Jan. 24, 2024 - Border deal ready to sneak through

… Congress nears deal to punish migrants … Americans upbeat about beating down inflation … Macy’s enters steel-cage deathmatch … Trump blah New blah Hampshire …

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I’m still scheduled to be on SiriusXM tomorrow! Details below.¹

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Lawmakers Prepare to Smuggle In Immigration Bill

🚨🚨🚨 MAGA Are Right About a Thing! 🚨🚨🚨

Yes, it’s true. No, it gives me no joy to say it, other than relishing the opportunity to display an absence of partisanship. Join me on this uncomfortable journey, won’t you? (Welcome to TFN, the Spirit Airlines of news…)

While everyone else (don’t lie) was watching New Hampshire, Politico reports that Congress was nearing a deal to package new immigration measures with new money for arms dealers to sell people-killing products to Ukraine and Israel and whoever else needs some war.

And when I say “Congress is near a deal” I mean a tiny number of people in the Senate – the lead negotiators. In this case: batting for Republicans is Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), for Democrats is Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and hiding in the back of the truck is Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) (which is a little unfair because I’ve seen suggestions she’s actually being productive behind the scenes on this one).

Lankford says he hopes to release the deal’s details this week. Murphy told Politico a vote will follow soon after.

So, what are MAGA right about here? Well, as The Hill reported later, MAGA senators are pissed that the negotiators are gonna hammer out a deal in secret and then shove it down their/our throats in public. Which, yes.

At a GOP meeting yesterday, MAGA senators lost what’s left of their shit about that prospect. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told The Hill afterward, “We’ve been through these things so many times where we’re told, ‘Oh, there’s not a deal yet, not a deal, not a deal.’ All of a sudden: ‘Oh, there’s [a] deal.’...without really any opportunity to read it and no opportunity to amend it.”

He’s right. And I say that as someone who generally considers Lee so wrong that I had to write my longest headline ever just to pack all of Lee’s wrongness into it.

Amazingly, Politico doesn’t mention any of the substance of this deal – which, spoiler, is the only reason we should give a shit. Luckily, the Hill does.

One example Lee gives is a proposal to give the president – whoever that might be – broader executive powers to sidestep asylum due process in deporting Mexicans, Guatemalans, and habeas corpus. Lee is pissed that presidents – whoever they might be – will only get that executive power if more than 5000 migrants are coming in per day.

But regardless of Lee’s particular position/inhumanity, he’s right that we’re supposed to have expansive public debate about this shit. And if progressives want to preserve due process for asylum-seekers, public debate is something they should be fighting for, too. (I’m sure some are, so yay them.)

P-THE FUCK-S It would be nice to see more Democrats pushing back against the narrative fueling this border-security deal – because it’s a solution to a problem we don’t really have.

The right wing is literally talking about an invasion across our border with Mexico. And Democrats are largely stipulating that the U.S. southern border is a hellscape to rival only the also-fictional hellscapes of our burning urban dystopias.

But as Rep. Henry Cuellar (R-TX) points out – as someone with whose outpointing I frequently disagree – fictional means not real. Cuellar last year put out a release with actual crime figures for actual crime in actual places… including both those border Thunderdomes and cities in red states:

If it’s showing up too small to read, those cute little blue tiles on the right are the crime rates for Texas border towns. The azure towers on the left are not. Turns out, some of those border towns have crime rates lower than Daytona Beach, Florida. Which makes sense given that undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes overall at a lower rate than red-blooded, blood-spilling Americans do.

Until they assimilate, of course!

Florida Child-Grooming Bill Heads for State House Floor

Florida Republicans yesterday passed a new child-grooming bill through committee, sending it on for a vote by the full House. The bill weakens some labor protections for 15-year-olds, and would let rich people make kids as young as 16 work more than eight hours a day, for more than 30 hours a week, as many as six days per week, starting as early as 6am and going as late as 11pm … even when school is in session. (h/t)

The bill to groom kids for a lifetime of meaningless, manual labor — at the expense of whatever counts as a Florida education these days — is expected to go within weeks to the House floor, as soon as some poor, pimply plebe finishes sweeping it before going home to finish their homework by candlelight.

Hilariously – if you’re a Dickens fan – the state Senate version of this bill was even wilder; they just took out a provision that would have let kids work on rooftops. That’s where gravity is!

And, just so we’re clear who we’re talking about here, we’re talking about poor kids from poor families. Including a lot of immigrant families. And why is this happening now? Because Florida’s rich people are having to :::gasp::: pay people more (thanks to Brandonnomics) and they’re losing workers (thanks to the xenophobia of future former Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who’s literally chasing away the workers his donors need to keep the money taps flowing).

So get to work, kids!  

Americans Turning Rosy on Bidennomics

New data out this morning show Americans are feeling better about inflation than they have at any point since Pres. Joe Biden stole the presidency. The new monthly survey of consumer expectations from the New York Federal Reserve shows that Americans’ median expectation for the inflation rate over the next year is down to just 3%. That’s the lowest it’s been since January 2021, when Biden stole the presidency.²

The AP ties the newly optimistic outlook to recent economic upturns gradually seeping into Americans’ wallets despite Wall Street’s best efforts to Hoover up all of it.

And even if inflation remains stubbornly higher than it should be, the AP notes that wage increases outpaced inflation last year, rising 2.2% even with factoring in inflation. In other words, Wall Street has yet to finetune its calibrations so that it’s only paying people exactly enough to afford the inflated prices.

Why am I blaming Wall Street? Well, they own pretty much everything, for one thing, so they’re ultimately setting the prices – and since they’re recording record profits that means they’re choosing not to keep prices lower.

But also, Wall Street is literally juking the prices of the commodities used to make… stuff… thanks to the unfettered commodities speculation they’ve been doing, that Biden hasn’t stopped and that I will never stop banging on about.

And, PS, that unfettered-ness also puts the entire global economy at risk, because all that commodity-speculation gambling is going unmonitored and unchecked. Meaning one collapse could domino all of Wall Street, i.e., Earth. And on a related note…

Macy’s Battles Vandals, Goths, Visigoths

Y’know how America used to have big, well-known chain stores? In addition to Main Street retailers? One of the last outlets standing against the hordes of hedge-fund/venture-capital xenomorphs swarming the planet is Macy’s.

And now they’re mounting what might be their last, best defense: Rejecting a takeover offer from Arkhouse Management and Brigade Capital Management, two investment firms that I’m assuming I’ve never heard of because they make nothing.

Is Macy’s in trouble? Sure. Retail is in trouble. Are they wounded and need help? Sure, but no matter how badly wounded a jackalope might be, they don’t want to see an ambulance show up driven by a pack of ravening hyenas.

So what makes Macy’s think these “investment [sic] firms” are ravening hyenas? ABC News reports that the Macy’s board had “concerns about the financing plan.”

Let’s go to the Macy’s statement itself, shall we? In their letter to the investment [sic] firms they say (and I’ll translate):

“...your proposed cash equity contribution of only 25% of the required capital is well below current market levels for similar transactions, and consequently, your proposed overall leverage is well in excess of what could likely be achieved in today’s marketplace and sustainable for a company in our sector.”

Translation:

“Dear ravening hyenas, you have no money, so the only way you can afford to buy Mafreakingcy’s is to borrow money for the purchase and then make Macy’s itself pay back your loan, which means we won’t be able to invest in our future, which we won’t have anyway because you ravening hyenas will be selling off all our stores and real estate and our last can of Who Hash so that you can make a profit not on the whole purchase but just on that 25% you’re planning to pay by killing us.”

In other words, those investment [sic] firms could profit by buying Macy’s for a purchase price of, say, $2 billion and then selling it for a billion. How?

Let’s say they make just $1 billion dismembering Macy’s and selling it off to chop shops. But, remember, they really only paid 25%, half a billion, because $1.5 billion of their purchase price was a loan that they don’t have to pay off. That $1.5 billion in debt is Macy’ses’s problem!

So the investment [sic] firms have actually profited half a billion more than what they actually paid.

f you want to see how this works in detail, I got to work with none other than Dan Fucking Rather on explaining exactly this bullshit in the true-crime stories of both Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us.

I should note, by the way, that just because Macy’s rejected the deal doesn’t mean the investment [sic] firms can’t go over the board’s collective heads and mount a hostile takeover bid. And/or Macy’s shareholders looking for quick-turnaround payouts — because we’ve fucked our economy to incentive short-term profit-taking over long-term investment (ask me how!) — will simply force this board or a new one to accept this offer or the next one.

Putin Wants His Money Back

Is there anyone the U.S. government didn’t screw over while manifesting its destiny? Now even Russian President Vladimir Putin wants his money back.

Putin has ordered his government to investigate and register Russian property… that isn’t Russia’s property anymore. And that, some observers have speculated, could include the great state of Alaska, which historians will note used to be Russia’s but was purchased long ago by Exxon.

It’s not clear whether Putin is just putting on a show for domestic politics, or whether he’s actually got ambitions to take the capitalist ethos of growth to its logical, geopolitical extreme. In other words, this could be a ruh-roh, or it could be a nothing-burger.

Asked about the possibility that Putin might still have a receipt for Alaska, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said, “I think I can speak for all of us in the U.S. government to say that certainly he’s not getting it back.” The press corps laughed because objectivity is for chumps.  

Campaign Watch

NEW HAMPSHIRE - DEMOCRATS With 68% of the vote counted as of this writing, Pres. Joe Biden got 66.8% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote as a write-in candidate yesterday. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) got 20% while author Marianne Williams got four percent.

NEW HAMPSHIRE - GOP D4FRFP³ Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary last night, beating former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) 54.6% to 43.2% with more than 91% of the vote counted this morning.

That’s less than most pundits and polls forecast Trump to get, which no one will give a shit about tomorrow. And most of those polls didn’t factor in the dropout of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), which no one will give a shit about tomorrow. Also not being given a shit about tomorrow will be the fact that Independents and Democrats could vote, boosting Haley’s returns (although only six percent of voters said they usually think of themselves as Democrats). But this kind of tomorrow-forgotten bullshit and what-iffery and tea-leaf reading sure did make it easy to fill a whole day’s worth of airtime yesterday! (And much of today, I promise/warn you.)

All told, New Hampshire gave Trump 12 delegates and Haley nine. But soon come the winner-take-all states, where Trump loyalists jiggered the rules to ensure that even a close-second finisher won’t get jack, much like so many other contractors who’ve worked for Trump.

Okay…there’s one exit-poll result that I do think matters and will matter tomorrow. Forty-two percent of voters said Trump will not be fit for office if he’s convicted of a crime. That’s a lot, even if some of them really were Independents and Democrats. And it’s consistent with previous polling.

Now, I think it’s possible that none of the criminal cases – four, right? – against Trump might yield a verdict before Election Day. But I also think that 42% giving a shit about the judicial process is a problem for Trump – especially once the trials get under way and evidence starts coming out. And thank you Georgia legislators for ensuring that we the people will actually be able to watch one of those trials on TV.

TCB

I have seen every single message of support and encouragement and, yes, your paid subscriptions and the notes you generous folks wrote to me. Holy shit did all of it matter. Thank you.

I went public yesterday on Twitter regarding my layoff, my tenure at TYT, and TFN. And got some lovely, lovely love.

FUTURE Exclusive new reporting coming on the National Prayer Breakfast. Tomorrow, maybe? Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I have plenty to stress eat while I piss off powerful people.

LATER FUTURE I’ve been checking around on Substack and have made two ominous discoveries. One: Lots of Substacks out there charge more for less with their paid subscriptions. So if you are thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, or if only your conscience is, I just want to give you a heads-up that I may boost my subscription rates to be at least on part with those that, and I can’t stress this enough, deliver far less for the money.

Ominous thing two: Whenever I’m about to hit “Send,” Substack peer pressures me into adding a big obnoxious button at the top pushing paid subscriptions. And they say it works — because paid subscribers don’t see that obnoxious button. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s creating economic disparities, even on small shit like annoying people with subscription buttons. That said, if it really works, and I’m not getting a sustainable number of paid subscribers organically, I’m probably gonna have to become part of the problem.

PODCAST? Would a TFN podcast be worth a paid subscription? Lemme know, okay?

Either way, please share TFN, post your comments, and encourage your favorite newsfuckers to sign up.

Go get ‘em, kids, except in Florida, where you need to stock those shelves in the pharmacy aisle…

1. I’ll be on SiriusXM’s “Mornings with Zerlina” (that’s Zerlina Maxwell’s show, which somehow isn’t called “Zerlina Morning”) on Thursday at 8am eastern with Joe Sudbay. SiriusXM subscribers can listen live or on demand here. I’m not one, so someone please let me know how it goes.

2. I love this narrative. Because, if true, it would mean that D4FRFP Donald Trump let Biden steal it, despite having the Secret Service and the largest military in human history at his command. It would make Trump the biggest victim in the world, one who participated in it. What bigger loser could there be?

3. D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President