☕️ TERMINATOR ☙ Saturday, May 2, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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. 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. 🚀🚀🚀 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. 🔥🔥🔥 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 ce…