High-Level Shenanigans
The Signal Chat Scandal was not all that The Atlantic claimed it was, but it certainly was amateurish, and then there is congress. Oh, man, is there ever congress!
The White House took pains today to point out that The Atlantic is now calling yesterday’s leak the Houthi “attack plan,” emphasizing that phrase as if it is proof that no “war plans” were leaked. These were attack plans. Get it right. Press Secretary Leavitz pointed out in the administration’s defense that even The Atlantic did not call them “war plans.” While a heated battle over the precise wording seems a little desperate, The Atlantic released the full text of the “Signal Chat Scandal” today on the now legitimate basis that everyone involved has said it contains no “war plans” and no classified information. In doing so, its story loses a lot of steam … unless you’re a Democrat looking to get steamed.
The full, unredacted release proves there was nothing that was likely to have been classified because there is no reason any of it should be classified. What was spoken about the Pentagon’s “attack plan,” if you prefer, was about as close to unactionable information as you can get. Yes, it gave times when things would happen but no locations and no names of the people who were the primary targets. It doesn’t even specifically mention what nation they would happen in, though that could be inferred. The closest thing to actionable information in the whole thread of texts was this bit:
“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME. [Italics mine.]
In other words, since all Houthis are now designated again as terrorists, some Houthi somewhere in the world was at a location that the text made sure not to identify by referring to it as Known Location. If the Houthis intercepted the information, all they would know was that one of them was going to be bombed somewhere in the world. So, conceivably, any Houthi who thought he might be important enough to be targeted could flee to an unknown location or a bunker. Go hide under a tree.
After the bombs/missiles hit their target, a little more information was provided that, had it been known prior, could have tipped the target off:
At 2 p.m., Waltz responded: “Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
The target might know it is him if he had just entered his girlfriend’s building and knows he’s a top missile guy … except that he was already dead or, at least, fully knowledgable that the building he was in had been hit by the time this missive went out. Perhaps he can read it and weep as he lays beneath the rubble protected by the iron bathtub he was lying in when the missile struck home. It was absurd for The Atlantic to think this was “target” information the enemy could do anything with.
So, indeed, nothing classified was leaked, and The Atlantic seems a little guilty of exaggerating the importance of the words that were shared in order to publicize their story. That said, the idea that officials would talk on such an insecure medium as Signal about any ongoing “war”/”attack” action seems sloppy at best. Clearly, those involved did not believe the entire conversation, if revealed, would play well for them; otherwise, as some in congress pointed out yesterday, they would just release the full un-redacted text since they are claiming no significant information was revealed in it and everything in it was unclassified anyway. Instead, they did their best to be as opaque as possible when questioned like any good Biden apparatchik would have done. Typical goverment.
Tulis Gabbard claimed nothing was classified and no war plans were revealed but then claimed she couldn’t talk about any of it in order to answer congress’s questioning. Why not, other than that it was embarrassing to have been part of such a bungle, which had even inadvertently invited a member of the press to join the party?
The sharing of emotions via emojis through the attack text probably didn’t help a lot either, as the fists, flames and flexing muscles made some of the participants look and sound a bit like frat boys laughing at the kids being hazed. Still, it was hardly the crime that the editor of The Altantic had stated this might be, which he claimed the public would see for itself if The Atlantic decided to release it. It was just amateurish stuff.
Yet, congress is even more clownish
As our government officials fist-bump each other over their scores against the Houthis, Republicans are playing even more amateurish games to hide their relentless fiscal abuse of the United States of America. Not wanting to appear to be the worst spenders since the last Democratic regime held the White House, they have concocted a plan to make their expansive new budget appear unoffensive. As with the “attack plan,” they are focused on semantics.
To hide the severe debt impact of extending their “2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” they want to lower the price tag of the extension from $4.5-trillion over the period in which the extension will continue to ZERO. This, they hope to accomplish by saying that it doesn’t add anything to the deficit because it is already adding it.
Due to the deficit impacts of extending the expiring tax cuts, Senate Republicans want to scrap “current law” baseline and instead use “current policy” baseline.
It’s a dodge to claim they are not increasing the budget because current policy already has those cuts in place. Except that it really doesn’t:
This is the most lame claim on earth because currently policy does not already those tax cuts during the years in which the new act of congress would take effect. The extensions do not exist then because they expire first. The current policy states its own expiration date as part of that policy, at which time revenue will leap higher if congress does not vote for the tax cuts renewal than it would be if congress let the actual “current policy” run its course as the policy says it will without the extension. The first time the act was approved, it massively expanded annual deficits between then and now, but that now ends. If extended, that new action will hugely increase annual deficits during the period of the extension over what they would be without the extension.
This is, in other words, exactly the kind of semantics you can expect from do-nothing, prevaricating congressman who always talk big about reducing the deficit but never actually do it! The budget they are proposing just kicks the can down the road several more years … as always. It assures the loss of revenue from these tax cuts will continue.
The full plan can be summed up as follows:
To offset their resolution, House Republicans had originally planned to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, cut $2 trillion in other federal spending, and assume that the extension will add $2.6 trillion in economic growth.
The last part is, of course, the same fiction they fed us last time about how the tax cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating growth. They did not. The spending cuts have not been proven yet either, as DOGE is nowhere close to hitting that mark … yet.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has seemed to come around to the idea, telling reporters that switching to the current policy baseline to finance the tax cuts “makes a lot of sense to me.”
But almost every tax and budget organization is calling the method a “gimmick” that would explode America’s national debt for decades to come.
Might as well just enshrine it forever until the nation collapses under it. Believe the same lie they told you last time, if you want, but …
The Congressional Budget Office, the Tax Foundation, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget all agree the TCJA extension will decrease tax revenue for the federal government by at least $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034….
“The attempt by some senators to adopt the current policy baseline … would result in $37 trillion in additional debt over the next 30 years,” MacGuineas said. “Lawmakers should stop making excuses and fake justifications and rise to the important challenge of making our government fiscally responsible.”
And here that is what I thought they were elected to do this time around and what DOGE was all about. Whatever happened to that?
As Bill Bonner points out today,
The first 100 days of a new administration are said to be the most important. That is when the new team has the most momentum and enjoys most support. People expect change…and want to see what happens.
So, with more than two-thirds of Trump’s first hundred days already digested, it might not be too early to guess about how the entire meal is likely to go down.
What we noticed in his first time in the kitchen was that the basic menu didn’t change much. Everything when he left was about the same as when he arrived — only worse. The swamp was deeper. The debt was higher. The power of the federal government was greater. And the reach of politics was further. The simplest measure of the totality of it was probably the federal debt itself, which rose from $20 trillion in 2016 to $28 trillion in 2020.
Clearly the national debt kept climbing through the first three years of Trump’s first term at the same rate it had been running. Then Trump blew it completely into the stratosphere with his mandated Covid lockdowns and all the rescue plans he had to create to save the economy from the ruin the lockdowns created. That is the sudden leap up you see during the mini recession of the lockdowns.
After that, Bidenomics steepened the ramp, but its hard to say how much of that was also necessary to continue to repair the extreme economic damage caused by the Covid lockdowns, as the steepening began right after the initial leap, still during Trump’s final year, and then many stimulus measures approved by Trump continued well into Biden’s term.
Sidekick Musk has made some remarkable headlines. But what good does it do to disclose waste and inefficiency if there is no real plan to do anything about them? Was not Team Trump aware that it had to work with Congress to make structural budget changes?…
The most urgent issue facing the Trump Team is bringing federal spending under control. Annual deficits are rising to $2 trillion. The cost of debt service — interest payments — is already over $1 trillion. And at the current rate, total debt will bound over $40 trillion before the end of Trump’s third year. At today’s 10-year bond yield, that would mean a financing charge of around $1.6 trillion — or about twice the entire military budget.
Mr. Trump said he would balance the budget. But there is no sign of it. Nor even a discussion of it.
Indeed, the discussion among Republicans in congress is how to bury the budget … or, at least, bury the degree to which they are enshrining continued exorbitant deficits … as far as the eye can see.
DOGE has saved billions…millions…or maybe nothing at all. Where’s that $5,000 DOGE dividend check? Thousands of useless federal employees have been fired. Wait… they are being re-hired. The Republicans are cutting hundreds of billions out of domestic spending budgets… but spending is still going up.
In the absence of any visible, coherent program…observers are trying to insinuate one.
One of the reasons the problem never changes is that the voting supporters of every new regime since Reagan, whether Democrat or Republican, make endless excuses for their own team whenever their team has the budget ball and fumbles it. It’s all about team sports, not getting the job done.
In a world of chaos, we try to find a theory…a plan…an idea that makes sense of it. Is Mr. Trump playing ‘three-dimensional chess?’ Four-dimensional chess? Chinese checkers?
That about sums it up.