Time for the Blue donor states to stand up to this tyranny and time for the Red dependent states to get off the public dole.

 There is a movement going on where a number of blue states who subsidize the federal government are taking steps to withhold money from the feds if Trump illegally cuts off federal revenue.

Several states, predominantly led by Democrats, are exploring ways to withhold payments to the federal government as a countermeasure against potential federal funding freezes, particularly those attributed to the Trump administration. This approach is described as a novel and untested gambit.
States with such legislative proposals:

Connecticut: Has introduced legislation to withhold federal payments under certain circumstances.
Maryland: Similar to Connecticut, it’s considering measures to withhold federal payments.
New York: Has also introduced bills to withhold federal payments.
Wisconsin: Bills have been introduced, but their progress is uncertain due to the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.
Washington: Lawmakers are in the process of drafting similar legislation.
California: Governor Gavin Newsom has suggested the possibility of withholding federal taxes if federal funding is reduced.
I say, go for it. Stop paying for this tyranny of the minority.

Top Donor States:

California: Contributed $83 billion more than it received, according to a report from the Governor of California.
New York: Contributed $89 billion more than it received, according to USAFacts.
New Jersey: Contributed $70 billion more than it received, according to USAFacts.
Massachusetts: Contributed $9 billion more than it received, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Connecticut: Contributed $8 billion more than it received, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Colorado: Contributed $2 billion more than it received.
Minnesota: Contributed $725 million more than it received.
Delaware: While not in the top 10 by total contribution, USAFacts reports Delaware had the highest per capita net contribution at $10,505 in 2023.

Top States Who Are Sucking at the Public Tit:

Alaska, Kentucky, Vermont, West Virginia, , Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, South Dakota, and Mississippi, according to USAFacts.

Eight out of nine voted for Trump —   let’s see how they do without Blue State money!

 

There are four political stories people should know about tonight.

First, President Donald Trump’s tariff war and weaker consumer spending translated to a contraction of 0.5% in the U.S. economy in the first quarter, even more of a drop than the 0.2% economists expected. The economy Trump inherited from President Joe Biden led the world in productivity.

Second, John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported today that intercepted communications showed that senior Iranian officials said the U.S. attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities caused less damage than they had expected and that they wondered why the strikes were so restrained.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo also called out that at a press conference in the Netherlands last Wednesday, Trump said he had given Iran permission to bomb a U.S. air base in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program sites. “They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”

Marshall expressed astonishment that this admission has attracted very little attention. He suggested that, if it is true, it represents “the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief,” and he wondered how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic president had said he had let “a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation.”

Third, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported today that the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill makes the biggest cut ever to programs for low-income Americans. Those cuts have made many Republicans skittish about supporting the measure.

After Trump attacked him yesterday for not supporting the budget reconciliation bill, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has announced he will not run for reelection next year, indicating his unwillingness to face a primary challenger backed by Trump. This puts the seat in play for a Democratic pickup.

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?… [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Fourth, the Senate parliamentarian has told senators that several of the provisions added to the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill violate the rules for budget reconciliation bills. Those provisions include the ones added to the bill to win the support of Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Today, Trump pushed Republican senators to ignore the Senate parliamentarian, who judges whether proposed measures adhere to Senate rules. Trump posted on social media: “An unelected Senate Staffer (Parliamentarian), should not be allowed to hurt the Republicans Bill. Wants many fantastic things out. NO! DJT.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office today said the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republican senators are trying to pass will increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years despite the $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other programs over the same period. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) called the measure “Robin Hood in reverse…stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich, this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top…. This is socialism for the rich.”

Last week was tough, and this week will be, too, because Trump will be braying like a donkey about forcing the Big Ugly Bill on the GOP and the American people. I will circle back to the events of last week later in this newsletter, but it is important to recognize that the Big Ugly Bill is the high-water mark of MAGA extremism.

The fact that congressional Republicans are backing a historically unpopular bill that breaks the most basic promises that GOP candidates made in 2024 is a sign of desperation. They understand this is their last chance ever to gut health and social benefits. If it costs them control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, they are willing to swallow that bitter pill.

No need to believe me. According to those few Republicans willing to speak the truth about the bill, including Trump’s former “Best Friend Forever,” Elon Musk, the reconciliation bill is “an act of political suicide.” See Newsweek, Elon Musk calls Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill “political suicide”.

Musk’s posts are linked to recent polling by a leading Republican polling firm (The Tarrance Group) that found that the reconciliation bill was wildly unpopular with Republican voters.

Musk had other choice words for the bill, including “utterly insane and destructive.”

A Fox “News” poll (conducted a week ago) found that the bill is even more unpopular among all voters. See Fox News, Fox News poll spells bad news for Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”

Only 38 percent favored the bill, while 59 percent opposed it, a 21-point gap against the bill. About half of all voters believed the legislation would be detrimental to their families, and just a quarter thought it would deliver any benefit.

However, the bill has worsened since the Fox News poll. Over the weekend, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released a report estimating that the Senate version of the reconciliation bill will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit and result in 12 million people losing Medicaid coverage over the next decade. See Axios, Senate’s “big, beautiful bill” would add $3.3 trillion in new debt: CBO.

And, as a cascading effect of the Big Ugly Bill’s increase in deficits, another statute will force cuts to Medicare of approximately $500 billion. See House Committee on Budget / Democrats, House-Passed FY25 Reconciliation Bill Triggers $535 Billion in Medicare Cuts.

Trump has muscled the bill through the Senate by threatening to mount primary challenges against any Senator who voted against the bill. On Sunday, GOP Senator Thom Tillis voted against a procedural motion to advance the bill. Trump posted on social media that he would find a primary challenger against Senator Tillis, who immediately announced that he would not run for reelection in 2026—and then took the Senate floor to speak the truth about the damage that will be caused by the bill. See Bloomberg, Trump Tax Bill Advances in Senate as GOP Scrounges for Votes.

Per Bloomberg,

Trump, who had been monitoring the Senate action this weekend from the Oval Office, swiftly threatened to find a GOP challenger to North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, one of the two Republicans to oppose opening debate on the bill. Rand Paul of Kentucky also voted against the motion.

The moment Senator Tillis was free of Trump (by announcing his retirement), Tillis took the Senate floor to acknowledge that the bill breaks Trump’s promise not to reduce Medicaid. See The Hill, Tillis: Senate bill breaks Trump’s promise on Medicaid.

Senator Tillis said,

What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? I think the people in the White House… advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise,

Now Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise, It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the cabinet room, when I was there with finance, where he said, we can go after waste, fraud, and abuse on any programs.

I am telling the president that you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate [bill] will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.

Notwithstanding the opposition of Senators Tillis and Rand Paul, the bill will pass because Senator Susan Collins has once again allowed herself to be bullied by Donald Trump. She is a coward who has betrayed the people of Maine on too many occasions to count.

So, too, with Senator Josh Hawley, who went through the preening motions of opposing the bill, only to back Trump as he always does. It’s another “fist pump” to the insurrectionists on January 6, except this time MAGA extremists are coming for grandma and grandpa’s healthcare and retirement.

Democrats will take Senator Tillis’s seat—because his Trump-endorsed replacement must publicly state that they would have voted for the Big Ugly Bill. And Susan Collins’ political future is over. She currently has a favorable rating of 14% and an unfavorable rating of 57% in Maine. See Teagan Goddard’s Political Wire (6/27/25), Maine Voters Don’t Like Susan Collins.

With Tillis gone and Collins historically unpopular, Democrats have a shot at flipping the Senate. I know, I know—every political pundit and rating book says Republicans have the advantage in the Senate in 2026 because their spreadsheets and backward-looking models can’t model an election following passage of the Big Ugly Bill.

Indeed, the prognosticators are part of the problem because they engender “learned helplessness.” They tell us that history determines our fate. Not true! We are not electrons forming pixels on a spreadsheet. We are American citizens with the power to decide our future.

Below is a list of the Republican seats up for election in 2026. We need to flip five seats to be confident of a one-seat majority (and creating a cushion for vulnerable Democrats in red states).

• Thom Tillis (not seeking reelection)
• Susan Collins (Maine) (Same favorability ratings as disgraced Rep. George Santos before his resignation from House.)
• Joni Ernst (Iowa) (Public Policy Polling (6/4/25), Joni Ernst Unpopular, May Face Tough Reelection.)
• Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) (Newsweek (6/5/25), Lindsey Graham Gets Bad Polling News Ahead of Reelection Campaign)
• John Cornyn (Texas) (Houston Public Media, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn rebukes report that he’s considering dropping out of 2026 race.)
• Roger Marshall (Kansas) (Was roundly booed and jeered at during his only town-hall meeting; he blamed “outside agitators” because the truth hurts.)
• Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) (Will likely face a GOP primary because he voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment; Cassidy was censured by Louisiana GOP.)
• Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) (Retiring to run for governor.)
• Ashley Moody (Florida) (Special election to replace Marco Rubio)
• Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) (Retiring)
• Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)
• Tom Cotton (Arkansas)
• Steve Daines (Montana)
• Bill Hagerty (Tennessee)
• Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
• Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming)
• Dan Sullivan (Alaska)
• Jim Risch (Idaho)
• Pete Ricketts (Nebraska) (Replaced Ben Sasse; now seeking full term.)
• John Husted (Ohio) (Seeking full term to replace JD Vance)
• Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma)
• Mike Rounds (South Dakota)

Frankly, I wouldn’t take anyone off the list as being vulnerable. The massive cuts in the Big Ugly Bill will become the default target of blame for every denial of Medicaid, Medicare, Affordable Care Act coverage, and lost job, illness, or injury due to the war on green energy, cuts to FEMA, NOAA, NIH, FDA, and more.

None of the above will take the sting out of the reconciliation bill if it passes. (There is still time to call your Senators and Representatives! Use 5 Calls!) The bill will cause suffering, financial hardship, food insecurity, and lack of access to medical care for tens of millions of Americans. And our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay for the tax savings of billionaires and millionaires in the short term.

A looming deadline to make trade deals doesn’t necessarily matter, President Trump said Sunday, because the U.S. will simply send letters to hundreds of countries assigning tariff rates.

Why it matters: The pause on Trump’s sweeping global tariffs expires in about 10 days, with one deal and one temporary truce in hand, and the rest of the world in varying states of limbo.

What they’re saying: “We made deals, but I’d rather just send them a letter, a very fair letter, saying ‘congratulations, we’re going to allow you to trade in the United States of America, you’re going to pay a 25% tariff, or 20%, or 40 or 50%.’ I would rather do that,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Asked about extending the pause, Trump said “I don’t think I’ll need to. I could, there’s no big deal.”

• “What I wanted to do is, and what I will do just — sometime prior to the 9th — is we’ll send a letter to all these countries,” he added.

How it works: “I’m going to send letters. That’s the end of the trade deal,” Trump said, giving U.S. ally Japan as an example.

• “Dear Mr. Japan, here’s the story. You’re going to pay a 25% tariff on your cars,” he said.
• Trump said letters would go out “pretty soon” and that “we don’t have to meet. We understand, we have all the numbers.”

Read more: https://www.axios.com/2025/06/29/trump-tariffs-pause

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But I thought there were already “200 deals”? 

 

Good grief!!!  This woman is an idiot in every sense of the word.

I read the news today and felt something primal: fear. Not just worry or frustration, but that deep, gut-level sense that something has gone terribly wrong and no one is coming to fix it.

It’s not just the steady drumbeat of rights being stripped away—though that’s bad enough. It’s the creeping sense that the ground rules of American life are being rewritten before our eyes. The Supreme Court rolls back rights our grandparents fought for. The president and his allies fuel division and anger. Laws target immigrants, the LGBTQIA+ community, women, and anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow, frightened definition of “American.”

But this goes deeper than policy. It’s about the deliberate targeting of those seen as “undesirable.” The machinery of government is being harnessed to police, punish, and erase—just as it was in other dark chapters of world history.

It feels like 1939 all over again—the year Nazi Germany invaded Poland and truly became the Third Reich’s war machine—when authoritarianism stopped being a threat and became the official state of affairs.

Let’s call it what it is: This is Nazi America. The comparisons aren’t just rhetorical flourishes—they’re warnings from history.

The shameful truth is that the Supreme Court of the land has become complicit. It’s scripted, predictable—its decisions less about justice than about consolidating power for the few and punishing the vulnerable. Each ruling seems designed to move us further from the promise of equality and closer to the machinery of oppression.

Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a far-right takeover of the federal government—isn’t a secret plan. It’s public, organized, and funded by a coalition of groups determined to rewrite the rules of American democracy.

Project 2025 calls for purging the civil service, filling every federal post with loyalists, and stripping away decades of civil rights protections. It’s a roadmap for weaponizing the Department of Justice against political enemies and silencing dissent. It promises the rollback of protections for immigrants, the LGBTQIA+ community, women, and anyone outside the “acceptable” mold. It aims to criminalize protest, stifle the press, and consolidate power at the very top—an authoritarian wish list hiding in plain sight.

This is not theoretical. Book bans. Censorship. The criminalization of teachers, doctors, parents. Vigilante laws and bounty hunters. Immigration raids that split families and terrorize communities. Project 2025 is already underway—piece by piece, law by law, ruling by ruling.

We are being shown—clearly and openly—how a democracy is dismantled. It happens not in a single moment, but in a thousand coordinated steps: through legislation, court rulings, executive orders, and the normalization of cruelty. The blueprint is right in front of us. History isn’t repeating; it’s being reenacted with American accents and 21st-century technology.

Because this is how it starts. Not with gas chambers, but with laws. Not with jackboots, but with bureaucrats. The machinery gets built, piece by piece, until one day the unimaginable becomes the law of the land.

There’s no comfort in denial. There’s no safety in silence. The warnings are everywhere. The danger is real.

The line between past and present is thinner than most people think. What once seemed impossible is already happening. The rights and freedoms we took for granted are being taken away, step by step.

This is not a drill.

This is how a nation unravels: one law at a time, one freedom at a time, one group at a time.

If we ignore what’s happening now, we can’t pretend later that we didn’t know. We saw it coming. The responsibility is ours.

History will judge what we did with the truth we had.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t speak on these issues, that I’d hold my tongue and focus on other work. But the headlines demand that I do.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid. History shows us what happens to those who speak out against rising authoritarianism. Sometimes, the people who dare to warn others become the targets—censored, silenced, or worse.

That fear is real. And if you’re feeling it too, you’re not alone. It’s a sign of how far things have gone, how thin the line is between safety and repression, between democracy and something darker.

But silence won’t protect us. If enough of us speak, it becomes much harder to silence everyone. The time to decide what side of history we’re on is now.

 

 

Additional fencing going up around the White House and the Treasury building.

🚨 Something’s not adding up.

The White House and Treasury just got hit with overnight barricades; the kind they only roll out when they’re bracing for backlash. No protests, no parades, no reason given. Just steel, silence, and speculation.

What’s coming? pic.twitter.com/q4l0pvRz2h

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) June 28, 2025

Meanwhile, there’s this:

Are they afraid of us? Afraid of We The People?   Good, they should be.  I’m going.

I’ll be unarmed.  This time.

Andrea Velez, a US citizen, was arrested in the time it took her mother to drive less than a block. She was on her way to work. She’s Latina. It appears that was enough.

 

Tuesday morning, Andrea Velez’s mom and sister dropped her off near her workplace. She’s a production coordinator at Top Pick Global. Andrea graduated with a degree in fashion from Cal Poly Pomona.

Near Andrea’s work, an ICE raid was taking place. In fact, someone had called the LAPD to say a “kidnapping” was taking place. The LAPD showed up, saw it was an immigration raid — LAPD is not permitted to assist ICE in immigration raids — and immediately switched to crowd control, making sure people weren’t in the street and so on.

As Andrea walked toward her place of employment, she says she looked up and saw an ICE agent barreling toward her. In the flash of thoughts that went through her mind, she thought maybe she was being targeted for the color of her skin, that maybe he thought she was not a US citizen. She instinctively held up her bag and the agent bowled into her.

Her mother — they hadn’t even made it a block away yet — looked in the rear view mirror and saw the plainclothes ICE agents standing over her daughter and putting her in cuffs. “They’re kidnapping your sister,” she said.

Andrea tried to get the LAPD to help, and so did her mother and sister. According to her mother and other witnesses, no one ever asked Andrea for ID or asked about her status. The police didn’t help, even when Andrea’s mother was screaming she was a US citizen. In fact, according to some witnesses, they moved to stand around Andrea to make it more difficult to film what was happening.

For the first 24 hours, her family couldn’t find Andrea. They didn’t know where she had been taken or what was happening. They hired lawyers who managed to find her, but no one would tell them what she was being charged with, only that she would likely face federal charges. DHS publicly said she would be charged with “assaulting an officer.”

When they got to court yesterday, ICE lawyers downgraded that to “obstructing” an officer. An ICE officer claimed that Andrea purposely stepped in his way and raised both of her arms to stop him from going after someone he was trying to arrest. Witnesses tell the story the way Andrea does: an ICE agent approached her, knocked her down, then arrested her without asking any questions about her status or identity.

Andrea, her lawyer, her mother and sister all have the same theory: during an ICE raid an ICE agent saw a Latina and scooped her up because of the color of her skin, and had to invent another reason once it was discovered she was a US citizen, born and raised in Los Angeles.

Andrea was released on a 5k bond yesterday.

Immigration officers have recently taken to arresting Latino and Hispanic US citizens on raids and claiming obstruction or assault, only to release them a few days later, sometimes without charges.

On June 12th, for instance, Brian Gavidia walked outside his work and saw immigration officers. He told them he was a US citizen and showed them his Real ID. They pushed him up against a fence and started asking him questions like “What hospital were you born in.” DHS later said he had “assaulted an officer” — video evidence does not back this up — but they didn’t charge him. Or return his ID. (A common pattern: DHS will say something like this on social media, but not in court. It appears to be a PR stunt, not any attempt at communicating something true or legally actionable.) When CNN reached out to DHS on this one they added that Brian “attempted to flee” as well, which is remarkable given that he’s a US citizen who literally just stepped outside his place of work.

Adrian Martinez, 20, had a run-in with Border Patrol on his break at WalMart. It sounds like — this is unclear — he tried to obstruct a BP vehicle that held one of his friends from work. Border Patrol agents grabbed him and claim that he punched one of them. Of course, a nearby bystander was recording and there is no evidence of a punch. And Border Patrol went on to say that Adrian was a “hostile group” of men, which is weird because he’s one guy… unless they are counting Oscar Preciado, the delivery driver who stood nearby and videoed the whole thing.

Neither Oscar’s video nor surveillance cameras that caught the entire event show a punch. Border Patrol says that the complete videos “are missing critical moments and don’t tell the whole story.” But after holding Adrian for THREE DAYS they also dropped the assault charge. Because, as Adrian’s lawyer said, “He didn’t assault anyone.” They’re now charging him with “conspiracy to impede or injure an officer” which his lawyer calls “trumped up” charges.

ICE has claimed that upwards of 70% of those they arrest are “serious criminals” but their own statistics tell a different story.

 

In the most recent ICE stats publicly released:

* 75% of people in ICE private prisons have nothing more than an immigration related issue or a traffic violation

* 47% of those being held by ICE have no criminal conviction at all… no criminal immigration violation, traffic violation, or criminal charge of any kind.

* Would you like to guess the percentage of “serious criminals” who are being held by ICE? We’ve been told over and over that we’re after the “worst of the worst” so I suspect it must be an impressive number. And that number is: NINE PERCENT.

It certainly appears that the enormous daily quota for arrests is encouraging quantity arrests rather than quality arrests. Arresting a US citizen, even if you have to release them a few days later, counts toward the arrest. Arresting a tourist at the border rather than refusing them entry counts toward the quota. Arresting people at their green card interviews, tricking immigrants without lawyers into giving up their asylum claims and immediately arresting them once they agree, these all count toward the quota.

 

Some key takeaways:

* Don’t call the police expecting help during an immigration raid. Even in states like California, where they are not legally allow to assist federal immigration forces, they also are unlikely to step in and help US citizens or others being abused. Best case scenario: they do some crowd control.

* ICE and other immigration forces are not afraid to arrest US citizens (and others) on trumped up charges, hold people, and release them later. There’s literally no consequences for them as individuals or corporately.

* It is ICE policy to lie. This is not an exaggeration. They call it a “ruse.” ICE agents aren’t just allowed to lie, they are encouraged to do so and trained to do so. ICE agents are trained to trick and confuse people.