Brad Reed, Common Dreams

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sunday denied that the Trump administration was stealing Venezuela’s oil just one hour after boasting that the country is being “forced to work” with the United States.

During a Sunday morning interview on ABC News, Wright was asked why he trusted interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, given that she was previously the vice president of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted by the American military earlier this year and brought to the US to face narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons charges.

“We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela,” Wright explained. “We control the sale of oil outside of their country. So right now, they are forced to work in partnership with us, and they are working in partnership with us.”

Shortly after, during an interview on Fox News, Wright grew indignant at the suggestion that the US was forcing Venezuela to give up its oil through threats of military force and other coercive measures.

“This is a home run!” Wright said of the Trump administration’s arrangements with the Venezuelan government. “These senators saying we’re stealing their oil at gunpoint, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the more oil that’s produced in Venezuela, including with the deal with the US government, the more royalties and tax revenues go to the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan people.”

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was supportive of the US abducting Maduro, last week criticized the Trump administration for cutting a deal with what she said was still a corrupt and oppressive government in Caracas.

“The wealth of our land does not belong to an illegitimate regime,” Machado said in a video posted on social media, “it belongs to the Venezuelan people.”

In an analysis published last week, economist Paul Krugman accused the Trump administration of concocting a “plot to steal Venezuela’s oil,” which he described as equal parts “vile and deeply stupid.”

The deal is vile, Krugman said, because it validates "everything the Latin American left has ever said about US imperialism” in the region.

And it is simultaneously stupid, he argued, because the investments required to improve Venezuela’s oil infrastructure will be so great that its benefits are unlikely to materialize in the near future, if at all.

“Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets,” Krugman wrote. “But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expert put it, ‘it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.’”

A survey released Saturday by polling firm Leger finds that a plurality of Canadians now view the US as an “enemy” nation thanks to President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on their economy and national sovereignty.

In all, the poll finds that 41% of Canadians now consider the US enemy, compared with 22% who say the US is an ally, and 22% who say the US is a neutral country.

In a similar poll conducted in June 2025, Leger noted, only 26% of Canadians said the US was an enemy.

Trump’s trade war is a major driver of negative opinion among Canadians, as 63% of those surveyed say they expect the president’s tariffs to have either a moderate or major impact on their personal financial situations.

Additionally, 74% of Canadians say they agree with their government’s decision to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs, even while acknowledging such retaliation will hurt the economy.

Canadians are also resentful of Trump’s demands that Canada become the 51st US state, with 85% saying they do not want to become part of America.

The disdain toward the US is driven almost entirely by Trump, the survey finds, with 64% of Canadians saying their opinions of the country would likely change if he were no longer president.

In an interview with The National Post, Leger vice president Andrew Enns emphasized the centrality of Trump in Canadians’ deteriorating views of their neighbor to the south, arguing that the US president “can move public opinion like nobody’s business.”

Brian Rathbun, professor of international relations and political science at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, told The National Post that while Canadians aren’t letting their dislike of Trump tarnish their opinions of Americans as a whole, that could change in the coming years.

“At some point, I think Canadians will start to get frustrated if this persists, even if it’s not what the American public wants,” said Rathbun. “They can say, ‘Why is it that no one’s standing up to this particular bully?’ Then I think that you could get into something like a deeper problem that couldn’t be fixed by kicking this guy out.”

The price of diesel fuel in the US hit another record high on Saturday, as data published by the American Automobile Association showed the average cost for a gallon of diesel now stands at $5.88.

According to a Saturday report from Axios, incumbent Republicans are fretting about the impact that skyrocketing gasoline and diesel prices will have on the 2026 midterm elections, particularly since their own internal polling shows voters are placing blame for the price hikes on President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran.

“Diesel’s at an all-time high,” one GOP operative told Axios. “Gas is about $4 a gallon. We can’t message that away.”

Another Republican source told Axios that GOP candidates don’t even have the option of distancing themselves from the president and his unpopular war given the iron grip he has on voters they will need to turn out in crucial races.

“We have no choice,” said the source. “We’re stuck on the boat with him whether we like it or not.”

US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy tried to spin the record-high diesel prices as something outside the president’s control during a Saturday interview on Fox News.

“When you look at diesel, you have to look at Russia and Ukraine,” Duffy said. “Russia was a major exporter, the second-biggest exporter in the world, on diesel. They stopped their exports, so that puts pressure on the global market. But President Trump has pushed American energy dominance, we are producing more energy now than in the past.”

Duffy added that “it’s only President Trump who’s trying to drive these prices down,” even though the president’s war has been the primary reason they’ve been going up.

As a report published Friday by The Associated Press explained, the cost of diesel has a particularly strong impact on the price of food since the fuel is used to power both farm equipment and the trucks used to deliver food to grocery stores.

“Fuel accounts for roughly 15% to 30% of the total cost of food, according to the Independent Grocers Alliance, a grouping of 7,500 global supermarkets,” reported the AP. “So higher diesel costs often result in more expensive groceries, although it can take a while for energy shocks to wind their way through the supply chain.”

The rising cost of groceries has been a major source of stress for US consumers for years, and Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign vowed that prices on groceries would come down starting on his very first day in office.

A report released Thursday by government watchdog Public Citizen estimates that President Donald Trump’s assorted cryptocurrency products have left investors on the hook for billions of dollars in losses.

In total, Public Citizen found that Trump’s crypto schemes have left investors at least $4.7 billion in the hole, with the majority of those losses coming from investments into the president’s personal meme coin, which he launched just three days before the start of his second term.

The value of Trump’s meme coin peaked at over $73 per token two days after its launch. Since then, its value has completely cratered and it is currently trading in the $2 range.

Early investors in the coin scooped up tokens that they quickly unloaded to other buyers, who were left holding the bag after the value of the digital assets collapsed.

In all, Public Citizen explained, 1% of wallets that invested in the coin reaped 80% of all gains, while 65% of wallets that put money into it are underwater to the tune of $3.2 billion.

Even as many investors in the Trump coin saw the value of their investments deteriorate, the president profited handsomely, hauling in $635 million in licensing fees from the coin last year alone.

Trump was also not personally hurt by the coin’s drop in value given that he invested no money to acquire his own share of the digital tokens, which Public Citizen estimated is worth $271 million.

While the Trump meme coin accounted for the lion’s share of losses suffered by investors, Public Citizen also highlighted the damage done by governance tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump in 2024.

As explained by Public Citizen, a governance token is “a digital commodity that conveys to holders certain ‘rights with respect to the associated functional crypto system,’ according to the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).”

In practice, however, Public Citizen said that owning such tokens is akin to having “membership in a condo board—but without actually getting to vote on many issues or even own the condo.”

The price of the tokens reached a peak of $0.33 per unit in September 2025, but they’re now trading at under $0.06 per unit.

And much like the Trump meme coin, a small group of early investors made a killing on the tokens while most others racked up losses totaling at least $1 billion.

“The accredited and foreign investors who got in on the private sale paid $0.015 or $0.05, meaning they’re up anywhere from 15% to 283%,” wrote Public Citizen. “Almost everyone who bought the tokens on the public market, though, is down—possibly as much as 83%, if they bought at the peak.”

Public Citizen also highlighted the money lost by people who bought nonfungible tokens (NFTs) that Trump marketed as digital trading cards and that sold for $99 a piece.

While the cards were initially worth $12.3 million at the time of their release, their aggregate value has since fallen to $3 million, leaving investors $9.3 million underwater. But regardless of how well investors in the cards fared, Trump still made $7.2 million in licensing fees and royalties on secondary market sales, Public Citizen found.

Zach Everson, research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project and author of the report, cautioned Trump critics against ridiculing people who invested in the president’s crypto products in a Thursday social media post.

“Trust me, I get the desire to sneer,” wrote Everson. “People decided to put their money into virtual currencies backed by the word of a man who: admitted to misusing charitable funds; took six companies into bankruptcy; was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. But these people got screwed over nevertheless.”

A top executive at one of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies drew backlash on Tuesday for describing Social Security as “a kind of accounting fraud” that will have to be dismantled.

Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI who previously worked in President Donald Trump’s White House, wrote in a social media post that while Social Security may have once been a “reasonable affordance” to people who “were dealing with an economic depression and a world war,” it was nonetheless “accounting fraud, whose debt is coming due and is coming due fast.”

Ball concluded his post by informing younger generations of Americans that “unwinding the great fraud... is your job, whether you wish it to be or not.”

Ball’s attack on Social Security drew a swift rebuke from David Segal, a former Democratic Rhode Island State Representative and founder of Demand Progress, who observed that it undercut other AI executives’ claims that their technology would create an era of unprecedented abundance.

“AI is gonna shoot productivity to the moon,” wrote Segal, “oh and also society can’t afford to pay old people $2,000 per month anymore starting today.”

Author Lincoln Michel similarly spotted the contradiction between AI industry vows that the technology “is going to give us [universal basic income] and we’ll never work again” and Ball’s declaration that “our main mission is to destroy Social Security.”

Henry Burke, senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project, argued that Ball’s analysis of Social Security revealed the true priorities of Big Tech elites.

“It’s notable that the Abundance guy turned OpenAI hack considers Social Security to be a ‘fraud’ that must be remedied,” wrote Burke, “and not the reckless tax breaks successive Republican presidents have given away to the wealthy which have exploded the national debt.”

Putting aside policy arguments, many critics pointed out that Ball’s call to dismantle Social Security was a major political loser.

Polling analyst Lakshya Jain, citing survey data showing vast and bipartisan support for Social Security, informed Ball that his rhetoric about the program is optimal for “anyone who wants to unite the whole of America (against them).”

Josh Orton, president of We Demand Justice, marveled at the politically tone deaf messaging coming from an executive at a company whose own CEO has said that “my job is to help people destroy jobs” with AI.

“These AI guys are not just condescending elitists,” wrote Orton, “they’re tremendously stupid about politics. It’s incredible.”

Max Steele, senior communications director at gun safety advocacy group Everytown, made a similar observation.

“Is it possible these guys are doing a performance art piece on the worst possible PR run in recorded history?” Steele asked.

Journalist Jon Schwarz questioned why Big Tech companies have been allowed to amass so much economic and political power in the US if their executives want to destroy the country’s most popular social insurance program.

“It’s a bad idea,” wrote Schwarz, “to have our society run by people like this who are so far out of touch with reality that they are functionally insane.”

A Trump voter is in shock after the president’s ongoing effort to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history impacted him personally.

In an interview with CBS News published Thursday, Texas businessman John Gannon expressed regret for supporting President Donald Trump in the 2024 election after federal immigration officials last month detained his fiancé, a Venezuelan immigrant named Yasmin Suarez Reyes.

Gannon said that he expected that Trump’s mass deportation campaign would only go after criminals who are unlawfully in the U.S., but instead found “they are picking up law-abiding citizens” and “destroying families, jobs.”

Gannon, the owner of over 1,000 billboards in the US and of a hotel and restaurant in Mexico, explained that Suarez Reyes was detained in July by multiple US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after passing through security at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

According to Gannon, the ICE officers “swarmed” Suarez Reyes and “wrestled her off into a car” without providing an explanation.

“This is like the Gestapo,” Gannon said.

Anne Kennedy, an attorney representing Suarez Reyes, told CBS that her client entered the US legally and had a pending asylum case and had been able to get a work permit and a Texas driver’s license before she was detained. Kennedy also noted that Suarez Reyes had no criminal record.

“For almost two weeks now, she has been in a physical jail cell,” said Kennedy, “when she has done nothing more than follow the laws of the United States and do what our immigration laws allow her to do.”

When asked by CBS what message he had for Trump, Gannon encouraged the president to “go after the criminals” but “leave the mom and pops and the kids alone.”

“Man, he’s destroying families,” Gannon added.

Some critics expressed little empathy for Gannon’s situation, however, given Trump’s decades of racist attacks on immigrants.

“You voted for Trump to do this to other people,” commented journalist Molly Knight. “You’re mad because he’s not doing this to ‘the right people,’ as defined by you.”

Election forecaster Rachel Bitecofer was similarly unsympathetic, and sarcastically summed up Gannon’s position as, “I only wanted other people’s relatives deported!”

Gun safety activist Shannon Watts questioned why Gannon needed to be personally impacted by Trump’s policies to turn against them.

“The most horrible things shouldn’t have to happen to you in order to oppose them,” Watts wrote.

Even as President Donald Trump continues dismissing Americans’ concerns about affordability heading into the 2026 midterm elections, a study released on Monday reveals that US parents are about to pay a hefty premium to ensure their children are prepared for school this fall.

A joint analysis from Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation finds that a typical basket of school supplies costs nearly 8% more than it did last year, with typical school lunch items costing 11% more.

Lunch boxes have posted the largest yearly price increase, as the analysis estimates they will cost nearly 27% more this year than in 2025. Other items whose prices have soared include one-subject notebooks (23% yearly increase), index cards (22%), and notebook paper (20%).

Trump’s illegal war with Iran, which has caused fuel prices including diesel to surge higher, has played a large role in increasing prices, as have his tariffs on foreign imports, the report notes.

The increase in diesel has been particularly troublesome for the price of food, the analysis points out, as the fuel is used both by farmers to power their agricultural equipment and by delivery trucks that ship food to grocery stores.

When it comes to the tariffs, the report points to Newell Brands—the company that makes Sharpies, Paper Mate, Elmer’s glue, and other school supply staples—which has been hit with a $174 million tax bill thanks to Trump’s policies and has consistently raised prices over the last year.

The report also points to changes made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) made in Republicans’ 2025 budget law that will make it harder for low-income kids to qualify for food assistance this school year.

Lindsay Owens, president of Groundwork Collaborative, said Trump’s policies are forcing parents “to worry about whether they can afford to buy what their students need to be successful in the classroom.”

“If the president continues to treat our economy like a schoolyard game, our students and their families will pay the price,” said Owens. “When report cards come this year, Americans will give Trump an F.”

Janelle Jones, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, noted that school supplies aren’t luxuries for families, but rather “the baseline for a kid to show up ready to learn.”

“When notebooks and paper are up over 20%,” Jones emphasized, “we’re not just squeezing family budgets, we’re setting students up to fall behind. We know where this leads: lower test scores, more kids repeating grades, and worse outcomes well into adulthood.”

Attorneys representing The New York Times have revealed that the Trump administration’s subpoenas of the newspaper’s journalists are far more aggressive than what had been previously reported.

In a letter sent to US District Judge Arun Subramanian on Saturday and unsealed by the court on Monday, attorneys David O’Neil, Douglas Zolkind, and Julie Edelstein said that the US Department of Justice was engaged in an “alarming pattern of conduct” beyond its recently revealed efforts to compel Times reporters to testify before a grand jury for a probe related to unspecified national security leaks.

The attorneys said the administration had gone so far as to subpoena phone companies for subscriber information and toll records for phone numbers used by one reporter’s mother and by two reporters’ spouses, among others.

They also revealed that two administration subpoenas seek records going back as far as January 1 this year, “long before the events that are purportedly the basis for the department’s investigation,” suggesting that “the department is using this investigation... to forage for information about the journalists’ source relationships more broadly.”

The subpoenas of the Times journalists, issued earlier this month, came days after the paper published a story that detailed security concerns about the luxury jet the Qatari government gave to President Donald Trump.

The issued subpoenas did not specifically name the Times’ reporting on the Qatari jet as the reason for the grand jury probe, although they were given to all four journalists—Tyler Pager, Julian Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and Eric Lipton—who reported the story.

It is highly uncommon for government investigators to subpoena journalists when they are probing national security leaks, as such actions are generally seen as having a chilling effect on reporters’ ability to gather information.

Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, described news of the department seeking phone records of reporters’ spouses and a parent as “an extraordinary escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to intimidate the press.”

“The Justice Department didn’t stop at journalists—it went after their family members, too,” Fallow noted. “That sends an unmistakably chilling message to anyone thinking about reporting on this administration. Every American who values a free and independent press should see this for what it is: an abuse of power designed to silence scrutiny.”

Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, was even more scathing in his denunciation of the administration’s actions.

“Even the Mafia says families are off limits,” said Stern. “It’s gross that the administration—in its never-ending effort to harass and intimidate reporters who reveal its incompetence—is going after the communications of journalists’ relatives.”

President Donald Trump’s decision to restart his illegal war with Iran has sent the price of oil back up, leading to a corresponding rise in the prices of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Data published by AAA on Thursday showed that the average price of diesel in the US is once again over $5 per gallon, which is 33% higher than the average price of diesel before Trump unlawfully attacked Iran without congressional authorization in February.

Oil industry analyst Patrick De Haan wrote in a Thursday social media post that diesel fuel powers “the trucks that move nearly everything you buy—groceries, goods, supplies,” meaning the current spike will lead to “higher prices down the line” for other key goods.

According to a Thursday report in The Wall Street Journal, the rise in diesel prices is unlikely to be short-lived given that there are now multiple factors pushing costs higher.

In addition to the resumption of the Iran war, the Journal writes, Russia has now banned diesel exports after its refineries came under attack by Ukraine. And in the US, domestic stockpiles of the fuel have now fallen to their lowest levels in 20 years.

Given all these factors, analysts told the Journal that diesel prices “could soon climb an additional 20 to 25 cents a gallon.”

An analysis published on Thursday by CNN Business senior reporter David Goldman pointed to another factor pushing diesel prices higher: Global refining capacities have taken a significant hit since the start of the Iran war.

Goldman noted that Iran has “damaged or destroyed 30 Middle Eastern refineries” since the start of the conflict, causing global refinery output to fall by “3 million barrels at the peak of the Strait of Hormuz disruption, and 2.1 million barrels of refining capacity remain offline.”

Energy analyst John Kemp said on Thursday that the diesel supply crunch will likely spill over to the price of regular gasoline in the coming weeks.

“US gasoline inventories have become critically low,” Kemp explained in a social media post, “as domestic refiners prioritize production of jet fuel and diesel to replace global supplies hit by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Ukraine’s escalating attacks on Russia’s refineries.”

Kemp added that the US gasoline stocks “have depleted in 13 of the last 16 weeks by a total of 43 million barrels” since the start of the war, making it “by far the largest [depletion] on record for the time of year, and three times faster than average over the last decade.”

In an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol warned that renewed fighting between the US and Iran was again threatening to create a global fuel supply crisis that could come in “not months” but “weeks.”

“If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed,” Birol said, “we may again have some difficulty for global economies, including those in the region and developing nations and Asia.”

The Trump administration is coming under fire for its response to the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a foodborne illness that causes explosive diarrhea and has so far been documented in more than two dozen states.

Public health officials still have not identified the source of the outbreak, which typically spreads via contaminated produce.

In an interview with Axios published Saturday, David Freedman, professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, suggested that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not been on top of tracking the outbreak the same way it has been in the past.

“Right now it’s individual state health departments that are having to speak up,” remarked Freedman, “because the CDC is really not following it on a day-to-day basis.”

Omer Awan, vice chair and associate program director for the diagnostic radiology residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, told PBS in an interview published Monday that infections will likely only grow if the government doesn’t track down the source of the outbreak quickly.

“Because we haven’t pinned it down, that means that these cases are likely to disseminate,” said Awan. “People are still eating the contaminated food that’s leading to so many cases.”

Awan added that mass firings at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the leadership of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., were hindering CDC’s ability to track the disease.

“The HHS and the federal government laid off a lot of CDC employees,” said Awan. “Many of them were the very employees that would track these particular outbreaks. And the other is that, from July of 2025 last year, the CDC has no longer required reporting cyclosporiasis. It’s become optional to report this to the CDC’s Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network.”

Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, pointed to the CDC decision to stop monitoring the cyclospora parasite as an example of the Trump administration putting Americans “in another shitty situation after laying waste to our public health infrastructure and gutting emergency preparedness.”

“Because RFK Jr.'s CDC turned a blind eye to dangerous foodborne pathogens,” Woodhouse added, “this outbreak spread quickly and states are now scrambling to do their own detective work on what’s causing it. The catastrophic cuts Trump and RFK Jr. made to disease surveillance and research keep coming back to haunt us, yet they want to cut even deeper to make up for their tax breaks for billionaires.”

The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that both federal and state officials have launched an investigation into whether fast food chain Taco Bell “played a role” in the cyclosporiasis outbreak.

According to the Post’s sources, some people who got sick from the disease said they had eaten at Taco Bell shortly becoming symptomatic, although others who were infected by the parasite said they had not eaten at the fast food chain before growing ill.

“Public health officials have said this season’s unusually high number of illnesses, now reported in more than 30 states,” reported the Post, “means more information and more patients to help identify shared foods, shopping habits and restaurant visits among those sickened to help determine the source.”

Hours after Sen. Lindsey Graham unexpectedly died on Saturday, many of his Democratic colleagues in the US Senate posted statements on their social media pages paying tribute to the South Carolina Republican.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said that he would most remember Graham (R-SC) for his “sense of humor and how he deployed it to move his policy positions forward.”

“Though we did not often agree,” Schiff added, “Senator Graham was never disagreeable.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) similarly said of Graham that “even though we disagreed on much, he was always willing to negotiate, with humor and wit,” adding “my heart goes out to his loved ones.”

Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said he was “saddened” to hear the news of Graham’s death, which he said came “as a real shock.”

“I’m grateful I had the chance to work with Lindsey,” said Kim, “including several international trips working on foreign policy.”

However, many critics argued that these tributes to Graham overlooked his destructive legacy in public office, including his decades of war mongering and his slavish devotion to the authoritarian President Donald Trump.

“I don’t give a f--- that Graham used to be friends with Democratic senators,” wrote Thomas Lecaque, associate professor of history at Grand View University. “He was a bloodthirsty bastard who cheered the killing of Muslims and sold his soul to the fascists to be able to push it more effectively. I don’t care about any other part of him: his choices caused mass death. That’s it.”

Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, responding directly to Schiff’s post, reminded him of Graham’s behavior during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings when he “threw an angry tantrum in defense of a SCOTUS nominee credibly accused of rape.”

“Did you all have a good collegial chuckle over that?” Kruse asked.

Brandon Friedman, co-founder of the Rakkasan Tea Company and a veteran of the Iraq War, also responded directly to Schiff.

“What I’ll remember most about Senator Graham,” Friedman wrote, “is how he sent my friends to die in an unnecessary war in Iraq.”

Jen Rubin, editor-in-chief of The Contrarian and former columnist for The Washington Post, described the Democrats’ tributes to Graham as “nauseating” and “everything that is wrong” with the US Senate.

Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, said the Democrats’ statements were just one more signal of weakness from the party.

“The Democratic Party’s approval rating is in the toilet,” Grossman wrote, “and the main reason is voters see Dem leaders and prominent members acting like things are basically okay instead of fighting like there’s an emergency. Slot ‘my friend Lindsey Graham, so funny, how great to work with him’ comments into that.”

Cartoonish Eli Valley was apoplectic about Democrats’ fawning hagiography of their late Republican colleague.

“That Democrats see mass-murdering fascists dismantling the country as nothing more than ‘colleagues they dislike’ is why we’ve been in a non-stop plummet,” Valley wrote. “Incredible this is still debatable, by people who ostensibly oppose fascism, ten years into this?!?”

Political consultant Jamison Foser wrote a parody of the Democrats’ statements that imagined them paying tribute to none other than Satan.

“Deeply saddened to learn of the loss of my dear friend Satan, the Prince of Lies,” wrote Foser. “Though we often disagreed about matters such as the appropriate role of torture in the afterlife, I will most remember how his quick wit and affable nature made our weekly golf outings a ritual. He will be missed.”

Some critics of the Trump administration are reacting with horror to revelations that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been serving as the de facto ruler of Venezuela.

According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, Rubio for the last several months has been acting informally as the “viceroy” of Venezuela ever since its recognized president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by the American military in January and brought to the US to face charges related to “narco-terrorism.”

The Times’ sources revealed that Rubio “effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government” and “is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations,” while maintaining regular contact with acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez.

Under current arrangements, the US Treasury Department takes in revenue from Venezuela’s exports, including its petroleum, and then disperses the money back to the country through its private banks with strict conditions set by Rubio over what it can be spent on.

In explaining the system, the Times likened it to “parents handing out allowances to children,” adding that it gives Rubio “immense leverage over... Rodríguez, who depends on the money to pay workers and prop up the national currency.”

Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia University, described Rubio’s power over Venezuela as “insane,” as well as “derelict, unconscionable, and impeachable.”

“The secretary of state’s time is scarce, valuable, and not [outsourceable],” Saunders emphasized.

Orlando J. Pérez, professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said the Times report made a mockery of Rubio’s professed claims to want to bring democracy back to Venezuela.

“It appears Rubio has transformed from democracy promotion warrior,” Pérez commented, “to transactional realpolitik operative!”

Kenneth Roth, former executive director at Human Rights Watch, wrote that US control over Venezuela appeared similar to the kind of imperial power wielded by European nations in the 19th Century.

“Trump has turned Venezuela into an effective US colony,” said Roth, “with Marco Rubio as the viceroy and Washington controlling the country’s oil revenue and dictating major foreign and domestic policies. Democracy has been relegated to the distant future.”

Bradley Simpson, historian at the University of Connecticut, also saw the current US arrangement with Venezuela as a return to overt imperialism.

“We are literally back in the Dollar Diplomacy days of the 1910s,” Simpson wrote, “when the United States invaded countries and took over their financial systems and ran them as effective colonies. Flagrantly illegal, enormously corrupt. Where is the organization of American states or UN in denouncing this?”

The controversy surrounding the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by federal immigration enforcement officials is growing amid new reports that the Trump administration is trying to deport three witnesses to the fatal shooting.

Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in a Thursday interview with The New Republic that the witnesses, all undocumented immigrants who were detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials after the shooting, are “being pressured to sign self-deportation orders.”

“They’re currently in detention,” said Proaño, who is serving as a representative for Salgado Araujo’s family. “These men hold the key to what actually happened.”

Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who ran a small construction business and had been living in the US for more than three decades, was pulled over by ICE officers in unmarked vehicles on Tuesday morning.

ICE officers claimed that Salgado Araujo, who was driving to work along with three coworkers, tried to evade arrest by ramming his car into them.

Purportedly fearing for his life, one ICE agent opened fire on Salgado Araujo and killed him, the officers said.

However, The Washington Post reported on Friday that all three men who were in the car with Salgado Araujo are strongly disputing the ICE agents’ account of the deadly incident.

In fact, all three witnesses said that the ICE officer involved in the shooting opened fire immediately after exiting his vehicle, and that Salgado Araujo did not try to drive into him.

Detainee Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement obtained by the Post through attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, bluntly contradicted the ICE officers’ claims.

“That is a lie,” Trinidad Rojas wrote. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over … there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”

Balderas-Ibarra told the Post that he interviewed the other two men in the car, who both gave the same account.

“All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a Friday social media post that the Post’s reporting seems to show “ICE appears to have lied yet again about killing someone.”

“Unbelievable,” he added, “but actually totally believable given that they lie about events fully captured on video.”

In a separate post, Bier examined a video of the shooting scene and noted that there appeared to be no damage to the front of Salgado Araujo’s van, even as ICE claimed Salgado Araujo had tried to use it as a weapon against them.

“These people are not credible,” Bier remarked.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out that all three witnesses to the shooting were telling the same stories even though they were being detained separately, which he said bolsters their credibility.

“When you add the videos showing a lack of evidence of damage to the front despite ICE’s ramming claim,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick added, “ICE’s story is falling apart.”

President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran is sending oil prices surging — again.

While attending the 36th NATO Summit of Heads of State and Government in Türikye on Wednesday, Trump said that the ceasefire agreement he struck last month with Iran is “over,” while adding, “I don’t want to deal with them,” in reference to the Iranians.

Shortly after the president’s remarks, Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices each jumped by more than 4% during Wednesday trading, marking the end of a steady decline in prices that occurred in the weeks since the ceasefire deal was first announced.

Later in the day, Trump went on a lengthy rant about Democrats criticizing his failed campaign promise to bring down the price of groceries starting on his very first day in office, and he falsely claimed that the price of oil “is coming down very big.”

At this point, a reporter interjected and said that oil prices on Wednesday were surging upward.

“If we hit Iran, oil goes up a little bit,” Trump replied. “That’s all right.”

Although the price of gasoline has been following the price of oil downward, any increase in petroleum prices will almost certainly send it back upward.

In a social media post, petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan said the renewed fighting between the US and Iran, combined with Russia banning exports of diesel fuel, would likely cause more pain at the gas pump in the near future.

“With news of Russia suspending diesel exports, markets have accelerated their climb,” De Haan explained. “In addition, the current national average for diesel of $4.75 per gallon could head back to $5 per gallon in the next week or two, while the national average gas price heads to $4 per gallon.”

De Haan added that spot gasoline prices on Wednesday were up by between $0.14 and $0.20, projecting that “today’s jumps could start being passed along tomorrow and in the days ahead.”