Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
Trump is charging the Secret Service for hot dogs at his own golf club. His administration is making it easier to bribe public officials. DHS is spying on Americans’ bank activity and having local cops pull them over. And ABC is ending Jimmy Kimmel Live! after 24 years on the air.
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Most bosses who buy the office lunch don’t invoice you afterward.
A Forbes investigation has found that Trump’s golf clubs bill the federal government when Secret Service agents eat hot dogs during the president’s golf outings. When Trump arrives at the 11th hole of his Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C., he instructs the chef to serve hot dogs to everyone in his party, including as many as 30 golf carts full of agents.
Sometimes the stand makes 50 at a time. The price of a hot dog depends on the property, from about $10 at Trump National Golf Club to $45 for a wagyu footlong called the “Trump Dog” at Trump National Doral Miami.
Trump has spent at least 135 of the 596 days of his second term on golf courses, most of them at properties he owns. The Secret Service has spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-branded properties in that time. They should be earning rewards points by now.
The First Amendment now protects speech, religion, the press, assembly, and buying a government contract.
The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to rescind Rule 206(4)-5 under the Investment Advisers Act, a rule referred to as the “Pay-to-Play” rule. The rule bars investment advisers from accepting compensation for advising government clients for two years after making political contributions to the officials who oversee those contracts.
SEC Commissioner Mark T. Uyeda released a statement last week arguing that the rule undermined the First Amendment rights of advisers by discouraging their political contributions. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins echoed that argument, claiming that people should not have to choose between their political speech and their careers in the financial industry.
The rule was adopted in 2010 and was intentionally broad because state and local prosecutors had long struggled to prove quid pro quo corruption in individual cases. Everyone knew the donations were buying contracts, but proving intent in court was almost impossible. The rule fixed that by banning the transaction outright.
The proposal follows a significant jump in private equity spending in 2024, which shifted toward Republicans. If the rule is lifted, investment firms would be permitted to donate to the campaigns of the very officials who award them government contracts, including the president.
At least the mob has the decency to tail you in person.
Border Patrol is reviewing Americans’ bank records and then having local cops pull them over for fabricated traffic violations, a 404 Media investigation found. The units, Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT), flag people who have not been accused of any crime and pass their information to local police.
In one case, a PITT analyst in the Spokane, Washington sector flagged Kyle Olson as he drove across Montana. The analyst looked over Olson’s financials and determined his activity looked suspicious, then passed the information on to a Montana Highway Patrol sergeant. The sergeant told Olson that he pulled him over because his license plate was blocked.
Officers searched Olson’s car and located marijuana products from his job at a licensed cannabis farm in California. He faces possession with intent to distribute and DUI charges.
The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause before a search. Customs and Border Protection would not say what financial information the units track, whether they obtain warrants, or how many of the agency’s 20 sectors have such teams.
The Trump administration has now successfully canceled more comedians than Netflix.
ABC reportedly doesn’t plan to extend Jimmy Kimmel’s contract beyond May 2027, bringing his 24-year run on the network to a close. A source told Page Six that Kimmel’s contract “is not getting extended,” while TMZ separately confirmed that Kimmel’s staff has been discussing his plans to pitch new shows and podcasts.
Kimmel has been working on year-to-year deals with the Disney-owned network and has been open about possibly stepping away in the future, giving ABC plenty of reasons not to fight for him. His show was pulled from broadcast last year after Sinclair and Nexstar, two major owners of ABC affiliates, removed it from their stations.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr launched an early review of ABC’s broadcast licenses after Kimmel called Melania Trump an “expectant widow” on the show, a joke Kimmel said was about the age difference between the president and the first lady. In a court filing in July, Disney’s lawyers described the review as an effort to punish the network for its coverage of the president.
If Kimmel does leave, he will follow Stephen Colbert, whose 11-year run on CBS’s The Late Show ended in May after his own conflicts with the administration. At this rate, Seth Meyers has until Christmas.
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White House Removes Racist Tetris Clone From Its Website After Creator Speaks Out. The White House took down a game called “Build the Wall” from a propaganda “arcade” section of its website. The game, a Tetris clone that involved players stacking wall segments to stop a “zombie border siege,” was taken down after the Tetris Company publicly denounced it. The Tetris Company said it was not involved in making the game and took copyright infringement very seriously, adding that Tetris had always been about bringing people together rather than dividing them. The other games are still on the White House site.
Supreme Court Upholds New York’s School Vaccine Requirement. The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a New York mother’s attempt to send her son to kindergarten without getting state-mandated vaccines after she argued they violated her Catholic beliefs. State and local officials said a religious exemption would interfere with efforts to prevent the spread of disease among children and the public, and the court ruled in their favor. Justices Alito and Gorsuch, who have repeatedly claimed that vaccine mandates without religious exemptions violate the First Amendment, were the only two who would have granted the mother’s request.
** Supreme Court Blocks Missouri’s GOP-Friendly Congressional Map for the Midterms.** The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to allow new congressional districts in Missouri that would have handed Republicans seven of the state’s eight House seats. Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the appeal without referring it to the full court and without comment. The Missouri state supreme court ruled that the November election must use the old 2022 map, and that a referendum petition with more than 300,000 signatures successfully put the new districts on hold. Denny Hoskins, the Republican Secretary of State, had waited until the last possible day to challenge the referendum, trying to run out the clock and hoping the Court would reward that strategy.
Appeals Court Blocks IRS From Sharing Taxpayer Data With ICE. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Tuesday unanimously upheld a lower court ruling blocking the IRS from sharing confidential taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE had asked for the last known addresses of 1.28 million suspected undocumented immigrants, and the IRS had already handed over 47,289 records before the original injunction was issued. A three-judge panel said the IRS violated strict federal tax-confidentiality safeguards adopted in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Judge Cornelia Pillard called the administration’s defense of the data-sharing agreement “weak sauce” and said the government could face civil and criminal penalties for willful violations of the law.