The first nighttime lighted football game in the US was played between Midwest and Casper.
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
New products take backseat amid Trump tariffs
Companies work to overcome staff incivility
This perpetual Golden Share prevents any of the following from occurring without the consent of the President of the United States or his designee:• Relocate U.S. Steel’s headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.• Redomicile outside the United States• Change the name of the company from U.S. Steel• Reduce, waive, or delay the $14 billion of Near-Term investments into U.S. Steel• Transfer production or jobs outside the United States• Close or idle plants before certain timeframes other than normal course temporary idling for safety, upgrades, etc.• Other protections regarding employee salaries, anti-dumping pricing, raw materials and sourcing outside the U.S., acquisitions, and more.
Man who says he can move TikTok to South Dakota is a bust in Wyoming politics: Reid Rasner lost by 43 points in a U.S. Senate race and has offered few details in support of his multibillion-dollar bid, but has won over the Rushmore State’s governor.
June 26, 2025
Wyoming oil positioned to weather Middle East conflict, analysts say: Nation's soaring oil and natural gas production may buffer energy prices if Israel-Iran conflict disrupts global supplies, some industry officials predict.
U.S. Ballistics plans on opening an artillery projectile plant in Cody.
cont:
The Senate parliamentarian has advised that a Medicaid provider tax overhaul central to President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending bill does not adhere to the chamber’s procedural rules.
June 28, 2025
The US broke off tariff negotiations with Canada, the US's largest trading partner.
Aluminium costs are pressing beverage manufacturers.
June 29, 2025
The Senate voted to take up The Big Ugly, which doesn't mean that it's passed.
For the sake of the country, it should not pass, but it likely will.
Elon is taking note of the impact, which won't please his former ally.
June 30, 2025
CBO on The Big Ugly, as reported by the CST.
CBO PROJECTS TRUMP BILL WILL RACK UP DEBT
As a doctor in Wyoming for over 20 years, I’ve cared for Medicaid patients my entire career. I understand Medicaid’s importance for the people it is intended to serve. I have also seen its shortcomings.Thanks to Wyoming being good stewards of taxpayer dollars, the Medicaid reforms included in the bill are unlikely to negatively impact our state. Wyoming’s policies are already aligned with a majority of the Medicaid provisions. This includes work requirements for all able-bodied adults enrolled in Medicaid.Medicaid was established to help children, pregnant women, seniors and the disabled. We need to make sure that high-quality care is accessible and reliable to those who qualify for Medicaid. This bill does that.
Dr. John also supported Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for his current position even though he no doubt privately believes Kennedy is a quack. And he hid under his desk for the most part during the recent public lands issue. Reaction to this story brought out a lot of anger by people remembering that, as it should.
Eight Republican Senators are currently holding out against The Big Ugly.
The GOP leadership has been struggling with getting the Big Ugly passed in general, and in meeting King Donald's arbitrary July 4 deadline. Now the monarch has indicated he has sort of a "m'eh" view on the deadline and he doesn't want things cut too deeply, which must be causing Grover Norquist fits.
cont:
The Big Ugly passed the Senate with J.D. Vance casting the tie breaking vote.
Now its back to the House where the House Freedom Caucus has already criticized it due to its increasing the deficit.
The most amusing vote on the Senate side was Lisa Murkowski, who voted for it, but indicated she was agonized by the whole thing. That seems to be Murkowski's theme. If the Senate proposed a vote to run over kittens, she'd vote for it, but note that the whole thing really bothered her.
Murkowski:
My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet.
Gutless.
July 2, 2025
The US dollar suffered its worst first-half decline in more than 50 years due to tariff concerns.
Lisa Murkowski is taking a lot of flak for selling her vote for changes to the Big Ugly that benefitted certain constituents in Alaska, including whalers, while she acknowledges the Big Ugly is ugly. She seems utterly surprised that she's now the subject of outright deserved contempt.
Murkowski was just playing politics the old fashioned way, trading her vote for something she thinks her constituents needed, while still not liking the bill. It's the way things are done, in normal times, which these are not.
Murkowski is 68 years old, which I'll mention as the Big Hugly contains tax breaks for seniors.
Well of course it does.
Old Boomers Never Die
They control away. . . *
Footnotes:
*From Old Soldiers Never Die.
As the Big Ugly is debated in Congress, I keep hearing a set of assumptions thrown around as if they're truths.
In each case, there's no reason to believe that they are.
The first one is that "the government is too big"? Oh? What's the right size government.
Republicans like to claim that the best government is the one that governs the least, but they've never put that into practice. They aren't right now. If you have masked Geheime Staatspolizei running around, you are definitely trying to govern.
They'd reply, as Mike Lee did the other day, that they're against faceless bureaucrats who are responsive to elected officials, which is pretty rich for a guy acting like he's the Senator from Deseret rather than Utah.
Anyhow, for a country of 300,000,000 what is the right size government?
Nobody seems to have an answer.
It's likely one, fwiw, that not only has more immigration officers, but more social security employees, and more IRS employees. The military, which nobody is proposing to shrink, probably doesn't need to be anywhere near its current size.
Speaking of the IRS, we also hear that "Americans are overtaxed". This is actually complete crap.
The big problem in the US economy today is that Americans are grossly undertaxed but still want a government that would have to be funded by a lot more taxes. Still, Americans believe they're heavily taxed.
I once had a die hard GOP Trumpee tell me that Americans paid the highest income tax rate in the world. When I challenged him on it, he looked it up right then on his computer and was stunned.
Frankly, the wealthy should pay a lot more taxes than they do.
An outright myth is the trickle down economic theory that Republicans have revived. Tax breaks for the wealthy don't trickle down. It's well demonstrated.
Another one is that you can grow your way out of a budget deficit. We know that you can't. And yet I heard Mike Johnson claim that we surely would do just that if the Big Ugly was passed.
Johnson is a smart man. He knows better, which either shows that he's sipping Sazerac with his coffee, willfully deluding himself, or flat out lying.
A secretly held one that causes people like Grover Norquist to wake up in the middle of the night cackling is that you can starve the government into being smaller. Newt Gingrich believed that. It just doesn't happen.
The rude truth of the matter is that the deficit has been too high for many years, but it really started ballooning during Trump I. Yes, it ballooned further during Biden's presidency. The Trumpites plan to balloon it to the point that will cause a fiscal crisis, there's no doubt about it.
The Republicans voting for the Big Ugly know this. They'll either be dead before it matters, or are just hoping somebody else will come around and fix the budget after they've killed the government back to 1914 levels. Why?
Well, um. . .the government is too big. . . and taxes are too high. . . and 1914 was a perfect year. . .
We start, where we left off:
June 13, 2025
Trump signed a Congressional resolution counteracting California's prohibition on the sale of petroleum vehicles after 2035.
It appears that a TACO moment is coming up.
The messaging here is really spastic. Illegal immigrants in cities are violent criminals, unless they work in the hospitality industry, in which case they're good, long time workers, which is also true of farms, even though the DHS has a plan to raid farms with National Guardsmen to remove them.
Eh?
Of course, regarding agriculture, which I'm very familiar with, this is all an unintended consequence of the Bracero Program, which started the process of taking American laborers out of the fields, all of which raises a larger question.
Will Americans return to the jobs occupied by foreign workers, and what sort of pay will it require, if they will, to cause them to do that?
And, as that tweet predicted, the Trump administration directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels.
We have a more indepth look at this story coming up, maybe, but Trump has repeatedly received a hard dose of reality on his pet theories, or the pet theories of those who backed him in his rise to power. Indeed, the entire group of MAGA theorists are getting repeated lessons on being locked into the past in a very distinct way. To reverse things, back to, say, 1958 requires massive disruption on a scale that the country, for the most part, isn't willing to endure.
This has given rise to the Trump "TACO" nickname, Trump Always Chickens Out. It's probably not really a good idea to goad him too much on that. Reversing course in disastrous policies isn't really "chickening out" but it does mean that Trump supporters and insiders have to now really turn a totally blind eye to what's going on.
What does that do, however, to people like Peter Navarro, who radically advocated for tariffs? And more than that, where does it leave people like Tom Homan who are radically in favor of mass deportation? Indeed, to a very large degree it was illegal immigration and the concept that American jobs had been stolen by migrants, or exported overseas, that brought Trump to power. Without those issues, much of what he stood for is gone.
Indeed, Holder denied he'd heard anything about any changes yesterday when it came up. Authorities raided two California farms earlier this week, and the now open plan is to try to deport 3,000 illegal immigrants per day. White House officials at first denied there were any changes as well, but now it seems that, indeed, their are.
Loyal Trumpites have consistently excused his changes in the menu. It'll be interesting to see if they have changed their views here as well.
Last edition:
I really like Uncle Mike's blog. It's one of two I have up here by New Yorkers (the other being City Father), and on a website like this you're going to get some nostalgia, like it or not, but it can serve to really reflect how our recollections of the past are pretty messed up in some instances.
Uncle Mike's essay starts off:
The Summer of 1963 was a beginning for some, and an ending for many more. America would never quite be so young again as it was that year.
The essay goes on from there to note a bunch of stuff that happened in 1963, and does a really nice job of it. I was prepared to condemn it, but I can't upon reading it. The part I'd still object to is the opening line. "Never quite be so young again"?
Well, maybe, but in part because 1963 was on the cusp of the real 1960s. 1963, quite frankly, was in the late 1950s, era was. The 1960s, as I've written here before, actually started in 1964 or 1965. I guess that means I'm placing myself as being born in the cultural 50s, but I'd also note that the real 1950s featured the Korean War, the Cold War, conscription, and a host of other bad stuff.
A lot of which were going on in the early part of the calendar 60s, some of which Uncle Mike notes.
So the post wasn't nostalgic delusion.
This is political nostalgic delusion:
Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023
Eh?
I remember growing up that we were losing the Vietnam War and inflation was destroying my parent's savings.
I don't like a lot of the way things are headed now, but we weren't living in a Normal Rockwell painting at any point in the past.
Nikki Haley was born in 1972, which means that she's a decade younger than me (thank goodness the GOP has some candidates that aren't 120 years old). That means that she grew up in the 70s and 80s.
I can recall the 70s and 80s. Indeed, I've done so here in a series of post on that topic, Growing up in the 1970s, Growing up in the 1980s .
I don't know if I have a more accurate recollection of being young than other people seemingly do, or if I lack a gene which causes us to romanticize the period of our youth. Either way, the 1970s weren't exactly all skittles and beer, or whatever the proper analogy was. Inflation was rampant, we lost the Vietnam War, Iran took our embassy staff hostage. . . you recall all that, Nikki?
Life wasn't actually all that simple if your parents were constantly worried about the price of absolutely everything. The cost of gasoline was a weekly topic. Watergate's investigations were on the news.
Do I remember how simple life was?
Yes, because I was a kid. For most kids, life is a joy because you are a kid. Same with being a teenager, really.
I was in my late teens and early 20s in the early 80s. For part of that time I lived at home, and I hunted and fished as I would. Sure, life was simple, because I had no financial worries, being a single guy with no responsibilities whatsoever.
Even at that stage, however, your DNA will come in and pull the brakes and levers. Pretty soon you are worrying, or should be, about your future, including your economic future. And you'll start to look for what modern boneheaded lexiconites call "a partner", meaning a spouse. It's the way of the world.
None of that is simple.
So was that time about faith, family, and country? Maybe where Nikki lived, but where I lived, probably less so. Everyone, pretty much, where I lived at the time, and where I still do, was a cultural Christian, and the mainline Protestant churches were still strong. This was before the onset of Southern Populism brought about by that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan. I'm Catholic, of course, but the shift was notable. To people just a little older than me there was disruption in the Catholic Church as reformers came in and took out the altar rails, etc., but I didn't hear much about that at home really, probably as I was a kid. Now that I'm far past being a kid, I don't really appreciate a lot that was done to the Church in that period, by which I do not mean Vatican II.
Anyhow, people were at least culturally Christian here, and this is the least religious state in the United States. People who weren't Christians were likely Mormons. So I suppose she has a point there.
On family, I suppose, at that time, most families were intact. Roe v. Wade and Hugh Hefner had started the march to Obergefell, so there were things occurring that were destructive going all the way back to the 1950s, if not before. The 70s was the real heyday of the Sexual Revolution, and it permitted the entire atmosphere of the culture. Playboy was sold at the grocery stores in the checkout lines, with the rack designed to camouflage most of the girl on the cover. Moral decay hadn't set in, in the really perverse ways that would take off in the 1990s, but it had started.
What about "country".
Well, amongst the young, in the 70s, not so much, and yes. I was in the National Guard for most of the 1980s, but frankly we didn't wear our uniforms off duty if we could avoid it, and we didn't bring it up in casual conversation. Part of that was to avoid getting a lecture from somebody our own age, a lingering aspect of the Vietnam War. The military recovered under Reagan, but social attitudes weren't what they became later, where everyone was thanking you for your service. More likely, somebody was going to ask "why?" if you were in the service, or maybe even give you a lecture.
None of which is to say that we don't have a moral dumpster fire going on in our society right now. But what led us to that was long in coming and will take real work to address. It isn't as if Joe Biden came in, and it was like electing Caligula. Our prior President, after all, has a history of behavior that the late Hugh Hefner would have approved of.
The point?
Well, Haley brings up some valid things about the current reprehensible state of affairs. But it would require a lot more work than voting Joe Biden out. It's a pretty deep cultural operation, really.
