The F Bomb 💣🔨 😱 ✡️🌻😱🔨💣 

Midnight Hammer:  On Monday Iran responded to the Operation Midnight Hammer attack on its nuclear facilities, retaliating with a few missiles launched at the US base in Qatar.  Then, later in the day, Trump announced via Truth Social that Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire though it took hours more for the two sides to confirm his post. He didn’t mention that the Qataris who last month gifted him a gold-plated plane and who continue to host the leaders of Iran’s Hamas surrogates mediated the ceasefire. Then because wars don’t stop on a dime and ceasefires, particularly in the Middle East, are fragile, Iran shot off a few lethal missiles and Israel responded in kind.  Unhappy about his ceasefire edict being ignored, concerned that the Nobel Prize he craves might be in jeopardy, and really pissed that a leaked Defense Department report appears to indicate that our bunker bombs didn’t obliterate Iran’s nuclear sites, a frustrated Trump dropped an F-bomb saying out loud for everyone to hear in their bedrooms and at their breakfast tables “We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” He then followed up with a series of all caps Truth Social Posts to hammer his point home. He raised almost as many eyebrows with his public utterance of the F-word as he did when he equated ally Israel with avowed enemy Iran, the country whose leaders have long called for the destruction of the US.  The ceasefire may or may not last, but it appears that “fuck” is no longer one of the “indecent” words that comedian George Carlin famously riffed couldn’t be used on television.  Trump is now attacking the media, sticking with his assertion that Iran’s nuclear facilities are gonzo, but also asserting that by “leaking” the Defense Department’s preliminary assessment that says that Iran likely moved a lot of its enriched uranium before the attack and that our bunker busting bombs only delayed Iran’s ability to develop nuclear bombs by a few months, CNN and the other mainstream outlets are committing treason.  Adding credibility to the reports that Iran’s capabilities have only been delayed, the White House keeps pushing off its planned Congressional briefing on the attack.  It’s now scheduled for Friday. The delay is particularly infuriating to House and Senate Democrats because unlike their Republican colleagues, the Democratic leaders who make up the Gang of Eight who are generally kept up to speed on such things were not given a heads up before the bombing took place.   

Big Ugly Bill:  Senate Leader John Thune is still trying to get his version of Trump’s bigly ugly bill passed out of the Senate by July 4 with Trump making it clear to all Republicans that he’ll cancel their flights out of Washington if they don’t get their shxt together.  Thune has made some progress, among other things, he appears to have figured out a workaround that will facilitate cuts in SNAP food stamps while also satisfying the Senate Parliamentarian. However, several members of the Republican caucus are still unhappy.  A few like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson and Kentucky’s Rand Paul want more cuts while others, most notably North Carolina’s vulnerable Thom Tilles are warning that by “drastically” cutting Medicaid Republicans are setting themselves up for a midterm election bloodbath akin to what Democrats experienced after the passage of Obamacare, the health insurance program that a majority of the electorate now loves but initially hated. Tilles has circulated a flyer to his Republican colleagues warning how much states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri will be hurt by the Medicaid cuts.  His list also includes Kentucky but Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell who has been warned by his state’s hospital association that the Medicaid cuts will be responsible for the closing of their hospitals, showed that he’s a member of Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s “people die” club by saying “Failure to pass the bill is not an option….I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it.” With one foot already in the grave, the ashen Mitch doesn’t have to worry about reelection, and he will be long gone before any of the people back home “get over it.”  The same schism exists in the House where a number of the so-called Republican moderates who will probably support whatever emerges from the Senate, are squawking about the Senate’s Medicaid cuts exceeding the huge ones they already voted for while some of the budget hawks, most notable Kentucky’s Thomas Massie remaining upset that the ugly bill isn’t ugly enough.  As to the bill’s impact on the deficit, Bloomberg reports that Thune intends to employ controversial math to wipe away $3.8 trillion of the bill’s red ink, just the ink, not the actual debt, meaning the deficit will balloon while he uses smoke and mirrors to pretend that it doesn’t.  Maybe he thinks maturing Treasuries can be paid off with Monopoly money and Melania meme coins.

Human Resources: Hearings for Trump’s ghoulish personal lawyer Emil Bove’s nomination to serve as a federal judge on the 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals are about to start. Yesterday, NBC revealed that a whistleblower, fifteen-year DOJ veteran Erez Reuveni, sent a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees asserting that as assistant Deputy Attorney General Bove told Justice Department lawyers that the administration would defy court orders that stood in the way of carrying out Trump’s mass deportations plans. Sticking with the f-bomb theme, Reuveni asserted that “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court orders.”   Reuveni was subsequently fired for refusing to lie about Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was illegally deported to the gulag in El Salvador. It’s likely that Republicans will have no problem confirming Bove because they’re good at following orders and the order is to confirm him. Though Garcia is back in the US facing what one judge acknowledged appear to be trumped up charges, the Supreme Court has given the go ahead for Trump to continue sending undocumented migrants wherever they want to send them.  To that end, with cameras rolling, a group of emboldened ICE thugs beat the crap out of Narciso Barranco, arresting the father of three US Marines, this week, while he was doing landscaping work outside of a Santa Ana IHOP.  Despite video evidence to the contrary the INS agents claim that Barranco was about to hit them with a weapon.  The so-called weapon wasn’t a weapon; it was the weed wacker that Barranco who has asked one of his sons to finish his weeding assignment was using when he was grabbed. That son reports that his father, who was injured by the gun waving INS team, is now languishing in a cramped INS facility where he has received no medical attention and is still wearing his bloodstained clothing. In related news, the wife of another veteran who was in the process of obtaining a green card is now being held in a Louisiana internment facility separated from her newborn baby because obviously that, like nabbing the landscaper who raised three Marines, makes us all safer?  The FBI teams who’d been tasked to help with the rounding up of migrants have been called back to the FBI to focus on counterterrorism because of concerns about Iranian sleeper cells and lone actor terrorists.  The not so good news on that front is that the person at the Department of Homeland Security in charge of counterterrorism is 23-year-old former grocery clerk Thomas Fugate.  In addition to being good at bagging produce, Fugate who describes himself as a “Trumplican” interned at the Federalist Society.  Lastly, because not all screw balls are Republicans, the apparent winner of NYC’s Democratic Mayoral primary is Zohran Mamdani, best known in New York for wanting to globalize the intifada among other not so friendly to NYC’s Jewish population things.  Apparent winner, because though former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who came in second place among a list of candidates that included Paper Boy Love Price, has conceded, NYC uses ranked choice voting and won’t announce the official winner until next Tuesday.  Mamdani will face off against Republican candidate/Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa and at least two Independents, current Mayor Adams, and a little-known lawyer named Jim Walden.  I am thinking about moving.                      

#BringThemAllHomeNow because there are still hostages and ceasefire with Iran or not the Gaza mess continues to fester.