Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

The $10 Billion Birthday Card


Bilopillya When the sitting president sues Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion, you don’t get a trial. You get a reckoning.

Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal, and two of its reporters is a lit match at the edge of a dynamite shed called discovery.

Because if this thing survives a motion to dismiss, it kicks open every locked drawer in the newsroom, the boardroom, and Mar-a-Lago. Discovery is where both sides get subpoena power. It’s the phase where receipts get pulled, reputations get x-rayed, and no one—especially not Trump—controls the narrative.

Trump claims the Wall Street Journal defamed him by reporting on a cartoonish birthday letter allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

The letter, supposedly found in Epstein’s files, contains a nude sketch, a bawdy caption, and Trump’s signature. Trump says it’s fake. That’s a bold claim. Discovery says: prove it.

That means:

  • Handwriting analysis. Was the signature real? If not, who forged it—and why?
  • Murdoch on the record. A deposition at 93 isn’t just a legal formality. It’s legacy exposure. Trump’s team may relish the optics, but Murdoch’s lawyers will fight to the teeth to keep him off the record.
  • Reporters under oath. Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo could be grilled about sourcing, editorial notes, verification chains—everything. Discovery tears open the process.
  • Access to Epstein’s files. If the card was in Epstein’s archive, how was it obtained? Who authenticated it? Were there corroborating materials? Discovery opens that vault.

But this knife cuts both ways.

Murdoch isn’t new to Trumpworld. He’s been both confidant and kingmaker. Which means he had to know a lawsuit was coming the moment the story dropped.

Trump sues like other men tweet. Murdoch also had to know he’d need more than hearsay to back this one up.

You don’t poke that bear without a fireproof file cabinet. If the Journal ran the piece, it’s likely because Murdoch knew he had the goods—or at least enough to hold up in court.

The defense will dig into Trump’s history with Epstein. They’ll want calendar entries, guest lists, party photos, voicemails, internal memos, Secret Service records—anything connecting the two men. They’ll ask Trump to account for years of conflicting statements. And they’ll do it under oath.

Even better? Defamation suits involving public figures require proof of actual malice. That means the Journal had to knowingly publish a lie—or be recklessly indifferent to the truth. To show that, Trump’s lawyers will need to expose editorial negligence, if not sabotage. That requires access to internal Wall Street Journal deliberations, Slack threads, edit meetings, and emails—possibly from Murdoch himself.

Trump’s gamble here is enormous. The case cracks open every corner of his past that touches Epstein, sex, scandal, or satire. It dares the media to go deeper. And it risks Trump being forced to testify under penalty of perjury about the very things he’s spent decades dodging.

But maybe he’s counting on this never reaching that stage. Maybe the lawsuit is the show. Maybe it’s just a political cudgel, a headline, a shiny object for the base. That’s possible.

Still, lawsuits have rules. And once discovery starts, the rules take over.

Trump sued for $10 billion. What he may have opened was a window—straight into his own archives.

Today’s Color Is Burnt Orange

They say they love America, but they keep trying to silence its voice.

In a late-night vote, the U.S. Senate approved the most sweeping attack on public broadcasting in modern history, passing a rescissions bill that would slash up to $1.9 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—effectively gutting both PBS and NPR.

Backed by P=Trump and passed 51–48 along mostly partisan lines, the legislation moves to the House for a rushed vote by Friday night. If it clears that hurdle, Trump has vowed to sign it into law—bringing a slow, deliberate chokehold on America’s most trusted non-commercial media to completion.

You don’t have to be a fan of Sesame Street or All Things Considered to recognize the scale of this assault. What’s at stake isn’t just Big Bird and Terry Gross—it’s access to education, public safety updates, local journalism, and independent media not controlled by commercial or corporate interests. This is ideological retribution masquerading as fiscal responsibility.

Let’s be clear: PBS and NPR aren’t lavishly funded federal beasts. They’ve been surviving on budgetary crumbs for decades. The proposed cuts would eliminate those crumbs entirely.

The Cuts at a Glance

Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)

  • 2025 federal appropriation: $535 million
  • Proposed rescission: $1.1 to $1.9 billion over two years
  • CPB funding supports over 1,500 public radio and TV stations nationwide

PBS (Public Television)

  • Receives ~$267.8 million annually via CPB
  • Federal funds = ~15% of PBS’s overall national budget
  • For rural PBS affiliates: funding = up to 50% of budget
  • Impact: major cuts to children’s programming, emergency broadcast systems, rural signal access

NPR (National Public Radio and Member Stations)

  • NPR itself gets <1% of its budget from federal funds
  • Local NPR member stations get 10–16% of budget from CPB
    • In rural areas: up to 60%
    • In cities like LA, Boston: 7–12%
  • Impact: station closures, layoffs, loss of local newsrooms and weather alerts

This is a playbook, not a policy. Trump’s executive order in May directed CPB to cease all support for NPR and PBS. Today’s Senate vote is the scalpel. Together, they’re the culmination of a long war against independent, fact-based media. One that began with cries of “liberal bias” and is ending with financial censorship.

A 2023 Pew survey found that 72% of Americans trust their local PBS and NPR stations more than any cable news outlet. That trust is now on the chopping block.

And what’s the price tag for all this carnage?

Roughly $1.1 billion, or about 36 hours of Pentagon spending.

We’ve been told this is about cutting waste. But the real waste is what we’ll lose: programming that informs without ads, teaches without charge, and tells stories without allegiance to sponsors.

The only thing this administration seems willing to subsidize is ignorance.

Republicans Show Shadow Self Publicly


The House voted this week, 211–210, to block the release of documents tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s child trafficking case.

Every Republican present voted to keep the files sealed. Every Democrat present voted to unseal them.

The Democrats may not hold a majority in the House or Senate, but they may have been handed a Trump card for the upcoming elections.

And they’re certainly not entering this clean. Bill Clinton’s name is already etched in the Epstein saga, and others in their ranks likely appear in those sealed files.

But they voted to release them anyway—either because it’s the right thing to do, or because they’re betting the fallout won’t be as catastrophic as what it could expose on the Republican side. That’s the calculation. That’s the opportunity.

Republicans, meanwhile, secured child molestation behind congressional procedure and dared the public to find the key. In doing so, they handed Democrats a blueprint for attack heading into the primaries.

Here’s what that looks like:

  • Make the vote the issue. Don’t wait for the names. The vote is the evidence. Frame this as a moment of moral clarity.
  • Name names. Voters may not know what’s in the Epstein files, but they should know exactly who voted to keep them buried.
  • Run it everywhere. Every campaign, every district, every state—make Republicans answer for choosing secrecy over sunlight.
  • Use Republican voices. MAGA media figures like Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino, and Bannon are already demanding answers. Quote them.
  • Nationalize it. This isn’t local. This is systemic. This is one party telling the country: You don’t deserve to know who raped those kids.

Trump, of course, called the push to release the files a “hoax” and mocked his own supporters for caring. Speaker Mike Johnson publicly supported transparency, then voted to stop it.

Their playbook hasn’t changed—deny, distract, discredit—but it’s showing its age. Even parts of their base aren’t buying it anymore.

Democrats have been handed something rare: a moral high ground carved from procedural bedrock. It’s not about virtue. It’s about vision. One party flinched at sunlight. The other didn’t.

Or at least play it that way. We know you’re good at that. No one’s pretending Democrats are saviors here. They’re not. This vote doesn’t cleanse them. It indicts the system.

But it also clarifies the stakes. If you vote to bury the evidence in a child sex trafficking scandal, you’re not cautious. You’re complicit.

And now the voters know who stood where.