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Coffee Break: American Politics, Follow the Money & Power Edition

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Follow the money has been a rule of thumb for understanding American politics since the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, but in the Trump 2.0 era it should be expanded to include following the kinetic power as well.

Let’s dive right in and start with the Trump Family, for, as we’ve been reminded by John Helmer, Trump is primarily motivated by personal (and familial) profit.

Follow the Money With Drones: The Trump Family Business

In a way, Trump’s devotion to being the pater familias of a political grift dynasty is touching. Along with his sense of humor, and taste for junk food, it’s one of his more relatable traits.

The Financial Times has the latest on Donald Trump, Jr.’s latest score, who knew he was a drone builder?

A little-known drone company backed by Donald Trump Jr has won its largest contract from the Pentagon, as the US government expands its procurement of the drones.

Florida-based Unusual Machines, in which Trump Jr has held a $4mn stake, said the US army had contracted it to manufacture 3,500 drone motors, alongside various other drone parts.

The company added the army indicated it planned to order an additional 20,000 components from Unusual Machines next year.

Allan Evans, the company’s chief executive, said he believed it was the largest order for Unusual Machines parts from the US government to date, but declined to disclose the value of the contract.
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Shares in Unusual Machines jumped as much as 13 per cent on Friday.

Unusual Machines brought Trump Jr on as an adviser in November 2024. The Financial Times earlier this year found shares in the company almost tripled in price in the weeks leading up to its disclosure of the move.

Soon after Trump Jr came on board, Unusual Machines disclosed he owned 331,580 shares, which would currently be worth roughly $4mn.

Trump Jr is not required to disclose whether he has since sold any of his stake, but Evans earlier this year said the president’s son had continued to invest in recent fundraising rounds.
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Unusual Machines has struck deals with other US defence suppliers in recent months, inking a $12.8mn agreement with Strategic Logix in September and a $1.6mn deal with an unnamed domestic defence drone maker in August.

The company, which is working on manufacturing more of its components in the US, has also been harmed by Trump tariffs.
In the first quarter of the year, it said the levies contributed to a $3.3mn operating loss. Unusual Machines has warned the cost of sourcing components from countries other than China could impact profits.

Follow the Money to Iowa Where Trickle Down Is Soaking Trump’s Constituents

Unfortunately, there’s no indication that Trump’s interests expand enough to include his most loyal rural voters. In his defense, it’s completely unclear that he or his trade team understand the havoc they’ve wrought on American agriculture.

Let’s follow the money to Iowa.

Per The New York Times

When President Trump announced a $20 billion bailout for Argentina this month, Larry Ory, 86, a farmer in Earlham, Iowa, could hardly believe it, especially after boatloads of Argentine soybeans began shipping to China, a once-critical customer for Mr. Ory’s family.

For Iowans, losing China’s soybean market in the president’s trade war was only one of many economic shocks that have hit the state since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term.
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Since siding with Barack Obama twice, Iowa has become a stronghold for Mr. Trump. Yet perhaps no state has struggled more with his economic policies. During the first quarter of 2025, Iowa’s gross domestic product dropped by 6.1 percent, more than any other state aside from neighboring Nebraska.

Manufacturing, which drives 17 percent of Iowa’s economic output, has been hit with higher production costs in part because of steep tariffs on inputs like aluminum and steel. Meatpacking plants, which help make Iowa the nation’s leading pork producer, rely heavily on foreign-born workers, hundreds of thousands of whom saw their legal status stripped away by the president. Mr. Trump’s war on renewable energy also threatens the wind industry that produces more than half of Iowa’s electricity.

For now, times are tough. Iowa is the country’s largest producer of corn and second-largest producer of soybeans. America exports as much as half its soybeans, and the vast majority of that had gone to China — $12.6 billion worth last year.

But this year, China stopped purchasing soybeans from the United States to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

American producers have spent decades working with people in China on how to use soy in animal feed, part of an effort to build up that growing market. Mr. Leeds said he has traveled to the country 25 times and used dollars paid by Iowa farmers to foster strong bonds with Chinese importers.
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Iowa’s large beef industry then recoiled after Mr. Trump suggested he would try to lower the cost of beef by importing more from Argentina.
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As he deals with those higher prices, Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation farmer in rural Polk County, said he will continue to use his more than 25-year-old, worn combine. A machine with greater power and a more sophisticated GPS system would cost upward of $100,000 used and more than $250,000 new, he said.

Follow the Money: Who’s Paying the Troops?

While Trump’s policies may be stressing the economy of key supporter states, the government shut down may be interfering with his plans, or at least Secretary of State/National Security advisor “Little” Marco Rubio.

As the Armchair Warlord reminds us on Twitter, failing to pay troops has been an imperial achilles heel through the ages.

Into the breach steps Trump Donor Timothy Mellon, per the NY Times:

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter.
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Shortly after departing Washington on Friday, Mr. Trump again declined to identify Mr. Mellon while talking to reporters aboard Air Force One. He only said the individual was “a great American citizen” and a “substantial man.”

“He doesn’t want publicity,” Mr. Trump said as he headed to Malaysia. “He prefer that his name not be mentioned which is pretty unusual in the world I come from, and in the world of politics, you want your name mentioned.”

It remains unclear how far the donation will go toward covering the salaries of the more than 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration’s 2025 budget requested about $600 billion in total military compensation. A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.

Mr. Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, is a longtime backer of Mr. Trump and gave tens of millions of dollars to groups supporting the president’s campaign. Last year, he made a $50 million donation to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, which was one of the largest single contributions ever disclosed.

A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

The Daily Beast goes into the source of Mr. Mellon’s hard-earned hundreds of millions:

Mellon’s grandfather was the longtime Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, who served from 1921 to 1932 under presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Andrew was the son of Thomas Mellon, who founded Mellon Bank, which made his family filthy rich for generations.

The donor’s dad, Paul Mellon, was a breeder of thoroughbred racehorses who benefited from the family’s banking riches. By 1957, when Fortune published its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister, and his two cousins were among the eight wealthiest people in the United States.

Timothy Mellon’s cousin, Matthew Mellon, was an early crypto investor who struggled with drug addiction. He died in Mexico in 2018, aged 54, just as he was about to check himself into rehab in Mexico. He was divorced from Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon, who once wrote that she was “snorting her way through alpine ranges of cocaine” during her marriage to the Mellon heir.

“He’s a great gentleman,” Trump said of Timothy Mellon, who appears to be more clean-cut than his younger cousin. “He’s a great patriot. He’s obviously a very substantial man, and he contributed $130 million toward the military in order to make up any difference. So he wanted to see the military get paid.”

The same piece points out that the $130 million won’t go far to cover the U.S. military payroll: it averages out to about $100/soldier.

Armchair Warlord piles on to that point:

Follow the Money Down the Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracy Path

Mellon’s famous last name and the 2025 zeitgeist inevitably led social media sleuths down the rabbit hole Epstein allegations, citing an October lawsuit against the Bank of New York (and Bank of America) by another unnamed alleged Epstein victim.

The Wall Street Journal has background on that suit:

The suit against BNY claims that since at least 2006 the bank had a relationship with MC2, a modeling agency that Epstein and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel created. The suit claims that the men used funds from the bank to facilitate Epstein’s sex trafficking. Brunel, who was arrested in 2020 on sex-trafficking charges, died in jail in 2022.

The suits were brought by lawyers, including Brad Edwards and David Boies, who have represented many of Epstein’s victims and previously filed similar class actions against JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank in 2022.

“The other banks responsible for allowing Epstein’s trafficking should have contacted us during the previous litigation to do the right thing for these victims,” Edwards said. “It is sad that only through lawsuits and Congress are we able to bring justice to this obvious problem.”
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JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank have said they regret their relationships with Epstein and settled the suits in 2023, without admitting wrongdoing. JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million to victims and Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $75 million.
Epstein’s estate recently turned over to Congress a list of more than 20 banks that held accounts for Epstein and entities related to him, and several had accounts with Epstein in his later years, the Journal has reported.

Right up front, let me quote The Economic Times (India) on the matter so that it’s clear I’m not among those making these claims and am merely reporting on them to show the public mood online:

After the NYT report, several posts online began suggesting that Mellon may have been linked to Jeffrey Epstein, due to a lawsuit filed against the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon). The lawsuit, filed on October 16, accuses the bank of facilitating financial transactions linked to Epstein’s operations. However, there is no verified evidence showing any connection between Timothy Mellon and Epstein.

BNY Mellon has rejected the allegations and described the lawsuit as baseless. A company spokesperson said, “The claims in the lawsuit are meritless, and we will vigorously defend against it.”

Confusion about the Mellon name has contributed to false links. BNY Mellon was formed after a merger between Mellon Financial and the Bank of New York in 2007. After the merger, the Mellon family did not retain ownership or control in the company. The firm became a publicly traded corporation, and institutional investors, including Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, hold the major shares.

So case closed, right? Seems like that’s not enough to turn off the X.com rumor mill:

Follow the Money to the Power Under the East Wing Ballroom

There’s been a fair amount of MSM handwringing over Trump’s new ballroom which is being built over the rubble of the East Wing of the White House. Most of it irrelevant boo hoo about the brilliant architecture of the Roosevelt era.

CNN accidentally mentions something far more important going on underground in the demolition zone:

Initially a carriage entrance during the term of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, it became the modern East Wing as millions of tourists see it each year — or did — under his distant cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt some 40 years later. The build-out was a practical matter: With World War II raging, an emergency underground bunker had been constructed on the spot and needed the building to hide it.
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The East Wing was not totally separated from more dire business. The bunker below — officially called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center — is where Vice President Dick Cheney went during the 9/11 attacks, and where Trump was taken during protests in his first term. President George W. Bush used the East Wing to practice his State of the Union address in 2004.

Carlyn Beccia has more on Medium:

According to the National Capital Planning Commission, no full architectural plans have been submitted — no elevations, no blueprints, no site approvals.

Yet demolition has begun. The White House maintains that “preparatory work” doesn’t require review. This neat little loophole somehow allows an entire wing of the most protected building in America to be erased without oversight.
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Unofficially, it sits on top of the country’s most secure hideout — The Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC. The US government built the bunker during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration after Pearl Harbor scared the hell out of everyone in Washington.

Today, most White House officials refer to it as “the shelter” or PEOC — pronounced Pee-ock, (as in the sound the Founding Fathers would make if they saw Trump’s renovation). It’s the kind of 5-story bunker that was meant to survive a direct hit — reinforced concrete, steel doors, filtered air, the whole “end of the world but make it dignified” package.

…FDR used it as a communications hub; Truman and Eisenhower beefed it up during the Cold War; Dick Cheney was ushered into its lair during the 9/11 attacks. And every president since has at least had a look around, just in case democracy ever needed to hide under the table.

After 9/11, the Bush administration realized the White House’s emergency bunker was about as cutting-edge as a rotary phone. Congress quietly funded a massive upgrade, and by 2010, the Obama team was digging under the North Lawn. The official story? “Air-conditioning and mechanical upgrades.”

…By 2018…: a new, high-tech command bunker was born, stocked with the latest communications systems, computers, its own air supply, food supply, and enough filtration gear to outlast the apocalypse in style.

…The PEOC wasn’t just a bunker; over the decades, it’s rumored to have sprawled into a labyrinth of tunnels connecting to the Treasury, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and possibly even Lafayette Park. Washington’s soil is laced with secrecy — a place where the Metro can’t dig without bumping into classified concrete.
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You don’t just slap a ballroom on top of that without “reconfiguring” something underneath. Which is why this new project, wrapped in secrecy and gold leaf, should have Americans asking the same question: Is Trump building a bigger ballroom or a bigger bunker?

All of this sheds new light on what happens when we follow the money to Trump’s alleged “ballroom” donors.

The Washington Post has more about that, including the full list of donors:

But ethics experts and Democrats say they are turning to a question related to the next phase of the project: whether the donors behind the planned $300 million ballroom that will replace the demolished annex will receive any benefits in return.

Tech companies and defense contractors such as Google, Lockheed Martin and Microsoft, as well as wealthy individuals such as longtime GOP donors Stephen A. Schwarzman and Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, have collectively covered the cost for Trump’s project, according to a list the White House released Thursday.

Many of the firms and individuals have business before the administration, such as seeking future federal contracts or eyeing potential acquisitions.
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Meredith O’Rourke, a longtime fundraiser for Trump, is coordinating the donations, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the efforts. O’Rourke referred questions about her role to the White House, which did not immediately respond.

The donations, which are tax-deductible, are being managed by the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that helps manage federal projects. Donors to Trump’s ballroom project have been told to expect some form of recognition, such as the placement of etchings of their names in the ballroom, according to the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trump said this week he has raised $350 million for his long-desired ballroom, which will be built on the site previously occupied by the East Wing, the longtime home to a visitor’s entrance to the White House. The annex also provided office space for the first lady and included other features such as a movie theater. The president, who did not specify what he would do with the extra $50 million for the project, said that he has donated “millions of dollars” himself for the beautification of the White House grounds and pledged to personally cover any shortfall in funding for construction of the ballroom if costs continued to rise.

Follow the money and it leads to the power, more often than not.

Follow the Money to the GOP Congressional Split

I’m pushing my follow the money metaphor just to please Google who loves to see “key phrases” repeated ad nauseam, so my human readers will have to forgive me.

But I wanted to cover this little swerve in the politics of the U.S. government shutdown fight.

It’s not just your usual GOP vs. Democrats split. Hapless MAGA Speaker of the House is Mike Johnson using the shutdown to control the dissident GOP house caucus according to The New York Times:

Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to put the House on an indefinite hiatus that is now stretching into its second month while the government is shut down is the latest in a series of moves he has made that have diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership at a critical moment.

It’s an approach born of political expedience that could have far-reaching consequences for an institution that has already ceded much of its power to President Trump. And Mr. Johnson, who without the president’s backing wields little influence over his own members, has chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump, a break with many speakers of the past who sought in their own ways to act more as a governing partner with the president than as his underling.
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His strategy of indefinite hiatus means that Mr. Johnson has not engaged in the typical political theater that speakers often employ during shutdown fights to jam the party out of power: scheduling tricky votes on bills to reopen parks or pay certain categories of federal workers, like agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.

Democrats had been bracing for him to do so. But instead, he has spent much of the shutdown appearing daily at news conferences at the Capitol, hammering them for refusing to fund the government and making the case that Republicans need not negotiate. He is insistent that the House has nothing to do but wait for the stalemate to end. And he defends a growing list of extreme moves by Mr. Trump.

The absenteeism, people around Mr. Johnson said, is a strategic calculation that the best way to keep his unruly rank and file in line is to place them on an extended leave.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who often serves as a sounding board for Mr. Johnson, said in an interview that if the House were in session, “other issues will begin to clutter this up, and there is some small danger that some Republicans might begin to have a mixed message on the shutdown.”

In fact, such dissonance has already begun bubbling up even with everyone working remotely. The divide among Republicans over whether to extend expiring health insurance subsidies — Democrats’ central demand in the shutdown fight — has highlighted a political vulnerability for the party.

It has all created a strange dynamic on Capitol Hill: Mr. Johnson appears to be using the considerable power of the speakership to render the House irrelevant.

This reinforces the arguments of those (like me) who claim the U.S. is in a post-Constitutional order (also see here).

For now we can leave the Replubicans behind and apply our follow the money and power lens to the doings of some Democrats.

Follow the Money Behind the Platner, Mamdani, Sanders, Porter & Fetterman Campaigns

I covered the contested Democratic primary in the U.S. Senate race challenging long-time GOP incumbent Susan Collins last week, but I forgot to include this key nugget about Platner’s consultants.

I also could have mentioned this nexus of operatives when covering Katie Porter, who has also employed some of their services on occasion.

So in the interest of advancing today’s follow the money theme, I’m going to add some key details from The New Yorker to today’s post:

It was three days before a video titled “Platner for U.S. Senate” would drop, catapulting this local oyster farmer, harbormaster, and former marine onto the national stage.

The video was produced by Morris Katz, a top political strategist for New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.
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The campaign rollout, which was orchestrated by Platner’s senior adviser, Joe Calvello (John Fetterman’s former director of communications), raised half a million dollars in its first four days; volunteer sign-ups for the campaign averaged three hundred a day. “No one was expecting this,” Calvello told me. The Times, ABC, NBC, and Fox News covered the launch, focussing on Platner as a political novice who represented a new approach for the Party.

The Bullhorn Bulletin obeys the “follow the money” edict and it leads to more on the coterie of “progressive” consultants profiting off the split in the Democratic party:

One of the biggest names in that business is Middle Seat, a self-described “visionary, persuasive, disruptive, and dynamic” digital firm that built its empire branding establishment politicians as grassroots crusaders. Their website showcases glossy ad reels and testimonials celebrating their “progressive” clients and reads like a leftist wish list: racial justice, climate action, immigrant rights, intersectional feminism. The branding is perfect. The business model is cynical genius, raking in a whopping $134 million since 2017.

At the top of their portfolio is John Fetterman. Middle Seat’s site features multiple campaign videos of the Pennsylvania senator, portraying him as a blue-collar hero standing up to the system. The problem is, once the cameras stopped rolling, Fetterman stood with the very system he claimed to fight, making what appeared to be a sharp right turn to his supporters, but not surprising to those familiar with Fetterman’s record.

Middle Seat’s growing client list raises a serious question: Do they vet their clients? Are they critical about who they sell their branding to, or do they simply offer it to anyone seeking a veneer of leftist populism? The firm claims to be “a full-service media and fundraising firm for progressive causes and candidates,” implying that its work is guided by shared values. Its website even boasts, “We bring our values to work,” and “We build movements that honor the authentic perspectives of our clients.” But do they?

Now that we’ve connected previous subjects of these columns, Platner, Porter, and Mamdani, let’s turn our follow the money and power lens to the New York mayoral race as it wraps up.

Follow the Money to Mamdani’s New York?

The mainstream media seems to have cut Andrew Cuomo’s campaign loose as Zohran Mamdani looks like a sure winner in the NYC mayoral general election, if Politico is representative at least, and it is:

Pretty much everyone — including Trump himself, per the WSJ — reckons Mamdani is certain to win next week. The fascinating question for our national politics is what happens next. Even as Republicans issue dire warnings about what they believe New York’s first self-described socialist mayor would do to the city, some will privately admit that — whisper it — they kinda want him to win.

Zohran the Boogeyman: That’s because GOP strategists believe Mamdani represents a major opportunity for their party — a politician they can, bluntly, demonize in the eyes of Americans as the sort of terrifying far-left figure that the Democratic Party now represents. And if you thought Trump vs. Gov. Gavin Newsom in Los Angeles or Trump vs. Gov. JB Pritzker in Chicago was something … just wait until the president turns his attention to a new-look New York next year.

There’s one more aspect of the New York race I haven’t seen getting enough attention.

What will Mamdani do when he catches the car and actually has to administrate the city, including the NY Police Department?

Never forget the NYPD has a budget of more than $5 billion per year. Oh and they train with the Israeli Defense Forces and consider the Keffiyeh and Watermelon to be anti-Semitic symbols and therefore violations.

So you can guess how many of the rank and file NYPD and their bosses view the incoming Muslim mayor.

Mamdani Seems to Be Aware of Kinetic Reality

Zohran Mamdani is already making the kind of compromise moves that show he’s aware of his political difficulties with the enforcement arm of the city government he will be running. However, it’s unclear if he realizes the magnitude of what’s he’ll be up against.

I’m referring specifically of his stated intention to retain Eric Adams’ Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Mamdani has faced deep skepticism from police union leaders and withering campaign trail attacks from former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, his chief rival, portraying him as hostile to law enforcement and soft on crime.

Embracing a figure like Ms. Tisch before Election Day could help the Democrat address both potential vulnerabilities — and send a clear signal that he is serious about building an administration staffed by experts who need not agree with him ideologically.

In this case, the differences are stark. He is a democratic socialist who once called the department “racist” and “anti-queer” and supported defunding it. (He has since disavowed those positions.) Ms. Tisch is a billionaire heiress appointed by Mayor Eric Adams who has pushed for stricter criminal justice laws.

Ms. Tisch’s allies have signaled for months that she would want to stay in the job regardless of the election’s outcome. The campaign officials declined to detail any conversations between the candidate and the commissioner, but said they were confident she would accept.

Some of the more vocal members of X.com’s anti-Zionist contingent have a more critical view of Ms. Tisch:

Follow the Money and Power: NYPD vs Mayor di Blasio’s Family Edition

And those of use whose memories extend all the way back to 2020 and the BLM protests in New York can think of at least one compelling reason the mayor should pay very close attention to “his” police department.

They doxxed and threatened the daughter of then Mayor Bill di Blasio during the Black Lives Matter protests. From The New York Times:

Among the hundreds of protesters arrested over the four days of demonstrations in New York City over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, only one was highlighted by name by a police union known for its hostility toward Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The name of that protester? Chiara de Blasio, the mayor’s daughter.

The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, used Twitter to post a police report documenting the arrest on Saturday night of Ms. de Blasio, 25.

The Police Department does not normally release internal police reports, and Ms. de Blasio’s contained personal details, including her height, weight, address, date of birth and driver’s license information.

The post was removed for violation of Twitter rules, and the union’s account was suspended Monday morning.

“The account is temporarily locked for violating our private information policy,” a Twitter spokesman confirmed.

Citing safety concerns, Twitter prohibits users from posting other people’s “private information” without their consent, a practice known as “doxxing.”

The practice has been used as a social-media weapon in culture wars, but the publishing of someone’s physical address, for example, could endanger that individual’s physical safety.

U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was hip to the scene back in the day, per Business Insider:

“Last night the NYPD Sergeants’ union *publicly threatened the mayor’s daughter* while they held her. Indefensible,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Monday. “If police budgets bought peace, the $6 *billion* NYPD budget would’ve bought the most sophisticated de-escalatory operation in the world. Clearly, it didn’t.”

And there’s also a follow the money angle to the Tisch-Mamdani relationship that the potentially future mayor may be ignoring:

Di Blasio’s non-response got him immortalized by the satirical web site The Onion:

Only time will tell if Zohran Mamdani becomes New York City mayor only to leave office as an emasculated laughing stock like di Blasio.

That’s plenty for today’s Coffee Break, I’ll be back with more attempts to follow the money to the power and anywhere else it leads.

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2 comments

  1. Pat

    I wondered about this move on Mamdani’s part, and hope it doesn’t pan out. but honestly I expect the NYPD to be the least of his troubles after the election. Truth is that enough multiple power groups will have their knives out to make the Ides of March look like a picnic. And then there are the two biggies. Hochul might not be the 800 pound gorilla that Cuomo was but Albany will still be a giant brick wall. (You could almost count the beats between DiBlasio attempting something and Cuomo would stomping on his efforts in the most humiliating way possible. Cuomo might not be as flamboyant as Trump but their governing styles have much more in common than “Fix the City” might want to admit.) And then there is the City Council of course.

    It is still better than being an afterthought yet again from Andy’s endless attempt to sell out to the right people to get a Cuomo in the White House.

    Reply ↓
  2. Mikel

    Back in the early 20th Century (maybe late 19th Century also), there were publications called “Blue Books”.
    A man would arrive in the city and purchase one of them to find a specific kind of entertainment and companionship. (Being diplomatic).

    Years later, some said (gossip heard while working in the TV biz) the old Hollywood Blue Book Modelling Agency was more than just a modelling agency.

    The more things change…

    Reply ↓

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