Elizabeth B Vannelle

[Mrs. Butters 🥧 @MrsButters]

Six people were charged in a child sex ring in South Carolina.

Matthew Fay - former Greenville Fire training officer
Waylon Rogers - former Greenville cop
Allen Foltz - former Mauldin cop
Paula Foltz - retired City of Mauldin employee
Edward Storer
Jeannine Storer

The allegations involve children UNDER 11.

Warrants say children were pulled out of bed for men to sexually assault them and retrieved when they tried to run away.

One defendant allegedly drove a child to different locations where multiple men sexually assaulted them.

Cops. A firefighter. A city employee.

I seem to have misplaced the drag queens again.

[Elizabeth B Vannelle @evannelle]

All true.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Pritzker: Just take a look at the lineup of speakers for today and tomorrow. From Texas, we have Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and Ted Cruz, each one a poster child for bad governance, bad morals, and bad vibes, respectively.

We have RFK Jr., the health secretary that you can thank for the return of measles and unsafe food. We have Todd Blanche, the attorney general who wanted to give your tax dollars to reward Trump’s insurrectionists. And we have Don Jr., the chief accomplice in his daddy’s shakedown of the American people.

And then we have J.D. Vance, Trump’s chief bootlicker, who wants to hide the fact that he’s the architect of Trump’s endless war in Iran. And, of course, we have Donald Trump himself, a president suffering from dementia, who unleashed violence on our cities, who jacked up grocery prices, screwed our farmers, and now has you paying for his gaudy golden ballroom.

[Elizabeth B Vannelle @evannelle]

I’m standing with you all hoping.

[Barbara F Walter @bfwalter]

I have an update on my gardener who was taken by ICE.

Three big things have happened since then.

1. The neighbors have all come together to help.

We hired a good immigration lawyer for him. We also found someone willing to serve as his financial sponsor. That matters because one of the things the government will consider is whether he’s likely to show up for future hearings. Having someone willing to vouch for him, and having deep ties to his family and community, can help.

2. We’ve raised enough money to post a bond if he’s granted one.

We think he has a strong case for being released from detention while his case proceeds.

He has lived in the United States since he was 16. (He is now 44.) He runs his own business. He has a wife and two young children. He owns his home. And he has many, many people willing to write letters saying that he’s an important part of this community and is not going anywhere.

We’ll have to wait to see if it’s granted. Fingers crossed.

3. His lawyer is asking to postpone his court date, which is currently scheduled for next week.

This is really important. The Trump administration is trying to move people through the immigration system quickly so it can deport them as fast as possible. His lawyer wants time to gather evidence and build the best possible case for letting him stay. Again, fingers crossed.

But this is what really broke my heart.

My gardener was finally able to get a call through to his wife two days ago. This strong, confident, capable man was terrified. He didn’t know what to do.

Then his wife told him what everyone was doing behind the scenes.

He sobbed.

I don't know if we are going to get him home. I wish I could tell you that we will.

But I do know that we are seeing both the best and worst of American in real time.

The worst is a system that can take a man away from his wife and kids and leave him sitting in detention, terrified.

The best is a group of people who heard what happened and immediately asked: What can we do? And then they did it.

I’m betting on that America.

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

So glad to see this launch. Washington deserves a first-rate news outlet owned by someone who lives in and loves the city and area. With stars like @Milbank @pkcapitol @tomsietsema @jstein_sun and many others, it's off to a great start.

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

I have often said that Donald Trump’s plan is to make it harder for you to vote and easier for him to cheat. Now we know what that will look like in 2026. https://t.co/cpk5dsGv9H

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

This is so unbelievably weak and embarrassing.

Trump has embarrassed America in front of the world.

Again.

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

Sunday morning, coffee, and Al Green. It doesn’t get much better.

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

The fact that the House just declared a recess partly to prevent the new Epstein petition by Massie from being discussed before midterms, should be a bigger story.
The fact that Todd Blanche keeps refusing to comply with the court order to release the Epstein files following Katie Phang's lawsuit, should be a more significant story.
The fact that the Epstein Estate ACTUALLY PAID a settlement to one of the women who alleged that Donald Trump raped her as a minor, and it was paid AFTER Epstein died, as told under oath by Epstein's longtime accountant, should be a more significant story.
The fact that Trump said he wasn't ever on Epstein's plane and then we found out he was, should be a more significant story.
The fact that senior officials gathered in the Situation Room to concoct and coordinate an Epstein coverup that should be a holy shit story, most significant of all.
And when you combine ALL these stories and add to it his hiring of Alex Acosta, the birthday card, the movement of Maxwell to a more lenient facility, and then - especially - his panicked behavior on all things Epstein, it really should have ended his presidency, and at any other moment of our last 250-years, it would have.

[Elizabeth B Vannelle @evannelle]

A leader who can address the deepest issues by simply explaining them in a way we all can understand. And positioning humankind in the center- not white people, not Christian Nationalists, not billionaires, or one country-rather all humans, all children of god.

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🚨 BREAKING:

Obama: "Sir, I'm not currently the President of the United States, so there's no point in yelling at me. I'm not responsible for foreign policy right now."

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Imagine the amount of propaganda it took to convince millions of people that healthcare, food assistance, social programs, clean water, clean air, good wages, housing, equal rights, diversity and a healthy planet for all people was somehow a threat to America and to Christianity.

[Elizabeth B Vannelle @evannelle]

Oh my! Dolly was ahead of her time and on the right side of history. May her love and her light shine forever, serving as a beacon for us all. ♥️

[Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids]

Omg this is incredible….Dolly Parton performing Peace Train with Ladysmith Black Mambazo

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Today, Meta settled.

Seventeen billion dollars to the states over ten years, more importantly, a commitment to fundamentally change how Facebook and Instagram treat children. Two-hour daily limits. Overnight blackouts. No notifications during school hours. Likes hidden. Beauty filters gone. Algorithmic feeds our kids can finally shut off. Protections advocates have begged Congress for over the better part of a decade, given up all at once by a company that has never given an inch.

They settled mid-trial. Their CEO never had to take the stand.

They didn’t do it because they had a change of heart. They did it because they could no longer outrun the parents.

A mother on the floor outside a bedroom door at 2 a.m., holding a phone that isn’t hers, trying to understand what happened to the child she raised. A father who saved every screenshot because he knew someday someone would have to believe him. Families who took the worst thing that ever happened to them and carried it into deposition rooms and hearing rooms and courtrooms, and said it out loud, again and again, to people who did not want to hear it.

They were told it was their parenting. They were told to take the phone away. They were told to log off and move on.

They didn’t move on. And in the end, the most powerful company in the world decided it would rather write a check than let one more of those parents finish their sentence in front of a jury.

I’m grateful to the attorneys general who carried this to trial and refused to blink. But they picked up a fight that parents and advocates had already been waging for years, mostly alone, mostly unpaid, mostly dismissed. The credit belongs to those families. It always did.

Now the hard truth underneath the celebration.

It took a courtroom. Not conscience. Not competition. Not one executive in one meeting saying enough. A courtroom, a jury box, and years of grief turned into evidence.

They had the research. They had the internal warnings. They had the phone calls from parents whose worlds had ended. And they kept building anyway, because the numbers went up when our children couldn’t look away.

So, let’s be clear about what today is. A floor. Not a ceiling. The technology will outrun this settlement; it always does. Somewhere right now a feature is being designed to hold a twelve-year-old’s attention a little longer, and no one in that room is thinking about her.

I think about my own kids growing up inside a world I can’t fully see, built by people I’ll never meet, tuned to a purpose that has nothing to do with them. Every parent knows that fear. It sits in your chest at night. You can’t legislate it away, but you can refuse to accept it.

There is no responsibility we hold more sacred than the safety of our children. Not one. That’s why I’ve carried the Children’s Safe Screens Act, because North Carolina shouldn’t wait on a California courtroom to decide what our kids are worth. And I’ll keep pushing until we have real age assurance, real accountability, and real consequences when a company trades a child’s wellbeing for engagement.

To every parent who told their story when telling it broke your heart all over again: you moved the ground today. You did that. Nobody handed it to you.

Be grateful today. Rest tonight.

Then get back up, because we’re not finished, and you won’t be walking alone.

Push.

[Charles MEANgus @theboogiecowboy]

Dolly Parton, her parents and siblings doing a version of “In The Pines” in 1976, a song long associated with Lead Belly but whose origins predate him…likely came out of a hodgepodge mix of songs from Southern Appalachia.

[Elizabeth B Vannelle @evannelle]

Pres Drumpf’s biggest scam of all.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

If I were president and I wanted to tank the dollar and get rich off it, here is exactly what I would do.

I would hire a Treasury Secretary who already made $3.5 billion crashing another country's currency. I would put my guy in charge of the agency that approves bank charters. I would install a crypto czar with $200M in crypto holdings and give him an ethics waiver so nobody could challenge it.

Then I would sign an executive order banning the government from ever creating a digital dollar so there was no competition.

Then I would have my family launch their own private digital dollar. My family takes 75% of net profits. I would grow it to $4.6 billion in circulation and route a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign fund deal through it to prove it works.

Then I would get Congress to pass a law requiring every stablecoin in the country to hold short-term Treasury bills. Now every dollar of my digital currency is a forced buyer of government debt. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive demand by 2030.

Then I would have my OCC guy grant my family's company a federal bank charter. Now I can issue my digital dollar with federal authority.

Then I would have my Treasury Secretary weaken the actual dollar. Bond buybacks that suppress yields but tank the currency. Build a $950 billion war chest for more. Let the debt hit $40 trillion. Dollar index drops to 99. Gold goes to highest point ever.

Then I would kill the Corporate Transparency Act and delete the FinCEN beneficial ownership database. That was the one law that required every shell company in America to report who actually owns it. Without it, nobody can trace who is buying my stablecoin, who is routing money through it, or where the profits land.

Then I would let the loop run. Weaker dollar drives demand for "stable" digital alternatives. The law I passed forces those alternatives to buy T-bills. That funds the government's debt. My family takes profit on every transaction. Foreign central banks walking away from Treasuries get replaced by legally mandated stablecoin reserves my family controls.

Then I would use sanctions to start cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely. And when those countries need a new way to transact in dollars, the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence is mine. They can buy it through shell companies nobody can trace because I deleted the ownership database.

I just built a toll booth on the global financial system. I take a cut every time someone uses the dollar. And I made it so nobody can see who is paying.

And every single step I just described has already happened.

So what does that mean for you and I?

The reason the United States can borrow at low rates and keep your mortgage and your car payment and your import prices stable is because foreign central banks hold trillions in dollar reserves. That system has always been public. The benefit went to everyone. Lower borrowing costs, cheaper goods , and the single biggest economic advantage any country has ever had.

What I just described is the privatization of that function. The entity buying the debt is no longer a central bank acting in the public interest. It is a private company taking 75% of net profits for one family. The reserve function used to generate a public benefit. Now it generates a private fee.

Your purchasing power shrinks every time the dollar weakens. Your 401k buys less in real terms. Everything you import costs more. And every time the dollar drops, demand for the private digital alternative goes up. The one the president's family owns. The one that by law must buy government debt.

You absorb the cost of a weakening dollar. His family collects the profit. That is the trade.

The enforcement mechanism to stop a sitting president from doing this? There isn't one. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says it would be a violation for literally any other federal employee, but not the president.

Nobody voted for this. No one was asked. There was no debate. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no one investigating it. The Senate tried and it was blocked.

This is the largest conflict of interest in American history happening in broad daylight while everyone argues about something else.

So what do you do? Share this. Make it impossible to ignore. Send it to your representative, your senator, every journalist you follow. We make them answer for it.
Because the only thing protecting this scheme right now is the fact that not enough people understand it yet.

[Elizabeth B Vannelle @evannelle]

We saw holiness. Thank you, Fr. Martin. ♥️

[James Martin, SJ @JamesMartinSJ]

Let us now praise holy women.

Like millions of others, I found myself surprisingly sad over the death of Dolly Parton. Of course, like those same millions of people, I was a huge fan of this woman with an outsized musical talent. She was a regular voice on the radio from my earliest years; I vividly remember eating Wheaties as a 13-year-old on a school morning and hearing her plaintive cri de coeur, “Jolene,” on the pink Bakelite radio that sat on our kitchen counter.

Dolly was a fixture in pop culture through my teenage years with tuneful hits like “I Will Always Love You” and “Here You Come Again” in the 1970s. A few years later, “9 to 5" summed up a whole era of office work when I was working in an office myself.

Her voice spoke, or sang, for itself; but growing up, I was only dimly aware of her prodigious writing talent: she was the composer of 3,000 songs, many of them covered by other artists. And I always enjoyed her sunny disposition and, especially, her confidently pushing back against people who would reduce her to a cartoon.

But only later in life did I became aware of her tremendous charity and big heart: giving away thousands of books to children in need (and “babies”: I love the idea of giving a baby a book); offering countless acts of charity to residents in Sevier County, Tennessee, her hometown; quietly helping a struggling singer or artist or writer or anyone; and being an early supporter of the LGBTQ community, when that could prove deeply unpopular.

The universal mourning may come from that last quality, which you could call charity or compassion, but you could also call holiness. When you read even cursorily about her life, what becomes obvious is a Christian faith that led to a lifetime of kindness and charity, often behind the scenes. This helps to explain the great sadness that greeted her death.

And it reminded me of someone else.

Think of how often we read about Jesus in the Gospels being pursued by crowds. Early in the Gospel of Mark, we read that Jesus’s “fame” spread throughout Galilee, with crowds waiting at his door in Capernaum. It’s not just the healing that people wanted; it was the innate desire to be near holiness: to be near compassion, near acceptance, basically, near love. Holiness calls to us, because it’s a quality of the divine and is one way that God draws us closer.

We saw in Dolly Parton something more than talent, something more than wit and something more than even charity; we saw holiness. Thank you, Dolly, for teaching me about the Christian life. And may you rest in peace with the God you loved and served so well.

[Tim Hogan 浩勤 @TimInHonolulu]

1/ I was starting my senior in high school when Neil Young released this, already aware that my low lottery number meant I'd be drafted the following year and unable to go to the university.

[Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids]

Amazing words in tribute for Dolly Parton from @YusufCatStevens….had no idea she covered Peace Train….the song clip at the end is beautiful

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

This teacher was at a Nevada School Board meeting & noticed that one of the CCSD School Board trustees was wearing an Anti-Trans shirt while conducting the meeting so she wrote a speech & got up & let Lorena Biasotti who’s with Moms of Liberty know how she felt & it was amazing.

[Donald Trump Portfolio Tracker @TrumpsPortfolio]

On Friday afternoon, a regulator Donald Trump appointed approved a bank Donald Trump's family owns, to issue a coin that makes Donald Trump money, under a law Donald Trump signed.

First time in American history.

Dropped at 4pm on a Friday, because they were counting on you not looking.

Here's what they buried:

The OCC — run by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould — granted World Liberty Trust Co. a national trust bank charter. World Liberty is 38% owned by "an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members."

That's not my framing. That's on their website.

"It's just a trust charter, it can't take deposits." Correct. It doesn't need to. That's not the business.

The business is USD1, their stablecoin.

You hand them a dollar. They park it in Treasuries. They keep the interest. And under the GENIUS Act — signed by Trump in July 2025 — they're legally barred from passing that interest to you.

All house money.

Friday's charter lets them cut out their middleman and run issuance, custody, and reserves in-house. Fatter margins. Federal seal. Institutional clients.

Now ask where the dollars come from.

A state-backed Abu Dhabi fund settled a $2 BILLION investment into Binance using USD1. World Liberty told Congress the deal likely would've used foreign currency if USD1 hadn't existed.

Meaning: it was routed through the President's balance sheet on purpose.

As of February, Binance held 87% of every USD1 in existence.

Binance's founder was pardoned. By Donald Trump.

Line it up:

→ He signed the law that built the market
→ He appointed the regulator
→ The regulator approved his family's bank
→ The bank prints the coin that pays him
→ A foreign government pumped $2B into it
→ It sits on an exchange whose founder he pardoned
→ The bank's board is chaired by the son of his Middle East envoy

He disclosed $57.4 million from World Liberty on one filing.

Elizabeth Warren: the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank.

CREW: the most egregious example yet of the President's businesses profiting off his government job.

Democrats introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act the same day. It bans regulators from chartering banks owned by the president. It will not pass.

Watch who votes against it anyway.

The OCC says career staff handled the review and everyone met their ethical obligations. Fine. Maybe every signature was clean.

That IS the story.

Nobody has to break a rule when you own the people who write them.

They did it on a Friday because Friday is where things go to die quietly.

Don't let it.