Between Ouch And Boing

"Trade wars are easy - and they're easy to win." --Donald Trump, 2024 campaign

US Trade Deficit Widens in July; Capital Goods Imports Hit Record High

WASHINGTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) - The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply ⁠in ⁠July as strong domestic demand ⁠boosted imports, positioning trade to exert another drag on economic growth in ​the third quarter.

The trade shortfall increased 24.4% to $88.6 billion, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census ‌Bureau said on Thursday. Economists polled ‌by Reuters had forecast the deficit at $90.0 billion.

The deterioration was flagged by data last week showing ⁠an import-driven surge ⁠in the goods trade deficit in July.

Domestic demand soared in the second ​quarter, a combination of both strong consumer spending and business investment in artificial intelligence. Demand is, however, being satiated with imports, helping to widen the trade deficit.

Imports increased 2.8% to $399.3 billion in July. Goods imports shot up ​3.7% to $320.6 billion. Imports of capital goods jumped $14.4 billion to a record high $140.3 billion, reflecting ⁠strong ⁠increases in computers, computer accessories ⁠and semiconductors, likely ​related to the AI buildout.

But imports of industrial supplies and materials, which include petroleum, dropped $1.8 billion. ​

Crude oil imports fell $1.8 billion ⁠amid lower prices.

Exports decreased 2.1% to $310.7 billion, with goods shipments dropping 3.0% to $201.0 billion. They were led by an $8.7 billion decline in industrial supplies and materials, mostly crude oil as well as nonmonetary gold, which is excluded in the calculation of gross domestic product. Capital goods exports, however, increased $1.9 billion. Consumer ⁠goods exports rose $1.7 billion, lifted by pharmaceutical preparations.

The goods trade deficit widened 17.3% to $119.6 ⁠billion in July. When adjusted for inflation, the goods trade deficit increased 12.7% to $106.4 billion. Trade subtracted 1.14 percentage points from GDP growth in the April-June quarter. The economy grew at a 1.5% annualized rate last quarter.

Imports of services decreased $0.6 billion to $78.7 billion in July, pulled down by charges for the use of intellectual property. Imports of transport services fell but those of travel services increased. Exports of services dipped $0.4 billion to $109.7 billion amid declines in travel, financial and transport services. Charges for the use of intellectual property rose ⁠as did exports of other business services.

Despite aggressive tariffs on imports, the United States posted record goods trade deficits with Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia. The goods trade balance with Switzerland swung into deficit, while the shortfall with Canada decreased $3.7 billion ​to $3.2 billion in July. The U.S. and Canada are embroiled in a trade ​war.

Iran Update

I get the feeling Trump is bored with it, and he's leaving it all up to his underlings so he can just blow it off, thinking that gives him some kind of plausible deniability as he skates away. Of course, he'll blame Hegseth or the generals or Barbra Streisand, or whatever the fuck.

The problem Hegseth's got now is that he's losing what little support he had. He's firing everybody with the brains and the guts they have to have to serve at those upper levels, so whoever's left will likely just pull the levers they're told to pull and the greatest military force in the history of the galaxy will just fizzle out with a resounding pffft.

And the bigger problem is that nobody can get thru to either Hegseth or Trump that this war is a waste of time, energy, money, material, and people. Continuing it is a perfect example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Anna Connelly

This shit is not normal.

Sarah Matthews

Calling All Recalls

Breaking the government is the point. And punishing people is meant to rally them to the cause.

"See? The government's all fucked up. And there's no fixing it, but you can stop your suffering by supporting us as we replace it with a corporate plutocracy."

OK, so it's not quite as bad as all that - not yet anyway - but I think it's healthy to maintain my very low confidence in this MAGA gang. IMO, it's more than justified, and it's likely to get worse before we have a real chance to make it better.

Lettuce. Blueberries. Eggs. Jalapeños. Why are there so many food-safety scares this summer?

Bill Marler's business is booming — and that's not great for the rest of us.

Marler is a food safety lawyer, defending people who've been sickened by foodborne illness. He has been doing this for 33 years, with such high-profile wins that he's become a towering figure in the food safety world.

This year, he's so slammed with foodborne-illness cases that, for the first time in years, he's expanding his team — hiring another lawyer and a couple of paralegals. "We just have too much shit to do," Marler said.

This summer alone, Americans have been warned about a massive Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce — 10,930 confirmed illnesses, 454 hospitalizations, and two deaths — plus Salmonella in jalapeños and eggs and E. coli in frozen blueberries. Then there are the recalls: bread that may contain metal fragments, fruit bars that may contain glass, and foods pulled for possible bacterial contamination or undeclared allergens.

By August, the FDA's 2026 public health advisories had covered what felt like everything, from cheese to infant formula.

"As a consumer, you're looking at this like, well, what the hell's safe to eat?" Marler said.

America is having a headline-grabbing food-safety summer. Some of that is perception: We're better at finding outbreaks, and recall counts can be misleading.

But long-standing vulnerabilities in our food system — compounded by cuts to the public health infrastructure designed to catch problems — are also at play. Whether it represents something more significant is harder to say.

"It's real, and it looks bad," Marler said.

Recall counts can be misleading

This summer looks more exceptional than it actually is, said Craig Hedberg, a professor and foodborne-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

"Certainly the magnitude of the cyclospora outbreak is unprecedented, but in terms of all of the things that are going on with food, it's not all that unusual," Hedberg said.

Summer is typically a busy season for foodborne illness, he said, and outbreaks involving foods like sprouts, berries, and produce recur year after year. What's truly extraordinary in 2026 is cyclospora — "an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen in previous years."

Recall counts can also exaggerate the number of distinct problems. Jennifer McEntire, founder of Food Safety Strategy, a consulting firm that works with industry groups, pointed out that when a single contaminated ingredient is used in many foods, each finished product may trigger its own recall.

"This makes the recall numbers look high, even though the number of 'root causes' may be much lower," McEntire said.

Take California Dairies, which recalled certain bulk batches of powdered milk and buttermilk in April due to potential Salmonella contamination. These products had been sold to wholesale distributors and manufacturers, triggering downstream recalls.

That meant the recall rippled across the sector, with over a dozen products pulled from shelves — from potato chips to ranch seasoning.

We're finding issues we couldn't find before

There's another reason today's food-safety problems may be more visible: We're better at finding them.

"We clearly have better tools and are using them more effectively to identify outbreaks," Hedberg said.

In the last five to 10 years, public health laboratories have increasingly used whole-genome sequencing to link seemingly isolated Salmonella or E. coli cases by their genetic fingerprints.

That means some of what appears to be an increase in foodborne illness is actually better surveillance. "We're finding ones that may have been missed previously," said Melanie Firestone, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, who studies foodborne-disease surveillance.

Those tools, however, aren't as readily available for Cyclospora, in part because the parasite can't be grown in a lab; investigators rely more heavily on finding common exposures among sick people.

Our food system has changed — and one mistake can go a very long way

The food system itself has also transformed. Americans can now buy fresh produce year-round, including fruits and vegetables.

"Foods don't go out of season. We just go to the season where they're being produced, and we bring them in," Hedberg said.

Still, a food system optimized for year-round availability, convenience, long supply chains, and massive distribution networks can also amplify failures.

Marler points to the massive 2006 E. coli outbreak linked to bagged spinach, a crisis so consequential that he said the leafy-greens industry came to refer to it as its "9/11."

Investigators traced the spinach to a single 20-acre farm that had a wild-pig invasion. Not every crop was infected, but harvesting and processing allowed it to spread. The bags were then shipped around the country, turning what Marler argued might once have been scattered illnesses into a national outbreak.

Ultimately, when something does go wrong, the modern food system can make it go spectacularly wrong.

"The reality is that with a lot of our fresh produce, once contamination occurs, we have limited ability to decontaminate the produce items," Hedberg said.

Parts of our safety net weakened

One explanation for the increased number of headlines about food safety has loomed particularly large this summer: the Trump administration's DOGE cuts.

In 2025, the administration cut thousands of jobs across federal health agencies and billions of dollars in grants to state and local health departments.

Those cuts landed on a public-health system that was already stretched. "Our public health systems have been chronically underfunded for a long time, and we're seeing that worsen," Firestone said.

In a statement, the FDA said that "frontline FDA investigators are critical to the FDA's mission and were exempt from past workforce reductions."

The agency said that while there are more foodborne illness clusters in 2026 than in previous years, it is "constantly working to improve laboratory detection of foodborne illness," such as Cyclospora. "Still, Cyclospora remains a challenging agent and epidemiology, and traceback are key elements of an outbreak investigation."

Food safety cuts predate the Trump administration. In 2012, under the Obama administration, the USDA's Microbiological Data Program ended after its funding was eliminated. The program had sampled and tested selected fruits and vegetables for foodborne pathogens, reporting its findings to federal and state public health agencies — proactive surveillance, rather than waiting for reports of infections to crop up.

Some food-safety hazards, Hedberg said, are well understood and "just require constant attention on the part of producers to be able to prevent."

So, should I be scared of my groceries?

Hedberg doesn't think this summer should change the way Americans eat. "Most of the food moving through the system is free of contamination," he said.

Fresh produce remains an important part of a healthy diet, and he cautioned against allowing a single enormous outbreak to distort our sense of risk.

That doesn't mean accepting outbreaks as inevitable.

Thirty years ago, hamburgers kept Marler incredibly busy: more than 90% of his E. coli cases involved them. Today, he said, it's practically zero. "That's because of government intervention and industry stepping up."

After the deadly 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak, regulators and the meat industry introduced new rules, testing, and other safeguards that made hamburger substantially safer.

So, is this summer unusually riskier? The Cyclospora outbreak is. Beyond that, many of the problems are familiar ones. And the hamburger example shows that which foods pose the biggest risks can change substantially over time.

Hawk

It won't be long before they can just give us a list of foods they haven't fucked up yet.

From the FDA website:

Overheard

Big Ag companies finally got the de-regulation from their coin-operated politicians, but they couldn't play it cool, even for little while. They immediately went with, "Yeah - now that we're free of all that cumbersome safety monitoring, we're gonna fuck up your food with shit, pesticides, and various industrial materials like glass and heavy metals. And why do we do this? Because fuck you, that's why."

Aaron Parnas

Wait just a damned minute - I've got questions.

• Hegseth can't go anywhere without his mommy?
• Because he's never learned to self-regulate?
• What grade is that little prick in now?
• What in the blue-eyed, buck-naked fuck are we doing?

Lying Liars

The Trump gang just makes shit up.

Medicaid work requirements built on invented evidence will harm the people they claim to help

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a new Interim Final Rule with comment period (IFC) implementing the Medicaid “community engagement” requirements included in H.R. 1. The IFC is fundamentally defective in both its substance and its analysis.

With respect to the analysis justifying the rule, the agency’s mandated Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) does not conform to the standards required of such analyses, as stipulated in Executive Order 12866 and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-4. It substitutes unsupported assumptions for the best available empirical evidence, counts speculative benefits while omitting well-documented costs, and produces estimates of coverage loss and federal savings that are inconsistent. With respect to the substance of the rule, CMS has added conditions, not required under the statute, that will make it even more difficult than the statute intended for people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders to retain coverage.

These are not technical shortcomings. This rule will determine whether millions of low-income Americans retain health insurance.

H.R. 1 requires certain Medicaid beneficiaries to document 80 hours a month of work or other qualifying activities to retain their eligibility for Medicaid. This IFC sets forth the rules defining which beneficiaries will and will not be exempt from this “community engagement” requirement. Under Executive Order 12866, economically significant regulatory actions, such as this IFC, must be accompanied by an RIA that assesses the costs and benefits of the action. In this case, the key parameter that will drive the costs and benefits of the regulatory action is how many people will become employed or otherwise community-engaged under the threat of losing Medicaid coverage. OMB requires agencies to base regulatory analyses on the best reasonably obtainable scientific, technical, and economic information. CMS acknowledges that it does not estimate this key behavioral response parameter from any such information. Instead, it assigns subjective weights to hypothetical scenarios. In its assessments of costs and benefits, CMS simply assumes that roughly one-third of affected beneficiaries will move into qualifying activities because of the requirement.

That assumption is wildly out of line with a substantial body of empirical evidence. Three distinct, robust lines of research, all consistent with one another, could have been used to estimate the likely impact of the requirement. First, studies of welfare-to-work programs, which condition receipt of cash benefits on employment, generally find small employment effects, with effects of under 5% even in scenarios where the work requirements in the programs are accompanied by childcare, transportation assistance, case management, and other supports—no such supports are included in the Medicaid rule. Second, studies of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion—the converse of the new work requirements—find that gaining Medicaid has little or no effect on employment, implying that withdrawing coverage is unlikely to produce a substantial increase in engagement. Finally, studies of recent work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid—including Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements waiver—have found substantial coverage losses but no measurable increase in employment.

CMS’ assumption that one-third of those subject to the work requirement will become community-engaged is over six times greater than the largest estimate in any of these literatures. That assumption is an invention from which the agency mechanically generates its estimates of employment, earnings, costs, benefits, and government savings.

Because those estimates carry through the entire analysis, they generate further inconsistencies and distortions. The one-third engagement estimate leads CMS to predict that only about 3.1 million to 3.3 million people will lose Medicaid coverage annually. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the statutory work requirement would reduce Medicaid enrollment by approximately 5.7 million people. Yet despite this much smaller headcount, CMS simultaneously projects approximately $350 billion in federal savings over 10 years—10% more than CBO’s estimate of $317 billion.

These figures are difficult to reconcile. If CMS expects fewer people to lose coverage but more money to be saved, it must implicitly assume that those losing coverage are dramatically more expensive than the beneficiaries reflected in CBO’s calculation. CMS’s numbers appear to imply average federal Medicaid spending of roughly $11,000 for each disenrolled person, compared with about $5,600 in CBO’s estimate.1 But Medicaid spending is highly concentrated. Many of the most expensive beneficiaries have serious health conditions that should qualify them for exemptions or temporary hardship protections. CMS does not adequately explain how its relatively small group of projected disenrollees can generate such large savings.

The implausible engagement assumption shows up again in the agency’s claims about the IFC’s benefits. Here, the agency claims that those shifted to engagement through the work requirement will become healthier from being induced into employment. The research basis CMS cites for the assumption that work makes you healthy is entirely based on associational studies of the health of workers and non-workers.

Healthier people are more likely to work. Poor health makes it harder to obtain and retain employment. Education, family resources, housing stability, and other factors affect both employment and health. Studies showing that employed people are healthier than unemployed people in no way establish that requiring a Medicaid beneficiary to work will make that person healthier. Indeed, the limited causal research, which relies on changes in retirement rules and other sources of plausibly exogenous variation, has produced mixed results: some studies find benefits from continued work, while others find that working harms health (for example, by increasing the risk of workplace injuries). There is no credible basis for assigning large health benefits to the hypothetical employment increases assumed to be generated by this rule.

At the same time, CMS largely omits the strongest causal evidence in this area: Medicaid coverage improves access to care, financial security, and health. Randomized and quasi-experimental studies have linked insurance coverage to improved treatment and, in several very credible studies, lower mortality. Other research shows that, at least for some populations, access to effective treatment can improve employment. Randomized studies of depression care, for example, have found increases in job retention, hours worked, and employment.

In other words, health coverage keeps people healthy and may help people work. Taking coverage away has direct harms and may make employment less likely. CMS’s analysis largely reverses this relationship: it assumes that work produces health while ignoring the possibility that health care produces both work and health.

The rule is especially poorly designed for people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders.

In the original statute, Congress provided exemptions for people with qualifying behavioral health conditions. CMS, however, would require many individuals to demonstrate not merely that they have a qualifying diagnosis, but that the condition significantly impairs their ability to comply with the work requirement.

Standard administrative reporting, such as medical claims, does not contain information on functional ability. That means that meeting the exemption will require a new miniature disability determination. States and clinicians will have to assess functional capacity, collect documentation, and decide whether a particular condition prevents compliance with 80 hours of monthly activities. States conduct such capacity determinations in conjunction with Social Security disability determinations; a costly, challenging process that provides applicants with important procedural protections (but nonetheless makes consequential errors).

Requiring such functional status determinations for people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders is particularly damaging because these conditions can impair memory, concentration, planning, and motivation. People with these conditions are likely to find it particularly difficult to navigate bureaucratic systems. The people most impaired may be those least able to prove that impairment.

The functional status criteria also fail to account for the fact that behavioral health conditions are chronic and recurring. A person with opioid use disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or recurrent major depression may be stable enough to work for one month, experience a relapse the next, miss a reporting deadline, and lose the Medicaid coverage financing the treatment that helped maintain stability and employment. Current functioning while under treatment is not proof that an exemption is unnecessary. It may instead be evidence that treatment is working.

The statute particularly called for an exemption for those participating in substance use treatment programs. The CMS rule places very restrictive conditions on what participation means. In particular, it limits the exemption to care provided by nonprofit providers. However, nearly half of people receiving substance use treatment are served by for-profit organizations, and the share is particularly high among opioid treatment programs providing methadone. That means that patients receiving substance abuse treatment could lose exemption from work requirements because the providers who happen to be available in their communities are for-profit. That will be particularly damaging in rural areas and other places with thin treatment networks.

The IFC is defective in its substance and its design. A defensible Regulatory Impact Analysis would use the following information:

• The extensive causal literature to estimate employment effects,
• Quantify the health consequences of coverage loss, and
• Reconcile its enrollment estimates with its claimed federal savings.

A defensible rule under the statute would:

• Automatically identify behavioral health exemptions using claims, pharmacy, managed-care, and behavioral health agency data;
• Accept attestations from clinicians, case managers, and treatment programs;
• Recognize relapse and fluctuating functioning; and
• Provide rapid reinstatement when illness contributes to noncompliance.
• Instead, CMS’s analysis assumes away the central empirical question, inflates speculative benefits, omits documented harms, and then adds administrative barriers that are likely to exclude precisely the people Congress intended to protect.

Have Buck, Will Pass

The buck stops somewhere else: A look at Trump’s tendency to avoid blame when things go awry

WASHINGTON (AP) — It is among the most famous phrases in presidential history: “The buck stops here.” Except with President Donald Trump, it almost never does.

Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.

The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the Republican president insists, even though the office of a prosecutor he put in the job has said the damage was due to shoddy workmanship.

The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Pithy slogans aside, all modern presidents shift responsibility onto others to some degree, frequently blaming the commander-in-chief who preceded them, Congress — or both. But Trump has taken it to a new level, effectively embracing a de facto political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly.

“Taking responsibility being a characteristic of presidential leadership — or any kind of leadership — is absolutely true,” said Nicole Anslover, a history professor at Florida Atlantic University and author of “Harry S. Truman: The Coming of the Cold War.”

Trump’s tendency to point fingers at others is increasingly in the spotlight before November’s midterm elections, when Republicans are trying to retain control of Congress. His unwillingness to accept blame sometimes leads him to deny that there are problems at all, and could leave GOP leaders in tight races with little reassurance for voters that their concerns are being addressed.

The White House counters that Trump is working to correct long-festering challenges, not simply throwing up his hands and ignoring them.

The president is “rightfully addressing the failures of his predecessors while taking action to deliver big wins for the American people,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said, pointing to a series of policies that she said Republicans can run on, including tax cuts, efforts to lower prescription drug prices, cracking down on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, increasing domestic energy production and a strong stock market.

Ducking responsibility dates to Trump’s first term

Truman famously kept a “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk as president. That came from “pass the buck,” which, according to Truman’s presidential library, dates to frontier times, when poker players would pass a buckhorn handle knife to the person whose turn it was to deal the cards.

“The president, whoever he is, has to decide,” Truman said during his farewell address in 1953. “He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

The understanding of the phrase has broadened over the years to include taking responsibility for the outcome of tough decisions. Trump used to espouse similar beliefs, saying back in 2013 that in running a business, “Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”

Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.

“The buck stops with everybody,” Trump said in 2019, during a lengthy government shutdown. In 2020, on the same day he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for a lack of COVID-19 testing.

Anslover said Truman took full responsibility for dropping atomic bombs on Japan even though he was not informed that the U.S. was developing such weapons until his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died.

John F. Kennedy saw his approval ratings rise after he acknowledged he was to blame for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Ronald Reagan said he was sorry for any involvement he may have had in the Iran-Contra scandal even while saying he wasn’t sure he was to blame. “The buck stops here with me,” he said then.

At his final news conference in early 2009, George W. Bush listed a series of mistakes he had made, including failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His successor, Barack Obama, said, “I screwed up,” after his nominee for health chief, Tom Daschle, withdrew because of unpaid back taxes.

Presidents before Trump “really usually take accountability,” Anslover said.

‘We inherited a total catastrophe,’ Trump says

The president acknowledged in a recent Punchbowl interview that voters are angry, but he said they are not mad at him but at congressional Republicans.

Trump believes his party can hold its congressional majorities after November, but he was clear that if Republicans lose, it won’t be his fault — echoing his comments before the 2018 midterms that he would not accept blame if his party lost control of the House, which it did.

Trump’s approval rating on the economy, once seen as among his strongest issues, has fallen throughout his time in office, from 40% in March 2025 to 32% in July, according to Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polling. About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse, according to Pew Research Center polling.

“The public certainly expects the president to be concerned about, and focused on, making life more affordable,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said.

Trump instead points to Biden, under whom inflation hit a four-decade peak of 9.1% in 2022 as the pandemic was still roiling the world economy, before declining to 2.7% by November 2024. Last month, pressured by the Iran war, it was 3.4%.

“When we took office, we inherited a total catastrophe,” Trump said at a recent rally, later adding, “I inherited those high prices, just so you understand.”

Andrew Bates, a Democratic strategist and former Biden White House spokesperson, noted that Trump no longer mentions his campaign promise to “immediately end inflation” on Day One.

“He may not remember having made those promises, but swing voters sure as hell do,” Bates said.

Trump has shown the same pattern with Iran and the Reflecting Pool

The president has characterized the Iran war as “a little excursion” or “detour.” To play down how long it has lasted, he frequently notes that U.S. wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan dragged on for years, though the Iran conflict — which he initially said would be over in four weeks to five weeks — is now in its sixth month with no clear end in sight.

Trump has sought to shift blame to the past on the Reflecting Pool, falsely suggesting that Biden and Obama spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” trying unsuccessfully to fix it.

But Trump’s main defense has been vandalism. And, so far, at least four cases alleging that, including the most prominent case against an Olympic canoeist, have been dropped because of a lack of evidence.

Anslover said that, after 11-plus years in politics, Trump has proved he is not afraid to violate norms of presidential comportment. Lots of his core supporters do not seem bothered.

“For many Americans, it has either been a shift in how they view the presidency, or, like with so many things, they just feel empowered to say, ‘These are my priorities. My priority is not the facts,’” she said.

It's The Money, Stupid

The red lights are working overtime, and still unable to flash as brightly and as frequently as the situation seems to indicate.

And as if all this doom-n-gloom isn't enough, the CBO has revised its estimate of the US federal budget deficit, which is projected to reach approximately $2.1 trillion for fiscal year 2026, reporting a 10-month shortfall of $1.8 trillion through July.

So much winning.

The ingredients are coming together for a US financial crisis

Trump could trigger a disaster as markets lose faith in Washington’s economic management

A dangerous view is creeping into the markets that the US has already gone so far down the path of a debt compound trap that it dare not raise interest rates to control inflation.

The US treasury has become acutely dependent on short-term funding from hedge funds, many tapping the $8.3tn (£6.2tn) money market and some operating with up to 100 times leverage. The share of purchases coming from stable lenders such as foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds has been drying up.

Steven Blitz, the chief US economist at TS Lombard, says the Federal Reserve cannot tighten hard without risking a chain reaction. Financing costs would “explode”.

“Raising rates today immediately impacts the cost of nearly 25pc of the federal debt, where issuance is growing fastest,” he said.

The US treasury has to roll over $6tn of debt every three months in an increasingly sceptical market, as well as issuing $2tn of new debt annually to cover the worst structural deficit in US peacetime history.

Annual gross financing needs – the key warning metric watched by rating agencies and bond funds – was 26pc of GDP in 2010. The International Monetary Fund says the figure will reach 45pc this year and is on track for 60pc by the early 2030s on current policies. No great power has long endured at that sort of level.

Scott Bessent, the poacher-turned-gamekeeper now in charge of the US treasury, has been concentrating ever more borrowing on short-term bills. It is a way to keep a lid on the spiralling interest cost of the US national debt, which has quadrupled to $1tn in a decade, now exceeds the US defence budget and is fast heading towards uncharted waters above 4pc of GDP.

But trying to defer America’s fiscal reckoning by monkeying with debt instruments is the trick used by broken hegemons through the ages. It is a Faustian pact.

We know how worried Bessent is about soaring bond yields – approaching a two-decade high – by the way he intervened alongside Japan earlier this month to halt speculation against the yen. He activated an obscure mechanism known as the FIMA Repo Facility to let Japan pawn a chunk of its $1.1tn of US Treasuries in exchange for dollar loans rather than selling these bonds on the open market.

He joined the action by mobilising the treasury’s holding of euros, without first telling the European Central Bank – a shocking breakdown of central bank etiquette. All this screams desperation.

Hedge funds have become the marginal buyers of US debt, doubling their share to 9pc of total US Treasury purchases over the last four years. They have been borrowing with extreme leverage on the repo market – a core part of financial plumbing – in order to extract arbitrage gains.

Both the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements have warned that this structure is an accident waiting to happen. It amplified a spiral of forced selling and a near meltdown of the US Treasury market in the Covid panic of March 2020. The critical point is that the whole US financial and fiscal system has never been so sensitive to short-term interest rates.

Kevin Warsh, the untested new Fed chairman, faces an invidious choice. The indecent manner of his appointment degraded his credibility before he even started. Markets know that Trump persecuted his predecessor for refusing to cut rates and refusing to become the infamous Arthur Burns of our age. They also know that Warsh’s billionaire father-in-law is a close Trump confederate and a key author of the Greenland grab.

Warsh struggled to articulate a coherent intellectual argument after the most recent policy meeting for why he was not raising rates. He could not explain how he intends to bring stubborn US inflation back towards the 2pc target when it is clearly going the other way.

“Sternly staring at inflation until it melts before our withering gaze is not an option,” said fellow Fed board member Christopher Waller.

Warsh faced the unusual rebuke of three voting dissenters and some have been outspoken to the point of contempt. The market verdict has been lapidary.

Warsh argues that AI is deflationary and therefore overrides the Phillips Curve, making it possible to combine blistering growth with low inflation. I am friendly to this line of thinking but it is not entirely convincing coming from Warsh, who used to be a chest-beating “inflation nutter”. Many suspect that he has latched on to this idea as a pretext for doing Trump’s bidding.

Reports that he talks to Trump “all the time” confirm the fears. Jerome Powell’s working code was always that the proper level of intercourse between the US president and the Fed chairman is “zero”.

The Dornbusch adage in the markets is that fiscal and financial crises take longer to happen than you think possible but then happen faster than you ever imagined.

We know that US federal debt is compounding at a rate of 3.5pc of GDP each year. The mechanical rise in entitlements – ie, middle-class welfare – has been part of the landscape for a long time. Trump 1.0 tax cuts, Covid and Joe Biden’s Rooseveltian New Deal together pushed the envelope a lot further. Trump 2.0’s One Big, Beautiful Bill tests the limits.

The IMF forecasts a US general government deficit of 7.4pc of GDP or higher every single year from 2026 to 2031. Now Trump wants to raise the Pentagon budget by 60pc and fritter away $275bn on his “golden fleet” of Trump-class battleships – an idée fixe ever since he watched the 1950s telly series Victory at Sea.

It takes a serious trigger to detonate a crisis of financial confidence in a great power with deep economic strengths and a world reserve currency. Military overstretch is usually to blame, the cause of imperial Spain’s default in 1575 and Britain’s convertibility crisis in 1947.

The ingredients for some sort of American financial crisis are falling into place, disguised for now – but also compounded – by the AI bubble. The global market no longer has full faith in the management of the US treasury and the Fed.

The US has stopped upholding free trade and open navigation, switching sides to become the chief instigator of piracy and world disorder. It has squandered much of its arsenal on an ill-planned war that it cannot end without accepting humiliation and that has shown the US to be a weaker military power than we all thought. It has further wrecked US alliances and largely played into the hands of Xi Jinping’s revanchist China.

The disaster is nearly complete. Now we await the US mid-term elections. Should the democratic transfer of power in Congress be obstructed by meddling with the results in swing states, we may have our trigger.

Here It Comes

Plutocracy rising.

A fully coin-operated government is one of the main goals of this latest iteration of the Daddy State.

They're intending to strip down the government to three main functions:

1. Defend commercial interests abroad
2. Keep the domestic rabble in line
3. Settle contract disputes

That's it - everything else is strictly Fee-For-Service. And of course, we need to leave the way open for "entrepreneurs" to step in and sell us "insurance" against the disasters that their fuckery is already causing.

And won't it be so fucking peachy when the fire departments and emergency services are run by the Suits and the Bean Counters, the same way health insurance is being run now. Where they'll have almost as many people working to deny your claims as they do people who're supposed to be saving your ass from the hurricanes and wildfires.

Yup - gonna be loads of fun.

JoJo From JerZ

Trump's gotten away with it, so why am I supposed to think it's anything but a free fly zone?

GOP In Disarray

GOP infighting erupts as Thune warns of legislative ‘train wreck’

Internal squabbles erupted in the Senate Republican Conference on Wednesday as GOP senators battled each other and the White House over a variety of issues, prompting Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to warn that his colleagues face a potential legislative “train wreck.”

Senate Budget Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) clashed with Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) over Johnson’s relentless push for a vote on a budget resolution to begin moving a third reconciliation bill before the August recess, according to GOP sources familiar with the meeting.

Collins, who is perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Republican up for reelection this year, told colleagues that diving into a floor debate and vote-a-rama on amendments to a budget resolution would be politically unwise.

The budget reconciliation process would allow Republicans to circumvent a Democratic filibuster, but it would also give Democrats the chance to force votes on an unlimited number of potentially embarrassing amendments.

Johnson warned colleagues Wednesday that as many as 10 or 11 Senate committees could receive reconciliation instructions, which could make a wide array of amendments germane and viable for adoption at a simple-majority threshold, according to a senator who attended the meeting.

“If we vote yes on the motion to proceed” to the budget resolution and “we got on it, we’d have to do vote-a-rama, and that’s what people are worried about,” said a GOP senator, who requested anonymity to discuss pushback from Republican colleagues to trying to pass a budget resolution before the August recess.

The senator said Collins pointed out those potential pitfalls.

“Can you imagine how many amendments that would be?” the senator said, noting Republicans might have to vote on proposals to restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or to permanently ban the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate MAGA allies prosecuted under former President Biden.

Several other GOP senators, in addition to Collins, pushed back hard against Johnson’s proposal to initiate a messy budget reconciliation process before the August recess.

Collins has said for weeks that she would prefer to provide funding for the Pentagon and farmers who are struggling because of low commodity prices through the regular congressional appropriations process.

She declined to comment on the arguments she made to colleagues at Wednesday’s conference meeting.

“I’m not going to discuss what happened at lunch,” she told The Hill.

Johnson, however, said after the contentious lunch meeting that he’s “still working” to advance the budget resolution before the Senate adjourns for the August recess.

Thune confirmed after the lunch meeting that attempting to move another budget resolution would drag “a bunch” of other committees into the process, which would open up the floor to votes on all sorts of controversial issues.

Asked if he would even have the votes to proceed to a budget resolution, Thune replied, “Probably hard to say.”

Thune also must navigate internal Republican disagreements over a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government until Dec. 11 and a bill championed by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to reform the rules for compensating college athletes.

“It’s kind of a train wreck, isn’t it?” Thune quipped to reporters as he arrived at the Capitol on Wednesday morning.

GOP senators battled with White House legislative staff at Wednesday’s lunch meeting over language the White House added to the CR that would delay the implementation of a ban on hemp-derived THC products such as delta-8 until December.

Republicans in the meeting described the discussion as heated after the White House blindsided GOP lawmakers with the addition.

Some Republican senators want to delay the ban on hemp-derived THC products, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has argued that it unfairly targets Kentucky’s hemp industry.

Paul on Wednesday accused Republican colleagues of exaggerating the potential harm of those popular products.

“These busybodies in there that want to ban everything are jumping up and down. It’s like they watched ‘Reefer Madness’ in 1937 and they believe the whole world’s going to be hooked on marijuana,” Paul told reporters for The Associated Press and “PBS NewsHour” after the meeting.

But other GOP senators are adamant about stripping the White House-backed hemp language from the government funding bill.

Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) is pressuring GOP leaders to allow a vote on an amendment to the stopgap measure to strip the provision.

“Let me be clear: I will not back down. I will not waver. I will not stop until this life-threatening hemp loophole is closed permanently. We must strip this amendment from the [continuing resolution] & regulate these harmful substances for what they are—not what the industry wants to call them,” Budd posted on the social platform X.

Other Republicans say they don’t want to have another fight over it right before Christmas.

Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) indicated they would support Budd’s amendment.

“I’d rather have the fight now than during the holidays,” Rounds said. “I can’t see why we should include semisynthetic hemp as a part of hemp itself as something that moves forward in the future. Let’s just call it what it is.”

Rounds said he doesn’t understand why the White House is trying to delay the ban on hemp-derived THC products.

“If I don’t know and nobody’s got a good reason for it, let’s take it out of the bill and then let’s get on with the CR,” he added.

Thune also has to referee a Republican-versus-Republican fight over the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill drafted by Cruz and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to create new regulations for compensating college athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness.

Thune on Wednesday filed a cloture motion to advance the bill, but it faces an objection from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

Hawley warns the legislation could overturn state-enacted bans on transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.

“I’m concerned about that,” Hawley said of Thune’s effort to move forward on the college sports bill.

“I filed amendments to the bill. Listen, I’m against men in women’s sports, and Missouri has a law that bans men in women’s sports that applies to collegiate eligibility,” he said.

“My concern is that this [bill] as it’s currently drafted would overturn Missouri law. Twenty-seven states have similar bans. This is something that needs to be fixed,” he added. “We cannot overturn 27 state laws that ban men in women’s sports.

“That’s just unthinkable,” he declared. “Can you imagine a Republican Congress overturning Republican state laws that ban biological men in women’s sports?”

Cruz, however, disputed the criticism that the bill would undermine state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports.

“That’s simply inaccurate. The legislation explicitly has language, number one, that nothing in the bill alters Title IX in any way. And, number two, it explicitly says on eligibility that you can be blocked from eligibility for violating a state law,” Cruz said. “That was written very deliberately to avoid disturbing the 27 states that have acted to protect women’s sports.”

Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program.

Thune said he hopes the fight over the college sports reform bill won’t stop it from passing before the August recess.

“I’m hoping it can be worked out. I know what it’s about and I think … some of our members have pretty good answers to some of the questions he’s raising,” Thune said of Hawley’s objection. “I’m hopeful that we’ll have the bipartisan votes to get on the bill.”

Thune also filed a cloture motion Wednesday to advance the House-passed ban on members of Congress trading stocks.

The legislation includes a provision that would require voters to show photo identification for federal elections.

Some GOP senators want to consider the House-approved stock-trading ban before the recess if they can’t make progress on a budget resolution to pave the way for $10 billion in funding for states to tighten voting rules.

The Stop Insider Trading Act passed the House last month 232-198.

“It’s a vote that a lot of members thought would be a good one to have. We’re just teeing some things up,” he said. “How it all unfolds is still a little bit up in the air.”

The Chill Factor

Trump's silly Reflecting Pool story masks something serious

Donald Trump's renovations for the Reflecting Pool haven't worked out.

Trump could blame himself — he's the one who ordered it. Instead, he offered stories about vandals.

We're used to Trump falsehoods. When they are turned into federal charges — like this one did — it should freak us out.

On July 2, federal prosecutors charged David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympian, with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

Hearn had made a "a violent effort" to damage the pool, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said.

A month later, Pirro's office told the court she wanted to drop the case.

It turns out, Pirro said in a court filing late Friday, that the pool's well-documented problems probably weren't a result of vandalism. Instead, they were likely because of "hasty and botched work" performed by a contractor.

A standard news management rule of thumb is that you put out embarrassing news right before the weekend, when it's least likely to get noticed. And most of the coverage of the Hearn case has indeed focused on the embarrassment it is generating for the Trump White House. Primarily because up until now, Pirro has been a loyal Trump supporter.

But if we treat this story like a standard-issue optics narrative for the Trump White House, we're doing it wrong. Because this is something much more important: It's the Trump White House using federal prosecutors as a tool to punish perceived enemies.

In a normal administration, this would be a giant story. The fact that we're treating this like business-as-usual should be a giant story, too.

The story of the Reflecting Pool, and Trump's obsession with it, has been well told. The shortest version is that last spring, the Trump administration ordered a poorly conceived renovation using contractors without experience doing that kind of work. So instead of a clear pool with an "American flag blue" bottom, the pool became an algae-infested bog.

But Trump wouldn't acknowledge that his plan hadn't worked. Instead, he insisted that rogues had attacked the pool with a box-cutter and somehow gouged a "300-foot slit" in the pool's lining.

That made the pool a "Trump says thing that's obviously not true" story — the kind that initially seemed unique back in 2017, when he insisted that his lightly attended inauguration was actually the world's biggest. Now that kind of tall and easily disprovable tale just elicits shrugs.

Last month, Pirro turned Trump's fibs into something much more serious by using them as the basis for a felony charge (her office later charged three other Americans with misdemeanors for similar theoretical offenses).

In Pirro's motion to dismiss the charge against Hearn, she argues that she was misled by Trump's Department of the Interior, which oversees the pool. The DOI initially provided "less than fulsome information" about the case, Pirro said. So her office didn't really understand what had happened until late July — weeks after a grand jury had indicted Hearn.

That's silly. Throughout the spring, story after story from mainstream news outlets reported that Trump's attempt to transform the pool was misguided, poorly executed, and had made things worse. Just as important: Trump's claims about vandalism weren't remotely plausible.

So, again: It's one thing not to correct Donald Trump when he says things that aren't true (Trump continues to insist that VANDALS are the cause of the pool's problems, as he argued on Truth Social this weekend; when I asked his press office for comment Monday, they referred me back to his post. He told reporters Monday that Pirro "made a mistake.")

It's another thing to tell stories about the president that don't seem to be true. But turning a Trump falsehood into a federal criminal charge is something very different.

It's also not the first time we've seen federal prosecutors turn themselves into Trump-branded prosecutors. The New York Times, for example, has documented hundreds of flimsy charges the administration has filed against immigrants and protesters during its ICE crackdowns in the last year. Almost half of those have fizzled, the Times reports: "Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them."

The Times itself has been the subject of a Trump legal campaign — last month Trump's Department of Justice filed subpoenas against Times reporters who'd written about security issues with Trump's new Air Force One, then dropped them after getting scolded by a federal judge.

In the Hearn case, it's tempting to brush this aside: After all, Pirro dropped the charges. The system worked, right?

But Hearn, whose case attracted support from prominent allies, should never have had to face a felony charge — and to take on the legal, reputational, and financial obligations fighting that charge entails — in the first place.

So the fact that the federal government has seemingly conceded that it brought a bogus case shouldn't give anyone comfort. It should make you wonder how many dubious charges Donald Trump's prosecutors have filed so far — and how many more we'll see while he's in office.

Squabbles

We've got millions of people having to decide between paying the utility bills or the insurance premiums - putting gas in the car or food on the table - medication or mortgage - and and and.

And what's going in our "government" looks like an endless WWE promo for the next episode of one big stupid cat fight.

Sick of this shit.

Trump blasts Pirro after she refutes his claim that Reflecting Pool was damaged by vandals

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday sharply criticized U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s assessment that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of shoddy construction and not the work of vandals, as he claims.

Pirro’s office, in a court filing on Friday, moved to drop criminal charges against a former Olympian, David Hearn, who had been accused of deliberately damaging the pool after it underwent a renovation ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration last month.

Trump, in a posting on social media, acknowledged that there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the installation of a new pool liner. But he continues to insist “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump added in his post.

The dismissal was an embarrassing setback for a Justice Department that had previously echoed Trump’s claims and billed the prosecution as accountability for damage at a Washington landmark, a pet project of Trump. Pirro’s decision to drop the case is also a rare moment during Trump’s second term of an aide or political appointee openly defying him.

The president, without providing any clear new evidence, continued to allege on Saturday that the majority of the damage to the pool was caused by vandals.

Government lawyers in their 20-page court filing on Friday said that additional documents provided by the Interior Department since the indictment of Hearn show that the damage was the result of a botched installation by a contractor as well as “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”

In addition, a recent visual inspection revealed damage throughout the pool, including in the middle — where prosecutors say a vandal would not likely have attempted to peel the lining.

Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was accused of pulling up a two-foot square piece of the pool’s lining.

“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro, a Trump appointee, said in her filing, which asked a judge to formally dismiss the case.

Pirro in the court filing also blamed the Interior Department for providing “less than fulsome information at the outset of the case.”

The filing added that had “DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.” It was a jarring turn in position from Pirro, who claimed the government’s case was built on “tremendous evidence” when she announced the indictment against Hearn last month.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in a posting on X appeared to push back against Pirro’s criticism, claiming some of the acts of vandalism were captured on video.

“We also provided the U.S. Attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool,” Burgum added.

Hearn’s legal team on Saturday criticized both Trump and Pirro and said it was weighing “legal remedies” on behalf of their client.

“Trump is mad at Pirro because she finally admitted what we made clear in our legal filings all along: Trump’s botched renovation was responsible for the damage — not Davey Hearn,” the legal team said in a statement. “However, her claim that she and her office were previously duped by Interior is nonsense. Starting immediately after the arraignment, our motions repeatedly proved that the administration was to blame for the Reflecting Pool failures, not Davey.”

Trump on Saturday also posted a nearly four-minute video that appears to have been taken from a security camera, in which three individuals can be seen with their hands in the pool, including one for an extended period.

The president claimed the video shows “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!”

It’s not clear from the video, which appears to be shot from some distance, that any vandalism occurred. Workers can also be seen standing nearby and don’t appear to notice the people sticking their hands in the water.

In May, Trump announced plans to beautify the Reflecting Pool this spring. Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings was awarded a $14.7 million no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof the pool’s concrete floor.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to requests for comment.

Water was drained and Trump directed that the bottom be painted with what he called “American flag blue.”

But problems emerged within days of the project’s completion, with chunks of the new liner peeling off.

Trump was quick to blame vandals. And the National Park Service reported to the U.S. Park Police a June 9 incident in which it claimed a sharp knife or razor cut the pool’s new liner.

The work on the Reflecting Pool is just one of a number of projects Trump has spearheaded across the nation’s capital. Most prominently, he demolished the White House’s East Wing to build a $400 million ballroom and plans to build a towering arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

The War

It can't come as any kind of surprise to anyone that Trump would jigger the numbers.

During the pandemic, when it was obvious there were a lot more cases being reported than Trump wanted to admit to, he said we should just stop testing so much.

When the jobs reports weren't to his liking, he fired the lady who was doing the reporting.

If there's a "bright side", it lies in the fact that there are good and decent professionals working in the government who know what they're doing, and who know it's ridiculously important to tell us the truth about what goes on when we're in a fuckiing war.

Pentagon reports more than 600 Iran war casualties in quiet database update

Figures are source of dispute as US defense department days ago reduced record of troops killed and wounded

The Pentagon updated its official war casualty database over the weekend, adding more than 140 wounded service members. The Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) also introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7”.

According to the updated database, the official toll for the earlier phase of the US-Iran war, known as Operation Epic Fury, now stands at 14 service members killed and more than 400 wounded in action.

These figures have been a point of contention after the Pentagon previously reduced the totals from 18 deaths and 482 wounded that had been recorded just days earlier.

The dispute comes after the collapse of the ceasefire with Iran and the resumption of near-daily airstrikes beginning on 6 July. Analysts and officials have questioned whether casualties from the renewed fighting should be counted separately from Operation Epic Fury, a move that would be unprecedented.

The Trump administration is seeking to classify the renewed military campaign as separate from Operation Epic Fury, the US military’s official name for the Iran conflict.

The change is tied to the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires the president to end military operations within 60 days unless Congress authorizes an extension. The Trump administration has argued that the April ceasefire with Iran paused the clock on 1 May for the conflict’s initial period. The separate casualty count beginning on 7 July follows that interpretation.

The shift became apparent earlier this week when the Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war did not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend. Their names, however, were included in a Pentagon press release announcing the formal transfer of their remains back to the US on Wednesday.

Lawmakers from both parties have challenged the administration’s interpretation of the War Powers Act timeline.

Thomas Massie, a Republican House member from Kentucky, responded to the updated numbers in an X post, writing: “Let me explain this absurd ruse: The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire.

“The reality: By going more than 90 days without congressional authorization,” the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable”.

Capt Mestyanek

Gardens Of Stone - the dialog (at about 35:50) between James Caan, James Earl Jones, and a gung ho DB Sweeney. Sweeney is arguing in favor of volunteering for Vietnam, saying the VC have nothing but bows and arrows. "How do you beat a helicopter with bows and arrows?"

James Caan rebuts with, "How're you gonna beat an enemy who's willing to fight helicopters with bows and arrows?"

If just 3½% of a population simply stand up and say no, even the most hardass regime will fall.

Erika

Turns out "Idiocracy" was actually a training film.

Tulsi's Brother

Tulsi Gabbard is not Tulsi Gabbard's brother, so I'll defend her on that point.

But - and it's a big but - the fact that her family has strong ties to the cult Science Of Identity Foundation - the cult she was raised in - should have given everybody ample reason to suspect her, especially as pertains to her obvious ties to Putin. She's exactly the kind of person susceptible to manipulation.

So while her brother's nutball behavior is his own, how are we supposed to ignore the probability that Tulsi could be just as flaky as he is - just in a different way?

We have to insist on better vetting. And yes, the Republicans get to own whatever damage she did while she was DNI, as she was confirmed with only Republican votes.

Tulsi Gabbard's brother arrested after attempting to entice kids back to his hotel room using cash and gum

Tulsi Gabbard's older brother was arrested after he allegedly tried to lure children into his Hawaii hotel room using cash and gum.

Bhakti 'Batarti' Gabbard, 55, is accused of approaching several children, including a nine-year-old boy, near the pool at a hotel in Waikīkī on July 12, according to Honolulu police.

He asked for their names, wrote them in a notebook, and offered them money and chewing gum in exchange for accompanying him to his room, witnesses told police.

The children refused and Gabbard allegedly walked away. A 42-year-old woman then reported the 'stranger danger' incident to authorities.

Gabbard was arrested on Friday afternoon and charged with second-degree custodial interference. He has not yet entered a plea.

His father, Hawaii state Sen Mike Gabbard, said the 55-year-old is suffering from a mental health episode and has been 'acting erratically.'

Gabbard was sleeping on the streets, gave his car away to a homeless person, and has been using drugs, his father said in a statement to KITV.

He was admitted to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation on a 72-hour hold while his care team and family work to determine next steps, the statement added.

Gabbard was also arrested for theft on Thursday. He appeared before a court Friday morning and pled not guilty to the charge.

He was released after the hearing and is due back in court on August 14.

No court date has yet been set for his custodial interference charge.

Gabbard has battled mental health issues for many years, but his parents claim he was 'doing well for the last 10 years,' Sen Gabbard's statement said.

His erratic behavior began several days ago 'as a result of smoking pot,' the lawmaker and his wife, Carol, claimed.

'His wife kicked him out of the house, so he's been sleeping on the streets. He gave away his car to a homeless person; lost his ID and phone and has no money,' the couple told the news outlet.

'He's renamed himself, Batarti, and also Jim Morrison Jr., as he's having delusions of being a rock star.'

The Daily Mail can reveal that just hours before the alleged hotel incident, Gabbard took to social media to promote his music career.

He urged his followers to have a 'sneak listen' of his new sound 'before it goes viral.'

'Namaste family,' he wrote. 'Super excited about getting into the Sessions recording studio tomorrow to record some life-altering music to offer to the Lord.'

He continued: 'Aloha and I welcome all of you to join me on this crazy ride Lord Krishna has in store for me. Fame and fortune is imminent, but I intend to use both to help the world discover Bhakti-yoga by using mantras in the choruses of my singles.

'Look forward to seeing you all soon at one of my shows.'

After Gabbard was released from custody Friday, a family member took him to the emergency room at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu.

During his intake, he allegedly told the doctor that a blood test would reveal that he had cocaine, ice and pot in his system.

Gabbard's wife of nearly a decade, Kimberly, has since filed a petition for a protective order, alleging that she feared for her safety.

She claimed that on July 11, the day before the incident at the hotel, that Gabbard was 'gravely disabled (psychotic break),' according to a petition reviewed by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Kimberly described how Gabbard was allegedly singing loudly on the main stage at the Ala Moana Center shopping mall, disrupted others and was forced to leave the facility by security.

She said that after the incident she tried to stop him from driving, but he got angry and refused.

A family court judge denied the petition on Friday.

His wife also claimed on the court filing that Gabbard was previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features, as well as narcissism.

Mike and Carol Gabbard have five children including Bhkati and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The Daily Mail has not received a response to its request for comment from Tulsi or Mike Gabbard. Calls to a phone number associated with Kimberly went unanswered.

The senator, however, told Fox News on Saturday night: 'We love him, and asked him to follow the protocol at the hospital, which he says he will do.

'We're praying for his speedy recovery, and would appreciate the prayers of others.'