Donald Trump and cult Republicans put fine print into 1,000 page ugly tax bill: Purpose- to weaken judiciary. IOW Fascism

Tucked in the bill’s 1,000+ pages: a weakened judiciary. Opinion letter published in the Boston Globe.

Whenever you have a Congressional bill that’s more than 1,000 pages, items will get snuck in that have little to do with the main thrust of the legislation. Amid the countless tax and spending cuts detailed in the House-passed ugly budget bill, there’s a section that diminishes the power of the judiciary.

Sec. 70302 reads, “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued ... whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”

The intent of this onerous power grab is to prevent the administration from being hamstrung by rulings from the bench by eliminating the judges’ ability to penalize government officials for defying court orders. If it passes, it would render courts impotent, allowing the government to break the law and violate the Constitution with impunity.😓

From William J. Santoro  Winchester Massachusetts

Maine Writer P.S. IOW- Fascism

AI Overview/Google: Fascism is a far-right political ideology and movement characterized by authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism, and a strong emphasis on the state and its leader. It often involves the suppression of opposition, a belief in a natural social hierarchy, and the subordination of individual interests to the perceived interests of the nation or race.

Comment on opinions page from "user": 
"Trump is simply a monstrous danger to our country in so many ways. And the entire GOP is complicitous with it's despicable genuflecting to their Dear Leader. History will NOT be kind to any of them!"

Donald Trump and cult Republicans in denial about how the ugly tax bill will cause economic harm

Donald Trump says tax cuts for the rich will be 'Rocket Fuel' for fhe economy. Obviously, Trump is influenced by campaign donor. 

#ElonMusk "SpaceX’s Starship 🚀💢explodes for 3rd time in a row, Musk promises more frequent launches" (This the "rocket fuel" Trump is talking about?)

Opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:

Tangled in Trump budget’s weeds and pricked by its thorns

‘Rocket fuel’ for the economy, says Donald Trump and the Republican echo chamber, the GOP — with most Americans in the blast zone💥❗

The Republicans claim their big budget bill will be “rocket fuel” for the economy. But if this rocket takes off, who will get blasted in its wake?

But, everyday people have the most to lose. The Republicans have thrown in a few short-term tax credits to distract us, but that will barely make a dent for working families losing the SNAP benefits that helped them make ends meet, or communities whose local health centers have to close due to cuts to Medicaid and other funding. School districts will struggle even more to provide enough teachers, supplies, and training to meet the needs of their students.

Meanwhile, communities all across the country currently enjoying the benefits of renewable energy investments — jobs, cleaner air, and a safer, more resilient grid — will watch those dreams go up in smoke.

The rocket is on the launch pad. Citizens must speak up before it takes off. The only folks actually getting in the rocket are billionaires. The rest of us are the collateral damage inside the blast zone.

From Mary Memmott in Framingham Massachusetts

Donald Trump and the Republican MAGA cult immersed in a cesspool of political lies

Echo opinion letter published in the Jacksonville My Journal-Courier in Illinois.

Now we bear witness to the consequences- a legacy of lies

Donald Trump Nazi salute!

Vice President Kamala Harris did not whine and lie to the American people that she really won the 2025 presidential election.

And because it was a free democratic election, the American people will get the government they deserve.

For those citizens who feel disappointed that a majority of voters chose as their leader a demagogue who believes the rule of law does not apply to him, your duty now is to bear witness to the consequences.

And remember. For history’s sake.

And stop thinking about King Trump. Entertainment is his game. He’s the best at keeping everyone distracted while he performs his con. He knows what he’s doing.

Also, don’t waste your time trying to convince your friends and relatives who have slid down the rabbit hole of self-delusion. This election proved Mark Twain was right when he observed, “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Stay awake as the herd nods off and avoids evidence of an insurrection that happened before their very eyes. Observe the idiot wind that blows constantly from the mouths of all those Trump-pets pretending that traitors are patriots. Don’t fall for the false equivalencies, like convincing you that their retribution is the same as real justice.

From James Tweed in Ocean City, New Jersey

Democrats must create visible non violent ways to effectively struggle against Donald Trump and Republican cultism

Bravo❗ 👏😘 Opinion by Robin Abcarian, published in the Los Angeles Times:

To all those engaged in the struggle against Trump’s anti-democratic bullying❗

The all-out war being waged by Donald Trump against so many American institutions and bedrock principles is sickening🤢 to watch.

In February, after Elon Musk took his chain saw to America’s most consequential foreign aid agency, I predicted that children would die as a result.

This month, PBS reported that a Nigerian mother of twins lost one of her babies to starvation, thanks to the dismantling of USAID. A former USAID chief nutritionist estimated that the cuts to food assistance could result in about a million children not receiving treatment for severe food nutrition and potentially 163,500 deaths. So much for rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Bill Gates told the Financial Times.

Every day brings a new horror as Donald Trump takes a blow torch to the Constitution.

He blackmails universities and corporations to force them to end efforts to diversify their student bodies and work forces. He makes life as hellish as possible for immigrants, legal and otherwise. He wants to kill off birthright citizenship. Suspend habeas corpus. Ditch due process. Accept “gifts” from foreign governments. Erase the line that separates church and state.

On Thursday, he ratcheted up his battle against Harvard University, announcing that it would no longer be permitted to enroll foreign students in what the New York Times described as “a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.”

The estimated 7,000 foreign students currently enrolled at Harvard, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem declared, would immediately have to transfer to other universities or lose their legal status.

While some Americans are positively reveling in the cruelty and chaos spewing from the White House, and many companies are knuckling under to Trump, those of us who oppose the descent into lawless bullying search for heroes and signs of hope anywhere we can find it.

Thankfully, Harvard is fighting back. With its $53-billion endowment, the school is uniquely suited to the task. Thursday, it filed a lawsuit challenging the termination of the school’s participation in the government’s student visa program. In April, it sued the administration over its revocation of $2.2 billion in research grants.

In January, Costco’s board of directors unanimously reaffirmed the company’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In February, 97% of Apple’s shareholders voted against a proposal to abolish the company’s DEI initiatives. Executives at Delta Airlines have declared that diversity initiatives are a critical part of the company’s business strategy. Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker known for its progressive politics, said it would not be “intimidated or bullied” into abandoning its commitment to racial and social justice.

Recently, I found a ray of hope in an unlikely place: Madison, Wisconsin, where I was attending the law school graduation of my step-granddaughter, Kenna.

I happened to drive past a Penzeys Spices store and pulled over to take a look. In an effort to counter some of the despair the second Trump term has caused, I have taken refuge in cooking, which yanks me out of my head and distracts me from all the bad news.

When I can no longer stomach the headlines, I zone out with my favorite online chefs: Notorious Foodie, a home cook who ends each of his videos by throwing a towel at the camera (I highly recommend his lasagne), and Chef Reactions, who offers a split-screen snarky commentary of trashy cooking videos (think Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake).

At the checkout counter with my herbes de Provence, pumpkin pie spice and ground Turkish sumac berries, the cashier gave me a little blue spice packet with a bleeding red heart labeled “Resist! Keep America Alive.” On the back: “Season Liberally.”

I did not realize that I had stumbled into what is probably Ground Zero of the business world’s Trump resistance. Based in Wisconsin — the state that can take credit for bringing Musk to his knees, the company’s founder and owner, Bill Penzey, has always been vocally liberal, and the outrages of the Trump era have given him an abundance of material.

On his website, in newsletters and Facebook posts, Penzey combines his politics with specials on various spices. In 2017, on the second anniversary of Trump’s infamous slander of Mexican immigrants, Penzey offered his customers free bottles of Mexican vanilla. “It seems a good day to apologize to the people of Mexico and Latin America,” he wrote on Facebook.

On the Penzeys Spices website, next to the typical “About Us” tab, he has added another, “About Republicans.”

“We’ve arrived at the point where there’s no way to respect the nonsense the Republican Party is promoting and have any hope of overcoming the problems we as a nation and we as a planet face,” Penzey writes. “Given the choice between saving America and planet Earth or saving the feelings of Republican voters, we are choosing to side with saving our country and our world.”

I reached out to Penzey, but he declined to chat with me.

“I‘m content with just doing what we do,” he wrote. “Somehow talking to people about it all and having them try to sum it up never quite clicks. Sorry.”

Oh don’t be. Just keep doing what you do, Mr. Penzey, and let’s hope that democracy prevails.

@rabcarian.bsky.social @rabcarian

Donald Trump and the Republicans are supporting an incompetent administration

One by one, Republicans lose credibility as they bow to Trump

Echo opinion letter published in New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOLAonline)

Before Donald Trump was running for president, a man asked my opinion of him. I looked to be sure there were no ladies present, and then I told him what I thought of a self-proclaimed billionaire whose employees had to sue him to get their wages.

The man asked if I was a Blue Dog Democrat, and I said I had been called a lot of things in my time. He explained that it was a man who would vote for a Blue Dog before he would vote for a Republican. I replied I probably was one, but I had once known a good Republican who was kin to me.

Thinking of our present elected leader, I can now say without contradiction why I felt that way. That was several years ago, and time has proven me right.

The ones in office now have their main purpose of pleasing Trump and going along. My congressional representative, Julia Letlow, talks about what she has brought to the district. Of course, she voted against all of it. Lying Clay Higgins swore in Congress that he had proof that the January 6the Capitol rioters 🤥were federal agents dressed up as Trump supporters, and he would bring out proof soon, very soon. That was quite a while ago, and Higgins has not come up with any proof.

The only one we had in elected office who could have finished as a statesman was Bill Cassidy. For some reason, he decided it was more important to please Trump than to take care of his constituents, so he gave us a former dopehead and antivaxxer for Health and Human Services secretary and a former drunk to head the military. As for Sen. "Cornpone" John Kennedy, we were lost from the start.

From Carl Crain in Baton Route Louisiana

Pope Leo XIV is American by birth with a genealogy rich in diversity and migration

Is Pope Leo my cousin?

Excellent feature article published in the Boston Globe by Julian Sorapuru: A Globe reporter saw his last name on the gravestone of the new pope’s grandparents.

When reporter Julian Sorapuru saw his last name on the gravestone of Pope Leo XIV’s grandparents, he did some digging.Globe Staff/Jari Honora/Associated Press

Just hours after Pope Leo XIV (born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago) made history as the first head of the Catholic Church from the United States, my aunt sent a Facebook post to our family group chat. It claimed the pope — who, at that point, was only known to have European ancestry — had “Creole of color roots from New Orleans on his mother’s side.”

As a Black Creole from a New Orleans Catholic family, I was excited. But as a journalist, I was skeptical. 

In moments of high public interest, misinformation tends to spread. But then my hometown newspaper wrote about it. Next came The New York Times, which ran a photo of the gravestone of Leo‘s maternal grandparents in Illinois.

But they weren’t buried alone. Other members of their extended family were also interred there and memorialized on the gravestone. Any doubt I had about the veracity of the pope‘s Creole heritage evaporated when I read my last name at the bottom of that gravestone.

Growing up with a last name as unique as Sorapuru — or “Soraparu,” as it’s spelled on the gravestone — my family always told me that if someone else shared it, we’re probably related.

So I immediately thought: Is Pope Leo my cousin?

The answer, which I’ll get back to, involves a winding tale mixed up in the muddiness of race. But first, some context.

In modern popular culture, the word “Creole” has become shorthand to signify someone of mixed African and European heritage, usually with ancestral roots in Louisiana. 

But, the term did not originate as a racial designation, said Mary Gehman, an independent historian who has written for more than three decades about free people of color in Southern Louisiana. Instead, she said, “it just meant something that was cultivated and developed in Louisiana, when it was under the French and Spanish,” which could apply to people, animals, and plants alike.

To understand how “Creole” became synonymous with race, we have to examine Louisiana’s pre-American history as a French, and later a Spanish, Catholic colony.

Compared with English American colonies, there was “a toleration and a recognition that there is this mixing that’s happening,” said Kent W. Peacock, a history professor and director of the Creole Heritage Center at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. There wasn’t “a full acceptance” of free mixed race people, he said, but they lived in a “space between the pure whites and enslaved Africans, and enslaved Indigenous folks.”

Many mixed-race people were designated free people of color and were permitted to seek things that were mostly denied to enslaved people like education, paid employment, property ownership — including that of other human beings — and legal protections.

The French and Spanish developed more laissez-faire attitudes toward racial mixing in comparison with the English for two reasons, Peacock said: The colony’s survival depended on it, and Catholic doctrine, which functioned both as religion and law, dictated that all people, regardless of race, had souls.

Although Louisiana functioned as a “tripartite” society, free mixed race people were still “a quandary,” said Wendy Gaudin, a professor at Xavier University of Louisiana, who specializes in Creole history. Despite speaking the same language, practicing similar customs, and often sharing ancestry, white Louisianans made it clear: “They’re not like us.”

After examining dozens of public records, mostly from the 19th century, I‘ve discovered my ancestry is filled with people who lived in this liminal space between fully realized humanity and complete dehumanization. But, that space slowly started to shrink after the Louisiana territory was sold to the United States in 1803. In the ensuing decades, as Americanization set in and the state transformed, so, too, did its racial ideas.

As the country grappled with the fallout of the Civil War, including the emancipation of enslaved people, “white people became very, very stringent about the question of race,” said Katy Morlas Shannon, a historian and author whose research focuses on the lives of enslaved people. 

White Louisianans, many of whom had family members of African descent, stopped describing themselves as Creole, because, they “became nervous that white Americans would think they were people of color,” she said.

Newly empowered to vote, Black people obtained unprecedented political power in Louisiana by way of public office during the 12-year Reconstruction period after the war. 

It was during this era, in 1875, that Joseph Paul Adolphe Sorapuru — my relative who is buried with the pope‘s maternal grandparents — was born in Louisiana.

Joseph, who went by Paul, is my first cousin four times removed. In other words, Paul‘s grandfather, Lorenzo Adolphe Sorapuru Sr., is my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

The earliest record I found of Paul — an 1880 census from St. John the Baptist Parish — marks his race, along with that of his grandfather, parents, and siblings, as “mulatto.” The term, which denotes a person of mixed African and European descent, is considered offensive by many today because “mulatto” derives from the Spanish word used to describe mules.

But, young Paul and his family would not be permitted to identify as such for much longer.

Shortly after Union troops ended their occupation of Louisiana, former Confederates and their children reclaimed political power in the state and “promptly decided that they would institute a binary racial system,” Morlas Shannon said.

So Creoles of color were left with a choice: attempt to disappear into whiteness and the privilege it grants, or fully embrace their Blackness and the marginalization that accompanies it.

Sometime between 1908, and 1917, Paul and Agnes moved north to Illinois. Records seem to suggest Agnes’s parents, Gerard and Ernestine Martinez, and her aunt and uncle, Joseph and Louise Martinez (the pope‘s maternal grandparents), also made the migration around this time. Leo‘s mother, Mildred, was born in Chicago in 1911. Agnes Sorapuru is listed as Mildred’s godmother on the younger cousin’s 1912 baptismal record. Mildred’s middle name was also Agnes.

By 1900, Paul and his family had moved 40 miles downriver to New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, the cradle of the city’s Black Creole population. However, by then, Paul, his mother, and his younger siblings were all listed as “white” on the census.

Eight years later, 32-year-old Paul married 22-year-old Agnes Martinez, also a Creole of color living in the Seventh Ward, in the Catholic church.

According to 1920, census documents, the Sorapuru and Martinez families — all marked as white — lived fairly close to each other in Chicago. It also appears Paul and Agnes lived with her parents, Gerard and Ernestine Martinez, on, of all places, Orleans Street.

Fair-skinned Black people leaving their hometown only to reemerge elsewhere living as a white person is known as passing, or “passé blanc” in Louisiana.

For many, it was an act of economic, social, and personal survival, Gaudin said, not an expression of anti-Blackness. They “made a decision that racism is harmful, it can harm me and it can harm my children,” said Gaudin, who wrote a book about her Creole ancestors’ migration to California. “Moving out of Louisiana gave people the opportunity, if they wanted it, to be more ambiguous, or to be able to slip and slide across racial lines a little easier.”

But that privilege came at a cost. Passing usually meant “breaking the ties of family,” Peacock said, because the discovery of African ancestry “could harm your opportunities.”

By passing, Paul and the Martinezes cemented their collective identity shift from Black Creoles living in Jim Crow New Orleans to a family of white Catholics in cosmopolitan Chicago. The latter narrative is the one Leo and his brothers seemingly grew up on.

John Prevost, the middle brother who is two years older than the pope, recently told the New York Times he and his siblings always identified as white and didn’t discuss their Creole roots.

“It was never an issue,” the Times quoted him saying.

The pope and his siblings never met Paul Sorapuru. He died in 1948, a few years before the oldest Prevost brother, Louis, was born. Agnes outlived her husband by 20 years. The couple, according to surviving records, never had children of their own.

Paul‘s marriage into the Martinez family connected the branches of Leo‘s family tree to my own. But the decision to move to Chicago and pass created a branching moment that separated us from them.

My direct ancestors who stayed in Louisiana were shaped by their Black Creole identity. Growing up, we called our godparents by Louisiana French titles: Parrain and Nana or Nanny, short for Nénènn. My First Communion photos are still on display in my childhood home nearly 20 years later. My paternal grandmother, both parents, and my older sister are all proud graduates of the only historically Black Catholic university in the country, Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans.

Despite their racial change, one thing the pope‘s ancestors retained from New Orleans was their Catholic faith. It was one of the few cultural identity markers from their old lives that was safe for them to hold onto.

Our fascination with Leo‘s Creole heritage shows how important race remains to our perceptions of people in America. 

So far, he has not publicly acknowledged his African ancestry, but if he does, it would be more meaningful than a simple appeasing gesture.

“When people envision American Catholicism, they think of Boston, they think of New York,” said Jari C. Honora, the New Orleans genealogist who first publicly discovered the pope‘s Creole connections. “They don’t think of New Orleans as a very culturally and historically Catholic place, but it is, including the long history of Black Catholicism in the city.”

In Black communities, especially Catholic ones, from Chicago to Haiti many people are already treating the pope as one of our own. 

(Maine Writer note here:  The first settler who is credited with beginning the city of Chicago was a Haitian immigrant*.)

In fact, it is “an act of reclamation that comes from histories of oppression,” Gaudin said. The pope‘s ancestors’ passing was a form of “self-erasure,” she added, “so claiming them as Black is a kind of reversal of that erasure.”

Honora warned that racial identity is difficult to categorize. “People like to quantify race, and that is really impossible to do, even with the popular genetic tests,” he said. “Nobody can say, ‘You’re precisely 22 percent Black or white,’ because these things are social constructs.”

Mark Roudané relates to the pope‘s situation better than most.

In 2006, at 55 years old, Roudané was going through the belongings of his recently deceased father when he came across a binder. Inside were ancestral photos and documents that revealed Roudané, who was raised white, had a long lineage of Afro-Creole ancestry.

“My heritage reappeared from this historical fog,” said Roudané, who currently runs a website dedicated to the legacy of the first Black daily newspaper in the United States, founded by his great-great-grandfather, Louis Charles Roudanez. “There was this whirlwind of emotion that left me with this undefinable realization that I was no longer who I thought I was.”

For Leo, Roudané said, there is an opportunity to use his platform as a world leader to make a difference about how we understand racial identity.

“I think the best thing that could happen from all of this new stuff that has come to light with the pope‘s ancestry is that he, and we, begin to really take a much more sophisticated look at what it means to be a human being,” Roudané said, “what it means to be Black, what it means to be white, what it means to be mixed race.”

So is the pope my “cousin”? Technically, no. My family member, Paul, is related to Pope Leo XIV by marriage, not by blood.

But in Black communities across America, family is largely defined by bonds, not by blood alone. The ties between our two families may have been severed a century ago — by migration, by circumstance, by racism — but the revelation of the pope‘s hidden heritage offers us a path toward reconciliation.

Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.

*AI- overview:  The first known Haitian immigrant to settle what would become Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. He is widely recognized as the first permanent non-Native settler and founder of Chicago. du Sable, born around 1750, established a trading post near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s. He was believed to be of Haitian descent, with a French father and an enslaved African mother.

Maine Writer Post Script:  Robert Francis Prevost is a beautiful example of the American melting pot, all in one family genealogy❗

Donald Trump with the hypocritical Republican cult administration are lying about the ugly tax bill! Hands Off Medicaid!

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times by Jackie Calmes (and The Los Angeles Times).

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is one big, ugly mess.

We’ve seen false advertising in naming laws before — the Democrats’ 2022, Inflation Reduction Act jumps to mind. 

Yet, no legislation has been as misbranded as the Republican tax and spending cuts that Donald Trump, the branding aficionado himself, is pushing along a tortuous path towards passage in Congress.

Trump’s appeal to many Americans has always been his purported penchant for “telling it like it is.” 

But, Trump is doing the opposite by labeling as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” 👽a 1,100 page behemoth that encompasses just about everything he can’t even try to do by unilateral executive orders — deeper tax cuts, more spending on the military and on his immigration crackdown and, yes, Medicaid cuts. His so-called beauty is a beast so frightening that ratings firm Moody’s saw the details last week, calculated the resulting debt and on Friday downgraded the United States’ sterling credit rating for the first time in more than 100 years. That likely means higher interest costs for the nation’s increased borrowing ahead.

And yet, in another example of the gaslighting at which Trump and his party are so adept, the White House and House Republican leaders dismissed the rebuke of their bill. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it would spur economic growth — the old, discredited “tax cuts will pay for themselves” argument. Speaker Mike Johnson said the Moody’s downgrade just proved the urgent need to pass the big, beautiful bill with its “historic spending cuts.” Which only proved that Johnson didn’t read Moody’s rationale, explaining that spending cuts would be far exceeded by tax cuts, thereby reducing the government’s revenues and piling up more debt.

The Republican Party, which postures as the fiscally conservative of the two parties despite decades of evidence to the contrary, would add about $4 trillion in debt over the next 10 years if its bill becomes law, according to Moody’s. Other nonpartisan analyses — including from the Congressional Budget Office, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania — similarly project additional debt in the $3-trillion-plus to $5-trillion range, more if the tax cuts are made permanent as Trump and Republicans want.

No surprise: Trump, after all, set a record for the most debt in a single presidential term: $8.4 trillion during Trump 1.0, nearly twice what accrued under his successor, President Joe Biden. Most of Trump’s first-term red ink stemmed from his 2017 tax cuts and spending, which predated the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s costly response.

“This bill does not add to the deficit,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted to reporters on Monday, showing yet again why such a facile dissembler was chosen to speak for the habitually prevaricating president.

“That’s a joke,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky responded.

Worse, it’s a lie. 🤥 And no surprise here, either, but Trump’s (tax) tariffs — another economic monstrosity that he’s declared “beautiful” 💥👺— aren’t paying for this bill, despite his claims. Yet the president repeated that falsehood on Tuesday (along with others), when he visited the Capitol to strong-arm Republican dissidents, including Massie, into supporting the measure ahead of a House vote. (Inside a closed caucus with House Republicans, the president reportedly called for Massie to be unseated; the Kentuckian remains opposed.)

“The economy is doing great, the stock market is higher now than when I came to office. And we’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariff money,” Trump told reporters at the Capitol. Every point a lie. 🤥

(This week provided yet more evidence that he’s utterly wrong to keep insisting that foreign countries pay his tariffs, not American consumers. After Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, said late last week that it would have to raise prices, Trump posted that it should ” ‘EAT THE TARIFFS.’ ” He added: “I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” This after a Walmart exec said that “the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb.”)

While details of the budget bill shift as Republican leaders dicker with their dissidents, here’s the ugly general outline, according to Penn Wharton:

Extending and expanding Trump’s 2017, tax cuts (for the rich❗💲), which otherwise expire this year, would cost nearly $4.5 trillion over 10 years, $5.8 trillion if the cuts are permanent. (Mandating that tax cuts expire after a time, as Trump did in 2017, is an old budget gimmick to understate a bill’s cost. The politicians know they’ll just extend the tax breaks, as we’re seeing now.) The bill’s proposed spending increases for the military, immigration enforcement and deportations would cost about $600 billion more.

Spending cuts over 10 years, mostly to Medicaid as well as to Obamacare, food stamps and clean-energy programs, would save about $1.6 trillion. That offsets as little as one-quarter of the cost of Trump’s tax cuts and added spending.

Also, the bill is inequitable. The tax cuts would disproportionately favor corporations and wealthy Americans. Its spending cuts, however, would mostly cost lower- and some middle-income people who benefit from federal health and nutrition programs. Changes to Medicaid, including a work requirement (92% of recipients under 65 already work full or part-time, according to the health research organization KFF), and to Obamacare would leave up to 14 million people without health insurance.

Penn Wharton found that people with household income less than $51,000, for example, would see their after-tax income reduced if the bill becomes law, and the top 0.1% of income-earners would get hundreds of thousands of dollars more over the next 10 years. Beyond that time, Penn Wharton projected, “all future households are worse off” given the long-term impact of spiraling debt and a tattered safety net.

“Don’t f — around with Medicaid,” Trump told Republicans at the Capitol, according to numerous reports. How cynical, given that he was pressuring them to vote for a bill that would do just that.

Jackie Calmes: is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump and his Republican cult adminisration obviously jealous about President Obama and his popularity

"Trump supporters say, 'We suffered 8 years under Barack Obama.'
What❓ Let’s take a look.👀

• On the day Obama took office, the Dow closed at 7,949 points. Eight years later, the Dow had almost tripled.
• General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of bankruptcy, with Ford not far behind, and their failure, along with their supply chains, would have meant the loss of millions of jobs. Obama pushed through a controversial, $80 billion bailout to save the car industry. The U.S. car industry survived, started making money again, and the entire $80 billion was paid back, with interest.
• While we remain vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass attack here since 9/11.
• Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.
• He drew down the number of troops from 180,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15,000, and increased funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
• He launched a program called Opening Doors which, since 2010, has led to a 47 percent decline in the number of homeless veterans. 
• He set a record 73 straight months of private-sector job growth.
• Due to Obama’s regulatory policies, greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 12%, production of renewable energy more than doubled, and our dependence on foreign oil was cut in half.
• He signed The Lilly Ledbetter Act, making it easier for women to sue employers for unequal pay.
• His Omnibus Public Lands Management Act designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, creating thousands of miles of trails and protecting over 1,000 miles of rivers.
• He reduced the federal deficit from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 3.2 percent in 2016.
• For all the inadequacies of the Affordable Care Act, we seem to have forgotten that, before the ACA, you could be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition and kids could not stay on their parents’ policies up to age 26.
• Obama approved a $14.5 billion system to rebuild the levees in New Orleans.

All this, even as our own Mitch McConnell famously asserted that his singular mission would be to block anything President Obama tried to do.

While Obama failed on his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, that prison’s population decreased from 242 to around 50.

He expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research, supporting ground breaking advancement in areas like spinal injury treatment and cancer.

Credit card companies can no longer charge hidden fees or raise interest rates without advance notice.

Most years, Obama threw a 4th of July party for military families. 

He held babies, played games with children, served barbecue, and led the singing of “Happy Birthday” to his daughter Malia, who was born on July 4.

Welfare spending is down: for every 100 poor families, just 24 receive cash assistance, compared with 64 in 1996.

Obama comforted families and communities following more than a dozen mass shootings. After Sandy Hook, he said, “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.”

President Obama is a 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet,

He never took away anyone’s guns........
He sang Amazing Grace, spontaneously, at the altar.
He was the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms without personal or political scandal.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
President Obama was not perfect, as no man and no president is, and you can certainly disagree with his political ideologies. 

But to say we suffered❓

If that’s the argument, if this is how we suffered for 8 years under Barack Obama, I have one wish:
may we be so fortunate as to suffer 8 more."

by Teri Carter, Lexington Herald-Leader

Donald Trump ignores the Supreme Court ruling about migrants illegally deported: An impeachable offense!

Letter to the Editor: Impeach Trump
Published in The Savannahian news:

Echo opinion letter published in the Savannah Georgia newspaper:

https://www.thesavannahian.com/letter-to-the-editor-impeach-trump/

Due process is not optional❗ Since when does a president get to defy the Supreme Court❓

To the Editor: Donald Trump must be impeached—immediately.

He’s using state power to settle personal scores and punish political opponents, openly and shamelessly. This kind of authoritarian behavior isn’t just dangerous—it’s fundamentally un-American. Yet, legacy media outlets barely raise the alarm.

Trump’s reckless tariffs are tanking the economy, hurting working families while lining the pockets of his billionaire cronies. And now, he’s flat-out ignoring a Supreme Court order to return Kilmer Abrego Garcia, an American citizen illegally detained and sent to a foreign prison. Due process is not optional. Since when does a president get to defy the Supreme Court?

Representative Al Green is stepping up with articles of impeachment addressing these violations. Congress must do the same. If we don’t hold Trump accountable, we’re surrendering the rule of law—and our democracy—to one man’s ego and greed.

It’s time to act. #RepublicansMustActNow❗ #SOS

From Randy Zurcher

Comment from reader Alan Seidman: "Absolutely! Congress is complicit in allowing 45/47 to make us an international laughing stock…"

Donald Trump and the Republican administration are illegally oppressing Americans' First Amendment rights without regard for free speech

Echo editorial published in The New York Times by the Editorial Board

 In 1791, the nation’s founders ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. It would come to offer protections in the new nation essentially never seen before: the right to ask things of and to criticize the government; to express opinions, popular or not; to assemble peacefully; to practice diverse religious beliefs; and to have a free press that publishes information without fear of censorship or retribution.

This constitutional provision reflects the framers’ intent to establish a society where individuals have the ability to voice their views and participate actively in shaping the nation’s governance while holding their leaders accountable. Together, these five guaranteed liberties continue today to make the people of the United States the freest in the world.

Donald Trump and many of his (cult❗) supporters — from tech leaders like Elon Musk to populist politicians like JD Vance — 

have spent the past several years portraying themselves as free-speech crusaders. Capitalizing on the censorial strains of the left, they regularly lecture about the necessity of letting people say whatever they want, even if it’s hateful, asinine or corrosive.

That form of free-speech absolutism, which aims to defend not just favored speech but also disfavored speech, has a long and welcome role in American society. But, problem is that for all their bluster, these supposed "free-speech crusaders" have proved themselves consistently intolerant when it comes to words, ideas and perspectives they disagree with.

Over the past month Donald Trump and his allies have embarked on an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavored speakers that should be decried, not just as hypocritical, but also as un-American and unconstitutional.

In the distorted view of the Trump Republican administration, protecting free speech requires controlling free speech — banning words, phrases and ideas that challenge or complicate government-favored speech. Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president’s language and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.

Obviously, the Orwellian nature of this approach is deliberate and dangerous. This posture is not about protecting free speech. Rather, it is about prioritizing far-right ideology — and at times celebrating lies and hate speech under the guise of preventing the criminalization of language — while trying to silence independent thought, inconvenient truths and voices of dissent.

When Donald Trump announced that he was changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, for example, it seemed to be an essentially harmless bit of nationalistic chest-puffery, paling in comparison with the real damage he intended to do to national security, public health, the Civil Service and the rule of law. But then he made it clear that compliance was mandatory.

This month, a reporter for The Associated Press showed up at an Oval Office event and was barred from entering because the news organization continued referring to the gulf by the internationally recognized name it has had since at least the 16th century. That was an editorial decision that The A.P., just like The Times and many other outlets, has every right to make on its own without government interference.

Yet, the White House press office then upped the ante; it is now keeping both Associated Press (A.P.) reporters and photographers away from many press events and off Air Force One on presidential trips, making it far more difficult for the nation’s largest wire service to provide essential coverage. The A.P., to its great credit, has sued officials in the administration, saying it was doing so “to vindicate its rights to the editorial independence guaranteed by the United States Constitution and to prevent the executive branch from coercing journalists to report the news using only government-approved language.”

Federal District Judge Trevor McFadden has yet to rule on The A.P.’s request but made it clear that the White House appeared to be improperly punishing the wire service for its editorial decision. “It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” the judge said at a preliminary hearing.

This struggle is obviously about more than the name of a body of water; the White House wants to use coercion to control how it is covered and even who gets to cover the president. On Tuesday the press office said it would begin handpicking the news organizations that cover Donald Trump as part of the press pool — a decision that up to now was made by a group representing the news outlets themselves. The White House immediately cut Reuters and HuffPost from the pool and added two sycophantic outlets, Newsmax and The Blaze.

The Trump administration’s intention can be seen clearly by looking at the way it communicates with the public. All federal contracts, job descriptions and social media posts are being scrutinized for any hint of “gender ideology,” according to a memo from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management; federal employees “whose position description involves inculcating or promoting gender ideology” must be placed on leave.

The National Park Service erased the letters T and Q: from L.G.B.T.Q. references on its website describing the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.

Unbelievable, The Republican Trump government won’t even describe its own museum collections as diverse. The word was eliminated from an Interior Department website describing federally owned works of art and natural history, though it has one of the broadest and most significant collections in the world.

The open hypocrisy on matters of speech is perhaps best exemplified by the actions of Mr. Musk, even before he became the Trump administration’s designated wrecking ball to crucial institutions of government. Mr. Musk has every right to say what he wants on X, a forum owned by a private company. Describing himself as a “free speech absolutist,” he said he acquired Twitter in 2022 to create “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” He seemed particularly agitated that the platform had dared to distinguish between lies — like those about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election — and verifiable truth.

But nearly immediately he began to demonstrate that the only free speech he championed was his own. Within a couple of months, he had suspended the accounts of journalists who had written critically about his business practices or the flights of his private plane. (So much for the hope he previously expressed that “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”)

“The White House press pool exists to serve the public, not the presidency,” said Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Politicians are allowed to criticize the press — that is free speech, too, and there is nothing new about it — but there is a difference between using language and using muscle. Government officials are supposed to use their considerable regulatory powers for the benefit of the public, not for personal or partisan goals. This administration, however, is mustering the arms of government to suppress speech it doesn’t like and compel words and ideas it prefers. It sees the press not as an institution with an explicit constitutional privilege but as a barrier to overcome, like an inspector
general or a freethinking Republican senator.

Members of Congress can be targeted for primaries, and inspectors general can be fired; under the same mentality, reporters need to be excluded and their bosses subjected to litigation.

Then he began suppressing access to posts with words like “transgender” and “bisexual” or ideas like Ukraine’s battling against Russian aggression and made it more difficult for users of his platform to read articles from independent news organizations, including The Times and Reuters. Purveyors of hate speech were invited to return to Twitter, which he later renamed X, and when some critics advocated a boycott of the platform in response, he moved to block them. Elon Musk even boosted his own pronouncements on X, forcing his posts to appear loudly even on the timelines of those who chose not to follow him.

And when he couldn’t quiet his critics, he sued them. He filed suit against Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that wrote about advertisements on X appearing next to neo-Nazi content, and then sued a group of prominent businesses, including Unilever and CVS, for what he said was an illegal advertising boycott of his platform. (Last year a federal judge threw out a similar lawsuit Mr. Musk brought against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.)

When the magazine Wired published the names of six inexperienced young men working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk falsely announced on X that publication of the names constituted a “crime.” And later, illustrating the connection between Elon Musk’s aims and those of the administration, one of the loyalists that Donald Trump installed as a federal prosecutor in Washington made an inflammatory announcement that he would use his position in the Justice Department to defend claims that Elon Musk had raised.

The administration’s desire to control speech and thinking has extended to Congress, the military and college campuses. Among other recent examples:

After the office of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, conducted a webinar instructing immigrants of their constitutional rights when challenged by federal officials, Tom Homan, the president’s so-called border czar, said he had asked the Justice Department to investigate whether she crossed a legal red line by suggesting noncompliance with federal immigration officers.

The Pentagon began pulling books off the shelves of school libraries used by the children of military families if they violated Donald Trump’s new rules on not speaking about gender or racial equity issues. Among the titles subject to military review are a picture book about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a book by the actress Julianne Moore about a young girl coping with her freckles.

In a fact sheet accompanying an executive order about antisemitism last month, Donald Trump said he would deport legal immigrants if they joined in “pro-jihadist protests” and would cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses. “We put you on notice,” he wrote. “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” Supporting terrorism is always wrong, and antisemitism is vile in any form. Even some congressional Democrats cheered the executive order. What the administration is establishing, however, is a much more expansive legal definition of hate speech to include even just strident criticism of Israeli government policy.

The current administration may argue that these steps are simply payback for an American political left that can be rightly criticized for policing speech in recent years, from trying to shut or shout down conservative speakers to trying to enforce adherence to its own list of acceptable words and phrases like “pregnant people,” the “unhoused,” “incarcerated individuals” and “Latinx.”

But, the Trump Republican administration’s early and furious reaction to criticism and pungent speech isn’t just guilty of the same sins; it expands on them, worryingly, with the powers of the state. If the MAGA (cult ❗) movement were really confident that the American public stood firmly behind the new intolerance, then why not welcome serious news reporting or even the jeers of critics and let the best ideas win? That seemed to be what JD Vance was advocating in recent remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“You do not have shared values if you’re so afraid of your own people that you silence them and shut them up,” he said.

The Republican administration and the broader MAGA (cult❗) movement are demonstrating how they lack the confidence to permit free thinking by the American people. But, those people still have the powers granted to them more than 230 years ago by the Bill of Rights to make themselves heard.

Americans have enormous ability and enviable creativity in finding ways to speak out against Donald Trump’s repressive and hypocritical speech regime, whether on social media or in the public square. The independence of The Associated Press and other organizations to make decisions contrary to government fiat should be defended and championed. Donald Trump wants to redefine free speech with bans, bullying and fear. It’s never been more necessary to speak up. 📣❗