Saturday Report 9/6/25 — A Democrat introduces a bill to eliminate taxes on social security; didn't Trump promise that?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Sep 06, 2025

— Trump seems to delight in the suffering and even deaths of others, a characteristic common among sociopathic dictators, so it shouldn’t surprise us that he wants to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War. After all, he’s already war-mongered Greenland, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Canada, Puerto Rico, and apparently North Korea. And now he’s got US F-35s buzzing Puerto Rico in practice runs for a possible war with Venezuela, after killing 11 people who were probably refugees fleeing that country. Renaming the DOD is something that only Congress can do legally, so, like with so many things, Trump’s bootlickers have come up with a workaround: they’re going to “brand” the DOD as the Department of War, but keep the official designation of Defense. So, presumably, the new letterhead, etc., will say, “Department of War” in big letters with a smaller asterisk somewhere on the page that says something like, “A division of the Department of Defense.” Meanwhile, Americans want to know what’s in the Epstein files and how deeply Trump was involved with him during the years he owned the Miss Teen USA pageant and bragged about breaking into the dressing rooms when the girls were naked.

— Trump is preparing to hand Europe over to Russia if Putin decides to go for it. After meeting with his mentor, friend, and probable owner Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Trump came home and handed the Russian dictator a major gift. The Washington Post sums it up with the headline: “Trump administration to end European security programs focused on Russia.” For decades in the years after WWII and then again after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has been funding and running programs to help Eastern European and Baltic nations fend off a possible invasion by Russian troops. We fortified their eastern flanks, trained troops, and provided hundreds of millions of dollars a year in both cash grants and military hardware. Now, in an apparent move to prevent Putin from releasing the Epstein documents he reportedly has, Trump has decided to simply abandon all of these American efforts to support NATO and Europe. This is very, very, very bad news for world peace.

— “Weird Stephen” Miller, who Trevor Noah calls “Sméagol in a suit,” is, according to The Washington Post, running Trump’s militarized takeover of Washington DC. After all, keeping Black people down is probably one of his favorite fantasies, the one he uses to get himself to sleep after a long day of deporting brown children. “I would say to the mayors of all these Democrat cities,” Naziferatu said on Fox, “like Chicago, what you are doing to your own citizens is evil. Subjecting your own citizens to this constant bloodbath and then rejoicing in it is evil. You should praise God every single day that President Trump is in the White House.” Everybody knows the solution to crime isn’t improving the living conditions of people, lifting people out of poverty, or good-old-fashioned policing; it’s having goose-stepping soldiers marching up and down every street, their tanks and half-tracks pointing big guns at the windows of anybody who dares resist; going door-to-door to find those brown-skinned modern-day Anne Franks hiding from ICE is the way to go. Right? F*cking Nazis.

— Trump has some problems with his base; when James O’Keefe goes after you, look out. The notorious “journalist” used a classic honeypot scheme to get a top Justice Department official, Acting Deputy Chief at the Office of Enforcement Operations Joseph Schnitt, to explain. Here it is in Schnitt’s own words, explaining how everything works to a woman he met on Hinge and thought was his date that night: “They’ll [DOJ] redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files, and have a very slanted version of it come out…” Speaking of Trump’s close friend and Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, he added: “It’s against BOP [Bureau of Prisons] policy because she’s a convicted sex offender. And they’re not supposed to get minimum security prisons, which is an interesting detail because she’s getting a benefit, which means they’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut.” As Gomer Pyle used to say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!” Who’d have ever thought that Trump’s ass-kissers like Pam Bondi, who was the top law enforcement officer in Florida while Epstein was continuing his rapes and did absolutely nothing about it, would be engaged in a coverup of Trump’s role in these crimes? Everybody, apparently, even the guys who work for Trump and Bondi. Meanwhile, Thomas Massey — the Kentucky Republican who co-sponsored the bill to force Bondi to release all the Epstein files — is getting hammered with TV ads in his district being paid for by a billionaire who, Massey says, is named in the Epstein files. The billionaire is a major GOP and Trump donor and appears, based on Massey’s revelation, not to want the Epstein files to ever see the light of day. Which raises the question, given how only 4 Republicans so far have signed Massey’s discharge petition: How many other high-level and wealthy Republicans are in Epstein’s files?

— CNN has uncovered audio of Bob Kennedy describing Trump supporters as “belligerent idiots,” “outright Nazis,” “cowards,” and “bootlickers,” while also comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler. It’s an interesting short clip and lives over on Musk’s sewer, but this is the best link I have: https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1963583449903632492. Enjoy!

— A Democrat introduces a bill to eliminate taxes on social security. Didn’t Trump promise that? What will the GOP do now? Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego has introduced legislation into the Senate, with a companion House bill from Minnesota’s Angie Craig, to eliminate the income tax that Reagan put on Social Security benefits back in the day. Trump campaigned on doing this, and has even claimed his Big Ugly Bill did it, but that was just another GOP lie. This legislation would end the practice and make up for the lost revenue by having people who earn more than $250,000 a year — people who currently pay nothing in Social Security taxes after their first $176,100 of income — to kick in their fair share. Given that the GOP is largely funded by morbidly rich billionaires who are deeply entranced by psychopathic greed it’s unlikely this legislation has even a small chance in the current Congress, but give it a few years…

— We’re the only developed country in the world where we’ve handed our nation’s healthcare off to massive for-profit corporations, and, wow, are they ever raking it in! Because of loopholes lobbyists and corporations convinced Republicans to put in Trump’s big tax-cut bills in 2017 and 2025, Americans for Tax Fairness finds in a new report, the industry is raking in billions and sharing almost all of it with their senior executives and shareholders. Their average profits are up around 75% — $35 billion — and pay for the companies’ senior-most executives exploded by a over $100 million. These increased profits (and compensation for their morbidly rich executives) have not, however, increased access to healthcare; to the contrary, the companies appear to have increased the rate at which they deny payments for doctors’ appointments, procedures, imaging, drugs, etc. It’s particularly bad for people who’ve been convinced by their well-compensated insurance agents to sign up for the Medicare Advantage scam; as many as 86% of their denials are overturned on appeal, suggesting they were wrong in the first place. America needs to join the rest of the developed world and extract these blood-sucking leeches from our backs; we pay twice as much for healthcare than any other developed nation and get the worst results. Medicare For All or its equivalent is needed now (and supported by over 70% of voters).

— The economy continues to slide toward recession as Trump’s tariff taxes bite and his attacks on the Fed cause the rest of the world to move away from US investments. The latest jobs numbers are grim, as Dean Blundell notes at his Substack newsletter, with hiring stalled, unemployment up, layoffs increasing, inequality getting worse, and revisions making previous numbers look even more anemic. Trump is using the news as an excuse to blame it all on Jerome Powell and the Fed because Trump has never taken responsibility for anything negative in his entire life, so far as I can tell.

— NATO’s chief is warning that China and Russia are preparing for a “long-term confrontation.” I’ve written several times about how Trump is pushing America and the world toward the brink of WWIII, and now NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is echoing my warnings, noting that that Russia and China are setting their defense industries up for “long-term confrontation.” He added, speaking at the IISS Prague Defense Summit: “We face serious and lasting threats: Russia and China are investing heavily to build up and modernize their militaries. Their defense industries are producing weapons and heavy military equipment at a remarkable, staggering, rate.” Neither the United States nor the EU are capable of matching the rate at which Russia and China are arming themselves, particularly China’s massive campaign to build warships and fleets of hundreds of thousands of drones that can be used in warfare. This is not the time to have an orange buffoon, an adjudicated rapist, a convicted criminal and con man in the White House. Hopefully this new Axis will hold off a few years before trying to confront us, so a real adult can be elected to the presidency.

— Republicans are pushing a gun ban to create a national registry of Trans people they can harass and perhaps one day imprison. Claiming it’s because the school shooter in Minneapolis was Trans, multiple Department of Justice officials have confidentially told CNN that Republicans want to create a national registry of Trans people, culling information from physicians, schools, DMVs, etc. Such a registry could then be used to deny Trans people guns, or at least that’s the excuse they’re going with. In reality, it could be used for all sorts of terrible things from denying Trans people healthcare to blocking them from education and jobs. Never forget, Hitler’s first victims, just weeks after he was installed as Chancellor in 1933, were Trans people. It can happen here.

— Trump’s newest nominee, the guy who he wants to take over the Bureau of Labor Statistics (because he fired the previous director for telling the truth about unemployment) turns out to behave like a racist, sexist bigot. No surprise here, of course; that’s what Trump is, and most of the people who’ve surrounded him are either fine with it or even more enthusiastic in their bigotry than he is. E.J. Antoni, the 37-year-old economist Trump tapped from the Heritage Foundation to run the BLS, has an interesting twitter history. As CNN notes, he accused Kamala Harris of sleeping her way to the top, called Christine Blasey Ford “Miss Piggy,” and “retweeted a post titled ‘Advice For Women: How To Land a Great Guy,’ which instructed women to ‘be in shape,’ ‘grow your hair long,’ ‘be sweet,’ ‘learn to cook,’ and ‘don’t be annoying.’ The post concluded: ‘Angry feminists and simps will try to sabotage you in the comments. Don’t listen to them. Listen to me.’” Only the best people…

— Hunters in a Farmer’s World: