Alexander Bolton at The Hill here:
... The vote to proceed to the sprawling budget reconciliation package remained open on the Senate floor for more than three and a half hours, stuck for a long time at 47 yes’s and 50 no’s. ...
Alexander Bolton at The Hill here:
... The vote to proceed to the sprawling budget reconciliation package remained open on the Senate floor for more than three and a half hours, stuck for a long time at 47 yes’s and 50 no’s. ...
... The comment by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, which was described by three people who heard his remarks and a fourth who was briefed on them, is the first known explanation given for why the US military did not use the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb against the Isfahan site in central Iran. US officials believe Isfahan’s underground structures house nearly 60% of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, which Iran would need in order to ever produce a nuclear weapon. ... Isfahan was only struck by Tomahawk missiles launched from a US submarine. ...
An early assessment produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the day after the US strikes said the attack did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program, including its enriched uranium, and likely only set the program back by months, CNN has reported. It also said Iran may have moved some of the enriched uranium out of the sites before they were attacked. ...
Caine and Hegseth on Thursday said the military operation against Fordow went exactly as planned but did not mention the impacts to Isfahan and Natanz.
The emphasis on Fordow from the beginning was intentional, because they knew they couldn't do anything about Isfahan.
You know, like "Look over there! A deer!"
Trump megabill narrowly advances in Senate despite two GOP defections
Senate Republicans on Saturday narrowly voted to advance a sprawling 1,000-page bill to enact President Trump’s agenda, despite the opposition of two GOP lawmakers.
The vote was 51-49.
Two Republicans voted against advancing the package: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes a provision to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who says the legislation would cost his state $38.9 trillion in federal Medicaid funding.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) changed his “no” vote to “aye,” and holdout Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) also voted yes to advance the bill.
The bill had suffered several significant setbacks in the days and hours before coming to the floor, at times appearing to be on shaky ground.
The vote itself was also full of drama. ...
Flashback to May 25 when Johnson said he had enough votes in the Senate to stop the bill:
GOP senator says resistance to Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' could stop it in the Senate
President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are hopeful for minimal modifications in the Senate to the "One Big, Beautiful Bill" passed by the House last week, but one Republican senator said there's enough resistance to halt the bill unless there are significant changes.
"The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, urging deeper spending cuts than those in the bill to reset to a "reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending."
"I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit," Johnson said. ...
Didn't even have him!
Canadian officials said this month that they would not pause the digital services tax, despite ferocious opposition from the United States.
“Obviously, we think it’s patently unfair to do it retroactively,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said later Friday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
Bessent said the Trump administration was hoping that Carney’s government would “put a brake on” the tax “as a sign of goodwill.” ...
Trump's idea of good will is 50% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, 25% tariffs on autos, an overall 10% tariff on most everything else, and a 25% "fentanyl" tariff.
... I’m always anti-boomer ...
In The New York Times, here.
First-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised lower Thursday in light of reduced consumer spending, surprising economists.
GDP contracted by 0.5 percent on an annualized basis, 0.3 percentage points lower than the last measurement from the Commerce Department.
Economists were expecting the number to stay the same at a 0.2 percent contraction. ...
More.
Average yields at Treasury Note auctions this week have been significantly lower than at the immediately preceding auctions, indicating there has been a flight to safety on souring economic growth expectations.
Trump may get his lower interest rates . . . the hard way, lol.
More.
Sounds like Howard Lutnick gobbledygook at the end there. Paragraph two speaks of an increase in imports. Paragraph three of a downward revision to imports.
Which is it lol?
Nominal 1Q2025 GDP clocks in at $29.962 trillion in the third estimate. SPX was at 5612 on Mar 31, yielding a crazy high stock market valuation of 187.
Iran’s nuclear facilities “suffered enormous damage” from the U.S. airstrikes Saturday, but more extensive evaluation is needed, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Thursday.
“I think ‘annihilated’ is too much, but it has suffered enormous damage,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Rafael Grossi told French broadcaster RFI. “I know there’s a lot of debate about the degree of annihilation, total destruction, and so on, what I can tell you, and I think everyone agrees on this, is that very considerable damage has been done.”
“Obviously, you have to go to the site and that is not easy, there is debris and it is no longer an operational facility,” he added.
More.
In its draft form, the measure would call for reducing the top-tier capital big banks must hold by 1.4%, or some $13 billion, for holding companies. Subsidiaries would see a larger drop, of $210 billion, which would still be held by the parent bank. The standard applies the same rules to so-called globally systemic important banks as well as their subsidiaries.
The rule would lower capital requirements to range of 3.5% to 4.5% from the current 5%, with subsidiaries put in the same range from a previous level of 6%. ...
However, Governors Adriana Kugler and Michael Barr, the former vice chair of supervision, said they would oppose the move.
“Even if some further Treasury market intermediation were to occur in normal times, this proposal is unlikely to help in times of stress,” Barr said in a separate statement. “In short, firms will likely use the proposal to distribute capital to shareholders and engage in the highest return activities available to them, rather than to meaningfully increase Treasury intermediation.” ...
All prices are FRED data from the St. Louis Fed in U.S. dollars.
Ground Chuck 6.018/lb
Coffee 7.931
White Sugar 1.054
Bananas 0.655
Potato Chips 6.731
Ice Cream 6.466/half gallon
100% Ground Beef 5.981/lb
All Uncooked Ground Beef 6.245
American Cheese 5.063
Beer 1.834/pint
This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
A couple dozen provisions have been removed. No ruling yet on the biggest one, which could mean $3.7 trillion in fake ‘savings.’
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
Because Trump is weak, Mark. It's a failure of nerve. He doesn't have the right stuff.
Iran should be forced to sign a surrender document. Unconditional surrender. They lost their nukes, they’ve lost their air force, they have no ground-to-air protection. China didn’t step in, Russia didn’t step in, not a single Arab country stepped in. The Supreme Nazi is hiding in a bunker much like Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He was going to be killed, so he committed suicide.
More.
From the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics this morning:
Iran's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017.
The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.
I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.
GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill
... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...
Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...
... certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online ...
... Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.
On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: "You can ask that question in two weeks, and we'll see." He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.
Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, "I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can't say yes or no."
Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.
"I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know within two weeks," Trump said. "We're going to find out whether or not he's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks." ...
Last Wednesday marked three weeks, and still bupkis from Trump.
It's been two months, not two weeks.
More.
... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion.
Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense.
The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...
Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.
“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...
LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.
“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...
Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles
It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters. ...
The idiot who did this map didn't know that B-2 Spirit Bombers are based at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri.
Also, the idiot from the White House should be an ex-official.
Mike Waltz is also missing lol.
To be fair, only Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz worked in an official capacity, and they remain in official positions.
In 2017 seven people got the ax by June, eighteen by the end of the year.
... Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to hit back even harder at Iran following the strike.
“We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran,” he vowed in an X post.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, backed up Netanyahu’s threat.
“These are war crimes of the most serious kind — and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes,” he tweeted.
“The Prime Minister and I have instructed the IDF to increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime.” ...
And there it is:
In Rob Schneider's world Iran never funded Hamas which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, never built and launched wave after wave of ballistic missiles at Israeli civilians, never enriched enough uranium to build over a dozen nuclear weapons, never promised over and over again death to Israel and death to America.
Truly hilarious.
... There is not much data on individuals in the $50 million to $1 billion range, which distorts the picture, according to Mazeau. He also said the wealth growth among middle and lower wealth brackets is underappreciated. For instance, the number of individuals with $1 million to $5 million, whom UBS dubs “everyday millionaires,” has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52 million.
“They have more wealth collectively than all the billionaires in the world,” he said. “It is often overlooked how much wealth is rising and is going towards the middle of the pack.”
The middle of the pack. Yeah right.
It takes $33 million in 2025 to be a 1913 millionaire.
More in "The U.S. added a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024: Report".
Meanwhile . . .
What we have here is a DHS secretary who on her own admission can be incapacitated by an allergic reaction, which doesn't seem very "secure" to me.
Maybe we need someone else on the job.
And what we also have here is yet more drama from the actors at Fort Detrick. Somebody needs to clean that place up once and for all, or shut it down permanently.
Will that someone be RFK Jr.?
Kristi Noem discharged from hospital as ICE Barbie's sudden illness sparks conspiracy theories
... According to its website, the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick studies viruses 'causing high-consequence disease' like like Ebola or COVID.
One of its major focus areas is to 'mitigate major public heath events related to emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases or biological weapons attacks.'
But Kennedy's Department of Health and Human Services ordered an indefinite work stoppage at the facility in April.
'NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick,' HHS officials said at the time.
'This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause.'
They added: 'During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.'
Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.
Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed to Fox News that the shutdown came after one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'. ...
I mean, holy crap.
The 2001 anthrax letter attacks CAME from anthrax STORED at Fort Detrick, which was the government's bioweapons research facility from way back in 1943 during WWII, until it became politically suicidal to say that and they snapped their fingers and presto!, it became a biodefense research facility.
The researcher there responsible for the anthrax attacks committed suicide as investigators finally got close to him.
James Comey and Robert Mueller infamously tried to frame the wrong guy for the crime. You know those guys, the guys who relentlessly went after Donald Trump.
DHS didn't even exist until March 2003.
I mean, c'mon Newsweek.
Fort Detrick is also suspiciously close to the location of a facility where elderly people came down with an unknown respiratory illness and died in summer 2019, which I think might have been a precursor to COVID-19. Most people now believe the Chicom lab at Wuhan was the lab from which coronavirus leaked, but I think Fort Detrick and Wuhan were cooperating at the time because bioweapons research was technically forbidden in the USA but they farmed it out to Wuhan on the sly, perhaps through Peter Daszak and Ecohealth-Alliance which got grants connected with Anthony Fauci. I speculate something leaked into the USA in summer 2019 from Fort Detrick.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people in America and abroad that there was a very severe flu-like illness already on the loose in the second half of 2019 which they commonly describe as the worst flu they ever had.
Meanwhile Fort Detrick has been perennially notorious for failing inventory protocols for the HAZMAT stored there, for shoddy maintenance and record keeping, and for leaking waste water into the local environment.
That ICE Barbie fell ill after a visit to Fort Detrick is really one hell of a coincidence.
Kristi Noem Visited Biohazard Lab Day Before Allergic Reaction
Trump yanks brief reprieve for immigrants he said are ‘good, long time workers’
The Trump administration has reopened arrests of immigrant workers at hotels, restaurants and agricultural businesses, backtracking on the brief reprieve they got after President Donald Trump stated they were necessary, good, longtime workers whose jobs were almost “impossible” to replace. ...
The announcement backpedals on Trump’s statement last week on social media that “changes are coming” after farmers and hotel and leisure business employers had complained that “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Just six days ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement paused arrests at worksites in agriculture industries, including fisheries and meatpacking plants, restaurants and hotels, according to an internal policy memo obtained by NBC News last Thursday. ...
Asked about the change during a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from the G7 summit, Trump said: “We’re going to look everywhere. But I think the biggest problem is the inner cities.” ...
Trump said cities are where “the really bad ones are, the murderers.”
“We’re going to get them out,” Trump said. “There are far more in the inner cities, Democrat-run cities, sadly, and I’m just giving you, there’s far more in there than you have on a farm or someplace.”