curated news excerpts & citations
Robert Reich: Trump’s Graft, Insider’s Grift
Margaret Ryan, the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency tasked with investigating insider trading and other illegal activities in financial markets — abruptly resigned last week, after just six months on the job.
Reportedly, Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct, including against Trump’s inner circle. But the SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, and other Republican appointees to the commission wouldn’t let her.
When Trump appointed Atkins chair of the SEC, he was co-chair of the Token Alliance, a cryptocurrency advocacy group, and he owned $6 million worth of holdings in crypto-related businesses.
During Atkins’s time at the SEC, the commission has dropped or settled numerous lawsuits with cryptocurrency companies and adopted a lax regulatory approach to fraud.
It’s also avoided politically sensitive cases — such as, let me hazard a guess, insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies.
Why do I mention insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies?
(Robert Reich more…)
Mike Allen @ Axios: Mystery trading patterns follow Trump
Michael Fanone: This Company Behind January 6 Just Got Paid — Again
If this doesn’t sit right with you, don’t just absorb it and move on. Share this. Talk about it. Make it inconvenient to bury.
Liz Dye: Kari Lake’s dismantling of VOA is a full-blown fiasco
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 25, 2026
Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “It wasn’t nuclear-related, it was oil and gas-related,” he added.
Today Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” or, as one put it: “stuff blowing up.”
Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump’s allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)CNBC: Iran rejects U.S. ceasefire offer, demands sovereignty over Strait of Hormuz
AP: Iran rejects US ceasefire plan, issues its own demands as strikes land across the Mideast
Alexander Willis @ RawStory: Admission from Epstein advisors undercuts central claim from Trump admin
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During their testimony, both Kahn and Indyke revealed that at no time were they ever contacted by federal investigators, an admission that “raises questions about the depth of the Justice Department’s review of Epstein,” NBC News reporter Raquel Coronell Uribe wrote in a report Tuesday.Alexander Willis @ RawStory: Jack Smith memo reveals Trump’s classified docs ‘motive’
Angelina @ Atlanta Black Star: ‘This Is a Joke’: Trump’s Knee-Jerk Reaction Sparks New Airport Chaos He Didn’t Account For — and It’s Sure to Have the White House Scrambling
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Paul Krugman: The War on Wind Continues
The burn, baby, burn compulsion persists amid a fossil fuel crisis
We are now in a global fossil fuel crisis. With oil and liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf unable to reach international markets due to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, hydrocarbon prices have been soaring around the world and widespread shortages are emerging. Anyone who thought that the U.S. would be insulated from this dire picture thanks to its large domestic oil production has had a rude awakening: the average retail price of gasoline has risen more than $1 per gallon over the past month, while the price of diesel is up $1.60.But the Trump administration hasn’t allowed these short-run distractions to divert it from its long-run goals: It remains deeply committed to killing renewable energy, especially wind power, and increasing America’s reliance on fossil fuels. …
And on Monday the Interior Department unveiled a new tactic in its war on wind: It announced that it will pay TotalEnergies, a French energy giant, almost $1 billion to not produce energy — specifically to abandon its plans to build two large wind farms off the East Coast.
To understand the Trump administration’s motives in its campaign to kill renewable energy, one must realize that this campaign is both economically self-destructive and, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel industry, deeply unpopular.
Fifteen years ago wind and solar power were still relatively marginal energy sources, which those hostile to their development could portray as unproven and uneconomic. Today they are major contributors to energy supply in many nations — and in some U.S. states. Perhaps most notably, as the chart at the top of this post shows, renewables — mostly wind, but with a growing role for solar — now account for more than a third of electricity generation in Texas, America’s largest producer of electricity and not exactly a state run by environmental extremists.
Even more impressively, renewables have dominated the growth in Texas’s electricity generation in recent years:
(Paul Krugman more…)
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Emily Atkin: What oil actually costs
The market price of oil has never reflected its true cost. This week made that impossible to ignore.
(Emily Atkin more…)
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Julia Musto @ Independent: New Covid variant has been identified and is already spreading in 25 states
Researchers say the strain could evade protection from current Covid shot
Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: Glyphosate: A story of science, risk, and nuance
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Jennifer Rubin: What Did Republicans Expect?
Republicans made a calculated bet that by indulging Donald Trump’s ill-conceived and cruel schemes (e.g., unleashing ICE on cities, tariffs, wars with Venezuela and Iran, slashing healthcare to pay for tax cuts for the rich), the country would somehow stumble through. They figured congressional Republicans would share in any successes but somehow avoid any blame when things (inevitably) went haywire. Politics rarely works out that way.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
ICE Accountability Project
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
- January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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