The Federal Reserve’s long-planned renovation of its Washington, D.C. headquarters has turned into a $2.5 billion political flashpoint. Initially estimated at $1.9 billion in 2021, the cost of overhauling the Fed’s historic Marriner S. Eccles Building and its adjacent Federal Reserve East Building has jumped by over 30%, drawing fire from President Donald Trump and his allies, and raising questions about fiscal oversight at the nation’s central bank.
The project, which began planning in 2017 and broke ground in 2022, aims to bring the aging buildings into compliance with modern safety and accessibility codes and add office space while preserving their historic architecture. But that effort has come with growing pains and costs.
Renovating the Fed was never going to be an easy task. In fact, Fed Chair Jerome Powell admitted the renovations would likely stoke controversy. “No one in office wants to do a major renovation of a historic building during their term in office,” he said in June. But Powell sees the project as necessary.
According to the Fed’s information page on the project, neither the Eccles Building nor the East Building has ever been fully renovated, despite having been built nearly a century ago, with some major mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems dating back to their construction and containing lead and asbestos.
The original budget underestimated several now-familiar forces: pandemic-era inflation, soaring construction costs, and unexpected infrastructure challenges. Prices for structural steel and other materials spiked in 2021 and 2022 as supply chains tightened and demand for large-scale projects rebounded. Labor shortages in the construction industry, namely mechanical, plumbing, and electrical trades, further drove up costs. These price inflationary factors were noted in the Fed board’s 2025 budget.
On-site, several environmental factors have also added to the renovation’s cost. Workers uncovered asbestos and several water-table issues resulting from the swampy DC soil. These complications added complexity and price costs, to excavation and foundation work—especially since strict D.C. building regulations cap building heights—forcing deeper builds underground. The difficult excavation work even earned the company working on the Fed’s foundation and underground aspects a 2025 award for “excellence in the face of adversity” from the Washington Building Congress.
And the best Trump could down was stick in the costs of a building finished five years ago to inflate the final costs. He was easily finished off by the Central Banker, who deals with far more sophisticated math than that. The visit was likely a distraction from the ongoing Epstein situation, from which he cannot extricate himself. That didn’t go as planned, as the release of a new South Park episode ate up the airwaves at the end of the week. I managed to find a place where I could watch it outside the graph of Paramount, which just got its wish to sell itself to Sky Dance. (No relationship to us and an insult of a name to dakinis on all planes of existence. “Sermon on the ’Mount” (South Park Season 27 Episode 1) is the funniest satire I’ve seen in years.
So, it couldn’t be better timing, but a terrible waste of funds to go bother Scotland, whose people hate Trump more than the Canadians. This is from the. New York Times. “Trump Flies to Scotland, Leaving Chaos Swirling in Washington. The five-day visit will be a mix of personal business and golf with some diplomacy thrown in.” What a brilliant waste of time. Plus, isn’t this all supposed to be in a government trust that he’s not supposed to involve himself in?
President Trump headed to Scotland on Friday for a five-day visit, hoping to leave behind the chaos of Washington and the persistent questions over the handling of the Epstein files for what will be a mix of personal business and diplomacy.
Mr. Trump will celebrate the opening of a new 18-hole course — the MacLeod Course — at Trump International Golf Links outside of Aberdeen, named after his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born in Scotland. He also plans to play rounds at the Trump Turnberry course, which Mr. Trump bought in 2014, on the other side of Scotland.
The president has some business on the agenda, as well. He plans to meet with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who has spent months nurturing his relationship with the American president.
Mr. Trump’s reception in Scotland may be rocky.
The Scots are generally not fans of Mr. Trump, and protests are already planned. A group called “Stop Trump Scotland” said it is organizing a “festival of resistance” against Mr. Trump during the trip and has called on John Swinney, the first minister of Scotland, to decline to meet with him.
“The people of Scotland don’t want to roll out a welcome mat for Donald Trump, whose government is accelerating the spread of climate breakdown and fascism around the world,” the protest group said in a statement.
A survey in February by the research firm Ipsos found that 71 percent of those polled in Scotland had an unfavorable opinion of him, versus 57 percent of the broader British public.
The authorities said they were prepared for the demonstrations.
It’s all enough to make me do a Highland Fling in the middle of this wretched heat and humidity. I’ll just settle by singing Scotland the Brave. However, all the fun may be here as we look forward to the midterm elections. This is from AXIOS. “Scoop: DNC targets vulnerable House Republicans with Epstein ads.” The thing that still worries me the most is that the poor women who were the child victims of Epstein have to see all this.
The Democratic National Committee will target MAGA voters with ads about Jeffrey Epstein in a dozen GOP-held House districts at the start of the August recess, Axios has learned.
Democrats are pitting squeamish Republicans eager to move on from Epstein against MAGA voters who want validation of theories around the late financier’s sex trafficking operation, its clientele and his 2019 death, ruled a suicide.
Driving the news: The ads will run before videos on right-wing YouTube and Meta channels like those of Fox News, Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro – target-rich audiences for the voters fixated on Epstein.
“Call your representative. Demand they release the Epstein files,” says the ad, while hitting House Republicans for going on August recess without having cast a floor vote to release more Epstein details.
One video ad features Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) deeming Epstein a “serious issue.” Another includes video of President Trump with Epstein. It’s long been known that Trump knew Epstein, and the president has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to his operation.
The ad will run for five days, starting Friday, in the districts of 11 Republicans the DNC says are vulnerable in the 2026 midterms:
Reps. Tom Barrett (Mich.) Gabe Evans (Colo.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Ashley Hinson (Iowa), Young Kim (Calif.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Zach Nunn (Iowa), Andy Ogles (Tenn.), Chip Roy (Texas), Bryan Steil (Wisc.) and Derrick Van Orden (Wisc.).
It’s also running in Rep. Virginia Foxx’s (N.C.) district. Foxx is not viewed as particularly vulnerable, but she chairs the powerful Rules Committee, which determines what legislation receives votes on the House floor.
What they’re saying: The DNC is seeking to reach up to a million Americans with the five-figure ad campaign.
It’s times like these when I’m glad my new TV is going on its third year in the box it came in. ProPublica has uncovered an American Scrooge. “His Former Company Got Caught Employing Undocumented Workers. Now He’s Profiting Off an Immigrant Detention Camp. Disaster Management Group is one contractor behind the nation’s largest detention camp, to be built at Fort Bliss. It’s run by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty to a scheme to hire and conceal undocumented workers. ” Isn’t this what America is all about these days?
On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base, a facility that will play a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.
Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.
Two people with direct knowledge of the award and two familiar with the company told ProPublica that Disaster Management Group would help build the new facility, receiving a substantial chunk of the more than $1.2 billion the government has allocated for the project.
“The idea that you could use illegal labor and then sell services to ICE, the irony is thick,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term and later under President Joe Biden, referring to the immigration case involving TentLogix, the company Albers once co-owned.
In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Disaster Management said that Albers and Disaster Management had been dropped from the DHS’ investigation of TentLogix and exonerated. Upon learning of illegal actions by TentLogix’s co-founder, the spokesperson said, “Mr. Albers parted ways as a minority and non-operating owner of TentLogix.”
The spokesperson didn’t directly answer questions about Disaster Management’s role in the detention camp at Fort Bliss, saying only that the company “is proud to support projects of national importance for nearly 20 years.”
The White House didn’t answer questions about Disaster Management or Albers, referring ProPublica to the DOD and DHS, neither of which provided comment.
The new migrant detention camp near El Paso, Texas, is expected to hold up to 5,000 people. The prime contractor is Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics, and people with direct knowledge of the work at Fort Bliss told ProPublica that Amentum, a major engineering and technology services contractor, will be another subcontractor.
Neither Acquisition Logistics nor Amentum replied to questions from ProPublica about the project.
Disaster Management specializes in building temporary structures. Since 2020, it’s won over $500 million in government contracting work, mostly to construct lodgings for a U.S. program to resettle Afghan refugees.
We’re getting details about the last Trump exchange of prisoners, and it’s about par for the course for Trump to have a murderer sent back to us. This is from the New York Times. “Convicted Murderer Released by Trump From Venezuelan Prison Is Free in U.S. At least some American officials knew that Dahud Hanid Ortiz had been convicted of a triple murder when he was put on the plane to the United States.” Well, isn’t that special?
He killed three people in Spain and fled to Venezuela, where he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, court documents show. Then last week, the Trump administration negotiated his release as part of a large prisoner swap, and he arrived on American soil.
Now, the convict, Dahud Hanid Ortiz, 54, a U.S. Army veteran, is free in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of the case. One said he was in Orlando, Fla.
When the Americans put Mr. Hanid Ortiz on a plane on Friday back to the United States, at least some people in the Trump administration knew of his criminal past, according to a third person.
Mr. Hanid Ortiz was among 10 Americans and U.S. legal permanent residents extracted by the United States from detention in Venezuela on Friday. In exchange, the United States agreed to allow the release of 252 Venezuelan men it had sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The Trump administration claimed all the men were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and had to be removed to protect the security of Americans.
Trump’s homegrown murderers and rapists get deals. This brings me to Gislaine Maxwell, who is suddenly getting a lot of visitors looking for something or another. This is from NBC News. It’s just breaking and is reported by Chloe Atkins and Dareh Gregorian. “DOJ’s Maxwell questioning done for the day, her attorney says.” Do you suppose it was a merry meet?
Maxwell attorney David Oscar Markus said the deputy attorney general has finished his questioning of Maxwell for the day.
“We started this morning right around 9 o’clock, and went to now lunchtime, and we’re finished after all day, yesterday and today, Ghislaine answered every single question asked of her over the last day and a half, she answered those questions honestly, truthfully, to the best of her ability. She never invoked a privilege. She never refused to answer a question,” Markus said.
“They asked about every single, every possible thing you could imagine. Everything,” Markus said.
It was unclear whether Blanche intends to question her further. Markus said he did not know whether the discussions would have any impact on her case.
“We don’t know how it’s going to play out. We just know that this was the first opportunity she’s ever been given to answer questions about what happened and so the truth will come out about what happened with Mr. Epstein, and she’s the person who’s answering those questions,” he said.
Prosecutors and the judge who oversaw her 2021 trial have said that Maxwell had made multiple false statements under oath and failed to take responsibility for her actions. She’s serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted of sex trafficking minors.
“People have questioned her honesty, which I think is just wrong,” Markus said.
Asked if she’d got any offer of clemency from the government, the lawyer said no offer had been made.
What exactly has happened to our country in the last few months? I don’t recall any of this stuff being something that would be normalized by even Richard Nixon. I know it could’ve been different.
Aid organizations report that thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border. The full flow of humanitarian assistance must be restored immediately. news.un.org/en/story/202…
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This is artist Amy Sherald’s take on the Statue of Liberty. You may remember she did the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. She quit a big show over the possible censorship of this painting. It’s a Trans Woman.
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No one could possibly have any more doubts about the addled and deranged brains of#FARTUS. (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist of the United States) He’s devised another distraction from the Epstein files, and it’s a doozy. Good luck to Congressional Republicans in the attempt to normalize this beahavior. This comes from this morning’s New York Times. Matthew Mpoke Bigg has the story. “Trump posts a fake video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.” When in doubt, return to the scene of the original crime.
President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files.
The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump.
The video appears to be manipulated footage of an Oval Office meeting that took place in November 2016 between Mr. Obama, then the president, and Mr. Trump, who days earlier had defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the election.
The fake video purports to show F.B.I. agents bursting into the meeting, pushing Mr. Obama into a kneeling position and putting him in handcuffs as Mr. Trump looks on smiling, while the song “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People plays. Later, the fake video shows Mr. Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. The start of the video shows a compilation of actual footage of Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr, saying, “no one is above the law.”
Mr. Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video.
Mr. Trump regularly reposts A.I.-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said last week that the latest report released by her offices showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump. She said she would make a criminal referral to the F.B.I. based on recently released documents.
A link to real video footage from an interview that Ms. Gabbard gave to Fox News on Sunday on the subject was also posted to Mr. Trump’s social media.
Democrats have denounced the administration’s effort to discredit Mr. Obama as politically motivated and riddled with errors, and contradicting previous reviews of the assessment.
The latest document, issued last week, did not show Russian manipulation of the election, and instead reinforced the view of intelligence officials who found no evidence that Russia hacked voting systems to change votes.
Democrats have cited reports by intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who found that, while Russian hackers probed election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes and extracted voter registration data in at least two states, there was no evidence that they attempted to change votes.
The Obama administration’s assessment also did not say that Russian hackers manipulated votes.
Mr. Trump has been trying to change the conversation among his supporters, after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.
That decision angered some of the president’s most ardent supporters. Some have questioned Mr. Trump’s judgment on the matter, causing strife within the MAGA movement that powered Mr. Trump to two presidential election victories.
“Oops!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Tulsi is still trying to get out of the doghouse, so she’s even reaching back for stale, old conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, there are enough disgusting stories about ICE going around that we hardly need anything totally invented out of a bunch of the brains of sickos. This is from The Guardian. “Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges. Incident in which migrants were shackled with hands tied one of succession of alleged abuses at jails in Florida.” If it’s news about something creepy, sadistic, and inhumane, it’s got to be from either Florida or Texas. The story comes from Richard Luscombe in Miami.
Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.
Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.
“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.
Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.
The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.
“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.
“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”
When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hielera – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.
There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.
“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.
At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.
Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.
In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.
All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.
Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.
The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.
The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.
“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.
“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”
These are the kinds of stories that make me think my country has been flushed down a dirty toilet. I can’t imagine any previous modern president doing this. The closest thing from history that was this barbaric was when Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee to Oklahoma via The Trail of Tears. There was also Wounded Knee, where hundreds of the Lakota people were murdered for their land. We think that the Civil War ended slavery and that we began making a better Union for all of us. It’s so alarming that it’s been dismantled so quickly by so few. Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The last horrid act of attempted mass termination of our indigenous nations was in 1956.
The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was one law among others through the 1940s and 1950s that are referred to as Indian Termination. It was an effort by the U.S. government to hasten the assimilation of American Indians. Some scholars have characterized the law as an attempt to encourage people to leave Indian reservations for urban areas, which resulted in poverty, joblessness, homelessness for many in the new urban environment.
The next major ICE assault on an American city will happen in New York. Politico reports that “ICE will ‘flood the zone’ in NYC. Trump administration officials said they’d increase staffing after getting blocked from opening an office in the city’s jails.” If this doesn’t feel like living under Hitler’s SS, I don’t know what would. What group of people will be on their next assault?
The Department of Homeland Security will “flood the zone” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York City after the City Council blocked federal law enforcement agencies from opening an office in the city jails, President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Monday morning.
Homan joined DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials to deliver that message at One World Trade Center after an off-duty federal customs officer was shot by an undocumented immigrant in an attempted robbery Saturday night, Noem said.
“You don’t want to let us in the jails to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a jail. You want to release him into the street, which makes it unsafe for the alien, because anything can happen in an on-street arrest,” Homan said. “So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna put more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy. So sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the community.”
The alleged shooter entered the country illegally in 2023 during then-President Joe Biden’s tenure and had been arrested and released four times in the years since, Noem said. She blamed the shooting on New York’s sanctuary city policies that limit the city’s cooperation with civil immigration enforcement and Mayor Eric Adams for not changing the policies, despite his good relationship with the Trump administration.
Adams has said he wants to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration more but blamed the left-leaning City Council for not letting him. “I have nothing to do with the rules that are put in place. I just carry out the rules,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference Monday when asked to respond to Noem.
Adams said he welcomes more ICE agents in the city if they’re going to help the city go after “dangerous people” like the alleged shooter, but said that “if it’s going to be to go after everyday individuals who are trying to complete the path, who are trying to be a citizen, I don’t think we should do that.”
I still don’t understand how property crimes can be lumped in with major crimes like sexual assault, murder, or battery, but then I don’t consider my car an extension of my genitalia. I also don’t understand how any American president can get away with defying judicial orders. Again, it seems we are on a fast, downward spiral to banana republic status. This is from theWashington Post. “Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him. A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of lawsuits against Trump policies shows dozens of examples of defiance, delay, and dishonesty, which experts say pose an unprecedented threat to the U.S. legal system.” Justin Jouvenal has the lede.
President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance withAmerica’s legal system.
Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent aresnubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.
Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have often agreed. None havetaken punitive action to try to force compliance, however, allowing the administration’s defiance of orders to go on for weeks or even months in some instances.
Outside legal analysts say courts typicallyare slow to begin contempt proceedings for noncompliance,especially while their rulings are under appeal.Judges alsoare likely to be concerned, analysts say, that the U.S. Marshals Service — whose director is appointed by the president — might not serve subpoenas or take recalcitrant government officials into custodyif ordered to by the courts.
The allegations against the administrationare crystallized ina whistleblower complaint filedto Congress late last monththat accused Justiceofficials of ignoring court orders in immigration cases, presenting legal arguments with no basis in the law and misrepresenting facts. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor also chided the administration, writing that Trump officials had “openly flouted” a judge’s order not to deport migrants to a country where they did not have citizenship.
The Post examined337 lawsuits filed against the administration since Trump returned to the White House and began a rapid-fire effort to reshape government programs and policy. As of mid-July, courts had ruled against the administration in 165 of the lawsuits. The Post found that the administration is accused of defying or frustrating court oversight in 57 of those cases — almost 35 percent.
Legal experts said the pattern of conductis unprecedented for any presidential administration and threatens to undermine the judiciary’s role as a check on an executive branch asserting vast powers that test the boundaries of the law and Constitution. Immigration cases have emerged as the biggest flash point, but the administration has also been repeatedly accused of failing to comply in lawsuits involving cuts to federal funding and the workforce.
Ed Maza, writing for HuffPo, has this story. “‘Reeks Of A Cover-Up’: Ex-Trump Official Suspects ‘Embarrassing’ Info In Epstein Files. Miles Taylor predicted that Trump will create distractions to keep people from talking about the Epstein case.”
President Donald Trump has backtracked on his promise to release files related to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and one former official from his first term thinks he knows why.
There might be “embarrassing” details about Trump in those documents, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security chief of staff in 2019. MSNBC’s Alex Witt asked Taylor about a report that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured FBI Director Kash Patel into getting 1,000 employees to sort through 100,000 Epstein records and flag any mention of Trump.
“This data point, to me, reeks of a cover-up,” Taylor said Sunday.
If the report is true, he said, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was criminal behavior, but the agents could have uncovered information that the president doesn’t want made public.
“Again, it doesn’t have to be criminal,” he said. “It could just be embarrassing.”
He pointed to a report in The Wall Street Journal of a strange birthday letter Trump allegedly sent to Epstein as an example of something that’s not criminal but “very embarrassing.”
Trump has denied sending the latter and is suing over it.
“The keyword searches looking for Trump’s name, I think, strongly suggest that somewhere, something could have been found that has affected his behavior in this case,” he said, and warned that the case could consume the president in the same way that the Russia investigation did during his first term.
The good news, he said, is that it might keep Trump distracted and unable to follow through on some of the most extreme parts of his agenda.
“The bad news is it’s going to make Donald Trump desperate to create other distractions because he doesn’t want people to focus on this,” he said.
The AP reports that Israeli forces are pushing farther and farther into Gaza. “Israeli forces push into parts of a central Gaza city that the war had largely spared.” It appears that Netanyahoo is using the massive amount of chaos created by Trump’s irrational Foreign Policies to conquer the country and expel its rightful citziens. This area is also a staging ground for groups providing aid. Trump has lost interest in the region since he’s so involved with Epstein reports.
Israeli ground troops for the first time Monday pushed into areas of a central Gaza city where several aid groups are based, in what appeared to be the latest effort to carve up the Palestinian territory with military corridors.
Deir al-Balah is the only Gaza city that has not seen major ground operations or suffered widespread devastation in 21 months of war, leading to speculation that the Hamas militant group holds large numbers of hostages there. The main group representing hostages’ families said it was “shocked and alarmed” by the incursion, which was confirmed by an Israeli military official, and demanded answers from Israeli leaders.
Israel says the seizure of territory in Gaza is aimed at pressuring Hamas to release hostages, but it is a major point of contention in ongoing ceasefire talks.
Well, they’ve got a lot of days left to kill off more of us. Let’s see how it goes. Down here in Lousyana, they’re just killing us off with not much excuse at all. A large Coastal restoration project that was funded by the Gulf Oil Spill settlement has been shut down by our crazy governor and the swampbillies in the legislature. There’s an incredible heatwave here for the next three days, and I’m just trying to stay as dry and cool as possible, but I have a feeling I’ll be cold, bathtub-bound for most of that time. This is from our local TV station, WDSU. “Louisiana officially cancels state’s largest coastal project.” Just write death by MAGA’s love of oil in my obit if I don’t make it.
Louisiana has officially canceled the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.
The project was the largest single ecosystem restoration effort in U.S. history and the cornerstone of the state’s own Coastal Master Plan.
Gov. Jeff Landry has been a critic of the project, saying it’s costing taxpayers $30 to $50 million a year, claiming it’s destroying Grand Isle, and impacting drinking water for several parishes.
Supporters of the program say it is crucial to restoring the coast.
Restore the Mississippi River Delta issued the following statement:
“In a complete abandonment of science-driven decision-making and public transparency, Governor Jeff Landry and his administration have pulled the plug on a fully funded, permitted, and under construction project designed to rebuild tens of thousands of acres of our collapsing coast. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion represents decades of research, public engagement, and bipartisan support.
Thursday’s announcement by the TIG was the culmination of a year-and-a-half-long campaign of misinformation and political arm-twisting by Gov. Jeff Landry and his coastal team to undermine and finally kill the state’s largest ecosystem restoration project.
Mid-Barataria is more than a project — it represents a generational investment, paid for with the penalties of an environmental disaster. These dollars were meant to restore the coast, not settle a cancellation of contracts behind closed doors. The project’s cancellation means the state is throwing away more than $618 million intended to be spent to protect the coast’s culture, residents, and businesses.
The state has recently resurrected the idea of a smaller diversion near Myrtle Grove as a substitute, but that project was previously dropped from the state’s master plan years ago due to poor performance in early modeling.
A stopgap project with no data is not a solution. We need diversion designs backed by science — not politics.
Coastal Louisiana is still in an accelerated land loss crisis, and the science remains clear: sediment diversions are essential to building and sustaining wetlands at scale. Any alternative must be grounded in rigorous evaluation, transparent public engagement, and a commitment to outcomes — not opinions and optics.
I think they want all of us dead. It’s the only explanation I have.
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The Texas flooding this weekend was shocking and sad. Aren’t there people, equipment, and methods to mitigate and alert people to these things in this country? Shouldn’t there be people on the ground who can handle the rescue and recovery at least? Well, first, remember this is Abbot’s and Paxton’s Texas, and this is America’s MAGA/Doge experiment. While there was nothing that could stop the flood, Texas and American Republicans failed the people on the ground. Texas is still early in the investigation process and is still in search and rescue mode. Mexican Firefighters came to the rescue yesterday, while I read about how Texas tanked a bill that would’ve made a big difference. NOAA did a Yeoman’s job as both predicting and alerting the area about dangerous flash flooding. However, cuts by Doge and the Trump administration had an impact. I have to say I’m getting progressively worried about peak hurricane season next month, as Tropical Storm Chantal created problems in the Carolinas.
If you look at what’s still standing on the FEMA website, you’ll see the substantial benefits of mitigation planning. The first deadly mistake in this catastrophe was the biggest, and it sits on the shoulders of the Texas Legislature. This is from the station KSAT. You’ll notice the comments by the idiot who represents this area. He couldn’t recall why he voted against it, but thought it was likely the cost. Well, now look at the costs they’ve incurred to date. You want a start a spreadsheet and try to quantify the loss of all those little girls? “Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster warning systems this year.”
For the last three days, state Rep. Wes Virdell has been out with first responders in Kerr County as they searched for victims and survivors from the devastating floods that swept through Central Texas early Friday morning.
“All the focus right now is let’s save all the lives we can,” Virdell, who was still on the scene in Kerrville, told The Texas Tribune on Sunday.
Virdell’s closeup view of the havoc wreaked on his district has made a lasting impression, he said, and left him reconsidering a vote he made just a few months ago against a bill that would have established a statewide plan to improve Texas’ disaster response, including better alert systems, along with a grant program for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment and build new infrastructure like radio towers.
“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said Virdell, a freshman GOP lawmaker from Brady.
The measure, House Bill 13, would have created a new government council to establish the emergency response plan and administer the grant program, both of which would have been aimed at facilitating better communication between first responders. The bill also called for the plan to include “the use of outdoor warning sirens,” like those used in tornado-prone Texas counties, and develop new “emergency alert systems.”
Authored by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, the legislation was inspired by last year’s devastating wildfires in the Panhandle, where more than 1 million acres burned — including part of King’s property — and three people died. The bill failed in the Texas Senate, prompting newfound questions about whether lawmakers should have done more to help rural, cash-strapped counties stave off the deadly effects of future natural disasters.
As of Sunday evening, at least 79 people had died in the floods. Of those, 68 were in Kerr County, many of them camping or attending a private summer camp along the Guadalupe River.
Virdell, a Hill Country native who lives about 100 miles away, made his way to Kerrville early Friday after seeing news that rains raised the Guadalupe more than two feet, swamping its banks in Hunt and other river communities that host thousands of holiday vacationers.
He stressed an alarm system may not have helped much in this instance because the floodwaters came so quickly. Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area.
“I don’t think there was enough evidence to even suspect something like this was going to happen,” he said. ”I think even if you had a warning system there, this came in so fast and early in the morning it’s very unlikely the warning system would have had much effect.”
Virdell said he doesn’t recall the specifics of the bill or why he opposed it, though he guessed ”it had to do with how much funding” was tied to the measure.
What’s that old saying about an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? It makes me believe that some people really do not want to be taught the basics of reality. My first experience with meteorologists came when I was hired by the Global Weather Wings of the Navy and Air Force to help them improve their process of making forecasts and getting them out way back in the early 1990s. The motivation was the death of soldiers and the accompanying loss of equipment of troops in a huge sandstorm in the Middle East, and a look back on the loss of helicopters and troops trying to rescue the Iran Hostages. A lot came out of that effort, including looking for better types of radar, mitigation, forecasting in general, and then alert systems. My clearance only went so far, so the Birds in the Back did a lot of work I never really saw. I just know the systematic approach to it all caused a lot more success in avoiding weather in the Gulf Wars that followed.
I’m still a volunteer storm and weather spotter with my local NWS. Having grown up in Tornado Alley and now in Hurricane Central, my wonderment about weather continues. I just reported and talked to a NOAA forecaster about some severe lightning we had in the hood last month. They love their equipment, but they love the reports from the ground too. It helps them to look back and determine if they could’ve seen that coming by radar patterns. I wish FARTUS and Elon had a strong fascination with weather. It would be more useful than a fascination with a Mars colony and shark attacks. Their impact on NOAA is and will cause the loss of lives as well as damage to families and communities. I’ve lived it and hope you never have to.
This is from Wired. “Meteorologists Say the National Weather Service Did Its Job in Texas. DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the NWS, but experts who spoke to WIRED say the agency accurately predicted the state’s weekend flood risk.” We were lucky this time. We won’t be so lucky if it’s a wind event because that takes the best radar to determine the subtleties of wind shift, and Hegesth has cut their access to the military satellites. I got hammered on Facebook by some folks wanting to point fingers at the NWS. I know we all want them to get back to peak operations, but NOAA did its job despite the chaos, and I do not want to see them taking a hit they don’t deserve. They’re missing staff, and that really good winds aloft satellite information that’s best got from the military, but this was a rain event. The exact location of the worst of it can’t be predicted. They just put out a get the fuck to high ground to folks where it’s likely to be worse.
Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.
But meteorologists who spoke to WIRED say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm. What’s more, they say that what the NWS did forecast this week underscores the need to sustain funding to the crucial agency.
Meteorologists first had an idea that a storm may be coming for this part of Texas last weekend, after Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Mexico. “When you have a tropical system, it’s just pumping moisture northward,” says Chris Vagasky, an American Meteorological Society-certified digital meteorologist based in Wisconsin. “It starts setting the stage for heavy rainfall events.”
The NWS office in San Antonio on Monday predicted a potential for “downpours”—as well as heavy rain specifically at nighttime—later on in the week as the result of these conditions. By Thursday, it forecast up to 7 inches of rainfall in isolated areas.
The San Antonio and Hill Country regions of Texas are no stranger to floods. But Friday morning’s storm was particularly catastrophic. The Guadalupe River surged more than 20 feet in just a few hours to its second-highest level in recorded history. Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told media Friday morning that the county “didn’t know this flood was coming.”
“We have floods all the time… we deal with floods on a regular basis,” he said. “When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.”
W. Nim Kidd, the Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), echoed Kelly’s comments at a press conference with Governor Greg Abbott on Friday. Kidd said that TDEM worked with its meteorologist to “refine” NWS forecasts. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” he said.
Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.
“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”
The moral of the story is to make sure your phone will send you emergency alerts from NOAA and from your local emergency center. Then, take it seriously. I lived my entire young life with Tornado Sirens. Each state needs to be prepared and Texas screwed up. The last perspective I want to share is from the Substack of Heather Cox Richardson. Massive floods have been known to be historical events that can change the course of things. ”
All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.
Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “[t]axpayers won’t pay for it.”
Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—“form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.
CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”
Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.
When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”
The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.
ICE Barbie made a quick photo op trip to Texas to prop up #FARTUS during his Golf Weekend. She’s not going to escape the glare on this one.
HAPPENING NOW: Greetings from the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, where Judge Paula Xinis is set to hold a motions hearing in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s civil case against the Trump administration over his wrongful removal to El Salvador. I’m here for @lawfaremedia.org. Follow along 🧵⬇️
I’ll try to post updates as they come out. If you go to the above links, you’ll see the number of items to be adjudicated. There are several motions. Judge Paula Xinis is up for the job! There are several articles up today about Trump’s ICE. Jason Zengerle has a Guest Op Ed up today in the New York Times on the horrible Steven Miller entitled “The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller.” In short, he hates everyone.
Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.
This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.
There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy.
Mr. Miller, 39, is both a committed ideologue and a ruthless bureaucratic operator — and he has cast himself as the only person capable of fully carrying out Mr. Trump’s radical policy vision. “Stephen Miller translates Trump’s instinctual politics into a coherent ideological program,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said, “and he is the man for the moment in the second term.”
It’s a long article, and it basically starts with his family background. Maybe BB can give us some hints as to why he turned into such a monster. This concluding paragraph shows what a monster this man became.
For the moment, though, it seems Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are aligned — and that means Mr. Miller has achieved a level of success, and satisfaction, that he didn’t dream of during Mr. Trump’s first term. Last year, in another podcast interview with Mr. Travis and Mr. Sexton, Mr. Miller told the two hosts what to expect if Mr. Trump returned to the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”
I continue to wonder if we’ve become so broken that we won’t be able to put ourselves back together again. I was heartened by my North Shore neighbors who had a slightly bigger parade in their neighborhood in Covington than Temple and I did in the Bywater. The small town is beautiful, and what started out as a cool getaway from New Orleans’ heat became a white flight zone. They had a MAGA approach them on the 4th, who attacked someone and also damaged a truck. The Covington Police came to their rescue, arresting this guy for attacking people who were just exercising their right to Free Speech.
“Covington police make arrest after person attacked while exercising right to free speech.” The guy has a face that only a mother could love, and if he shaved, he could possibly pass as Steven Miller.
The Covington Police Department has made an arrest after it says someone was attacked for exercising their right to free speech on July 4.
According to police, Jeremy Judice was arrested and is facing a charge of simple battery and criminal damage to property.
Police did not disclose details surrounding the attack; however, they issued the following statement saying they take a zero-tolerance approach to violence in the community:
“This kind of behavior will not be tolerated in the City of Covington, regardless of anyone’s political ideology. We are committed to upholding the rights and safety of all individuals in our city and will take decisive action against those who seek to undermine them,” said Chief Michael Ferrell.
WDSU has reached out to the police department for more information on the incident.
Well, he’d better have enough money for a good lawyer. There are a lot of them that live in that neighborhood.
I hope your Independence Weekend brought you some relief and peace.
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If it wasn’t for you I’d be happy If it wasn’t for lies you’d be true I know that you could be just like you should If it wasn’t for bad you’d be good
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Today’s Republican Decision-makers seem hell-bent on killing people. Considering so many of them are hyper-Christian, I find this very strange. I’ve found instances of this in basically all three branches of government today. Steven Miller’s high deportment numbers sending everyday people to death zone countries can only be described as some kind of eugenics experience in trying to increase the percentage of wipipo in the country. The Big Bad Budget-Busting Bill, making its way to law in Congress, will definitely kill people. Then, there’s this SCOTUS ruling that almost made it past me. Imagine handing a lot more power to life-or-death situations to RFK, Jr? Well, that’s exactly what SCOTUS did with the drunk on the Court making the decision.
Aren’t these the same people who scream at women trying to get Health Care over fertilized eggs? This is from USA Today, as reported 2 days ago by Adrianna Rodriguez. “What the Supreme Court Obamacare decision means for RFK Jr.” As if I wasn’t worried enough about ICE killing people and sending them to death zones and the Big Budget-Busting bill removing Medicaid from the neediest people and children. I still haven’t figured out how a 90-year-old in dementia care is going to manage to find a job to access private insurance, but that’s just Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts coming back to haunt us.
The justices reversed a lower court’s ruling that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which under the 2010 law has a major role in choosing what services will be covered, is composed of members who were not validly appointed.
“The Task Force members are removable at will by the Secretary of HHS, and their recommendations are reviewable by the Secretary before they take effect,” he wrote. “So Task Force members are supervised and directed by the Secretary, who in turn answers to the President preserving the chain of command.”
Chain of Command? Are we bombing Iran again? I’m going to have to call Sister Helen PreJean CSJ for another one-on-one conversation about what life means again. Conway, Kavanaugh, and Kennedy need another set of Sunday School lessons. So that article is good for basic information, like, evidently, a certain type of Christians feel they can murder people if they just claim a method that’s in line with whatever their cult made up as a religious exception. Handing people over to RFK Jr. just seems beyond cruel. Mark Joseph Stern has this analysis in Slate. Again, it’s from 2 days ago. “The Supreme Court Just Handed RFK Jr. a New, Extraordinarily Frightening Power.” It’s just another example of SCOTUS and its idea of concentrated power in the Executive branch.
The Supreme Court upheld a key plank of Obamacare against a constitutional attack on Friday by a 6–3 vote. But in the process, the majority wound up handing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. significantly more authority over American health care than Congress ever intended. Kennedy, the current secretary of health and human services, now has unquestioned power to hire and fire members of a key panel that mandates insurance coverage for preventive treatments, and to block its decisions about what insurers must cover. To save the panel, the court destroyed its independence.
Friday’s case Kennedy v. Braidwood Management involved a challenge to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or PSTF. Congress designed this body to consist of medical experts who use their independent judgment to determine which preventive services provide a substantial benefit to patients. A provision of the Affordable Care Act made their decisions binding on insurers, meaning top-rated services must be covered at no cost to patients. Today, the PSTF has determined that more than 40 treatments qualify for mandatory coverage, including many cancer screenings, heart medication, and HIV prevention drugs.
The Supreme Court upheld a key plank of Obamacare against a constitutional attack on Friday by a 6–3 vote. But in the process, the majority wound up handing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. significantly more authority over American health care than Congress ever intended. Kennedy, the current secretary of health and human services, now has unquestioned power to hire and fire members of a key panel that mandates insurance coverage for preventive treatments, and to block its decisions about what insurers must cover. To save the panel, the court destroyed its independence.
Friday’s case Kennedy v. Braidwood Management involved a challenge to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or PSTF. Congress designed this body to consist of medical experts who use their independent judgment to determine which preventive services provide a substantial benefit to patients. A provision of the Affordable Care Act made their decisions binding on insurers, meaning top-rated services must be covered at no cost to patients. Today, the PSTF has determined that more than 40 treatments qualify for mandatory coverage, including many cancer screenings, heart medication, and HIV prevention drugs
The problem with the PSTF is that its structure and operations are likely unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s current precedents. And indeed, in a 2020 decision, the court hinted that this kind of scheme is unconstitutional. There are two main issues: First, it is not entirely clear from the law who is supposed to appoint its members and who, if anyone, has authority to fire them. Second, the ACA states explicitly that the panel “shall be independent and, to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.” Congress seems to have intended it to operate as an independent body with open-ended power to regulate the multibillion-dollar insurance market, subject to little or no political oversight. That setup clashes with the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of executive authority. Specifically, it would make the PSTF’s members “principal officers” who must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. And because its officers are not currently appointed this way, Supreme Court precedent would render its decisions invalid and voluntary.
This is extremely important as HIV Denialism is just one in a long list of RFK Jr’s hobgoblins. Read about Justice Thomas’ complaints about the Beer Guy’s logic at the link. It actually is worth the read. As for the Big Budget-Busting Bill, it’s speeding along to passage today. This is from the Washington Postand Jeff Stein. “Senate GOP tax bill includes largest cut to U.S. safety net in decades. The legislation would enact historic, possibly unprecedented, reductions in Medicaid and food stamps spending.” What I can’t figure out is why they’re not concerned that the people who benefit the most live in Red States, concentrated in rural areas of the country, and are primarily white. Isn’t that their voter base? No wonder Bezos could afford to buy Venice for a day, and his wife could afford all those ugly clothes and that awful plastic-surgery ruined face. We live in a land of monsters.
The Senate Republican tax bill speeding to passage includes the biggest reduction of funding for the federal safety net since at least the 1990s, targeting more than $1 trillion in social spending.
Although the legislation is still estimated to cost more than $3 trillion over the next decade, the Senate GOP tax bill partially pays for its large price tag by slashing spending on Medicaid and food stamps, which congressional Republicans maintain are rife with fraud.
The tax bill centers on making permanent large tax cuts for individual taxpayers, extending the cuts that Republicans first enacted under President Donald Trump’s first term. The bill includes an increase to the standard deduction claimed by most taxpayers, rate reductions for most U.S. households, and a partial version of Trump’s plan to end taxes on tipped wages, among many other provisions.
But it offsets these expensive tax cuts in part through what several experts said may prove to be the most dramatic reductions in safety net spending in modern U.S. history. While last-minute changes to the bill text make precise estimates impossible, the legislation appears on track to cut Medicaid by about 18 percent and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by roughly 20 percent, according to estimates based on projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Previously, the biggest recent cut to food stamps was a roughly 14 percent cut approved by Congress during President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s, according to Bobby Kogan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank. (Food stamp benefits also sharply increased, and then fell, after the expiration of COVID benefits.) The biggest prior cut to Medicaid was during President Ronald Reagan’s term in the 1980s, when Congress and the White House approved a roughly 5 percent reduction to the federal health insurance program that primarily benefits low-income households during his first two years in office, Kogan said.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the Senate tax bill will lead to roughly 12 million fewer people receiving Medicaid and more than 2 million fewer people receiving food stamps.
ThisNew York Timesarticle gets down to the nitty gritty if you’re interested (gifted). “A List of Nearly Everything in the Senate G.O.P. Bill, and How Much It Would Cost or Save.” I bet the bills for Presidential golfing and loafing around Mar-a-Lago are bigger than any money saved by kicking small children off their daily meals.
The tax and domestic policy bill nearing a vote by Senate Republicans includes hundreds of provisions, including extended and expanded tax cuts and significant cuts to Medicaid, food benefits and other programs. It would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt. To become law, it still needs to pass the Senate — where an extended “vote-a-rama” on amendments and rulings by the Senate’s parliamentarian could bring last-minute changes. Then it must gain a second passage through the House and be signed by the president to become law.
Below is a table that lists how nearly every provision would affect the federal budget over 10 years, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in an analysis published Sunday. The budget office measured the legislation as it usually does, taking into account the cost of extending expiring tax cuts. This is a different approach than the one embraced by the Senate’s leaders. The C.B.O. evaluation does not include a handful of policy provisions that do not have direct effects on the federal deficit.
This is from Jennifer Ruben writing at The Contrarian. “The worst bill in modern history. Democrats must make it a career-ender for Republicans.” I can’t imagine Boudreaux and Thibodeaux getting up in their houseboat on the Atchafalaya Basin, not realizing they’ve just been had. But I may be wrong. I’m frankly suggesting that Senator Cassiday lose his license to practice medicine based on how much harm this does.
Senate Republicans over the weekend decided to move forward on the big, ugly bill to rip healthcare coverage from 17 million people, deprive millions of food assistance, and use that money to pay (only partially!) for gigantic tax cuts for the super-rich. Their version is far worse than the House’s handiwork; Senate Republicans want to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid. Apparently, they concluded the House’s $700 billion cut did not throw a sufficient number of people off their healthcare coverage. An estimated 17 million (including those priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges) would lose healthcare coverage
Even those who mouthed concerns about the draconian cuts, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) fell into line, voting to move the bill forward. They are daring voters not to hold them accountable for their monstrous hypocrisy.
Lawmakers are not in the dark. Their constituents, rural hospitals, state and local officials, the Congressional Budget Office, conservativethink tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and their Democratic colleagues have explained the bill’s horrid consequences. Republicans might parrot MAGA talking points, but when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) distributes materials to fellow Republicans highlighting the devastation the bill will cause, only the truly deluded can imagine this is anything but horrid policy. (The Hill quoted a source familiar with the scene at Tuesday’s Senate Republican lunch: “Thom Tillis got up and he had a chart on what the Senate’s provider tax structure will cost different states, including his. His will lose almost $40 billion. He walked through that and said, ‘this will be devastating to my state.’”)
Senate Republicans have been hammered from all sides. On the right, the Committee for a Responsible budget found it would add $3.5-4.2 trillion to the debt and move the Medicare and Social Security trust funds a year closer to insolvency. Meanwhile, Republican senators with Democratic governors (e.g., Josh Stein in North Carolina, Laura Kelly in Kansas, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Janet Mills in Maine) got slammed daily on the consequences of Medicaid, SNAP, and other cuts back home.
Aside from the disastrous policy objections, Republicans should not delude themselves about the political quicksand they stepped in. The reverse-Robin-Hood scheme is deeply unpopular in every recent public poll. A Fox News poll shows only 38% support it, while 59% oppose it. (Among independents, it is a stunning 22-73%.) Quinnipiac’s poll is even worse for MAGA (27-53%; among independents 20-57%.) KFF (35-64%; only 27% of independents support); Pew (49-29%) and The Washington Post and Ipsos (23-42%) are miserable as well.
Perhaps the scariest poll for Republicans was one from Maine showing Collins sure has reason for “concern”: Her favorability is a miserable 14% with disapproval at 57%. Mills, the strongest potential 2026 challenger, has a 51-41% favorability rating. Come to think of it, maybe Collins should forget “concern” and zoom ahead to full-blown panic.
Phillip Bump has these thoughts at the Washington Post. “This is what ICE is doing with the tax dollars you already provide it. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stands to see a sharp increase in its funding under the Republican budget bill.” My understanding is that they have a bigger budget now than the Marines. Miller sure wants to deport him some POC.
But there is another group of people who would also benefit enormously from the bill: staff and officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency which stands to see tens of billions more in funding. An analysis of an earlier version of the bill indicated that “mass deportation would account for almost a quarter of the bill’s total price tag.” So it’s worth stepping back and considering what ICE is doing with the by-contrast modest (but still substantial) funding it currently gets.
We should start by acknowledging that ICE’s hyperactive targeting of immigrants in the U.S. since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January doesn’t exactly reflect current funding levels. Earlier this month, it was reported that ICE was already $1 billion over budget for the fiscal year, driven by the new administration’s focus on deploying the agency to arrest and deport as many immigrants as possible.
What that’s meant, in practice, is a surge in arrests and detentions of immigrants who have not been convicted or even accused of any crime. The number of criminals and accused criminals who have been arrested by ICE and remain detained by ICE is up 128 percent over a year ago. But the number of immigrants with no criminal record arrested and detained by ICE is up more than 1,400 percent — there are more than 15 times as many now as there were then.
In past years, it was generally Customs and Border Protection that arrested more noncriminals, since it was stopping and detaining people seeking to enter the U.S. without authorization. In mid-June 2024, for example, there were 30 times as many noncriminals in ICE detention who’d been arrested by CBP vs. ICE. Now, thanks in part to declining attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the ratio is almost 1 to 1.
The grifting in this administration is astounding. This is from ProPublica. “Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations.” This was investigated by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski.
In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.
In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.
Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.
Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I am silently screaming now. None of this is what should be happening in the United States of America.
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Well, I know I’m not sleeping well at night. How about you?
JJ sent me the link to this horrifying story. It gave me my first share, but now I’m wondering if I’ll actually be able to eat lunch today. This is from the New York Times. “Inside Trump’s Decision. The Times pieced together the days and hours leading up to President Trump’s decision to strike Iran. It’s a story of diplomacy, deception, and a secret that almost got out.” We don’t have to worry about him being around to take that 3 am phone call. The Pentagon was worried about him putting the entire attack plan on Truth Social. I’ve gifted the link to you so you can read the entire thing. You know the Missouri Bombers he blathered about? One fleet was a ruse. Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff at Congressman Don Beyer, tweeted it out.
Inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command, military planners worried that Trump was giving Iran too much warning about an impending strike. So they worked up their own ruse: They had two fleets of B-2 bombers leave Missouri at the same time, one flying east and one flying west. Flight trackers spotted the westward planes, which offered some idea of the timing of a possible attack. But those planes were a decoy.
The eastbound planes crossed the Atlantic undetected, joined with fighter jets and flew into Iranian airspace. At 2:10 a.m. local time yesterday, the lead bomber dropped two of the bunker-busters on the Fordo site. By the end of the mission, 14 of the bombs had fallen.
You may read about the details of the attack at PBS if you aren’t overwhelmed already by the thought of Sex Pest and Drunk, Pet Hegseth being a part of this. This headline from The Hillwon’t make you feel any less queasy. I’m assuming you knew that #FARTUS was also posted that he would help Iran Make Iran Great Again. That was while Hegseth and Rubio were busily telling the press that our hijacked country had no plans for regime change. Remember, if his lips are moving, he’s telling a big ol’ story. “Israel attacking government sites in Iran as Trump floats regime change.” The reporting here is by Sarah Fortinsky.
Israel said it is carrying out attacks on Iranian government sites and “regime targets” — including the notorious Evin Prison — as President Trump muses publicly about a regime change in Tehran.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a social media post at noon local time on Monday that Israeli forces are “currently striking with unprecedented force regime targets and governmental oppression entities in the heart of Tehran,” according to an English translation of the Hebrew statement.
He said those targets include the headquarters of Basij, the paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Evin Prison, used to incarcerate political prisoners and opponents of Iran’s leadership; and the “Destroy Israel” clock in Palestine Square.
Katz said the attacks are also striking “additional regime targets,” including internal security headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards and the ideology headquarters.
Throughout Monday morning, meanwhile, the Israeli military said sirens were sounding across the country as Iran continued to launch missiles targeting Israel.
That sure sounds like a war to me. Peter Nicholas, NBC News, reports that Democrats in the District are finally sounding some kind of alarm. “‘Biden didn’t start any wars’: Democrats sharpen their arguments against Trump’s foreign policy. In the wake of the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, Democrats are pointing to Trump’s own promises that he wouldn’t ensnare the country in foreign conflicts.”
Democrats are seizing on Donald Trump’s surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities to make the case that the world is becoming more dangerous on his watch, not less, and that he is reneging on a promise to avoid foreign military interventions.
The argument strikes at Trump’s contention that his blend of negotiating skills and toughness is enough to keep the United States safe.
In the space of a few days, Trump has made the United States a combatant in another Middle East war that exposes soldiers to potential deadly reprisals, Democrats contend.
In a statement, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin pointed to Trump’s inaugural address, in which he said he would measure his success by “the wars we never get into.”
Yet, Martin said, “against his own words, the president sent bombers into Iran. Americans overwhelmingly do not want to go to war. Americans do not want to risk the safety of our troops abroad.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Several lawmakers said Sunday that they will press the Trump administration for clarity about the attack on Iran and the endgame he envisions. But they are also using the moment to try to undercut Trump’s standing with those who voted for him in the hope he would not get entangled in foreign wars.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said Trump’s commitment was “to get us out of foreign wars.”
“Say what you want about Joe Biden, Joe Biden didn’t start any wars,” Smith said. “He got us out of the one war that we were in [in Afghanistan]. Trump has now started a war with Iran.”
The Guardianhas a headline today that’s spot on. George Bush got led on by his own advisors. Trump’s advisors said no to the mission. Evidently, Trump was taken by strongman Benjamin Netanyahoo! After all that speechifying about Hillary getting us into another World War and how he’d never drag us into something like Dubya did to Iraq and Afghanistan. Here we are. “Like George W Bush, Trump has started a reckless war based on a lie. The Iraq War was built on a lie. Now history is repeating itself.” Mohamad Bazzi has the analysis.
In May 2003, George W Bush landed on the deck of a US aircraft carrier to deliver a triumphant speech, declaring that major combat operations in Iraq had ended – six weeks after he had ordered US troops to invade the country. Bush spoke under a now-infamous banner on the carrier’s bridge that proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished”. It would turn into a case study of American hubris and one of the most mocked photo-ops in modern history.
As Bush made his speech off the coast of San Diego, I was in Baghdad covering the invasion’s aftermath as a correspondent for a US newspaper. It was clear then that the war was far from over, and the US was likely to face a grinding insurgency led by former members of the Iraqi security forces. It would also soon become clear that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was built on a lie: Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not intent on developing them. And Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, despite the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to connect Hussein’s regime to al-Qaida.
Today, Donald Trump has dragged the US into another war based on exaggerations and manipulated intelligence: the Israel-Iran conflict, which began on 13 June when Israel launched a surprise attack killing some of Iran’s top military officials and nuclear scientists, and bombing dozens of targets across the country.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that Israel had to attack because Tehran was working to weaponize its stockpile of enriched uranium and racing to build a nuclear bomb. “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu said, as the first wave of Israeli bombs fell on Iran. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months.”
Before dawn on Sunday, US warplanes and submarines bombed three major nuclear facilities in Iran. In a speech from the White House, Trump declared the operation a “spectacular military success” and said the sites had been “totally obliterated”. Trump added that his goal was to stop “the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.
But does Iran pose the immediate threat that Netanyahu and Trump have claimed?
US intelligence officials, along with the UN’s nuclear watchdog and independent experts, say that while Iran has dramatically increased its supply of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade, there is no evidence it has taken steps to produce a nuclear weapon. In March, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress that America’s intelligence agencies continued “to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. She added that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
I’m sure none of this is lost on us. Mark Landler writes this analysis for The New York Times. “Iran’s Nuclear Dreams May Survive Even a Devastating American Blow. Through revolution and upheaval, the program has become intertwined with the country’s security and national identity.” Let’s hope all of this sinks in before Trump’s Folly starts costing American lives.
By joining Israel’s military campaign against Iran, Mr. Trump has greatly raised the costs for Iran’s leaders in refusing to accept stringent curbs on their uranium enrichment program. Yet, however this conflict ends, he may have given them even more compelling reasons to seek a nuclear deterrent, experts say.
“Any strategic thinker in Iran, present or future, realizes that Iran is located in the Middle East, that its neighbors are Netanyahu’s Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and M.B.S. in Saudi Arabia,” said Professor Alvandi, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
To that list of threats, Iran can now add the United States.
The American bombardment likely inflicted serious damage on the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, and the research complex at Isfahan. Earlier Israeli strikes killed several of Iran’s prominent nuclear scientists, as well as damaging installations. Taken together, that could set back Iran’s program by years.
But bombs alone cannot erase the knowledge that Iranians have accumulated over nearly seven decades, since 1957, when Iran first signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Eisenhower administration. The United States was then encouraging countries to engage in the peaceful exploration of nuclear science through President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative.
In 1967, with American help, Iran built a small research reactor in Tehran that still exists. A year later, it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a symbol of the shah’s desire to be accepted into the club of Western nations.
Flush with cash from 1973 oil shock, the shah then opted to rapidly expand Iran’s civil nuclear program, including developing a homegrown enriching capacity. He sent dozens of Iranian students to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study nuclear engineering.
The shah viewed it as a prestige project that would vault Iran into the front ranks of Middle Eastern countries. But that put him at odds with the United States, which worried that Iran would reprocess spent fuel into fissile material that could be used in a weapon.
“It was an icon of the country having arrived as a major power, with the side idea that if Iraq ever threatened Iran, it could be diverted to military uses,” said Professor Alvandi, who published “Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War.”
Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. Yup, another Republican steps on the detonator. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has a bigger perspective at her Substack, Letters from an American.
In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”
This afternoon, Trump posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
On ABC’s This Week, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said: “It’s way too early to tell what the actual effect on the nuclear program is, and of course, it’s way too early to tell how this plays out, right? I mean, we’ve seen this movie before. Every conflict in the Middle East has its Senator Tom Cottons who promise us mushroom clouds. In the Iraq war it was Condoleezza Rice promising us a mushroom cloud. And initially—and this is true of every one of these wars in Libya, in Iraq, and Afghanistan—initially, things looked pretty good. Saddam Hussein is gone. Muammar Qaddafi is gone. The Afghan Taliban are gone. And then, over time, we start to learn what the cost is. Four thousand, four hundred Americans dead in Iraq. The Taliban back in power. So bottom line, the president has taken a massive, massive gamble here.”
There are already questions about why Trump felt obliged to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites right now. In March, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who oversees all U.S. intelligence, told Congress that the intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program since April, and when Israel attacked Iran on June 12, a sixth round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran was scheduled to begin just two days later, in Oman.
White Christian Nationalists have been at the heart of the big problems in just living your American life, extending their warmongering, hateful, bigoted selves into a second century. Meanwhile, back in the USSR, the bear awakens. Has Trump changed his fealty? This is from the Washington Post. Will he give up his position as RasPutin Fangirl and such to Netanyahoo? “Russia condemns U.S. strikes on Iran but takes no concrete actions. Iran’s foreign minister is in Moscow seeking support, but other than condemning the attack, Putin has not taken any major moves to back Tehran.” I was last night years old when I read that a Russian official told the press there were lots of countries willing to send actual nukes to Iran. It was part of the reason I didn’t sleep last night without a hefty dose of Benadryl. I didn’t snore either, from my poor stuffed sinuses suffering from the humidity and pollen here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday condemned the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran ahead of a meeting with Iran’s top diplomat, describing the strikes as “absolutely unprovoked,” but he has so far stopped short of any more concrete measures to assist Russia’s regional ally.
The U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran have underscored Putin’s declining capacity to influence events in the Middle East — once a key plank of his foreign policy — with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria last year, Moscow’s cooler relations with Israel and Putin’s failed effort to convince President Donald Trump that he could be a mediator in the Iran crisis.
In comments Monday to military graduates, Putin said Washington’s involvement was dangerous and a sharp escalation. “Non-regional powers are also being drawn into the conflict,” he said, referring to the U.S. bombings. “All this is bringing the world to a very dangerous point.”
The conflict has demonstrated the limits so far to Russia’s willingness to assist Iran militarily — after both sides signed a strategic agreement in January without a mutual defense clause.
I’m going to start wrapping things up, but I wanted to share a few of the reporters outside the beltway. Jude Legum writes this for Popular Information. “A new war based on manipulated intelligence. More than two decades after the Iraq War commenced, history is repeating itself.” Even the weirdos he put in his cabinet saw the intelligence and just thumbed their noses at them. He “knew” better and used his instincts.
On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush began the bombing campaign in Iraq, justifying the attack with manipulated and bogus intelligence. Twenty-two years later, history is repeating itself.
The clear judgment of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not authorized a nuclear weapons program. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s top intelligence official, said so publicly on March 25, 2025. “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard asserted in her opening statement.
Last Tuesday, asked about Gabbard’s testimony on Iran, Trump said, “I don’t care what she said.” On Friday, as his rhetoric became more bellicose, Trump was reminded of that March assessment and asked: “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon?” Trump did not say that the intelligence community had gathered new information since March. Rather, Trump said that “my intelligence community is wrong.” He also publicly rebuked Gabbard again, adding, “She’s wrong.”
Now, to justify the bombing of several sites in Iran, top members of the Trump administration claim Iran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, Vice President JD Vance said that the administration believed “the Iranians were rushing toward a nuclear weapons program.” That directly contradicts the March assessment by the IC that no such program had been authorized, much less commenced.
Vance dodged questions on whether the intelligence has changed since March:
KRISTEN WELKER: Why launch this strike now? Has the intelligence changed Mr. Vice President?
VANCE: A couple things about that Kristen. What Tulsi said back in March is that Iran was producing highly-enriched Uranium that was only consistent with them wanting to build a nuclear weapon.
The transcript of Gabbard’s Congressional hearing reveals Vance’s characterization of Gabbard’s remarks is false and misleading. She did say that Iran was enriching Uranium, something that has been true for many years, and that its enriched uranium stockpile was higher than that of other nations without nuclear weapons. But she was clear that they had not taken steps to build a nuclear weapon, nor had such a program been authorized.
On Sunday, in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the intelligence about whether Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon “irrelevant.”
Margaret Brennan: Are you saying there that the United States did not see intelligence that the supreme leader had ordered weaponization?
Rubio: That’s irrelevant. I see that question being asked in the media all the time. That’s an irrelevant question. They have everything they need to build a weapon.
Brennan: No, but that is the key point in U.S. intelligence assessments. You know that.
Rubio: No, it’s not.
Brennan: Yes, it was.
Rubio: No, it’s not.
At a Pentagon press conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also avoided answering whether the intelligence assessment had changed since March …
Jennifer Ruben, now writing at The Contrarian, has the term I’ve been using for at least two weeks. “Trump’s wags the dog. Risky military action disrupts the political dynamic. He’s been trying to get us off the topics of Doge, the Big Beautiful Budget-Busting bill, and the incredible cuts floating around the Senate.
Donald Trump, without authorization from Congress and without substantive consultation, took a fateful step in ordering the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, based on the false pretext that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear weapon. The consequences of this move have yet to unfold, and the breathtaking array of outcomes—from another forever war to a failed state in Iran to a quickly negotiated nuclear deal—makes it impossible to predict how this will affect Trump’s agenda and his ongoing assault on democracy.
His failure to get authorization for a strike in a war in which the U.S. was acting offensively, despite there being no immediate threat (no one with sense believes Trump’s contradiction of our own intelligence that Iran was on the verge of making a bomb) raises grave constitutional and political consequences.
Despite Trump’s war-talk Saturday night, Vice President JD Vance insists we are not at war. That, as even this crew understands, would require congressional action. On one level, such an assertion is preposterous—as we have indeed become combatants in an extended, ongoing war.
Whatever fiction the administration advances, as Tom Nichols points out, “the enemy gets a vote.” The most likely scenario, he suggests, is not as tidy as Trump would have us believe:
The Iranian regime will be wounded but will likely survive; the nuclear program will be delayed but will likely continue; the region will become more unstable but is unlikely to erupt into a full-blown war involving the United States.
Should we get bogged down in an extended war or face retaliation, Trump’s unilateral action based on a lie (not even DNI Tulsi Gabbard thinks Iran was on the verge of making a bomb) will be viewed as a gross error and a constitutional overstep.
I’m ready for No Drama Obama to make a comeback. Trump is an exhausting and soul-snatching miscreant. I’m so tired but yet I cannot sleep. How are you doing? We shall live in Peace someday.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
And the best Trump could down was stick in the costs of a building finished five years ago to inflate the final costs. He was easily finished off by the Central Banker, who deals with far more sophisticated math than that. The visit was likely a distraction from the ongoing Epstein situation, from which he cannot extricate himself. That didn’t go as planned, as the release of a new South Park episode ate up the airwaves at the end of the week. I managed to find a place where I could watch it outside the graph of Paramount, which just got its wish to sell itself to Sky Dance. (No relationship to us and an insult of a name to dakinis on all planes of existence. “Sermon on the ’Mount” (South Park Season 27 Episode 1) is the funniest satire I’ve seen in years.
It’s all enough to make me do a Highland Fling in the middle of this wretched heat and humidity. I’ll just settle by singing Scotland the Brave. However, all the fun may be here as we look forward to the midterm elections. This is from AXIOS. “Scoop: DNC targets vulnerable House Republicans with Epstein ads.” The thing that still worries me the most is that the poor women who were the child victims of Epstein have to see all this.
It’s times like these when I’m glad my new TV is going on its third year in the box it came in. ProPublica has uncovered an American Scrooge. “His Former Company Got Caught Employing Undocumented Workers. Now He’s Profiting Off an Immigrant Detention Camp. Disaster Management Group is one contractor behind the nation’s largest detention camp, to be built at Fort Bliss. It’s run by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty to a scheme to hire and conceal undocumented workers. ” Isn’t this what America is all about these days?
We’re getting details about the last Trump exchange of prisoners, and it’s about par for the course for Trump to have a murderer sent back to us. This is from the New York Times. “Convicted Murderer Released by Trump From Venezuelan Prison Is Free in U.S. At least some American officials knew that Dahud Hanid Ortiz had been convicted of a triple murder when he was put on the plane to the United States.” Well, isn’t that special?
Trump’s homegrown murderers and rapists get deals. This brings me to Gislaine Maxwell, who is suddenly getting a lot of visitors looking for something or another. This is from NBC News. It’s just breaking and is reported by Chloe Atkins and Dareh Gregorian. “DOJ’s Maxwell questioning done for the day, her attorney says.” Do you suppose it was a merry meet?
These are the kinds of stories that make me think my country has been flushed down a dirty toilet. I can’t imagine any previous modern president doing this. The closest thing from history that was this barbaric was when Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee to Oklahoma via The Trail of Tears. There was also Wounded Knee, where hundreds of the Lakota people were murdered for their land. We think that the Civil War ended slavery and that we began making a better Union for all of us. It’s so alarming that it’s been dismantled so quickly by so few. Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The last horrid act of attempted mass termination of our indigenous nations was in 1956.
I still don’t understand how property crimes can be lumped in with major crimes like sexual assault, murder, or battery, but then I don’t consider my car an extension of my genitalia. I also don’t understand how any American president can get away with defying judicial orders. Again, it seems we are on a fast, downward spiral to banana republic status. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him. A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of lawsuits against Trump policies shows dozens of examples of defiance, delay, and dishonesty, which experts say pose an unprecedented threat to the U.S. legal system.” Justin Jouvenal has the lede.
Ed Maza, writing for HuffPo, has this story. “‘Reeks Of A Cover-Up’: Ex-Trump Official Suspects ‘Embarrassing’ Info In Epstein Files. Miles Taylor predicted that Trump will create distractions to keep people from talking about the Epstein case.”
The AP reports that Israeli forces are pushing farther and farther into Gaza. “Israeli forces push into parts of a central Gaza city that the war had largely spared.” It appears that Netanyahoo is using the massive amount of chaos created by Trump’s irrational Foreign Policies to conquer the country and expel its rightful citziens. This area is also a staging ground for groups providing aid. Trump has lost interest in the region since he’s so involved with Epstein reports.
Well, they’ve got a lot of days left to kill off more of us. Let’s see how it goes. Down here in Lousyana, they’re just killing us off with not much excuse at all. A large Coastal restoration project that was funded by the Gulf Oil Spill settlement has been shut down by our crazy governor and the swampbillies in the legislature. There’s an incredible heatwave here for the next three days, and I’m just trying to stay as dry and cool as possible, but I have a feeling I’ll be cold, bathtub-bound for most of that time. This is from our local TV station, WDSU. “Louisiana officially cancels state’s largest coastal project.” Just write death by MAGA’s love of oil in my obit if I don’t make it.
What’s that old saying about an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? It makes me believe that some people really do not want to be taught the basics of reality. My first experience with meteorologists came when I was hired by the Global Weather Wings of the Navy and Air Force to help them improve their process of making forecasts and getting them out way back in the early 1990s. The motivation was the death of soldiers and the accompanying loss of equipment of troops in a huge sandstorm in the Middle East, and a look back on the loss of helicopters and troops trying to rescue the Iran Hostages. A lot came out of that effort, including looking for better types of radar, mitigation, forecasting in general, and then alert systems. My clearance only went so far, so the Birds in the Back did a lot of work I never really saw. I just know the systematic approach to it all caused a lot more success in avoiding weather in the Gulf Wars that followed.
The moral of the story is to make sure your phone will send you emergency alerts from NOAA and from your local emergency center. Then, take it seriously. I lived my entire young life with Tornado Sirens. Each state needs to be prepared and Texas screwed up. The last perspective I want to share is from the Substack of Heather Cox Richardson. Massive floods have been known to be historical events that can change the course of things. ”
It’s a long article, and it basically starts with his family background. Maybe BB can give us some hints as to why he turned into such a monster. This concluding paragraph shows what a monster this man became.
Chain of Command? Are we bombing Iran again? I’m going to have to call Sister Helen PreJean CSJ for another one-on-one conversation about what life means again. Conway, Kavanaugh, and Kennedy need another set of Sunday School lessons. So that article is good for basic information, like, evidently, a certain type of Christians feel they can murder people if they just claim a method that’s in line with whatever their cult made up as a religious exception. Handing people over to RFK Jr. just seems beyond cruel. Mark Joseph Stern has this analysis in Slate. Again, it’s from 2 days ago. “The Supreme Court Just Handed RFK Jr. a New, Extraordinarily Frightening Power.” It’s just another example of SCOTUS and its idea of concentrated power in the Executive branch.
This is extremely important as HIV Denialism is just one in a long list of RFK Jr’s hobgoblins. Read about Justice Thomas’ complaints about the Beer Guy’s logic at the link. It actually is worth the read. As for the Big Budget-Busting Bill, it’s speeding along to passage today. This is from the Washington Post and Jeff Stein. “Senate GOP tax bill includes largest cut to U.S. safety net in decades. The legislation would enact historic, possibly unprecedented, reductions in Medicaid and food stamps spending.” What I can’t figure out is why they’re not concerned that the people who benefit the most live in Red States, concentrated in rural areas of the country, and are primarily white. Isn’t that their voter base? No wonder Bezos could afford to buy Venice for a day, and his wife could afford all those ugly clothes and that awful plastic-surgery ruined face. We live in a land of monsters.
This New York Times article gets down to the nitty gritty if you’re interested (gifted). “A List of Nearly Everything in the Senate G.O.P. Bill, and How Much It Would Cost or Save.” I bet the bills for Presidential golfing and loafing around Mar-a-Lago are bigger than any money saved by kicking small children off their daily meals.
Phillip Bump has these thoughts at the Washington Post. “This is what ICE is doing with the tax dollars you already provide it. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stands to see a sharp increase in its funding under the Republican budget bill.” My understanding is that they have a bigger budget now than the Marines. Miller sure wants to deport him some POC.
The grifting in this administration is astounding. This is from ProPublica. “Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations.” This was investigated by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski.
You may read about the details of the attack at PBS if you aren’t overwhelmed already by the thought of Sex Pest and Drunk, Pet Hegseth being a part of this. This headline from The Hill won’t make you feel any less queasy. I’m assuming you knew that #FARTUS was also posted that he would help Iran Make Iran Great Again. That was while Hegseth and Rubio were busily telling the press that our hijacked country had no plans for regime change. Remember, if his lips are moving, he’s telling a big ol’ story. “Israel attacking government sites in Iran as Trump floats regime change.” The reporting here is by Sarah Fortinsky.
That sure sounds like a war to me. Peter Nicholas, NBC News, reports that Democrats in the District are finally sounding some kind of alarm. “‘Biden didn’t start any wars’: Democrats sharpen their arguments against Trump’s foreign policy. In the wake of the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, Democrats are pointing to Trump’s own promises that he wouldn’t ensnare the country in foreign conflicts.”
The Guardian has a headline today that’s spot on. George Bush got led on by his own advisors. Trump’s advisors said no to the mission. Evidently, Trump was taken by strongman Benjamin Netanyahoo! After all that speechifying about Hillary getting us into another World War and how he’d never drag us into something like Dubya did to Iraq and Afghanistan. Here we are. “Like George W Bush, Trump has started a reckless war based on a lie. The Iraq War was built on a lie. Now history is repeating itself.” Mohamad Bazzi has the analysis.
I’m sure none of this is lost on us. Mark Landler writes this analysis for The New York Times. “Iran’s Nuclear Dreams May Survive Even a Devastating American Blow. Through revolution and upheaval, the program has become intertwined with the country’s security and national identity.” Let’s hope all of this sinks in before Trump’s Folly starts costing American lives.
Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. Yup, another Republican steps on the detonator. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has a bigger perspective at her Substack, Letters from an American.
White Christian Nationalists have been at the heart of the big problems in just living your American life, extending their warmongering, hateful, bigoted selves into a second century. Meanwhile, back in the USSR, the bear awakens. Has Trump changed his fealty? This is from the Washington Post. Will he give up his position as RasPutin Fangirl and such to Netanyahoo? “Russia condemns U.S. strikes on Iran but takes no concrete actions. Iran’s foreign minister is in Moscow seeking support, but other than condemning the attack, Putin has not taken any major moves to back Tehran.” I was last night years old when I read that a Russian official told the press there were lots of countries willing to send actual nukes to Iran. It was part of the reason I didn’t sleep last night without a hefty dose of Benadryl. I didn’t snore either, from my poor stuffed sinuses suffering from the humidity and pollen here.
I’m going to start wrapping things up, but I wanted to share a few of the reporters outside the beltway. Jude Legum writes this for Popular Information. “A new war based on manipulated intelligence. More than two decades after the Iraq War commenced, history is repeating itself.” Even the weirdos he put in his cabinet saw the intelligence and just thumbed their noses at them. He “knew” better and used his instincts.
Jennifer Ruben, now writing at The Contrarian, has the term I’ve been using for at least two weeks. “Trump’s wags the dog. Risky military action disrupts the political dynamic. He’s been trying to get us off the topics of Doge, the Big Beautiful Budget-Busting bill, and the incredible cuts floating around the Senate.
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