Midnight Hammer 💣🔨 😱 ✡️🌻😱🔨💣 

🕛 🔨:   Trump still hasn’t made good on a health plan, infrastructure funding, or a myriad of the other things that he’s promised to do in “two weeks,” but by bombing Iran’s nuclear sites he got one bigly thing off his to do list.  Don’t call the attack a war, because Trump says it’s a one off, for now, and also don’t say he wants regime change despite his tweet last night suggesting that he does. Depending on who you listen to, Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was brilliant or a catastrophic violation of the Constitution that will lead to World War III. The reality is probably somewhere in between.  Just about everyone agrees or should agree that Iran having an arsenal of nuclear weapons would be a very bad thing; the challenge has always been how best to insure that doesn’t happen.  President Obama’s solution was the 2015 multi-lateral JCPOA nuclear deal, which instead of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, involved monitoring and limiting the country’s enrichment of uranium, pushing their nuclear bomb capability off to some future date.  The JCPOA was flawed, it did nothing about Iran’s missile capability and didn’t curtail the country’s aggressive behavior and support for murderous surrogates, but it did slow down its nuclear progress.  Trump pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018 but never negotiated an alternative though, until this weekend, he was sort of trying to do so with his ill-equipped real estate buddy Steve Witkoff.  Iran responded to the US withdrawal from the JCPOA by enriching its uranium stockpile beyond what had been agreed to in the deal and beyond what was needed for the peaceful purposes it asserted that its program was all about. The question going into this weekend’s attack was whether Iran had North Korea level nuclear ambitions and how close they were to achieving them. Some “experts,” a group that included everyone from the real scientists who actually monitored Iran’s program to Tucker Carlson, who insisted that Iran’s ambitions were limited, believed that Iran wasn’t on the verge of becoming fully nuclear, others, including Israel and some, though far from all members of the intelligence community, insisted that the Ayatollah was weeks away from becoming the Middle East’s Kim Jong un. This weekend’s military operation makes that debate moot.  The question now is whether Trump’s decision to bomb the bejesus out of Iran’s nuclear sites did what it was intended to do.  The good news is that Operation Midnight Hammer went off without a hitch and that all our pilots have returned home safely.  The not so good news is that we don’t know whether the much heralded but previously untested bunker bombs destroyed Iran’s nuclear capability and there are real concerns that Iran managed to move a large part of its enriched uranium stock to places unknown before the attack, possibly in response to Trump’s public musings. Moreover, though we are sure the Ayatollah and the remaining members of its teams that the Israelis haven’t taken out will retaliate we don’t know how or where those attacks will take place. Iran is still sending missiles into Israel and has announced plans to close the important oil transport lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. Some “experts” are now asserting that if anything the US operation will accelerate Iran’s development of nuclear bomb capability; ironically, some of those experts are the very same people who insisted that Iran didn’t have any nuclear bomb ambitions. And lastly, in case you are wondering, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who despite his freshly slicked back hair looked like he desperately needed a drink or maybe just had one, anything that goes wrong going forward is due to all the “dumb” presidents who preceded Trump.    

Midnight Express:  This morning’s NY Times has one of those Haberman-Swan and team tick-tock articles about the lead up to Trump’s decision to move forward.  A few of the takeaways: the two week announcement was a ruse, Trump had already authorized the attack, and military equipment was being put into position before Press Secretary Leavitt insisted he was giving the Iranians two weeks to come to the negotiating table; concerned about Trump’s bombastic statements and social media posts giving away their plans, the military sent a few B 1 bombers off in the wrong direction, allowing the stealthy planes to be tracked as a diversion; and, Trump had already decided to bomb Iran before meeting with anti-interventionist Steve Bannon but had him over for burgers and fries to make it look like he was still persuadable.     

The Byrd 🐦  Bath: Though this weekend’s focus was on Trump’s bombing mission, there’s lots going on in budget bill land. The Senate is still working on its version of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. To pass through the Senate via reconciliation, the process that allows finance bills to pass with only a majority vote, the components of the bill have to be signed off on by the Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. Her review is called the “Byrd Bath” because the reconciliation process follows rules set by the late Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd.  To be approved by the parliamentarian, the components of the bill have to be linked to the budget, must be fiscal in nature, and must deal with taxation. So far, MacDonough has rejected the shifting of the cost of SNAP (food stamps) from the federal government to the states, the axing of all funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Senator Mike Lee’s efforts to give Congress new authority to claw back federal regulations, and efforts to place limitations on federal district judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions.  She has signed off on the controversial provision in the bill that limits the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), a problem for some Senators including Missouri Republican Josh Hawley. Her decisions are causing math problems for the Senate bill which is already more expensive than the House version.  It’s not just the Byrd Bath process that’s slowing things down.  The Senate has finally come to the realization that their cuts to Medicaid and their planned changes to Medicaid’s hospital tax scheme will kill rural hospitals, so they are trying to come up with a special fund for those hospitals, and the SALT (state and local tax) problem continues to fester.   

More:  RFK, the Make America Healthy brain hole guy, who is committed to killing vaccines, is shortening the Obamacare enrollment period because he can. The Trump family is launching a new phone grift which will include a $45.47 monthly fee achieved by following the Mint Mobile playbook which involves buying up excess capacity from larger providers, something that is cheap but results in a lower quality of service.  The phone plan includes selling a $499 gold phone that despite Eric Trump’s assertion otherwise will not be produced in the US. And that quality of service problem, maybe Trump can fix it by having all the regulators he controls prioritize his company or maybe his subscribers won’t care because people who buy gold Trump emblazoned products with fees determined by his presidential order just don’t care.    

#BringThemAllHomeNow