The Big, Beautiful… Oh, Never Mind.

You WILL Learn to Love This Bill and Other MAGA Mania

The House of Representatives has its marching orders: give the president his Senate-approved budget by July 4. While there is a slim chance they wouldn’t meet that deadline, the bill will eventually pass.

Trump will make a big deal about signing it, and his enablers will start the sales pitch to the American people.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made a social media post over a small ‘victory’ as the Senate fulfilled its obligation to Dear Leader, boasting that he’d had the title (Big Beautiful…) changed. Republican strategists, huddled together in whatever sewer they inhabit, smiled, bigly. They’d fooled a Democrat into eliminating one of the biggest hurdles in selling this budget to the public; its name.

All the energy put into branding the cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc into one neat package is now wasted. Instead, the House is now considering the “Working Families Tax Cuts (WFTC).” It should surprise exactly nobody that this lipstick on a pig has been poll-tested for optimum results.

The polling, covering likely 2026 voters in four critical Senate battlegrounds: Georgia, Maine, Michigan and North Carolina, was paid for One Nation, a 501(c)(4) organization aligned with Majority Leader John Thune. Tony Fabrizio and company found respondents came back 62% favorable vs. 12% unfavorable when the legislation was framed in this way.

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Centrist and right leaning Democrats have their own Dollar Store version of the right’s Project 2025 called Project 2029. The fact that Project 2025, which most people agreed was bad, didn’t drive voters to the polls doesn’t seem to matter. What’s important to this flavor of Democrats is that the “market” continues to be the driver of policy.

Via The New York Times:

• One of the most visible fissures is between a populist wing that wants to cast corporations and billionaires as villains (see the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour anchored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont) and advocates of the so-called abundance agenda, named for the book with that title by Ezra Klein, a columnist for The New York Times, and Derek Thompson, who recently announced his departure from The Atlantic.

• Supporters of the abundance approach seek to work with corporations — “There will be no green transition without corporate ingenuity,” Mr. Klein wrote in a recent column — and cut through regulation to solve problems and achieve progressive outcomes more quickly. The party’s long-term success, the argument goes, will be determined most by showing that liberalism works.

• The populist wing, at its simplest, seeks to redistribute power and wealth to the working class and away from economic and corporate elites, and to mobilize voters through that fight.

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Hey, you wanna know how to rid Congress of a bunch of pesky Democrats?

Trump knows how and so should you. Next up after deporting “illegals,” will be Remigration, the mass deportation or coerced repatriation of naturalized citizens and their children.

There are an estimated 25 million naturalized US citizens to choose from in considering those who could be exiled. According to the memo, among those prioritized for denaturalization will be “Cases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism.”

If you observe Republican characterizations of those they disagree with, this category alone is large enough to cover just about anyone that the administration wants to get rid of. Protesters, check. Leftist opinionators and influencers, you betcha. Shared a meme of JD Vance? That excuse is already being used to deny tourists entry into the US. You can and will be ejected from America.

Not really serious side note: I have to personally wonder, as a very small fish in a very big pond of lefty writer/activists in California, when or if the fact of my overseas birth (Turkey, both parents US citizens) will qualify me for das Trumpmeister boot.

According to PEW research, at least 80 members of Congress are either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants. Sixty of those electeds are Democrats, plus one independent (Sen. Bernie Sanders). Twenty are from the great ‘failed’ state of California.

So the President can dismiss a substantial number of pesky legislators with the stroke of a pen. The Supreme Court would say it’s ok.

Don’t laugh. Trump’s already personally threatening the City of New York should Zohran Mamdani be elected mayor.

• “As President of the United States, I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York,” Trump posted on Truth Social, a reference to Mamdani. “Rest assured, I hold all the levers, and have all the cards. I’ll save New York City, and make it ‘Hot’ and ‘Great’ again, just like I did with the Good Ol’ USA!”

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Finally, Hamilton Nolan on what must be done:

• Getting through the period of American history that is now descending upon us will require all of us to practice radical empathy. A strange quality of even the worst totalitarian fascist states is that very bad things might happen to the person next to you, and your life can still continue as normal. More and more Americans are going to find that their neighbor or their friend or their employee or their colleague was just snatched up by armed men and taken somewhere. And meanwhile, all of us who were not snatched up can still go to McDonald’s and go to the beach and watch TV. The urge to retreat into the comforting security of the idea “it’s not me” will be strong.

• Yet navigating our way out of this means having a collective heart. You do not know whether they will come for you, or your neighbor, or your friend, or your colleague, and if they come for any one of us, they come for all of us. We must nurture the outrage that fuels the resistance to what is going to happen. We must hit the streets for our neighbors in the same way that our neighbors would hit the streets for us.

• It is an illusion to think that you are exempt from the gaze of the secret police. That’s not how it works. Believe that they can come for any one of us, and it will give you the conviction that this cannot be allowed to persist. Some bad things are coming. Luckily, we have something that Trump and Vance and Miller and all of the ICE agents never will. All the money and guns and masks and prisons in the world can’t make up for a coward’s weak heart.

A Trans Pilot Was Falsely Blamed for a Plane Crash. Now She’s Fighting the Right-Wing Disinfo Machine by Varsha Bansal at Wired

• Researchers and trans advocacy groups say that as this pattern of dehumanizing trans people continues, it not only distracts the public from the real issues but also results in real-life harms, including violence against and harassment of LGBTQ people. Research shows that trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violence compared to cisgender people. According to LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, between May 2024 and May 2025 there have been at least 26 injuries and one death reported among trans and gender-nonconforming people, a 14 percent jump from the previous year.

• Meanwhile, claims that trans people are behind mass shootings doesn’t add up: Per the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 4,400 mass shootings in the past decade, of which fewer than 10 known suspects were trans: 0.11 percent.

• One reason people could be portraying transgender people as a force behind mass shootings and other violent acts is to justify discrimination against them, researchers say. “Spreading false claims about trans people being mass shooters [or causing other violence] fits the pattern of dehumanizing trans people to justify this bigotry against them,” said Kayla Gogarty, a research director at Media Matters, an organization that’s been tracking online hate against transgender people. “This is part of a larger pattern that we see within the right-wing-media echo chamber.”

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CBS becomes a quisling of journalism by Mark Jacob at Stop The Presses

• The suit was a blatant act of extortion and abuse of power. Trump sued over CBS’s editing of an interview of Kamala Harris on “60 Minutes,” arguing that it represented “election and voter interference” because the program didn’t include her full answer to a question. That complaint was ridiculous, challenging the kind of editing that happens every day in the news business.

• CBS would have won the case, but Trump had a huge advantage: His highly politicized Federal Communications Commission has been stalling on a merger of CBS parent Paramount with Skydance Media. It’s clear that Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, decided to pay the ransom so Trump would stop holding the merger hostage.

• It was a selfish, destructive act. Every surrender by the media encourages Trump to find new victims. It’s up to the public – which means you – to support news outlets that hold the line against Trump’s intimidation. Those outlets include the Associated Press, ProPublica, The New Republic, the Guardian US, The Atlantic, Wired, Meidas Touch, States Newsroom, Courier, and Rolling Stone, along with a variety of insightful newsletters.

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The Legacy of the "Hate State" by Brad Willis at Perspectives

• Postscript: As a result of its history of white supremacist groups, Idaho has often been characterized as the “Hate State.”

• Rightfully distressed by this characterization, residents hoping to change that image have embraced the slogan "Idaho is too Great for Hate."

• In 2021, a proposal to create specialty license plates featuring the slogan was rejected by the GOP-controlled Idaho Legislature.