One Big Beautiful Disaster

Trump's "big beautiful bill" passed the House late last week, and it gives extremely generous tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country (including Trump himself) while cutting spending on Medicare and Medicaid to the bone. 

Oh yes, and it also permits the President to ignore court orders by removing the right of the judiciary to charge him with contempt of court.  It would also give the executive branch more power over federal elections to rig the vote in favor of his party.  This is the closest thing to an Enabling Act that the House has passed so far.

Speaking of political parties, how did this bill get past House Democrats?  House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries was counting on the narrow margin the GOP had in the lower chamber to allow Democrats peel off enough Republican votes to prevent any extreme MAGA legislation from getting through, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (yes, that's what it's officially called), slipped through by one vote - one vote - because Trump was able to (likely literally) twist a few arms while the Democrats were counting on Republican divisions to sink the bill.  It might have failed if Jeffries and his "leadership" team had done more to keep wavering Republicans from Democratic-leaning regions of the country from going with MAGA.  Congressional Democratic leaders aren't fighting for us.  They're trying to keep their rear ends clean.

The bill still has to get through the Senate, and it might not be so easy there.  But not impossible, so the jury is still out.  And any bill that allows Trump to skirt charges of contempt of court will mean that the jury is to be dismissed.  I'll be back later. 

Dr. Steinister

The more I learn about Jill Stein, the more I regret voting for her in 2016.

As everyone knows, Dr. Stein, once again the Green Party presidential nominee, is setting her sights on Michigan, where she says she plans to win enough votes to deprive Kamala Harris of a victory there, which would of course make it easier for Donald Trump to win the White House and turn the United States into Der Amerikanisches Reich.  She is appealing to the large number of Michiganders of Arab heritage and/or the Islamic faith due to the unpopular Biden-Harris administration's policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.   I couldn't understand why Dr. Stein, who supposedly leads the ticket of a progressive minor party, would focus squarely on the Biden-Harris administration's missteps on the Middle East while ignoring Trump's racist attitudes toward the Palestinians and his unreserved support for Israel.  The only explanation that makes sense is that she's a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hopes to interfere in the American election to help Trump.

Now, I've had a hard time accepting the notion that Dr. Stein is a Putin stooge, given her leftist views and his fascistic rule of post-Soviet Russia.  Oh, sure, I knew that she - and Michael Flynn, the Hermann Göring of Trumpworld - attended a dinner in Moscow in December 2015 to celebrate Russia Today (RT), the propaganda "news" channel tat had been founded in 2005, and sat at Putin's table, which I decided wasn't that much different from that scene in Bananas where Fielding Mellish has dinner with the President of San Marcos ("I could kill him now!  He brings cake for a group of people, and he doesn't even bring an assortment!"). 

And Dr. Stein had a plausible explanation for her presence there. She that while RT's American channel covered her presidential campaign extensively, the major networks ignored her. "And my own connection to RT, you know ironically, it takes a Russian television station to actually be open to independent candidates in this country and that is a shame. A shameful commentary on our own media."

The realization that Dr. Stein is full of snail snot came not when I saw that Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin were seated at the same dinner table with her.  It came when I found out who her other seatmates were.

As the superimposed name tags show, all but four of the people seated with Flynn, Putin and Dr. Stein are all associates of . . . Putin.  The other three are Cyril Svoboda, a pro-Putin former deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic, Willy Wimmer, a pro-Putin German politician who has served in the German Bundestag, Bosnian pro-Putin film director Emir Kusturica, and his wife.

A person is judged by the company she keeps.

*SIGH* . . .  Once again, I have to explain my vote for Dr. Stein in 2016 because some of you may not have read my earlier blog posts on the subject . . ..  I live in New Jersey, which hasn't been a swing state since 2004, and I voted for the Green ticket in 2016 because I not only loathed Donald Trump but because I thought the Democratic National Committee had hijacked the party nomination for Hillary Clinton, whom I believed thought was entitled to it and because of how the Democratic National Committee had undermined Martin O'Malley, whose 2016 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination I supported. I would have voted Green if Homey the Clown had been the nominee, because I wanted to help the Greens get enough of the vote to qualify for matching funds in 2020. They didn't.  And when the Democrats were in danger of going full Whig in 2017, I hoped progressives could call a convention and start a new party to fill in the void left by the Democrats once they died what I thought would be a richly deserved death. But progressives didn't call for anything, and the Democratic Party hobbled on.  Now I find out that Dr. Stein's seatmates at this dinner in Moscow were not just Putin and Flynn but Putin's Kremlin stooges and  pro-Putin Europeans?

I wish I hadn't voted for Dr. Stein.  I was wrong to do so.  There, I said it.  I don't regret voting for a minor-party presidential candidate, even though I did so more out of anger at the Democratic National Committee over how they treated Martin O'Malley than anything else, and besides, I knew Hillary would win a popular majority in New Jersey and its fourteen electoral votes, which she did.  However, I voted for the wrong candidate. I should have voted for Workers World Party presidential nominee Monica Moorehead. New Jersey was one of three states in which Moorehead was on the ballot.

As for Jill Stein, this doctor is out.