MONDAY: A certain bill keeps chugging along!

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2025

But what the heck is in it? The bill was given a silly name—The One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The obvious purpose of the name is to assist in the content-free branding of this massive piece of legislation. 

That said, what's included this sprawling bill, which has yet to reach final form? As we sit here typing today, this is the overview provided by the leading authority:

One Big Beautiful Bill Act

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, also referred to as the Big Beautiful Bill, OBBBA, OBBB, BBB or OB3, is a proposed budget reconciliation bill in the 119th United States Congress. OBBBA passed the House of Representatives on May 22, 2025, in a largely party-line vote of 215–214–1.

The House-passed OBBBA would extend the major provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which are set to expire at the end of 2025. It would reduce non-military government spending and would significantly cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid through stricter eligibility requirements. It would also allocate an additional $150 billion for defense spending; scale back many of the Inflation Reduction Act's clean-energy tax credits; extend the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, which is also scheduled to expire in 2025; and increase the SALT deduction cap from $10,000 to $40,000. It contains a number of other provisions, including a ten-year ban on all state-level AI regulations.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that OBBBA would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt of the United States by 2034 and would cause 10.9 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage. This number has been disputed by multiple GOP members, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump. The CBO later raised the estimated increase in the budget deficit to $2.8 trillion.

Following the House passage of OBBBA, the bill moved to the Senate for consideration. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has set a goal of passing the Senate's version of OBBBA by July 4, 2025.

That's what the authority says at present. The bill is so big that it has four (4) acronyms, along with its silly name.

(As a point of fairness, we note the reference to the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, which was given that name despite the fact that it had nothing to do with inflation reduction. So it goes as the American discourse about such matters disappears into chaos and incomprehension, possibly never to find its way back to its previous miserable state.)

The current bill is in a state of flux. Depending on where you go for your "news," you've heard vastly different things about its vast array of provisions.

On the front page of this morning's New York Times, Andrew Duehren offered a bit of an update:

Senate Bill Would Add at Least $3.3 Trillion to Debt, Budget Office Says

The sprawling tax and health care bill that Senate Republicans are trying to pass would add at least $3.3 trillion to the already-bulging national debt over a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Sunday, putting a far higher price tag on the measure than some of the party’s fiscal hawks had indicated they could stomach.

The cost of the Senate bill, which Republicans rolled out overnight on Friday and were still shaping on Sunday, far exceeds the $2.4 trillion cost of the version passed in the House, where lawmakers had insisted that the overall price of the bill not substantially change. But Senate Republicans still moved forward with a number of costly changes to the bill, including making prized tax breaks for business a permanent feature of the tax code.

With roughly $29 trillion in debt currently held by the public, the budget office had already expected the government to borrow another $21 trillion over the next decade, meaning the Republican bill would make an already-dire fiscal forecast worse. And the initial estimate of a cost of $3.3 trillion for the Senate bill is an undercount, because it does not include additional borrowing costs which could push the bill’s overall addition to the debt closer to $4 trillion.

[...]

The main component driving the cost of the Republican legislative effort is the extension of a series of tax cuts from 2017. Many of those tax cuts are set to expire this year, and extending them into the future represents a roughly $3.8 trillion hit to the budget. Republicans have also piled some additional tax cuts on top, including versions of President Trump’s promises to not tax tips and overtime, bringing the overall size of the Senate tax cut to roughly $4.5 trillion.

(In this report, the Times returns to providing the figures concerning debt held by the public.)

That figure currently stands at roughly $29 trillion. Under current arrangements, that figures stands to rise to something like $50 trillion by the end of the next decade. That's before the GOP steps in to address the problem of national debt, concerning which its various spokespersons still express great concern.

How has the GOP decided to tackle this problem? Facing an expansion of debt which Duehren describes as "dire" (Paul Krugman has called it "unsustainable"), the GOP has decided to address the problem by creating "additional tax cuts"—by finding ways to bring in even less revenue over the next ten years.

According to the CBO, the OBBBA as it currently stands would therefore take the national debt from its current $29 trillion to something more like $54 trillion—unless you listen to Republican solons, in which case 1) you will hear that explosive economic growth will destroy this gloomy scenario, or 2) you'll will see the solon quickly start to talk about something else. 

Regarding the spending cuts on health care programs mentioned by the leading authority, Duehren offers this today as he continues directly:

...Republicans have also piled some additional tax cuts on top, including versions of President Trump’s promises to not tax tips and overtime, bringing the overall size of the Senate tax cut to roughly $4.5 trillion.

To offset some of that cost, Republicans have also proposed deep cuts to the country’s social safety net, particularly Medicaid. According to the C.B.O., the Senate version of the legislation would mean 11.8 million Americans lose their health insurance by 2034 as federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare is reduced by roughly $1.1 trillion over that period.

In newspapers directed at Blue America, you'll be told that spending cuts will cause many people to lose their health insurance. From citizens serviced by Red America, phone calls like this were being fielded, over the weekend, by C-Span's Washington Journal.

At 7:22 on Sunday morning, Kelly from North Carolina was on the phone, reassuring the previous caller:

MODERATOR (6/29/25): That was Jerry in Tennessee. Kelly, in Clemmons, North Carolina, on the line for Republicans. Good morning, Kelly!

KELLY IN NORTH CAROLINA: Hi, Tammy! Well, I want to tell that man right there that his prayers have already been answered because they're not cutting Social Security, they're not cutting Medicare, and they're not cutting Medicaid. 

They are reforming Medicaid, and the way the cuts would be are not real "cuts." They are no more illegals being able to use them. That's where the cuts are coming from, OK? All you people who are American citizens, you will still be getting everything you were getting...

I just want you all to know there's nothing to worry about. You are listening to propaganda, and it's all propaganda from the left. Stop listening to it, you're hurting yourselves. They are trying to make you in fear. Have faith, not fear, and God Bless you all.

MODERATOR: That was Kelly in North Carolina.

We have no doubt that the caller was sincere. Within Red America, that messaging has been widespread concerning the adjustments to the Medicaid program and the dollar savings which will result.

We're living in various countries now. There's no way to run a modern nation in such a state of peak Babel.

ARRIVALS: How should we describe the current arrival?

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2025

PBS shatters a rule: We didn't say so last Friday afternoon. But when the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a type of arrival.

This takes us all the way back to the very dawn of the West. That arrival was described by Professor Knox in his lengthy introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad.

The lengthy essay by Professor Knox was published in 1990. Within it, he described an arrival.

That ancient arrival was characterized by fury and extreme violence. When the Achaeans came over the walls, this is what occurred:

[T]he death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. 

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

If you can't defend your civilization, your civilization will fall! At any rate, when the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a type of arrival—but it was also a stunningly violent assault:

King Priam, a thoroughly dignified ruler, was butchered at the altar. His wife was dragged off into slavery. Their daughter Cassandra was raped.

His noble son's infant boy was thrown to his death from the city's high walls. Is this, in some far-fetched way, the type of arrival with which Blue America is currently struggling? Are we struggling to turn back, even to describe, an arrival of this general type?

As we noted in Friday afternoon's report, Hollywood has often portrayed other types of arrival. In 2016, Denis Villeneuve pictured a different kind of arrival in an Oscar-nominated film of that very name:

Arrival 

Denis Villeneuve’s lyrical alien film, based on a short story by Ted Chiang, is sci-fi at its most emotionally devastating. When a mysterious, looming extraterrestrial craft lands on Earth, a linguist played by Amy Adams...is recruited to try to speak to the tentacled beings known as heptapods. Less a saga about invasion than it is about communication, “Arrival” is intoxicatingly mysterious until it wallops you with its time-turning gut punch of an ending.

In this film, a linguist attempts to communicate with the newly arrived—with a group of tentacled beings! To what extent can our nation's current (and ongoing) struggle be compared to something like that?

Hollywood has offered many films in which the arrival involves a type of "alien" which differs from the "illegal [undocumented / unauthorized] aliens" who play a key role in our current societal drama. In 1997, a bit of whimsy was present:

Men in Black

Men in Black is a 1997 American alien/UFO science fiction action comedy film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as "men in black," secret agents who monitor and police extraterrestrials...In the film, Agent K (Jones) and Agent J (Smith) investigate a series of seemingly unrelated criminal incidents related to the extraterrestrials who live in secret on Earth.

[...]

Plot

In 1961, the Men in Black (MiB) organization is founded after secretly making first contact with extraterrestrials. Ever since, they established Earth as a politically neutral zone for alien refugees who live in secret among humanity...

In this, as in so many films, the arrival involved a species of extraterrestrials—beings who aren't like us. In Men in Black, they've been (secretly) living among for well over thirty years!

Back then, an alien invasion of this type could still be seen as humorous. It was different in 1956, when the arrival featured a darkly ominous tone:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

[...] 

The film's storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers this "quiet" invasion and attempts to stop it.

To our ear, the portrait of "duplicates devoid of all human emotion" can almost start to ring a bell as we try to find the way to describe, and to understand, the nature of the current situation. 

Hollywood continues to offer portraits of unexpected arrivals. In 2022, Jordan Peele's Nope stuck to the concept of the extraterrestrial source of the arrival. 

On the other hand, you could almost say that Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019) describes the arrival of an alien force of apparently human type. This thumbnail comes from the new survey by the New York Times, in which Once Upon a Time joins Arrival among this century's hundred best:

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Like Martin Scorsese’s New York or Federico Fellini’s Rome, Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles is a thing to behold: The director’s fevered love letter to his hometown circa 1969 is a gonzo-maximalist dream, encompassing a fictional fading TV star (Leonardo DiCaprio), his laconic stuntman-sidekick (Brad Pitt), a passel of Manson family freaks and the very real starlet Sharon Tate (played as pure blond sunshine by Margot Robbie). From there, the script breaks with established history, building to one of the most bravura and far-out finales in film history.

A tragic arrival is underway in that film, involving "a passel of Manson family" types. (Does it also involve the fatuous Hollywood players on whom those types will feed?)

Do any of those portraits help us understand and describe the arrival which got its start when then-Candidate Donald J. Trump came down the escalator in June 2015?  Completing the record for today, PBS has now added a portrait of a deeply horrific arrival in the latest offering from its American Masters series. 

This portrait of a disastrous arrival debuted last Friday evening. Along the way, PBS broke one of the most widely-stated rules in the book. To watch the whole program, click here:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

So reads the official thumbnail from the PBS program itself. 

For what it's worth, this 83-minute PBS program explicitly compares the rapid arrival of the Third Reich to the events now gripping our own struggling American nation. Whether justified or not, the comparison is completely undisguised as of the program's 20-minute mark, as chronicled by Jackie Calmes in this overview of the PBS program for the Los Angeles Times.

When the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a violent arrival. In part for reasons of our own making, those of us in Blue America have had a hard time describing the type of arrival we ourselves currently face.

Blue America's journalistic elites have established or played by certain rules—rules which regulate the types of things which can be said about this arrival:

Our journalists have observed explicit rules forbidding medical talk—forbidding discussions of mental health and mental disorder. They seem to be playing by rules which won't let them report or discuss the astonishing conduct which takes place, all day and all night, on the powerful Fox News Channel.

We lack an established journalistic language which lets us discuss the sheer stupidity which suffuses the American public discourse. Also, we have a rule which says that we mustn't discuss what happened in Germany, and then throughout Europe, not so long ago.

Like the fictional citizens of Camus' Oran, we simply haven't been up the challenge of describing—possibly, even of recognizing—what's happening in our midst. For what it's worth, our own view would be that the current arrival has almost surely already passed the point of no return—will not now be turned back. 

For the record, also this:

As we've noted many times, it was our own Blue America's foolishness, down through the years, which set the stage for this arrival—which triggered the anger of those who arrived. And as in sacred Troy, so too here:

It's an anger which many of the newly arrived can't seem to control, regulate or contain.

In truth, arrivals like these have taken place all through the course of human history. In the current instance, many of the newly arrived are well intentioned. Presumably, quite a few others are not.

 In our view, we Blues, like the citizens of Oran, simply haven't been up to task of dealing with this arrival. In The Plague, Camus described the mindset of Oran's denizens when their challenge arrived:

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

 As with American Masters, so too here! Camus was speaking about what happened in Germany too.

All week long, we'll try to develop the language with which sensible people might be able to describe the current (ongoing) arrival. Once again, we'll say, up front, that we think the battle has already been lost.

We'll try to establish ways to describe the nature of this arrival. Sadly, we'll borrow from Lincoln in making this point:

We Blues have been part of this too.

Tomorrow: The view from American Masters

SATURDAY: Trump wanted the journo "thrown out like a dog!"

SATURDAY, JUNE 28, 2025

Leavitt then swung into action: Karoline Leavitt, the scolder-in-chief, had finally just about had it with CNN's Natasha Bertrand.

The smash-and-grab crew at oppo research had handed the youngster a big stack of claims concerning Bertrand's past work. Also, the sitting president had said that he wanted to see Bertrand fired by CNN—to see her "thrown out like a dog."

It isn't like her party's philosopher king to say such things as that! On that basis, the spokesperson knew that the claims against Bertrand just plain had to be true.

On that basis, Leavitt hurried to the White House briefing room, eager to warn the public. In this report for Mediaite, Zachary Leeman cited some of the things she now said:

‘She Should Be Ashamed of Herself!’ Karoline Leavitt Unleashes on CNN Reporter Trump Wants Network to Fire

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid into CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand on Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump demanded the reporter be “thrown out like a dog” over her reporting on the U.S.’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

[...]

At a Thursday White House press briefing, Leavitt called out Bertrand by name and suggested she was being “used” by Washington, D.C. insiders with an anti-Trump agenda to “push a false narrative.” She also claimed only “bits and pieces” of the initial report were leaked.

As Leavitt called out Bertrand from her podium, she listed out other reporting the administration takes issue with, including reporting in 2020 on dozens of intelligence officials chalking up Hunter Biden’s infamously abandoned laptop to Russian disinformation, as well as reports on the origins of Covid-19.

“This is a reporter who has been unfortunately used by people who dislike Donald Trump in this government to push fake and false narratives. She should be ashamed of herself,” Leavitt said.

And so on from there, with tape.

Bertrand should be ashamed of herself, the thoughtful press spokesperson said. Indeed, Bertrand had even been used in the past! As one example, Leavitt cited Bertrand's past reporting for Politico about that infamous "laptop from Hell."

How phony was Bertrand's reporting back then? By clicking here, you can start to see for yourself. 

Below, you see the start of Bertrand's report on the statement made by those intelligence officials. The report was published by Politico on October 19, 2020:

Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.

While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.

“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

Nick Shapiro, a former top aide under CIA director John Brennan, provided POLITICO with the letter on Monday. He noted that “the IC leaders who have signed this letter worked for the past four presidents, including Trump. The real power here however is the number of former, working-level IC officers who want the American people to know that once again the Russians are interfering.”

The former Trump administration officials who signed the letter include Russ Travers, who served as National Counterterrorism Center acting director; Glenn Gerstell, the former NSA general counsel; Rick Ledgett, the former deputy NSA director; Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA senior operations officer; and Cynthia Strand, who served as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for global issues. Former CIA directors or acting directors Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell also signed the letter, along with more than three dozen other intelligence veterans. Several of the former officials on the list have endorsed Biden.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on Monday that the information on Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” though the FBI is reportedly conducting an ongoing investigation into whether Russia was involved.

And so on from there.

Just this once, we'll be honest. We have no idea what's supposed to be wrong with that news report:

A group of major former officials had published a letter about a matter of public interest. Their statement had been made available to Politico, and Bertrand had been assigned to report what the former officials had said. 

The letter "presented no new evidence" about the matter at hand, Bertrand quickly noted. She also noted that several of the former officials had endorsed then-Candidate Biden.

She quoted a denial by President Trump's DNI, though she also said that the FBI was reportedly investigating the matter. This strikes us as straight-ahead, standard news reporting of the most obvious kind.

On Thursday, the scolder-in-chief burst into the briefing room and let the miscreant have it. The president wanted her "thrown out like a dog"—and as Leavitt went on and on, it sounded like she did too.

For the record, Leavitt never ventured into specifics. She never explained what was supposed to be wrong with Bertrand's past or present work. So it frequently tends to go in the wake of a recent arrival.

In yesterday afternoon's report, we wondered about the arrival on the scene of players like Leavitt and Pete Hegseth. What in the world have they come from? we asked. What explains their unusual impulses and characteristics?

In the 2016 film Arrival, a group of "mysterious tentacled beings" had suddenly appeared on the scene. All next week, we'll be trying to develop a language with which to describing the ways of this latest new group.

FRIDAY: In Arrival, it was a race of tentacled beings!

FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 2025

Today, it's Hegseth and Leavitt: How strange has American culture become in the years since their arrival?

We're speaking of the type of arrival which formed the basis for a major feature film back in 2016.

In this brand-new survey,  the New York Times has created a list of this century's hundred best films. The film in question got voted at #29—as the 29th best so far:

Arrival 

Denis Villeneuve’s lyrical alien film, based on a short story by Ted Chiang, is sci-fi at its most emotionally devastating. When a mysterious, looming extraterrestrial craft lands on Earth, a linguist played by Amy Adams, in a career-best role, is recruited to try to speak to the tentacled beings known as heptapods. Less a saga about invasion than it is about communication, “Arrival” is intoxicatingly mysterious until it wallops you with its time-turning gut punch of an ending.

We ourselves weren't blown away by the Oscar-nominated film, though we probably should have seen it in an actual movie theater. 

That said, the arrival of the present day's new group of beings has now produced a cultural result as monumentally stupid as this:

Trump Threatens to Sue The NY Times and CNN Over ‘Unpatriotic’ Reporting On U.S. Military Intel

The New York Times struck a defiant tone in a Thursday letter in response to a personal lawyer for President Donald Trump demanding the paper “retract and apologize” or be sued over a report on the state of Iranian nuclear sites following Trump’s bombings.

The Times reported on the letter sent by Alejandro Brito, which threatened to sue the paper and CNN for publishing reports on a leaked Pentagon assessment that said Trump’s bombings only set Iran’s nuclear program back a few months. The assessment was labeled as an initial intelligence finding, but contradicted Trump’s public claims that Iran’s nuclear sites had been totally “obliterated.” Trump’s lawyer called the article “false,” “defamatory,” and “unpatriotic” while demanding it be retracted.

David McCraw, the Times’s deputy general counsel, replied to Brito, saying, “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”

Trump has publicly raged against both the Times and CNN in recent days. On Thursday, he took to his Truth Social platform and wrote, “FAKE NEWS REPORTERS FROM CNN & THE NEW YORK TIMES SHOULD BE FIRED, IMMEDIATELY!!! BAD PEOPLE WITH EVIL INTENTIONS!!!”

And so on from there, Mediaite reporting. The stupidity has gone on and on, and then it's gone on and on some more. Existing news orgs on the planet don't seem to know how to discuss it—or they may be too frightened to try.

How peculiar has our political culture become in the years since this arrival? The fury of yesterday's press event with Pete Hegseth would be one obvious case in point.

A few hours after that serial meltdown, Karoline Leavitt went off. Is her endless ridiculous conduct really "a cancer on the discourse?" Again, we'll let Mediaite report, and then you can decide:

‘She Should Be Ashamed of Herself!’ Karoline Leavitt Unleashes on CNN Reporter Trump Wants Network to Fire

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid into CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand on Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump demanded the reporter be “thrown out like a dog” over her reporting on the U.S.’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Trump took aim at Bertrand over her reporting on a leaked intelligence assessment that concluded strikes against the Iranian sites likely only set their nuclear programs back by months, rather than years as the president and other officials claimed. Trump has called the report “fake news” and lashed out at The New York Times and others for reporting on the assessment."

[...] 

At a Thursday White House press briefing, Leavitt called out Bertrand by name and suggested she was being “used” by Washington, D.C. insiders with an anti-Trump agenda to “push a false narrative.” She also claimed only “bits and pieces” of the initial report were leaked.

As Leavitt called out Bertrand from her podium, she listed out other reporting the administration takes issue with, including reporting in 2020 on dozens of intelligence officials chalking up Hunter Biden’s infamously abandoned laptop to Russian disinformation, as well as reports on the origins of Covid-19.

How dumb was Leavitt yesterday? So dumb that her claims were foolish even by her own standards! Tomorrow, we'll show you the kinds of past reporting by Bertrand which had Leavitt, our latest very strange arrival, calling for the CNN journalist's head.

In the 29th best film of this century, a linguist played by Amy Adams is recruited to try to speak to a bunch of tentacled beings. Where are some such linguists now with respect to these latest arrivals?

Tomorrow, we'll look at Leavitt's pathetic attack on Bertrand. Next week, we'll conduct a type of search—a search for some sort of way to describe this new group of arrivals.

As for the film Arrival, it wasn't about an "invasion," the New York Times has said. We're not sure we'd say the same thing about the arrival of furious, deeply entitled beings like the aforementioned Leavitt and Hegseth.

They're deeply entitled and deeply aggrieved. We Blues set the stage for their arrival, but where did their looming craft come from?

THE PLAYERS: Reporters asked the question three times!

FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 2025

Hegseth kept failing to answer: He never did answer the question.

We refer to Secretary Hegseth. Also, to the question he avoided three separate times during yesterday morning's gonzo press event.

During the 42-minute event, General Caine conducted himself in a thoroughly professional manner. By way of contrast, Secretary Hegseth staged one of the most remarkable serial meltdowns of his short time in the cabinet.

Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can peruse a transcript of yesterday's event simply by clicking here. The transcript is accompanied by videotape of the event, or you can access C-Span's videotape.

Rev has transcribed the full event. Remarkably, here's what happened:

Hegseth burned the first ten minutes away with a deeply silly scolding of the assembled press corps. After General Caine's introductory statement, questions were finally permitted, at roughly the 30-minute mark.

At the 37-minute mark, the following question was asked. It was a blindingly obvious question. It would be asked three times:

REPORTER (6/26/25): Just a quick question. There's public imagery available saying that highly enriched uranium was moved out of Fordow before the strikes. Is that accurate? Have you seen that?

Had uranium been squirreled away before last Saturday's attack? After General Caine spoke to a separate question, Hegseth was prompted to respond to that—and this is what he said:

REPORTER: And the highly enriched uranium?

HEGSETH: There's nothing that I've seen that suggests that we didn't hit exactly what we wanted to hit in those locations.

We'll score that as an obvious "non-answer answer." For that reason, Jennifer Griffin of Fox News quickly followed up. 

Jennifer Griffin is highly experienced. Continuing directly from above, she now posed the obvious question for the second time: 

GRIFFIN (continuing directly): That's not the question though. It's about highly enriched uranium. Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordow Mountain or some of it—because there were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance. Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?

Unacceptably, Griffin had dared to tell this high priest that he hadn't answered the question. He responded with an astonishing meltdown directed at Griffin herself. 

Hegseth responded by savaging Griffin. With respect to the actual question, he took a dive once again:

HEGSETH (continuing directly): Of course, we're watching every single aspect. But Jennifer, you've been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says...

[Personal attack on Griffin]

We're looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was where.

We're watching every single aspect! We're looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was where!

Setting the personal attack to the side, that was Hegseth's second non-answer answer. That was his second attempt to dodge the question at hand.

Another reporter now stepped in to question the mighty member. After he had scolded her for her alleged obsession with DEI, she became the third reporter to raise the unanswered question.

In this exchange, in Biblical fashion, the secretary refused to answer for what was now the third time:

REPORTER: Are you certain that the uranium wasn't removed from the facility before the B2s struck?

HEGSETH: So I'm not aware of any intelligence that I've reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise.

We're cleaning up an imperfection in the Rev transcription. But in that string of argle-bargle, we have the secretary's third refusal to answer this obvious question. That said, this third refusal to answer the question did, in fact, serve as an answer:

No, Virginia! Despite the rantings of President Trump, the administration doesn't know, at this point in time, whether "highly enriched uranium was moved out of Fordow before the strikes." That would be the obvious conclusion we would take from Hegseth's refusals to answer.

At this point, the administration doesn't know if enriched uranium was taken away in the days before the strike. Even as he kept melting down, the secretary's three (3) refusals to answer had finally seemed to provide the answer.

For now, we've skipped past the content of Hegseth's several meltdowns, including his remarkable attack on Griffin herself. We're also skipping the ridiculous performance, later that day, by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in which she savaged CNN's Natasha Bertrand in ways which made zero sense.

So it goes as a group of warfighters go to war on behalf of the current commander. For now, we'll offer a brief overview of Griffin's tenure at Fox News—and we'll briefly note the conceptual difficulties Blue Americans face with respect to this new breed of furious tribal warfighters.

Yesterday, at the 38-minute mark, there came his 19th nervous breakdown of the day's press event.  

Griffin dared to note that he'd failed to answer the question.  Hegseth responded with this:

GRIFFIN: That's not the question though. It's about highly enriched uranium. Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordow Mountain or some of it—because there were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance. Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?

HEGSETH: Of course, we're watching every single aspect. But Jennifer, you've been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says...

Before his second full refusal to answer, Hegseth continued along from there, battling Griffin's objections to that characterization. After his ad hominem attacks on Griffin, he again failed to answer.

For the record, who is Jennifer Griffin?  As a general matter, we'll tell you this:

Even now, the Fox News Channel employs a certain number of people who provide high-end, nonpartisan news reporting. Griffin has been cast in that role at Fox since 1999—or maybe since 1996. The leading authority on her career starts with this overview:

Jennifer Griffin

Jennifer Griffin is an American journalist who works as Chief National Security Correspondent at the Pentagon for Fox News. She joined Fox News in October 1999 as a Jerusalem-based correspondent. Prior to the posting, she reported for three years from Moscow for Fox News.

Since 2007, Griffin has reported daily from the Pentagon where she questions senior military leaders, travels to war zones with the Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense, and reports on all aspects of the military...

And so on from there. 

We'll admit that that initial chronology doesn't quite seem to parse. Did Griffin "join  Fox  News in 1999?" Or did she hire on three years prior to that?

The chronology there doesn't quite make sense. In fairness to the leading authority, its chronology was taken, live and direct, from the jumbled chronology posted by Fox News itself.

At any rate, Griffin has long been one of the Fox News Channel's handful of competent, non-partisan news reporters. By all accounts, she's highly regarded by others in the field.

For that reason, Hegseth's personal attack seemed especially odd—but also made an obvious type of sense. That said, Hegseth is a person filled with anger—a person who seems to run on a remarkable sense of grievance.  In fairness, Leavitt's later attack on Bertrand may have been even nuttier than the Hegseth's attack on Griffin.

As at Troy, so too here. A new group of tribal warfighter have been coming over the walls since President Trump was elected again last November.

Their claims and their behaviors are often very strange. (One might say, are often highly unfamiliar.) It's very hard to find the language with which to describe their attitudes and their work.

Hegseth is part of this tribal group. So is the routinely ridiculous Leavitt, this aggressive warfighting tribe's frequent scolder-in-chief.

Ages and ages hence, someone may be telling this story with a sigh—or then again, possibly not! Starting on Monday, we'll attempt to find the language with which to describe the attitudes and the behaviors of this profoundly aggrieved new group.

At Troy, the Achaeans finally came over the walls; astonishing violence followed. Today, it's fighters like Hegseth and Leavitt who proceed in their wake.

Our foolishness in Blue America helped put these players in place. That said, they almost seem to be a whole new type of aggregation. It's hard to find a recognizable way to describe their relentless conduct.

Secretary Hegseth is gripped by a sense of grievance which won't seem to leave him alone. It's hard to find the language with which to describe his furious conduct.

Having said that, we can tell you this:

No, Virgina! From President Trump on down, it seems that these players simply don't know if uranium was carted away before last Saturday's strike.

It's only one of many possible questions at this point. But their fury seems to know no bounds, and it won't permit them to simply say that they don't actually know.

Their fury has them by the throat. It won't seem to let them go.