Further

After decades of silence born of fear, shame, trauma, over 20 Epstein survivors came together in D.C. for the first time to publicly tell their grievous stories of rape and abuse - what did it cost them? - when they were 14, 15, 16 years old. Facing not just their own dark pasts but dogged denial, stonewalling, and a literal silencing by a senseless military flyover, they still wielded "the fire and the power of our voices" to insist, "We are the proof that fear did not break us."

It was months after Trump vowed to release the Epstein files "on Day One" and Pam Bondi said an upright DOJ was "lifting the veil" on Epstein's crimes - and decades after they were committed - when the resolute victims came to stand together, speak of "the weight we live with daily," and demand to be heard. Their signs said "He Is On the List," "S-H-A-M-E," "Trust the Victims, Not the Felon." Many had never met each other, and thought they were the only ones bruised and haunted by long-ago rape, abuse, enduring trauma. "Our government could have saved so many women. Those women didn’t matter,” said Marina Lacerda, who was 14 when she was raped by Epstein. "Well, we matter now. We are here today, and we are speaking, and we are not going to stop speaking."

Implausibly, it keeps getting weirder, darker, worse. Hankering to make war against his own citizens in the name of an imaginary crime wave, the deranged, draft-dodging Peace President of the United States just posted a mock Apocalypse Now meme of himself as Duvall's warmongering sociopath, warning Chicago is "about to find out why it's called the Department of War" and leering, "I love the smell of deportations in the morning." Sigh. Nothing to see here.

Wildly flailing in a job he is utterly unfit for and so eager to deflect from the looming, damning Epstein files he'll do pretty much anything even kill us, the old, bored, crumbling, makeup-caked cretin now defiling the White House randomly decided it was time to "send a message of strength" to an unlistening world by changing the longtime name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. "We won the first World War, we won the second World War, we won everything before that and in between," he babbled, "and then we decided to go wokey and we changed the name to Department of Defense." Umm. Ok. So now he's changing it back except Congress would need to approve the change so not really.

Sparking a populist fire, the "Fighting Oligarchy" tour in Portland brought tireless Bernie, aspiring governor Troy Jackson, and electrifying veteran, oyster farmer, harbormaster, and unabashed populist Graham Platner - come, finally, please, to rid us of odious collaborator Susan 'I'm-Sure-He's-Learned-His-Lesson' Collins. With his "plainspoken fury at the billionaire economy," Platner's unafraid to "beat back fascism," "name the enemy - oligarchy" - call genocide genocide, and summon "a life that allows us to dream."

Boasting he can now say he's barnstormed from California to Maine - and drawing over 300,000 people en route - Bernie told a revved-up Labor Day crowd here of over 6,500, triple his likewise ardent audience in 2016, to "think big" and in unprecedented ways to combat our "unprecedented and dangerous moment in American history." On his travels, he's learned Americans "do not want to live under a kleptocracy" where they "sure as hell are sick and tired of the ongoing war of the rich against the working class." His now-decades-old solution: Building a "strong, progressive grassroots movement" to make real "a vision of where we want this country to be." The trick of the ruling class, he said, is "to say that ordinary people are powerless," that "they have all the money, all the power, you got nothing, and they can do anything they want....We must, must stop them today."

When Pigs Fly Dept: The "remarkable failure" of prosecutors to indict the D.C. "hero with a hero" who hurled his sub at a neighborhood thug prompted glad praise that, "Ham sandwiches are finally getting a break." It also reflected a growing resistance to a fascist takeover that, with its inept efforts to turn small breaches - an open beer, a wrong door, a nap in the car - into felony charges, has judges, lawyer and an aggrieved populace denouncing it as merely, malignantly "fucking with people for no reason."

In the now-famous "assault with a deli weapon," Sean Dunn, a 37-year-old decorated Afghanistan veteran and former trial attorney and foreign affairs specialist with the DOJ, got up in the face of one masked, armed, burly goon among many in D.C., yelled, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here?" and hurled his wrapped sandwich, reportedly salami, at said goon's bullet-proof-vested chest before sprinting away. About 30 federal agents, with little else to do, chased down, handcuffed and arrested him. He was quickly released, but the next day, in the well-worn name of totalitarian pageantry, the DOJ recorded dozens of stormtroopers swarming his apartment, guns drawn Bin-Laden-like, to re-arrest him and charge him with felony assault for what U.S. Attorney Boxwine Pirro called "a serious crime," but definitely not like the Jan. 6 now-pardoned rioters who assaulted over 140 cops.