Elitist climber, progressive snob.
April 2025:
April 2026:
Elitist climber, progressive snob.
April 2025:
April 2026:
In June 1995 the average mortgage payment in the United States was roughly $773.
Adjusted for inflation to June 2025 that's $1,635.
The actual average mortgage payment in 2025 was about $2,235.
Bill Clinton teeming up with Republicans in 1997 to turn our homes into mere commodities has really worked out great, hasn't it?
Especially for young people.
The median age of a first time home buyer in 1995 was 29.
In 2025 it's 39.
But your GOP-controlled U.S. Senate couldn't care less.
It stayed up late last night to scheme for more money for ICE even though ICE is completely incompetent to deport illegal aliens, but it never stays up to solve the most pressing problems of America's younger generations.
The blindness is mind-boggling.
U.S. Senate votes to advance $70 billion funding plan for ICE, Border Patrol
... Lawmakers voted 50-48 in the predawn hours to adopt the non-binding budget resolution and send it to the U.S. House of Representatives ...
Two Republicans — Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski — opposed the measure.
If adopted by the House, the resolution will allow congressional committees to begin filling in the details on how the $70 billion would be spent in separate legislation that President Donald Trump would have to sign into law. ...
Republicans plan to employ a rarely used procedure known as budget reconciliation in the separate legislation, which allows some budget-related bills to bypass Democratic opposition in the Senate. ...
Such measures require only a simple majority for passage in the 100-member chamber, instead of the usual supermajority of 60 votes or more. Republicans hold a 53-47 seat majority. ...
After two U.S. citizens were fatally shot by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis, Democrats insisted that ICE and Border Patrol be subject to the same operational rules as police forces across the United States, including a requirement that judicial warrants be obtained before agents can enter private homes.
But weeks of negotiations ended in a stalemate. ...
Last year, Republicans passed legislation providing around $130 billion in funding for these two agencies, separate from their annual appropriations and the $70 billion now being advanced in Congress. ...
The Senate returns in 2 weeks to take up the matter.
Kristi Noem did a really fantastic job running DHS, didn't she?
TSA funding update: House GOP spikes DHS funding proposal, extending shutdown that’s caused delays
... The stopgap measures advanced out of the House Rules Committee on Friday, teeing up a vote as soon as later this evening. ... Any such effort would need to go back to the Senate for final approval and would extend the shutdown. It is also not likely to pass in the Senate, where most lawmakers have already left town. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Friday called the proposal “dead on arrival.” ...
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. ...
You have the government you deserve lol.
Millionaires Are Overrepresented in the U.S. Senate — By a Lot
... “The Senate is packed with multimillionaires, and the fact is some of them have lost touch with the real world challenges faced by Americans all over the country,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, told NOTUS in a statement. “It is part of the reason that we have a tax system that favors people who make money off of money and penalizes those who earn a paycheck through hard work. We need to change that.”
Van Hollen is one of at least 11 senators whose median net worth is less than the median household net worth of their respective states, according to a NOTUS analysis of senators’ financial disclosures and U.S. Census Bureau data. Van Hollen has a median net worth of $7,500; the median Maryland household has a net worth of $152,400. (Census Bureau data does not include median household net worth for seven states: Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.) ...
The median net worth in the Senate is nearly $4.4 million — more than 70 times the Census-reported median U.S. household net worth, which similarly excludes equity in primary residences. ...
The median net worth for members of the Senate Democratic Caucus is more than $2.9 million, while for Senate Republicans, it’s nearly $5.7 million. ...
A full table for the current Senate is here.
Trump is convinced illegal aliens vote in large enough numbers to prevent Republicans from winning even though he and the Republicans swept into office in 2024 and control the executive and legislative branches of government.
Trump-backed SAVE America Act will get a Senate vote next week, Thune says
The legislation is expected to fail unless a change is made to the filibuster, which requires 60 votes on most measures considered by the Senate. ...
For months Trump, GOP hardliners and online influencers like Elon Musk have railed against opponents of the bill and called repeatedly for a change to the Senate filibuster rule to ensure passage in the upper chamber. Thune supports the legislation but has rejected those calls, saying changing Senate procedure could have unintended consequences. Speaking from the Senate floor Thursday, he made no mention of changing the chamber’s rules, all but assuring the proposal will not pass. ...
Anticipating the bill’s failure in the Senate, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who introduced the legislation, and other proponents have engaged in a pressure campaign to revert back to a “standing filibuster,” which requires dissenting members to actively hold the Senate floor to block legislation and could, in theory, allow for the passage of the bill with a simple 50-vote majority. ...
Republicans claim to be against more wars, but they let them happen anyway.
House rejects war powers resolution to rein in Trump on Iran
... The vote was 212-219, with four Democrats joining Republicans to torpedo the measure and two Republicans joining Democrats in voting for the measure. The Senate shot down a similar measure on Wednesday. ...
War powers vote fails in the Senate, allowing Trump to continue Iran strikes
... The measure, brought by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rand Paul, R-Ky.,
faced steep odds and was largely symbolic even if it passed — Trump is
almost certain to veto any bill aimed at decreasing his authority to use
the military. The vote was 47-53, under the 50-vote threshold needed to
advance the resolution. ...
Trump says he will replace DHS Secretary Kristi Noem with Sen. Markwayne Mullin
Now he's poaching from the thin Republican majority in the U.S. Senate. Brilliant. Just Brilliant.
The median net worth of an American household in 2023 was less than $200,000.
The median net worth of a current member of the U.S. Congress is $1,000,000.
So the legislative branch is ordering the executive branch to D O S O M E T H I N G.
The legislative branch ordered TikTok to do something by last January, you'll recall, but the executive and its Department of Justice found a way around that.
They'll find a way around this, too.
The foxes remain in charge of the henhouse.
It's been a story of a bad week just getting worse every day in this Trump-friendly poll.
People are in a foul mood in the aftermath of the government shutdown, which ended on Wednesday.
But it could be a lot worse.
Trump's all time low in this poll was -26 on 3 August 2017, after the U.S. Senate had just days earlier failed to overturn Obamacare and then recessed for August without one legislative accomplishment in Trump's first year in office to date.
Still, Democrats this week failed to get what they wanted from the shutdown on the Obamacare tax credits, which is a victory for Trump and should be showing up more positively in this poll, but it is not.
Trump has been his own worst enemy this week, AGAIN!, defending H-1B visas because America doesn't have enough talent in his opinion, defending foreigners and especially Chinese taking up seats in America's college classrooms, gaslighting about consumer inflation coming down, and handing out bonus money like water to air traffic controllers and DHS employees who kept working during the shutdown.
But Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, now on Trump's shit list, caused an uproar this week because she said the increases in Obamacare premiums in 2026 are going to wreak havoc on her constituents. Trump promptly kicked her off the plantation after she appeared on The View to talk about it.
Maybe the politics of Obamacare tax credits have flipped for the GOP rank and file and Trump and the Republican elites are going to be the last to know about it.
The Congress has the tariff authority, not the president, according to the constitution, and needs to reign in the powers it has delegated to the executive if it cares what is good for the country.
65% of the country disapproves of the GOP-controlled Congress.