NATIONAL INDEPENDENT BEER RUN DAY UPDATES

An Appropriate Holiday to Celebrate with National Stay Out Of the Sun Day and Air Conditioner Appreciation Day!

-It has been said that Donald Trump decided to run for President the day he attended the White House Correspondents Dinner and became the butt of jokes of Barack Obama (and then watched Seal Team Six take out Osama Bin Laden), so there may be something to be said to be careful whenever Trump is publicly humiliated as he was on June 14 when his pathetic excuse of a military parade on his birthday was vastly overwhelmed by the No Kings protests. Ever since, Trump has apparently been trying to buck up his fragile psyche, and decided the one way to do it was to give him a big July 4 thing to do to make him feel big and manly and Presidential and get one on all those people that hate him (which is quite a list and growing).

-That thing, as it is turning out, is to sign what Trump Congressional lickspittles monstrously named One Big Beautiful Bill, and which this Substack has modestly renamed the Big Bill O'Crap. Once thought to be tantalizingly close to defeat, as of this writing it is tragically on the verge of being passed by the MAGA GOP Congress, in a series of votes driven solely by that artificial July 4 deadline (a budget need not be passed until mid-August) and a Republican Party brought to heel and driven by cult-like devotion to a fast-developing autocrat whose fee-fees are wounded virtually every second he breatheleers.

-Witness how the vote went down Tuesday in the Senate, where the House bill was taken and made horribly worse - led by devastating and gratuitous cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, SNAP funds to feed children, an explosion in the Federal deficit, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and most ominously, the metastization of ICE into a quasi-secret police force with a budget that will be larger than the Coast Guard and the ability to become the largest jailer in the world (with "jail" being a misnomer in that jails are supposed to be for criminals, which ICE facilities would not be). With virtually ever Republican fully aware of how catastrophic the bill has the potential to be, only three Republicans could muster the courage to vote NO - Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Thom Tillis.

-The fourth Republican that could have killed the bill to at least get it rewritten was Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, but as we all know by now, Murkowski voted yes on the bill on the pathetic excuse that even though several attempts to carve out special dispensations for her home state (screw the rest of the country) were knocked down by the Senate Parliamentarian, she still decided to move the bill to the House in the stupid belief the House would put the brakes on the bill to revise it. She spent the post-vote catatonically staring and attempting to give the silent treatment to an NBC reporter who tried to get a comment.

-If she was staring before, she may very well go blind, as the bill move to the House, where another set of Kabuki played out that at least led to some further humiliation of the worst Speaker in American history, Mike Johnson.

-There, what should have been a five-minute vote to move the entirety of the Senate reconciliation bill in the House became a ten-hour standoff where ten MAGA members voted "present" rather than move the bill to the floor in hopes to make the bill even WORSE, four expected NO votes, and an unexpected fifth NO vote from a PA Representative whose district voted for Biden that nobody knew was going to vote NO.

-In regular times that would have killed this bill and returned it to committee for further drafting and new votes - but that would not allow Dear Leader an Independence Day ceremony, and THAT. CAN. NOT. STAND in MAGAville, so Johnson kept the vote open and worked to sway the votes he needed to get it to the floor to no avail. So, naturally, he went to the White House, where the votes were flipped - and you will roll your eyes and scream to the Heavens while every patriot tomorrow should celebrate whirls in their graves as to what was promised to get all but the PA Representative to vote to advance the bill ...

-Were those districts given jobs? Bridges? Exemptions? No - according to the New York Times, all the MAGAts needed to get was … merch. Signed MAGA hats. Promises of photos with Dear Leader in the Oval Office. Phone calls. So (a) Speaker Johnson not even being able to do THAT shows just what kind of a puppet he is (one controlled by a puppet-master with wee tiny hands); and (b) MAGA continues to show their cult-like devotion to Trump, and just how cheap they are.

-That the bill has not been voted on yet as of this draft is because of one person: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who decided to bend time himself by using what is referred to as "the miracle minute" to break a record for holding the floor in one last gasp attempt to find four votes to kill this version of the bill and go back to the drawing board after July 4. A noble attempt, but (a) let's not get our hopes up that it will work - another one-vote margin is likely, (b) another delay to extract more "concessions" (maybe a photo with Melania? maybe a bottle of Trump Perfume?); and (c) let's not rip on Jeffries or the Democrats unless we admit our role in this debacle for not getting enough of our voters out last November to get to where we are. (We're Democrats, we can take some responsibility here.)

-Get ready for the bill to get on line, and get ready for people finally reading it to see what's on in it, and for the open-book plan for MAGA to try to bamboozle their districts logn enough to keep Congress for two more years.

-A cursory reading of the Senate bill, as reported by The Daily and other outlets, shows that the big Medicaid cuts are not going to go into effect until 2027 and 2029 - far enough from the midterms and general election for MAGA Media (with certain help from Legacy Media, Inc. - STINK EYE TOWARDS CBS) to try to say "Medicaid cuts? What Medicaid cuts?!", but also windows by which Democrats, if they can regain control of at least the House, can use the budget process to attempt to mitigate some of the worst of what is going to happen. And it's not like other bad stuff won't happen - and much of that will be written about as the rancid crap is put out there, so we won't get into all of that at this time.

-But the ICE stuff we need to highlight, because it is beyond grotesque. Just as the trains kept rolling even as Germany was losing World War II, so too is Stephen Miller's racist wet dream (which is all he has with wifey now with Elon Musk) of an all-white 'Murika fuses with the high-tech eugenics of the Peter Thiel/Curtis Yarvin/JD Vance wing of MAGA with the funding ICE is about to get. Indeed, a sub-reason for the bill getting rammed through was the fear of ICE running out of money having spent it like drunken sailors in just five months - a fear soon to be alleviated. Trump proudly toured the new holding facility in FL, which is selling merch as "Alligator Alcatraz" featuring alligators with ICE hats being bought by many MAGA media choads - available through the White House and (for a time) on Etsy.

-If you needed any further anger towards them, a social media post by Very Special Trump, Ahrm, "Advisor" Laura Loomer trumpeted that "Alligator Lives Matter" before "fantasizing" about being able to feed "65 million alligators." That number is deliberate. It is not reporting that there are 65 million illegal immigrants, but 65 million Hispanics in the United States in total. So someone with Trump's ... ah ... ears ... is openly making jokes about nothing less than ethnic cleansing of the country. All that, and the facility flooded hours after the tour thanks to a gentle rainstorm.

-Goals for the next No Kings protests later this month are becoming clearer and clearer, as mass action will be necessary to fight back against what promises to be ghastly abuses amped up for one of the lone companies currently hiring in the United States. (The "unemployment numbers" released today by the White House are already being brought into question by that known liberal commie outlet Bloomberg News as being untrustworthy, so ...)

-So Trump will get his bill ... and whenever he signs it, be aware that, after reports from multiple aides in on the meetings, Trump will sign a bill he does not think cuts Medicare at all. Even as legislators whose jobs are on the line by passing the bill to make him happy tried to tell him that, no, the bill not only touches Medicaid but grabs it like a p***y, Trump continued to insist that the bill did not do what it is about to do. It is also not as if witnesses thought Trump wasn't being told by his handlers, but that he did not seem to comprehend the question itself.

-That issue - comprehension of questions - was laid bare on Wednesday when he was sitting down to answer questions from the press (NOT standing as he used to) after his tour of the FL ICE holding facility. The question he was asked, by a Fox reporter, no less, was this: "Is there a specific time frame you expect the detainees to spend here - days, weeks, months?" Trump asked if the reporter meant Florida - the state he was in - the reporter helpfully added, "Yes, here at Alligator Alcatraz." Here is the verbatim transcript of Trump's response:

-“I’m gonna spend a lot. This is my home state. I love it. I love your government. I love all the people around … these are all friends of mine. I know them very well, and I’m not surprised that they do so well. Ron [DeSantis] has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in this state. I’ll spend a lot of time here. You know for four years I’ve got to be in Washington, and I’m OK with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. It’s like a diamond. It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. It wasn’t maintained properly, I will tell you that, but even when it wasn’t it was still the Oval Office so it meant a lot.

-“But I’ll spend as much time as I can here. You know my vacation is generally here because it’s convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It’s my home, and I have a very nice little place. A nice little cottage to stay at, right. But we have a lot of fun and I’m a big contributor to Florida. We pay a lot of tax. A lot of people move from New York, and I don’t know what New York is gonna do. A lot of people move from Florida to New York for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. Taxes are so high you can’t believe it. I don’t know what New York is gonna do about because some of the biggest, wealthiest people, and some of the people that pay the most taxes of anyone in the world for that matter, they are moving to Florida and other places. So, we are going to have to help some of these states out I think but thank you very much. I’ll be here as much as I can.”

-“Very nice question!”

-After playing the over 2:30 minute clip on his show, Lawrence O'Donnell simply noted, "He's not there. His mind does not work." His niece Mary Trump has been saying the same thing, and Salon's Brian J. Karem notes that, as Trump now only plays golf in a course in Virginia (not even his Jersey course, much less Mar-a-Lago), does not work at all on Mondays, and has people near his inner circle whispering off the record that he's not "in good physical health." Not to mention his mental health, such as it is.

-But hey, that's okay, because THIS JUST IN ... the Big Bill O'Crap is the Big Law O'Crap, as the MAGAGOP House passed it 218-214. Two Republicans voted with all the Democrats to try to stop it. Trump has an appearance in Des Moines, IA this afternoon to proceed the signing ceremony for what is already acknowledged to be one of the worst, if not the worst, pieces of legislation passed in American history - so we will get to see what is likely to be Trump's finest moment of his second term tomorrow. Which is barely six months in.

-We will have plenty of time to assess what happens next because we will have to, but if at all possible, please try to do what you can to not let Trump ruin tomorrow's holiday. You can ignore the actual holiday and barbecue, but I will be celebrating the America we will need to work for when Trump is gone - and he will, some day, sooner or later, be gone. And as you can see, there will be places to try to mitigate the damage in the short-term - but it's gonna take work we will all have to do, which will take energy and each other. We can and we will, so on to the trivia, and have an Independence Day.

-NEWS ON THIS DATE: In 1775, George Washington became Commander of the Continental Army. In 1863, Union forces defeated the Confederates, winning the Battle of Gettysburg and turning the tide of the Civil War. In 1962, Algeria won its independence from France. In 1973, David Bowie announced the retirement of his Ziggy Stardust persona. In 1976, Israeli forces rescued hostages from a hijacked plane in an airport in Entebbe, Uganda. In 2013, the Egyptian military overthrew President Mohammad Morsi, who took the office after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in the so-called Arab Spring the year before.

-DEBUTS ON THIS DATE: Quebec City (1608), color television (1928), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME (1984), BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985).

-HAPPPY BIRTHDAY: Samuel de Champlain, George M. Cohan, Franz Kafka, Margaret McFarland, George Sanders, M.F.K. Fisher, Earl Butz, Ken Russell, Pete Fountain, Tommy Tedesco, David Shire, Tom Stoppard, Fontella Bass, Gloria Allred, Michael Cole, Betty Buckley, Dave Barry, Jan Smithers, Laura Branigan, Frank Tanana, Montel Williams, Stephen Pearcy, Vince Clarke, Thomas Gibson, Tom Cruise, Yeardley Smith, Greg Vaughn, Moises Alou, Brian Cashman, Audra McDonald, Teemu Selanne, Patrick Wilson, Olivia Munn, and Sebastian Vettel.

-REST IN PEACE/POWER: Andre Citroen, Trigger, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Ross Martin, Rudy Vallee, Jim Backus, Curly Joe DeRita, Don Drysdale, Pancho Gonzalez, Gaylord Nelson, Boots Randolph, Andy Griffith, Arte Johnson, Vince Tobin, and today, Diogo Jota and Michael Madsen.

-FEED THE WORMS: Jean-Claude Duvalier and Julian Assange entered Earth on this date.

-TODAY'S MUSICAL INTERLUDE: The first single from the album WHITE BLOOD CELLS, released on this date in 2001.