No mystery here; it will attract mostly republican voters and very few demonkrats , which will allow the Democrats to gain majorities in Congress as well as take the presidency.
A real alternative to the republican and democrats is needed, (neither party is capable of stopping out of control spending) but I just cannot see how this is possible without giving the Dems complete control of the govt.
It’s too bad Musk and Trump cannot find a way to cooperate.
Re: tragedy in Texas; coming out of the woodwork are the low life sickos claiming that the white, Christian victims – many of them children – deserved their fate because their parents are Trump supporters and/or blaming Trump for the tragedy.
Just goes to show that truly evil, consumed with hate folks can just as easily be an “American,” and not some foreign born mentally deranged lunatic fanatic.
Many of these never Trumpers would have no qualms implementing mass exterminations to achieve their goals.
Kurt Schlichter has another good column up this morning. One reason I like him is that his view of the GOP parallels mine: the stupid party. Maybe Trump will force a change in the GOP. The passage of the BBB gives some hope. I’m not sure I want the GOP to be the faceless monolith that the Democrats are; some dissent is good. But most of the time the GOP seems like they like to lose.
A third party need not run its own candidates. It can mobilize its members to vote in GOP primaries. If Musk hasn’t thought of that, he will.
Unless it’s a grift, some third parties are.
A former third party candidate is in the Oval Office at the moment.
There are existing third parties that operate on the model of influencing the election toward or away from the big parties’ candidates, rather than running their own. The Conservative Party of New York State, for example, has been around since 1962 and usually endorses the GOP candidate.
On the left, the Working Families Party has been doing much the same since 1998, usually endorsing a Democrat.
Mark Twain (apparently non-satirically) proposed a similar idea, the Casting Vote Party, which was based on the sort of Schoolhouse Rock idea that an election is to choose the best individual to fill the office. Today we would call such a thing the “Swing Vote Party”, the point being that it would be big enough to determine any election.
A single-issue-focused group, regardless of whether you call it a “party”, can have great influence on elections. In the NRA heyday, for example, every GOP politician knew that the Second Amendment was a red line you had to be very careful if you wished to cross. I would dearly love to see such a focus on fiscal responsibility.
At the moment there’s just not enough people willing to put that first, as we see by the Right cheering on the budget-buster that just passed.
In personal finance terms, not only do we spend the whole paycheck, not only do we run up our credit cards, we also use our home equity line of credit to make our minimum monthly payments. That did not change in this last budget, it is not even an improvement on last year’s or that of the year before. Money printer keeps going brrr. The math simply does not care why it was done or who did it.
The others marched in lockstep. NPR is a paramilitary organization. Not that that’s a bad thing. It just shouldn’t be publicly funded.
NPR has had some agreeable programming over the years (e.g. This American Life). However, their news and public affairs programming has long had issues. Fred Barnes critique of the work of their Central America correspondents was published in 1987. I’m not sure they ever tried to be impartial. The president of NPR from 1977 to 1983 was a man previously employed as George McGovern’s campaign manager. The NPR station in Binghamton around about 2003 changed their broadcast radius making it difficult to receive where I lived and then you had such gems as commentary by Daniel Schorr, so I stopped. For all that it was biased, public broadcasting ca. 1990 still had some contrary voices, e.g. Wm. F. Buckley. Nowadays, the ‘Republicans’ who have berths in public broadcasting (and there are few) are Régime shills like Margaret Hoover and David Brooks. It’s as if the range of opinion at NPR has always been a function of what it was within the Democratic Party and as the Democratic Party became less and less able to function in fora it did not control, NPR and PBS has exiled any alternatives.
Physicsguy, Schlichter takes a well deserved GOP victory lap. Being Republicans, there will be naysayers but I am not tired of winning. The bbb defunds planned parenthood for a year. Now on to the recission bill to defund pbs and npr.
A good discussion on where the US is heading economically and the Musk/Trump rift by the boys at the All-In podcast. This is a segment of their larger weekly podcast and worth the 13 minutes.
We cannot / should not ignore the debt cliff. Not included in this discussion, but numbers that add to the potential problems the Trump administration will have to navigate– the dollar has dropped 10% in value in the first half of 2025 and US debt purchased by foreign governments/interests is falling. During the last 20 years or so, foreign interests have purchased more of our debt as it has ballooned. That trend is reversing, which may make it harder for the US to find buyers without increasing effective interest rates, which is the exact opposite of what is needed (lower interest rates).
Friedberg points out that Bessent still believes they can achieve the administration goals of 3/3/3– 3% deficit to GDP/3% GDP growth/3% inflation.
The numbers currently are at 6% deficit to GDP/1.4% GDP growth/2.4% inflation. The are also committed to getting some of the cost savings identified by DOGE into law or through impoundment at the end of this fiscal year.
Skepticism is the word of the day whether Congress will have the fortitude to actually cut spending, given some the spending cuts in the reconciliation affecting Medicaid don’t go into effect until 2027.
These 10 year budget projections are just a way for Congress to do nothing to control spending. All the spending cuts always seem to be at the end of the 10 year cycle.
@Bob Wilson:The bbb defunds planned parenthood for a year. Now on to the recission bill to defund pbs and npr.
That’s great that it empties some of Team D’s troughs and fills some of Team R’s. The math doesn’t care. It’s still busting the budget, the debt-to-gdp ratio will continue to go up, the % of the budget devoted to paying interest on the debt is still going up, the amount spent this year is still higher than last year, and it is still not sustainable.
And as Speaker Mike Johnson said just in January, after he was reelected so no one put a gun to his head,
If we don’t follow through on our campaign promise for fiscal responsibility, we don’t deserve to hold power. The national debt is a grave threat to America’s economic and national security – and no issue exemplifies the Congress’ failures more.
I’m sure that most people who vote Republican would say they agreed, but that never translates into actually doing the thing. Either people won’t look at the numbers or won’t think about them, or just don’t care as much as they pretend to.
Are those Rainier cherries on top?
Chases Eagles:
Yes.
Niketas, interest rates on treasury debt are dropping from over 5% for 10 year bonds at the beginning of the year to below 4 1/2%. Investment in American semiconductor fabs is exploding and other manufacturing is being onshored. American hydrocarbon fuel production is skyrocketing, and the price of gasoline is dropping, except in communist states like California. The stock market is at an all-time high and is ignoring the hedge fund shorts on the US dollar. Bears like you are trying to talk down the US economy, but our natural exuberance will come through. I like our chances.
@Bob Wilson:nterest rates on treasury debt are dropping from over 5% for 10 year bonds at the beginning of the year to below 4 1/2%…
The math doesn’t care about your list of Good Things. The the debt-to-gdp ratio will continue to go up, the % of the budget devoted to paying interest on the debt is still going up, the amount spent this year is still higher than last year, and it is still not sustainable.
The math does not listen to the smooth-tongued wizards of the Gods of the Marketplace; the math listens to the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
We’ll not be bankrupt next year, “gradually then suddenly” is how it proverbially goes. A man may gain 250 pounds and suffer no obvious ill effects, but it doesn’t mean he can gain another 250 or another 500. He’ll never know which bacon cheeseburger is the one that gave him the coronary, because it wasn’t one, it was ALL OF THEM.
Fox reporting that D congress critters are seeing increased calls for them to resort to violence to stop Trump. It seems to alarming them. For me, it’s not surprising. As I have reported here for months the left minions are getting increasingly crazy as Trump wins more. They are having mental breakdowns as to them their world is crumbling. Interesting that it now rates a national story:
The math I see is that my investments in the United States stock market and in US treasury securities are doing much better than inflation. Even after taxes, which will remain low thanks to the GOP. Where are you investing your savings?
I did not know there are red-yellow cherries that look like tiny apples.
I’ll wager we can make salutary adjustments in the trajectory of spending, but not enough to avoid raising taxes. In regard to tax regimes, you want as far as possible to avoid sectoral preferences which divert investment to less than optimal uses and which generate patron-client relationships between politicians and industries. You also want to incorporate features to cross compensate the less affluent segment of the population for the effect on their purchasing power of modifications in the remainder of the tax regime. The name of the game should be to protect the impecunious – roughly the least affluent 30% or so.
@Bob Wilson:Where are you investing your savings?
The math does not care where you or I are investing our savings. I spend all my money on bulk purchases of Maker’s Mark, as it happens, but the math does not care about that either. If it’s not reined in, your treasuries and stock won’t do you any good, but if you (like most people commenting here) are past 70 you might not live to see it, I grant you. There’s people who live for decades carrying around 300 or 500 extra pounds, and there are people who die before their creditors discover they don’t have any real assets.
Stocks looked really good up until October 23, 1929, and then by November 1 people were jumping out of windows, and stocks didn’t recover until 1954. And that wasn’t the government going insolvent either, quite a different problem. Even still, lots of people can bet wrong, and in hindsight everyone will say it was obvious.
@Art Deco:I’ll wager we can make salutary adjustments in the trajectory of spending
We CAN. I would wager that we CAN, I would not wager that we WILL.
When I get some more time today I’m going to follow up on something Brian E said and ballpark how big a budget that was trying to restore fiscal sanity might be. Interest, SS and Medicare are mostly nailed down, so I have to look some things up.
physicsguy, on the increasingly violent talk coming from leftists: The mother of the young girl we know of who died at Camp Mystic has posted a comment online to the effect that the politicization of the flood tragedy is not at all helpful to grieving families. This mother is herself left-wing politically.
I know it’s not clinically correct to call these people “insane,” but their increasingly delusional hatred certainly departs from anything we could call “normal.” Do I want leftists to continue to lose elections? Absolutely. Do I want them to be murdered in the streets? Absolutely not. They have lost any reciprocal feelings, decent feelings.
I spend all my money on bulk purchases of Maker’s Mark, as it happens, … — NC
Ha! I just bought two half gallon bottles myself. One for me, and another for a good friend who in spite of her high income, has had to tighten her belt considerably. Her expenses were not beyond her control, but intelligent life choices led to considerable continuing costs.
Niketas-
Better give Woodford Reserve a try, a much better bourbon than Maker’s Mark.
Art Deco says “The name of the game should be to protect the impecunious – roughly the least affluent 30% or so.” I disagree. That just gets one on the slippery slope of socialism. We have been protecting them for decades, and their fraction of the population remains unchanged or is growing despite the War on Poverty and other nonsense.
@ Niketas: “A former third party candidate is in the Oval Office at the moment.”
Citation, please?
@Cicero:Better give Woodford Reserve a try, a much better bourbon than Maker’s Mark.
Quantity has a quality all its own, I find.
@Selfy:Citation, please?
Is Google down? Must be. Here you go. His campaign website is long gone from the Internet, so you’ll have to settle for his statement abandoning his candidacy, and contemporaneous NYT coverage of same.
Since beginning my Presidential Exploratory effort, I have consistently said that I was only interested in running if I had the prospect of winning.
I believe that in order to win the presidency as a Third Party Candidate, all forces within that party would have to strongly pull together and be totally unified. Sadly, this has not happened. I agree with my friend Jesse Ventura-the Reform Party has become dysfunctional. I do not believe that the internecine warfare within the party, including the removal of Jack Gargan as National Chairman, is conducive to victory. The prospect of divisive lawsuits, continued fighting over the National Convention site and general fratricide leave me deeply concerned about the direction of this party.
Now I understand that David Duke has decided to join the Reform Party to support the candidacy of Pat Buchanan. So the Reform Party now includes a Klansman, – Mr. Duke, a Neo-Nazi – Mr. Buchanan, and a Communist – Ms. Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep.
More importantly, Governor Jesse Ventura, the most attractive individual in the party has withdrawn because he can no longer stomach the constant bickering within the Reform Party. I applaud Governor Ventura’s formation of a new Independence Party and predict that Governor Ventura will have a great political future. But without Jesse, the Reform Party is just an extremist shell and cannot be a force or even a factor in 2000.
I have consistently stated that I would spend my time, energy and money on a campaign, not just to get a large number of votes, but to win. There would be no other purpose, other than winning for me to run. I have therefore decided not to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party.
I disagree. That just gets one on the slippery slope of socialism. We have been protecting them for decades, and their fraction of the population remains unchanged or is growing despite the War on Poverty and other nonsense.
==
You should not be imbibing Maker’s Mark at this time of day. My object is to design a tax regime. Benefit programs are a separate question. (‘Ere taxes and transfers are applied, about 7% of personal income adheres to the least affluent 30%. They’re not a rich source of revenue).
@Art Deco, you have your commenters mixed up, I wonder what you’re drinking this early. Cicero made the comment you are responding to. As for me, I’m not drinking the Maker’s Mark–much–I’m stockpiling it. When government credit collapses and alcohol is rationed, and I’m sitting on cases and cases of Maker’s Mark, then we’ll see who has a “drinking problem”.
If you ever get the idea that Amnesty International has finally hit bottom and cannot sink any lower, they’ll prove you wrong.
Art Deco, you noted:
If you ever get the idea that Amnesty International has finally hit bottom and cannot sink any lower, they’ll prove you wrong.
Is there some trouble? When I was in college, I used to write in their letter campaigns for political prisoners. I forget most of the details, of course, but I’m pretty sure there were occasions when I wrote to Gaddafi, Saddam, Ortega (his first iteration), a few others whose names would be recognizable and a few I would probably have trouble even placing in the right country now.
Kyle Cheney:
BREAKING: A federal judge just blocked the “big beautiful bill’s” provision to defund Planned Parenthood.
“We’ll see who has a drinking problem” – Isn’t that the truth.
@sdferr: BREAKING: A federal judge just blocked the “big beautiful bill’s” provision to defund Planned Parenthood.
Blocked by one Indira Talwani, appointed by one Barack Obama, in Boston Massachusetts, confirmed 94-0 by the US Senate in 2014 so upward of 39 GOP senators voted for her.
I wonder what legal reasoning there is to say that Congress can’t fund or defund something.
On another thread the rising political influence of Indian-Americans had come up.
Worst Photoshop edit ever! Hakeem Jeffries bends space in funny Photoshop error – Repost
It’s the 20th Anniversary of ‘7/7’. This appears to have been largely forgotten outside of the UK, and even there, a muted commemoration.
Next year will be the 25th Anniversary of 9/11. I’m sure the commemoration will be significant, but still muted. By the 30th Anniversary (even if, hopefully, ‘President Vance’ is in office), I expect it to be as quiet as today’s 7/7
And now for something completely OT…
The Barbarella remake is coming along. With Sydney Sweeney!
______________________________________
I can’t say too much, but it’s really going to come together in a very, very fun and big way. It’s a long process. I don’t think people realise how long some things can take, but it’s gonna be worth the wait…
This could work. It doesn’t sound like Sweeney is going to girlboss this one. Barbarella (1968) and The Fifth Element (1997) may finally have some competition for sexy, stylish, insane sci-fi.
>@ Niketas: “A former third party candidate is in the Oval Office at the moment.”
>Citation, please?
>”Is Google down? Must be. Here you go. ”
From your links: “One, it could influence whether Mr. Trump, Mr. Ventura’s choice for the party’s presidential nomination, decides to run. ”
Trump: ” I have therefore decided not to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party.”
Trump considered running but was not a candidate, as you claimed. Words have meanings.
Never mind …
@Selfy:Trump considered running but was not a candidate, as you claimed. Words have meanings.
By that logic, only the people actually nominated by a party are ever “running” or a “candidate” for President, so Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush never “ran” or were “candidates”? That’s not how we use those words.
He had formed an exploratory committee, set up a campaign website, and was for some time publicly seeking their nomination. You can call that something different from “running” or being a “candidate” if you wish.
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So Musk will be starting a third party.
No mystery here; it will attract mostly republican voters and very few demonkrats , which will allow the Democrats to gain majorities in Congress as well as take the presidency.
A real alternative to the republican and democrats is needed, (neither party is capable of stopping out of control spending) but I just cannot see how this is possible without giving the Dems complete control of the govt.
It’s too bad Musk and Trump cannot find a way to cooperate.
Re: tragedy in Texas; coming out of the woodwork are the low life sickos claiming that the white, Christian victims – many of them children – deserved their fate because their parents are Trump supporters and/or blaming Trump for the tragedy.
Just goes to show that truly evil, consumed with hate folks can just as easily be an “American,” and not some foreign born mentally deranged lunatic fanatic.
Many of these never Trumpers would have no qualms implementing mass exterminations to achieve their goals.
Kurt Schlichter has another good column up this morning. One reason I like him is that his view of the GOP parallels mine: the stupid party. Maybe Trump will force a change in the GOP. The passage of the BBB gives some hope. I’m not sure I want the GOP to be the faceless monolith that the Democrats are; some dissent is good. But most of the time the GOP seems like they like to lose.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/07/07/hell-freezes-over-as-congressional-republicans-dont-blow-it-n2659943
A third party need not run its own candidates. It can mobilize its members to vote in GOP primaries. If Musk hasn’t thought of that, he will.
Unless it’s a grift, some third parties are.
A former third party candidate is in the Oval Office at the moment.
There are existing third parties that operate on the model of influencing the election toward or away from the big parties’ candidates, rather than running their own. The Conservative Party of New York State, for example, has been around since 1962 and usually endorses the GOP candidate.
On the left, the Working Families Party has been doing much the same since 1998, usually endorsing a Democrat.
Mark Twain (apparently non-satirically) proposed a similar idea, the Casting Vote Party, which was based on the sort of Schoolhouse Rock idea that an election is to choose the best individual to fill the office. Today we would call such a thing the “Swing Vote Party”, the point being that it would be big enough to determine any election.
A single-issue-focused group, regardless of whether you call it a “party”, can have great influence on elections. In the NRA heyday, for example, every GOP politician knew that the Second Amendment was a red line you had to be very careful if you wished to cross. I would dearly love to see such a focus on fiscal responsibility.
At the moment there’s just not enough people willing to put that first, as we see by the Right cheering on the budget-buster that just passed.
In personal finance terms, not only do we spend the whole paycheck, not only do we run up our credit cards, we also use our home equity line of credit to make our minimum monthly payments. That did not change in this last budget, it is not even an improvement on last year’s or that of the year before. Money printer keeps going brrr. The math simply does not care why it was done or who did it.
NPR, maintaining its brand:
In Totally Tilted NPR Hour on Defunding, ONE Caller Says It’s ‘Terrible, Partisan, Hacky’
The others marched in lockstep. NPR is a paramilitary organization. Not that that’s a bad thing. It just shouldn’t be publicly funded.
NPR has had some agreeable programming over the years (e.g. This American Life). However, their news and public affairs programming has long had issues. Fred Barnes critique of the work of their Central America correspondents was published in 1987. I’m not sure they ever tried to be impartial. The president of NPR from 1977 to 1983 was a man previously employed as George McGovern’s campaign manager. The NPR station in Binghamton around about 2003 changed their broadcast radius making it difficult to receive where I lived and then you had such gems as commentary by Daniel Schorr, so I stopped. For all that it was biased, public broadcasting ca. 1990 still had some contrary voices, e.g. Wm. F. Buckley. Nowadays, the ‘Republicans’ who have berths in public broadcasting (and there are few) are Régime shills like Margaret Hoover and David Brooks. It’s as if the range of opinion at NPR has always been a function of what it was within the Democratic Party and as the Democratic Party became less and less able to function in fora it did not control, NPR and PBS has exiled any alternatives.
Physicsguy, Schlichter takes a well deserved GOP victory lap. Being Republicans, there will be naysayers but I am not tired of winning. The bbb defunds planned parenthood for a year. Now on to the recission bill to defund pbs and npr.
A good discussion on where the US is heading economically and the Musk/Trump rift by the boys at the All-In podcast. This is a segment of their larger weekly podcast and worth the 13 minutes.
We cannot / should not ignore the debt cliff. Not included in this discussion, but numbers that add to the potential problems the Trump administration will have to navigate– the dollar has dropped 10% in value in the first half of 2025 and US debt purchased by foreign governments/interests is falling. During the last 20 years or so, foreign interests have purchased more of our debt as it has ballooned. That trend is reversing, which may make it harder for the US to find buyers without increasing effective interest rates, which is the exact opposite of what is needed (lower interest rates).
Friedberg points out that Bessent still believes they can achieve the administration goals of 3/3/3– 3% deficit to GDP/3% GDP growth/3% inflation.
The numbers currently are at 6% deficit to GDP/1.4% GDP growth/2.4% inflation. The are also committed to getting some of the cost savings identified by DOGE into law or through impoundment at the end of this fiscal year.
Skepticism is the word of the day whether Congress will have the fortitude to actually cut spending, given some the spending cuts in the reconciliation affecting Medicaid don’t go into effect until 2027.
These 10 year budget projections are just a way for Congress to do nothing to control spending. All the spending cuts always seem to be at the end of the 10 year cycle.
“What The F Are We Doing?” David Friedberg On BBB’s Deficit Increase & Trump vs. Elon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeSk_I3QapM
@Bob Wilson:The bbb defunds planned parenthood for a year. Now on to the recission bill to defund pbs and npr.
That’s great that it empties some of Team D’s troughs and fills some of Team R’s. The math doesn’t care. It’s still busting the budget, the debt-to-gdp ratio will continue to go up, the % of the budget devoted to paying interest on the debt is still going up, the amount spent this year is still higher than last year, and it is still not sustainable.
And as Speaker Mike Johnson said just in January, after he was reelected so no one put a gun to his head,
I’m sure that most people who vote Republican would say they agreed, but that never translates into actually doing the thing. Either people won’t look at the numbers or won’t think about them, or just don’t care as much as they pretend to.
Are those Rainier cherries on top?
Chases Eagles:
Yes.
Niketas, interest rates on treasury debt are dropping from over 5% for 10 year bonds at the beginning of the year to below 4 1/2%. Investment in American semiconductor fabs is exploding and other manufacturing is being onshored. American hydrocarbon fuel production is skyrocketing, and the price of gasoline is dropping, except in communist states like California. The stock market is at an all-time high and is ignoring the hedge fund shorts on the US dollar. Bears like you are trying to talk down the US economy, but our natural exuberance will come through. I like our chances.
@Bob Wilson:nterest rates on treasury debt are dropping from over 5% for 10 year bonds at the beginning of the year to below 4 1/2%…
The math doesn’t care about your list of Good Things. The the debt-to-gdp ratio will continue to go up, the % of the budget devoted to paying interest on the debt is still going up, the amount spent this year is still higher than last year, and it is still not sustainable.
The math does not listen to the smooth-tongued wizards of the Gods of the Marketplace; the math listens to the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
We’ll not be bankrupt next year, “gradually then suddenly” is how it proverbially goes. A man may gain 250 pounds and suffer no obvious ill effects, but it doesn’t mean he can gain another 250 or another 500. He’ll never know which bacon cheeseburger is the one that gave him the coronary, because it wasn’t one, it was ALL OF THEM.
Fox reporting that D congress critters are seeing increased calls for them to resort to violence to stop Trump. It seems to alarming them. For me, it’s not surprising. As I have reported here for months the left minions are getting increasingly crazy as Trump wins more. They are having mental breakdowns as to them their world is crumbling. Interesting that it now rates a national story:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dem-lawmakers-say-voters-threatening-blood-violence-over-inability-hinder-trump-report
NC “ The math doesn’t care”
The math I see is that my investments in the United States stock market and in US treasury securities are doing much better than inflation. Even after taxes, which will remain low thanks to the GOP. Where are you investing your savings?
I did not know there are red-yellow cherries that look like tiny apples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainier_cherry
I’ll wager we can make salutary adjustments in the trajectory of spending, but not enough to avoid raising taxes. In regard to tax regimes, you want as far as possible to avoid sectoral preferences which divert investment to less than optimal uses and which generate patron-client relationships between politicians and industries. You also want to incorporate features to cross compensate the less affluent segment of the population for the effect on their purchasing power of modifications in the remainder of the tax regime. The name of the game should be to protect the impecunious – roughly the least affluent 30% or so.
@Bob Wilson:Where are you investing your savings?
The math does not care where you or I are investing our savings. I spend all my money on bulk purchases of Maker’s Mark, as it happens, but the math does not care about that either. If it’s not reined in, your treasuries and stock won’t do you any good, but if you (like most people commenting here) are past 70 you might not live to see it, I grant you. There’s people who live for decades carrying around 300 or 500 extra pounds, and there are people who die before their creditors discover they don’t have any real assets.
Stocks looked really good up until October 23, 1929, and then by November 1 people were jumping out of windows, and stocks didn’t recover until 1954. And that wasn’t the government going insolvent either, quite a different problem. Even still, lots of people can bet wrong, and in hindsight everyone will say it was obvious.
@Art Deco:I’ll wager we can make salutary adjustments in the trajectory of spending
We CAN. I would wager that we CAN, I would not wager that we WILL.
When I get some more time today I’m going to follow up on something Brian E said and ballpark how big a budget that was trying to restore fiscal sanity might be. Interest, SS and Medicare are mostly nailed down, so I have to look some things up.
physicsguy, on the increasingly violent talk coming from leftists: The mother of the young girl we know of who died at Camp Mystic has posted a comment online to the effect that the politicization of the flood tragedy is not at all helpful to grieving families. This mother is herself left-wing politically.
I know it’s not clinically correct to call these people “insane,” but their increasingly delusional hatred certainly departs from anything we could call “normal.” Do I want leftists to continue to lose elections? Absolutely. Do I want them to be murdered in the streets? Absolutely not. They have lost any reciprocal feelings, decent feelings.
I spend all my money on bulk purchases of Maker’s Mark, as it happens, … — NC
Ha! I just bought two half gallon bottles myself. One for me, and another for a good friend who in spite of her high income, has had to tighten her belt considerably. Her expenses were not beyond her control, but intelligent life choices led to considerable continuing costs.
Niketas-
Better give Woodford Reserve a try, a much better bourbon than Maker’s Mark.
Art Deco says “The name of the game should be to protect the impecunious – roughly the least affluent 30% or so.” I disagree. That just gets one on the slippery slope of socialism. We have been protecting them for decades, and their fraction of the population remains unchanged or is growing despite the War on Poverty and other nonsense.
@ Niketas: “A former third party candidate is in the Oval Office at the moment.”
Citation, please?
@Cicero:Better give Woodford Reserve a try, a much better bourbon than Maker’s Mark.
Quantity has a quality all its own, I find.
@Selfy:Citation, please?
Is Google down? Must be. Here you go. His campaign website is long gone from the Internet, so you’ll have to settle for his statement abandoning his candidacy, and contemporaneous NYT coverage of same.
I disagree. That just gets one on the slippery slope of socialism. We have been protecting them for decades, and their fraction of the population remains unchanged or is growing despite the War on Poverty and other nonsense.
==
You should not be imbibing Maker’s Mark at this time of day. My object is to design a tax regime. Benefit programs are a separate question. (‘Ere taxes and transfers are applied, about 7% of personal income adheres to the least affluent 30%. They’re not a rich source of revenue).
@Art Deco, you have your commenters mixed up, I wonder what you’re drinking this early. Cicero made the comment you are responding to. As for me, I’m not drinking the Maker’s Mark–much–I’m stockpiling it. When government credit collapses and alcohol is rationed, and I’m sitting on cases and cases of Maker’s Mark, then we’ll see who has a “drinking problem”.
If you ever get the idea that Amnesty International has finally hit bottom and cannot sink any lower, they’ll prove you wrong.
Art Deco, you noted:
Is there some trouble? When I was in college, I used to write in their letter campaigns for political prisoners. I forget most of the details, of course, but I’m pretty sure there were occasions when I wrote to Gaddafi, Saddam, Ortega (his first iteration), a few others whose names would be recognizable and a few I would probably have trouble even placing in the right country now.
Kyle Cheney:
https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1942345612906594650
pdf of the TRO is at the link.
lol, words.
“We’ll see who has a drinking problem” – Isn’t that the truth.
@sdferr: BREAKING: A federal judge just blocked the “big beautiful bill’s” provision to defund Planned Parenthood.
Blocked by one Indira Talwani, appointed by one Barack Obama, in Boston Massachusetts, confirmed 94-0 by the US Senate in 2014 so upward of 39 GOP senators voted for her.
I wonder what legal reasoning there is to say that Congress can’t fund or defund something.
On another thread the rising political influence of Indian-Americans had come up.
Worst Photoshop edit ever! Hakeem Jeffries bends space in funny Photoshop error – Repost
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/07/worst-photoshop-edit-ever-hakeem.html
Were there any survivors among the cherries?
It’s the 20th Anniversary of ‘7/7’. This appears to have been largely forgotten outside of the UK, and even there, a muted commemoration.
Next year will be the 25th Anniversary of 9/11. I’m sure the commemoration will be significant, but still muted. By the 30th Anniversary (even if, hopefully, ‘President Vance’ is in office), I expect it to be as quiet as today’s 7/7
And now for something completely OT…
The Barbarella remake is coming along. With Sydney Sweeney!
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I can’t say too much, but it’s really going to come together in a very, very fun and big way. It’s a long process. I don’t think people realise how long some things can take, but it’s gonna be worth the wait…
–Sydney Sweeney
https://collider.com/barbarella-remake-update-sydney-sweeney/
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Fun and big, huh?
This could work. It doesn’t sound like Sweeney is going to girlboss this one. Barbarella (1968) and The Fifth Element (1997) may finally have some competition for sexy, stylish, insane sci-fi.
>@ Niketas: “A former third party candidate is in the Oval Office at the moment.”
>Citation, please?
>”Is Google down? Must be. Here you go. ”
From your links: “One, it could influence whether Mr. Trump, Mr. Ventura’s choice for the party’s presidential nomination, decides to run. ”
Trump: ” I have therefore decided not to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party.”
Trump considered running but was not a candidate, as you claimed. Words have meanings.
Never mind …
@Selfy:Trump considered running but was not a candidate, as you claimed. Words have meanings.
By that logic, only the people actually nominated by a party are ever “running” or a “candidate” for President, so Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush never “ran” or were “candidates”? That’s not how we use those words.
He had formed an exploratory committee, set up a campaign website, and was for some time publicly seeking their nomination. You can call that something different from “running” or being a “candidate” if you wish.