
5. gVOR10 says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:14

   @Scott:

   but we’re not simply part of the political process and there’s a reason for that and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.

   Don’t tell me you’re not political, Roberts, show me.

   9
6. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:40

   The following is a very long piece focussed on SCOTUS and the Shadow Docket, but if you scroll down you come to this:

   “Mike Brock”

   I want to slow down here, because the next layer requires care. There is a parallel corruption layer running through Gulf oil sovereigns, Israeli political-intelligence networks, and a documented financial broker named Jeffrey Epstein. The Department of Justice’s 2026 release of more than 3.5 million pages of Epstein documents establishes patterns that warrant separate treatment, with appropriate epistemic care about which connections are documented and which are inferential.

   Documented through the Miami Herald, Reuters, Middle East Eye, Forbes, and Al Jazeera: Epstein positioned himself as financial advisor to Mohammed bin Salman, with twice-monthly meetings demanded, review power over the Saudi central bank and sovereign wealth fund proposed, and a proposed small palace requested as residence. He advised against a New York listing of Saudi Aramco. The Aramco IPO listed in Riyadh, not New York, in 2019. He received advance intelligence about the Ritz-Carlton corruption purge from an unidentified source. He maintained documented relationships with Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem of Dubai’s DP World, with members of Qatar’s ruling family, and with other Gulf-sovereign actors. He used these relationships to broker meetings between Israeli political figures — principally former prime minister Ehud Barak — and Gulf interlocutors. He invested in Carbyne, an Israeli surveillance technology company staffed by veterans of Unit 8200, the Israeli military cyber-intelligence unit, in a structure that Forbes documented as financially concealed through a Barak-established holding entity.

   The Israeli government, through its mission to the United Nations, installed surveillance equipment and access-control protocols at an Epstein-managed Manhattan apartment building where Barak regularly stayed. Wall Street Journal reporting cited in the CounterPunch analysis documents Epstein scheduling at least thirty-six meetings with Barak between 2013 and 2017. A 2018 email in the DOJ files shows Epstein joking with Barak: You should make clear that I don’t work for Mossad. The joke is doing the same evasive work that the leaked Roberts memos do — performing transparency about a thing the parties prefer not be examined.

   What is documented at the level of correspondence and financial relationship: Gulf-oil access, Israeli political-intelligence entanglement, the Carbyne surveillance-investment nexus, the Wexner Foundation’s operational engagement with Israeli strategic communications. What is alleged but not formally established: that Epstein operated as a coordinated intelligence asset for any specific government. The 2020 FBI memo from a confidential source asserting that Epstein was trained as a spy under Barak is in the public record but contested. The structural picture the documents establish is that Epstein was, at minimum, a broker positioned at the intersection of Gulf oil capital, Israeli political-intelligence networks, and elite American financial-legal-political figures. Whether the brokerage was operationally coordinated with any single intelligence service is the question that remains open even as the financial and political relationships become increasingly clear.

   The relevance to the Court-capture story is structural rather than direct. The fossil-fuel-industry capture of the Supreme Court that the Roberts memos document was funded principally through domestic dark-money channels — Koch, the API, the Concord Fund, the Leo network. The parallel Gulf-Israeli-Epstein layer documents foreign-capital-and-intelligence networks operating on adjacent American legal-political terrain through different channels. The two layers are not the same operation. They are corruption ecosystems whose memberships and financial flows overlap at specific nodes. Leon Black, who paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017, is a major Republican donor whose Apollo Global Management has interlocking interests with the broader donor networks. Wexner, Epstein’s original benefactor, was simultaneously a major figure in pro-Israel American philanthropy and adjacent to the donor networks that produced the Federalist Society‘s judicial pipeline. The connections are documented at the level of overlapping memberships and parallel flows. They are not documented at the level of single-operation coordination, and intellectually careful writing on this topic should not claim more than the documents establish.

   Then we come to Mr. Kushner. Affinity Partners, founded in 2021, holds approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management as of April 2026, with 99 percent of that funding from foreign nationals — principally the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The Saudi Public Investment Fund, controlled by Mohammed bin Salman, committed $2 billion to Affinity shortly after Trump’s first administration concluded. The PIF advisory committee’s internal due diligence, obtained by the New York Times in April 2022, rated Affinity‘s operations unsatisfactory in all aspects, objected to the inexperience of the management, identified the kingdom as bearing the majority of the investment and risk, characterized the management fee as excessive, and flagged public relations risks from Kushner’s White House role. The full PIF board, led by MbS, overturned those recommendations within days. Of course they did.

   Kushner is, at the time of this writing, continuing to serve as Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Peace in the Middle East. His investors are the governments whose interests he is simultaneously negotiating with as the official representative of the United States. He met Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva. The talks failed. The United States and Israel then bombed Iran in a war that Donald Trump has, by all available indication, lost — at the cost of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the doubling of global jet fuel prices, and the failure of Spirit Airlines whose final flight landed yesterday. At Davos in January 2026, Kushner announced the administration’s New Gaza initiative while simultaneously soliciting billions of dollars in additional Affinity investments from global business leaders at the same conference.

   4
7. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:42

   Alisa believes Ghislaine Maxwell was Israeli intelligence and a handler running Jeffrey Epstein: This would involve gathering kompromat on public figures .

   “Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez”

   Okay. So Robert. Robert Maxwell. Born in what’s now Ukraine. Flees Hitler, ends up in England. Speaks like eight languages. Serves in the M16 intelligence operation for England. Bosses say he’s next to useless after the war because his only loyalty is to Israel. Yet he stays in England, working for intelligence. Probably more than one country’s intelligence. Makes a boatload in his publishing front, whilst also being a spy. Publishes scientific journals. Gets access to scientists. Including nuclear physicists. Comes to New Mexico. Does the thing with the labs. Whistleblowers tell the FBI. Ed Meese, president Ronald Reagan’s head of the Dept. of Justice, drops the investigation. Then, around 1991, the story gets weird. Like everything else about these people.

   And by weird, what I mean to say is that in 1991, Robert Maxwell died in a rather weird way. He is said to have had a heart attack on or near his yacht, named The Lady Ghislaine (because of course it is), and then he drowns in the inky blue sea near the Canary Islands. It gets weirder. Because, yeah.

   British media reports from the time say medical examiners can’t agree on either the cause of death OR that the obese waterlogged corpse is even Robert Maxwell at all. His wife says its him, though. And that’s good enough for everyone else. Then it gets weirder.

   Upon Robert Maxwell’s death, it comes to light that he has somehow managed to move hundreds of millions of pounds out of the pension accounts for his publishing empire employees, and that money has simply vanished. It’s a scandal, naturally, as so many things are in jolly old England.

   …

   Poor Ghislaine, the media said, consoled herself by moving to Manhattan and hooking up with a rich hottie named Jeffrey Epstein, whom she would later tell current US Attorney General Todd Blanche her father had “never met.”

   It was lie, though. Like almost everything that slips easily from Ghislaine’s mouth. Epstein had, in fact, met Robert Maxwell long before he met the man’s youngest daughter.

   According to former Mossad intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, Jeffrey Epstein met Robert Maxwell first, because both Jeff and Rob were working for Israeli military intelligence in the early 1980s. Ben-Menashe, who claims to have run both of them, says Epstein was already squirreling away millions of pounds for Robert Maxwell in the early 1980s, in offshore bank accounts.

   Which means one of two things, to me. Either:

   Ghislaine Maxwell knew to go to Epstein in the event of her father’s death, to get the hidden money, and covered her own ass by allowing it to seem as though Epstein — who, let’s be honest, never met a person over 14 he wanted to date — was “supporting” her; or

   Robert Maxwell, with the help of the Mossad, began making arrangements a decade before he faked his death, so that his youngest daughter, his favorite daughter, the daughter he took everywhere with him (to learn the trade, I presume?) could take over his spy operations and the family fortune, without having to take on the faltering publishing empire.

   Think about it. It’s almost too perfect. The official story, repeated by the med to this day, is that poor little Ghislaine, who was little more than a randy, raunchy, charming but oversexed party girl, was so heartbroken over the death of her domineering bombastic father, and so destroyed by the disgrace he brought to her family, that all she could do was flee to New York City to rebuild her life again — which is what all newly destitute people do, naturally, go to the most expensive city in the United States, to flit about at cocktail parties and fashion shows.

   It’s all so obvious in hindsight. Especially as new interviews and documents come to light demonstrating that Jeffrey Epstein was not the genius financier he was painted out to be. He was, rather, a real, living, fictional creation — a pretend financier, funded by and propped up by Israeli intelligence and their three-letter ally organizations in the United States. US attorney for the Souther District of Florida, Alex Acosta, said as much when he confessed to having been forced to give Epstein a much lighter sentence than the norm, because, he was told, Epstein was “one of ours,” meaning intelligence.

   3
8. Kylopod says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 10:53

   “We have an independent judiciary, and the government is not involved in the decision-making of the judiciary. In fact, judges in the judiciary have their own independence from the center of authority of the judiciary.” — Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in 2020

   2
9. Scott says:
   Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 11:12

   Dumbest headline of the day.

   New York Times:

   Higher Gas Prices Are Hitting Lower-Income Americans the Hardest

   No shit, Sherlock

   3
10. Jay L. Gischer says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 11:13

    @Scott: You know, that statement by John Roberts sounds a lot to me like: “We are not simple politifcal hacks. It takes years of training and study to produce the high-flown hackery we make here. It’s not the least bit simple, and I wish people understood that better.”

    6
11. gVOR10 says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 12:06

    @Jay L. Gischer: Or, “We are following strict originalist principles. Unless what we want demands consequentialism.. And don’t look too deeply at how Originalism was designed by the Federalist Society to support a 1790s style oligarchy like Chuckles Koch wants.”

    3
12. Slugger says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 13:05

    Serious hantavirus infections were recognized in the US in 1993 in the Southwest under the name of the Sin Nombre virus. If I were a virologist studying this virus, I would be assuming a low profile. If hanta does cause more than one outbreak on a cruise ship, it’s likely to cause a lot of turmoil in the press and more chatter from people whose only qualification is internet access. Dr. Fauci has received a lot of vituperation by important people such as Sen. Paul calling for him to be indicted and some calling for worse. An associate has recently been indicted actually. I have no idea if they committed crimes or if this is political scapegoating. In today’s world I would fear being close to the tornado of blame finding if anything bad happens. Perhaps it would be smart to avoid any field with possible public health implications; the funding is drying up anyway.

    2
13. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 13:50

    @Slugger:

    Hantavirus commonly spreads through rodent droppings and urine. This is rather uncommon.

    The Andes strain, as I commented yesterday, can also be spread person to person. That’s what makes for a pandemic danger.

    There have been few human cases, so research is scarce. Keeping this in mind, it seems to have a long incubation period and a short transmission window. The latter maybe only a day or so, apparently when symptoms, especially fever, first appear.

    Assuming this is right, it’s not an imminent danger. But who knows how it can change. remember what the Delta variant of the trump virus did, even to those vaccinated against the original strain.

    Developing a vaccine for it would be a good idea, even if only just in case it mutates into something more transmissible. Keep in mind the trump virus was first identified in 2019, ergo COVID-19, but didn’t become a problem for a few months. this also means it was likely circulating before it was identified, possibly months earlier.

    3
14. Michael Reynolds says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 15:16

    I think it’s pretty clear that in the interests of public health the Navy should sink that cruise ship. Or. . . or we could drop RFK Jr. via fast-rope onto the ship with his bag of dried rodent genitals, and then sink the ship.

    3
15. Michael Reynolds says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 15:46

    Seen this?

    President Donald Trump’s chest-thumping narrative about his Middle East war has been undercut by a damning intelligence leak on the extent of Iran’s capabilities.

    A confidential CIA analysis delivered to policymakers just this week concluded that Iran can survive a U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months before it plummets into economic hardship, four insiders told The Washington Post.

    The same analysis also found that Iran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities even after weathering weeks of attacks from the U.S. and Israel, according to the outlet, further raising questions about Trump’s bombastic claims about the war.

    The report came just a day after Trump heaped praise on the Navy’s “unbelievable” blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and claimed that Iran’s missiles are “mostly decimated.”

    The CIA estimated that Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for at least 90 to 120 days, The Post reported. A U.S. official who spoke to the outlet said they believed that Iran’s capacity to endure prolonged economic strain may be far greater than the agency’s estimate.

    “The leadership has gotten more radical, determined, and increasingly confident they can outlast U.S. political will and sustain domestic repression to check any resistance” inside Iran, the official said. “Comparatively, you see similar regimes lasting years under sustained embargoes and airpower-only wars.”

    Pack your bags, Tulsi.

    7
16. Gustopher says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 15:55

    @Michael Reynolds:

    dried rodent genitals

    Raccoons aren’t rodents.

    1
17. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 16:34

    After the PC scare the other day, I’ve begun to browse the web for laptops. BTW yesterday the desktop started up normally and behaved itself. I did not try to access Bluesky…

    Anyway. I used to be on top of PC specs and developments, back in the early 2010s when I last bought a PC. Since then, things have changed. A lot. So I tried LLMs.

    I posed the same prompt to Copilot and Gemini. Basically, I need a reasonably fast, future-proof* laptop that can connect to an external monitor and keyboard and mouse.

    Copilot laid out a range of specs, listed pros and cons, and gave some general advice on ports, hubs, and docking stations. Gemini listed several links for websites that sell PCs, plus some advice on an NPU chip and RAM.

    Of course I trust neither. I’m checking what Copilot said. Gemini, though, seems near to useless.

    *Future-proof means it will likely run Windows 12, whenever it comes out. That’s chancy, of course.
18. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 16:38

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Decimated? Damn. All that explosive tonnage and thousands of deaths, and all the vaunted US Navy and Air Force and the IAF managed to do was reduce Iran’s missiles by 10%?

    Too bad ill-conceived wars don’t come with warranties or refunds.

    4
19. CSK says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 16:44

    @Kathy:

    Wasn’t that “mostly decimated”? I’d put the figure at, say, 8%.

    3
20. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 16:57

    @CSK:

    I told you I’m not good at math.

    Though the way El Taco does percentages, you’d think it was 7,500%

    1
21. JohnSF says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 17:14

    @charontwo:
    I’ve said before, the whole Maxwell connection is a thread that really need pulling on.
    And yet it seems to be a dog that is not barking at all.
    One of the few outlets that has repeatly pointed out the link us the UK’s Private Eye which is sometimes satirical, at others doggedly pursues matters others would prefer forgotten.
    Given how notorious Robert Maxwell’s reputation is in British media and politics, it’s really notable that nobody else ever seems to even mention “Captain Bob” in connection to Epstein.

    “Poor bereft Ghislaine” rocking up in New York and immediately linking up with Epstein; at just the same time as Epstein suddenly rockets into the near-billionaire stakes, and all sorts of international doors start opening?
    In the immortal words of Garak: “I believe in coincidences, coincidences happen everyday, but I don’t trust coincidences.”

    The financial operations threads are also something not being followed up systematically. US law enforcement seems to be not bothering, and its probably both beyond the resources of the media, and less interestrsting to the public than the sexual exploitation angle.
    By now its a fair bet that a lot of the financial records offshore have been erased.
    But if nobody is even trying?

    As to who was “handling” Epstein/Maxwell: my personal suspcion is that there were some links to some western agencies, enough to give them “cover”. But also to New York “mobs” various, and that Epstein/Maxwell also did a fair bit of freelance quasi-blackmail, and “compromise” trading to various parties on their own account.

    And who else do we know moving in the same shark-infested waters of the sleazier side of NY “society” and finance in the late 80’s/early ’90’s?
    Why, hello Mr Trump!

    6
22. al Ameda says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 17:47

    @Kathy:

    Decimated? Damn.

    @CSK:

    Wasn’t that “mostly decimated”?

    Wait a minute: what the hell happened to ‘obliterated”?

    4
23. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 17:51

    Iran fired at US ships after it claimed the US violated the ceasefire.

    What was in that memo anyway?

    3
24. CSK says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 17:58

    @al Ameda:

    Trump thinks decimated and obliterated are synonyms.

    5
25. Slugger says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 18:54

    @Kathy: My thought is that there is a danger greater than RNA viruses and that is the blind lynch mob mentality of the internet. The Covid experience shows that gain of function by politicians’s demogoguerie is real which why I advise hanta virologists to keep a low profile.

    1
26. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 19:34

    @Slugger:

    Absolutely. We know most pathogens can be defeated or ameliorated by vaccines, and fewer, but still a substantial fraction, with drugs and supportive interventions.

    We don’t know yet how to do the same with malicious stupidity.

    2
27. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 19:37

    Won’t any court allow El Taco to impose illegal tariffs in peace?

    TL;DR: The Court of International Trade ruled against the across the board Taco 10% tariff.

    2
28. Michael Reynolds says:
    Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 20:17

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being sidelined by the White House as a rift emerges between the MAHA and MAGA movements, a new report alleges.

    I know, you’re all thinking what I’m thinking: are cage matches to the death really that wrong?

    4
29. Richard Gardner says:
    Friday, 8 May 2026 at 02:30

    @Kathy: I suggest you also look at Costco (Mexico – I’ve been in the Tijuana one) for computers when the time comes. For now I’d wait until the hardware specs for Win12 come out (my CPU is one edition too early for Win 11, running 10).

    2
30. Kathy says:
    Friday, 8 May 2026 at 09:53

    @Richard Gardner:

    I have been looking at Costco.

    Great minds think alike 🙂

    I’m a bit more concerned about the CPU. The latest ones have the infamous neural processing unit, which appears to be needed to run some portion of the LLMs locally. Opinions differ on whether MS will require them or not for Win12. Some opine it’s more of a battery life issue.

    1