DHS will remain shutdown, GOP-controlled U.S. House passes 60-day continuing resolution to fund DHS, ignoring the plan passed by the GOP-controlled Senate earlier

 The Senate returns in 2 weeks to take up the matter.

Kristi Noem did a really fantastic job running DHS, didn't she?

 

 

Senate Democrats get partial win, bill funding DHS passes without further funding for ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection, which were massively funded last year by the Big Ugly Bill

Senate advances DHS funding bill, tees up House vote to end shutdown as TSA airport lines stretch 

... After weeks of Republicans fighting Democrats on their calls to remove funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement from any potential deal, the bill does exactly that. It would fund all of DHS except for ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection, though it does not include the changes to ICE’s immigration enforcement practices that Democrats had demanded. 

... The shutdown began in February in the weeks after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis as part of a federal immigration crackdown. Democrats demanded changes in ICE and DHS more broadly and refused to fund the department. ...

After telling you that war is peace, get ready for the Ministry of Truth to say that the Save America Act about voter ID is a fiscal issue permitting passage under reconciliation

 In the Senate, Thune resurrects idea of reconciliation 

... Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted, “It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation. And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”

Lee, a member of the Budget Committee, has led the push for the chamber to debate SAVE and even pursue a so-called talking filibuster to pass the bill via a simple majority. ...

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said that “I don’t see any way that any part of the SAVE America Act [with] any teeth gets included in a reconciliation package.”

“On top of that, I think it’s very difficult to pass a reconciliation package. We don’t have big tax cuts coming. That’s really what got the last one done,” Scott said. “I think it’s going to be very difficult to get you know 50 of us to agree on something.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who opposed last year’s reconciliation measure, said, “It would seem on its face, because there’s so much policy involved, that it would be difficult to do.” 

“It’s kind of interesting to see if they’re just going to be pushing maybe some of the funding that could fit within reconciliation. But I don’t know how the policy fits in there.”

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, who has been part of hashing out the agreement between Democrats and the White House to reopen DHS, also declined to support reconciliation, saying “I don’t think that’s a good approach.” ...

The chamber’s conservative House Freedom Caucus called the idea “gaslighting” from Senate Republican leadership. ... 

 

 

Because they have nothing better to do

 ICE agents might as well try security theatre after deportation theatre flopped at the box office earlier.  

 

ICE agents will be deployed to U.S. airports on Monday: Homan

... “We will be at the airports tomorrow, helping TSA move those lines along,” Homan said, adding that ICE will assist in areas like guarding exit doors to relieve TSA agents for screening travelers. “We’re simply there to help TSA do their jobs in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise.” ...

If stuff like guarding exit doors is an area that doesn't need the TSA's "specialized expertise", why are TSA agents doing that stuff in the first place, and why are we paying for it?

 

 

GOP liars portray passing routine legislation under reconcilation rules as a standard part of the process when the gimmick is restricted to budgets and wasn't used for the first time until 1980

Now they want to make everything fall under reconciliation in order to make an end run around the filibuster. 

The Byrd Rule codified in 1990 makes legislation extraneous to the budget process, like the Save Act, ineligible for the process. 

Reconciliation Is the Strategy To Pass the SAVE Act

Gerrick Wilkins, RealClearPolitics

Trump thinks high interest rates are all Powell's fault when they are HIS: The war in Iran, the tariffs, the addition of $2 trillion in debt in seven months

 

Trump creates an emergency by attacking Iran, turns right around and declares an emergency to by-pass Congress and sell weapons to Persian Gulf states even though we need another $200 billion from Congress for weapons

 

 Trump invokes emergency powers with $23 billion in Gulf arms sales as Iran war wages on: WSJ report

... For some of the deals, the American government invoked the emergency clause of U.S. arms control law, a mechanism that allows the executive branch to proceed without the standard 30-day congressional review period, according to the report.

 

How war escalates to consume the state: Things don't go right after two weeks (!) and suddenly Trump needs NATO to come to his rescue and Congress to fork over an additional $200 billion which we don't have

 All because of one, supremely disordered soul.

 

 

 

‘We will remember’: Trump warns countries to help secure Strait of Hormuz as shipping stalls (Mar 16)

Hegseth says potential $200 billion Iran war spending request could shift: ‘Takes money to kill bad guys’ (Mar 19)

The U.S. national debt topped $39 trillion yesterday, five months after topping $38 trillion, seven months after topping $37 trillion

Recent National Debt Milestones

3/17/26  $39 trillion

10/21/25  $38 trillion

8/11/25  $37 trillion

11/21/24 $36 trillion

 

 

U.S. Federal Debt continues to be a very popular investment with foreigners who owned $9.2484 trillion of it at the end of 3Q2025

As of early 2026, the average interest rate paid on all outstanding U.S. federal debt is about 3.35%.

This rate represents a significant increase from the roughly 1.5% average seen in early 2022.

The chart was updated on Mar 4, 2026.

The $9.248 trillion owned by foreigners in 3Q2025 was about 24.5% of the total public debt outstanding at the time. 

The latest data available from the U.S. Department of the Treasury indicates that in Dec 2025 foreigners owned $9.2709 trillion.

  

 

For WHAT?

 Congress Could Get Healthy Pay Raise...

... In private, many members suggest they deserve higher pay ...          

 

Meanwhile the story never mentions insider trading, which is how the net worth of your average member of Congress becomes about 100 times that of your average American. 

Congress doesn't get rich by making $174k, let alone $250k, a year.

Not talking about the real problem seems to be the mission of Congress, and of the press. 

The CBO forecasted last week that we will be $64 trillion in debt by 2036

 ... In CBO’s baseline projections, whereas debt held by the public increases by $24 trillion from the end of 2026 to the end of 2036, debt held by government accounts remains relatively stable, averaging $7 trillion over the next decade. As a result, gross federal debt is also projected to rise by $24 trillion over that period, reaching $64 trillion at the end of 2036. Debt held by government accounts makes up 12 percent of that sum. ...

More (page 18).

Spending: Wei Tu Hai

Taxes: Wei Tu Lo

 

Nancy Pelosi's Speakerships were a double-whammy of obscene spending unprecedented in the post-war which never delivered on the economic growth

The double whammy burger you order never looks as good as the picture.

 

We're already close to the first: As of Feb 2026, the average interest rate on the U.S. National Debt is 3.4% while the compound annual rate of nominal GDP growth from 3Q2007 to 3Q2025 is only 4.3%

 One path to U.S. fiscal disaster is most alarming — and most likely

... An Everest of debt is an incentive for an inflation crisis to reduce the value of existing debt by paying lenders with debased dollars. But inflation would become baked into the expectations of investors, who would demand higher interest rates. Then R>G would bite: When interest rates paid on debt exceed the rate of economic growth, a crisis intensifies as rising interest rates depress economic growth. ... The most probable, and most ominous, outcome would be a gradual crisis. ... Nothing unsettles a middle-class nation more rapidly than inflation, a component of all of these crises. ...

The biggest number in this story is $293.6 million

 Wake me when the New York Post writes a story entitled:

 

Trump's $75 billion ICE Police State rammed through right-wing Congress at taxpayer expense under phony reconciliation rules

 

‘Grassroots’ anti-ICE campaigns funded by left-wing billionaire donors: sources 

American Greatness confidently tells us that the American and French revolutions had nothing whatsover to do with one another when French financial support of the American one lead to theirs

Seen here:

... The two revolutions had nothing whatsoever to do with one another ...             

They had more to do with one another than not.

Louis XVI unwisely spent literally billions of dollars he did not have supporting the American revolution. His motivation for support was revenge against Britain. Most of it was piled up as high interest debt which the rich of the French aristocracy and of the Church refused to pay but the peasantry could not. Add famine into the mix after trying to squeeze blood out of that turnip and boom.

Donald Trump is spending $75 billion we don't have to round up illegal aliens in the streets using militarized police, but he refuses to punish the employers who get rich off their labor. He got elected promising to cut food and energy costs but here we are one year later and those things still cost a fortune. 

Two Americans have been murdered in the streets by government agents.

You can see where this could go, but American Greatness can't. 

The wealth inequality of today's K-shaped economy goes back to the Reagan Revolution

Wealth inequality and the ‘K-shaped’ economy are more striking than ever, data shows

 

They take vacations and buy luxury goods. You struggle to pay for food, shelter, and transportation.

 

K is not OK.

 

... A key measure of wealth concentration called the Gini coefficient sits at 60-year highs, according to a report from U.S. Bank published earlier this month. ... The net worth of America’s top 1% hit a record share of nearly 32% in the third quarter of 2025, the Federal Reserve reported. By comparison, the bottom 50% cumulatively held 2.5% of overall net wealth.

 

The portion of U.S. GDP heading to workers in the form of compensation tumbled to its lowest level in its more than 75-year history, per data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means the average nonfarm business worker is seeing an increasingly small slice of an economy that has largely boomed over the last 15 years. ...

 

Total relative “outlays” — a broad measure of spending and nonmortgage payments — by U.S. consumers in the top 20% hit multidecade highs last year, a data analysis conducted by Moody’s Analytics found. The other 80% tumbled to new lows, the data shows. ...

 

While the “K-shape” term became popularized as an explanation for the uneven economic recovery seen during the pandemic, economists say the origins of this breakaway can be traced back decades earlier.

This type of diverging economy stems from the economic reorganization seen during the Reagan administration, according to Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at tax firm RSM. About two decades later, the structural break that created the K-shaped economy, as it’s now understood, was more clearly observed in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s, he said.

That was in part due to the loss of wealth tied to the historic housing market crash, Brusuelas said. On top of that, he said the jump in joblessness limited earnings potential for those without steady employment in their prime working years.

The Great Recession “created the conditions for the winner-take-all economy that emerged in its aftermath,” said Brusuelas, who first heard the K-shape term around 2008. “If you live, work and inhabit certain portions of the economy, you might as well live on the dark side of the moon compared to what goes on down-market.” ...

To make meaningful inroads, the U.S. would instead need to focus on tax reform and expanding social safety nets, according to RSM’s Brusuelas. ...

Last July's Big Beautiful Trump Bill was actually Trump's Big New Fascist Police State and Concentration Camp Bill

 

Trump's government is $602 billion in the hole for the first three months of fiscal year 2026

 This rate of deficit spending implies $2.4 trillion added to the national debt for FY2026 when it's over.