Like Ships in the Night 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

🚢 🛳️ 🚢 🛳️: The weekend started out on a positive note with the Supreme Court ruling 7 to 2 that the Trump administration had violated the due process rights of Venezuelan migrants by hurriedly removing them from the US by using the Alien Enemies Act. The Court’s ruling extended the pause on Alien Act removals but did not determine whether the Trump administration can ultimately carry out those removals under the Alien Act.  Instead, it sent the case back to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to determine whether the use of the Alien Act was legal and how much notice is due to those targeted by the act for removal to places like the El Salvador gulag.  Naturally, the two dissenting Justices were the not so charming Sam Alito and his sidekick Clarence Thomas who apparently could care less about migrants being hastily dispatched off to gulags.  As he usually does when courts rule against his wishes Trump responded by posting “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” on Truth Social, adding “This is a bad and dangerous day for America!” ……not allowing me to do what I was elected to do” and his Border Czar Tom Homan ramped up his threats to prosecute members of Congress with the help of US Attorney’s like traffic lawyer Alina Habba.   After the SCOTUS ruling the weekend took a more ominous turn.  First, citing fiscal concerns, Moody’s downgraded the sovereign debt rating of the US to Aa1 from Aaa.  Of course, since blame shifting is so Trumpian, while saying that the Moody’s downgrade wasn’t of concern to him, Treasury Secretary Bessent blamed it on Biden saying it was his programs, the ones that combated climate change and increased health care coverage that were responsible for the downgrade.  Funny how he failed to mention all the times that Republicans blew holes in the deficit or that the current budget bill, should it pass, will do more of the same in a bigly way. Then, perhaps as a metaphor for what Trump’s policies are doing to the economy, the Cuauhtémoca, a Mexican tall ship crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge leaving the bridge intact but killing two sailors and injuring 22 others, some critically,  Maybe the bridge incident was an omen because the weekend ended with the sad news that Biden, whose mental acuity rather than the current President’s obvious failings, had been the talk of the town all week, had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer.  Notably, the NY Times reported that while not curable, Biden’s cancer is treatable and that as a result of his “moonshot” effort to find cures for cancer, there are now more treatments available, even for the type of cancer he has.  That’s another reminder why the Trump and DOGE efforts to defund cancer and other health related research will be so impactful, in a really bad way.

Budget Update:  House Republicans continue to fight with each other over Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the one that cuts health care for anywhere from 8 to 13 million while extending and adding tax cuts and further expanding the debt load that concerns Moody’s but apparently only matters to most Republicans when Democrats are in control.  On Friday, the bill failed to make it out of the House Budget Committee after four conservative Republicans including Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, and Andrew Clyde of Georgia who wanted deeper and more immediate cuts in Medicaid, joined all the Democratic members of the committee by voting against it. After a weekend of negotiations with nothing put in writing but plenty of promises made to add or accelerate more cuts, the four outliers relented by voting present and as a result the bill will now go to the House Rules Committee. However, issues still remain since the promises made to the four have yet to be formalized or even shared and it’s not clear that the so-called Republican moderates, mostly from swing districts, will vote for those new provisions especially since most of them are also unhappy about the SALT (state and local tax) provisions included in the bill.  Anyway, should the bill make it out of the House to the Senate, it will be altered significantly, because one crowd’s big and beautiful is another’s fat and dumpy. Oh, and consumer sentiment has dropped to the second lowest reading on record over tariff and inflation concerns and Walmart says it will be passing tariff related expense increases on to consumers because of course.  And Trump is now threatening to sue ABC again, upset that they more than implied that the 747 plane he claims is a gift to the US military from Qatar is really a gift for him.  Me thinks he doth protest too much.  

Fog: The Trump effect influenced the outcome of another election, this one in Romania where much to the dismay of the misogynist and “allegedly” criminal, rapey, mansplaining Tate Brothers the centrist candidate beat his hard right pro-Trump rival.  Unfortunately, though the Trump effect has been helping moderates win elections it’s doing little for Ukraine because despite Trump’s assertions that his buddy Putin would agree to an end in hostilities he hasn’t.  The two are scheduled to talk today, not that we’ll really know what transpires on the call because Trump doesn’t release transcripts of his calls anymore.  Over the weekend, Bridget Brink, the former US ambassador to Ukraine said she left her post and also exited the Foreign Service last month “because the policy since the beginning of the administration was to put pressure on the victim Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia,” She added that while she “fully agrees that the war needs to end” she believes “that peace at any price is not peace at all. It’s appeasement and, as we know from history, appeasement only leads to more war.”  Over the weekend there were also reports of some hostage talks between Hamas and the US and maybe Israel but so far there’s nothing to show for them and the Gaza situation continues to worsen, as if that’s even possible.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow