All corruption, all the time in Trump world, exhibit 67,456: abcnews.com/US/capit... Big bank closed Trump accounts for "anti-money laundering reasons"...

Capital One says it closed hundreds of Trump's bank accounts in 2021 'for anti-money laundering reasons'

Capital One says it closed hundreds of accounts associated with President Trump and his businesses in 2021 "for anti-money laundering reasons," according to a filing.

abcnews.com

Politico has become right-wing mouthpiece, and nowhere is that clearer than its crusade to make much more of New Jersey's voter registration goof's than it remotely deserves. Pathetic, but that's Politico under right-wing ownership.

Legacy media’s embarrassing feeding frenzy on New Jersey voter registration error

The legacy media has pounced on the story of New Jersey’s voter registration error. But the volume and tone of the news coverage have been embarrassingly out of proportion to the scale of the issue.

democracydocket.com

Ed Zitron has been on this for a long time, but good to see that the NY Times finally is digging into Silicon Valley OG Larry Ellison's sleazeball ways -- and his prop-up-Oracle-stock-until-it-crashes bets on AI. www.nytimes.com/2026...

Journalism's latest evergreen story: "Trump says deal is close to end Iran war" -- and headlines like these run routinely, and almost never do news outlets bother to mention that he's said this again and again and it's never been true. At least not yet. Big Journalism genuinely doesn't get it.

All corruption, all the time in Trump world, Exhibit 67,444: Trump Jr is investor in right-wing high-school dropout's company that was invited to bid on -- and needless to say won -- State Department contract.

The High-School Dropout Hiring Diplomats for Trump’s State Department

(Bloomberg) -- Andrew Crapuchettes, the founder of a boutique Idaho firm that specializes in headhunting conservative employees, was surfing LinkedIn when an unsolicited message appeared from an unlikely employer: the US State Department.Most Read from BloombergUS Intercepts Iran Attack on Bases, Puncturing Days of CalmSK Hynix Profit Disappoints, Spending Soars to $31 BillionApple Set to Make Big Smart Home Push With Siri AI at CenterNvidia’s $750 Billion in Deals Reignite Circular AI FearsChip

finance.yahoo.com

The pace of security updates in Ubuntu Linux and applications has dramatically increased recently. There's a new batch almost every day. This means people are at least trying to keep up with the deluge of exploits the LLMs are uncovering at an accelerating pace.

"Worse on Purpose" is great. It focuses on consumer products, and their relentless decline in quality as brands get absorbed by enshittification-happy financial manipulators. But the site also tells you who's NOT wrecking things -- who you can still trust. www.worseonpurpose.com/ (I'm a donor.)

Worse on Purpose

Investigative essays on corporate enshittification — how the brands you trusted made everything worse on purpose, and who profits when they do.

worseonpurpose.com

Conde Nast's online subscription services are the absolute worst I've seen. I've come to believe that it's on purpose -- to deter me from canceling.

Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc makes a deal with Newsmax to use the latter's right-wing spewings as AI training data, thereby ensuring that anyone looking for even remotely accurate output from the Ai is on a fool's errand: ir.newsmax.com/news/...

An excellent bit of Big Journalism news: New York Times right-wing propagandist Douhat is departing for the Magafied CBS "News" -- www.nytimes.com/2026... Until the Times (predictably) replaces him with another right-wing propagandist, the quality of its editorial pages will be markedly higher.

Ross Douthat Joins ‘60 Minutes’ as a Correspondent

Mr. Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, will join the CBS News program, along with several other journalists.

nytimes.com

All corruption, all the time, in Trump world. Exhibit 63,660: MAGA influencer's "charity" --

This MAGA Influencer Runs a Charity to Teach Kids Civics. Much of the Money Goes to Him Instead.

Nick Adams’ Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness has brought in millions in donations and helped him land a State Department appointment, but records show there is almost no indication FLAG was spending that money on its stated mission.

propublica.org

Corporate and establishment Democrats are desperately trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed from being Michigan's U.S. Senate nominee. They claim it's his (for them) too-progressive views. Nowhere in the news coverage have I seen talk of another plausible (if ugly) reason: they're worried about his name.

A hero for our authoritarian times:

A 77-year-old Republican man is staging a solo protest against St. Pete’s Flock cameras

Carl Gunn in St. Petersburg, Florida on July 25, 2026. Photo by Valerie Smith. Carl Gunn, 77, was concerned for his privacy when he spotted a camera

cltampa.com

Status is my media newsletter of choice. I pay for it. (Not cheap but it goes on sale periodically.) This piece, which you can read if you give them an email address, helps explain why I pay. It calls the White House correspondents' dinner with Trump what it was: a disgrace.

The White House Correspondents’ Disgrace

The WHCA sought to reconvene its annual dinner in celebration of press freedom. Instead, it handed Donald Trump a platform to attack the very journalists the organization exists to represent.

status.news

Finally have given up on Dropbox -- Linux support just doesn't cut it -- in favor of local encrypted backups and rcloning that directory to Backblaze. Less convenient, yes, but since I couldn't trust that Dropbox was functioning properly, a worthwhile tradeoff (and also less expensive)...

Musk's Tesla modified contracts with customers -- without the customers' permission -- long after they were signed. How does this differ from outright fraud?

Tesla retroactively added 'supervised' to FSD contracts owners signed years ago

Tesla appears to have retroactively modified FSD purchase agreements to add 'supervised' language that wasn't there when owners signed. Some contracts are now inaccessible.

electrek.co

White House correspondents and their bosses demonstrate their total lack of self-respect by inviting Trump to their dinner, and applauding him, despite his escalating war on democracy and journalism. What a pathetic bunch of quislings they are.

Trump lobs insults at political opponents, press during rescheduled White House correspondents' dinner

President Donald Trump attended the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association Dinner Friday night.

abcnews.com

Scumbag owner of Madison Square Garden spies on everyone who comes into the place, but makes an exception for Taylor Swift and her celebrity friends.

For Taylor Swift, Madison Square Garden’s Controversial Cameras Briefly Went Dark

MSG’s sprawling surveillance system can monitor guests down to the second. Its owners made an exception for the pop star’s rehearsal dinner.

wired.com

Crypto barons spent >$200 billion since 2024 to buy a friendly Congress. They got "a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass, a Republican majority too cowardly to rein in the president, and a president who won’t sign anything that...threatens his $1.4 billion-a-year grift."

Issue 107 – An unserious offer

The crypto industry has spent $200 million to get a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass and a president too corrupt to sign anything that might meaningfully limit his grift.

citationneeded.news

New York Times columnist understands how Trump et al are working feverishly to steal this year's elections: www.nytimes.com/2026... Yet the Times news pages -- like most of Big Journalism -- have offered only sporadic coverage of this conspiracy to end democracy. Pure journalistic malpractice.

Opinion | How Trump and His Allies Can Corrupt the Midterms

Stop the steal before it starts.

nytimes.com

Book excerpt in the New Yorker by longtime Google employee who dared to dissent. It turned out poorly for her. www.newyorker.com/cu... There was a time, way back, when Google was a righteous and honorable company, but it's long, long gone.

How I Lost Faith in Google

While working at Google, Claire Stapleton cracked the code for generating corpspeak with personality. Then she lost faith in what the company was selling.

newyorker.com

Indiana news org got banned from Facebook but public outrage forced the soulless social-media giant to reconsider. bloomingtonian.com/2... (FB seems to have banned me, too, but I have no interest in going back.)

R.I.P. John Dvorak, one of the most influential tech journalists and commentators. I'll miss his amiable crankiness.

It's essential that people understand the flagrant contempt for law that Elon Musk demonstrates on an ongoing basis. A current example: dozens of fossil fuel generating turbines with no permits and poisonously placed near black communities. www.reuters.com/worl... #pitchforks

All corruption, all the time in Trump world, exhibit 64,003:

The Winklevoss Twins Gave Trump $10 Million After Regulatory Win

The crypto investors donated $10 million in bitcoin to Trump's super PAC weeks after his administration moved to abandon a federal enforcement action against their crypto exchange.

levernews.com

The New York Times has (somewhat belatedly) discovered that Google is an enemy of the open Internet. This is an important piece, because the Times still is an agenda-setter in journalism. www.nytimes.com/2026... (Google spokes-parrot denies it all, of course.)

There's a decent chance that the Trump regime did irreparable damage to a packaged food company by claiming, falsely, that it was responsible for the explosive-diarrhea outbreak. Oops, said the incompetent (by Trump's choice) FDA. www.reuters.com/busi...

AI companies and Amazon are inviting bogus "authors" to publish bogus books about real people. www.nytimes.com/2026...

More details from the excellent @404mediaco@mastodon.social on how police use, and often abuse, the odious Flock surveillance cameras in ways that I guarantee most people are not aware of.

How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars

Cops have used Flock's FreeForm search feature to look for people with tattoos and wearing specific sport shirts, and searches sometimes include the target's race, according to data reviewed by 404 Media.

404media.co

Right-to-repair people are celebrating what they claim is a pathbreaking agreement by John Deere, the rapacious and unethical tractor maker, to stop monopolizing repairs. Matt Stoller says it all may be yet another scam on farmers (and the rest of us):

You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy: Why It's So Hard to Break John Deere's Control Over Farming

It's not hard to help America's farmers escape from John Deere's monopoly. But actually breaking the firm's inefficient control over equipment would cut against our strategy of Number Go Up.

thebignewsletter.com