Representative Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, a nine-term congressman who was the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, died on Wednesday, his family said in a statement. He was 75.
Mr. Connolly died at his home surrounded by his family, the statement said. It did not give a cause of death. Mr. Connolly had announced in 2024 that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus.
In April, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election in 2026. He also said he would soon relinquish his spot on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
U.S. Rep. Gerald “Gerry” Connolly, an outspoken Democrat who sought key reforms in the federal government while bringing transformational development to his populous Virginia district, died Wednesday. He was 75….
The spirited and at times bullheaded Fairfax Democrat became known for his voluble nature and willingness to engage in spirited debates. In one hearing, he accused Republicans of engaging in a witch hunt against the IRS, asking a witness if they ever read Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”
“I am heartbroken over the loss of my dear friend,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. “To me, he exemplified the very best of public service.” He said Connolly “met every challenge with tenacity and purpose, including his final battle with cancer, which he faced with courage, grace, and quiet dignity.”
A fixture of Virginia politics for three decades, Connolly was first elected to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 1995. On the county board, he steered the transition of northern Virginia’s Tysons Corner from a traffic-heavy mall area to a downtown business hub.
In 2003, Connolly was elected board chairman, and he continued pushing for transportation investment that had been debated among officials for decades. Connolly sought billions in state and federal dollars to develop the regional rail system’s Silver Line connecting the national capital region to Tysons Corner.
Connolly’s dream was realized with the Silver Line’s opening in 2014, and eight years later, the rail line was extended an extra 11 miles (18 kilometers) to reach Dulles International Airport.
What’s happening in politics today:
The news getting the most attention today is the so-called “big beautiful bill” that Trump and House Republicans are trying to pass and send to the Senate. Yesterday, we got some shocking news about this nightmare bill. Not only does it cut nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid. It also cuts Medicare by more than $500 billion from Medicare. If you watched Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night, you heard all about it. In case you missed it, here is O’Donnell’s interview with Rep. Brendan Boyle:
Rep. Boyle: The one thing I would point out, though, is this bill is actually significantly worse [than the GOP’s ACA repeal attempt in 2017], because this piece of legislation will throw 13.5 million, almost 14 million Americans off their healthcare.
First, you’re cutting people off Medicaid. But second, this does include very deep cuts to Obamacare as well. And finally, I have breaking news for you tonight, that literally just came out in the last few minutes as I’ve been sitting here: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the official authority on these figures, has now confirmed that this bill, in addition to Medicaid cuts, in addition to Obamacare cuts, includes $500 BILLION WORTH OF CUTS TO MEDICARE that is now in this bill as well.
Lawrence O’Donnell: That is breaking news…$500 billion in cuts to Medicare. That’s the biggest cut to Medicare ever contemplated by the Congress. There have been, over the years, trims to Medicare for budget reasons, but nothing on this order has ever been done to Medicare. What happened? Talk more about that, about that breaking news piece that the CBO has projected in here. Is that because of interactions that Medicare has with the Medicaid program?
Rep. Boyle: Yeah, and forgive me this…given your great experience on the Senate Finance Committee, you’ll understand this, but it does get a bit wonky for normal folks. Basically it’s because of those interactions and specifically because of a provision called “Paygo” that will force a certain amount of Medicare sequestration, again, to the tune–and these aren’t my figures, these are the Congressional Budget Office official figures–$500 billion.
So they take the biggest cuts to Medicaid in American history. They take massive cuts to Obamacare. And then, add on top of that, the impact of all their policies mean a result of the biggest cuts to Medicare in American history on top of all of it.
House Republicans are pushing to slash nearly $1 trillion from two of the nation’s bedrock safety net programs, Medicaid and food stamps, as part of their sweeping package aimed at enacting President Donald Trump’s agenda. If the legislation is approved, millions of Americans could lose access to these benefits as a result of a historic pullback in federal support.
Trump has repeatedly vowed not to touch Medicaid, while GOP lawmakers insist that their proposals would largely affect adults who could – and should, in their view – be employed. But the actual impact would likely hit a far broader range of Americans, including some of the most vulnerable people the GOP has promised repeatedly to protect, experts say. They include children, people with disabilities and senior citizens.
A sizeable share of the US population depends on these programs. More than 71 million people are enrolled in Medicaid, and roughly 42 million Americans receive food stamps, according to the federal agencies that oversee them.
Hospitals would also feel the financial fallout of the Medicaid cutbacks, which could prompt some to raise their rates for those with job-based insurance and others to close their doors.
States would have to shoulder more of the costs of operating these programs, which could force them to make some tough decisions. Among their options could be slashing enrollment, benefits and provider rates in Medicaid or pulling back on residents’ access to food stamps. They might also shift spending from other state-supported programs such as education and infrastructure or hike taxes.
In addition, grocery store owners are warning that cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as food stamps are formally known, could harm local economies and cost jobs.
Read the details at the CNN link.
The House Rules Committee met under cover of darkness beginning at 1:oo this morning.
House Republicans on Wednesday are set to try to push President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration package across the finish line, hoping to conquer internal divisions and tee up a vote that would send Trump’s sprawling agenda to the Senate.
The House Rules Committee worked through the night on the legislation, trying to push the bill past a procedural test that would allow for a final vote. Lawmakers were still debating its provisions early Wednesday after a committee session that began at 1 a.m.
But the GOP’s narrow majority is far from unified around the proposal. And although Trump visited the U.S. Capitol for a conservative pep rally Tuesday, warring Republican factions on both sides dug in to oppose what is now officially called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The House GOP’s narrow majority means leaders can afford to lose only a handful of votes — and for now, they don’t have the support they need to pass the measure.
The bill would extend tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 that are otherwise due to expire at the end of this year, along with new changes to reflect Trump’s campaign promises — such as no taxes on tips and overtime wages — and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on border security, the White House’s mass deportation campaign and funding for defense priorities and a “Golden Dome” continental missile defense system.
The Congressional Budget Office, lawmakers’ nonpartisan scorekeeper, projects that it will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. The national debt already exceeds $36.2 trillion.
Hard-line conservatives said Tuesday that the legislation did not sufficiently cut spending to pair with trillions of dollars of new tax cuts or extensions of current rates, and they angled for deeper budget reductions to Medicaid and federal benefits programs.
Blue-state Republicans demanded a higher cap on how much people can deduct from their federal taxes to offset what they pay to state and local tax authorities, and they warned that any cuts to the social safety net could cost them their political futures — and hand control of the House to Democrats after the 2026 midterm elections.
The big legislation Republicans are trying to pass this week would shrink economic resources for the poorest Americans while boosting the richest, according to a new analysis by Capitol Hill’s official budget scorekeeper.
The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as it’s officially known, would shrink household resources for the lowest-income households by 2% in 2027 and 4% in 2033, mainly because of cuts to health and nutrition programs.
Food Stamps are on the chopping block
”By contrast, resources would increase by an amount equal to 4 percent for households in the highest decile in 2027 and 2 percent in 2033, mainly because of reductions in… taxes they owe,” CBO director Phillip Swagel wrote in a letter to Democrats.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, requested the CBO analysis of the bill’s distributional effects for the top and bottom 10% of households by annual income.
“This is what Republicans are fighting for – lining the pockets of their billionaire donors while children go hungry and families get kicked off their health care,” Boyle said in a statement. “CBO’s nonpartisan analysis makes it crystal clear: Donald Trump and House Republicans are selling out the middle class to make the ultra-rich even richer.”
The legislation uses about $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to help pay for $3.8 trillion in tax cuts that benefit all income groups, but especially wealthier Americans. The CBO has previously estimated the legislation would shrink Medicaid enrollment by more than 7 million, including through increased eligibility checks and limits on benefits for people without jobs.
What will happen to the U.S. debt if the bill passes the Senate in it’s current form?
The United States hit its record debt level at the end of 1945, after a world war and the Great Depression.
That record, in which the debt was briefly larger than the size of the entire economy, is almost certain to be broken in the next several years. Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office published in January showed that the country was on track to overtake it in 2032 — and that was before the Republicans’ large tax and spending bill was taken into account.
Under the G.O.P. megabill being considered in the House, budget experts now say, the U.S. debt would blow past the record even sooner and climb significantly higher in coming decades.
America has had periods of high debt before, but they have tended to occur during wars, recessions or other major shocks. Generally, federal deficits have been lower during periods of low unemployment. Today, there is no war or recession to easily explain the rapidly increasing pace of borrowing.
Because the government has been spending more than it collects in taxes over the past two decades, the debt has been growing. Without any changes to existing law, the Congressional Budget Office predicts the debt will rise to about 117 percent of the economy’s size by 2034, higher than the 1945 record.
The Republicans’ bill would widen the gap further by extending and expanding tax cuts and increasing military spending, partly offset by spending cuts in other areas. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that favors debt reduction, estimates that the nation’s debt could be as high as 129 percent of the economy by 2034 under those plans.
More details at the NYT. I’ve run out of gift links for this month, unfortunately.
The president went to Capitol Hill to urge Republicans to unite behind a budget-busting budget bill, and Axios reported that his strong-arm tactics were putting conservatives into a precarious position.
“Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill‘ is projected to add trillions to the deficit over the next decade — rattling conservatives who have long warned that the U.S. is barreling toward fiscal catastrophe,” Axios reported. “Some Republicans now find themselves trapped between two of the party’s most animating principles: Deficit reduction vs. absolute loyalty to Trump.”
The White House is hoping the budget bill will receive a vote on the House floor this week, and the president and his aides have brushed off warnings that the tax cuts embedded in the measure would explode the national debt without politically toxic cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
“This tax bill’s enormity is being underplayed … [It] will cost more than the 2017 tax cuts, the pandemic CARES Act, Biden’s stimulus, and the Inflation Reduction Act combined,” Jessica Riedl, a budget specialist at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told Yahoo Finance.
The Trump administration claims Biden created the deficits and Trump policies will lower the debt.
“[Those projections] assume consistent economic growth,” Jim Millstein, a former chief restructuring officer at the Treasury Department, told Bloomberg. “Just imagine the Trump tariffs … cause a recession. They are risking a fiscal disaster.”
For decades, budget hawks warned that America’s debt load was unsustainable and that runaway spending financed with borrowed money was eventually going to scare investors away from lending to the United States. Those fears are now taking hold more strongly in the bond market, and are at risk of spreading further.
Tax cuts pushed by the Trump administration are amplifying debt and deficit concerns among bond investors, a powerful group of market players who strongly influence how much it costs for the government to finance its budget. The buying and selling of government debt, known as Treasuries, also influences interest rates on a wide variety of debt extended to American households and businesses, including mortgages, credit cards and car loans.
Those investors were already on edge over President Trump’s whipsawing tariff policy. Then this week’s attempt to push through sweeping tax cuts without significantly slashing spending — in what the president has called a “big, beautiful bill” — set off a fresh bout of bond market turmoil. Mr. Trump put more pressure on Republican lawmakers on Tuesday, visiting Capitol Hill and warning that failing to advance the bill would lead to higher taxes.
Since dropping below 4 percent in early April, the 10-year Treasury yield has risen back above 4.5 percent, a large move reflecting deficit worries. The moves for the 30-year yield this year have also been stark: It has jumped above 5 percent, its highest level in about a year and a half.
As you probably know, that’s how much we have to pay the bondholders.
Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, warned that volatility in the Treasury market could add to already heightened uncertainty about the economic outlook.
That risks making people “even more cautious about how they engage,” he said. “If that happens, then I’ll have to assess the extent to which that should change my outlook on how the economy is going to perform.”
House Republicans’ internal negotiations on the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” went south Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, with GOP hardliners publicly digging in their heels against the legislation.
Why it matters: Some of the anger centers on a deal House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is nearing with blue-state Republicans to raise the State and Local Tax Deduction cap.
“I think, actually, we’re further away from a deal because that SALT cap increase upset a lot of conservatives,” House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said in a Newsmax interview.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), another GOP holdout, told Axios in a text message: “THINGS ARE NOT LOOKING GOOD!!”
State of play: Johnson and a group of House Republicans from New York, California and New Jersey were close to a deal on SALT as of Tuesday night, Axios’ Hans Nichols reported.
The deal would have raised the SALT cap to $40,000 a year for those making up to $500,000.
The income phaseout would grow by 1% for 10 years, and then the deduction would become permanent.
Yes, but: Johnson’s right flank has long been skeptical of the SALT cap, which would increase the deficit and disproportionately benefit taxpayers in high-tax Democratic states.
Some conservative hardliners also feel the bill doesn’t go far enough in cutting Medicaid and nutrition assistance spending.
I don’t buy it. My guess is the right-wingers will vote for it in the end. But if they don’t go with the SALT increase, blue state Republicans are going to lose their seats. In fact, if this bill passes, I think that will guarantee Democrats take the House in 2026.
I’m going to end there. All this talk about tax cuts, cuts to social programs, and the exploding U.S. debt are making me very tired and depressed. Take care, everyone!
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Trump is touring the Middle East, looking for graft as president and grift for his family business. Most presidents choose to visit a U.S. ally like Canada or Great Britain as their first foreign trip, but Trump goes directly to the richest, most corrupt, least democratic countries where he can score lucrative deals for himself. On the trip, the big story is that he wants to accept the gift of an airplane from the Emir of Qatar. This would of course be wildly unconstitutional and unethical.
Trump was in Saudi Arabia yesterday. Here’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary from last night.
RIYADH, May 13 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump kicked off his trip to the Gulf on Tuesday with a surprise announcement that the United States will lift long-standing sanctions on Syria, and a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the U.S.
The U.S. agreed to sell Saudi Arabia an arms package worth nearly $142 billion, according to the White House which called it the largest “defense cooperation agreement” Washington has ever done.
The end of sanctions on Syria would be a huge boost for a country that has been shattered by more than a decade of civil war. Rebels led by current President Ahmed al-Sharaa toppled President Bashar al-Assad last December.
Speaking at an investment forum in Riyadh at the start of a deals-focused trip that also brought a flurry of diplomacy, Trump said he was acting on a request to scrap the sanctions by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“Oh what I do for the crown prince,” Trump said, drawing laughs from the audience. He said the sanctions had served an important function but that it was now time for the country to move forward.
Jamal Kashoggi
Of course one of the things he did for the crown prince was to overlook the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi.
Trump and the Saudi crown prince signed an agreement covering energy, defense, mining and other areas. Trump has sought to strengthen relations with the Saudis to improve regional ties with Israel and act as a bulwark against Iran.
The agreement covers deals with more than a dozen U.S. defense companies for areas including air and missile defense, air force and space, maritime security and communications, a White House fact sheet said.
It was not clear whether the deal included Lockheed F-35 jets, which sources say have been discussed. The Saudi prince said the total package could reach $1 trillion when further agreements are reached in the months ahead.
It’s not just the “gesture” of a $400 million luxury plane that President Donald Trump says he’s smart to accept from Qatar. Or that he effectively auctioned off the first destination on his first major foreign trip, heading to Saudi Arabia because the kingdom was ready to make big investments in U.S. companies.
It’s not even that the Trump family has fast-growing business ties in the Middle East that run deep and offer the potential of vast profits.
Instead, it’s the idea that the combination of these things and more — deals that show the close ties between a family whose patriarch oversees the U.S. government and a region whose leaders are fond of currying favor through money and lavish gifts — could cause the United States to show preferential treatment to Middle Eastern leaders when it comes to American affairs of state.
The Trump sons have been seeking out deals for the familiy business
Before Trump began his visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, his sons Eric and Donald Jr. had already traveled the Middle East extensively in recent weeks. They were drumming up business for The Trump Organization, which they are running in their father’s stead while he’s in the White House.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Eric Trump announced plans for an 80-story Trump Tower in Dubai, the UAE’s largest city. He also attended a recent cryptocurrency conference there with Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and son of Trump’s do-everything envoy to the Mideast, Steve Witkoff.
“We are proud to expand our presence in the region,” Eric Trump said last month in announcing that Trump Tower Dubai was set to start construction this fall.
The presidential visit to the region, as his children work the same part of the world for the family’s moneymaking opportunities, puts a spotlight on Trump’s willingness to embrace foreign dealmaking while in the White House, even in the face of growing concerns that doing so could tempt him to shape U.S. foreign policy in ways that benefit his family’s bottom line.
The strategic pitch also included the possibility of a detente with Israel and US access to Syrian oil and gas reserves, according to sources familiar with the effort.
Jonathan Bass, a pro-Trump activist, met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa for four hours in Damascus on April 30, alongside Syrian activists and representatives from Gulf Arab states.
That formed part of a broader push to broker a meeting between the two leaders, which occurred on Wednesday.
It was the first time in 25 years that the leaders of the US and Syria had met, and came after a surprise announcement from Trump that the US would lift all sanctions on Syria.
In Riyadh, Trump also embarrassed himself by saluting Saudi generals.
President Donald Trump saluted Saudi Arabian generals as they lined up to greet him during his visit to Riyadh, the first stop in his four-day tour of the Middle East.
There has been a discussion in recent years about the proper etiquette for presidents saluting the military, particularly those from other nations.
A returned salute by Trump to a North Korean general during his first term sparked criticism, with some saying he should not have shown respect to a hostile nation. Others said it was courteous to return the gesture.
The salute has not sparked the controversy that followed the emergence of video that showed the president saluting the North Korean general during his first term.
But it comes as Trump leads a large delegation of top officials from his administration and leaders in the business world, as he seeks to discuss peace in the Middle East and improving trade and investment.
Trump’s inappropriate behavior doesn’t shock people anymore; it’s expected that he’ll be an embarrassment to the country wherever he goes.
Qatar signed an agreement Wednesday to purchase 160 jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing for Qatar Airways.
The agreement was signed by both President Donald Trump and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani during Trump’s visit to the Gulf Arab country.
Trump said the deal was worth $200 billion and included 160 jets.
“So it’s over $200 billion but 160 in terms of the Jets, that’s fantastic,” Trump said.
“So that’s a record, Kelly, then congratulations to Boeing,” he added, directing to his comments to Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who was in the room.
Boeing could certainly use the help. Orders last year effectively ground to a halt after a door plug blew off of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max at the beginning of 2024, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane. Even with a rebound in orders toward the end of 2024, Boeing’s gross orders were just 569 for all of last year — down a stunning 60% from 2023.
Also not helping Boeing was a massive strike in the fall. About 33,000 machinists hit the picket lines in September, and Boeing didn’t restart production until early December. That sank Boeing’s deliveries to just 348 planes last year, down 34 percent from 2023.
And that was before Trump’s tariffs hit.
Of course the big issue today is the plane that Trump wants to accept from Qatar.
Donald Trump has doubled down on why he wants to accept a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar, a country where he traveled to today to negotiate business deals, with the US president portraying the $400m aircraft as an opportunity too valuable to refuse.
“The plane that you’re on is almost 40 years old,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity during an Air Force One interview on the Middle East trip, where he is also visiting Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
“When you land and you see Saudi Arabia, you see UAE and you see Qatar, and they have these brand-new Boeing 747s, mostly. You see ours next to it – this is like a totally different plane.”
Clearly irritated by questions about the ethical criticism of accepting such a lavish gift as president, Trump insisted American prestige was at stake. “We’re the United States of America. I believe we should have the most impressive plane.”
The timing of Trump’s visit has raised eyebrows, coming just weeks after the Trump Organization secured a deal with Qatar for a luxury resort and golf course development outside the capital, Doha, called Trump International Golf Club & Villas….
But the idea of accepting a plane from Qatar has triggered alarm across the political spectrum. The Democratic representative Ritchie Torres condemned it as a “flying grift” that violates the constitution’s emoluments clause, which explicitly prohibits federal officials from accepting valuable gifts from foreign powers without congressional approval.
Even staunch Trump allies have broken ranks, including the Texas senator Ted Cruz, who warned that the aircraft deal “poses significant espionage and surveillance problems”, while the West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito said bluntly she’d “be checking for bugs”.
On Sunday night, as the public first learned about Donald Trump’s plan to accept a superluxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from his friends in Qatar to be used as Air Force One, the president was eager to defend the arrangement. The plane, the Republican argued online, would be “FREE OF CHARGE.”
Trump returned to the point a few days later, asking why taxpayers should be “forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars” for a plane “when they can get it for FREE” from Qatar. He added soon after that only “a stupid person [would] say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”
Even if the luxury jet were free, this arrangement would still be a legal, ethical and political mess. But there’s a related problem: The “free” plane wouldn’t be free. NBC News reported:
“Converting a Qatari-owned 747 jet into a new Air Force One for President Donald Trump would involve installing multiple top-secret systems, cost over $1 billion and take years to complete, three aviation experts told NBC News. They said that accepting the 13-year-old jet would likely cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars over time, noting that refurbishing the commercial plane would exceed its current value of $400 million.”
Politico had a related report that noted it “could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars” to retrofit Qatar’s “gift” into a makeshift Air Force One.
“This isn’t really a gift,” said Rep. Joe Courtney told Politico. The Connecticut Democrat, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and helps oversee its panel on executive airlift, added, “You’d basically have to tear the plane down to the studs and rebuild it to meet all the survivability, security and communications requirements of Air Force One. It’s a massive undertaking — and an unfunded one at that.”
In other words, when Trump says the jet from Qatar would be “FREE OF CHARGE,” it’s true that it would be free for him — the president wouldn’t have to reach for his own wallet — but it wouldn’t be free to us, the American taxpayers.
I wonder if anyone is going to be able to talk Trump out of this madness.
Even if the luxury jet from Qatar were free, this "gift" would still be a legal and ethical mess. But there's a related problem:The free plane would cost American taxpayers a fortune.
What a spectacle! There they were yesterday, assembled in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, autocrats and plutocrats and kleptocrats, gathered to enjoy each other’s company under the benevolent patronage of their host, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Saudi Arabia was an appropriate destination for Donald Trump’s first foreign trip in his second term as president. He chose to visit not a democracy but a despotism; not a free nation but one of the world’s most unfree; not a land of tolerance but of repression.
And Trump made it clear yesterday that he did not consider these features unfortunate or undesirable aspects of life under the House of Saud. There was not a hint of criticism or even of hesitation in the fulsome praise Trump heaped upon his hosts. The American president admires the Saudi achievements in autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy.
And so Trump paid homage to his “friend,” Mohammed bin Salman, who rules without consent and who brooks no dissent. “I like him a lot. I like him too much,” the president said. So much for the late Jamal Khashoggi. As to the kingdom over which bin Salman rules, Trump said the United States has “no stronger partner.” So much for the free nations with whom we are allied.
And Trump emphasized that the achievements of Saudi Arabia that he admires have nothing to do with democratic principles or ideas of freedom. Quite the opposite. He disparaged those who supported efforts at democratization and liberalization in the region—“the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits.” [….]
Once upon a time, when American presidents still believed in the principles of the American republic, they accepted that they still had to work with despotisms like Saudi Arabia. Still, they mostly tried to move them along, even if slowly, toward the goal of a freer society….
No longer. The very word “liberalization” now seems antique. In the era of Trump and Putin and Xi and bin Salman and many others, autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy are the way of the world….
More than two dozen American titans of business participated in a business lunch with bin Salman and Trump. They no doubt paid appropriate homage to the two autocrats, hoping to walk away, as Trump said, “with a lot of checks.” One doubts any of them uttered the words “freedom” or “democracy” or “consent of the governed.” One assumes none defended the importance of free speech or of dissent.
In other news, a few more items:
House Republicans are still determined to use massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. Here’s the latest:
House Republicans on Wednesday pushed forward on their sweeping domestic policy bill, slogging through marathon drafting sessions that began Tuesday and stretched into the night as they haggled over Medicaid and tax cuts.
The meetings in three key committees, a crucial part of advancing what President Trump has labeled the “one big beautiful bill” carrying his agenda, came as Republican leaders raced to push the legislation through the House before a Memorial Day recess that begins at the end of next week.
Republicans are seeking to extend Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut and temporarily enact his campaign pledges not to tax tips or overtime pay. They want to partly offset the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of those tax measures — as well as plans to increase spending on the military and immigration enforcement — by making cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for clean energy.
But even as they moved toward winning committee approval of the plan, House Republican leaders faced pushback in their own ranks that could delay or derail passage. Conservative lawmakers have argued the proposed cuts to Medicaid, which stopped short of an overhaul in an effort to protect vulnerable Republicans from political blowback, do not go far enough in restructuring and slashing costs of the program. They are unhappy that the largest reduction included — new work requirements for beneficiaries — would not take effect until 2029, putting off any savings until then, after the next presidential election.
And Republicans from high-tax states like New York were furious about a provision that would increase the limit on the state and local tax deduction to $30,000 from $10,000, a cap they regard as far too low and which was still being negotiated.
Democrats, who are expected to oppose the package en masse, have aimed most of their criticism at the bill’s health care provisions, which are estimated to cause more than 8 million Americans to lose insurance coverage, and which they believe will be politically damaging.
This Is going to be a disaster. I hope the Senate won’t accept these health care and food assistance cuts.
House Republicans unveil Medicaid cuts that will leave millions without care
The Medicaid portions of the GOP megabill would lead to 10.3 million people losing coverage under the health safety net program and 7.6 million people going uninsured, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans released the partial estimates Tuesday less than a half hour before the House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled to mark up its portion of the legislation central to enacting President Donald Trump’s agenda on taxes, the border and energy.
The panel has been tasked with finding $880 billion in savings, and the CBO confirmed the committee is on track to meet that target. CBO also projects that many of the major Medicaid policies would account for $625 billion in savings, though the scorekeeping office didn’t calculate the impacts of all provisions.
Work requirements would produce the biggest savings in the bill, accounting for nearly $301 billion over a decade — deeper than what had been initially anticipated. Overturning Biden-era rules on the program would save nearly $163 billion, and a moratorium on new taxes that states levy on providers to help finance their programs would recoup roughly $87 billion.
Republicans have argued that the changes will streamline Medicaid and allow it to better focus on serving the most vulnerable beneficiaries.
Democrats have argued the changes will lead to devastating impacts on health care access and have made the case — including by pointing to previous CBO estimates — that work requirements would simply remove people from coverage rather than motivate beneficiaries to find jobs.
Americans broadly disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president and favor Democratic U.S. House candidates for the 2026 midterms by 6 points, a new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds. In a survey experiment, support for the president’s immigration agenda falls when respondents are informed of mistaken deportations, such as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Adults say the economy and inflation are their top priorities, but do not think either party is prioritizing the issues enough. A majority opposes making budget cuts to social programs, such as Medicaid, in order to extend tax cuts and shrink the deficit. If the 2024 election were held today and non-voters were allowed to participate, the electorate would lean toward Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 5 points, 47% to 42%.
Methodology note: Verasight conducted this poll among 1,000 U.S. adult residents from May 1-6, 2025. It has a margin of error of 3.2%. The survey was weighted to match the political and demographic characteristics of the U.S. adult population according to the March 2025 Current Population Survey, as well as recent benchmarks for partisanship and past vote.
Verasight uses mail, SMS text, and the internet to recruit a sample using both probability-based and non-probability techniques. Verasight handled recruitment, interviewing, and weighting. Strength In Numbers had input on questions but did not participate in other methodological decisions, and conducted all analysis, including creating the topline document.
You can download a pdf of the poll at the link.
Speaking of health, RFK Jr. will be testifying in Congress today.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is testifying Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where the nation’s top health official is expected to be quizzed on his handling of the measles outbreak, the firing of thousands of federal health workers and major cuts to the health agencies he oversees.
Kennedy is appearing before a House Appropriations subcommitteeWednesday morning and will move to the Senate health committee in the afternoon. The pair of hearings marks Kennedy’s first time testifying before Congress since being sworn in as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in mid-February.
Since then, the Trump administration has moved to reshape the nation’s public health infrastructure through eliminating roughly 20,000 jobs, ousting top career officials, threatening billions of dollars in federally funded scientific research and proposing a major reorganization of the health department. Such actions have been deeply divisive, with Democrats and public health experts expressing strong concern that the changes will damage the nation’s public health infrastructure, and Kennedy and his allies countering that they are necessary to refocus the federal government on addressing chronic disease.
In his opening remarks before the House panel, Kennedy said he is focusing on “fighting debilitating disease, contaminated food, toxic environments, addiction, mental health, and illness [affecting] families across every race, class and political belief.”
The hearings are being billed as Kennedy’s opportunity to defend the Trump administration’s budget proposal released earlier this month, which proposed a 26 percent reduction to the department’s $127 billion budget of discretionary spending. But lawmakers typically capitalize on the moment to ask a wide range of questions, particularly demanding answers over the most controversial issues facing the nation’s sweeping health department.
Finally, DOGE really doesn’t seem to have saved the government any money to speak of, despite illegally firing thousands of government workers and illegally closing agencies.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is no longer claiming credit for killing dozens of federal contracts after The New York Times reported last week that they had already been reinstated.
The Times had identified 44 revived contracts, and 43 of them were still featured on the group’s online “Wall of Receipts” as of last week. Then, late Sunday, Mr. Musk’s group deleted those claims for 31 of the contracts from its website, eliminating $122 million of the savings it claimed to have achieved by cutting federal contracts.
Those savings had actually disappeared days or weeks before, when federal agencies reversed cancellations they had made at the behest of Mr. Musk’s group. One revived contract, which DOGE said was worth $108 million, was restored by the Department of Veterans Affairs after eight days. Mr. Musk’s group still listed it as “terminated” for two months after that.
The presence of revived contracts on DOGE’s list of “terminations” was the latest in a series of data errors that have inflated its success at saving money. In the past, the group has deleted other errors from its “Wall of Receipts” site after new reports found that they were double-counting the same cancellations or claiming credit for killing contracts that had ended decades before.\
On Sunday night, Mr. Musk’s group also added more than 800 new terminated contracts and raised its overall savings estimate — across all government activity, not only contracts — to $170 billion from $165 billion. The group did not delete all of the resurrected contracts identified by The Times. It left 12 on the site, still claiming that terminating those had saved taxpayers $121 million.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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I’m trying not to let myself fall into despair over what’s happening in our country and the world, but it isn’t easy. I try to distract myself by reading novels and by watching shows on Netflix and Max. But inevitably I open my phone or turn on cable news and get hit with awful news about what new insane thing Trump is doing or saying.
This morning, as I look around at stories in the news, I find myself sinking into sadness over what we have already lost from our democracy and what more losses could be coming. It’s all so tragic. I honestly despise the people who voted for Trump.
There’s one person who never fails to lift my spirits, if only temporarily: MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. Recently, he has had a great time making fun of Trump’s seeming obsession with American girls’ dolls and how they need to make do with just 2 or 3 or 4 instead of 35 because of his tariffs.
Last night Lawrence made an interesting point about Trump’s cognitive decline. He pointed out that Trump saying “I don’t know,” when asked if people in the U.S. have a right to due process and when asked if he has a duty to defend the Constitution is something new for him. Normally, Trump never admits to not knowing something. He would rather bumble around talking complete nonsense than admit to not knowing.
Lawrence argues that Trump is a pathetic husk of his former self, exhausted and befuddled by his responsibilities. Not that any of this is going to drive Trump from office, but it’s an interesting thought. The danger, of course is that other people like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller could be in control of the presidency.
Lawrence also discussed Trump’s embarrassing appearance yesterday in the Oval Office with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“The Canadian prime minister both humbled and humiliated Donald Trump at the same time without Donald Trump having the slightest idea it was happening,” he said on Tuesday night.
Later in the segment, O’Donnell slammed Trump’s “utterly demented attempt” to turn Canada into a state. Carney, he noted, responded by saying “absolutely no to Donald Trump to his face.”
But Trump, he said, barely noticed.
“Donald Trump had no fight in him today when the very polite Canadian beside him talked rings around Donald Trump like a ring master in a circus with a trained animal, threw in some magic words that sounded flattering enough to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump actually ― and you’ll see this ― ends up nodding and agreeing with the man who is humiliating him and defeating him right there in the room on TV,” O’Donnell said. “No president has ever lost more in one conversation in the Oval Office than Donald Trump lost in these 90 seconds.”
O’Donnell rolled the footage of the meeting, where Carney told him Canada would never be for sale and would not be a U.S. state.
So, on to today’s news.
India and Pakistan–both nuclear powers–appear to be on the verge of war.
India launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said on Wednesday and Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets, in an escalationthat has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict.
India’s missile strikes early Wednesday morning targeted “terrorist infrastructure” across nine sites in Pakistan’s densely populated Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it said. They came in response to a massacreby militantsof tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir two weeks ago, that New Delhi blamed on its neighbor.
India Pakistan map
Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in Wednesday’s strikes – including women and a three-year-old girl – and 46 wounded. The country’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif describedthe strikes as “an act of war” and Islamabad has vowed to retaliate.
From early Wednesday the two sides have exchanged shelling across their border, with locals on both sides telling CNN they weretakingshelter. A CNN journalist in Pakistan-administered Kashmir heard multiple loud explosions.
“A shell landed at a house close to the mosque in which two people were injured. Shells also hit other houses in our area and we fled from our area to a safer place,” said Shakeel Butt, a resident of Muzaffarabad, in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. A senior Indian defense source said at least eight people had been killed on the Indian side of the border.
Pakistani military sources later said they shot down five Indian Air Force jets and one drone in “self-defense,” claiming three Rafale jets – sophisticated multi-role fighters made in France – were among those downed as well as a MiG-29 and an SU-30 fighter.
A local resident and government official told CNN that an unidentified fighter aircraft had crashed on a school building in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Tensions between India and Pakistan intensified Wednesday after India’s military launched strikes against the neighboring country in response to a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last month, heightening fears of war between the nuclear-armed rivals….
The strikes have set the region on edge and shattered the fragile ceasefire that has largelyheld since 2021, with analysts warning of escalation in the decades-long conflict that has riven the South Asian subcontinent over the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, parts of which are controlled by India and Pakistan, though the area is claimed in full by both countries.
Wednesday’s aerial assault is on a far bigger scale than in 2019, when India struck a single, remote Pakistani site in response to a suicide bombing that killed more than 40 Indian soldiersin Kashmir….
The sharp rise in tensions follows a deadly April 22 attack on tourists near the town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Gunmen armed with rifles killed 25 Indians and one Nepalese citizen. More than a dozen others were injured. The attack was the deadliest against civilians since the 2008 Mumbai attacks by the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 166 people.
Indian-administered Kashmir is a heavily militarized zone. An armed insurgency — either seeking independence or favoring accession to Pakistan — has continued against Indian rule for more than three decades.
India has long accused Pakistan of fomenting separatist violence in Kashmir. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said Wednesday that India had found evidence linking themilitants in the Pahalgam attack to Pakistan.
The Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status in August 2019 and instituted a crackdown, including imposing the world’s longest internet shutdown in a democracy. Promising development and investment, New Delhi had touted a return to relative peace, citing the surge of tourists to the region, a narrative upended by the deadly attack last month.
Read more at the WaPo.
Joe Biden gave his first major interview since he left the White House.
Former US President Joe Biden has given his first in-depth interview since he left the White House in January, speaking to the BBC about his legacy, foreign policy and his view of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days.
He said that he had few regrets, but he offered grave warnings about global affairs as Europe marks 80 years since the end of World War Two on the continent….
The former president also reflected on his decision to drop out of the 2024 election race – but he had less to say about any mistakes he and the Democrats may have made along the way….
On leaving the 2024 presidential race:
Democratic strategists have lamented that the last-minute handover left their campaign flat-footed, ultimately aiding Trump’s path to the White House, even as Democrats held a financial advantage in the 2024 race.
Biden boasted of being “so successful on our agenda” – a reference to the major legislation enacted in his first two years in office on the environment, infrastructure and social spending, as well as the better-than-expected Democratic performance in the 2022 midterm elections.
“It was hard to say now I’m going to stop,” he said. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.”
Ultimately, quitting was “the right decision”, he said, but it was “just a difficult decision”.
On Trump and Ukraine:
Biden described the Trump administration’s suggestion that Ukraine give up territory as part of a peace deal with Russia as “modern-day appeasement” – a reference to European allies that allowed Adolf Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia in the 1930s in an ill-fated attempt to prevent a continent-wide conflict.
Joe Biden at BBC interview
“I just don’t understand how people think that if we allow a dictator, a thug, to decide he’s going to take significant portions of land that aren’t his, that that’s going to satisfy him. I don’t quite understand,” Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin….
Though Biden’s repeated assertion that Russian tanks would be rolling through central Europe if America and its allies didn’t support Ukraine is impossible to prove, he views the threat posed by Putin as serious and worthy of the comparison.
Biden also said that if the US allowed a peace deal that favoured Russia, Putin’s neighbours would be under economic, military and political pressure to accommodate Moscow’s will in other ways. In his view, the promise of American support to European allies becomes less believable and less of a deterrent.
Until this week, President Biden himself (former presidents keep their titles after they leave office) has largely observed the convention that former presidents do not criticise their successors at the start of their time in office. But from the moment we shake hands it is clear that he is determined to have his say too.
In a dark blue suit, the former president arrives smiling and relaxed but with the determined air of a man on a mission. It’s his first interview since leaving the White House, and he seems most angry about Donald Trump’s treatment of America’s allies – in particular Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky….
“I found it beneath America, the way that took place,” he says of the explosive Oval Office row between Trump and Zelensky in February. “And the way we talk about now that, ‘it’s the Gulf of America’, ‘maybe we’re going to have to take back Panama’, ‘maybe we need to acquire Greenland, ‘maybe Canada should be a [51st state].’ What the hell’s going on here?
“What President ever talks like that? That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity – not about confiscation.”
The U.S. is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.
The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.
The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.
A collection-emphasis message helps set intelligence-agency priorities, directing resources and attention to high-interest targets. The Greenland order, which went to agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, underscores the administration’s apparent commitment to seeking control of the self-governing island. It forms part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and a decadeslong ally.
James Hewitt, a National Security Council spokesman, said the White House doesn’t comment on intelligence matters, but added: “The president has been very clear that the U.S. is concerned about the security of Greenland and the Arctic.”
In a statement, Gabbard said: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”
More at the WSJ. I got past the paywall by clicking the link on Memeorandum.
A Navy fighter jet failed to land on an aircraft carrier and plummeted into the Red Sea on Tuesday, marking the fourth major mishap involving the vessel and the third loss of a fighter jet deployed with it since the warship left home last year.
The F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet, worth about $67 million, went overboard after an unsuccessful attempt to slow it down upon landing on the USS Harry S. Truman, the Navy said in a statement. Both aviators aboard the jet safely ejected and were rescued at sea by helicopter with minor injuries, and no one aboard the warship’s flight deck was harmed, the service said.
Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet
The latest incident, reported earlier by CNN, followed the loss of another jet, an F/A-18E, in an accident aboard the Truman last week in which the aircraft tumbled overboard after sailors aboard lost control of it while towing it in the ship’s hangar bay. A third fighter jet from the Truman was shot down accidentally over the Red Sea in December by another Navy warship, the USS Gettysburg, in an incident that triggered concerns about communication among warships and fighter jets in the region.
The Truman also was involved in a collision in the Mediterranean Sea in February, prompting the service to fire its commanding officer, Navy Capt. Dave Snowden. He was replaced by Navy Capt. Christopher Hill, who had just completed the deployment of another carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
While the incidents have not killed any service members, they have raised questions about the strain placed on the aircraft carrier’s crew and its ability to carry out a grueling deployment in which troops have clashed for months with Houthi militants in Yemen, who have repeatedly launched drone and missile attacks against vessels in the region. The mishaps have the attention of senior U.S. military leaders, a defense official familiar with the discussion said Tuesday night, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has twice extended the aircraft carrier’s deployment since it left its home in Virginia last September, most recently last week, to ensure that the Navy had two aircraft carriers on hand to battle the Houthis. Since March, the carrier has been on the front lines of a full-scale assault that President Donald Trump ordered against the Yemen-based militant group in response to its attacks on commercial and military vessels dating to late 2023.
Pete Hegseth isn’t the only cabinet member who doesn’t seem to care about protecting the nation’s secrets.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years, according to leaked records reviewed by WIRED. Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a journalist, the revelation raises further questions about the security practices of the US spy chief.
WIRED reviewed Gabbard’s passwords using databases of material leaked online created by the open-source intelligence firms District 4 Labs and Constella Intelligence. Gabbard served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, during which time she sat on the Armed Services Committee, its Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, and the Foreign Affairs Committee, giving her access to sensitive information. Material from breaches shows that during a portion of this period, she used the same password across multiple email addresses and online accounts, in contravention of well-established best practices for online security. (There is no indication that she used the password on government accounts.)
Tulsi Gabbard
Two collections of breached records published in 2017 (but breached at some previous unknown date), known as “combolists,” reveal a password that was used for an email account associated with her personal website; that same password, according to a combolist published in 2019, was used with her Gmail account. That same password was used, according to records dating to 2012, for Dropbox and LinkedIn accounts associated with the email address tied to her personal website. According to records dating to 2018 breaches, she also used it on a MyFitnessPal account associated with a me.com email address and an account at HauteLook, a now-defunct ecommerce site then owned by Nordstrom.
Records of these breaches have been available online for years and are accessible in commercial databases.
Gabbard’s spokesperson downplayed this story, saying the information is a decade old and passwords have been changed many times since then. But check out this info on Gabbard:
The password associated with all of the accounts in question includes the word “shraddha,” which appears to have personal significance to Gabbard: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had been initiated into the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement into which she was reportedly born and which former members have accused of being a cult. Several former adherents told The Journal that they believe Gabbard received the name “Shraddha Dasi” when she was allegedly received into the group. Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, responded to questions from The Journal at the time by posting them on X and accusing the news media of publicizing “Hinduphobic smears and other lies.”
The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.
The team overseen by Elon Musk is collecting data from across the government, sometimes at the urging of low-level aides, according to multiple federal employees and a former DOGE staffer, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The intensifying effort to unify systems into one central hub aims to advance multiple Trump administration priorities, including finding and deporting undocumented immigrants and rooting out fraud in government payments. And it follows a March executive order to eliminate “information silos” as DOGE tries to streamline operations and cut spending.
At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” Davis did not respond to a request for comment.
But DOGE has also sometimes removed protections aroundsensitive information — on Social Security numbers, birth dates, employment history, disability records, medical documentation and more. In one instance, a website for a new visa program wasn’t set up behind a protective virtual private network as would be customary, according to a Department of Homeland Security employee and records obtained by The Washington Post.
The administration’s moves ramp up the risk of exposing data to hackers and other adversaries, according to security analysts, and experts worry that any breaches could erode public confidence in government. Civil rights advocates and some federal employees also worry that the data assembled under DOGE could be used against political foes or for targeted decisions about funding or basic government services.
“Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” said Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.”
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration may start enforcing a ban on transgender troops serving in the military that had been blocked by lower courts.
The ruling was brief, unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It will remain in place while challenges to the ban move forward.
The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted dissents but provided no reasoning.
Commander Emily Shilling
The case concerns an executive order issued on the first day of President Trump’s second term. It revoked an order from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that had let transgender service members serve openly.
A week later, Mr. Trump issued a second order saying that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.”
The Defense Department implemented Mr. Trump’s order in February, issuing a new policy requiring transgender troops to be forced out of the military. According to officials there, about 4,200 current service members, or about 0.2 percent of the military, are transgender.
The context:
The Supreme Court’s order came against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s broad attacks on transgender rights. The administration has sought to bar transgender athletes from sports competitions. It has tried to force transgender people to use bathrooms designated for their sex assigned at birth. And it has objected to letting people choose their pronouns.
The justices will soon decide the fate of a Tennessee law that bans transition care for transgender youths, challenged in a case brought by the Biden administration. The Trump administration flipped the government’s position in that case in February, after an executive order directed agencies to take steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other gender transition care for people under 19 years old.
In the case decided on Tuesday, seven active service members, as well as a person who sought to join and an advocacy group, sued to block the policy, saying, among other things, that it ran afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
One of the plaintiffs, Cmdr. Emily Shilling, who began transitioning in 2021 while serving in the Navy, has been a naval aviator for 19 years, flying more than 60 combat missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her lawyers said the Navy had spent $20 million on her training.
In March, Judge Benjamin H. Settle of the Federal District Court in Tacoma, Wash., issued a nationwide injunction blocking the ban, using Commander Shilling as an example of the policy’s flaws.
Faced with the highly secretive and complex ritual of choosing a new pope, Catholic cardinals have turned to Hollywood to learn how it could all play out.
As crazy as it might sound, some of the 133 high-ranking clerics set to enter the Sistine Chapel when the conclave starts on Wednesday have looked to the Ralph Fiennes movie ― handily titled just “Conclave” ― for pointers.
“Some have watched it in the cinema,” a cleric involved in the real thing admitted to POLITICO.
The movie, directed by Edward Berger, features English actor Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals. As the pope-appointed steward of the conclave, he has to deal with fractious clerics, the emergence of scandalous dossiers targeting papal favorites and the appearance of an unknown candidate from an obscure diocese.
It all might sound painfully relevant. The film is seen as remarkably accurate even by cardinals, said the cleric, making it a helpful research tool, especially at a time when so many of the conclave participants have little experience of Vatican politics and protocol.
A majority of the cardinals who flocked to Rome in the weeks since the death of Pope Francis were appointed by the late pontiff, and have never experienced a conclave. Mirroring the Fiennes film, many also come from small, previously overlooked dioceses across the globe.
This has gotten way too long, so I’d better wrap it up. What’s on your mind today?
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The GOP-controlled Senate early Wednesday morning voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard to be President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, putting the former congresswoman in charge of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community.
The 52-48 vote was largely along party lines, with nearly all Republicans present voting in favor of Gabbard. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the former longtime GOP leader who has clashed with Trump, was the only Republican who joined all Democrats in voting against her.
Tulsi Gabbard
Gabbard’s confirmation is a win for Trump and represents yet another example of his dominance over the GOP, where few have shown a willingness to step out of line.
After Trump announced Gabbard as his DNI pick in November, Democrats — and a handful of Republicans — voiced serious concerns about her 2017 secret meeting with then-President Bashar Assad of Syria; her sympathetic comments about Russia; her past efforts to repeal a powerful government surveillance tool, known as Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702; and her previous support for Edward Snowden, a former government contractor who leaked classified information to the press about those spying programs.
In the end, McConnell was the sole Republican to buck Trump and vote no on Gabbard. In a scathing, lengthy statement after the vote, McConnell said it was apparent Gabbard was not prepared for the job and demonstrated a “history of alarming lapses in judgment.”
“The Senate’s power of advice and consent is not an option; it is an obligation, and one we cannot pretend to misunderstand. When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent,” McConnell said.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a key participant in the process that informs every major national security decision the President makes. The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.
Susan Collins was *concerned,* but not enough to go against Trump. If only Mitch McConnell had acted on his true beliefs and voted to impeach Trump, U.S. national security would not be in so much jeopardy today.
It’s a good thing Trump has something to celebrate today, because yesterday was a humiliating disaster for him. We now know for sure that Elon Musk is the real POTUS. Trump is just letting Musk run the country while poor Donald plays golf and posts rage-filled messages on Truth Social. Does Musk have something on Trump besides money? Is Trump afraid of Musk?
William Kristol at The Bulwark: When President Musk Speaks, Donald Trump Listens. DOGE is in charge now.
It was an unusual scene yesterday in the Oval Office. Elon Musk stood and held forth for a half hour to the assembled press corps, while Donald Trump sat at his desk, occasionally chiming in, but mostly looking up at Elon with what seemed to me to be increasing irritation.
With the president looking on, Musk was asked to justify his minions’ wanton rampage through the ranks of our civil servants. He said:
“We do find it sort of rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth. . . . The reality is they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer’s expense. That’s the honest truth of it.”
Here’s a tip based on many years of watching politicians and, for that matter, of watching my fellow human beings: When someone says “that’s the honest truth of it,” that person is probably not telling the honest truth. Especially if that person is someone like Musk.
The truth is that Musk has no idea what the net wealth is of various government employees. Unless, that is, he’s had his apparatchiks take a look at those employees’ SF-86 security clearance questionnaires or their IRS records. Which would be illegal—an illegality for which we don’t, so far at least, have any evidence.
So Musk is just making this up. But why should the world’s wealthiest man let the truth stand in the way of a casual slander of government employees if that can help his assault on our government?
More and more, the president appears to be a puppet of the world’s richest man.
During an Oval Office press conference on Monday, Donald Trump remained hunched over the Resolute Desk while Elon Musk took the reins, spending more time answering reporters’ questions than the president himself.
Trump had called journalists into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively green-lighted Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the jarring visual of a multibillionaire hovering over a U.S. president and answering questions for him stayed with and rattled political commentators.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called Trump’s “presidential subservience” to Musk the “most powerless image of a president of the United States ever created by a camera.”
Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—did “everything he possibly can to tell the world, without saying a word, that ‘Donald Trump is not the boss of me,’” according to O’Donnell.
The Tesla CEO also violated Oval Office norms by appearing at the press conference in casual garb and with his son. By O’Donnell’s measure, Musk spoke 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.
Compare that to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either.
Elon Musk humiliated President Donald Trump during Tuesday’s joint press conference in the Oval Office, which left Trump looking like the “most powerless” U.S. president ever caught on camera, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said on The Last Word.
During a press conference in the Oval Office in which they claimed—without providing a single piece of evidence—to have uncovered billions of dollars of government waste and fraud, Musk spoke 3,666 words to Trump’s 2,487, O’Donnell said.
Musk brought his 4-year-old son X to the press conference, wore a T-shirt and baseball cap, and even interrupted Trump.
He stood over Trump while the president sat behind the Resolute Desk, “delivering a picture of presidential subservience the likes of which we have never seen—the most powerless image of a president of the United States ever created by a camera,” O’Donnell said….
Trump, he continued, has always craved the attention of the “truly rich, virtually all of whom ignored Donald Trump as phony rich and vulgar rich.”
Now he has the attention of the world’s richest man, who can literally bail him out of the $82.5 million he currently owes writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Trump for defamation, and the $500 million judgment levied against him in a civil fraud case in New York.
O’Donnell also opined on the way Trump responded to the Musk child–turning away suddenly when the kid approached him and said something. Trump hates kids, but he let this one into his inner sanctum. He actually picked his nose and wiped it on the Resolute Desk.
And why is Musk always dragging that poor kid with him everywhere he goes? Does the boy have any friends his own age? Why isn’t he in Pre-K?
The boy’s mother is not happy.
The Independent: ‘He should not be in public like this’: Grimes reacts after Elon Musk parades their son around Oval Office.
Grimes has spoken out after Elon Musk paraded their four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, or Lil X, around the Oval Office as Donald Trump signed an executive order to bolster the Department of Government Efficiency’s powers in government.
The Canadian musician, 36, who shares three children with the Tesla CEO, a father of 12 offspring, took to X (Twitter) in response to her son’s surprise appearance saying: “He should not be in public like this. I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”
Her comment came in response to another user who chimed that “Lil X was very polite today! You raised him well. He was so cute when he told DJT ‘please forgive me, I need to pee’.”
During the controversial press event, Lil X was seen picking his nose, mimicking his father, and whispering to Trump as he lingered by the Resolute desk.
Making light of more grave matters, the child looked on as Trump bolstered Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (Doge) power to reshape the federal government by signing an executive order requiring agencies to cooperate with the Musk-led department and the effort to slash costs…..
Grimes, singer of “Genesis”, has remained outspoken on X, responding to fans and spouting her political views, as well as denouncing her ex’s alleged ties to the alt-right and Nazism.
One more comment from me. What was with that outfit Musk was wearing? It looked like an overcoat and a T-shirt and sweatpants–and a baseball cap. WTF? Trump is always so fussy about how the people under him dress–another sign that Musk is in charge.
Two serious posts on this madness:
Robert Reich at his Substack: Fraud and Musk.
The Trump-Musk regime is accusing federal civil servants of fraud, based on no evidence, while at the same time allowing corporations to pay off foreign officials, dropping bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, pardoning a former governor of Illinois who tried to sell his Senate seat, and stopping investigations into foreign influence-peddling in the United States.
In other words, Trump-Musk have declared open season on real fraud and bribery.
On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order halting investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.
Today, Musk held forth in the Oval Office, claiming that drastic reductions in the federal workforce were justified because it was rife with fraud.
I’ve spent more than a dozen years in the federal government, and I can tell you that the vast majority of civil servants I’ve had the honor of working with are dedicated and hardworking. They are delivering critical services to Americans and protecting them from corporate malfeasance.
For the richest person in the world to be given a bully pulpit in the Oval Office to impugn their integrity is beyond shameful.
Musk has the integrity of a slug. Since Trump was elected president, Musk’s fortune has increased $270 billion. If you think that’s an accident, you haven’t been paying attention.
When Trump was sworn into office, Musk’s six corporations were under more than 32 continuing investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies, according to a review by The New York Times.
Most of these cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the agencies that initiated them are being defanged by Musk and Trump.
Reich lists multiple examples of Musk’s fraud against the U.S. Read about it at the link.
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse: Call it what it is.
A week ago, I wrote a piece here called “Is It Really a Coup?” My answer, based on the evidence in front of us, was yes. Since then, life has gone on and DOGE has mostly gone on (despite what they seem to view as the inconvenience of a few temporary restraining orders), committed to nothing less than the radical transformation of government by a small band of unelected, quasi-official people, who are operating outside of government transparency rules. It has all the characteristics of a non-military transformation of a democratic government into something entirely different.
In a statement that made me proud to be a lawyer yet again, the American Bar Association (ABA) all but called it a coup, but without actually using that word: “No American can be proud of a govt that carries out change in this way. Neither can these actions be rationalized by discussion of past grievances or appeals to efficiency. Everything can be more efficient, but adherence to the rule of law is paramount.”
This morning in the Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul wrote an excellent piece on DOGE. Mr. Raul served as the associate White House Counsel under President Ronald Reagan and went on to serve as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush. He is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Not exactly a liberal.
In his piece, titled, Why DOGE is unconstitutional, he writes, “What is not debatable, however, is that Congress has not authorized this radical overhaul, and the protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization.”
It’s such a polite way of saying it’s a coup without saying it.
Maybe now that the Reagan Republican guys have shown up, we can all agree we are living through the quietest of coups. If we don’t start calling it what it is and putting a stop to it, it stands a fair chance of succeeding. The lawyers are hard at work, but that will not be enough alone. They are holding the ground until the public catches up. It would be nice if Congress and the Supreme Court did their jobs too. But for starters, let’s call the coup a coup—while we still can.
Lest you think that’s hyperbolic, yesterday, the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.“ Later in the day, they were refused access. It’s a clear and also an extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, which prevents the government from imposing prior restraints on anyone’s speech, let alone the press.
Apparently, it’s easy to ignore such a ridiculous moment, and most people seem to have. But this is a form of Newspeak, the Orwellian construct of language that a government insists people use in order to narrow people’s range of thought. Sure, it was only over what we call the Gulf of Mexico, but this was not trivial buffoonery; it was a significant moment, a testing of the waters to see if this new White House could get away with stepping on the First Amendment without causing a furor.
“While we still can.” How much longer do we have to save our democracy? Is it too late?
I know this isn’t much of a post; but I’m not feeling well today so that’s all I have. Take care everyone.
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Autumn Portrait of Lydia Cassatt, by Mary Cassatt, 1880
Last night, Lawrence O’Donnell opened his show with a scathing rant on the results of the Republican crusade against legal abortion titled, “Women are dying. They got what they wanted.” He talked about the ProPublica article about Amber Nicole Thurman, who died in a Georgia hospital because doctors were afraid to give her the basic procedure (dilation and curettage or D&C) that would have saved her life. They then continued to withhold treatment until she died of sepsis. As a result, Thurman’s 6-year-old son has been left without a mother. O’Donnell then talked about what happened to his own mother when he was 6 years old. His mother had a miscarriage and was immediately given a D&C. This was before abortion was legal. O’Donnell choked up as he told this story. You can watch the video at MSNBC.
Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.
“They said it was going to be more painful and her body may not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.
But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.
At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.
An autopsy found unexpelled fetal tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind — whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death.
Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
The conclusion of experts:
When a state committee of experts in maternal health, including 10 doctors, reviewed her case this year at the end of August, they immediately decided it was “preventable” and blamed the state’s abortion ban, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity.
They came to that conclusion after weighing the entire chain of events, from Miller’s underlying health conditions, to her decision to manage her abortion alone, to her reticence to seek medical care. “The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case,” one committee member told ProPublica. “She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”
This is the second preventable death related to abortion bans that ProPublica is reporting this week. Amber Thurman, 28, languished in a suburban Atlanta hospital for 20 hours before doctors performed a D&C to treat sepsis that resulted from an incomplete abortion. It was too late. “This young mother should be alive, raising her son and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Vice President Kamala Harris said of Thurman on Tuesday. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.”
There are almost certainly other deaths related to abortion access. Georgia’s committee, tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, has only reviewed cases through fall 2022. Such a lag is common in these committees, which are set up in each state; most others have not even gotten that far.
Path in the garden of the asylum, Vincent Van Gogh
The situation women are dealing with now is far worse than what happened in the years before Roe. Old right-wing men without even basic knowledge of the female anatomy and medical procedures are making decisions that can condemn women to death and their families to the loss of a mother or daughter who becomes pregnant in a red state. Of course none of this could have happened without six monsters on the Supreme Court. As Lawrence O’Donnell said, “Women are dying. They got what they wanted.”
Here’s another horror story out of Georgia; this one is about election interference. Justin Glawe at The Guardian:Network of Georgia election officials strategizing to undermine 2024 result.
Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.
The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.
Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.
The communications include correspondence from a who’s who of Georgia election denialists, including officials with ties to prominent national groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, a group run by Cleta Mitchell, a former attorney who acted as an informal adviser to the Trump White House during its attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group – which includes elections officials from at least five counties – calls itself the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition.
These emails go way back:
Among the oldest emails released are those regarding a 30 January article published by the United Tea Party of Georgia. Headlined “Georgia Democratic Party Threatens Georgia Election Officials”, the article was posted by an unnamed “admin” of the website, and came in response to letters sent to county election officials throughout Georgia who had recently refused to certify election results.
“In what can only be seen as an attempt to intimidate elections officials,” the article began, “the Georgia Democratic party sent a letter to individual county board of elections members threatening legal action unless they vote to certify upcoming elections – even if the board member has legitimate concerns about the results.”
The letter had been sent by a lawyer representing the Democratic party of Georgia to county election board members in Spalding, Cobb and DeKalb counties. Election board members in each of those counties had refused to certify the results of local elections the previous November. In their letter, Democrats sought to warn those officials that their duty to certify results was not discretionary in an attempt to prevent further certification refusals, including in the coming presidential election. In response, the United Tea Party of Georgia took issue with the letter, calling it “troubling” and saying that it was “Orwellian to demand that election officials certify an election even if they have unanswered questions about the vote”.
While the author of the article was not named on the United Tea Party of Georgia’s website, the emails obtained by Crew show that it was Hancock, an outspoken election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections, who has become a leading voice in the push for more power to refuse to certify results.
There’s more at the link.
Autumn in Honfleu Cote de Grace, cir. 1906, byEmile-Othon Friesz
The FBI and Postal Service are investigating suspicious mail containing a white powder substance that was sent to election offices in at least 16 states this week, according to an ABC News canvass of the country.
None of the mail has been deemed hazardous so far – and in one case, the substance was determined to be flour – but the scare prompted evacuations in some locations.
Election offices in New York, Tennessee, Wyoming, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Colorado received the suspicious packages. Similar suspicious mail was addressed to offices in additional states – Arizona, Georgia, Connecticut and Maryland among them – but investigators intercepted them before they reached their destination.
The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a statement Tuesday that they were investigating letters containing white powdery substances. A law enforcement source said at this point none of the packages were believed to be hazardous.
“We are also working with our partners to determine how many letters were sent, the individual or individuals responsible for the letters, and the motive behind the letters,” the statement read.
At least some of the packages were signed by the “United States Traitor Elimination Army,” according to a copy of a letter sent to members of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center obtained by ABC News.
A representative for J.D. Vance was told “point blank” that the Republican vice presidential nominee’s claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio were not true, but he continued to smear them anyway as bomb threats were called in to local schools and government offices.
The Republican senator posted about the rumors on X, where he’s got 1.9 million followers, and he did not delete the post even after one of his staffers called Springfield city manager Bryan Heck on the morning of Sept. 9 to ask whether Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating cats and dogs, as other social media users had alleged, reported the Wall Street Journal.“
He asked point-blank: ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the newspaper. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” [….]
Vance has admitted the claims are false, but he continues to make dubious and debunked claims about Haitian immigrants in the state he represents in the U.S. Senate, such as his claim that communicable diseases have spiraled out of control in Springfield.“Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023 — the lowest since 2015,” the Journal reported.
“The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.”
Another claim by Vance fell apart after a spokesperson provided the Journal reporter with a police report involving a woman who alleged that a Haitian immigrant may have taken her cat.“But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later — found safe in her own basement,” the newspaper reported. “Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”
The Republican mayor of Springfield, Ohio, the city that has been the target of unfounded claims from former President Donald Trump and his running mate about Haitian immigrants’ eating residents’ pets said Tuesday that a visit from Trump would tax the city’s resources.
“It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Mayor Rob Rue said at a news conference at City Hall.
NBC News reported Sunday that Trump planned to visit the city “soon,” according to a source familiar with his planning, after he amplified during the presidential debate a baseless claim that had circulated in right-wing spheres online for weeks, saying Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs” and cats of local residents.
Officials in Springfield have said the allegations are meritless, with city police issuing a statement that said there were “no credible reports” of Haitian immigrants’ harming pets.
Nassau County police responded to a “suspicious occurrence” near the location of former President Donald Trump‘s Wednesday night rally in Long Island, noting that no explosives were located, the department confirmed to Newsweek.
“We did respond to a suspicious occurrence in the vicinity of the Nassau Coliseum, however there was no validity of an explosive device being found,” a public information officer told Newsweek after a report about an explosive device at the rally site circulated online.
“We’re unsure where this information originated, but we can confirm that no explosives were discovered.”
I suppose we’ll be dealing with these false alarms from now on.
More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday after concluding that their party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, is “unfit to serve again as president.”
In a letter to the public, the Republicans, including both vocal longtime Trump opponents and others who had not endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, argued that while they might “disagree with Kamala Harris” on many issues, Mr. Trump had demonstrated “dangerous qualities.” Those include, they said, “unusual affinity” for dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior.”
John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–1856
“As president,” the letter said, “he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests and betrayed our values, democracy and this country’s founding documents.”
The letter condemned Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aimed at allowing him to hold onto power after losing an election, saying that “he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country.” It quoted Mr. Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, who has said that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
The 111 signatories included former officials who served under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. Many of them had previously broken with Mr. Trump, including two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank; the former C.I.A. directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte; and former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts. Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye, two Trump administration officials who became vocal critics, also signed.
But a number of Republicans who did not sign a similar letter on behalf of Mr. Biden in 2020 signed the one for Ms. Harris this time, including several former House members, like Charles W. Boustany Jr. of Louisiana, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Dan Miller of Florida and Bill Paxon of New York.
If there is one thing on which liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, journalists and political partisans all agree, it’s that the 2024 presidential race is too close to call.
Vice President Kamala Harris may have a slight advantage nationally and in a couple of competitive states, but polling in at least half a dozen swing states – including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin – shows that the presidential race between Harris and former president Donald Trump is separated by only a percentage point or two.
As the New York Times wrote on Sept. 8 and updated three days later, “The national results are in line with polls in the seven battleground states that will decide the presidential election, where Ms. Harris is tied with Mr. Trump or holds slim leads, according to New York Times polling averages. Taken together, they show a tight race that remains either candidate’s to win or lose.”
But if you are something of a gambler and everyone you know believes the 2024 presidential contest is and will remain extremely close, you probably should put a few dollars on the possibility that November will produce a clear and convincing win for Harris.
That assessment isn’t based on the most recent survey numbers but on the current dynamics of the race and the advantage of taking a contrarian position.
Harris has plenty of momentum going into the fall election. She has become a strong speaker at her rallies, and she should have a considerable financial advantage over the next couple of months.
Her coalition, which includes some high-profile Republicans and conservatives, stretches from former Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative intellectual Bill Kristol on the right to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left.
Harris clobbered Trump in their first (and possibly only) debate, and another debate would be extremely risky for Trump, who can’t afford another bad performance.
Harris wasn’t merely good on one or two topics during the debate. She successfully deflected Trump’s attacks and baited him so that he spent more time defending himself than defining his opponent. Harris was particularly effective on abortion/reproductive rights and foreign policy/national security.
The Democratic ticket is drawing huge crowds in the key states where Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are campaigning, and it’s quite possible that pollsters are underestimating the turnout that the Democrats will generate in the fall.
Read the whole thing at the link.
Have a nice Wednesday, everyone!!
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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.
But the GOP’s narrow majority is far from unified around the proposal. And although Trump visited the U.S. Capitol for a conservative pep rally Tuesday, warring Republican factions on both sides dug in to oppose what is now officially called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The House GOP’s narrow majority means leaders can afford to lose only a handful of votes — and for now, they don’t have the support they need to pass the measure.
Tax cuts pushed by the Trump administration are amplifying debt and deficit concerns among bond investors, a powerful group of market players who strongly influence how much it costs for the government to finance its budget. The buying and selling of government debt, known as Treasuries, also influences interest rates on a wide variety of debt extended to American households and businesses, including mortgages, credit cards and car loans.
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