Extreme Commanders

If Trump and Vance like to make up names, the media might as well play along. They laugh at others being annoyed or offended.

Vance wants to embrace his Appalachian heritage? VP Cletus has a ring to it.

Got nothing for Trump that hasn’t already been said … so I’d just go with President Spray-tan golf-cheat

'President this rattled': Trump reportedly 'spooked by a bombshell leak'

Trump will continue his aggressive PR blitz on Iran this morning as the president seeks to hammer home the message that his bombing raids were a success. Trump will send out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and assorted “military representatives” for an 8 a.m. news conference — neatly timed to catch the Fox News breakfast crowd — to again make the case that Iran’s nuclear facilities have been utterly destroyed.

And that’s just the start: At 1 p.m. Trump’s combative press secretary Karoline Leavitt will enter the fray with a televised White House press briefing, which you already know will be focused on Saturday’s air strikes. (Also — don’t be surprised if she gives representatives from CNN and The New York Times a hard time.) And then at 4 p.m. Trump himself will appear for a White House event specifically focused on the passage of his “big, beautiful bill.” It surely won’t take long for Iran to come up.

Here’s the thing: It’s rare to see the president this rattled by a negative story about his administration. Obviously Trump goes after the media all the time, but it mostly feels performative these days — and maybe it always did. This is different. The president posted 21 times on Truth Social yesterday about the supposed success of his military strikes. And at yesterday’s NATO summit — a moment specifically designed by the Western world for Trump to bask in the glory of a huge defense spending boost — he spent most of his public appearances repeating his assertions on Iran.

What’s going on? Critics see a president spooked by a bombshell leak that has undermined his authority. Supporters say Trump is genuinely outraged by what he claims is false reporting and wants the record corrected. Either way — he’s using every tool in his arsenal to push back hard: Witness the hammer-like repetition that sites were “obliterated”; the plentiful use of surrogates like Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio; the vindictive targeting of the journalists and media organizations involved; the barrage of statements from both U.S. and Israeli intelligence chiefs yesterday that the initial report was wrong.

Playing the patriotism card: Today things will get even more heated when we’re told that to even question whether Iran’s mountainous defenses might have held up a little better than expected is an outrageous slur on America’s armed forces. Hegseth’s job this morning is to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “These Patriots were very upset! After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times.”

And that’s before we get to the leakers themselves … who are now facing an FBI investigation. The White House is already pointing the finger of blame at Congress, per Axios’ Marc Caputo, and there will be retribution in that direction too. “Administration sources say they’re planning to limit posting on CAPNET, a system the administration uses to share classified information with Congress,” Caputo reports. “Almost as soon as we put the information on CAPNET, it leaks,” an administration source tells him. “There’s no reason to do this again.”

Street food vendor clings to tree as immigration agents detain her in Ladera Heights

A street food vendor was seen clinging to a tree as federal immigration agents took her into custody in Ladera Heights.

On June 23, Aleca Le Blanc said she spotted several masked agents grabbing the woman while she was selling food outside a Home Depot store.

Le Blanc quickly walked over to the agents and asked for identification but was ignored.

She said the agents refused to identify themselves or provide proof of a warrant for the woman’s arrest. As they grab the woman, she clings onto a tree to avoid being taken.

Several more bystanders approach the group and demand that officers take their hands off her. The woman was eventually handcuffed and taken into custody.

“She was calm and quiet and just resilient,” Le Blanc told KTLA’s Ellina Abovian. “She held onto the tree, but eventually they were able to rip her off and shove her arms behind her back.”

Le Blanc said the agents were armed and pushed the woman into an unmarked SUV. Some of the agents’ vests appeared to have a Border Patrol insignia. As bystanders were heard yelling, “They’re kidnapping her!” the agents reportedly threw tear gas at the group before they drove off.

“These guys throw three canisters of tear gas at the five of us who were standing around,” Le Blanc said.

The street food vendor was later identified as Selena Vanessa Hernandez Ramirez, 25, from El Salvador. She is also reportedly the mother of a 5-year-old boy.

“Here’s the thing, whether she has a criminal record or not, the [agents] didn’t even know who she was,” Le Blanc. “She was clearly just being profiled, chasing a random woman with brown skin down the street.”

Click on the link for the full article and video

GOP budget bill could transfer wealth from young Americans to older generations, study finds

The Republican budget package aims to make President Donald Trump's tax cuts permanent while offering a host of new financial breaks. Yet the "big, beautiful bill," as the legislation is dubbed, could also effectively transfer wealth from younger generations to older Americans over their lifetimes, a recent study finds.

Long-term, the primary beneficiaries of the GOP bill would be older, wealthier Americans, while younger, middle- to low-income people would see fewer benefits, according to the analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a University of Pennsylvania think tank that studies the fiscal issues.

The group's projection assesses the impact of proposed tax cuts under the bill, as well as reductions in federal programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, better known as food stamps. Penn Wharton also factors in the long-term fiscal impact of the debt the U.S. would likely have to issue to pay for the bill's tax cuts, the group said.

Younger Americans would bear the brunt of the nation's spiraling debt, Kent Smetters, director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told CBS MoneyWatch.

"Somebody has to pay — nothing is for free. In this case, that's the future generations," he said. "We have finally reached this inflection point where under any reasonable estimation, younger people are going to be worse off in the future" if the current version of the bill is passed.

For example, the bill would cost an infant born into a low-income family $14,100 over their lifetime. This loss stems from factors including reduced social safety net benefits and lower wages resulting from slower economic growth driven by increased national debt and deficits.

On the other hand, a high-income 70-year-old stands to gain $120,000 over his remaining years due to the proposed legislation's tax cuts and other benefits, the analysis found.

Click on the link for the full article

Apparently Costa Rica now provides better due process than the US:

Court orders Costa Rican government to release Asian migrants deported by Trump

Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday ordered the government of Rodrigo Chaves to release Asian migrants deported by the Trump administration who have been held in a temporary shelter in the Central American country since February.

In a 4-3 vote, the justices found that the Costa Rican government had violated the migrants’ rights by failing to provide them with “timely and sufficient information” about their immigration status or give them access to legal counsel. “Nor was free contact with the media permitted, nor was there any information from the outset about the possibility of requesting asylum,” the court said in a statement.

The judges gave the government 15 days to release the deported migrants and ordered it to determine their immigration status “individually” and based on the law.

In February, the Trump administration sent 200 Asian migrants to Costa Rica on two deportation flights, including nearly 100 children. The deportees came from countries such as China, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan. More than 70 were minors.

The agreement between the two countries was reached as Costa Rica feared that President Donald Trump would retaliate if it refused to accept the migrants, according to statements made to the press by the president and the foreign minister.

Click on the link for the full article

Gavin Newsom’s office says Linda McMahon’s ‘fake’ threats over trans kids in sports ‘divorced from reality’

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the former professional wrestling magnate, on Wednesday morning, said California could lose federal funding if it refuses to comply with new Title IX enforcement demands targeting transgender student-athletes, escalating the Trump administration’s broad effort to penalize states that allow students to compete based on gender identity.

Her comments came just hours before the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights formally announced its conclusion that the California Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation are in violation of Title IX, the federal civil rights law barring sex-based discrimination in education. The department claims that California’s policy of allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports constitutes unlawful sex discrimination.

In a press release Wednesday, the department said California must rescind its guidance permitting participation based on gender identity, issue written apologies to cisgender female athletes, restore records and titles “misappropriated by [transgender] athletes,” and adopt binary “biology-based definitions” of sex. If the CDE and CIF do not accept the proposed resolution agreement within 10 days, the department said that the matter will be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“The state must swiftly come into compliance with Title IX or face the consequences that follow,” McMahon warned in the release. She added that Newsom himself “admitted months ago it was ‘deeply unfair’ to allow men to compete in women’s sports,” referencing the governor’s controversial March podcast interview with far-right activist Charlie Kirk.

That interview drew sharp condemnation from LGBTQ+ advocates, including the Human Rights Campaign, who accused Newsom of legitimizing anti-trans narratives. “It is an issue of fairness,” Newsom said during the debut episode of This Is Gavin Newsom, agreeing with Kirk’s framing of trans girls in school sports. Although his office later attempted to clarify his position, civil rights groups argued that the damage was done.

Newsom’s office rejected McMahon’s threat. “It wouldn’t be a day ending in ‘Y’ without the Trump Administration threatening to defund California,” Newsom’s director of communications, Izzy Gardon, told The Advocate. “Now, Secretary McMahon is confusing government with her WrestleMania days — dramatic, fake, and completely divorced from reality. This won’t stick.”

According to a state official, the CIF is an independent nonprofit organization, not part of the Newsom administration, and they noted that California is one of 22 states with laws requiring schools to allow students to participate in athletics consistent with their gender identity. The state’s law — AB 1266 — was enacted in 2013 under then-Gov. Jerry Brown. The number of transgender student-athletes in California’s public school system, the official said, is estimated to be in the single digits among 5.8 million students.

Another official in Newsom’s office called the resolution “not a serious legal document, telling The Advocate that it’s a political document designed to intimidate school officials and unlawfully override well-established state laws protecting students.” The staffer said the agreement would force retaliation against transgender students by requiring school officials to comb through more than a decade of athletic records and strip medals, titles, and honors from trans girls, even if those students are no longer enrolled. The proposal, the person added, would mandate misgendering and public shaming by requiring schools to “certify” that no trans girls are participating in girls’ sports and then publicly post that information online.

Click on the link for the full article

Senate referee rejects key Medicaid cuts in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has rejected key Medicaid provisions in the Senate GOP megabill, a ruling that appears to strike a major blow to Republicans’ strategy for cutting federal spending.

The Senate’s referee rejected a plan to cap states’ use of health care provider taxes to collect more federal Medicaid funding, a proposal that would have generated hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to offset the cost of making President Trump’s corporate tax cuts permanent, according to a Democratic summary of the parliamentarian’s ruling.

The decision could force Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to reconsider his plan to bring the Senate bill up for a vote this week.

The cap on health care provider taxes in both states that expanded Medicaid and did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act was projected to save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years, but it would have forced states to shoulder substantially more of the cost for Medicaid coverage.

The provision generated strong pushback from several Senate Republicans, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who warned deep cuts to federal Medicaid spending could cause dozens of rural hospitals in their states to close.

Hawley and Collins declined to say Wednesday whether they would vote to proceed to the bill unless Senate Republican leaders came up with a plan to save rural hospitals from bankruptcy.

The parliamentarian ruled that Sect. 71120 of the bill covering health care provider taxes violates the Byrd Rule, which determines what legislation is eligible to pass the Senate with a simple-majority vote on the budget reconciliation fast track.

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Meta boss praises new US army division enlisting tech execs as lieutenant colonels

Meta’s chief technology officer has called it “the great honor of my life” to be enlisted in a new US army corps that defence chiefs set up to better integrate military and tech industry expertise, including senior figures from top tech firms that also include Palantir and OpenAI.

Andrew Bosworth, a long-term lieutenant to Mark Zuckerberg known widely as “Boz”, is one of several senior Silicon Valley executives commissioned to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the corps, called Detachment 201, which the US army says will “fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation”.

Bosworth, who joined Facebook in 2006, was sworn into the army reserves earlier this month alongside Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, a technology firm with extensive defence contracts, Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI, and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab, a $10bn AI company. They wore military fatigues at the swearing-in ceremony but will not be full-time soldiers.

The recruitment is a sign of the increasing importance of technology in modern warfare and growing commercial and research links between some of the largest tech firms and the military. The US army said it was “just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers”.

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Is this supposed to be like a tech version of the US Public Health Service Commissiioned Corps?