Happy Hour

Get happy

Of Course They Did

The Tony Blair Institute For Taking Bribes To Do Middle East Murder couldn't not:

The Tony Blair Institute participated in a project to develop a postwar Gaza plan that envisaged kick-starting the enclave’s economy with a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”.

It envisaged all Gaza’s public land being put into a trust for development, whose assets could be sold to investors via digital tokens traded on a blockchain. Gazans would be offered the chance to contribute their privately owned land to the trust in return for a token that gave them the right to a permanent housing unit.

How my apes doing?

 Amazing people:

When first approached by the FT regarding its role in the project, a TBI spokesperson said: “Your story is categorically wrong . . . TBI was not involved in the preparation of the deck, which was a BCG deck, and had no input whatever into its contents.”

The FT then provided details of a 12-person message group used for the project — including two TBI staff, BCG consultants and the Israeli businessmen — and an unpublished TBI document shared within the group titled “Gaza Economic Blueprint”.

At this point, the TBI spokesperson said: “We have never said TBI knew nothing about what this group was working on or that they weren’t on calls in which the group discussed their plans.”

Keep On Extending

Mr. Deals gives everybody another 3 weeks or so.   Remember when all the MAGAs were fantasizing about having iPhone factories up and running by June 1, or whatever.

Countries that don't make trade deals with the U.S. by August 1 can expect tariff rates to return to the levels announced in April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday.

It had been July 9.

Kooky Billionaries And Politics

Musk isn't the first rich guy to try to enter national politics in a bigly way, and of course it remains to be seen if he follows through. While they obviously have a lot of influence working within the parties - and keeping Supereme Court members as pets - the "third party" or "I will run for president myself" versions generally have extremely limited success.

I suspect it to be more funny than important, with a reasonable chance that he just forgets about it in a month. Unless he has some genuinely cunning plan I can't fathom, the smarter play for a rich guy is the threat of primary challenges against Republican candidates.

The cult of Trump beats the limited cult of Elon. I don't think he gets this.

Most likely it all comes to little. They almost always claim they speak for the "middle" which is both stupid and clever. Stupid because they believe it, clever because our stupid Advanced Politics Knowers love calling far right things "centrist" if you give them any excuse.

Just the commonsense bipartisan solutions that hardworking Americans are craving.

Sadly, that's how Hakeem Jeffries talks, too.

Morning

Sunday funday

Sure Why Not

Mr. Trump, sir, crush this rival, Mr. Musk.

Horrible

No politics content, just tragic.

Rescuers search for over 20 girls from Texas camp as flooding death toll rises to 27

Afternoon

Enjoy

What's It All About Then

The NYT has gone another around on their attempt to portray Mamdani correctly checking boxes as somehow suspect. They are what they are and if I haven't convinced you of that after 20 years of doing this then I never will (though I will admit Dash is worst in the failson line), but in case you still can't figure out who what they are trying to communicate, it is:

Mamdani pretended to be black, because black people have lots of unfair advantages that he wished to exploit.

 

One Quick Trick

A lot in here but this is the key Tesla "innovation."

There’s more. Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility.

The YouTuber Mark Rober, a former engineer at Nasa, replicated this behaviour in an experiment on 15 March 2025. He simulated a range of hazardous situations, in which the Model Y performed significantly worse than a competing vehicle. The Tesla repeatedly ran over a crash-test dummy without braking. The video went viral, amassing more than 14m views within a few days.

This is how fatal crashes are never Elon's fault.

Morning

Slacker Saturday

Afternoon

go

Obvious Point Made Obviously

"No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker. And in some cases, shylocks and bad people."

[image or embed]

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) July 4, 2025 at 1:40 AM

Putting Suckas In Fear

 Good for LL Cool J.

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- LL Cool J says he won't be performing at Philadelphia's 4th of July celebration concert as long as the strike is ongoing with District Council 33, the city's largest blue-collar workers' union.

Eugenics Daily

Columbia University's applicant data was hacked by people trying to "prove" that Columbia has been admitting too many black people. The New York Times has an obsessive anti-trans health reporter who got the "scoop" - he called it a scoop, he was very proud - that Mamdani checked both Asian (he is) and African-American (he is) and furthered clarified Ugandan (he is) on his application, the "scoop" being, for racists, that he attempted to "cheat" his way into Columbia by claiming to be black.

He did not get into Columbia.

The NYT granted the source of this hacked information anonymity, despite his name being well-known, to cover up the fact that they used a Nazi eugenicist freak as a source of hacked information. The anonymity (pseudonymity, precisely) was not to protect the source, but to try to protect the rep of the Times.

They even tried to determine whether Mamdani's family ever intermarried with indigenous Ugandans, which somehow was important to this story of how a 17-year-old correctly checked the boxes on his form.

 
There are 3 bylines on this story.

Morning

Light blogging today. Doing some holiday weekending.

Happy Hour

So happy

Your Democratic Consultants

Jake Sherman is capable of providing useful information, but he's basically PR for the Republican party.

But now Republicans have created another problem. They didn’t just cut Medicaid; they also have forced nearly half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare, the health program for the elderly.

Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.

Here's what a Dem consultant told a reporter about my story that the GOP bill,as written, forces $500bn in Medicare cuts: "I need an actual publication to verify this before I take it seriously. Like what’s Jake Sherman’s take here? My understanding is these Medicare cuts are routinely cancelled" 🙄

[image or embed]

— David Dayen (@ddayen.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 6:39 PM

You can say "oh that's just one guy" but, trust me, looking for affirmation and approval of anything from right wing validators is pretty much the norm for most of the Democrats.

Dems can't find their "Joe Rogan" if they can't even handle "David Dayen."

Stephen Miller In The Cuck Chair

Who is Mrs. Miller's boss, Stephen?

BREAKING: Stephen Miller just accused Elon Musk on live TV of supporting the invasion and called him an outside voice who doesn't represent the interests of the American people.

Oh - My - God. pic.twitter.com/1luhAD8Z5d

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) July 2, 2025

The Car

I have no doubt that, as I said, Trump and the Republicans will try to put some jenga pieces back, depending on which interests have their ears and how many Trumpcoins they buy, or whatever, but it won't work very well!

BROOKS-LASURE EXPLAINED WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANS when a hospital closes, recalling a closure when she was at CMS. “The first thing we had to do is make sure people in that hospital are moved to somewhere they can get care. You might have people in serious situations, and moving them is a life-threatening proposition.”

Another factor is how the loss of an anchor hospital affects local economies. A hospital can be the biggest employer in a small town. If it closes, the entire town can wither away, straining local and regional finances and burdening the residents who don’t have the resources to move.

Over the longer term, the closure of rural hospitals forces patients to spend hours getting to the nearest care center, and in some cases leaves them without access at all. “I was in Colorado and we drove from one part of the state to the other to get to a hospital,” LaSure explained. “They said to me, ‘The road you drove over, one out of three days of the year you can’t get over that road,’” due to weather or some other complication. When the nearest hospital is across the Rockies and it’s snowing, you really have no ability to get care.

Already starting.