... “I have rules for men,” Watters began onWednesday’s [Fox News] The Five.“They’re just funny, they’re not that serious. Like, you don't eat soup in public. You don't cross your legs. And you don't drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate.”
Referring toWalz, he said: “His excuse was, ‘well I was drinking a milkshake.’ Again, you shouldn’t be drinking a milkshake. Milkshakes are for kids.”
Watters also claimed that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands.”
“We wave with one hand, not both hands at the same time,” he said. ...
As the Social Security
Administration seeks to curb identity fraud, more people will now be
required to visit an office to prove their identity for new benefit
claims and direct deposit changes. ... The changes are aimed at helping to avoid the fraudulent redirection of benefit checks, which the agency has been warning about for years. ... SSA estimates the agency is now losing more than $100 million per year due to direct deposit fraud. ... The change may require foot traffic to Social Security offices
nationwide to increase by about 75,000 to 85,000 more in-person visitors
per week, according to reports on an internal Social Security Administration memo. ... The AARP, an interest group that represents Americans ages 50 and over,
urged the Social Security Administration to reverse the decision.
In fiscal 2024 Social Security paid out $1.35 trillion in benefits. $100 million is 0.0074% of that!
I predict that the costs of this silliness will exceed the savings.
... Impeachment proceedings, even when they don’t involve presidents, can be time- and resource-intensive affairs. ... privately
there is dread inside Johnson’s leadership circle about the prospect of
having to pursue messy, certain-to-fail impeachments that could
ultimately backfire on the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
“It’s never going to happen,” said a senior House Republican aide. “There aren’t the votes.”
“It
would be such a heavy lift and we’ve got too many heavy lifts coming
up,” said another top GOP aide. “What is the endgame here?”
A
third said GOP leaders and even some conservative House members are
“rolling their eyes” at the impeachment filings that “aren’t going to go
anywhere.” ...
... Musk critics have organizeddozens of peaceful demonstrationsat Tesla dealerships and factories across North America and Europe. Some Tesla owners,including a U.S. senatorwho feuded with Musk, have vowed to sell their vehicles.
But the attacks are keeping law enforcement busy. ...
A number of the most prominent incidents have been reported in left-leaning cities in the Pacific Northwest, likePortland, Oregon, and Seattle, where anti-Trump and anti-Musk sentiment runs high. ...
". . . cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits
innovation. I might even say that it’s a drug that too many American
firms got addicted to . . ."
The indispensable contribution driving investment back home to the United States will have to be penalizing foreign investment's income and rewarding long term domestic investment's income through the tax code, which also means dramatically raising ordinary income tax rates. In other words, returning to the status quo ante-Reagan.
The reason is we have learned that rich people don't know what's best to do with their own money any more than the rest of us do. The rich have not done what's best for the country. Ronald Reagan was completely wrong about that. They took one look at the quick and easy money and immediately started looking to maximize it elsewhere. The tax code used to force them to do the right thing, which was keep it here and invest at home if they wanted to get richer. And that is what made all of us richer, with jobs with which we could afford to marry, buy houses and cars, raise children and send them to college.
People who got rich through Reagan's low ordinary income tax rates fell for the cheap labor abroad to get even richer, but now here they and we sit together beholden to countries abroad who are hostile toward us.
The chart below shows how domestic investment dominated foreign throughout the post-war until the Reagan tax reform of 1986. Investment abroad did not overtake domestic until 1993, at 105% of private fixed investment, after the Reagan tax cuts had taken full effect. Foreign as a percentage of domestic investment is double that and more today. For every four dollars invested at home in 2024, eight were invested abroad.
It took decades to screw this up, and it will take decades to fix it. But as sure as I'm sitting here neither J. D. Vance nor Donald Trump nor any other politician out there has any clue about this.
The ruling is significant because the dopes in the Republican Party just rammed through a continuing spending resolution which fully funds the now severely diminished USAID.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development by billionaire Elon Musk’s
Department of Government Efficiency likely violated the Constitution, a
federal judge ruled Tuesday as he indefinitely blocked DOGE from making
further cuts to the agency. ...
In one of the first DOGE lawsuits against Musk himself, U.S. District
Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland rejected the Trump administration’s
position that Musk is merely President Donald Trump’s adviser.
Musk’s public statements and social media posts demonstrate that he
has “firm control over DOGE,” the judge found pointing to an online post
where Musk said he had “fed USAID into the wood chipper.” ...
The judge said it’s likely that USAID is no longer capable of performing some of its statutorily required functions. ...
Chuang said DOGE’s and Musk’s fast-moving destruction of USAID likely
harmed the public interest by depriving elected lawmakers of their
“constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down
an agency created by Congress.” ...
Ordinarily after successfully pulling off such a deportation coup, which may or may not be legal, you would think Trump would be gloating, but you would be wrong.
Nothing is ever good enough. He is never satisfied. He is never secure.
"He who is the real tyrant," said Plato,
"whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise
the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the
vilest of mankind."
"He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy,
and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to
inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear
and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he
resembles."
The 3.257 trillion miles of 2019 was exceeded in 2024 by 5 billion miles, on an average annual basis.
The depression in road travel from the Great Financial Crisis lasted eight years, from 2007 to 2015.
Previous to that we had similar, but smaller contractions in US road travel, from 1979 to 1982, three years, and from 1973 to 1975, two years, precipitated by the oil trade shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the Yom Kippur War respectively.
In the first column are 30 Democrats who infamously voted to abolish the filibuster late in the evening on Jan 19, 2022, which failed 48-52 because of Sinema and Manchin, but happily tried to mount one last week.
The roll call vote in the US Senate is here (the Wikipedia entry is wrong on this, citing a CBS story and dating the vote to Jan 20).
In column two are 7 Democrats who campaigned to abolish the filibuster but who also happily tried to mount one last week.
The 2017 letter
to Mitch McConnell in the last column references the names of 19 Democrats
who then said they were for the filibuster, but last week 5 of them weren't lol.
The irony of all this of course is that Joe Biden's spending for fiscal 2025 was just passed with little modification by Republicans with the help of 10 Democrats (1 Independent) and the Democrats are beating themselves up over it.
But it's kind of hard to crow about Joe Biden's success after you just forced him out of power.
... two IRS employees who spoke to CNN said that some of the actions taken by DOGE inside IRS appear to be aimed at finding ways to use the agency’s protected data to find undocumented immigrants. ...
... Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world and Alberta is
the country’s biggest producer. Some 97% of the country’s 4 million bpd
of oil exports went to the U.S. in 2023 with several European nations
and Hong Kong taking the remainder, according to Canada’s energy regulator. Alberta supplied 87% of the oil exported from Canada to the U.S. in 2023. ...
[Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith said Canada is looking at three different pipeline proposals to
its West Coast, at least one pipeline into the Northwest Territories,
one into Manitoba, one to the Hudson Bay, and one into Eastern Canada.
“Those are conversations we were not having three months ago,” [provincial energy minister Brian] Jean said of the pipelines. ...
The Senate filibuster is indeed a magical, wonderful, horrible, no good thing. It makes you collect 60 votes to end debate, but then you can vote to make yourself look good right after you betrayed your friends.
The Senate passed a six-month funding bill Friday to avert a
government shutdown hours ahead of the midnight deadline, sending it to
President Donald Trump to sign into law.
The vote was 54-46, with
two Democrats joining all but one Republican in voting yes. Earlier
Friday, the bill cleared a key procedural hurdle with the help of 10
Democrats in a 62-38 vote. Sixty votes were needed to defeat a
Democratic filibuster.
The votes came after a dramatic 48-hour period during which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., broke with most House and Senate Democrats,
announcing he would support moving forward on the bill one day after he
declared it didn’t have the votes. Schumer ultimately voted no on final
passage of the legislation.
The cloture motion roll call 62-38 is here showing the nine Democrats and one Independent vote Yea to defeat their own filibuster.
The final passage roll call 54-46 is here showing eight of the ten, all Democrats, voting their phony Nays: Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand and Schumer, Hassan, Peters, and Schatz.
Peters, who voted Yea and then Nay, isn't running again next year, and neither is Shaheen, who really didn't care and voted Yea both times with King the Independent.
The anger mirrors less visible Republican discontent with its supine leadership for failing to assert Congress' control over the power of the purse and letting Elon Musk run their show.
... "I know I speak for so many in our caucus when I say Schumer is
misreading this moment. The Senate Dems must show strength and grit by
voting no," said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.).
... Some House members, in turn, have gotten an earful from constituents. "I
have also never had so many people from home personally texting
me—ANGRY," said another House Democrat. "I don't think they knew who Chuck Schumer was before today," the lawmaker said. "But they know now and they hate him." ...
President Donald Trump’s
special envoy for Ukraine and Russia was excluded from high-level talks
on ending the war after the Kremlin said it didn't want him there, a
U.S. administration official and a Russian official told NBC News.
Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was
conspicuously absent from two recent summits in Saudi Arabia — one with
Russian officials and the other with Ukrainians — even though the talks
come under his remit.
“Together,” Trump said in announcing Kellogg’s nomination in November, “we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”
But Kellogg did not attend U.S.-Russia talks in
Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Feb. 18. Russian President Vladimir Putin
thought he was too pro-Ukraine, a senior Russian official with direct
knowledge of the Kremlin’s thinking told NBC News. ...
... “While the Polling Institute has done excellent work, it’s public
polling mission is no longer aligned with our current strategic goals,”
said Leahy. “I realize this is a significant change given the decades of
outstanding work led by Patrick Murray, the founding director of the Institute since its inception in 2005.
“Patrick’s skilled analysis and media aplomb established the Monmouth University
Poll as one of the top polls in the country for both accuracy and
transparency, including a top-five ranking from the poll analysis
website FiveThirtyEight.” ...
... Kevin’s success was also a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery.
It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without
being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary
person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub
elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet
write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary
Americans—read and respect. ...
If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase.
Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald
Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which
raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to
their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly
$5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years.
... Alsup, a San Francisco-based
appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Defense, Treasury,
Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments to
“immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back.
The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made an
“unlawful” decision to terminate them. ... Alsup is the first federal judge to order the administration to broadly
unwind the firing spree that has roiled the federal workforce during
Trump’s first two months in office. ...
The monthly rise in core wholesale prices in January 2025 of 0.5% was revised up to 0.7% today, and the year over year increase was revised up to 3.8% from 3.6%.
Inflation in January 2025 was worse than previously reported, and probably was in February too as reported today, but we'll have to see, as long, anyway, as Ludwig doesn't manage to blow us all up in the meantime.
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employees and
outside groups are fighting an order from the agency’s leadership to
shred and burn its classified documents as well as personnel records.
An email obtained by The Hill sent by USAID’s acting executive
secretary instructs remaining employees at the dismantled agencies to
“shred as many documents as possible first, and reserve the burn bags
for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.” ...
Even as Ohio Republicans stuck
with President Donald Trump and voted on Tuesday to approve a six-month
government funding bill in the U.S. House, that decision came with a
price — as the GOP plan denied federal funding for a variety of local
projects across the state. ...
