WASHINGTON (AP) — Former U.S. Rep. Billy Long of Missouri was confirmed on Thursday to lead the Internal Revenue Service, giving the beleaguered agency he once sought to abolish a permanent commissioner after months of acting leaders and massive staffing cuts that have threatened to derail next year’s tax filing season.
The Senate confirmed Long on a 53-44 vote despite Democrats’ concerns about the Republican’s past work for a firm that pitched a fraud-ridden coronavirus pandemic-era tax break and about campaign contributions he received after President Donald Trump nominated him to serve as IRS commissioner.
While in Congress, where he served from 2011 to 2023, Long sponsored legislation to get rid of the IRS, the agency he is now tasked with leading. A former auctioneer, Long has no background in tax administration.
(The Center Square) – Wisconsin ranked 22nd in the American Legislative Exchange Council’s new labor policy rankings.
The state was graded with a total of three stars while Arizona and Utah led the way with 5.5 stars and both Alabama and Arkansas had five stars.
“Wisconsin made history with Act 10, a landmark reform that stood up to entrenched special interests and put power back in the hands of taxpayers,” said Alan Jernigan, manager of the ALEC Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force. “That moment inspired a national movement. But real reform is never a one-time event, it’s a continuous process.”
On Monday he said he was “retiring” all of the Acip panel members. Eight of the 17 panellists were appointed in January 2025, in the last days of President Biden’s term.
Most of the members are practicing doctors and experts attached to major university medical centres.
Kennedy noted that if he did not remove the committee members, President Trump would not have been able to appoint a majority on the panel until 2028.
“The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” Kennedy wrote.
He claimed that health authorities and drug companies were responsible for a “crisis of public trust” that some try to explain “by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes.”
In the editorial, Kennedy cited examples from the 1990s and 2000s and alleged that conflicts of interest persist.
“Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Since May 7, 2025, travelers have needed a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID to board domestic flights. And now, TSA is putting its foot down, telling travelers that their Costco cards do not count as a valid form of ID to travel with.
TSA posted the following message on Facebook: “We love hotdogs & rotisserie chickens as much as the next person but please stop telling people their Costco card counts as a REAL ID because it absolutely does not.”
Several people flocked to the comments section of the Facebook post, writing things like, “I mean at least it has a STAR on it,” and “Im pretty sure that the Costco card is stronger than some passports.” Another jokingly wrote, “So, you’re saying we should bring you a chicken?”
There are only two scenarios for KJP. Either she knew that Biden has lost his marbles and knowingly lied to the American people about it or she was never near Biden and lied to the American people about her access to the President. I suppose there’s a third option that she was with Biden all the time and just too stupid to notice that he was riddled with dementia, but that seems unlikely for anyone with a moderate degree of intelligence. Either way, there is no way that we can ever trust anything that KJP ever says again. If she was smart, she’d take some high dollar job doing PR for a lefty corporation and drop out of the public eye, but she won’t.
The release from Legacy Lit, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group, said Jean-Pierre has chosen to “look beyond party lines” and is embracing “life as an independent,” a decision it indicated she did not come to lightly.
Jean-Pierre, who served in the Biden administration, is somewhat vague about why she no longer identifies as a Democrat, writing that she feels the current political moment necessitates “freeing ourselves of boxes.”
“Until January 20, I was responsible for speaking on behalf of the President of the United States,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement on Wednesday. “At noon on that day, I became a private citizen who, like all Americans and many of our allies around the world, had to contend with what was to come next for our country.”
Obviously working hard for all Wisconsinites. They won this battle years ago. The culture has shifted. But they need to keep pushing to keep the base agitated and donating money.
LGBTQ+ Caucus Chair Sen. Mark Spreitzer argued Wisconsin should update its constitution to ensure no residents’ marriages are in doubt.
“This constitutional amendment would remove discriminatory language from our state constitution and ensure that my right to marry the person I love, and every Wisconsinite’s right to marry the person they love is not dependent on the votes of nine US Supreme Court justices, some of whom have publicly threatened to roll back these rights,” the Beloit Democrat said at a press conference yesterday.
Legislative Democrats and members of the LGBTQ+ Caucus introduced a package of legislation defending LGBTQ+ rights heading into Pride Month in June.
The letter sent to Congress by the State Department notes that the reorganization will affect more than 300 bureaus and offices, saying it’s eliminating divisions it describes as doing unclear or overlapping work and that Rubio believes “effective modern diplomacy requires streamlining this bloated bureaucracy.”
The document is clear that the reorganization is also intended to eliminate programs — particularly those related to refugees and immigration, as well as human rights and democracy promotion — that the Trump administration believes have become ideologically driven in a way that is incompatible with its priorities and policies.
“These offices, which have proven themselves prone to ideological capture and radicalism, will be either eliminated, with their statutory functions realigned elsewhere in the department, or restructured to better reflect their appropriate scope and the administration’s foreign policy priorities,” the notification says.
The reorganization notes USAID’s dismantlement and the shifting of some of its work to the State Department, particularly under a vastly restructured Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. PRM, as it is known, will have under its responsibility U.S. international disaster relief operations that had previously been tasked to USAID.
“Stand” will be published Nov. 11, St. Martin’s Press announced Wednesday. In April, the New Jersey Democrat made headlines by delivering the country’s longest continuous Senate floor speech — just over 25 hours. The 56-year-old Booker spoke in opposition to numerous Trump administration policies, whether the desire to make Canada part of the United States or cuts to Social Security offices.
“This book is about the virtues vital to our success as a nation and lessons we can draw from generations of Americans who fought for them,” Booker said in a statement.
The president will send a $9.4 billion rescissions package to Congress next week, giving Republicans an opportunity to enact cuts suggested by Elon Musk’s White House DOGE office.
During the ongoing massive manhunt for 10 inmates who escaped from a New Orleans jail last week, authorities say the use of facial recognition cameras run by a private organization helped lead to the recapture of one of the fugitives — even as the police department has come under scrutiny by critics from civil rights organizations to conservative politicians over its use of the technology.
Earlier this week, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told ABC News that facial recognition cameras maintained by Project N.O.L.A. had been used in the New Orleans manhunt despite the fact that she recently ordered a pause in the automated alerts her officers had been receiving from the group, which operates independently of the police department.
[…]
In a March 27, 2025 letter to Kash Patel, who was then acting director of the federal Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms Explosives, Biggs, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, and Davidson raised concerns over news reports indicating the ATF utilized facial recognition technology to identify gun owners. “The Subcommittee has concerns about ATF’s use of facial recognition and Al programs and the effects that its use has upon American citizens’ Second Amendment rights and rights to privacy,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter, requesting documents on policies and training in the use of facial recognition technology.
Excellent. Where are you, Wisconsin? I believe in the freedom of people to eat and drink crap at their own expense, but if I’m paying for it, I only want to pay for healthy-ish food. Yes, I understand that there are widely differing opinions on what is healthy and what is not, but we can all agree that soda is terrible for you.
The move, announced Monday by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, would affect about 152,000 people in Nebraska enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps families pay for groceries.
“There’s absolutely zero reason for taxpayers to be subsidizing purchases of soda and energy drinks,” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said in a statement. “SNAP is about helping families in need get healthy food into their diets, but there’s nothing nutritious about the junk we’re removing with today’s waiver.”
Six other states — Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Indiana, Iowa and West Virginia — have also submitted requests for waivers banning certain foods and drinks or, in some cases, expanding access to hot foods for participants, according to the USDA.
Too slow. Too often wrong. But the judicial process is working.
The US Supreme Court has said it will allow the Trump administration to terminate deportation protections for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US.
The ruling lifts a hold that was placed by a California judge that kept Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in place for Venezuelans whose status’ would have expired last month.
Temporary Protected Status allows people to live and work in the US legally if their home countries are deemed unsafe due to things like countries experiencing wars, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions.
The ruling marks a win for US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly tried to use the Supreme Court to enact immigration policy decisions.
I can’t let that last sentence go. This is literally a story about how Leftists sued to stop Trump from doing what he is empowered by the Constitution to do and this bonehead reporter says that Trump “has repeatedly tried to use the Supreme Court to enact immigration policy decisions?” What an idiot.
On the issue itself, Biden arbitrarily granted TPS for hundreds of thousands of foreigners because he wanted to flood the country and destabilize it with mass migration. I support healthy immigration and want to keep our doors open to refugees from around the world. But we can only absorb so many people at a time before it overwhelms our social safety net and undermines our nation. I understand that Venezuela is a socialist hellhole that people want to escape. It is not Americans’ responsibility to be the safety net for failed nations. We can help some, but only with our reasonable ability to absorb the population.
And what Biden did, Trump has the power to undo. It sucks for the Venezuelans who will be sent back to their homeland. I hope they work hard to reclaim their nation from its socialist nightmare.
Prayers for his speedy recovery, but this raises more questions about the honesty and transparency of the Biden family and his administration.
Former US President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, a statement from his office said on Sunday.
Biden, 82, was diagnosed on Friday after he saw a doctor last week for urinary symptoms.
The cancer is a more aggressive form of the disease, characterised by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10. This means his illness is classified as “high-grade” and that the cancer cells could spread quickly, according to Cancer Research UK.
The obvious inconsistency is that Biden is an elderly man with a private physician and was, until very recently, his health was the rightful concern of the American people. Biden has a phalanx of doctors and they all missed diagnosing one of the most common cancers in elderly men? We are supposed to believe that?
Or, the more likely scenario, is that the same doctors and Biden supporters who lied to us about his dementia also lied to us about his cancer.
Again, I sincerely pray for his speedy recovery, but the cancer within his government needs to also be excised.
Frankly, Moody’s was negligent by not lowering it sooner. Until our politicians control spending and get our debt under control, we are a credit risk. Pretty soon our Congress is going to be getting payday loans to keep the spending going.
The US was stripped of its last top credit rating by Moody’s Ratings, reflecting deepening concern that ballooning debt and deficits will damage America’s standing as the preeminent destination for global capital and increase the government’s borrowing costs.
Moody’s lowered the US credit score to Aa1 from Aaa on Friday, joining Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings in grading the world’s biggest economy below the top, triple-A position. The one-notch cut comes more than a year after Moody’s changed its outlook on the US rating to negative. The credit assessor now has a stable outlook.
[…]
The shift comes at a time when the federal budget deficit is running near $2 trillion a year, or more than 6% of gross domestic product. A weaker US economy in the wake of a global tariff war is set to increase the deficit as government spending typically rises when activity slows.
That outlook comes as the overall debt level for the US has already surpassed the size of the economy in the wake of profligate borrowing since Covid. Higher interest rates over the past several years have also pushed up the cost to service the government’s debt.
[…]
The US government is on track to surpass record debt levels set after World War II in just four years, reaching 107% of gross domestic product by 2029, the Congressional Budget Office warned in January.
Former FBI director James Comey has been interviewed by the US Secret Service after he shared then deleted a social media post that Republicans alleged was an incitement to violence against US President Donald Trump.
Comey voluntarily participated in the questioning at the law enforcement agency’s Washington DC headquarters and was not being held in custody, sources told US media.
It comes a day after he posted on Instagram a photo of seashells that spelled the numbers “8647”.
The number 86 is a slang term whose definitions include “to reject” or “to get rid of”, however, it has more recently been used as a term to mean “kill”. Trump is the 47th US president
Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in 2017, was interviewed on Friday afternoon about what he meant by the post, and whether he intended it as a threat to Trump or an attempt to inspire others to commit violence, according to CNN.
A budget bill, long touted by Donald Trump as the “big, beautiful bill” hit a roadblock on Friday when lawmakers from the president’s own party voted against it in congress.
Five Republicans joined all Democrats in delivering a stunning setback to President Trump’s domestic agenda, demanding deeper budget cuts.
Trump, who has muscled through close votes several times this year, urged lawmakers to unite behind the legislation. “We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party. STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!,” he posted on Truth Social.
The bill’s chances of success are not hopeless, but its failure gives the Trump administration its first legislative bruise of the year.
Support for the bill among Republicans varies. Some hard-liners want to see the budget cuts go further, while other Republicans have expressed concern about cuts to programmes like Medicaid, which their constituents are dependent on.
While this story is written to insinuate that the federal government is inappropriately favoring Musk, this is happening all across the country. It’s a good thing. The federal government’s regulatory overreach works to retard growth and we should celebrate the Trump administration for pulling the government regulators back.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s regulatory problems have started to fade into the past.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.
In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.
MADISON, Wis. — The father of the 15-year-old girl who opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School last December, killing two people and injuring six more is in custody, online records show.
[…]
However, evidence collected from the Rupnows’ home and further testimony from Rupnow show his child had access to numerous guns while he was aware of her ongoing mental health struggles.
According to the complaint, Rupnow told police on the day of the shooting that he had 12 guns at his home, locked in a safe. However, police allegedly only found eight of those firearms when searching the home.
The complaint alleges that Rupnow took one of the guns out of the safe the day before the shooting at his daughter’s request, and he later told investigators that he couldn’t remember if the gun was returned before he closed the safe back up.
[…]
Jeffrey Rupnow had previously been questioned about his daughter’s suicidal tendencies in 2021. At the time he said he didn’t take things seriously. In 2022, Madison police spoke to him about high-risk behavior the eventual shooter was engaging in on the internet.
When asked why he allowed his daughter to unpack and pack the gun safe, Rupnow allegedly told investigators “I didn’t feel like I needed to babysit her with this.”
In general, I am in favor of charging negligent or criminal people who facilitate someone else committing a crime – even if that other person is their kid. Details matter here, though. In this case, it appears that the dad knew his daughter was not mentally stable and still gave her free and unsupervised access to guns. If those facts are true, then it rises to the level of negligence, at least.
What I worry about is prosecutors going too far. It is not a crime to have guns in your home. It is also not a crime to have unsecured guns in your home. It is a good idea if you have small or mentally disturbed children around, but if your kids are normal, responsible teenagers, it could be perfectly acceptable to have unsecured guns in your home. For generations, this was normal behavior. We don’t want our government to criminalize the “keep” part of the 2nd Amendment.
I am one of those who thinks we should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank and this is one of the reasons why. Their decisions don’t follow any kind of data-driven process. Based on the rate of inflation, employment, and every other metric, the Fed would have lowered interest rates if Biden were president. Because they don’t like the current president, they decided to keep interest rates where they are. If the Fed is just another political body trying to manage our economy based on political motivations, then they are doing more harm than good.
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday, just weeks after President Donald Trump intensified calls for lower borrowing costs and voiced eagerness about the potential “termination” of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Some things never change. Just read the Leftists’ opposition to ICE raids. Illegal immigrants are exploited by employers who can underpay and abuse them because they know that the illegals will never go to the cops. This is this slave labor relationship that the Leftists persist in defending. And while they try to confuse the issue by lumping legal and illegal immigrants together, ICE is only concerned with the illegals.
“If ICE wants to snatch up every single immigrant working in food service and delivery, then the entire industry will collapse,” Amy Fischer, a core organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, which supports migrants arriving in the capital, said in a statement.
The Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington — which represents the more than 60,000 restaurant workers in the area — said in a statement shared with ABC News that it was “deeply concerned” by the reports of ICE raids and drop-ins across Washington, D.C.
[…]
“Immigrants make up a significant portion of our workforce at all levels. From dishwashers to executive chefs to restaurant owners, immigrants are irreplaceable contributors to our most celebrated restaurants and beloved neighborhood establishments,” the statement said. “The immigrant workforce has been essential to sustaining and growing our local restaurant industry and has been a major contributor to our local economy.”
