“The bipartisan deal to end the funding lapse includes a long-term agreement on just three of the dozen bills lawmakers need to finish each year to keep cash flowing to federal programs. And those three measures are some of the easiest to rally around — including money for veterans programs, food aid, assistance for farmers and the operations of Congress itself.
Together, they represent only about 10 percent of the roughly $1.8 trillion Congress doles out each year to federal agencies. Under the deal, everything else is funded on a temporary basis through Jan. 30 at levels first set by Congress in March 2024, when Joe Biden was president.
That leaves behind major open decisions about the vast majority of discretionary dollars — including for the military and public health programs — along with the stickiest policy issues. It doesn’t help that House and Senate leaders still haven’t agreed on an overall total for fiscal 2026 spending, amid GOP divisions over how deeply to cut.”
“In a 2019 email to Wolff, Epstein wrote that “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. [O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
The message appears to reference Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted Epstein co-conspirator currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for crimes connected to Epstein.
The following year, Epstein and several associates received word that Reuters was readying a story about a lawsuit filed against the disgraced financier and Trump over an alleged sexual assault from 1994.
“Well, I guess if there’s anybody who can wave thus [sic] away, it’s Donald,” Wolff wrote. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
These quotes seem too vague to draw strong conclusions from.
“The town of Irvington in Essex County, New Jersey, was hit hard by the opioid crisis. In 2023, the county recorded 459 drug overdose deaths, 401 of them opioid-related—the most deaths of any county in the state. Despite this predicament, Irvington officials spent most of their more than $1 million share of opioid settlement funds not on treatment, prevention, or recovery programs, but on a pair of summer concerts with DJs, luxury trailers, and catered food.
The town billed the concerts as “Opioid Awareness Day,” but they appeared designed more to promote awareness of Mayor Tony Vauss. His name topped the event’s promotional materials, and, as the State Comptroller later noted, “no opioid-related information appeared on stage, though two large posters of Mayor Vauss flanked it.””
“Oklahoma lawmakers are suggesting that a new state law aimed at “adult performances” means municipalities must predict what sorts of events might become obscene and preemptively prohibit them. It’s a clear recipe for chilling protected speech—especially drag performances, which were one of the main targets of the law.”
“President Donald Trump has sought to justify the summary execution of suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs.
Those positions are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. But they are otherwise hard to reconcile with each other, and their implications underline the immorality and lawlessness of his bloodthirsty antidrug tactics.”
“Air traffic control (ATC) is too important to be vulnerable to politics. Around the world, governments have acknowledged this fact and depoliticized their ATC systems, beginning with the reformist Labor government of New Zealand in 1987. They removed the ATC system from their transport ministry and permitted the aviation user fees that had been paid to the government to instead be paid to the new Airways New Zealand.
It worked so well that within a decade, a dozen more governments had followed suit, realizing that ATC is essentially a public utility, analogous to electricity. A stream of ATC user-fee payments is a bondable revenue stream that has been utilized by ATC utilities to finance large-scale technology upgrades and consolidate aging ATC facilities into a smaller number of modern ones.
Today, roughly 100 countries receive their air traffic control services from user-funded utilities.”
“To convict Comey, prosecutors would have to persuade a jury that there is no reasonable doubt about either of those propositions. It is therefore not surprising that Erik Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor, was not keen to pursue this case, or that Trump managed to get what he wanted only by intervening at the last minute. He replaced Siebert with Halligan, a neophyte prosecutor whose main qualification was her willingness to overlook the weaknesses that had deterred her predecessor, and he publicly ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey before it was too late.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump told Bondi. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Five days later, Siebert delivered the indictment that Trump had demanded, although it was such a hasty job that the details of the allegations against Comey are only now coming into focus. Those details reinforce the impression that Trump was determined to get Comey one way or another, regardless of the law or the evidence.”
If you can’t humanely treat the mass of people you are arresting on immigration charges, then you should arrest less people.
“The emergency lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois’ Eastern Division on October 30, accuses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and ICE of denying detainees adequate access to counsel, food, water, and medical care. An emergency hearing was held on Tuesday, in which Broadview detainees described being held in a cell with roughly 150 other people, sleeping on the floor for days near overflowing toilets, inoperable showers, and a lack of hygiene products like toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap while at the facility.
One of the detainees who spoke on Tuesday was Felipe Agustin Zamacona, a 47-year-old man who was born in Mexico but has lived in the U.S. for 31 years. He said the cell was never mopped or swept, and had an overflowing garbage can, according to CBS News. He told the judge that “it smelled like a dirty washroom, like sweat, like a dirty locker,” reported The New York Times. Although detainees were given two or three cold sandwiches a day, Agustin only ate his first one after subsequently getting sick with diarrhea.”
“Over the last decade, roughly one in every 10 dollars of budget authority has worn an emergency tag.
…
On paper, the Office of Management and Budget has a five-part test for emergency spending: It should be necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and not permanent. Congress rarely forces itself to demonstrate, item by item, that all five prongs are met. There’s no neutral referee. Once “designated as an emergency” appears in the bill and the president concurs, the amounts are exempt from caps and PAYGO scorecards.
And because this budget label is separate from more specific “national emergency” declarations under statutes like the Stafford Act or the National Emergencies Act, it quietly turns into a vehicle for funding routine projects. It’s such a procedural magic word that fiscal guardrails all but disappear.
Finally, even when a real crisis exists, so too does opportunism. Emergency bills move fast, face weak scrutiny, and become irresistible means for unrelated projects or those that Congress would never approve otherwise. This dynamic marred the 2012-13 Hurricane Sandy package and has recurred in other disaster bills, not because relief is illegitimate but because speed plus political cover invites provisions that would die in regular order.
…
The stakes of the abuse of emergency labelling are no longer abstract. Interest costs on debt that results from the extra spending are crowding out core functions of government. Americans are hammered with “emergency” tariff costs. The next true crisis will arrive with less room to maneuver if we keep burning credibility on manufactured ones.
A republic that treats emergencies as a governing philosophy is a republic that lives without its safeguards. We must put the word back in its place: as one describing something rare, reviewable, temporary, and paid for.”