NEW: Sen. Lisa Murkowski stares me down for more than 10 secs after I ask her to respond to Sen. Rand Paul’s critique of the deal she struck to get her to a YES and pass the OBBB.
“Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests.”
This is somebody who knows she has voted for a horrible bill, one that is terrible for most of the country, and also a net negative even for Alaskans. Indeed, she’s already trying to evade responsibility in multiple senses:
“This is a bad bill advanced by a bad process, but what am I, the median vote on the bill, supposed to do about it? Maybe, uh, the House will do something about it?”
Murkowski has plenty of money. She’s 68. She cast a critical no vote on the last round of ACA repeal and did just fine. If she didn’t want to take the pressure anymore she could spend the rest of her life on a lucrative no-work lecture circuit. Instead she wants her legacy to be senselessly sickening and killing and immiserating people because she can make it marginally less bad for her own state, and she’s still trying to convince herself that someone else will fix it. Unspeakably vile.
The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s massive tax and immigration spending plan would wipe out many of the strides made by the Affordable Care Act in reducing the number of uninsured Americans, resulting in at least 17 million Americans losing their health coverage, according to nonpartisan estimates and experts.
The bill, which narrowly passed the Senate on Tuesday and now heads back to the House, would effectively accomplish what Republicans have long failed to do: unwind many of the key components of the ACA, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, which dramatically increased the number of Americans with access to health insurance.
To start, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate version of the bill would result in 11.8 million more uninsured in 2034, mostly because of Medicaid cuts, compared with 10.9 million if the House version became law.
In addition, both versions of the bill would allow pandemic-era enhanced subsidies for health insurance through ACA marketplaces to expire at the end of the year, sharply raising out-of-pocket costs for millions of Americans. The CBO estimates that 4.2 million people would lose insurance as a result. An additional 1 million are likely to become uninsured because of a combination of other Trump administration cuts and the Republican legislation, according to the CBO.
The bill also includes other, less-noticed changes that over several years would make it harder for states to maintain the ACA’s Medicaid expansion at existing levels, which currently cover some 20 million Americans, according to KFF, a health policy research organization.
“This bill — if passed, and if the enhanced subsidies expire — will be a very effective undermining of the vision of the Affordable Care Act to move the United States to a country where universal coverage is in sight,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “This was the 100-year fight to get to the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”
Congratulations to every reporter who suggested that electing Trump would just make in 2019 again, although Republicans were completely clear that they intended to repeal the ACA and the guy who stopped them from doing it last time is dead.
I back of the enveloped this figure in a post this morning, but in doing so I both relied my increasingly treacherous memory, and neglected to consider people who voted for other presidential candidates, and people who voted but didn’t vote for any presidential candidate (a surprisingly non-trivial total, at least to me.)
So here are the fully crunched numbers, courtesy of the Florida Election Lab, where Michael McDonald does deep dives into what percentage of the American adult population is actually eligible to vote at any particular time. (By his calculations, 7.6% of the voter-age population wasn’t eligible to vote last November).
Percentage of the VOTER ELIGIBLE (not voter age) population that:
Didn’t vote at all: 35.93%
Voted for Trump: 31.60%
Voted for Harris: 30.66%
Voted for other presidential candidates, or voted but not for a presidential candidate: 1.82%
69.35% of the people eligible to vote in November didn’t vote against Donald Trump. Seven out of ten Americans are either:
White Supremacists
OK with a certain amount of white supremacy, and by a certain amount I mean “a lot.”
Too clueless to understand anything about any of this because [fill in favorite explanation(s); mine is currently THE INTERNET].
I mean what can you say? (I’m sure you’ll think of something).
A strike by nurses and front-line workers at Butler Hospital is dragging into its seventh week, not just because union leaders and hospital executives are far apart on issues.
It’s also because of a little-known executive order signed by President Trump in March that gutted the agency overseeing federal mediators — people responsible for bringing companies and labor unions to the negotiating table.
Before the executive order, there were 143 federal mediators nationwide. After, only four were left.
“They shut down the regional offices where mediators knew the issues locally. That’s a real problem,’’ said Jesse Martin, executive vice president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) District 1199, the union that represents the striking workers.
Even when negotiators for the union and Butler executives make progress, follow-up meetings are delayed because a federal mediator is not available. The delays are costly to both sides: As workers remain on strike, they go without pay and benefits, including health insurance, which hospital executives cut off in May. Meanwhile, Care New England, the health care system that owns Butler Hospital, is shelling out millions of dollars for contract workers to temporarily replace those on strike.
Federal mediators are brought in when unions and management can no longer productively communicate with one another.
“The fact that the federal administration has now not quite eliminated but gutted it, is terrible for labor relations and, ultimately, it’s trouble for the economy,’’ said Eve Weinbaum, a sociology and labor studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Labor Center.
“There are mediators who deal with thousands and thousands of situations every single year where management or labor or both call in an outside expert to help resolve a dispute,’’ Weinbaum added. “And I don’t understand why the federal government wouldn’t want to make that continue.’’
…
But with the dramatic decrease in the number of federal mediators, some experts say more strikes and other collective actions could take place because contract negotiations hit a standstill or because of the lack of a neutral party in the middle.
“It’s possible that you see more extreme actions by unions,’’ said Erik Loomis, a professor of labor and environmental history at the University of Rhode Island.
The cuts come as many workers around the region are bracing for potential strikes.
On June 13, workers at Fenway Park who work for Aramark, the food service and facilities provider, in Boston authorized a strike in an effort to seek better pay and limits on automation, including beer kiosks and self-checkouts. The strike could begin at any time.
Last Monday, workers at Rhode Island Hospital, the state’s only Level I Trauma Center, and Hasbro Children’s Hospital, the state’s only pediatric care hospital, voted to authorize a strike. Both hospitals are run by Brown University Health, formerly known as Lifespan Corp. In order to avoid delays caused by the lack of federal mediators, the hospitals’ executives opted to use a retired federal mediator that they already had a relationship with to help with contract negotiations, said Brown University Health spokesperson Jessica A. Wharton.
Private mediators and arbitrators can be brought in by companies and labor. But, Weinbaum said, that’s uncommon.
“It’s hard to find them,’’ said Weinbaum. “It’s also hard for both sides to know that the person is objective and reliable. That’s why a federal organization exists.’’
This is just Trumpism as its stupidest. It doesn’t even per se help the employer, as I tried to state in that one quote (really it feels out of context with what I was trying to get at, but you can’t help what lines reporters will actually use and I don’t really think unions are going to have a new radical edge because of all this). Its just the enshittification of labor disputes. Fun times,.
I’m just a scientist who thinks and writes about politics because politics is how we live, but this video (split in two because of Bluesky limitations) has some impressive numbers, and numbers are what we scientists do.
I don’t recall James Carville having numbers like this. Maybe time to rethink strategies.
This @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social video is absolutely INCREDIBLE. The numbers he cites, the strategy and results they produced — it’s the future. When have you heard *any* campaign talk about this, ever? (Video split in 2 to fit in Bluesky’s limits)
Yet another contrast from the other side of the aisle.
Sen. Murkowski admits Trump's budget bill is harmful after she folded and voted yes on it: "I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill"
Let’s let the former (?) mainstream media darling who cast the tie-breaking vote summarize the Defund Rural America Especially the Hospitals Act:
Let’s not bicker over the “minute” of the 17 million people who will lose access to healthcare, or even mention the millions of people who will go hungry, or the massive tax cuts for billionaires these savage cuts don’t even pay for. It doesn’t matter because you’re getting a lot more concentration camps and a lot more masked goons in unmarked vans to police the local Home Depot.
The many editors who slobbered over Vance as the representative of Trumpism weren’t wrong, they were just wrong about what that consisted of.
This was May 8, and remember this when the media wonders why so many people don’t understand what’s in the bill:
He opened Claude on his laptop. I noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. He told me, “I said, ‘Turn it into concise bullet points.’ ” He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.
Alex searched until he found a paper for an art-history class, about a museum exhibition. He had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions. “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with,” he said. After skimming the essay, he felt that the A.I. hadn’t sufficiently addressed the professor’s questions, so he refined the prompt and told it to try again. In the end, Alex’s submission received the equivalent of an A-minus. He said that he had a basic grasp of the paper’s argument, but that if the professor had asked him for specifics he’d have been “so fucked.” I read the paper over Alex’s shoulder; it was a solid imitation of how an undergraduate might describe a set of images. If this had been 2007, I wouldn’t have made much of its generic tone, or of the precise, box-ticking quality of its critical observations.
Eugene, serious and somewhat solemn, had been listening with bemusement. “I would not cut and paste like he did, because I’m a lot more paranoid,” he said. He’s a couple of years younger than Alex and was in high school when ChatGPT was released. At the time, he experimented with A.I. for essays but noticed that it made easily noticed errors. “This passed the A.I. detector?” he asked Alex.
When ChatGPT launched, instructors adopted various measures to insure that students’ work was their own. These included requiring them to share time-stamped version histories of their Google documents, and designing written assignments that had to be completed in person, over multiple sessions. But most detective work occurs after submission. Services like GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Originality.ai analyze the structure and syntax of a piece of writing and assess the likelihood that it was produced by a machine. Alex said that his art-history professor was “hella old,” and therefore probably didn’t know about such programs. We fed the paper into a few different A.I.-detection websites. One said there was a twenty-eight-per-cent chance that the paper was A.I.-generated; another put the odds at sixty-one per cent. “That’s better than I expected,” Eugene said.
I asked if he thought what his friend had done was cheating, and Alex interrupted: “Of course. Are you fucking kidding me?”
Yeah, fucking telling me about it.
It’s easy to get hung up on stories of academic dishonesty. Late last year, in a survey of college and university leaders, fifty-nine per cent reported an increase in cheating, a figure that feels conservative when you talk to students. A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is. Until we’re eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We’re essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential. But even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or a diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of A.I. means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether.
There are no reliable figures for how many American students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of students between the ages of thirteen and seventeen suggests that a quarter of teens currently use ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the figure from 2023. OpenAI recently released a report claiming that one in three college students uses its products. There’s good reason to believe that these are low estimates. If you grew up Googling everything or using Grammarly to give your prose a professional gloss, it isn’t far-fetched to regard A.I. as just another productivity tool. “I see it as no different from Google,” Eugene said. “I use it for the same kind of purpose.”
Being a student is about testing boundaries and staying one step ahead of the rules. While administrators and educators have been debating new definitions for cheating and discussing the mechanics of surveillance, students have been embracing the possibilities of A.I. A few months after the release of ChatGPT, a Harvard undergraduate got approval to conduct an experiment in which it wrote papers that had been assigned in seven courses. The A.I. skated by with a 3.57 G.P.A., a little below the school’s average. Upstart companies introduced products that specialized in “humanizing” A.I.-generated writing, and TikTok influencers began coaching their audiences on how to avoid detection.
Unable to keep pace, academic administrations largely stopped trying to control students’ use of artificial intelligence and adopted an attitude of hopeful resignation, encouraging teachers to explore the practical, pedagogical applications of A.I. In certain fields, this wasn’t a huge stretch. Studies show that A.I. is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English. In some STEM classes, using generative A.I. as a tool is acceptable. Alex and Eugene told me that their accounting professor encouraged them to take advantage of free offers on new A.I. products available only to undergraduates, as companies competed for student loyalty throughout the spring. In May, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a product specifically marketed for educational use, after schools including Oxford University, Arizona State University, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business experimented with incorporating A.I. into their curricula. This month, the company detailed plans to integrate ChatGPT into every dimension of campus life, with students receiving “personalized” A.I. accounts to accompany them throughout their years in college.
There’s one way to ensure academic honesty and that’s to force students to do things in class without technology. Hello reading quizzes and in class exams! I am also highly interested in returning to banning technology from the classroom entirely.
Any thoughts from the rest of you on how to handle this? Some say there are “opportunities” here to rethink teaching, but I am highly skeptical of how I would do that.
The return to pen and paper has been a common response to A.I. among professors, with sales of blue books rising significantly at certain universities in the past two years. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, grew dispirited after some students submitted what he suspected was A.I.-generated work for an assignment on how the school’s honor code should view A.I.-generated work. He, too, has decided to return to blue books, and is pondering the logistics of oral exams. “Maybe we go all the way back to 450 B.C.,” he told me.
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Senate Republicans have passed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing a work requirement for the first time and restricting states’ ability to finance their share of the program’s costs. If the bill ultimately becomes law after passing the House and receiving Trump’s signature — which could all happen before Friday — American health care is never going to be the same.
The consequences will be dire.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion and that nearly 12 million people would lose their health insurance. Republicans added a last-minute infusion of funding for rural hospitals to assuage moderates skittish about the Medicaid cuts, but hospitals say the legislation will still be devastating to their business and their patients.
When combined with the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which were not addressed in the budget bill, and the other regulatory changes being made by the Trump administration, the Republican policy agenda could lead to an estimated 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, according to the health policy think tank KFF.
Fewer people with health insurance is going to mean fewer people getting medical services, which means more illness and ultimately more deaths.
One recent analysis by a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers of the House Republicans’ version of the budget bill (which included the same general outline, though some of the provisions have been tweaked in the Senate) concluded that 700,000 fewer Americans would have a regular place to get medical care as a result of the bill. Upward of 200,000 fewer people would get their blood cholesterol or blood sugar checked; 139,000 fewer women would get their recommended mammograms. Overall, the authors project that between 8,200 and 24,600 additional Americans would die every year under the Republican plan. Other analyses came to the same conclusion: Millions of Americans will lose health insurance and thousands will die.
After a painful legislative debate in which some of their own members warned them not to cut Medicaid too deeply, Republicans succeeded in taking a big chunk out of the program to help cover the costs of their bill’s tax cuts. They have, eight years after failing to repeal Obamacare entirely, managed to strike blows to some of its important provisions.
So, for better or worse, they own the health care system now, a system that is a continued source of frustration for most Americans — frustrations that the Republican plan won’t relieve. The next time health care comes up for serious debate in Congress, lawmakers will need to repair the damage that the GOP is doing with its so-called big, beautiful bill.
How the Republican budget bill will drive up health care costs for everyone
The effects of the budget bill won’t be limited only to the people on Medicaid and the people whose private insurance costs will increase because of the Obamacare funding cuts. Everyone will experience the consequences of millions of Americans losing health coverage.
When a person loses their health insurance, they are more likely to skip regular medical checkups, which makes it more likely they go to a hospital emergency room when a serious medical problem has gotten so bad that they can’t ignore it any longer. The hospital is obligated by federal law to take care of them even if they can’t pay for their care.
Those costs are then passed on to other patients. When health care providers negotiate with insurance companies over next year’s rates, they account for the uncompensated care they have to provide. And the fewer people covered by Medicaid, the more uncompensated care hospitals have to cover, the more costs are going to increase for even people who do have health insurance. Republicans included funding in the bill to try to protect hospitals from the adverse consequences, an acknowledgement of the risk they were taking, but the hospitals themselves are warning that the funding patches are insufficient. If hospitals and doctors’ offices close because their bottom lines are squeezed by this bill, that will make it harder for people to access health care, even if they have an insurance card.
The effects of the Republican budget bill are going to filter through the rest of the health care system and increase costs for everyone. In that sense, the legislation passage marks a new era for US health policy. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats have primarily been held responsible for the state of the health care system. Sometimes this has been a drag on their political goals. But over time, as the ACA’s benefits became more ingrained, health care became a political boon to Democrats.
Going forward, having made these enormous changes, Republicans are going to own the American health care system and all of its problems — the ones they created and the ones that have existed for years.
The BBB’s passage sets the stage for another fight on the future of American health care
For the past decade-plus, US health care politics have tended to follow a “you break it, you buy it” rule. Democrats discovered this in 2010: Though the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions did not take effect for several years, they saw their popularity plummet quickly as Republicans successfully blamed annual premium increases that would’ve occurred with or without the law on the Democrats and their new health care bill. Voters were persuaded by those arguments, and Democrats lost Congress in the 2010 midterms.
But years later, Americans began to change their perception. As of 2024, 44 million Americans were covered through the 2010 health care law and two-thirds of the country say they have a favorable view of the ACA. After the GOP’s failed attempt to repeal the law in 2017, the politics of the issue flipped: Democrats scored major wins in the 2018 midterms after successfully campaigning against the GOP’s failed plan to repeal the ACA. Even in the disastrous 2024 election cycle for Democrats, health care policy was still an issue where voters trusted Kamala Harris more than Trump.
Democrats have more work to do on explaining to the public what the bill does and how its implications will be felt by millions of people. Recent polling suggests that many Americans don’t understand the specifics. A contentious debate among Republicans, with several solitary members warning against the consequences of Medicaid cuts, have given politicians on the other side of the aisle good material to work with in making that case: Democrats can pull up clips of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on the Senate floor, explaining how devastating the bill’s Medicaid provisions would be to conservative voters in Republican-controlled states.
Republicans will try to sell the bill on its tax cuts. But multipleanalyses have shown the vast majority of the benefits are going to be reserved for people in higher-income brackets. Middle-class and working-class voters will see only marginal tax relief — and if their health care costs increase either because they lose their insurance or because their premiums go up after other people lose insurance, then that relief could quickly be wiped out by increased costs elsewhere. That is the story Democrats will need to tell in the coming campaigns.
Medicaid has served as a safety net for tens of millions of Americans during both the Great Recession of 2008 and since the pandemic recession of 2020. At one point, around 90 million Americans — about one in four — were covered by Medicaid. People have become much more familiar with the program and it has either directly benefited them or helped somebody that they know at a difficult time.
And difficult times may be coming. Economists have their eyes on concerning economic indicators that the world may be heading toward a recession. When a recession hits — that is, after all, inevitable; it’s just the normal cycle of the economy — people will lose their jobs and many of them will also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. But now, the safety net is far flimsier than it was in previous crises.
Republicans are going to own those consequences. They took a program that had become an essential lifeline for millions of Americans and having schemed to gut the law ever since the Democrats expanded Medicaid through the ACA more than a decade ago, have finally succeeded. This Republican plan was a reaction to their opponent’s most recent policy overhaul; the next Democratic health care plan will need to repair the harms precipitated by the GOP budget bill.
In the meantime, the impetus is on Democrats and truth tellers in the media to help Americans understand what has happened, why it has happened, and what the fallout is going to be.
When Eric Adams barely squeaked by, all the advanced politics knowers decided - amazingly - that barely winning a heavily contested primary in New York City somehow meant you were just what the nation was looking for in a politician. It didn't make any sense then, but those are the rules now.
Zohran Mamdani has won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a new vote count confirmed on Tuesday, cementing his stunning upset of former governor Andrew Cuomo and sending him to the general election.
The Associated Press called the race after the results of the city’s ranked choice voting tabulation were released and showed Mamdani beating Cuomo by 12 percentage points.
I’d like to think that this horrifying spending bill will turn people away from the Republicans. But what possible evidence is there for the point? Oh sure, it will piss off liberals and they are the high-volume voters now. I have little doubt Democrats will do well in the midterms next year. Unlikely to do well enough to win the Senate, which is what really matters, though Trump forcing Tillis out improves the chances by a good bit since there’s no way North Carolina Republicans aren’t going to nominate someone who is totally insane, quite possibly Lara Trump. Her on the ballot would also be the demonstration of whether Trump has any coat tails at all at this point.
People will definitely suffer. But how we will tell them that it is Republicans’ fault? I ask because all the Republican Party is going to blame it on Democrats. All we have is the truth and education from traditional news sources. And if you think that is going to work in terms of political messaging, let me remind you this nation has elected Donald Trump twice.
This is what I’m talking about when I say that Democrats need to rethink their politics completely. Because if you can’t message the truth, you lose. If you can’t reach out to people to inform them in an entertaining way that they will watch the truth, you lose. And if you bore them with policy details, you definitely lose. Republicans have to be demonized as the scum of the Earth. Which also happens to be true and that doesn’t hurt.
But what has happened since the election for any of this to happen? Democratic leadership still has no clue and its New York dominated contingent sees Mandami as a greater threat than Trump anyway. What is the transition in messaging? What is the new media strategy? None of it has happened. And if you think that it’s too soon to see the results of work that might have been done, well, you might well be right about that. But is there any evidence that anything has changed for Democrats at all?
So what is going to happen is the following.
People are going to lose their health care, go hungry, etc.
Republicans will lie to them about who is at fault for this.
Democrats will have not thought out how to change that.
Democrats will win a thin but real majority in the House next year and could make progress in the Senate
Democrats will then think they are on the upswing and believe they are fundamentally doing things right
The people will still be convinced Democrats are at fault for the bill or just won’t see anyone at fault because they are completely uneducated about it all except for the vibes they get
The 2028 election will be extremely tight and Republicans will do whatever they can to tip the scales, through “legal” means, by which whatever John Roberts allows.
The only way to actually break this cycle is to build back up significant power within lower educated communities that might have used to support Democrats but have swung to Trump.
Like it or not, that’s the only way.
So how are we going to do that so that the voters hurt by this horrendous bill actually begin to understand who did this to them?
A divided Senate on Tuesday narrowly passed Republicans’ marquee bill to slash taxes and social safety net programs, as the G.O.P. muscled through deep internal rifts in a bid to deliver President Trump’s agenda.
The 51-to-50 vote sent the legislation to the House, where its passage was far from certain even though Mr. Trump has demanded that lawmakers send the bill to his desk for enactment by July 4. Three Republicans, Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined all Democrats in voting against it, forcing Vice President JD Vance to cast the tiebreaking vote.
Meanwhile, Susan Collins sets a new world record for meaningless symbolic no votes on major pieces of GOP legislation.
My nurse let me out on an adventure! I got to see a bit of the prairie garden at the university — I saw it for a long time because I was moving at a snail’s pace past this little patch.
The real purpose of the outing, though, is that it’s been 6 days since I’d been in the lab, and while spiders are hardy beasts that do prefer being left alone, I have to occasionally give them something to eat. So, mealworms and flies all around!
Despite my neglect, the spiders know what season it is, and they’ve been producing egg sacs for me, so another duty I had was to separate eggs from mothers and move them into the special temperature and humidity controlled incubator. I’m accumulating a little collection, labeled Sbor, Ptep, and Lmac, all quietly thriving and awaiting their moment of emergence. I’m going to try and get in to the lab more frequently because they’ll be hatching out soon.
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high.
The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself is a smorgasbord of policy and could also affect clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance, but perhaps the most consequential changes will be to Medicaid.
The bill was approved by the House in May and passed a key Senate vote on Saturday. Republicans are divided over competing priorities; some want to extend Trump’s tax cuts and boost immigration and defense spending, while others worry about the $2.6 trillion cost and cuts to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers aim to pass the bill by Friday using budget reconciliation, but it’s unclear if all 53 Republican senators will agree.
This is a developing story. Follow along here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.
Jimmy Swaggart is dead. I regret to note that while he was on my obituary list, I did not get to him in time (I am working up a good one on that hypocritical scumbag and extremely brief GOP speaker Bob Livingston though. I’ve also started the Mitt Romney obit). Suffice it to say that no one sums up the grotesque ridiculousness of modern TV evangelicalism more than Swaggart. Also, it’s incredibly appropriate that he was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin, as they are two sides of the same insane southern white coin. Saturday Night/Sunday Morning indeed.
A couple years back I received an offer and a prompt from a friend to contribute a story to a collection to be called “Queer Country.” The most significant genre requirement was that the story be set in the “Old West,” in this case an isolated county in 1880s Colorado. I of course submitted a Lovecraftian horror story with post-Civil War overtones (prominent mentions of both Nathan Bedford Forrest and a shoggoth). The collection has wound its way through the process and is now available. If anyone deigns to read I would be absolutely delighted to hear everything and anything you have to say about it!
I know it makes me a bad blogger, but I can't be bothered to follow the unfolding vote in the Senate. At some point I realized if it isn't fun to watch the game, you can just find out the score at the end and spend your time doing other things.
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lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed) wrote2025-07-02 12:46 am
