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.” ...
