BREAKING: “YOU FIND THE VOTES!” Republican Senate leader John Thune fires back at Trump over his complaints they can’t pass his election-steal bill.

A full-blown Republican civil war burst into the open after the White House publicly attacked Senate Majority Leader John Thune over President Donald Trump's stalled voter suppression bill, only to have Republican senators line up behind their leader and admit Trump's top legislative priority will never have the votes to pass.

The extraordinary public feud erupted after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt warned reporters that Trump's "patience is running out" with Thune over the Senate's failure to advance the SAVE America Act, a voting measure Trump has demanded Congress pass before the August recess.

Thune didn't hide his irritation with KKKaroline.

"She or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?" Thune shot back. "So instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats. And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get on the phone. Let's get them to 'yes.'"

But the real shock came when Republican senators openly contradicted the White House and acknowledged that Trump's demands simply aren't possible.

"We just don't have the votes, and so there's nothing that Senator Thune can do to change that," Sen. John Cornyn said. "This idea that he can just command members of the Republican Conference to get in line is just a fantasy."

Cornyn warned that someone had badly misled Trump about the bill's prospects.

"I don't know who it was that sold the president on this idea that this was attainable, but it's creating a circular firing squad for Republicans," he said.

"Here we are, what, 103 days before the midterm elections, and this is not a great place for us to be."

Other Republican senators echoed the same message, making clear that Trump's pressure campaign cannot overcome the basic math in the Senate.

"Everybody wants to talk about 60 votes. We don't have 51 votes," Sen. John Hoeven said.

Sen. John Kennedy defended Thune while delivering one of the day's most memorable lines. "John's doing the best he can, but John can't put a gun to people's heads and make them vote a particular way. When you're [the] majority leader, you take a lot of the spears and the arrows. That's his job."

Even Sen. Rick Scott, one of the SAVE America Act's biggest supporters and a frequent critic of Thune, acknowledged the difficult position both men find themselves in. "It's hard being leader," Scott said of Thune. "I'm sure if I was the president of the United States, I'd be frustrated if everything I wanted didn't get done."

The increasingly public clash comes after Trump has spent months demanding action on the SAVE America Act, a proposal that would require proof of citizenship for voter registration, stricter voter identification requirements and major new restrictions on mail voting.

For months, Trump has insisted Republicans simply need to "get it done." Now his own party is publicly admitting that's fantasy.

The votes don't exist, the White House can't bully them into existence, and Trump's latest pressure campaign has accomplished something he never intended: exposing a growing Republican schism for everyone to see.

 

Eileen Foster

 

The woman they hired to catch fraud caught the biggest fraud in America. So they fired her.

Her name is Eileen Foster. And what they did to her should make you angry.

Foster hunted fraud for a living. Twenty-five years. She was good at it.

Then she landed the big job. Head of fraud investigations at Countrywide. The largest home loan company in America. She had thirty to forty investigators under her. She reported to regulators. To the board.

She thought she was protecting the company. She had no idea what she was about to find.

2007. A call came in on her fraud hotline. A fired worker in Boston. He said there was massive fraud in the branches. Going on for years. Nobody ever did a thing.

Foster dug in. What she found was sickening.

Employees were forging borrowers' signatures. Faking incomes. Making broke people look rich. Doctoring documents. Tricking the computer systems.

Why? To push through loans that should never have been approved. To people who could never pay them back.

Every bad loan meant a fat commission. The salesmen got rich. The borrowers got buried.

She shut down six branches in Boston. Fired around forty-four people. She thought she was cleaning house.

Then it got worse. She found the same fraud everywhere. Miami. Chicago. Las Vegas. Los Angeles. City after city.

It was not a few bad apples. It was the whole orchard.

And then she found the most disturbing thing of all.

The company had a hotline for honest workers to report fraud. But it was a trap. When workers reported, they were not protected. They were tipped-off on, demoted, harassed, fired. The wrongdoers got warned. The whistleblowers got crushed. Rigged to protect the salesmen making the most money.

Foster gathered the evidence. Mountains of it. She reported it up the chain.

That is when she became the target.

Instead of fixing the fraud, the company came after her. Her job. Her name. They twisted her statements. Cooked up phony findings about her.

Bank of America was buying Countrywide by then. They had their own reasons to want her quiet. She knew too much.

September 2008. They fired her.

They slid a document across her desk. A gag order. And around 228,000 dollars to disappear.

All she had to do was sign. Take the cash. Vanish.

She said no.

She filed a complaint. She took on Bank of America. One of the most powerful banks on Earth. Of 1,500 whistleblowers like her, only 21 had ever won. She knew the odds and went anyway.

September 2011. The government ruled in her favor. It found Bank of America had illegally fired her for blowing the whistle. It ordered them to take her back and pay her 930,000 dollars. A regulator said the bank had used illegal tactics against her, and that she had shown great courage.

She threw the hush money back in their faces. Then she beat them for four times as much.

Her story went national. 60 Minutes put her on television. And a stunning fact came out.

She had run fraud investigations at the company at the very heart of the crisis. And the Justice Department had never even called her. Never once asked what she knew.

Now here is the part that should keep you up at night.

The fraud she exposed helped crash the entire economy. Millions of families lost their homes. Their savings. Everything.

And the men who built the machine? Take Angelo Mozilo, the tanned, silver-haired CEO who ran Countrywide. He paid a 67.5 million dollar settlement to the SEC. He was never criminally charged. He never spent a single day in prison. He kept his fortune and died a free, wealthy man in 2023.

The banks paid huge fines. The men who ran them walked away rich. And free.

Foster proved the fraud was real. She proved it came from the top. And still, not one of them saw a jail cell.

She was the fraud cop. When she caught the biggest fraud of all, they tried to bury her for it. She refused to be buried. She kept her name. Kept her voice. Became a hero for whistleblowers everywhere. And she is still standing today, still fighting for the people brave enough to tell the truth.

The bankers who broke millions of families never spent one day in jail. They are betting you will just forget.

So do not give them that. Drop a word below for the woman who refused the hush money and told the truth anyway. Share her story so the men who got away with it never get the silence they paid for.

 

Good morning, my friends. It's second cuppa coffee time, and I'm looking through the headlines, shaking my head, rolling my eyes, and waiting for the "aha" to hit - the outrageous or ridiculous or alarming thing that I just can't NOT write about.

You ask me all the time, don't I get overwhelmed? And yes, I do. But I have a way to deal with that. I write. I get it all out. And then I get feedback from YOU, and validation, and additional information, and emotional support. And THAT gives me a better handle on it which leads to having a sense of stability and even control.

Suddenly, I am not alone in the dark scary forest with a quagmire under my feet, and sharp toothed creatures stalking me behind the trees.

You are there, and you are not empty handed. You are carrying flashlights and maps and tents and blankets and food and water. You bring your knowledge and experience and just as importantly, your sense of humor.

So, rather than starting off with the grim stuff, like I said on Monday, let me just chat with you about what I am seeing and sensing lately. Please chat back. I really want to know what you are thinking, too.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If you don't know me that well, yet, this is not a group or professional page, just my personal profile page. I have not monetized it. I am retired and nobody is paying me. I do not take donations, and I have stayed off platforms that use subscriptions. No, I am NOT rich, LOL. I am just at the age and stage of life that I refuse to ever be beholden or have to answer to any boss or corporation or social organization or entity again. No more crap. I love debates and discussions, but I will not stand for disrespect or abuse from anybody. Not towards me, and not to my friends here on this page.

One of the many jobs I enjoyed was working on various local AM radio stations doing talk shows and the news. I got REAL good at skimming the news for the important stuff, connecting the dots, and condensing it simply for a three-and-a-half-minute newscast. On the nose, to the second, so there would be room for the weather, traffic and commercial spots.

I really appreciate good journalism and I gotta tell you, I am SO pissed off at what I am seeing these days!

Mainstream news, either because their owners are so afraid of lawsuits or Epstein-type threats, or because they have been BOUGHT with government contracts and investments, have done their best to muzzle truly hard-hitting reports.

Trump propaganda media has been elevated by the White House to "legitimate" status. Most people do not know the difference between tabloid reporting, magazine stories, punditry, opinion, or journalism anymore. For the record, I regard myself as a pundit. I am a commentator. I gather reports from a wide variety of sources, and I do my radio thing.

As for independent online journalism, I am losing patience lately with most Youtube podcasters, because EVERY title graphic these folks use is sensationalized click bait - some Emergency Chaos that will End It All - which they will tell you all about, but first please click this, this, and that, and buy their book and watch their ad. And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, when they FINALLY get to what they were hyping, its pretty much a nothingburger.

At least half of them are about Trump is "dying" and losing his mind. And yes, he has both physical and mental issues... but... no, their hype is just the same old stuff we already know about.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

HOWEVER. The past few months there has been a definite change in him, both physically and mentally, and this is accelerating. Rapidly.

Trump is a performing artist, and he has used scripts all his life. He portrays two fictional characters. The first is his stage persona, which we all know well.

He used to be able to keep to his script, and even "weave" all kinds of personal observations and anecdotes and stories into them without losing the narrative. But his real talent was in turning to the audience, or to the officials he was using as props, and getting them to laugh, applaud and nod on cue.

Once he got them to participate with him, they were his.

And then there was the OTHER character he created. The one everyone who has met him in person has commented on. "He's not like that when you sit down and talk to him," they all say with surprise. "He's so reasonable and CARING." Uh huh.

We all have gotten a glimpse of THAT character. It's like he takes off a mask. His voice drops, no longer strident or sing-songy, but soft-spoken and "normal". No-no-no, he says with a little laugh, he is not REALLY going to do such-and-such, he just has to SAY that so that the press and "our" adversaries will take him seriously.

THAT is the persona he uses to sweet talk donors and investors. The one he uses behind closed doors to make deals. To win converts to his cult. To seduce.

Who is the REAL Trump? The one who scares the shit out of his staff and the GOP. The erratic, childish tyrant who LIKES to torture people. Who needs to assert his dominance and be the center of attention every single moment. The one who threatens, not with violence, but with "dirt," or lawsuits, or taking away their positions or contracts or access to MONEY.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And that leads us to where I am going with this. More and more, he is losing control of his stage personas, and he can no longer keep to his script. His REAL self is no longer kept behind the curtain, but is out in full view, constantly threatening. No more happy official portraits or coin images, just glowering, nasty images of his inner self.

He uses only a few phrases now. Someone is either "highly respected" or "low IQ" or "fake". He repeats the same line over and over and over again. He has apparently only a handful of lines he can remember, and he trots them out to answer every question, no matter the subject. When he goes OFF script, he loses his place, and cannot weave his way back. And he is forgetting words.

Yesterday at the Oval presser with the President of Lebanon, he tried to change the subject of his disastrous war in Iran to Venezuela. How easy and quick his "war" was. How he's taking millions of barrels of oil out, like nobody has ever seen before which has paid for "that violent war" ten times over, like nobody thought was possible.

He said Venezuela is now a very HAPPY place, [OOPS. HE JUST REMEMBERED THEY ARE NOT] "but, uh, they had a tragic incident, uh, with the event that took place, a couple of days ago, uh, a couple of weeks ago, what a, uh, what a terrible thing that was, uh, they had a movement, a shifting, uh, that was unbelievable, nobody's ever, THEY've never seen anything like it, a lot of people were killed, so it's all unrelated [WHAT?] and by the way, we were one of the first ones there to help, we were there to help, Venezuela, [LIGHT DAWNS! YOU CAN SEE IN HIS EYES HE SUDDENLY REMEMBERS THE WORD] it was an EARTHQUAKE, I guess you'd CALL it, uh, a pretty massive EARTHQUAKE, and we were able to do a lot of good."

In the middle of all that fishing around for the word he could not remember (um, man, woman, person, TV, camera?) Trump turned to President Aoun as if he expected him to jump in like one of his aides and give him the word he was looking for. Trump did the same thing at the NATO Summit, looking at Rutte the same way when he got stuck. He does that more and more now.

He also closes his eyes immediately when someone he's with starts speaking, even if he is standing up. It's like he is either on or he is off. He turns on when the spotlight is on him, and off when it is not.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

He's constantly mentioning "genes" now, and the "racehorse theory" that the supremacists of the third reich promoted. Well, speaking of his own, his father developed Alzheimer's at his age, and it progressed rapidly.

I worked with nursing home dementia patients for a lot of years as a music therapist (one of the other jobs I loved) and got pretty familiar with the different forms and presentations of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. I certainly am not qualified to diagnose anybody, but the things I am seeing in him are pretty dang familiar.

He simply does NOT have two more years, I believe, or even until January. In fact, I will be surprised if he lasts until the Midterms. Not that he would die, of natural causes at least, but simply because he can no longer play his part.

The GOP and the billionaire donors behind Project 2025, who want to replace our government with a Corporate model, have all put up with and catered to his tantrums and whims because it has paid off for them. Until NOW.

But his war with Iran, his disruptive social media decrees, his obsessions, and his paranoia are getting harder to manage. Damage control is getting impossible because he not only countermanding their efforts, he is kicking those people out of the room-where-it-happens, and choosing new "favorites" all the time.

Stephen Miller was reportedly even exiled for a while. Trump now has three young female aides in constant attendance, 24/7, plus Karoline Leavitt and Susie Wiles. But he seems to be keeping all the men remaining in his orbit more and more at arms length.

They are losing their grip on him, and he has lost the grip on himself.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I honestly thought that Trump would step down after his birthday last month, and retire with a full pardon, with promises for lucrative government contracts for his sons, and a permanent place on the world stage through the Chairmanship of his Board of Peace.

I still think it will happen soon. But maybe not voluntarily any more.

He is mentally intact enough to know he will lose the Midterm elections, but he obviously thinks he can overturn them one way or another - maybe with a whole batch of ways - or by using some kind of "emergency" to stop them completely.

But that may not be PROFITABLE for his backers any more, not the way it would be if he was still running the show COMPETENTLY as its front man.

Plus, there has been a HUGE shift in power, wealth, and alliances in Europe and the Middle East, as a result of Trump's bungling. China has gotten stronger, not weaker. And Putin has become a loose cannon, with the potential to cause as much damage to their tidy plans as Trump.

They have miscalculated. And the sociopathic sharks who rise to those positions of power do not operate out of sentimentality or compassion or lofty principles of morality and justice.

Or patriotism. They have international interests. They are not doing it for God or party, either. It's all about THEIR money, and THEIR power. They will cut their losses. And they will invest elsewhere. And that may not even be in America.

Some of his biggest donors are not from HERE, after all.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The only thing I know for sure is that change is coming, and it will come soon.

OK. That's my two cents. What are you seeing, and what are you thinking?

- Glee Violette

SECTION 224 UPDATE — IT PASSED THE HOUSE.

NOW IT IS IN THE SENATE.

When I wrote the original piece on Section 224 in late May, the provision was still in committee. I told you to contact your senators because that was where the fight could still be influenced. Here is where things stand as of today, July 23, 2026.

The provision survived. It passed the full House of Representatives as part of the FY27 NDAA. It has been renumbered — what was Section 224 in the original Chairman’s Mark is now Section 219 in the House-passed version. The substance has not changed. The mechanism has not changed. The scope has not changed. Only the section number moved.

And it is now in the Senate, where a parallel version already exists as Section 1217 under the name United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act of 2026 — the FUTURES Act language that could not pass as standalone legislation, now embedded in both chambers’ versions of the must-pass defense bill simultaneously.

WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE THE ORIGINAL PIECE

Several developments have occurred since May that sharpen the picture considerably.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a letter to Congress on June 1 that analysts and critics found revealing. In it, he appeared to claim personal credit for the broader policy shift — describing the move from US aid toward joint defense cooperation, development, production, and investment as, in his words, his plan. That letter drew significant attention because it suggested the initiative originated not from American defense planners identifying a strategic need, but from Israeli government lobbying that found its legislative vehicle in the NDAA.

A retired Air Force Lieutenant General told The Intercept that he could not think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power. That statement came from someone who spent a career inside the defense establishment. It deserves to be taken seriously.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated the vote would be the most watched recorded vote in modern times, saying it would give a list of names of every member of Congress who betrayed America. Greene’s framing is her own and worth noting for the temperature it reflects, regardless of where you stand on the substance.

On the Senate side, Senator Bernie Sanders has objected to the provision, arguing Congress should not give Israel greater military integration than a NATO ally by placing the initiative inside the annual defense bill. Senators Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and others have also raised objections. The opposition in the Senate remains bipartisan in character even if it is not yet numerically dominant.

WHERE THE PROVISION STANDS NOW

The House has passed its version with Section 219 intact. The Senate has its own version with Section 1217 containing parallel language. The two versions now go to a conference committee where House and Senate negotiators reconcile the differences between the bills. The conference report then returns to both chambers for final passage before going to the President’s desk.

AIPAC has publicly praised the inclusion of the provision and the broader NDAA package, which authorizes $750 million for US-Israel cooperative programs — a $65 million increase over FY26 — including $500 million for missile defense, $100 million for counter-unmanned systems, $100 million for subterranean operations, and $50 million for emerging technologies. The lobbying infrastructure supporting this provision is organized, well-funded, and openly celebrating its survival through the House.

The conference committee and the Senate floor vote are the remaining opportunities to challenge, amend, or strip this provision before it becomes law.

WHAT MY POSITION REMAINS

I wrote this clearly in May and nothing that has happened since has changed it.

I am not arguing against a US-Israel defense relationship. That relationship has existed for decades and there are legitimate strategic arguments for cooperation in specific domains.

What I argued then and what I continue to argue now is that the depth of integration proposed here goes beyond anything the United States has formalized with any other country on earth — including NATO allies we have fought alongside for 75 years.

The mechanism remains the same problem it was in May. Legislation that could not pass as a standalone bill because it would not survive direct public scrutiny has been embedded in must-pass defense authorization in both chambers simultaneously. The fact that it is now in both the House and Senate versions does not make that mechanism more legitimate. It makes it more entrenched.

As political pressure builds to reduce US military assistance to Israel, Section 224 provides the framework for continuing and expanding US-Israel military ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the US defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process. That analysis from legislative trackers confirms exactly what I argued in the original piece.

The annual foreign aid vote is the accountability mechanism. This provision is designed to make that mechanism irrelevant by embedding the relationship at the supply chain level.

Once Israeli technology is integrated into US weapons systems at the production level, removing it becomes a logistics problem not a policy choice. That is a fundamental transfer of congressional sovereignty over defense policy that deserves a standalone debate and a direct vote — not a quiet embedding in a trillion dollar bill.

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW

The Senate floor vote has not happened yet. The conference committee has not concluded. Those are the two remaining windows.

Contact your senators directly at senate.gov. Call the office. Send the email. The message remains the same: I am aware of Section 1217 in the Senate version of the FY27 NDAA — the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. I am asking you to oppose its inclusion in the final conference bill and to demand that any US-Israel defense integration framework of this scope receive a standalone vote with full public debate.

This is closer to becoming law than it was in May.

But it is not law yet.

Follow the signal. Stay informed.

— Adam Schultz

Schultz Report | Independent Journalist SchultzReport.com | @SchultzReport

Sources: Military.com US-Israel Defense Integration House NDAA July 14 2026. Military.com Section 224 Analysis June 3 2026. The Intercept Section 224 Investigation June 8 2026. AIPAC Section 219 Press Release July 2026. A New Policy Legislative Tracker Section 224 and 1217 May 2026. Factually.co NDAA 2027 Analysis July 2026. H.R. 8800 FY27 NDAA full text. Senate NDAA Section 1217 FUTURES Act language. Netanyahu letter to Congress June 1 2026.

#SchultzReport #RealTalk #NDAA #Section219 #SystemsThinking #Geopolitics #Sovereignty #CivicAction

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It’s happening. Right now. Right before our eyes. And not a single protester is in the streets. Few people are even talking about it. But hey, at least we didn’t miss the World Cup!

Buried in the 2027 NDAA defense bill — the one that’s supposed to fund American troops, American ships, American readiness — is a provision that has nothing to do with defending America. It’s called the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.”

Strip away the bureaucratic branding and here’s what it actually does: it creates a permanent executive agent inside the Pentagon whose entire job is fusing US and Israeli military systems together — joint weapons research, joint production, shared supply chains, and something called “data fusion,” which means combining sensor feeds and intelligence into a single targeting picture. Shared between two countries’ militaries, as a matter of standing law, not a case-by-case alliance decision.

Congress is handing Israel more military integration than we give NATO — an actual treaty alliance of 32 countries — through a single line item in an annual budget bill.

And here’s the part that should make every American furious regardless of where you stand on Israel: they won’t let it come to a vote. No debate. That is not how we’re supposed to make permanent decisions about our own military’s independence.

Ask yourself what “integration” means once it’s built into law instead of decided fresh each time. It means American targeting data flows through a foreign intelligence apparatus as a matter of course. It means Israeli companies embedded inside the acquisition pipeline that’s supposed to answer to American taxpayers and American oversight. It means infrastructure that’s much harder to unwind than any treaty.

Whatever you believe about Israel as a country or Netanyahu as a leader, that’s a separate question from whether the American public should get a say in something with implications this large.

Supporters frame this as routine, mutually beneficial tech-sharing similar to what the US already does with other close allies, not a “merger.” Don’t believe it.

Once Section 219 is signed into law, the question of whether America’s defense industrial base answers only to Americans stops being a live political question and becomes a settled fact, quietly written into the architecture of the Pentagon itself.

 

 

They called her “the most beautiful woman to ever die.” On May 1st, 1947, Evelyn McHale stepped off the Empire State Building and landed on a parked limousine, without a single drop of blood or a broken bone in sight.

Her legs were delicately crossed. Her gloved hands clutched her pearls. Her expression? Peaceful. Serene. Almost like she was asleep. A young photography student just happened to be nearby. He snapped a photo before police arrived, and captured what would become one of the most haunting images of the 20th century.

Time Magazine published it. Andy Warhol reimagined it. And decades later, people are still captivated by the chilling perfection of that moment. No horror. No chaos. Just a quiet, impossible stillness… frozen in time. They never saw it coming. But the world would never forget it.