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Republicans Are Trying to Hide Their Health Care Cuts

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation without some form of universal health care coverage/access, instead leaving American citizens to either get coverage through their jobs - typically at high cost - or at the mercy of the rapacious for profit health insurance like United Health Care. The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") sought to improve access to coverage, but the Felon and his bootlicking congressional Republicans are making cuts to support for the ACA and throwing millions off of Medicaid. Compared to European nations where life expectancy is still rising, in the Felon/GOP's America, life expectancies are falling, particularly in red states (the difference in life expectancy in say Massachusetts versus West Virginia is nothing short of shocking). Only in America are average citizens treated as disposable garbage while the ultra-rich are showered with massive tax-cuts.  With the mid-term elections approaching, voters need to realize the cuts are about to get worse, cynically timed to take effect after the mid-term elections.  Obviously, the GOP views much of its base as too stupid to realize they are getting screwed over yet again so that the very wealthy can live ever more opulent lifestyles. A main editorial in the New York Times shouts out about the Felon/GOP's insidious cuts.  Here are highlights:

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

[The Felon] President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, [the Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.

Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct.

In the passive approach, [The Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans allowed the expiration of enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats created the marketplaces for people who fell through the cracks. These people did not receive coverage through their jobs, and they were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

In 2021, President Joe Biden and Congress increased the size of the subsidies, but they set them to expire in 2025, which mitigated their impact on the federal debt. . . . The federal debt is a genuine problem, having soared in the 21st century relative to the size of the American economy. But taking away people’s health insurance is not the answer. Repealing [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s foolhardy tax cuts, which benefit mostly the wealthy, would have a bigger fiscal effect than his health insurance cuts.

Those health insurance cuts led premiums and deductibles to spike this year. As an example, a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could see their premiums more than double, costing an additional $3,500 a year.

In the more direct approach to cutting health care coverage, Republicans targeted Medicaid, the program focused on the poor and disabled. Last year, the federal government enacted what Republicans call a work requirement. In reality, it is a paperwork requirement — one that forces Medicaid enrollees, most of whom are working or have a valid reason for not working, to file repeated documents proving they have a job or a valid exemption.  . . . About two in three enrollees who will lose health insurance should, in fact, be eligible for it, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated.

Arkansas enacted a version of this policy before the federal law passed, and it was a failure: Work force participation did not rise, and eligible people lost their insurance because of paperwork problems.

The Affordable Care Act was a triumph of government, and it is justifiably popular. Mr. Trump and other Republicans once promised to repeal the law, but they have largely stopped making such statements. Instead, they have sought to weaken the law — partly out of an ideological aversion to government, partly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — and hope that voters do not notice.

Democrats should not let the president get away with this subterfuge. They should make the health insurance cuts a central piece of their midterm campaign and, as important, offer voters a vision that includes other improvements to the nation’s costly, rickety health care system, both to continue expanding access and to reduce costs. The Affordable Care Act also happens to be a model on costs; it meaningfully slowed growth in health care prices over the past decade.

Congress should be looking for next steps, not moving backward. The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that progress is possible.

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Trump Wants to Cut Taxes for the Rich. Again.

The federal deficit has hit an all time high, with a disproportionate amount of the debt piled on under the Felon's two regimes. So what does the Felon and his billionaire sycophants want to do? Give even more tax breaks to the wealthy, of course, further pursuing the Republican Party's effort to create a new Gilded Age, with even more tax burden shifted to the less than wealthy. It's all part of the GOP's long established reverse Robin Hood agenda. Should more tax cuts for the wealthy be enacted,  the deficit will balloon even more, likely driving up interest rates and making things more expensive, not more affordable. Decades of evidence shows that tax cuts for the wealthy never pay for themselves and that "trickle down economics" has been a fraud since the Reagan era. But in the up is down and down is up alternate reality of the GOP and far right, why worry about facts and objective reality.  Meanwhile, the super wealthy, who put lower taxes above all else, are spending millions on the mid-terms to elect pro-tax cutting Republicans to Congress.  Concerns about bankrupting America are nowhere on the radar screen.  A piece at The New Republic looks at this latest round of irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy proposals.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s election time, so the White House, according to Bloomberg’s Katy O’Donnell and Caitlin Reilly, is weighing whether to give the rich more tax breaks. Republicans! They just can’t help themselves!

Cutting taxes on the rich is a uniquely unpopular idea. Since 1939, Gallup has been asking, “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich”? In 1939, 54 percent said “should not” and only 35 percent said “should,” even though the Great Depression was raging and the New Deal was well along. Since 1939, though, the should nots have been falling and the shoulds have been rising. Today, a 52 percent majority say the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich heavily, and a 47 percent minority say it should not.

If you put the question in a manner more appetizing to moderates—do the rich pay their fair share?—61 percent say no, according to an April Pew Research Center poll. Fully 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners also say no, along with a not-inconsiderable 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Given these realities, the White House, if it endorses a tax cut, will try to sell it as a middle-class tax cut. The Democrats have tax-cut proposals of their own that target lower-income people. I’ve explained previously that I prefer the alternative approach of cutting payroll taxes at the low end and eliminating the Social Security tax ceiling at the high end

On Tuesday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, who held that post during Trump’s first term, discussed on Fox Business the two tax proposals Trump is contemplating. One is to index the capital gains tax, and the other is to exempt from capital gains tax home sales below $2 million. (Currently the exemption goes up to $500,000.) The first of these is a more obvious giveaway to the rich. The second mimics the Obama administration’s strategy of shielding the haute bourgeoisie when it hikes taxes on the rich. . . . . In Trump’s version, the context for cutting taxes for the haute bourgeoisie is a tax cut for richer folks, too.

The dialog between Kudlow and Hassett conveyed that particular air of unreality characteristic of Fox World. (It was on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, which is called Kudlow.) Kudlow began by noting that the Congressional Budget Office had just projected this year’s budget deficit to be $2.1 trillion, up from February’s estimate of $1.9 trillion. “The budget deficit for the first ten months of the year is $1.8 trillion,” Kudlow said. “I’m not sure I understand why.”

Kudlow was baffled because he actually believes, contrary to 45 years’ evidence, the GOP’s propaganda that tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. The tax cuts in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, for instance, slashed federal revenue by an estimated $570 billion.

In Fox World, as opposed to the real world, it is not thought illogical to follow a lamentation about government insolvency with a plea for tax cuts. Kudlow cited a McLaughlin & Associates poll that said 62 percent of voters approved of indexing the capital gains tax to inflation. . . . . Why not index capital gains taxes, too?

Because capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. The top labor-income rate (which is also too low) is 37 percent. Get back to me when you’ve eliminated that differential—and when you’ve also eliminated the “angel of death” loophole that lets assets escape capital gains tax when passed on to heirs—and we can talk. But if we ever do index capital gains like we do income-tax brackets, we’ll have to figure out some way to capture lost revenue—because remember that $2.1 trillion deficit? You don’t want to make it $3 trillion. According to the Yale Budget Lab, indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.

Then there’s the distributional impact. People making less than about $100,000 would receive virtually no benefit, according to the Yale model (and would likely pay more income tax to cover the lost revenue). People making more than about $3 million, on the other hand, would save $350,000 in taxes. If McLaughlin & Associates had bothered to furnish voters with that information, its poll results would have been quite different.

If Trump endorses these tax proposals, he’ll say they’re an affordability play and argue that lowering capital gains tax will encourage more people to sell their houses, thereby lowering prices. But Democrats should answer that these are just two more Trump giveaways to the wealthy, most especially the indexing of capital gains. There are many ways to reduce the cost of housing: zoning for higher density where appropriate; investing in infrastructure; eliminating tariffs on lumber, steel, and aluminum to lower construction costs; subsidizing low-income housing; and so on. Throwing money at millionaires and billionaires is the most regressive way conceivable to lower housing costs, and there’s no great reason to believe it would even work.

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Trump Is Trapped in His War in Iran

The price of oil remains elevated, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Iranian allies in Yemen have fired on Saudi ships in the Red Sea, and the Felon's only words to the American public is "it will work out" as Iran signals that it has the Felon right where they want him.  The Felon won reelection promising to lower prices "on day one" and to not involve the USA in more foreign wars.  Of course, he has done the exact opposite pushing prices higher through tariffs and now higher gas prices and higher fertilizer prices among other things, thanks to the Iran war that the Felon started by choice. One can debate why many voters were stupid enough to believe these lies from the lips of a man who lied over 30,000 times during his first regime, but that doesn't help to save America from the Felon's self-created mess in the Middle East. A piece in the New Republic looks at the situation - a similar article is in The Atlantic - looks at how there is no end to the war in sight and no relief from the associated increase in prices (gasoline hit an all time high for August) any time soon.  Here are higlights from the New Republic:

[The Felon] Donald Trump is not worried about Iran—at least, that’s the message he’s trying to send to panicked investors, frustrated voters, and vulnerable congressional Republicans. “We are low-keying it” on Iran, the president told Axios’s Barak Ravid on Sunday. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” he said, noting the country was “in very bad shape” economically. “It will work out.  It always works out,” he concluded. “It’s like a chess game.”

“It always works out” is never a reassuring message to receive during a crisis, especially when it comes from someone who has declared multiple bankruptcies and launched a failed coup.

Trump, of course, was elected president for the first time after those bankruptcies and won again after the failed coup (and the dozens of criminal charges that followed it). But just because he got lucky twice doesn’t mean he will again. And if the war with Iran is a “chess game,” then it’s one he and the United States are losing badly, with few available moves left on the board.

Iran announced on Monday that it would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that carries around a fifth of the world’s oil supply, until the U.S. agrees to its demands, which include the lifting of sanctions, the payment of reparations and the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and ending the blockade that Trump believes will ultimately lead to victory.

Now, Iran—not Trump—is playing hardball. And there’s little reason to believe that even the economic chokehold Iran is currently facing will cause its leaders to bend anytime soon, especially since they’re well aware of the damage that the war—in particular its steroidal impact on the price of gas, fertilizer, and other essential goods—is doing to the GOP’s bid to retain control of Congress in the November midterms.

Ever since the war began, Iranian leaders have insisted that they are prepared to withstand crippling economic sanctions and devastating airstrikes, in large part because they believe that Trump and congressional Republicans are far less willing to face the rising prices that have accompanied the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. So far, it’s hard to argue with that read.

Trump is historically unpopular on the economy; his net approval on inflation is 50 points underwater. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are facing an electoral bloodbath that could equal the 2006 wipeout. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, seem more than willing to withstand a blockade until the midterms and to use those elections to their benefit. The only question now is if Trump folds before the midterms or if he allows the war to continue indefinitely—an eventuality that would almost certainly hand the White House to Democrats in 2028.

The war in Iran is already, strategically speaking, one of the biggest foreign-policy blunders in American history. Iran will likely emerge from the conflict, whenever it ends, stronger than before. The U.S., meanwhile, has lost much of what was left of its global credibility, along with the majority of its supply of munitions. But the war is also the capstone of one of the biggest political blunders in American history. Less than two years ago, voters elected Trump because they were frustrated about the state of the economy. Since retaking office, he has done seemingly everything he can to make that economy even worse—and make an ever-increasing number of those voters hate him.

The frenetic nature of Trump’s presidency makes it hard, if not impossible, to tell one overarching story about it. Every week, it seems, features at least three middle-of-the-night tweetstorms, two historic corruption scandals, and one other news-generating disgrace that eats up several days of media coverage.

In just a year and a half, his administration has launched a global trade war, decimated much of the U.S. government, kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation and launched a war against another, all while deploying masked paramilitary goons to snatch people off of the street in our communities and trying (usually without success) to prosecute its critics. In this time, Trump has also survived two historic scandals, one relating to his long-time friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the other involving ongoing self-dealing and corruption that has netted him and his family billions—and that would make a politician in the Gilded Age blush. There’s a lot going on, in other words.

But the biggest story of Trump’s second term is arguably its simplest. Voters returned Trump to power because prices were high, even though the incumbent administration was not really at fault. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation was rampant everywhere in the world.

That didn’t matter. Voters were pissed off about paying too much—so pissed off, in fact, that they reelected the person who had failed to responsibly manage the pandemic and then tried to cling to power after he lost in 2020, notably by ginning up a mob that intended to hang his vice president.

Trump got lucky. A normal administration would have recognized as much on some level. At the very least, it would have made the most important issue of the recent presidential election a focal point: do everything possible to bring prices down and take other steps to alleviate the affordability crisis. Trump didn’t. He and his advisers decided a narrow, fluky election was a historic mandate that gave them clearance to do whatever they wanted. Many of those moves—the massive cuts driven by Elon Musk’s DOGE project, Trump’s global trade war, the war in Iran—sabotaged the economic recovery that had begun under Joe Biden. They did nothing to address the things that people hated about the economy under Biden—and in fact, they all made those things worse to varying degrees.

And so here we are. Even Trump’s voters are fed up. . . . . . Trump’s overall economic numbers are historically bad and have fallen 31 points since he returned to office.

Congressional Republicans, particularly those in vulnerable seats, are campaigning in the constant shadow of these political storm clouds. But Iran’s leaders can see them too, and that’s why they’re playing hardball over the Strait of Hormuz. All Trump can offer, meanwhile, is hollow reassurance that “it always works out.” That adage may be true for him, but it rarely works out for the people caught in his blast radius.

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The Ghost of “60 Minutes” Will Haunt Bari Weiss

The Felon, like would be dictators before him, has long wanted to censor members of the the press and media outlets that report the news objectively and expose the excesses, corruption, and incompetence of his regime or the ugly aspects of the Felon in general. Part of this stems from the Felon's intense narcissism, but it also stems from his desire to create a false reality for his Kool-Aid drinking cultists. Fox News has long been a propaganda arm for the Felon, but other outlets have not willingly surrendered their integrity and become mere arms of the Felon's corrupt regime. Sadly, many in the billionaire class who seek to curry favor with the Felon and approval of business mergers have no hesitation about destroying reputable news outlets. Jeff Bezos has turned the Washington Post into a mere shadow and seen of what it once was and seen the paper lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers (I canceled my subscription) and David Ellison is endeavoring to do the same to CBS, including destroying the independence and  journalism of  programs like "Sixty Minutes" which Ellison's henchwoman Bari Weiss is savaging (we no longer watch CBS).  Hopefully, the stellar journalists being fired and/or muzzled will find homes at other outlets and continue to expose the bad and the ugly about the Felon and his every more corrupt regime and those who aid and abet it.  A piece at Salon looks at this sad situation:

For 58 seasons, through wars, impeachments and the corporate dismantling of the network news business around it, “60 Minutes” remained America’s highest-rated newsmagazine. Viewership of the CBS News program was up 9% during the 2025-2026 season and generated more than 2.5 billion social-media video views, according to the network. Yet in a bizarre case of fixing something that does not need fixing, the program became the one CBS property executives chose to radically remake. 

David Ellison, the network’s new owner, appears determined to test whether the rare commercial-news institution that persuaded millions of Americans to spend an hour with investigative reporting can survive the removal of the very people who made it matter. In barely a year, under the ownership of Ellison’s Skydance and the editorial stewardship of Bari Weiss, that legacy has been stripped down, gutted and reassembled as an instrument of political appeasement. By sacrificing seasoned investigative reporters and filling the vacuum with anti-woke contrarians, Ellison and Weiss have defanged a national treasure. 

[T]he program retained an essential public purpose. And in its zeal to purge the newsroom of dissent, CBS and Weiss may have inadvertently triggered the creation of their most dangerous future competitor — and accidentally set the stage for its own undoing.

The journalists Weiss pushed out did not simply disappear. Bill Owens, the former “60 Minutes” executive producer who resigned in 2025 over corporate interference before Weiss even arrived, has reportedly been assembling a business plan and pitch deck for a rival investigative newsmagazine, seeking something in the neighborhood of $50 million to fund two years of programming. The names attached to it read like a “60 Minutes” reunion special. Such a group — joined potentially by Anderson Cooper and the former producers who resigned in protest — could sell itself as carrying the true DNA of gold-standard television news. 

There is a reason Ellison spent billions acquiring a legendary news brand. His $8 billion purchase of Paramount and his aggressive right-wing revamp of CBS News is an overt attempt to smooth the waters for an infinitely larger prize — a $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes cable news giant CNN. With Donald Trump long signaling his disdain for traditional media, Ellison’s moves at CBS functioned as a high-stakes litmus test. When the Department of Justice cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger in June, Ellison passed.

But after 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America filed anti-trust lawsuits to block the merger ahead of a trial next March, Ellison took to the opinion pages of The New York Times on Tuesday to defend his growing empire. Pushing back against speculation regarding his political loyalties, Ellison pledged “independence” for his newsrooms and argued that the combined entity would control only a fraction of the streaming market. But his pleas for personal trust ring hollow. You do not demonstrate a commitment to objective journalism by spending $150 million to acquire The Free Press and handing the keys of a legacy news division to Weiss — an opinion columnist with zero television management experience and a well-documented history of tendentious reporting.

Now, at CBS News, her editorial interference has been disguised as routine management. At her infamous first staff meeting, Weiss vowed to “do the f**king news,” but what followed instead suggests a systematic effort to reshape reality.

When covering the conflict in Iran, Vega said she was instructed to open her segment by declaring the nation “totally outgunned by the United States and Israel” — framing that skewed favorably toward the Trump administration’s telling of events. (CBS News has disputed the broader claim that it sought to inject bias, saying its editorial process reflects ordinary review.) 

Elsewhere, Weiss personally blocked a deeply reported piece by Sharyn Alfonsi on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of individuals into conditions marked by horrific human rights abuses. Though the story eventually leaked in Canada and later aired on CBS in its original form, the message Weiss sent to the newsroom was unmistakable. The effect was to launder censorship in the language of journalistic standards.

Most recently, it was revealed that Alfonsi had been sitting on a major scoop regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s financial ties to Wall Street giants like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — complete with an on-camera interview filmed in March 2026 with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who was heading his own investigation into Epstein’s finances — before being fired by Weiss in May. CBS claimed the piece simply was not finished by the end of last season, and has not said whether it intends to air it this fall. Wyden is now pushing legislation to hold individual bankers personally accountable for exactly this kind of institutional silence.

The optics are damning regardless of the internal timeline: The network fired the reporter chasing one of the biggest financial accountability stories of the year in the middle of a purge explicitly aimed at correspondents who resisted political pressure, and the story broke three months later, just not on CBS.

This should be the central concern about the Ellison era at CBS. Not whether Ellison privately considers himself a conservative, a liberal or a man above ideology, nor whether Weiss thinks of herself as a dissident or a reformer. The question is whether their actions are creating the practical conditions under which reporters can hold power to account.

The upheaval has been extraordinary. Tanya Simon, the executive producer who oversaw the program’s recent success, was removed alongside correspondents Alfonsi and Vega, as well as senior editors and producers. Scott Pelley was fired shortly after publicly challenging the appointment of Nick Bilton as executive producer and accusing Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. Cooper had already departed. The result is a “60 Minutes” with a drastically depleted bench heading into a new season.

In place of these decorated investigative journalists, Bilton and Weiss have assembled what the former reportedly referred to as “the Avengers of news.” But, as longtime media critic Eric Deggans pointed out, a look at the roster reveals a strategy straight out of the old Fox News playbook: Hire a token investigative journalist to construct a thin facade of balance while filling the remaining ranks with anti-woke contrarians. 

When an organization hires a conservative columnist known for asking whether liberal feminism ruined the workplace, or a producer whose major contributions include reframing starvation in Gaza through the lens of pre-existing health conditions, it signals a troubling shift in focus. 

Yet in their rush to destroy the old guard, Weiss and Ellison have overlooked the fact that they left behind an elite corps of unemployed, highly motivated investigative journalists with nothing left to lose. Whether this exiled team finds a home as the investigative video arm of an outlet like ProPublica, launches a streaming-native newsmagazine or partners with an independent distributor, the potential is staggering. Pelley and Alfonsi are now set to serve as journalists in residence at Columbia Journalism School during the 2026-27 academic year. While that is not a launch announcement, it is evidence that their careers and credibility did not disappear when CBS took away their airtime. 

Somewhere out there, a rival show called “Stop Watch” is writing itself, and CBS built the pitch deck for it, one firing at a time.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump’s Reflecting Pool Fiasco Is Going to Haunt Him

The Iran war remains in a stalemate with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and some are now comparing the Felon to Jimmy Cater being held hostage by Iran and others saying the Felon has been defeated by Iran.  Meanwhile, the Felon's poll numbers remain in the toilet, the US economy continues to limp along with a 23,000 drop in jobs, and the Felon's efforts to prosecute "vandals" who in the Felon's fantasies damaged the Reflecting Pool are collapsing. All the evidence points to incompetent work by a company owned by a crony of the Felon who received a no bid contract to repair the Reflecting Pool - the Felon now, of course, is pretending to not know the contractor - and cases against those wrongly prosecuted by the utterly corrupt Department of Justice ("DOJ") are bein dismissed. At least one wrongly targeted defendant, former Olympic canoeist David Hearn,  is suing to have the charges against him permanently dismissed and may seek monetary damages for wrongful prosecution and perhaps defamation.   A piece at the New Republic looks at how the Felon's wrongful prosecutions will likely continue to come back to haunt him despite is continued lies that the Reflecting Pool was vandalized:

You’d be forgiven for thinking the saga involving Donald Trump’s vile prosecutions of innocent people over his Reflecting Pool fiasco has finally come to an ignominious end. On Thursday, a judge officially threw out felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who’d been falsely accused by Trump of vandalizing his disastrous renovation of the landmark.

But this is not the final chapter in this story—not by a long shot. And what happens next will help settle whether we are capable of dispensing real justice to all those Trump accomplices who are helping make our slide into authoritarianism possible.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are set to launch an investigation into the decision to criminally charge Hearn and others over the Reflecting Pool fiasco, I’m told. Although Democrats are in the minority, their probe offers a blueprint for what they’ll pursue with subpoena power if they control the House in six months.

This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and potentially its future chair—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.

“Judiciary Democrats will investigate who lied, who buried the evidence, and who decided to threaten an American citizen with prison simply to protect Trump’s wounded feelings and continuing corruption,” Raskin said in a statement to me. “Participants in this frame-up will be held to account.”

At the center of this saga is Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, a longtime Trump confidante. Pirro’s office eagerly indicted an innocent man after the ailing despot in the Oval Office, embarrassed over reports of algae and other problems plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, raged that his underlings must produce a scapegoat to spare him humiliation. Pirro did subsequently move to dismiss the case. But there’s a ton we still don’t know about all these corrupt machinations.

The more we learn, the worse it will likely get. Hearn, 67, had claimed he’d merely stopped to observe the already-widely-discussed failures at the Reflecting Pool and dipped his hand in the water. Yet despite the plausibility of this account, when Pirro charged him July with felony property destruction (several others received lesser charges), she declared she had “tremendous evidence” of his guilt.

But only weeks later, when Pirro moved to drop the case in late July, her office admitted that a wealth of information provided to prosecutors by the Department of the Interior—which oversees management of the Reflecting Pool—showed that the damage had been caused by a “botched installation and not vandalism.”

What remains to be answered fully is this: How did Pirro’s office secure the July 2 indictment of Hearn for a felony, and what happened inside the Trump administration leading up to it?

Pirro’s office has defended itself by insisting that at the time of this indictment, the Interior Department misled prosecutors by initially failing to provide them info indicating that bad contracting caused the damage.

Making the Keystone Kops nature of this even more buffoonish, Pirro has now angrily accused Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of deliberately misleading her office by persuading prosecutors of Hearn’s guilt. But under ethics guidelines, prosecutors aren’t supposed to bring indictments unless they really think the charges are supported. Shouldn’t Pirro have looked more skeptically at this “evidence” before throwing the book at Hearn?

Indeed, none of Pirro’s excuses explain why her office brought the indictment when it did. . . . the government’s own sole witness testified to the grand jury that this damage was visible before Hearn ever touched it, and it was obvious to the naked eye that something far more than vandalism had marred the project.

“The notion that they did not know that there was a botched, rushed renovation of the Reflecting Pool does not hold water,” Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, told me.

Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.

Eisen confirmed to me that the push for those grand jury materials will now continue, despite Hearn’s exoneration. That’s because the court dismissed the case without prejudice—so prosecutors can theoretically revive the charges later. Getting those materials will hopefully persuade the court to rule that prosecutors cannot bring back this case, Eisen said, because they will “reflect on whether prosecutors were candid with the grand jury.”

Recall that well before the indictment, Trump was already publicly stating as fact that the project had been vandalized. This was surely understood by Pirro and Burgum as a command to make it true that vandalism caused the renovation’s failure.

The stakes here are very high. The Justice Department has become the site of an epic struggle over Trump’s lawless efforts to unleash law enforcement on his critics. Hearteningly, many of these gambits have imploded on contact with facts and law. Many prosecutors have resisted, leading to resignations and firings.

Yet the authoritarian abuses continue, relying on underlings who are willing to carry them out—some eagerly, and others no doubt because going along is easier than resisting, as there’s no perceived accountability in the offing. That’s why it’s critical to seek all manner of censure and redress. In the Hearn affair, this will likely include civil lawsuits against the government, asking the courts to impose professional sanctions on key actors, and seeking their disbarment—possibly up to Pirro herself.

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Iran Issues List of Demanded American Concessions

The Felon has continually claimed that Iran is "desperate" for a peace deal and that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz was imminent.   Like everything else flowing from the Felon's mouth these statements were lies aimed at calming the oil markets - the price of oil is rising again - or merely expressions of the Felon's delusion that he is in control of the situation.  With the release of a list of demanded American concessions, including war reparations payments, Iran has underscored the falsity of the Felon's claims.  Indeed, Iran appears like a cat playing with a mouse before going in for the kill - which in this context means keeping oil prices high and gleefully watching as the Felon's poll numbers tank and GOP concerns about the mid-term elections intensifies. All of this makes it clear that the war against Iran by the Felon and his unqualified Secretary of Defense was a fool's errand and unforced error that was doomed to go off the rails with America losing control of the situation.  By this statement, no slight is made towards American service members doing their best to follow the ill-advised directions of the Felon and Hegseth. Meanwhile, the Felon continues to threaten allies - a Texas company is seemingly preparing to drill for oil in Greenland without local or Danish approval. A piece in the New York Times looks at Iran's latest demands:

A top Iranian national security official delivered a sweeping set of demands on Saturday that he said the United States must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can reopen to maritime traffic, throwing the fate of the critical trade waterway into question.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a statement carried by state media laying out multiple requirements for reopening the strait. He called for the United States to lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets, as well as end attacks on Iran’s allies in the region and threats against the country.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Iran’s demands. A previous cease-fire between Iran and the United States, agreed to in June, had said that sanctions would be fully lifted only in the event of a final deal regarding Iran’s nuclear program. And U.S. officials have said in the past that Iran could access its frozen funds only if it committed to giving up its highly enriched uranium first.

Mr. Zolghadr’s list of demands upended expectations that a deal with Oman would soon allow commerce to flow through the strait once more and ease global energy prices. They will likely put pressure on President Trump to consider Iran’s conditions if he wants to lower consumer prices for Americans, which pose a risk for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Even before Mr. Zolghadr’s statement, Iranian officials had hinted on Saturday that the reopening of the strait was not imminent. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said that reopening the strait was “not contingent on the Iran-Oman negotiations.”

In comments carried by Tasnim, an Iranian news outlet affiliated with the Guards, Mr. Mohebbi said that it would depend “on the United States fully accepting Iran’s conditions.” . . . “However, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is contingent on other conditions, including the United States compensating for its violations of the Islamabad Memorandum,” Mr. Araghchi was quoted as saying, referring to the cease-fire agreement that Iran and the United States signed in June.

The United States backed a southern route for ships that skirted Oman’s coastline and avoided Iranian waters, and Iran responded by warning and striking ships that took that route. The cease-fire soon collapsed, and the United States reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

“The Americans were seeking to establish new routes through the Strait of Hormuz, and despite the warnings issued by our country, they sought to undermine Iran’s management of the strait,” Mr. Araghchi said. “Therefore, any violation of the memorandum of understanding or of Iran’s management of the Strait of Hormuz is absolutely unacceptable to the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli research institute, said the comments by Mr. Mohebbi and Mr. Araghchi reflected Iran’s view that its negotiations with Oman were intended “at most” to work out how the waterway will be reopened in the future.

Even if Iran and Oman agree to specifics on the strait, “it is clear that Tehran will not agree to implement them without a return to the U.S. commitments under the memorandum, including lifting the naval blockade and resuming the process of sanctions relief,” Mr. Zimmt wrote on social media.

On Saturday, the Emirati foreign ministry said an Iranian attack had targeted a tanker belonging to the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as it crossed the Strait of Hormuz.

Just over a dozen ships per day have navigated the strait over the past week, according to Kpler, a maritime data company. Before the war, an average of 130 ships used the route daily.

To avoid detection by the Iranian or American forces imposing blockades on the strait, some ships switched off the transponders that transmit their locations, making an accurate count of crossings difficult to compile.

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