Seventy-one Republicans and 46 Democrats voted against the bill in
the House — mostly liberals and conservatives protesting specific
provisions of the bill. Their numbers, however, were never a threat to
the bill’s passage because of a hodgepodge of moderates and leadership
allies who — despite some acknowledging the bill wasn’t exactly what
they wanted — threw their support behind the measure. ...
While votes on rules, which govern debate over legislation, typically
break along party lines, 29 Republicans broke from the GOP and opposed
the rule on Wednesday as a way to boycott the debt limit bill. Shortly
before the vote closed — as the bill was poised to be blocked — 52
Democrats threw their support behind the rule, bringing the final vote
to 241-187 and allowing the debt limit bill to advance to the floor for a
full vote.
In the past two years,
my partner and I have taken more at-home COVID tests than we can count.
After our first test in 2021, we obsessively checked every few seconds
to see what the indicator would reveal. Longest 15 minutes ever.
We’re up to date on
our vaccinations. We still mask up in stores and on public
transportation. We recently attended our first concert in three years
and though most of our fellow concertgoers at the outdoor venue weren’t
masked, we were. Still we swabbed our nostrils a few days later. Both
negative.
So it never crossed
our minds as we were about to leave town for the Memorial Day weekend
that we would get anything other than the desired result. My COVID test
was negative. Hers was positive. A second test confirmed the first.
The Penny Plan would be triggered in the event 12 appropriations bills are not passed by Jan. 1 annually, automatically reducing spending 1% across the board.
Ending the present bad habit of omnibus spending bills is essential to a return to good governance and represents a good reason to vote for this bill despite its shortcomings.
Massie followed through with his statement during Tuesday evening’s
vote when he supported the rule. He also told reporters that he plans to
vote for the bill when it comes to the floor on Wednesday after
announcing it in a closed-door GOP conference meeting minutes earlier.
“It’s because it cuts spending,” Massie told The Hill Tuesday night when discussing his intent to support the bill.
“Nothing I’ve ever voted on has ever cut spending that’s passed that’s become law; this will,” he added.
During Tuesday’s Rules Committee hearing, Massie highlighted a
provision in the debt limit bill that incentivizes Congress to pass 12
appropriations bills rather than relying on omnibus measures to fund the
government. The provision threatens to cut government spending by one
percent across the board if the measures are not approved by Jan. 1.
“There is one way in which I think this bill got better, and it is
this 1 percent cut that we’re all agreeing to if we vote for this bill,
Republicans and Democrat, come Jan. 1. If we haven’t done our homework,
and if the Senate hasn’t done their homework, and if the president
hasn’t signed those bills — so everybody is gonna be in this,
responsible for the outcome,” Massie said.
In exchange for a two-year hike in the federal borrowing limit, the
legislation roughly freezes next year's spending at fiscal 2023 levels,
followed by a 1% increase in 2025. The legislation also imposes some
changes to work requirements for food stamps and will speed the
development of energy projects with permitting reform.
Fiscal outlays for 2023 are projected to hit $5.792 trillion. Adjusted for inflation since 2019 that should be more like $5.385 trillion.
Meanwhile, deficit spending since 2019 through fiscal 2023 has added, will add, $8.5 trillion to the debt, which has been the solution to, and the cause of, all our problems.
And look what has happened to interest payments on the debt, which come out of current revenues. They have gone vertical. At $929 billion annualized, they represent 31.4% of current tax receipts annualized.
Everyone minimizing the gravity of this situation is whistling past the graveyard when government social benefits to persons already exceed the tax receipts.
This will continue until it can't, and great will be the fall of it.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) speaks at a U.S. House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., December 13, 2022.(Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)none
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Protesters booed and heckled RepresentativeAlexandria Ocasio-Cortezat a town hall she held in Queens, N.Y., on Friday night.
A man holding small American flags approached the progressive “Squad” member and shouted, “American citizens before migrants.”
“Where are you on the migrant issue? You’re a piece of s***,” he added.
Ocasio-Cortez said, “OK,” as the man was escorted off.
New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) declared a state of emergency in New York after the expiration of Title 42 earlier this month. The state has roughly 60,000 asylum seekers relying on social services. New York City has gotten so overwhelmed with the influx of migrants that the city has begun sending them to the suburbs. Hochul said she is “looking at all state assets to help ameliorate the problem that is at a crisis level here in the City of New York,” which could includes housing migrants at SUNY campuses, closed psychiatric centers, large parks and parking lots.
Protesters at the town hall held signs concerning a number of issues: “America First. Vetted legal migrants only,” “Stop funding Ukraine,” “AOC: An Obvious Criminal,” and “AOC: Stop pushing drag queen story hour,”
More protesters came forward throughout the evening, including a woman who was critical of Ocasio-Cortez’s support for U.S. funding in Ukraine. The New York Democrat voted to send $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine last year.
“Stop funding this war, there’s a lot of communities that need help and need that money,” another woman said as she was removed from the event.
Ocasio-Cortez was met with both boos and cheers from the crowd when she suggested the Biden administration should abolish the debt limit, as a June 5 debt default deadline looms.
“$100 billion for Ukraine that you voted for!” one man shouted in response to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on the debt ceiling.
The progressive lawmaker said earlier this week that the “stakes of a default cannot be understated.”
“The chaos that would ensue and the impact on people’s everyday lives would likely be immediate and it is one of the reasons why we need to take default off the table,” she said.
New research published this month, involving millions of people worldwide over decades, is adding to worries that heavy use of high-potency cannabis and legalization of recreational weed in many U.S. statescould exacerbate the nation's mental health crisis in young adults. “There is a big sense of urgency not just because more people are smoking marijuana, but because more people are using it in ways that are harmful, with higher and higher concentration of THC,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), said in an interview. ... The magnitude of the connection between cannabis and schizophrenia for young men surprised study author Volkow, who was expecting the number to be closer to 10%. “This is worrisome,” she said.
Among 16–20-year-old males, no clear pattern over time is observed, with PARFs generally fluctuating between 10% and 20%. In older males, the PARFs show a clearly increasing pattern, ending up around 20–30% until the age of 31–40 when PARFs fluctuate between <1% and nearly 20%.
A majority in Rapanos
(2006) couldn’t agree on how to limit EPA’s authority over wetlands.
Four Justices said the Clean Water Act’s scope extended to “only those
relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water”
such as oceans, rivers and lakes, and wetlands that were directly
adjacent and “indistinguishable” from those waters.
However, the agencies and lower courts have adopted Justice Anthony Kennedy’s
lone opinion that federal jurisdiction extends to land that has a
“significant nexus” to a waterway. This test is as clear as a swamp.
While
all nine Justices ruled for the Sacketts, they disagreed on the scope of
federal power. The majority strips away the “significant nexus”
ambiguity from Justice Kennedy’s Rapanos
opinion, but reaffirms the conservative plurality’s view that a
“wetland” must “be indistinguishably part of a body of water that itself
constitutes ‘waters’ under the CWA.”
The
cases of the whistleblower Gary Shapley and journalist Matt Taibbi show
why the GOP should claw back that $80 billion infusion.
As House
Republicans and the White House wrangle over a debt-ceiling deal, one
GOP demand ought to be nonnegotiable. A politicized Internal Revenue
Service has no business keeping its untrustworthy fingers on last year’s
$80 billion cash infusion.
“On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all
these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political
targeting and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” DeSantis said
in his response. ...
DeSantis replied, “I would say any example of disfavored treatment
based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no
matter how small or how big.”
The Justice Department said this month more than 1,033 defendants have been arrested as part of its probe of the Capitol riot. ...
DeSantis said he planned to use the pardon power “at the front end”
instead of waiting until the end of his term in the White House.
“We’re going to find examples where the government’s been weaponized
against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate. But
it will be done on a case-by-case basis,” he said.
According to multiple sources within the group,
officially known as "The Eight-Year Alliance," DeSantis is "a proven
winner," a contender with a depth of policy proven by what he's
accomplished at the state level, and a leader who "does what he says."
The
primary motivation of the group, the sources said, is to promote a
candidate they feel would be a viable contender for two presidential
terms, something they see in DeSantis. They also want to prevent former President Donald Trump
"immediately becoming a lame-duck president" should he win back the
White House, considering the polarizing affect his persona has had on
American politics.
Key point: depth of proven policy in Florida sustainable nationally over two presidential terms is a better choice than another drama-plagued and by definition ineffectual presidency under the best of conditions.
Mr.
Lee remained close to his wife, Krista Lee, even though they were
separated. He recently moved to Miami with his father, a widower, but
regularly returned to San Francisco to visit his two teenage children,
Dagny and Scout, named after characters in “Atlas Shrugged” and “To Kill
A Mockingbird.” The family had planned a trip together to Japan in
August.
In the 1990s, she taught Russian history at Vassar. According to an online profile, she went on to work as an "independent
contractor doing research and translation projects on topics in Russian
science and technology," dates unknown. There is not much more public
information about her career until she pops up in 2010 as a CIA analyst
in an Expert Working Group (including her DOJ husband and future Fusion
boss Simpson) on international organized crime; then, finally, in 2016,
at the center of the Fusion GPS/DOJ/FBI anti-Trump web.
See here for Nellie Ohr's self-identified employer, Open Source Works, an in-house CIA operation:
Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization. In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.
She wrote her first
Millian report in April 2016, the month before Fusion GPS hired former
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to put his imprimatur as
a supposed former “spy” and "Russian insider" on the dossier.
"This
report was prepared just ten days after Fusion GPS was retained by
[Clinton campaign law firm] Perkins Coie to conduct opposition research
on Trump,” the Durham Report states, "and prior to Steele being retained
by Fusion GPS."
Durham suggests Nellie
Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations
leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion
that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of
cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to
Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a
source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the
allegations attributed to him.
In fact, Durham says that Millian initially
wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector" Igor
Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who's admitted much of
the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip.
Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor
said “implicated" Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests
Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor added, Bruce Ohr,
an anti-Trump Democrat, pushed his wife’s reports that cited Millian —
12 in all — onto the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI headquarters that
was investigating Trump and his campaign for possible espionage. Agents
used her reports as a source of corroboration for the Steele reports
they received in the summer and fall of 2016, even though it was
circular reporting. ...
In other words, Steele was not the catalyst
behind the dossier’s central claims. Rather, it was Clinton's contractor
Fusion GPS -- but more specifically, the wife of a senior DOJ official
who worked for Fusion. So the FBI wasn’t really investigating "Crown
reporting,” as officials referred to Steele’s dossier, implying it was
British intelligence. More accurately, it was investigating information
from inside its own department that was laundered through Steele and his
dossier.
The Durham report shows that the FBI had the dossier reports in July 2016, two months before the time in September insisted upon by the FBI.
The Ohrs are ground zero for the Trump-Russia-collusion disinformation operation.
Why anyone remains indignant about this, like Goodwin, is beyond me.
A presidential campaign in the US is normally a war, between the two parties. Turning it into a multi-front war, however, as Trump did, was pure hubris on his part.
His catastrophic record of appointments simply amplifies the point.
Trump didn't bring with him into government his own army, let alone get the loyalty of the GOP army he had attacked relentlessly for 18 months. NeverTrump didn't materialize out of thin air. Getting anything accomplished in Washington with your side on your side is hard enough. Trump didn't have even that.
Trump narrowly won the battle of 2016, but utterly lost the war, because he was unprepared.
Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down
first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him
that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.
His name is Warren Hern. His conscience used to bother him in the early days, but he got over it.
Christianity, he told me, not for the first time, “is now the face of fascism in America.” ... Hern sent me a copy of his poetry collection and his new book on global ecology. In the latter, titled Homo Ecophagus,
he compares mankind to a cancer on the planet, writing that our
unrelenting population growth will ultimately lead to the demise of
every species on Earth.
Abortions
that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some
people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and
sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these
diagnoses. He and his staff are just as sympathetic to other
circumstances. Many of the clinic’s teenage patients receive later
abortions because they had no idea they were pregnant. Some
sexual-assault victims ignore their pregnancies or feel too ashamed to
see a doctor. Once, a staffer named Catherine told me, a patient opted
for a later abortion because her husband had killed himself and she was
suddenly broke. “There isn’t a single woman who has ever written on her
bucket list that she wants to have a late abortion,” Catherine said.
“There is always a reason.”
It wasn't against Trump early on. It was to determine whether or not
there was Russian interference with the presidential campaign. He slips
into this too conveniently. "It was against Trump." Early on it was just
about hey, have the Russians colluded or intervened in this campaign?
And as you accurately pointed out they did. There are two dozen Russians
charged with indictments under the Mueller inquiry, six of them at
least were card-carrying Russian intelligence officers from the GRU. You
can't say there was no collusion found here.
Politics is legal in America. That's precisely the problem. Only the communists have figured out the solution: staff the institutions with your own cadres.
Durham goes further in his criticism, however, arguing that the FBI rushed to investigate Trump in a case known as Crossfire Hurricane, even as it proceeded cautiously on allegations related to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In particular, the report notes that while the FBI warned Clinton’s team when agents learned of possible evidence by a foreign actor to garner influence with her, agents did not give a similar defensive briefing to the Trump campaign before quickly launching an investigation.
The FBI’s handling of key aspects of the case was “seriously deficient,” Durham wrote, causing the agency “severe reputational harm.” That failure could have been prevented if FBI employees hadn’t embraced “seriously flawed information” and instead followed their “own principles regarding objectivity and integrity,” the report said.
As examples of confirmation bias by the FBI, Durham cites: the FBI decision to go forward with the probe despite “a complete lack of information from the Intelligence Community that corroborated the hypothesis upon which the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was predicated”; agents ignoring information that exonerated key suspects in the case; and the FBI being unable to corroborate “a single substantive allegation” in a dossier of Trump allegations compiled by British former spy Christopher Steele.
“From a historical standpoint, we’ve never seen a presidential family
receive these sums of money from adversaries around the world,” said
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican.
The web of Biden family LLCs was uncovered by scouring four Biden
family bank accounts. The companies were used in what investigators say
was a complex money laundering scheme that filtered money from foreign
companies, through Biden LLCs and eventually into the bank accounts of
nine Biden family members, including one of the president’s grandchildren.
Republicans said a web of foreign transactions generated 170 suspicious activity reports by the banks where Biden family members and business associates deposited money.
The findings also contradict statements from the president, who said his family did not receive any money from China.
“That was a lie,” Mr. Comer
said. “And he continues to lie to the American people now. The Bidens
have received millions of dollars from China. It is inconceivable that
the president did not know it.” ...
The FBI told the panel Wednesday that it would not comply after Mr. Comer asked FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to turn over a Biden-related whistleblower complaint by noon. The complaint says Mr. Biden took bribes from a foreign national while serving as vice president. The whistleblower is credible, Republicans said.
'Hoffman's money has made some wavesin the Carroll case because, in her October 2022 deposition, Carroll denied that anyone was paying her legal fees. Here is what Carroll said:
Q: Are you presently paying your counsel's fees?
A: This is a contingency case.
Q: So you're not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date. Is that correct?
A: I'm not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.
Q: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
A: No.
'As the trial approached, Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, wrote to the Trump legal team to admit that what Carroll said was not true. ...
'In addition, advocates for the Adult Survivors Actwanted to address the tremendous suffering that victims of sexual abuse experience. The lawsuit says Carroll endured "significant pain and suffering" and uses some form of the word "suffer" 11 times. Yet in a June 24,2019 interviewwith CNN's Anderson Cooper, part of the book promotion, Carroll declined to refer to what happened to her as a "rape" and offered this statement: "I just have trouble with the word. I just have trouble. I write an advice column for 25 years and women write to me with these devastating stories and they have been violently, you know, disposed of by men. And I just — I feel too much respect for their suffering. I didn't suffer, Anderson. I did not suffer. I did not lose my job. I wasn't beaten."'
