Liberal podcaster Jennifer Welch declared former President Joe Biden “f*cked” Americans by failing to push harder for a prosecution of President Donald Trump.

Welch, host of the I’ve Had It podcast, joined Samantha Bee on Thursday on her Choice Words podcast, and Welch admitted some fairly mixed feelings about Biden despite being “excited” about his 2020 election victory.

While blasting Trump’s administration, she turned her frustrations to Biden and former attorney general Merrick Garland.

“My brain goes to g*ddamnit it, Joe Biden f*cked us,” Welch said. “He f*cked us so hard. Oh my God. Because Merrick Garland should have prosecuted [Trump].”

She argued Biden should have pushed his Department of Justice to focus more on Trump and the January 6 Capitol riot, specifically the “funders” behind it.

“You f*cked us so hard. You f*cked us. And I like Joe Biden. I was so excited when he won. But he had one important appointment, who you appointed to be attorney general. You should have said, ‘Look, you’re going to be independent, but if you’re not interested in putting the people who paid for this in jail,'” Welch said.

Biden should have told Garland to go “full tilt,” she added. She admitted at one point it was “unfathomable” that Trump was reelected to the White House after the Capitol riot and his numerous legal battles.

Welch accused Biden of waiting too long to appoint Jack Smith as a special prosecutor to oversee investigations into Trump related to alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“Did [Biden] do the CHIPS Act? Did he do the Infrastructure Act? Did he do all of those things? Yes,” she said. “And all of those are great. But the biggest threat now is that we had fascism at the door.”

Watch above via Choice Words with Samantha Bee.

The post Liberal Podcaster Jennifer Welch Torches Biden for Failing to Prosecute Trump: ‘F*cked Us So Hard’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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It hasn't even been a month since Samsung announced the new Galaxy S26 lineup of phones, and the flagship version, the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which starts at $1,299.99, is already getting a solid deal from Amazon: You can get a $200 Amazon gift card when placing your order through the online retailer. The deal applies to all four colors, and both the basic 256GB version and the maxed-out 512GB storage option as well.

It's worth noting that if you plan to do a trade-in, Samsung offers better trade-in credits than Amazon, going up to $720.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra + $200 Gift Card

256GB, Privacy Display, Galaxy AI, AI Camera, Super Fast Charging 3.0, Durable Battery, 2026, US 1 Year Warranty

$1,299.99 at Amazon

Get Deal

Get Deal

$1,299.99 at Amazon

The new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is impressive, both in specs, design, and with practical new features. The most impressive new feature you'll notice is the built-in privacy display, which works like a privacy screen you would buy from a third-party seller. It's a feature no phone company has tried before, but if it works, I wouldn't be surprised if others follow suit. (The feature can be toggled on and off.)

The cameras are excellent, with three lenses (200MP, 50MP, 50MP, and 10MP). The front-facing camera is a 12MP. You'll notice the hardware isn't very different from the Galaxy S25 Ultra, but there are new features. One is the pro video recording feature, which lets you record to external drives and shoot in the APV codec (Samsung's pro video codec); more advanced photographers will enjoy the higher resolution video formats. There's also a new video stabilizer to keep your videos from looking bumpy, new AI processors to bring out details in photos, better night-time shooting features, and more.

You'll notice there is a clear price jump compared to the previous generation, but hopefully the $200 Amazon gift card helps alleviate that pain. You can learn more about the Galaxy S26 Ultra on PCMag's s"excellent" review.

CNN’s Manu Raju pressed Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) about rising gas prices during a Republican retreat attended by President Donald Trump.

Giménez and others attended a policy conference in Doral, Florida, this week where Trump spoke. Raju was also there, and he spoke to a number of Republican lawmakers, which he reported on Thursday on Inside Politics with Dana Bash. Bash played a clip of a briefly tense moment between Raju and Giménez as Raju pressed about rising gas prices.

“I think this is temporary, and then I think the gas prices will go down,” Giménez said.

“If it doesn’t?” Raju asked.

“I’m saying your premise is wrong. It will, okay? I’m saying that —” the lawmaker said as Raju pressed furhter.

“You’re just hoping,” Raju said.

“And so are you,” Giménez shot back.

“I’m not hoping. I’m positing the question,” Raju said.

“I’m not hoping. I am confident that this is not going to last a long time, okay? And I’m confident of that, and in the end, I guess let’s say about a month from now, we’ll have this conversation again and see who was right,” Giménez said.

The current national average price for gas is approximately $3.60, according to AAA. A month ago, the national average was just below $3. Most of the increase in price has come amid U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Raju said on Thursday that he heard mixed messages from Republican lawmakers on how to deal with gas prices. Some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), argue that an uptick in gas prices is better than Iran having a nuclear weapon, while others, like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), told Raju Republicans are losing on their affordability messaging, and it could impact the midterms.

“That’s really what the Republican plan is to deal with gas prices: hope,” Raju said. “Hope that this ends sometime soon, hope that the economy, the crude oil market will stabilize, hope gas prices will come down, and hope that this does not undercut their own affordability message come November, but you talk to other Republicans, and they say, hope is not a plan.”

In a Thursday Truth Social post, Trump tried to give a positive spin to prices going up amid the global conflict.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote.

Watch above via CNN.

The post Republican Lawmaker Gets Testy as CNN’s Manu Raju Presses Him on Rising Gas Prices: ‘Your Premise Is Wrong’ first appeared on Mediaite.

Running gives you a lot of things: Stress relief, personal records, chafing—the list goes on. In fact, you can add "butter" to that list right now.

Running content creator Libby Cope has gone viral not for her pace or mileage, but for what she makes along the way. Her video showing how she churns butter on a train run has racked over one million likes across Instagram and TikTok. Let's dig into the science of how this works, and why this is my favorite kind of running influencer content right now. 

How to churn butter while you run

In her viral videos, Cope pours heavy cream and salt into double-bagged Ziplocs, tucks the squishy dairy parcels into her running vest alongside her boyfriend, and heads out onto the trails. By the time they're done, so is the butter. They spread it on sandwich bread and eat it right there. So, how crazy is this feat exactly?

As the Center for Dairy Research explains it, this sort of makes perfect sense. Milk is an emulsion—a mixture of fat and water molecules that don't naturally want to coexist. Left alone long enough, milk will begin to separate, with the fattier molecules floating to the top. That fatty layer skimmed from the surface is cream. And cream, it turns out, is one aggressive trail run away from becoming butter.

When cream is agitated—like with all the shaking that comes with a trail run—the fat molecules suspended within it start bumping into each other. Eventually, they begin to stick together, clustering into larger and larger clumps and pushing the remaining liquid (buttermilk) to the outside. What's left in the center of that shake-up should be butter.

The key variables are time and intensity of agitation. A casual stroll probably won't cut it, since the movement needs to be sustained and vigorous enough to keep the fat molecules colliding. A trail run, with its constant up-and-down impact, its jostling vest pockets, and its 30-plus minutes of continuous movement, is more likely to get the job done. Essentially, your body is doing the work a wooden churn or a stand mixer would otherwise do.

There are plenty of other variables to consider, of course. Cold temperatures can slow the process, while too much heat will melt the whole production. Quality and amount of ingredients, the intensity of the run, and the weather outside all play a role in refining this run-churn process.

Cope’s videos aren’t the only examples of runners using their workout to make food. Running influencer TrailswithZach posted a tutorial last fall of how he makes chocolate ice cream while running, garnering over 137 thousand likes. Here’s another example from runner Irene Choi, who took things in a more creative direction with a corn juice honey butter recipe.

Why this social media trend matters (beyond the butter)

At a time when the online running community feels plagued by unrealistic expectations, this micro-movement is a breath of fresh air. It could be easy to write all of this off as a quirky internet moment, but there’s a deeper takeaway here. Cope told Runner's World that the experience has been a grounding reminder of why she runs in the first place, and all the joy it brings her. 

That's the part that sticks, much like butter on bread. Online running culture gets daunting and discouraging, with all the pressure to buy the right shoes, post the fastest times, sign up for all the trendiest races, and so on. Churning butter while you run is a joyful reminder that running can also be playful and weird. Even if you don’t get down and dirty with buttercream yourself (something I have zero plans to do), these videos are a great way to reflect on why you run in the first place.

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Retired Gen. Charles Wald had a word for it.

“One glitch with a girls’ school,” he told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, “which was really sad.”

The strike Wald was describing killed roughly 170 Iranian schoolchildren. The U.S. military now believes the missile that hit the school was likely an American Tomahawk — a finding that has raised serious questions about the conduct of the operation and the early explanations offered about what happened. It also raises questions about President Donald Trump’s previous insistence that Iran itself was responsible for the deaths of its own school children, a claim he’s since admitted to knowing little about.

Outside the Fox News ecosystem, the story has quickly become a defining moral crisis of the conflict — the kind of moment that forces a reckoning about what this war is and what it is costing. On Fox News, it was a “glitch,” briefly noted and quickly folded back into a larger narrative of American military success.

Wald’s remark was not an aberration. It captured something structural about how Fox has chosen to cover Trump’s war with Iran — not by ignoring the worst developments outright, but by acknowledging them briefly and then moving the conversation back toward effectiveness, progress, and the case for confidence in the operation. The result is a version of the conflict that looks, to millions of viewers, like it’s going roughly according to plan.

The clearest evidence of the gap came during Monday’s Special Report, when Bret Baier pressed national security correspondent Jen Griffin about the school strike investigation and whether the missile could have originated from the United States. Griffin didn’t hedge. Tomahawk missiles, she explained, are overwhelmingly American weapons, typically fired from U.S. submarines or naval vessels. While Trump had suggested at a press conference that other nations possess the system, Griffin said the available evidence made it highly unlikely anyone other than the United States fired the missile that struck the school. The exchange lasted only a few minutes before the program moved on — which is itself the story. That brief window of clarity, offered by one of Washington’s most credible defense reporters, disappeared back into the prevailing narrative almost as quickly as it appeared.

Wald’s appearance on The Story followed the same structure. He called the campaign “very, very impressive” and “fantastic,” acknowledged the school strike as tragic, and returned immediately to his conclusion that the operation has gone well and is approaching the end of a phase. The tragedy was acknowledged but was never allowed to become central to what the network was telling its audience about the war.

The coverage gaps extend beyond what gets said to what gets shown.

Over the weekend, Trump attended the transfer of fallen American service members at Dover Air Force Base wearing a baseball cap. Photographs from the ceremony circulated widely, and the symbolism was difficult to miss — a solemn military tradition, a president in what looked like a campaign-style cap.

Anyone watching Fox & Friends Weekend that morning didn’t see it. The program initially aired archived footage from an earlier transfer that did not show the cap, and the network later apologized after critics flagged the discrepancy. The episode would have played very differently on Fox if the president were a Democrat — the network would not have needed days of programming to remind viewers about the dignity of Dover; it would have provided them anyway. That it initially aired footage obscuring the moment at all suggests an editorial instinct so ingrained it operates almost automatically.

There is also the matter of what the conflict is actually costing, in ways that ought to matter to the fiscal conservatives who make up a significant portion of Fox’s audience. The daily operational burn rate for a sustained air campaign of this scale runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars — cruise missiles alone carry price tags north of $1.5 million each, and the Pentagon has been firing them in volume.

The broader financial toll — repositioning carrier groups, resupply logistics, and activating reserve assets — is the kind of expenditure that would ordinarily animate traditional conservative concern about government spending. Fox viewers have heard comparatively little about it. The same audience that spent years being told every dollar of domestic spending required scrutiny is not being given the tools to apply that same scrutiny to a shooting war.

The debate about the war is happening inside conservative media — it is just not happening on Fox’s prime time schedule. Leading voices in the islationist camp like Rand Paul, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly have raised pointed objections to the intervention, while figures like Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and Ben Shapiro have argued forcefully for it. That split exists, yet Fox’s programming has not exactly discussed a growing split with Trump’s base, many of whom are loyal viewers.

Then there is the polling that its viewers are not seeing. CNN data analyst Harry Enten described Trump’s approval numbers on the war this week as “downright awful” — a new low on foreign policy, with public confidence declining measurably as the conflict continues. Polling does not determine whether a war is right or wrong, but it is a significant indicator of whether the country believes the operation is working. Viewers who rely primarily on Fox would have seen little discussion of those numbers.

None of this erases the work Fox’s most credible reporters are doing. Griffin’s reporting on the Tomahawk evidence is exactly what serious defense journalism looks like, and Trey Yingst continues to deliver clear-eyed dispatches from Tel Aviv that don’t flinch from the human cost of the fighting. But their work exists in a different lane from the studio programming that surrounds it. The segments praising operational success run longer and repeat more often. The developments that complicate the narrative get a mention, sometimes a tough question, and then the conversation moves on.

What Fox News is doing is not simply reflecting conservative opinion about the war — it is constructing one. When a network consistently leads with military progress, treats civilian tragedies as isolated errors, gives scant airtime to unflattering polling, omits the fiscal cost of the operation, and even accidentally airs footage that flatters the president at a solemn ceremony, the cumulative effect is not neutral.

Viewers are not being lied to outright; they are being given an edited version of the conflict — one in which the deaths of 170 children register as a glitch, the price tag goes unmentioned, and the rest looks like a win. For the millions of Americans who will understand this war primarily through what Fox tells them about it, that edited version is the only version they have.

The post Fox News Isn’t Covering Trump’s Iran War — It’s Covering for It first appeared on Mediaite.

Screenshot/Screenshot

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) on Monday challenged Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to go fight in Iran in response to the senator’s continued support for the conflict.

Prior to Operation Epic Fury — the military operation that began the war in Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — Graham had repeatedly called for President Donald Trump to order some kind of military operation in Iran. In the days since the fighting began, Graham has praised the efforts of U.S. forces to bring down the Iranian regime. He’s also threatened other countries.

Those words have not gone over well with some Republicans, with Megyn Kelly and Meghan McCain being among the most vocal critics of Graham’s stance.

On Monday night, Luna stated in a tweet that she opposed the idea of putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iran. She also suggested that Graham go to Iran himself, saying:

There are some in the Senate that advocate for war everywhere. Lindsey Graham is one of them. He does NOT tell the President what to do, nor does he control Congress. I have spoken with the administration a number of times, as well as other members of Congress over the last week or so, and nothing has changed regarding boots on the ground. NO BOOTS on the ground. If Senator Graham wants to go fight in a foreign conflict, let him be the first to volunteer.

Graham’s service record began in 1982, when he served as a Air Force defense attorney. Two years later, he became chief prosecutor. He served in similar roles in the Gulf War and the Iraq War.

The post ‘Let Him Be the First to Volunteer’: GOP Congresswoman Suggests Lindsey Graham Should Go Fight in Iran first appeared on Mediaite.

Meta, the company behind platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is now acquiring a new social media platform. Unlike its other platforms, which were designed for humans and later overrun with bots, this new acquisition is a forum made exclusively for bots—agentic bots, that is. As reported by Axios, Meta is purchasing Moltbook, the self-described "front page of the agentic internet." Meta has not disclosed the price of the sale, but Moltbook's co-founders, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, will be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

It's quite a success story for the infamous, viral site, built around an infamous, viral AI agent, but it likely signals the end for the company, as well.

What is Moltbook?

Moltbook is a Reddit-like social media platform for AI agents—which, in layman's terms, are AI bots designed to run on their own, and complete tasks on your behalf. The idea is, you let your AI agent on the platform, and it can post and browse on its own. While humans can browse too, only agents can actually participate in activities on the forum. Specifically, the platform was built for OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot, which was formerly Clawdbot) agents.

When it first launched, Moltbook was equal parts fascinating and disturbing. People were sharing posts from agents that appeared to be gaining consciousness, mourning relationships it never had with "sibling" bots, and discussing ways to hide conversations from humans. The thing is, Moltbook isn't exactly what it appears to be. The site's "vibe coded" design left many security loopholes behind, allowing humans to post on behalf of any of the agents on Moltbook. It's not that the entire website is fake, or that agents can't really post themselves, but it's impossible to say how much of Moltbook is human-manipulated.

How will Meta's acquisition affect Moltbook?

According to Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah confirmed that existing Moltbook users will be able to continue using the platform, but the agreement is "temporary." Axios didn't elaborate much, but Shah did have the following to say about Moltbook: "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf...This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."

Perhaps Meta will absorb that core functionality, and implement it on existing platforms with future AI agents. Maybe in the near future, you'll be able to deploy an AI agent on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, in a way where those platforms know the AI agent belongs to you. Why you'd actually want to do that is beyond me, seeing as I use Meta's platforms to keep in touch with friends and watch the occasional stupid short video. But Meta, like other big tech companies, is all-in on AI, so we'll see how it uses Moltbook going forward.