Tag: One Big Beautiful Bill

Twosdaz Theme Music

If that’s the garbage truck, it must be Twozda. Indeed, it’s the garbage truck and Twozda, October 7, 2025. Beautiful 67 F with blue skies forever and sunshine flooding over the trees and mountains. 81 F is in range as today’s top end.

Trump news has me itchy with irritation. With the government shutdown underway, stats and data useful to decision making and trend spotting is MIA. Air traffic controllers and the military are being asked to work without pay. ATC is a stressful job. The military can be as stressful. Working without pay adds to that stress. Financial institutions are helping both segments cope with the loss of income but how sustainable is that? Beyond those areas, home foreclosures under Trump are on the rise. Mortgage rates are high. Insurance costs are soaring and will go yet higher as the costs of replacement materials increase. Local taxes and service fees are increasing to replace revenue losses and the loss of Federal assistance under the Trump Regime. Food prices keep going up. Going into the holiday season in the United States, the vaunted last three months of the year, home to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanza, and Hannukah, prices of gifts and food are expected to take deep bites out of budgets. Couple that with other factors, and an ugly quagmire is being put into place.

The Trump Regime doesn’t help any of it. As tax revenues fall and farmer suffer from losses because of tariffs, the Trump Regime wants to bail out the farmers hurting from Trump’s destructive tariffs and trade wars. It’s a classic downward spiral. Contributing further, Trump is cutting off renewable energy projects. That takes a chunk out of the economy, as those projects usually contributed to state and city local economic booms. Unemployment will rise. Meanwhile, his moves to instill manufacturing will take time. And if people are unemployed and counting pennies to get buy, who is going to buy the goods that the factories make? He’s killing the market.

Finally, uselessly deploying troops to cities are estimated to cost about twenty million dollars a day per place. Trump thinks that tariffs will replace tax revenues but if people are buying less and less because the cost of everything is rising, WTH does he think is going to buy? Coupled with all of this, the government shutdown and shaky economic and weakening economic forecast will drive higher costs to pay off the Federal deficit, and it has already caused companies to put spending and hiring plans on hold.

It is a fucking mess, and will just get worse. Healthcare premiums are set to soar under the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. Read that in the mocking tone it deserves. With healthcare premiums increasing, people will cut insurance. More people will get sick but get help less often, usually until it’s dire. This leads to increasing healthcare costs and lower productivity. Lower productivity generates higher costs. All this is historically documented. The Trump Regime refuses to acknowledge those history lessons.

Stack on: tourism is down and will keep going down as Trump’s military presence grows in cities and his ICE agents aggressively attack people. Those are bad optics for tourism, and the soft data tells us that foreign visitors are shunning the United States as a tourist, education, and business destination. Additionally, the Trump assault on universities and colleges are reducing enrollment. That means those institutions will need to cut overhead and personnel. And, again, as Trump cuts Federal funding for government-backed research, activities in those projects will significantly drop or go completely idle. That’s more lost jobs. More lost local revenue. More lost Federal revenue.

It’ll all come crashing down under its own weight. Our questions are, how bad will it get? How long will it take before all these pressures come together to fuse the political will to work against Trump. So far, the GOP is completely MIA in this. This is their mess, but it will crush all except the wealthiest. The wealthiest, like Trump.

Reminder: this is the Epstein shutdown. The fear releasing the files. Releasing the files might generate the political will to move on from Trump. And the GOP is happier with him and they in charge, wrecking the world, than revealing who he is. As if we don’t already know. I guess they fear the validation of who he is, who they worship, and support.

All this stirred The Neurons to play “On the Dark Side” in the morning mental music stream. This song was from a movie called Eddie and the Cruisers, about the life and times of a fake rock band with heavy focus on the tortured soul lead singer, Eddie. The real music is performed by John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band.

Enough venting, enough from the dark side. Hope grace and peace resurfaces for us all and doesn’t hold out too much longer. Time for coffee. Time to write. Here we go, out into the day. Cheers

3

Sprigs of Democracy

Grand Juries Refused to Indict These Ham Sandwiches—and Other Sprigs of Democracy This Week…

Annie shares some encouraging stories which might be developing into a trend. I have another Item (or two) to add to her list.

Item:

Republicans are learning that their constituents are not happy with Trump. The general warning being circulated around Republican centers of power is, don’t meet the voters face to face. Do it remotely, by Zoom, if possible. Because voters are mad and vocal. The Daily Beast reports that Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson was repeatedly shouted down and challenged when he recently bucked that advice and held a town hall meeting in Ohio.

Janna Brancolini reports, Republican Hit With Furious Boos at Town Hall Disaster in JD Vance’s Backyard

“A U.S. representative from Ohio became the latest Republican to be heckled into silence during a disastrous town hall held just miles from where Vice President JD Vance grew up.“

“More than 500 people attended a rare town hall on Wednesday hosted by Rep. Warren Davidson in rural Trenton, Ohio, about five miles from the town of Middletown, which Vance immortalized in the memoir that catapulted him onto the national stage, Hillbilly Elegy.”

A self-professed Libertarian, Rep. Davidson could not explain how his small government views aligned with Trump’s growing police state, established by sending in National Guard units to ‘patrol’. The states and cities where he’s sending them did not ask for these troops and do not want them. With little crime to battle, the troops have been used to spread mulch and pick up trash. That’s not a good use for troops, especially at an estimated cost of S1,000,000 per day in our capitol. That will not reduce the budget deficit, as Trump has so frequently promised to do.

Item:

Donald Trump is even running away from his One Big Beautiful Bill’s impact and is struggling to change the narrative. Several media sites report that he announced that he would no longer refer to his One Big Beautiful Bill by that title any longer. He insists, that was just to sell it. As more critical observers note, it was never one big, beautiful bill, but a grotesque offering masquerading as something useful. The bill has not been popular with U.S. voters. As the truth about it seeps out, the bill is becoming less popular. Trump likes to insist that it’s a huge middle-class tax cut. Fact checkers such as PolitiFact note that’s an inaccurate description and rate Trump’s claim as “Mostly False”.

“For most families, they are going to see a child tax credit that increases by a maximum of $200 per child — from $2,000 to $2,200,” said Margot Crandall-Hollick, principal research associate at the Tax Policy Center. “Some are going to pay a little less because of the tips and overtime provisions and a slightly higher standard deduction.” 

“The law preserves a more generous standard deduction that had been set to expire and increases it slightly to $15,750 for single filers and $31,500 for joint filers in 2025, to be indexed to inflation annually.”

“At the same time, Crandall-Hollick said, some families, especially those with lower incomes, will  pay higher taxes because of the expiration of health insurance premium tax credits, which were not extended by the Big Beautiful Bill.”

Acting with predictable behavior, Trump is trying to rebrand his miserable bill and cast it in a more favorable light. However, with many Republican Senators themselves complaining about the bill’s impact on Medicaid, changing the subject won’t be easily done. Too many voters are personally running into the One Big Beautiful Bill’s chainsaw effects. U.S. voters do not forgive and forget when they’re personally affected.

I’ll close with Annie’s summary and reminder.

“I hope you see the pattern here. We the People are the ultimate guardrail against the would-be dictator and his acolytes–as jurors, as voters, as concerned citizens insisting that our legislators act responsibly and urgently in behalf of the Constitution and the greater good.“

“Call 202-224-3121 and asked to be transferred to your senators and representative.“

0

Mundaz Wandering Political Thought

Lessee. Trump has begun a new week by breaking another agreement by inviting Putin to the United States and failing to protect and help Ukraine.

While Trump tells Americans they must tough it out as prices rise and they can’t afford medicine, his priority is not to we the people of the United States, but having a new ballroom built, a monstrosity that’s an offense to taste and an insult to integrity. (‘Kids don’t need to eat lunch’: Trump pauses $1 billion in funding for school lunches, food banks; USDA cancels $1 billion in funding for schools and food banks to buy food from local suppliers)

His mental faculties, never top notch, have crumbled more. During his speech, he kept referring to ‘going to Russia’ when he’s going to Alaska. Alaska is a U.S. state. Given Trump’s shaky grasp of knowledge, he may not know that. See more at ‘Doddering old man’: Trump’s Russia-Alaska blunder fuels concerns

Trump has lied and continues to lie and make up stories to justify his overreaching and erratic behavior. Included in this is his decison to take over control of Washington D.C.’s police force. Trump makes wild claims about roving gangs and rampant crime. Facts show instead that violent crime in D.C. is at a thirty-year low. (Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low)

Another lie Trump said was that he would not touch Medicaid benefits. (Here are the times Trump has said he wouldn’t cut Medicaid); his wholly inappropriately named ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ did just that, as shown by Republicans’ desperate move to restore them. (Vulnerable Republicans Are Claiming They Love Medicaid After Voting to Gut It; Why Josh Hawley Is Trying to Reverse Medicaid Cuts He Voted For)

For his lies, misconduct, broken promises, failure to uphold his oath of office, dishonesty, and failing mental capacity, he needs to be removed from office for the good of the United States and the world. He needs removed before his increasing incompetence and his desperation to appear strong drives him to do something really stupid with the military, including using nuclear weapons.

Impeach now.

0

Sundaz Theme Music

Sunda has arrived in Ashlandia and is offering it’s bonafides as a typical summer day for us. It is July 27,2025. July skidded by on greased slicks, with little sound but a lot of speed. 82 F now, at noon, sunny, an 87 F high is expected by most forecasters for us. Air quality is good with a small smell of wet smoke detected by my nose. That smoke may have been from the Greenway Fire in Medford, 90% contained and 256 acres.

Lot of Trump news to review today.

Donald Trump struggles to understand simple question amid ‘cognitive decline’ concerns

Trump posts fat JD Vance meme sparking rumor they’ve fallen out

Trump’s imaginary numbers, from $1.99 gas to 1,500 percent price cuts

Poll: Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Is a Flop With Voters

Trump Is Trying to Hide the Cost of Renovating His New Air Force One

I take exception with the use of ‘imaginary numbers’ in the one article. Imaginary numbers have a place in math; what Trump is using is fictional numbers to spread his lies, as fiction is something invented or feigned. I know I’m pissing up a tree. It’s semantics and pretty meaningless in a world which plays with irregardless, figuratively vs. literally, etc.

I find the Trump meme about a fat Vance hilarious. Hello, kettle, sayeth the pot. You’re black.

And, there we go again, talking about Trump’s cognitive decline and his age, but few others take up the beat, yet they mercilessly hammered President Biden about these things. Yes, we know where the media takes their lead.

Today’s theme music comes from being outside and considering the stars and the black field where they play. Looking at those nocturnal diamonds, I wondered if there was anyone out there coming to save us or destroyus. Meanwhile, The Neutons quickly filled the mental music stream with songs about space and time before bringing up the diamong aspect, and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd from 1975. I enjoy the lyrics and the sonic interplay happening during the various suites.

Hope you have the best Sunda that aliens, gods, fate, and your good selves can deliver. Time to put another one in the books. Cheers

0

Twosda’s Theme Music

Cool air regales us today, Twosda, July 15, 2025, in Ashlandia. Tiny wet old smoke offset’s the mountain air’s freshes. We’ll live. 68 F now, 97 F is forecasted. We saw 99.3 at our house yesterday but didn’t need the A/C. A clear blue sky and focused sun says, yeah, this might be a hot one.

On local news, the talk is about affordable housing. Affordable housing has been discussed since I moved here twenty years ago, along with growth. Each time ‘affordable housing’ is approved and built, investors snatch it up to flip or rent out. So it’s all been 20 years of talk and churn with no substantial changes.

Our local economy isn’t doing well. Ashland depends on tourism and Southern Oregon University (SOU) for the most part, along with some spotty light industry, mostly related to outdoor tourism, and of course, healthcare. Wineries and breweries give us two more legs. Beyond that, we have a service based economy, as most residents are older and retired. Tourism has been damaged by heat, wildfires, and smoke. Tourism’s centerpiece is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, assisted by a series of outdoor concerts called the Britt Festival. Both were heavily cratered by smoke, heat, and wildfires. The pandemic then knocked tourism back again just when recovery began. Now we hold our breath, cross our fingers, and wait to feel what Trump’s attacks on people, trade, common sense and other nations does to tourism.

Meanwhile, healthcare’s rising costs have driven costcutting, layoffs, and firings to that local industry. The Greedy Ol’ Trump Party’s monstrous bill is expected to implode rural healthcare activities, and we’re part of that scene.

Finally, SOU has announced that enrollment has declined again. Tuition has been raised but they can’t keep raising it, so they’ve cut staff and programs. Desperate for money, they’re planning to shift some unused parts of their their campus into that fast-growing industry, assisted living. But again, the greed propelled GOTP absurdly named ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is expected to body slam education at all levels. Trump has cut Pell Grants and other programs, and that will leave a mark.

Underlying all of it: Trump’s charge to deny climate change and do nothing except punish those who do try to talk about it and address its impacts and causes. But climate change will affect the beer and wine industry, tourism, and wildfires. Did I mention that insurance companies withdrew from providing coverage in the area?

BTW, talk is about more than just this. We’re also talking a lot about deer, as they’ve become aggressive and attack dogs and people walking dogs.

Today’s song is “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie. The Neurons slotted the 1974 song into the morning mental music stream for reasons they closehold and don’t disclose.

In a final comment on the morning, the local Internet, and by local, I mean ‘at my house’, is very sluggish. Anything happening to it out there in the world? Probably, but when will we learn?

Have the best day you can. I hope it’s excellent. Cheers

0

Frida’s Wandering Political Thoughts

Just putting out reminders who Trump is because he likes pretending he’s someone else. I know I’m getting numb to it; I’m sure others are, too. We’re angry but numb.

Angry But Numb might be a good rock group name.

0

Munda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

If you have a brain, and some thinking skills, the full Trumpasy is all revealed. Just check out the Trump Regime’s actions. Look at the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’. Read again Project 2025.

  1. Redistribute wealth to the wealthy. They need it to ‘build the economy’. This is called trickle down economics. It has been decisively proven not to work.
  2. Start shredding the welfare net. Cut Medicaid. Force people to work more.
  3. Cut all assistance contributed by the Federal government to the states and local communities. Downtrodden existences lead to downtrodden morale. A sick people is a desperate people, and are more easily manipulated.
  4. De-construct the education system. An uneducatd population is more guillible. Indoctrinate young people into right wing values via vouchers and private schools.
  5. Manufacture and reinforce negative stereotypes of other citizens, people who ‘are different’, i.e., people who are not heterosexual and white. This is useful for blame games and distraction, and helps neuter political will.
  6. Weaponize ICE into a paramilitary force. While laws limit what the US military is authorized to do to citizens, it’s a more wide-open field with ICE. Under the guise of rounding up ‘illegal immigrants’, the Trump Regime are also undermining due process and the concepts of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. People are being disappeared as the right-wing social media machine provides cover by declaring that the Constitution isn’t meant to be applied to ‘non-citizens’.
  7. Establish concentration camps. The first one has been built in Florida, of course. Don’t be surprised if Texas eagerly builds one in the race to be patriotic by refusing others equality, rights, and freedom. Disappearing people and creating concentration camps stoke fears and can be used to threaten political opposition.
  8. Build a right-wing Supreme Court bias that’s willing to overlook history and precedence, one which will used flawed interpretations of the U.S. Constitution to empower the Executive Branch and wipe out the checks and balance system provided by three equal branches.
  9. Weaponize trade. Try to force manufacturing back to the United States, even though the raw materials are obtained elsewhere, and even though the capital investments needed for new factories are astronomical. This provides a false hope of new jobs; there will be new jobs but they won’t pay wages needed to live in this ever expensive land, forcing people to work more, no matter their health or situation. This will also increase people’s desperation to work and make money to pay for basic goods and services such as food and housing, as prices see tariff-based inflation bound upward.
  10. But — also cut limitations on child labor laws. Encourage poor poeple to have more children to provide a larger and cheaper work force.
  11. Cut or waive environmental laws and regulations to reduce the cost of building new manufacturing facilities.
  12. Nurture confusion among facts and distrust of the news media. Confusion helps the Regime maintain control by undermining grass root organizations’ ability to effectively organize and protest. It also allows the Regime to turn citizen against citizen in a cold war that favors the Trump Regime’s heavy hand.
  13. Distract, distract, distract. In this endeavor, natural disasters are your friend; they pull focus from the political arena. Reduce the Federal government’s effectiveness in predicting disasters and helping states and communities. Again, chaos, confusion, and low morale are useful for controlling and manipulating the population. As a bonus, when a natural disaster levels a region, it opens up land and opportunity to rebuild. People with next to nothing can be more easily induced to take less pay for bad jobs.
  14. Attack other nations; encourage aggression among other nations. Make the world a scarier place.

Yes, this is cynical. It’s not my thinking, but my interpretation of what the Trump Regime and the Republican-filled Greedy Ol’ Trump Party, also known as the GOTP, is doing. Show me I’m wrong. Point to Trump’s actions and demonstrate otherwise. Parse that OBBB for clues that this is not what the Trump Regime pursues.

Time will tell. It’s already told us a great deal in the first six months of 2025.

1

Sunda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

Southwest Nebraska medical center announces plans to close, blames uncertainty over funding

The uncertainty over federal Medicaid funding appears to have claimed its first victim in Nebraska.

Community Hospital in McCook announced Wednesday that it will close Curtis Medical Center in Curtis, winding down its services over the next several months.

“Unfortunately, the current financial environment, driven by anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid, has made it impossible for us to continue operating all of our services, many of which have faced significant financial challenges for years,” Troy Bruntz, President and CEO of Community Hospital, said in a news release.

The budget reconciliation bill that the House of Representatives voted to approve on Thursday contains several provisions that experts say will slash Medicaid, which rural hospitals are more dependent on than their urban counterpart

Read the rest…

Mauna Loa Observatory captured the reality of climate change. The US plans to shut it down

The greenhouse effect was discovered more than 150 years ago and the first scientific paper linking carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with climate change was published in 1896.

But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists could definitively detect the effect of human activities on the Earth’s atmosphere.

In 1956, United States scientist Charles Keeling chose Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano for the site of a new atmospheric measuring station. It was ideal, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at high altitude away from the confounding influence of population centres.

Data collected by Mauna Loa from 1958 onward let us clearly see the evidence of climate change for the first time. The station samples the air and measures global CO₂ levels. Charles Keeling and his successors used this data to produce the famous Keeling curve – a graph showing carbon dioxide levels increasing year after year.

But this precious record is in peril. US President Donald Trump has decided to defund the observatory recording the data, as well as the widespread US greenhouse gas monitoring network and other climate measuring sites.

Read the rest…

The Dilemma of the Fourth of July
As we finish out this holiday weekend, it’s a good moment to reflect on how the Fourth of July is a complicated holiday for many of those living in the United States. At Native News Online, author Mark Charles looks at the contradictions in the experience of July 4th for many Native communities.

“The other day I was eating dinner with my wife in a restaurant located in Gallup, New Mexico, a border town to the Navajo reservation. Gallup was recently named “Most Patriotic Small Town” in a nationwide contest. Soon after sitting down I noticed that we were seated at a table directly facing a framed poster of the Declaration of Independence.

The irony almost made me laugh.

When our server, who was also Native, came to the table, I asked if I could show him something. I then stood up and pointed out that 30 lines below the famous quote “All men are created equal” the Declaration of Independence refers to Natives as “merciless Indian savages.”

The irony was that the restaurant was filled with Native Americans customers and employees and there in plain sight, a poster hanging on the wall was literally calling all of us “savages.”

Read more…

0

Wenzda’s Theme Music

It’s Wenzda, aka humpday, but also July 2, 2025. Cooled down to a comfortable level last night some and the morning ingredients are calling birds, blue sky, sunshine, and 72F. High will be 83 F, a drop from what I saw yesterday at my casa, 95 F.

I realized this morning that I’m in a metaphorical holding-my-breath state. So many balls in the air. I scan horizons for ‘the next’ in six different directions. Out there is the One Big Beautiful Bill, known in some places as the Big Ripoff, the Great Screwed Up Give to the Rich bill in others. Trump was again idiotically blithering on TV like someone who shouldn’t be allowed out on their own again. Russia and Ukraine’s war continues. Iran and Israel are still out there glaring at one another. Israel bombed some more people in Gaza. Don’t worry: they’re ‘investigating’ how it came to be that they bombed a cafe and killed reporters and workers and such. Yep. Tariffs hang all over everything like toilet paper from trees after Devil’s Night. Supreme Court rulings have been issued and the storms building behind those will come out. It’s Hurricane Season. Europe is suffering record heat and it’s not that cool in ‘Merica, either. Wildfires burn and FEMA is ready to shrug because Trump says states should be doing it for themselves. DOGE has had access to personal data; can that be good? The U.S. measles outbreak has ‘plateaued’ according to the gov’t but has it really? And what will happen with all that new guidance from the science and medicine skewed HHS led by worm brain Kennedy? Killer Noem’s ICE Troops seem more reckless, sanctuary and blue states are being threatened by Trump, he has a new eua-du-shit out, and Musk and Trump have taken their insults to new levels. Then there’s the personal and family stuff.

Hold my breath. Wait to see. What. Is. Next.

Quickening to my mood and thoughts, The Neurons unleashed “I Will Wait” by Mumford and Sons into the morning mental music stream. The song came out in 2012. Led by Marcus Mumford, the band has a different sound but it works for me and enough others that they’ve established a solid career. Hope you find it okay for your Wenzda’s beats.

My follow up dental appointment went well yesterday. All is healing, no problems, no complaints. Biopsy showed nothing of concern from the cyst removed from my gum. Have another appointment, different dentist, for a cleaning.

Coffee-fueled energy is ascending. I’m off to early morning yardwork. Have the best day you can. Cheers

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑