emptywheel

@emptywheel.bsky.social

Coverage of American authoritarianism with a focus on legal cases. An American-Irish in Limerick, Ireland. Legendary potty mouth!

4k Following305.5k Followers

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:44 PM

Reminder: Iran hacked Trump's campaign, via Trump's weak underbelly, Roger Stone. To this day, we STILL don't know if Iran got blackmail on Trump, Susie Wiles, or Lindsey Halligan.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:39 PM

The other day, Chuck Schumer (who allegedly never does anything) introduced a bill to address corruption. I was skeptical, but Brennan lays out why it is a good bill.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:37 PM

I think given the lawsuits, there may be important legal reasons why Blanche is not being permitted to renege on the Terrorist Slush Fund in writing. But I also think if Trump's cop assailants and terrorists come to believe he will NOT reward them, they will pursue violent revenge.

Trump's post:

John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called “Fund,” which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas, who easily won the Nomination for the United States Senate. Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history. They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them. I gave up any payments for myself, which would have been substantial, including for the illegal and unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago, my home in Florida, even though many legal experts, and others, including John Cornyn, said it was a shocking and disgusting display of “weaponization” against me. Such an event has never happened before, and hopefully will never happen again! I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined! Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide Presidential win, where this was a major subject of debate, and so did John Cornyn, until he lost his Election to an opponent that I Endorsed. Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I have superimposed the words:
Trump says he has to reward adjudicated terrorists and cop assailants.

in big blue letters.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:30 PM

Thanks. I understand being called out for your illiberal refusal to get off your own ass in the wake of the decimation of the old press would lead you to make excuses, that *I* am defensive.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:23 PM

I'm not saying you're a bad dem. I'm saying you're a lazy illiberal easy mark for billionaires.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:23 PM

Rather than excerpts I was going to post a poll: Who would you rather see go catastrophically broke in the AI crash, Elon or Ellison. But then I got hung up on trying to think of a third. Maybe I still should.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:20 PM

But the middle is full of all these details about what truly absurd people these are, like his mystery partner a third of his age.

Ellison was living on Lanai with Keren Zhu, a Chinese national who came to the United States as a teenager and who goes by Jolin. Very little is known about her, including whether she and Ellison are married. But people who lived on Lanai and worked for Ellison told us that he and Jolin had their first child when she was about 23 and he was about 70 — before Ellison was divorced from his fifth wife, Nikita Kahn, in 2020 — and that they have since had at least three more. Ellison appears to be attentive to Jolin’s desires. When she complained about missing authentic Chinese food, he had one of the island’s local spots, the Lanai City Bar and Grill, which he also owns, temporarily converted into a Sichuan restaurant.

Image
Larry Ellison, wearing a black V-neck sweater, sitting with a woman with long dark hair wearing a striped sweater and a white University of Michigan cap.
Ellison with his partner, Keren Zhu, at a tennis match at Indian Wells in 2018.Credit...Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:19 PM

Here's how the beginning of the (very long) article pitches Ellison as a cautionary tale, the personification of the AI bubble, possibly about to burst.

Ellison did cash in, at least at first. He signed the Stargate deal with Altman, putting him in business with the hottest young executive in the A.I. industry. He opened one of the world’s largest data centers in Malaysia, which has provided by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s A.I. computing power, and developed plans to build another one in the United Arab Emirates. Oracle became a major investor in the U.S. division of the social media app TikTok. Ellison also moved into a whole new realm of influence. In 2024, he backed his son David’s $8 billion bid for Paramount, the owner of a major Hollywood studio as well as CBS News. And in 2025, he helped finance David’s $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of a far bigger studio, dozens of cable channels and CNN. The Ellisons appeared to be building a very new sort of tech and media empire for the A.I. age, and Ellison’s wealth was soaring. Last September, he briefly became the richest person in the world.

But his big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debt in every imaginable form — bonds, letters of credit, asset-backed securities — available in seemingly unlimited quantities, because the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. It held that advancements in A.I. were directly tied to the generation of unprecedented amounts of computing power to process unprecedented volumes of data. Reaching the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., when computers match or surpass human thinking at any task, was going to require bigger data centers and a lot more of them. It all came down to capital expenditures — capex, in the lingo of the Valley. Whoever controlled the most computing power would control the A.I. economy.

But lately, some investors and analysts have started questioning the scaling hypothesis or at least asking if all this spending is sustainable. The …

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:16 PM

This NYT profile of David Ellison ends with something I've been wondering: Was he so willing to hold off on the Warner acquisition bc he can't afford it anymore. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/m...

David Ellison’s $111 billion bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery was also running into trouble. Twelve state attorneys general sued to block the deal, and a judge granted them a temporary restraining order. Soon after, Paramount Skydance announced that it was delaying the acquisition, citing the continuing court case. Ellison’s $45.7 billion pledge to back David’s bid represented a much larger percentage of his net worth than it did when he made the commitment less than a year earlier. It would be a bad time to sell, or borrow against, his Oracle shares if he needed to. The C.E.O. of everything had fallen pretty far.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:08 PM

I didn't say Google was the answer. It is, however, the bare minimum someone who calls herself a citizen should be able to muster. Citizenship is not a holiday spa. It requires actual work, unless you want to be some billionaire's slave.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:01 PM

You are LITERALLY the billionaires' ideal rube. Playing right into David Ellison's hands!!!!

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 3:00 PM

Again, billionaires have spent A LOT of money ensuring that hard as they try, Democrats have a very hard time *being* loud. So are you going to just capitulate to those billionaires? You're going to do nothing to defy them?

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:53 PM

Do you understand that billionaires have very intentionally made it hard to get information and that saying, "Okay then, I guess it's too hard now" is capitulation?

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:48 PM

Golly there was this exceptionally good NYT story 11 days ago. It was published on A1. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/u...

nytimes.comFaced With Piles of New Paperwork, People Are Losing Food StampsArizona’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program rolls have plummeted, offering a possible preview of national trends as states try to avoid new federal penalties.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:46 PM

You said you really shouldn't have to go to Google. Why not? Who is responsible? ESPECIALLY who is responsible before making claims Dems have not done something? DO you think information just gets uploaded to your brain or it didn't happen?

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:39 PM

TY!

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:37 PM

How are you going to measure success?

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:36 PM

Let's unpack that. How are you going to find out about it without that? Do you understand that things don't go viral On Here, by design?

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:35 PM

Page 13: Kavanaugh justifies Kavaugh stops. Page 22: Plaintiffs describe the millions in damages they're claiming from a terrifying Kavanaugh stop, followed by a slew of DHS lies. Via @courtwatch.bsky.social. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

43. The Supreme Court of the United States issued an unsigned order
granting the Solicitor General’s request for a stay, lifting the TRO restrictions on or
about September 8, 2025. In a concurring opinion on September 8, 2025, Justice
Brett Kavanaugh opined that an officer can develop reasonable suspicion through
evaluating four factors, considering an “extremely high number and percentage of
illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in
certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain
kinds of jobs…and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area…do not
speak much English.”20

86. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct,
Plaintiff Francisco Longoria suffered: (a) physical injury from being struck in the
head by J.C.; (b) severe emotional and psychological injuries including PTSD,
anxiety, and depression; (c) lost wages of $45,000; (d) total-loss property damage to
his 2001 GMC Sierra 1500 valued at $6,652; and (e) wrongful incarceration,
detention, public humiliation, and reputational harm from the lies spread by
Defendants regarding the incidents described herein. Plaintiff Francisco Longoria
alleges $25,000,000.00 in non-economic damages.
87. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct,
Plaintiff Jonathan Longoria suffered severe emotional and psychological injuries including PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and remains terrified of leaving his home.
Plaintiff Jonathan Longoria has also suffered public humiliation and reputational
harm from the lies spread by Defendants regarding the incidents described herein.
Plaintiff Jonathan Longoria alleges $10,000,000.00 in non-economic damages.
88. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct,
Martin Daniel Rascon suffered severe emotional and psychological injuries
including PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and remains terrified of leaving his home.
Plaintiff Martin Daniel Rascon has also suffered public humiliation and reputational
harm from the lies spread by Defendants regarding the incidents described herein.
Plaintiff Martin Daniel Rascon alleges $10,000,000.00 in non-economic damages.

@emptywheel.bsky.social Jul 31, 2026, 2:19 PM

Jeebus Pete. They canceled tours to hide how badly Ric Grenell destroyed it.

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