☕️ TERMINATOR ☙ Saturday, May 2, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Administration dodges War Resolution trap and puts war on 'standby;' the latest Epstein conspiracy graces the NYT and is a doozy; Trump branded IRA accounts; Comey redux; Maine's Nazi-loving candidate
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for your Weekend Edition roundup, which includes: text tips; Iran War news — Trump dodges War Resolution trap and declares the “hostilities are terminated”; he’ll be back; Times breaks a brand new Epstein conspiracy theory that media somehow avoided for the last seven years; more fallout from the Epstein files sneaks quietly through the media cycle; Trump signs executive order for branded IRA accounts for working-age Americans; DOJ opens another front against former FBI Director Comey, who must be feeling like it’s one damned thing after another these days; Janet Mills drops out of Maine senatorial race to make way for Democrat fascist; Dems deploy remasculization strategy; more.
⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️
I recovered from an anger management breakdown this week, after I received more political text messages in a single morning than words in an above-average C&C roundup. So in frustration, I finally searched high and low for a solution. (I googled it.) Until this week, I’d been investing increasing amounts of rage-inducing time each day into ‘stopping’ and deleting them, one by one, like an obsessive-compulsive maniac.
Anyway, having located an answer, and having tested it all week, I’m now sharing the solution with everyone else who, like me, may have missed the memo. (This is iPhone only. I’ve never touched an Android phone.)
Go into Settings. In the Search box, enter ‘Messages.’ When you find and tap it, scroll down to “Unknown Senders.” Set “Screen Unknown Senders” to on. Then make sure “Filter Spam” is on.
It works great. The only downside is that from time to time, you’ll need to glance in your “Unknown Senders” folder to make sure nothing real got swept in there, like a question from the DoorDash driver who’s trying to deliver your extra spicy Taco Bell chalupas.
Finally, some spam texts may still slip through. There’s a nuclear option for those. The App Store offers a selection of apps that aggressively police your text inbox. I’m currently trying ‘Sifter,’ which, although it seems aimed at computer science majors, only costs a couple of bucks and adds aggressive filtering and blocking. You can see in my Messages settings, above, that the “Text Filter” is set to “Sifter.” That’s why.
You might not even need Sifter or apps like it. Turning on Screen Unknown Senders may be enough to get the job done. Please share additional tips in the comments. We need to work together to prevent this high-tech epidemic from spreading. 15 days to flatten the text tsunami curve.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Yesterday, in a letter to congressional leaders that can only be described as a masterclass in creative legal writing, President Trump informed Congress that the Iran war has been, and I quote, “terminated.” CBS News reported, “Trump tells Congress ‘hostilities’ with Iran have ‘terminated’ as conflict hits 60-day deadline.” Well, how terminated depends on the meaning of that word, “terminated.” Maybe more like, mostly terminated— like a mostly peaceful protest.
The letter arrived with the split-second precision of a lawyer filing at 11:59 PM right before the deadline. (I might be familiar with the maneuver.) Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the President has exactly 60 days to continue military operations before Congress weighs in. That countdown reached zero yesterday, on May 1st. So Trump did what every president since Richard Nixon has done when the timer runs out— he sent the American language into battle.
“The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026 have terminated,” Trump wrote in a letter to Republican leaders in the House and Senate. This will surprise the 50,000 American troops currently maintaining a naval blockade of Iran’s ports, who might be forgiven for thinking that surrounding a country with warships is, at minimum, hostility-adjacent.
Defense Secretary Hegseth helpfully clarified we could resume bombing “at the push of a button,” which I guess you’d call un-terminating hostilities or something. (Either way, it is either a War Powers Resolution button-hole or the button on Skynet’s user interface, depending on who you ask.)
Under the War Powers Resolution —a statute passed by Congress— a president can start military action without ‘prior authorization,’ but he must notify Congress within 48 hours, and then he must ‘terminate hostilities’ within 60 days unless Congress grants an extension. Today would have been 61 days from the start of the war.
A week ago, the New York Times was practically crowing about the War Powers Resolution, euphorically hoping it would cut Trump off at the knees:
Sorry, Times. “As the situation develops,” Trump’s letter concluded, “I will continue to update the Congress on noteworthy changes.” In other words: I’ll be back.
Since it originally passed, Congress has successfully used the War Powers Resolution to end a military campaign exactly zero times. Not even once in nearly 53 years. This makes the Resolution’s 60-day “deadline” essentially a polite suggestion with no enforcement teeth and practically invites lawyerly wordplay. Obama did it with Libya (he argued “operations” didn’t constitute “hostilities”). Clinton did it with Kosovo (he argued congressional funding was implicit authorization). Clinton also did it with Somalia (not “sustained”). Biden claimed we weren’t engaged in “hostilities” against Russia at all (Ukraine was).
Many SCOTUS-watchers note an unrelated but relevant 1983 Supreme Court decision captioned INS v. Chadha, which disapproved of Congress taking any action without legislative process and ‘presentment’— which means getting the presidential John Hancock. So it’s likely that, to stop a president’s war, Congress would need a signature from the same president it was trying to stop.
Indeed, in 2019, Trump vetoed a Yemen resolution, and Congress lacked the votes to override him. Thus, the War Powers Resolution appears to be the legislative equivalent of a strongly-worded letter, like a notice from the HOA explaining that your 12-by-18 American flag exceeds the 6-by-9 maximum in subsection 4.7(b), and please remit the $10 fine within 30 days.
The President has repeatedly told reporters he thinks the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional— a sentiment shared by many constitutional scholars. His letter never mentioned the Resolution directly one way or the other; the only reason we know the two were connected was the timing and the use of the words “hostilities” and “terminated,” which track the statute.
But the letter did mention “my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.” That’s a direct slap at the Resolution’s main constitutional weakness, which is that the Constitution puts the President in charge of both military and foreign policy, meaning Congress can’t start setting war deadlines and making military rules.
Since hostilities have now officially been “terminated,” if we resume them, does that mean the 60-day clock starts over? Nobody knows. The War Powers Resolution has never been tested in the Supreme Court, and given the Resolution’s constitutional problems, I doubt Congress will ever push it there.
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Like Dr. Frankenstein throwing the switch and sending lightning surging through the Monster’s veins, the New York Times electrifyingly resurrected the stale Epstein suicide conspiracy this week, in a story headlined, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Possible Suicide Note Hidden From Public View.” If you thought you already knew all the weird, inexplicable facts about Epstein’s death, just wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The Times story is typically useless. Worried, perhaps, about legal liability, it tiptoed around some of the most astonishing revelations since we learned the cameras were turned off and the guards were sleeping.
First of all, the story reported that three weeks before he was killed, Epstein was found unconscious in his cell with “a strip of cloth around his neck.” When he came to, Epstein told jailers that his cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione (remember his name), had tried to kill him and he was definitely not suicidal.
Tartaglione denied it. A week later, Epstein recanted his allegations against Tartaglione and “said he felt safe being housed with him.” Two weeks later, as you know, Epstein was found dead in his cell, strangled with a cloth sheet (again).
The second time, also as you know, Epstein didn’t wake up. (Allegedly.)
That quick timeline was the story’s first explosive reveal. I bet most of you never even knew about Epstein’s prior “suicide attempt.” (I didn’t.) But wait. It gets much crazier.
🔥 The Times described Tartaglione as “a former police officer charged with a quadruple homicide,” which drastically understates the case. He’s serving four life sentences, which means he’s one of those special prisoners with nothing to lose. What’s one more life sentence? We’ll return to the ex-cop in a moment, but before we continue, I mean, get a load of this musclebound killer:
After Epstein was moved to a new cell and put on suicide watch, Tartaglione claimed to have “found” a suicide note “tucked into a graphic novel.” Tartaglione told jail officials, “I opened the book to read and there it was”— scrawled on a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad.
(Annoyingly, the Times never mentions which graphic novel, which is the only thing I really wanted to know. What does an ex-cop quadruple murderer with four consecutive life sentences read for fun? Watchmen? Manga? Maybe one of those Punisher arcs where the corrupt cop is really the hero?)
Tartaglione described the mysterious bookbound note as saying: “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.” (Connoisseurs of late-90s adult contemporary/Italian fare will immediately recognize the dramatic closer —“Time to say goodbye”— as the chorus of the popular Sarah Brightman-Andrea Bocelli duet.)
Then —unbelievably— the alleged suicide note, a critical piece of evidence, went on walkabout. The Times described a bizarre, complicated timeline of Tartaglione trying to give the note to one of his attorneys “in case Epstein claimed he’d tried to hurt him,” failing to effect a handoff, giving it to another lawyer (and succeeding), the note failing authentication, but then later being (allegedly) authenticated by unnamed “handwriting experts,” and then Tartaglione’s judge demanding the note be surrendered and secured by the clerk of court.
The clerk’s dusty, Indiana Jones-style archive is right where the note remains today, and nobody else has ever seen it.
The DOJ said it has never seen it. Us either! It wasn’t included in the Epstein files. Though the facts weren’t state secrets —his lawyers argued constantly about the note in the felon’s appeal— the media has never mentioned it in relation to the Epstein suicide story. (Remind me what the media’s job is again?)
You’d think an alleged suicide note would’ve been a salacious wrinkle with which to engage media’s readers. But … crickets. That’s massive reveal number two.
🔥 All of that is strange enough. And, at least, the Times finally surfaced those incredible facts. But it stopped far short of mentioning the most astonishing and explosive facts of all. Tartaglione. All the story said about Epstein’s cellmate was his quadruple murder conviction and that he “maintains his innocence,” as if there might even be something to it.
That description is risibly inadequate.
Here’s the buried lede, which can be easily found online with 10 seconds of effort in the DOJ’s sentencing announcement. Nobody denies that Tartaglione was a crooked New York cop straight out of Central Casting. He was in a drug deal with a bunch of cartel crooks, and when the deal went sideways, Tartaglione tortured Martin Santos-Luna for information about where $250,000 in Tartaglione’s share of the money went. (As well he might.)
When Luna refused to talk, officer Tartaglione killed him. Then he executed three witnesses to the killing, back-of-the-head-style, and buried all four bodies in shallow graves in his Otisville home’s backyard. Pretty gruesome. But that’s not the important thing.
Guess how Tartaglione killed Martin Santos-Luna, the first victim who wouldn’t talk? He strangled him. Officer Tartaglione strangled Luna using a ziptie. In short: Tartaglione —a violent, roid-raged, muscular murderer with police connections who was housed with Jeffrey Epstein— was a strangler.
By himself or someone else, Epstein was also strangled. A pretty strange coincidence! You agree? A strange coincidence worth a media mention or ten?
You really cannot make this stuff up. Nor can you explain how these facts —long available in court records and DOJ press releases— were somehow never reported during all the years of hoopla over Epstein’s bizarre suicide.
🔥 All this raises the difficult question that nobody at the Times —or even at DOJ— seems eager to ask out loud: why in the first place was Jeffrey Epstein ever housed in the same tiny cell with this particular inmate? Federal jails are supposed to classify inmates for risk, and keep high‑value pedophilic prisoners like Epstein away from obvious predators. It’s not supposed to bunk them with a disgraced ex‑cop and convicted strangler with four bodies in his backyard and nothing left to lose.
If you were trying to maximize the chances that Epstein would have “an incident,” while preserving maximum deniability for everyone else, Hollywood couldn’t script a better roommate, not even with a team of experienced Game of Thrones show-writers.
In classic motive‑means‑opportunity terms, Tartaglione is almost too perfect as a cut‑out. He had the means: a proven willingness to torture and kill, including by ligature strangulation, and the physical access from sharing a locked cell with Epstein. He had the opportunity: weeks of intimate, unsupervised access inside one of the least‑monitored corners of a poorly supervised federal jail, complete with mysteriously missing camera footage and very sleepy guards.
And, thanks to four consecutive life sentences and a long history in the morally ambiguous gray zone between cops and crooks, Tartaglione supplied the perfect motive: a man with nothing to lose, every reason to curry favor with whoever still has power over his conditions, a delusional hero fantasy of dispensing personal justice to criminals, and a ready‑made story in his back pocket about how his famous cellmate “killed himself” and even left behind an exculpatory farewell ‘note.’
Remember, the bodies may have been, but none of the information was concealed in a shallow grave. Tartaglione’s zip‑tie strangulation, the execution‑style shootings, the graves on his own land, even Epstein’s first neck incident and his accusations against his cellmate have been sitting in public records for years. Yet through round after round of “Epstein killed himself” coverage, nearly every major outlet treated those details as … what? —irrelevant? Too impolite to mention?
Goodness gracious. I know it’s awful, but come on. What is the corporate media even for? Apparently, nowadays, its purpose is just to communicate the official narrative and bury inconvenient information bodies behind the Times’ offices. Good little doggies.
Trad-media evidently preferred to repeat DOJ’s “exhaustive” suicide mantra rather than investigate what it could mean that the world’s most dangerous witness was locked in a cell with a convicted strangler who had a proven ability to deal with inconvenient witnesses who knew too much.
This doesn’t tell us much about who among Epstein’s many high-profile enemies with government connections might’ve arranged his death (such as ones connected to other convenient suicides), but it does give us a lot more insight into the how.
🔥 RELATED: The Epstein files have not, in fact, gone away. They are still dropping rotten fruit nuggets all over academics and leftists. Here are just three recent examples:
April 20th: New York Times, “Epstein Craved Harvard Connections. Many There Were Eager to Help.” It’s a long, detailed piece incriminating dozens of Harvard professors. You’re shocked, I know.
April 21st: NYT, “Gates Foundation Is Conducting an External Review of Its Epstein Ties.” They didn’t say who is conducting the outside review. But this is exactly how Klaus Schwab’s downfall began. Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if Gates gets kicked off his own foundation?
Yesterday: NYT, “Bard College’s President, Leon Botstein, Will Retire After Epstein Revelations.” Botstein had run Bard for 50 years. In 2013, he told Epstein, “miss you.” (In 2021, Soros pledged $500 million to Bard.) Now, Botstein is an ex-college president. Sad!
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Yesterday, CNBC reported, “Trump’s new executive order, with help from Congress, could increase U.S. retirement wealth up to 77%, researchers find.” Congress had better help. It has a giant insider-trading problem. The President expressed optimism.
CLIP: President Trump explains TrumpIRA.gov (1:43).
President Trump signed an executive order this week creating another new, Trump-branded government website: TrumpIRA.gov, starting early next year. “You’ll be able to access the same type of retirement accounts that federal employees enjoy through the Thrift Savings Plans, which are incredible, as part of the federal Saver’s Match program,” President Trump told reporters at the White House press conference. “Low-income Americans will be eligible to receive up to $1,000 per year in matching funds deposited directly into their accounts.”
President Trump explained it is “so everyone can benefit from the rising stock market.” CNBC said, “researchers found that cumulative American retirement wealth could rise by as much as 77%, adding up to $1.35 trillion in projected retirement wealth over 10 years.”
In other words, while Congress has spent decades using non-public information to outperform the S&P by margins that would make a hedge fund blush, the rest of us are finally being invited to the index fund. Pelosi can keep her 70% annual returns. Working folks will settle for the matching dollars and a Vanguard log-in.
Once active, the TrumpIRA website will let workers without employer-provided plans research, compare, and enroll in low-cost private-sector IRAs. It will also tell them whether they’re eligible for matching funds. This will be most meaningful for young, working-age folks and blue-collar workers. All our kids (and grandkids) will probably want to consider signing up when they’re eligible.
A 25-year-old enrolling next year will be looking at the word “Trump” on her quarterly statement until roughly 2065. Voters rejected the Bidenomics brand after about eighteen seconds. TrumpIRAs are a brand that compounds tax-deferred for forty years. There’s a strategy in there somewhere.
President Trump is reaching all generations. He is teaching working-age Americans who is really looking out for their best interests. (Don’t forget no taxes on tips.) Yesterday, he reminded an enthusiastic rally audience in Florida at The Villages about his cuts to Social Security taxes. And he’s even getting kids! In the same press conference, President Trump said that over 5 million children have already signed up for Trump Accounts. They’ll be tracking those accounts as they turn 18 and start voting.
Our kids will be the first generation whose starting political memory will be a deposit notification.
It is 5-D chess. Democrats can’t oppose Trump IRA’s without also opposing low-income retirement matches. They have no good choices. Their only two options are (a) attack a populist program that most helps poor workers (political suicide) or (b) silently vote for it and let Trump take the win (just as bad).
Can you see yet how things are taking shape for the midterms? Remember— If Democrats win the House or Senate, they’ll take all this great stuff away, but they will keep making insider trades for themselves. The script writes itself.
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This week, Bloomberg Law reported, “Trump DOJ Pursuing Separate Comey Probe for Classified Leaks.” The DOJ indicted the former FBI Director in North Carolina this week, for making threats against the President. Now Bloomberg is reporting that a separate investigation is underway against Comey for leaking classified information to Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, who then leaked to corporate media.
They don’t know much, including where a second indictment could be brought. Bloomberg mentioned both New York and Virginia (DC area) as possibilities. They aren’t done with Comey yet. Maybe not by a long shot.
Interim Attorney General Todd Blanche is crushing it.
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Maine’s handsome, gravel-voiced governor Janet Mills —who is terming out— has now officially ended her Senate election race challenging incumbent Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine). Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Trump said he would end her political career, but Democrats did her in.” Also sad!
This week, nearly six months after she opened her campaign, Mills dropped out of the Democrat primary, following a frosty response from voters and “difficulty raising money.” The WaPo called it a “stunning political collapse of a sitting governor” that has “ left Mills’s allies reeling and raised questions about whether Democratic voters want to reward politicians for standing up to Trump.”
Mills dropped out because ‘she’ was getting shellacked by former Marine Graham Platner —a white, male, “blue-collar oyster fisherman” (though he’s from a wealthy family)— who for 18 years proudly sported a Third Reich “Totenkopf” Special Forces tattoo on his chest. He recently claimed he got the tattoo while he was drunk on shore leave in Croatia in 2007. Could happen to anyone. (He’s since had it re-inked into something that looks like it crawled out of the movie The Thing.)
Here’s the original version:
To perhaps understand Democrat primary voters’ love affair with him, Platner also has been exposed in now-deleted Reddit posts calling himself a “communist,” which apparently elevates him with Democrats —fascist Nazi tattoos notwithstanding— above a sitting governor popular with Democrat partisans for “standing up to Trump.”
For a taste of Democrats’ fascist flexibility, here’s a fun mashup of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy (D) first complaining about Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute” and then defending Platner’s actual Nazi tattoo (“sure, he’s made some mistakes…”).
(Notice how the male Democrat senators are simultaneously rolling out the five-o’clock shadow and the unbuttoned collar? Call it Operation Beard. The party that spent five years explaining masculinity was toxic has apparently issued the senator-grade follicle policy. Fetterman was the prototype. Murphy is still in beta.)
Frankly, I think the real reason they prefer him is probably just because Platner looks normal. I’m not saying ‘Janet’ Mills is a hot mess in this era of collapsing trans narratives, but come on. Whatever you think about Democrats’ inability to recognize actual fascist symbols while easily finding them in cloud formations over Trump rallies, Platner appears more normal than Janet Mills ever did.
Whether Graham “Third Reich” Platner has a Maine snowball’s chance against Susan Collins remains to be seen. Seems like a gamble. But it will be as much fun to watch as the next Terminator sequel.
Have a wonderful weekend! Then come back on Monday morning for another terrific edition of essential news and commentary.
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