< civil rights|222||Contradict him at your peril.>
In his March 5th address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump said, “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” He backed that up with an executive order. What he did not say was that his free speech edict does not permit others to say or write what he doesn’t like.
Just before July 4th, Paramount announced it would pay Mr. Trump – his library fund supposedly — $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by him about the editing of a snip of what Kamala Harris had to say in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes”. The suit, filed just before the election for a preposterous $10 billion, would have gone nowhere in court, but Paramount is up for sale to a Hollywood studio run by the son of the world’s third richest person, Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle Corporation, and the transaction needs the approval of the federal government.
To the extent that the broadcast journalists and their research and production staffs don’t quit in protest, the sellout tarnishes the reputation and future credibility of “60 Minutes”, an institution that has been on air since 1968.
the official verdict
It doesn’t stop with CBS. Mr. Trump has now threatened to sue The New York Times and CNN for reporting on an assessment of the Iran nuclear site bombings that differed from his proclamation that they were “totally obliterated”. The Times and CNN must pay for mention of any other conclusion. On social media he said journalists at both organizations should be fired.
One of the 18 government intelligence agencies had quickly issued a “preliminary” report expressing its surmise that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program had been set back by only a few months. Not just any of the agencies, but it was by the Defense Department itself – the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had immediately fallen in line: “Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated”. So did Steve Witkoff, billionaire real estate investor and now Trump’s special Middle East envoy and negotiator, who concluded:
“[T]here’s no doubt that it was obliterated. So the reporting out here that in some ways suggests that we did not achieve the objective is just completely preposterous.”
Explosives expert and Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was irate:
”The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter [sic] pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen [sic] 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Fox News wanted to disseminate the official line quickly, so in the prime nine-o’clock slot, Jesse Watters skated quickly past the briefest mention of a Defense Department report so as to make it a CNN reporter’s article. “CNN says the bunker busters we dropped didn’t work.”
Trump outside the White House made no mention that it was a DIA report:
“That place is demolished. The B2 pilots did their job but when I see CNN all night long they’re trying to say, well, maybe it wasn’t really as demolished as we thought. It was demolished…and I will say I think CNN ought to apologize to the pilots of the B2s. I think that MSDNC ought to apologize. I think these guys, really, these networks, cable networks, are real losers…They’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN cause I watch it. I have no choice. I’ve gotta watch this garbage. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news. But I think CNN is a gutless group of people.”
(MSDNC — i.e., Democratic National Committee — is the president’s moniker for the MSNBC network).
The letter from Trump’s attorney to the Times and CNN said that their reporting had damaged Mr. Trump’s reputation by making the DIA report known and they must “retract and apologize” for reporting that the lawyer called “false”, “defamatory”, and “unpatriotic”. The newpaper’s lawyers responded with “No retraction is needed” and “No apology will be forthcoming”.
In the days since, there has been a mix of assessments in the media and from government figures ranging from an Iran capable of fashioning a dirty bomb in days if the uranium had been moved before the attack, to needing years to recover. Certainly the “obliterated” claim has been obliterated and yet the president exhibited his questionable faculties still saying just last Sunday:
”The attack turned out, according to every single atomic energy commission that was a complete and total obliteration.”
Jul 11 2025 | Posted in
National |
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< taxes|206||What debt? Creative accounting makes it go away.>
Republicans now face the dicey task of persuading their voters that the “One Big Beautiful Bill” they’ve just passed is anything of the sort. Deeply unpopular, Fox News and Quinnipiac polls show an average of 57% of voters are opposed to the OBBB, with only 34% in favor. And when told that it could add $3.5 to $4.0 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years while cutting $800 billion from Medicaid at a cost of 8-10 million people losing medical coverage, all to preserve the 2017 tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, support of even MAGA Republicans plunges 10% or so in polling. And wait until they discover that no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, both have limits, and together with the quadrupled state and local tax deductible, all expire in just three-and-a-half years at the end of Trump’s term.
So what are Republicans to do? Step one, attack their own Congressional Budget Office which has always been the go-to source for non-partisan analysis. Several op-eds dug into historical examples of when the CBO got it wrong. “The CBO has a terrible track record of predicting health insurance losses”, says the arch-conservative Washington Examiner‘s editorial board. “Most importantly, the CBO report ignores the macroeconomic damage that would result from rejecting the OBBB.” Well, of course. The CBO Is not evaluating what didn’t happen.
accounting skullduggery
But surely the most desperate dodge Republicans have come up with to enshroud the huge addition to U.S. debt they have enacted is to argue that they haven’t cut taxes at all. The tax rates and standard deduction are the same as in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Nothing changes. We just continue as before. So that’s declared the new “baseline”. So if they haven’t cut taxes other than a few extra giveaways (no taxes on tips, overtime, etc.), the OBBB doesn’t add to the debt at all!
But wait a minute. President Trump says “Senate Republicans are voting for the largest tax for middle-class Americans in history.” At a dinner with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu July 7th he called them, “the biggest tax cuts ever”. How can they be the biggest tax cuts ever if taxes aren’t changing? (Also, they’re an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, which he at the time called the biggest tax cuts in history, so he’s double-counting.) Trump says, “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.” But what’s changed to suddenly spur the economy?
The 2017 TCJA was passed by Republicans under “reconciliation” rules that require only a 51% majority in the Senate for bills that deal only with financing the government. But they are temporary; they expire after ten years. Some sooner. Expiration would restore the higher pre-2017 tax rates. The $4.5 trillion in revenue to the government that would add in the coming decade would wipe out the $3.5 to $4.0 trillion increase in the nation’s debt caused by extending the TCJA.
But now Republicans speak of the reversion, required by the rule they agreed to in 2017, as the biggest tax increase in history. Trump hallucinated about the bill that “if it’s not approved, your taxes will go up by 68%”. That’s either a preposterous lie or something’s amiss with his mental acuity. Comparison of tax tables then and now say more like 7%. He also continues to say “no tax on Social Security”. Seniors just get a reduction.
town halls not recommended
Accordingly, Republicans back in their home districts will have to argue simultaneously that the Act is a monumental, historic tax cut that benefits everyone but doesn’t add to the deficit at all because the new baseline says there is no tax cut. Golly, in fact, when you wipe clean any notion of pesky debt increase, the OBBB magically becomes a $508 billion deficit decrease.
Even the usually sober Wall Street Journal is party to the hoax. An editorial sloughs off the CBO $3.5-$4.0 trillion debt increase because “it’s only true if you assume that Congress was going to tolerate a $4.5 trillion tax increase.” They are saying that because allowing expiration of the 2017 Act and reversion to the status quo ante was off the table — “Congress was never going to allow that” — there is no debt increase because there is no revenue increase to measure it against. So the editors adopt the new baseline that makes tax extensions “free”. The CBO “scores” legislative proposals against “current law” and current law before passage of the OBBB was that the reconciliation bill of 2017 would expire and revenue would increase. But the Journal says, “In any rational world, changes in the law would be scored against current policy” (emphasis ours). Policy trumps law.
The Journal‘s news pages disagree. One day earlier an article began,
“Republicans waved a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget.”
The reporter quotes Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY):
“Republicans are doing something the Senate has never, never done before — deploying fake math and accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of their bill.”
Jul 11 2025 | Posted in
Taxes |
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< governance|211||He has a much cheaper plan.>
President Trump has said that he intends to put an end to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after the current hurricane season ends. With 119 dead and 173 missing as this is written, and catastrophic damage inflicted on the hill country area of Texas, one would think he’d have second thoughts.
He had come to that conviction in January when he visited Asheville in North Carolina where in late September of last year Hurricane Helene had wrought devastation never experienced by the mountain region of the state:
“I’d like to see the states take care of disasters, let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen. And I think you’re going to find it a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half and you’re going to get a lot quicker response.”
It was a stunning notion with no basis whatever in facts, and yet at end-April he appointed 13 people to review FEMA and gave them 180 days to come up with a recommendation.
In the meanwhile, the managerial brilliance of Musk and DOGE cut the permanent staff by 20%. No surprise that The New York Times is reporting that FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of thousands of calls to its disaster assistance line because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers.
The agency’s acting director who Trump appointed in May has no background in disaster response and told employees last month he didn’t know the country has a hurricane season.
One of the reviewing panel is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who can be counted on to turn thumbs down on FEMA’s survivor because that’s what Trump is looking for. She has already disrupted FEMA’s preparedness grants to states and localities, insisting on personally approving all outlays of more than $100,000, slowing issuance to a crawl.
But another committee member is Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who after the July 4th disaster in his state would be vilified by his constituents should he vote for FEMA’s extinction.
Asked days ago by a reporter about “planning to phase out FEMA”, Trump’s equivocation suggests he hasn’t changed his minded:
”Well, FEMA is something we can talk about later, but right now they’re busy working so we’ll leave it at that.”
brain fog
Turning over emergency management to the states is an asinine idea evident from just a moment’s thought, and leaves one wondering whether the president has cognitive dysfunction rivaling Biden’s.
It would require every state to create an agency of its own – FEMA cloned 50 times over. Each would need to develop emergency management professionals, inventory costly supplies of water and foodstuffs, stock tents and bedding, on and on, a long list, poised to deal with calamity. And staffing wouldn’t be just a few people; it would have to be a full-size team poised to handle an extreme weather event — an event that might not happen this year, perhaps not next year either, nor possibly for an indefinite, unpredictable number of years beyond. All the while, 50 agencies with personnel sitting about with nothing to do in most states, each state bearing the redundant cost burden.
That, says businessman Trump, would be “a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half”.
fix it
The solution is the opposite. To be sure, FEMA draws a lot of complaints. In the wake of a disaster people expect it to be everywhere at once. It was Trump himself in the days immediately following the hurricane who said about FEMA in North Carolina, “They’re not getting water, they’re not getting anything”, which was of course a lie from someone far removed. “They’re giving your FEMA dollars to illegals. They’re housing them with your FEMA dollars”, he claimed, misinformation amplified by chief propagandist at Fox, Jesse Watters. FEMA has a separate program, Shelter and Services, mandated and funded by Congress, to manage the migrant overflow, just as now it is charged with running “Alligator Alcatraz”. No money was diverted from North Carolina rescue operations.
Trump said residents were being offered only $750 in relief. The Biden administration had the foresight to add a few months prior a $750 handout as an on-the-spot stopgap for people to buy food, baby formula, diapers, whatever – a supplement to the regular and substantial relief to follow. He did great harm. It caused people to believe there was only the $750 and not reach out for the further assistance that awaited them, and replacing the institutional faith people had in their government with misguided resentment.
Trump’s reviewers should come up with reforms, not just another irresponsible DOGE-style shutdown. Above all, the review committee should recognize that FEMA is faced with an ever-increasing number of weather events – 27 with at least $1 billion in damage in 2024, and before judging that as being probably a fluke, note that there were 28 in 2023 – yet it is always chronically unfunded and understaffed. By dismantling FEMA, Trump would show he simply wants to wash his hands of responsibility.
Jul 11 2025 | Posted in
Governance |
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