Congress passes the BBB – and before the Fourth, as well

The New Neo Posted on by

From the NY Post:

The GOP-led House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in a 218-214 vote Thursday following hours of relentless arm-twisting and deliberation that included the longest floor speech and longest procedural vote in the body’s 236-year history.

In the end, just two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, voted against the measure after Trump held 11th-hour White House meetings Wednesday with more than a dozen holdouts — before deploying his Truth Social account in the final stretch.

“Largest Tax Cuts in History and a Booming Economy vs. Biggest Tax Increase in History, and a Failed Economy. What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!” Trump, 79, erupted just after midnight.

I wrote about the bill at some length this past Tuesday. It’s not perfect – fancy that. It has things to like and things to not like, and to top it all off it’s so long that it will take a while to get clear on what’s actually in it and what isn’t. The Democrats, of course, mischaracterize it as awful, but what else is new? The proof will be in the results.

Trump is right, though, that doing nothing was going to lose votes for members of Congress. People are fed up, and the tax cuts were due to expire. I don’t think anyone should underestimate how difficult it was to herd the GOP cats into passing this when the majorities are razor-thin. It’s quite an accomplishment for Johnson and Thune, and I doubt it would have happened if McCarthy and especially McConnell had still been in there.

More:

The final vote was further delayed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reading letters from constituents who expressed concern about their Medicaid benefits being stripped.

The House Democratic leader would end up using his “magic minute” of debate against the bill to stall its passage for almost nine hours, shattering the record previously held by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in 2021 during his opposition to the Build Back Better Act.

“It’s an utter waste of everyone’s time, but you know, that’s part of the system here,” Johnson groused to reporters about Jeffries’ stall tactics.

“It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth,” the speaker later clapped back during a floor speech just before voting on the actual bill took place.

Trump will sign it, of course.

Russiagate revisited: new CIA review

The New Neo Posted on by

This is being treated as news, but didn’t we already know it?:

A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”

Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.

The “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] on Russian Election Interference” was conducted by career professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe in May.

The “lessons-learned review” found that, on December 6, 2016, six weeks before his presidency ended, Barack Obama ordered the assessment, which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the election.

The review identified “multiple procedural anomalies” that undermined the credibility of the ICA, including “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”

More at the link.

On the right, many of the comments take the form of saying something like “not only did we already know this, but so what – will these people be prosecuted for their scurrilous lies?” The answer to the last part of that is probably not; I’m not sure that the dangerous and deplorable things they did were actually crimes in the legal sense, and none of them are still in office so they can’t be removed. And yes, we mostly knew what the report says in the general sense, but it’s more specific about the roles of Obama, Brennan, Comey, and Clapper.

Most people formed their ideas about Russiagate long ago and probably aren’t even reading the report, however, especially the details. It’s been almost ten years since Russiagate began – imagine that. And yet it was a shocking thing, and remains so. Ironically, Russiagate has contributed to people’s distrust of everything the government says, including when it emanates from the right – such as this report.

As for the NY Times, it does cover the new report, but the Times’ article has this ho-hum headline that could easily lead a reader to the conclusion that Russiagate was correct: “C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote – But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.”

And here’s the article’s lede:

A C.I.A. review of its assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election criticized the agency’s leadership at the time for rushing the effort but did not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.

The review also criticized John O. Brennan, who was the C.I.A. director when the assessment was written, for his oversight of the project and for too tightly controlling access to sensitive intelligence that formed the basis of the work.

That certainly would be unlikely to cause any Democrat to doubt Russiagate – or to read much further.

U Penn agrees to apologize for allowing men into women’s sports

The New Neo Posted on by

And not just “allowing” but rather forcing women to accept the invasion.

Here’s the latest:

Transgender swimming champion Lia Thomas will be stripped of University of Pennsylvania swimming titles after the Ivy League school bowed to pressure from the Trump administration.

The university will also issue formal apologies to every biological female competitor who lost out to a transgender competitor following an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

The probe found UPenn violated Title IX by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities.”

“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.

Swimmer Lia Thomas was and is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-equipped post-pubescent biological male. He had no business being in a woman’s locker room, and the fact that U Penn forced such a thing on its female swimmers was a terrible offense.

So, at the very least, the university won’t be doing that anymore – until, of course, Democrats take control of the federal government and redefine what Title IX means.

Or perhaps the left has learned its lesson on this, although I wouldn’t count on it. And by “its lesson,” I mean the practical lesson that forcing men into women’s locker rooms isn’t a popular stance, and may have contributed heavily to Democrats’ losses in 2024. I don’t expect that the left would learn the moral lesson or the lesson about biology.

On Islam and the definition of “religion”

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed a discussion in the comments today about whether Islam is a religion, so I thought I’d feature a link to this previous post of mine on the subject of the definition of “religion.”

That post – which I suggest you read – focuses on the legal definition, and obviously people often use the word in more than the legal sense. But I think that Islam is a religion by any definition that comes to mind, at least for me.

Of course, not all religions promote good things (that’s covered somewhat in the previous post, as well, with examples such as suttee and female genital mutilation). But that’s a separate issue, although an important one.

Commenter “Cicero” writes:

Islam is an ideology, not a religion. It has found the soft underbelly of the post-Enlightenment West. An example is CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a clearly political entity, as its name clearly indicates, which is a non-profit because it is ”religious”.

Those are two separate issues as well, in my opinion. The first – that Islam is not a religion but rather an ideology – is incorrect, in my opinion, because Islam has all the trappings of a religion in the legal and in the vernacular sense. However – as with most religions – a lot of other things come along with Islam in terms of its actual beliefs and practices. It’s not that Islam isn’t a religion. It’s that it is a suprasecessionist religion that wants to dominate the entire world and that it also is deeply intertwined with political goals. For example:

Political aspects of the religion of Islam are derived from its religious scripture … as well as elements of political movements and tendencies followed by Muslims or Islamic states throughout its history. Shortly after its founding, Islam’s prophet Muhammad became a ruler of a state, and the intertwining of religion and state in Islam (and the idea that “politics is central” to Islam), is in contrast to the doctrine of rendering “unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”, of Christianity, its related and neighboring religion.

Of course, many countries do have Christianity as an official religion (such as, for example, the Church of England), but they also have freedom of religious belief. In the US, the separation of church and state goes further in that no state religion can be established. That’s why the US Constitution and Islam proper are in inherent conflict. Although there are plenty of not-so-religions individual Moslems who aren’t interested in Islam taking over the world or the US government, the traditional beliefs of devout Moslems would include such a goal of takeover. In that sense Islam is both a religion and a political ideology.

CBS pays Trump in settlement of biased-editing lawsuit

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump’s on a roll.

Here’s the agreement reached in his lawsuit against CBS for deceptively editing a Kamala Harris interview to make her look better:

Paramount Global and CBS agreed on Tuesday to pay President Donald Trump a sum that could reach north of $30 million to settle the president’s election interference lawsuit against the network.

Trump will receive $16 million upfront. This will cover legal fees, costs of the case, and contributions to his future presidential library or charitable causes, to be determined at Trump’s discretion.

There is an anticipation that there will be another allocation in the mid-eight figures set aside for advertisements, public service announcements, or other similar transmissions, in support of conservative causes by the network in the future, Fox News Digital has learned.

I suspect that’s nothing much to CBS. But still, it’s a victory for Trump. And apparently they are also agreeing that in the future they will post entire transcripts for interviews with presidential candidates.

More:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and eight Democratic colleagues sent a letter to Redstone in May asking her not to settle the lawsuit against CBS News, which they called an “attack on the First Amendment.” They called the potential settlement a “grave mistake” and “a blatant attempt to intimidate the media and those who speak out against him, President Trump.”

The letter also stated “presidents do not get to punish or censor the media for criticizing them” in the United States.

Nobody censored anyone – except for CBS, which censored (that is, made editorial decisions that were somewhat deceptive) the words of Kamala Harris. Trump wanted full disclosure of her words; how is that censorship? And he used a courtroom to duke it out with CBS. Of course, Trump has a lot of power as president. But CBS has a lot of power as a major network, and it has used that power over and over to put its finger on the political scales in favor of the left.

Sean “Diddy” Combs found guilty on the more minor charges

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t covered the Sean Combs trial. I’ve left that to others because I just don’t happen to be all that interested – I’m not a fan, and it’s clear he’s a sleazebag although whether he’s guilty of actual crimes isn’t something I especially wanted to follow.

But the verdict is in:

A Manhattan jury has found Sean “Diddy” Combs not guilty of racketeering conspiracy, the most serious of the charges he was facing, and the one that could have put him behind bars for life. This charge, which falls under the RICO Act, “alleged that Combs participated in a criminal enterprise. Prosecutors claimed he used his business empire to facilitate illegal activities,” according to NBC News.

He was also acquitted on two counts of sex trafficking, by force, fraud, or coercion. This charge relates to “allegations that Combs coerced individuals into engaging in commercial sexual activity,” as per NBC. If he had been convicted, he would have faced 10 years to life in prison for each count.

Combs was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. “This charge alleges that Combs knowingly transported individuals across state lines or internationally with the intent that they would engage in prostitution.”

From what I’ve read of his offenses – which isn’t much – a life sentence seems excessive. So perhaps this is the correct verdict. As for his fans, I’m not sure whether the trial disgraced him or enhanced his status.

Mamdani’s new voters

The New Neo Posted on by

We’re still digesting the Mamdani primary win from a week ago. Here’s another tidbit, this time from Front Page, in which Daniel Greenfield observes that the NY Times discovered that 10% of the NYC Democrat primary voters were newly registered, and number about 40K. In addition, a greater percentage than in 2021 had names that tend to be “associated with Muslim majority countries.”

Plus, they are young, between 18 and 25 years old, a group that had more participation in the primaries than any other age group.

Greenfield opines:

Who were these 18-25 year olds? The Muslim settler population in the US is uniquely young so that “roughly a third of all Muslim adults are under the age of 30”. That may offer a partial explanation for what we’re seeing here. Social media trends wouldn’t do this. Organized community bloc voting would. Beyond fraud and numbers like these absolutely raise that question, we are seeing a test of the system that Islamists used to swamp elections in the UK.

So this is probably not fraud in the sense of registering people who don’t exist. But this seems to represent the result of organizing by far-leftist and/or Moslem partisan groups. In a primary with low turnout, mobilizing voters is absolutely crucial. The extent of participation of these new voters doesn’t seem to have been reflected in polls either, which showed the race to be much tighter.

NOTE: Mamdani got by far the most out-of-state contributions of any of the candidates.

Happy belated 95th birthday to Thomas Sowell

The New Neo Posted on by

I missed the occasion, which was yesterday. But I want to wish a belated happy birthday to a formidable and formative thinker on the right, probably the contemporary political writer I most admire. He apparently has hardly lost a step in his extreme old age, which is quite an achievement.

Here are links to the over-100 posts I’ve written that mention Sowell. But for now I’ll just repeat the substance of this one from four years ago:

And yet most people probably have no idea who Sowell is.

Sowell was one of the very first thinkers I encountered during the course of my political change experience, and he was probably the most formative one. When I initially read his work – I think it was the book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy – it was with a happy sigh of recognition and relief as well as admiration. Finally, here was someone who was voicing clear, intelligent, common-sense versions of thoughts, some of which were new to me but some of which I’d already had in extremely inchoate and amorphous form but had never been able to articulate or order. He made perfect sense, and I couldn’t imagine why everyone in the world didn’t agree with him.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

Notice also that subtitle – of a book first published in 1996 – Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. That’s an excellent example of Sowell’s ability to distill – into a short phrase, sentence, or paragraph – a complex and highly insightful as well as illuminating idea. He’s been doing that for about fifty years, and his body of work holds up very well.

So Happy Happy Birthday, Thomas Sowell. Long may you live and grace us with your clear-headed wisdom.

Do you know what’s in the Big Beautiful Bill that just passed the Senate?

The New Neo Posted on by

I freely admit that I’m struggling to understand exactly what’s in the bill and, more importantly, how it will affect Americans. And I think I’m hardly the only one, if people were to be honest.

The media and the politicians and even bloggers and commenters put their own spin on it. There are, for example, the usual cries against GOP members who are perceived as selling out to various interest groups. There’s the railing against the parliamentarian and those who decided not to overrule her, although they might have. But I don’t fully trust anything I’m reading. So here’s my take on it which admittedly contains a lot of guesswork.

The bill passed 51-50 with Vance breaking a tie, and the three GOP defectors being Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins:

Paul and Tillis had each voted against even debating the bill. Paul called for greater spending cuts. Tillis said the bill would cost his state $26 billion in Medicaid funding, breaking a federal promise of health care to low-income people. …

Collins had voted to debate the bill but opposed its approval primarily because of Medicaid cuts. She said one-third of her state – 400,000 people – depend on Medicaid and the bill would hurt rural healthcare providers and nursing homes.

She also cited concerns about phasing out tax credits for renewable energy providers. She said the bill should have kept incentives for families that choose to install heat pumps and residential solar panels.

I’ve said it before about Collins, and I’ll say it again: if you want Maine to have a Republican senator, it would have to be someone who votes as Collins does. Otherwise, it’s a Democrat for sure and would help Democrats to gain control of the Senate.

Note also there were only three defectors, which made it possible for the bill to pass. That’s because the other would-be defector, Murkowski, was placated in a compromise:

The deal with Murkowski breaks a deadlock that lasted throughout Monday night and into Tuesday morning.

Thune, Crapo and Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) thought they had secured Murkowski’s vote by crafting language to provide an enhanced federal Medicaid match for Alaska and a waiver to shield the state from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts.

But Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough threw a wrench into those plans by ruling the initial Medicaid and SNAP provisions designed to help Alaska didn’t comply with the Byrd Rule and therefore weren’t eligible to pass the Senate with a simple-majority vote.

Republican leadership and committee staff then spent hours Monday and early Tuesday morning to craft language that could secure the approval of both Murkowski and the parliamentarian.

So, why didn’t the Senate GOP just vote to overrule the parliamentarian? I believe – although I also don’t know – that the answer revolves around the three defectors plus Murkowski. I don’t think any of them – and that includes Murkowski – would have voted to overrule the parliamentarian. Certainly there’s no reason that the three who voted against the bill would have voted to overrule the parliamentarian in order to pass it – that simply wouldn’t make sense. And Murkowski was very lukewarm on the bill as well, and relishes her own power.

So those people who are angry at the GOP as a whole for not voting to overrule the parliamentarian are – IMHO – not taking into account the reality, which is that it probably couldn’t have been done. Still another reality is that getting rid of Collins would bring the Democrats closer to a Senate majority; Tillis is going anyway; and Rand Paul is Rand Paul, another kettle of fish.

Furthermore, this isn’t the final bill. It has to be “reconciled” in the House. The fat lady may be warming up in the wings, but that’s about it.

NOTE: If you want to find out what’s in the Senate bill about Medicaid versus what’s in the House bill about Medicaid, here’s the only article I found that purports to say. It’s CBS, so it would tend to have an anti-GOP spin, but take a look.