Senator Lisa Murkowski was listing all the ways that President Trump’s efforts to slash the federal government had harmed Alaska, from the funding freezes on programs the state depends on to the layoffs of federal workers who live there, when she delivered something of an understatement.
“It’s a challenging time right now,” she recently told a crowd at a state infrastructure conference here in the state’s largest city. “I could use nice words about it — but I don’t.”
At a time when the Republican Congress has grown increasingly deferential to Mr. Trump, Ms. Murkowski has veered in the opposite direction from her party, using sharp words and her vote on the Senate floor to push back on him and his administration time and again.
They’re coming for her:
Senate Republicans have a relatively small majority, with three votes to spare. And a number of other G.O.P. senators have publicly aired qualms with the bill’s provisions dealing with Medicaid, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and Susan Collins of Maine. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have agitated for even deeper cuts to the program and others like it, warning that the bill as passed by the House would balloon federal deficits to unacceptable levels.
But when the Club for Growth, the anti-tax group, unveiled an ad campaign last week pressing the Senate to pass the bill, they targeted a single Republican who they said must act to avoid a looming tax hike.
“It’s in Lisa Murkowski’s hands to stop it by extending and expanding Trump’s tax cuts,” says the ad, which is running in both Alaska and Washington. “Tell Murkowski: Don’t block Trump’s agenda.”
Mr. Trump has made it clear that he does not appreciate Ms. Murkowski’s dissent, including her among a group of Republican senators he called “unbelievably disloyal.”
Ms. Murkowski, who at 68 is serving her fourth full term in the Senate, has never been easily cowed by the prevailing political winds in her party. She was first appointed to the Senate in 2002 by her father, Senator Frank Murkowski, who had served there for two decades before resigning to become governor of Alaska. And she has held on to the seat through a period of remarkable political upheaval inside the G.O.P., maintaining a centrist bent and an independent streak along the way.
She even voted to impeach Trump and got re-elected anyway.
Alaska is a red state although it does have an independent streak. But Trump backed her rival there and lost. I think it does go to show that people will reward integrity. Too bad more Republicans don’t have some.
At a time when collaboration is necessary to undertake President Donald Trump’s mass deportation goals, trust has eroded as some high-ranking employees feel they are being closely monitored by the White House over how they are carrying out arrest operations of illegal immigrants.
“They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals,” the first official said. “That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.”
ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.
[…]
“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population. “Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.
Miller says he wants 3,000 arrests minimum, every day.
According to the article heads are rolling at ICE because they are disappointing Commandante Miller.
Apparently, the ICE officers assigned to do the rousting aren’t happy in their work. It’s boring and menial and they think they are being asked to do things that are “below their pay grade.” This report doesn’t suggest that any of them are unhappy with their task of arresting children and law abiding citizens, many of whom have been in the country for many years, though. They just find the whole thing dull.
They are no doubt looking forward to the Big Beautiful $45,000 bonus in the Big Beautiful Bill though. And the massive influx of cash for the deportation camps and other goodies will certainly be welcome.
Miller is a psychopath and a pathological liar. He said that the all the immigrants who are being rounded up are those that Biden allegedly allowed into the country illegally. That is not true. They are picking off the easiest prey, the law abiding citizens who have been living in the open, doing everything required of any good citizen, in the hopes that they might some day attain legal status. And now that the Supremes have allowed the deportation of the 500,000 who are in the country working under Temporary Protected Status, these lazy ICE officers will have a bunch of new easy pickings.
The mass deportation operation will be a “bloody story,” Trump said last weekend. And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.
The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said last year. In multiple interviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.
Right now immigrants are being held in facilities around the country but they are maxed out. They simply have to build more prisons and there are private companies lining up for those contracts. They get paid by the body. The more they can stuff inside the more money they make.
The United States became the undisputed leader of the “free world” after World War II for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important was the fact that so many of the most renowned scientists who had been displaced during the war came to America. This was especially true of German Jews and some of their comrades who were chased out of Germany when the Nazis took power. It was a massive brain drain that hobbled the German war effort and benefited the allies greatly.
As reported in the book “Hitler’s Gift” by Jean Medawar and David Pyke, Germany had long been the acknowledged world leader in the hard sciences. Between 1901 and 1933, it had won a full one third of all the Nobel Prizes. Between 1933 and 1960, it won only eight. According to the book, “some 2600 scientists and other scholars left Germany within the first year [alone], the vast majority of them Jewish. Twenty-five per cent of all physicists were lost from German universities in an insane squandering of talent.” Almost all of them emigrated to the United States and the U.K. winning a vast number of nobel prizes in the ensuing years. They included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann,Hans Bethe and Stanisław Ulam among many others.
This ended up being Hitler’s gift to America which spent the next 90 years welcoming the very best minds from around the world to study here and do the research that made the U.S the world’s leader in physics, medicine, chemistry, economics which has led to the astonishing innovations such as this contraption you’re reading this on right now. The alliance between the federal government and the great American research universities is one of the most successful public private partnerships in history.
The parallels between what happened to Germany’s scientific community and what is happening here isn’t perfect but it’s close enough. The Trump administration has embarked on a concerted effort to end America’s role as a world leader in science and innovation. They aren’t singling out Jewish scholars, although plenty of Jews will be caught up in it. They are instead using a blunderbuss to blast the whole system by targeting foreign students for deportation and defunding the research that will lead to the breakthroughs of the future.
There is no logical reason for any of this. Their reasons change day to day. One day it’s because the research is “DEI” which simply means we have no need to understand anything about diverse populations. Another day it’s withholding money for universities allegedly because of antisemitism and revoking Harvard University’s right (and probably others in the future) to enroll foreign students. Now we’ve gone into full red scare McCarthyism toward Chinese students and scientists.
Listen to the Secretary of Homeland Security speak about it over the weekend:
Kristi Noem: "China hates us, and they have infiltrated our country, they've hacked into our systems, they've proven they can shut down our critical infrastructure … they want to destroy us, and Harvard is allowing that to happen on their campus…" pic.twitter.com/FD7GrRChkk
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 1, 2025
That’s just ignorant smearing by someone who doesn’t even know what habeas corpus is. But it’s a problem since our Secretary of State has just announced that he will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.” There are over a quarter of a million of them studying in the country as well as other Chinese and Chinese-American researchers who are very heavily represented in the scientific fields. They are now being hunted, apparently because our government doesn’t value scientific innovation and wants them to go elsewhere to share their talents and ambition.
[A] recent brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) found that the NIH has canceled $1.9 billion in funding across hundreds of grants over the past few months.
“This year’s terminations of biomedical research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health are unprecedented in the history of the agency,” stated AAMC in the brief.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is eagerly anticipating that they will reap the benefits of “Trump’s Gift.” According to Politico, he has sparked Europe’s “New Enlightenment.”
European universities and top politicians have mobilized in response to Trump’s domestic measures, creating new initiatives aimed at attracting top foreign talent to Europe by offering generous grants and greater academic freedom.
Earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a €500 million plan named “Choose Europe for Science” aiming to lure foreign researchers to the EU.[…]
The Commission last month announced plans to accelerate visa procedures to attract U.S. researchers and EU research ministers met in Brussels on May 23 to discuss how to increase Europe’s competitiveness in science and innovation.
China and India are also stepping up efforts to lure foreign talent and keep their own at home.
All of this is going to affect not just the cutting edge medical advances, it’s going to affect U.S. business competitiveness and the jobs of the future. The dynamism of the American economy has been the envy of the world for decades but we are throwing away the very engine that drives it. But then, the Trump administration keeps insisting that Americans yearn to work in factories and eschew material things in order to engage in more spiritual pursuits so perhaps our future really lies with supplying the rest of the world with consumer goods while they engage in the services and investing that made America wealthy in recent years.
In some ways it’s odd that Trump would go along with all this. He’s always been a big admirer of the MIT big brains like his uncle who taught there (which he often uses as validation of his own alleged genius) and he went to Penn as did Don Jr, Ivanka and Tiffany and it’s an Ivy League school. But then he does have tremendous status envy which was exacerbated during the pandemic when he commonly made a fool of himself with his attempts to discuss serious scientific subjects. And he certainly senses how much his followers loathe the intellectual elite.
At this point, the battle with Harvard is simply a battle of wills. He wants to see them crawl. Whether they do or not, much of the damage is already done. The top scientific talent from around the world is already seeking opportunity elsewhere and they are being offered plenty of incentives. It’s only a matter of time before American talent does the same because they won’t have the support or the resources to do their work here anymore.
It’s a hell of a “gift” to the rest of the world. So much for America first.
A Missouri town is shocked, shocked that “Carol,” the Waffle House waitress, house cleaner, and soccer mom next door, has been arrested as part of Donald Trump’s immigrant roundup. (Will there be horses and cowboys and rodeo clowns? What’s Glenn Beck doing thses days?)
Ming Li Hui, who goes by the name of “Carol,” has lived for 20 years in the town of Kennett, Missouri, after coming here from Hong Kong. She has been raising a family there and works as a waitress—and as The New York Timesreports in a piece featuring quotes from Carol and many locals, she’s well-liked in the community. But Carol was recently arrested and now faces potential deportation. This has shocked and dismayed many of the town’s residents, even though the area went overwhelmingly for Trump. Carol talked to us on the podcast straight from jail, where she is awaiting her fate. At times the conversation was difficult: She broke down in tears about her ordeal, was emotionally overwhelmed at the support she’s received from the Trump-backing town, and offers wrenching thoughts about Trump’s effort to deport countless others just like her. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
Hui: Please let me free. I just want to stay here with my children. Please protect me. I’m so sorry. I have a poor English. I don’t know. I just want to [be with] my family with my children, stay here in the U.S. for freedom and have [a] better life.
This is heartbreaking. Listen to Ming Li "Carol" Hui, from ICE detention, break down in tears as she contemplates having to leave her family behind. She has no criminal record and had permission from ICE to stay despite a removal order for over a decade — yet Trump's revoking it.
“There’s a lot of mixed messages and mixed signals [from the White House] which creates sort of chaos and uncertainty,” said Jeffrey Singer, a drug policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank. “On the one hand you’re threatening even tougher penalties on people who deal in drugs, while on the other hand you’re releasing drug dealers from prisons.”
The image at Lawyers, Guns, and Money is a joke, but it’s what caught my eye first. In its audacious drone attacks on Russian air bases over the weekend, Ukraine smuggled small drones deep into Russia aboard semi-trucks and launched them by remote control. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reportedly oversaw the operation personally.
Ukraine’s drone attack on airfields deep inside Russia on Sunday was a strategic and symbolic blow that military analysts said was designed to slow Moscow’s relentless bombing campaign and to demonstrate that Kyiv can still raise the cost of war for the Kremlin.
When they say deep, they mean it. The Times included a map:
Operation Spiderweb employed 117 remotely operated drones to attack across three time zones and thousands of miles from Ukraine. Ukraine’s security service claims it damaged or destroyed 41 aircraft including strategic bombers used to launch cruise missile attacks on Ukraine.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said that Ukraine attacked airfields in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions, and that it thwarted attacks at three of the bases. The New York Times verified videos that showed successful strikes at Olenya Air Base in the Murmansk region and Belaya Air Base in the Irkutsk region and damage to at least five aircraft, four of them strategic bombers.
Several Russian and Ukrainian media outlets reported that Ukraine carried out the operation by launching drones from lorries parked near military airfields deep inside Russia.
Ukrainian officials told the media that the operation – codename “Spiderweb” – had been in preparation for more than 18 months. The drones were first smuggled into Russia and later concealed under the roofs of small wooden sheds which were loaded on to trucks and driven to the perimeter of the airbases. The roof panels of the sheds were lifted off by a remotely activated mechanism, allowing the drones to fly out and begin their attack, the official said.
Via The Guardian: The drones supposedly used in the attack. Photograph: Ukraine’s security service
News services are still trying to independently verify the battle damage.
“No intelligence operation in the world has done anything like this before,” defence analyst Serhii Kuzan told Ukrainian TV.
“These strategic bombers are capable of launching long-range strikes against us,” he said. “There are only 120 of them and we struck 40. That’s an incredible figure.”
It is hard to assess the damage, but Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko says that even if the bombers, and command and control aircraft were not destroyed, the impact is enormous.
“The extent of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, is unlikely to be able to restore them in the near future,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
Max Boot of The Washington Post writes that Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war and compared the attack to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor:
In the process, the Ukrainians revealed a vulnerability that should give every general in the world sleepless nights. If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?
Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.
This will be in textbooks. Ukraine secretly delivered FPV drones and wooden mobile cabins into Russia. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the cabins, which were later mounted on trucks.
At the signal, the roofs opened remotely. Dozens of drones launched directly from the… pic.twitter.com/sJyG3WyYYI
Ukraine’s attack is hardly a decisive blow against Russia, but another David vs. Goliath success from a country fighting an asymmetric war and mastering the genre. Boot observes, “Sunday’s attack shows, yet again, that the Ukrainians are proving far more resilient and adaptable fighters than anyone had anticipated before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than three years ago.”
If only Democrats were so resilient and nimble in responding to the asymmetric information war they are in with conservative media Goliaths in this country. But no.
BREAKING: Over 40 ‼️‼️Russian warplanes reportedly hit in massive Ukrainian drone strike. Ukraine’s Security Service has launched a major drone operation, reportedly damaging more than 40 Russian aircraft — including A-50, Tu-95, and Tu-22M3 bombers. That’s over $2 billion in… pic.twitter.com/8iIdQq47yy
Cheryl Rofer writes at the original Lawyers, Guns, and Money post, “The Ukrainians are master strategists, to steal Darth Putin’s conceit. High value target? The planes causing most of the destruction in Ukraine. Vulnerable on the tarmac, carrying the fuel that will destroy them when a match is supplied. So the Ukrainians figured out how to supply those matches.”
Almost 5000km from Ukraine, a Ukrainian drone operator takes his time in choosing the perfect point of impact to destroy this Tu-95 strategic bomber that regularly rains missiles on the cities of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/CqDcHqY35I
Spiderweb proved Ukraine can run a massive special op deep in Russia’s rear with flawless logistics and 1.6 years of total secrecy. Russians had no idea it was coming.
Let’s note that Ukraine does not have a monopoly on asymmetric tactics (Politico):
Who set fire to the Marywilska 44 shopping mall in Poland last year? In May, authorities in Warsaw announced they now know the answer, and that the perpetrators were ordinary civilians recruited by Russia.
The arrangement is very on trend. The Kremlin has been using freelancers to carry out dirty deeds across Europe with increasing frequency — and those freelancers can be anyone. The strategy is as sinister as it is effective. It’s also a law enforcement nightmare.
Sabotage in Germany against hundreds of private cars in 2024 appeared to be carried out by political activists. Police later found they were one-off, gig attacks “committed by various small-time criminals who were recruited by a Russian agent on the messaging app Viber. The agent had promised — and delivered — payment of €100 per car, one of the suspects told the police.”
President Donald Trump’s top budget officer is playing down concerns among Republican senators that the administration’s sweeping megabill will add to the budget deficit and result in politically punishing Medicaid cuts…
Trump’s domestic policy package, which passed the House by a single vote in May, faces a rocky road in the Senate. One obstacle: Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, as well as Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), have all signaled discomfort in the face of potential cuts to Medicaid.
“I think they’re totally ridiculous. This is astroturf. This bill will preserve and protect the programs, the social safety net, but it will make it much more common sense,” Vought told Bash.
“Look, one out of every $5 or $6 in Medicaid is improper. We have illegal immigrants on the program. We have able-bodied working adults that don’t have a work requirement that they would have in TANF or even SNAP. And those are something that’s very important to institute. That’s what this bill does. No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill.”
Meanwhile:
Deficit hawks, including Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Elon Musk, have also played up concerns about the bill’s impact on the debt.
Vought is to the federal budget what Stephen Miller is to immigration: a fascist.
Vought gets a little salty after Dana Bash plays the clip of him saying that he wants federal bureaucrats to be "in trauma," telling her "you cherrypicked the quote" (she literally just played the clip) pic.twitter.com/M3w0nLaxL5
Here’s a story about Warner Discovery, CNN’s parent company, going to the Trump “orbit” to see how they can curry favor with King Trump:
WBD confirmed that a company representative recently reached out to the Trump orbit seeking advice about how the company might advantageously interact with the White House and improve its Trump-age odor. The reported message was to look at the example of Amazon and Jeff Bezos paying Melania Trump $40 million to participate in a documentary about herself. Don Jr. might like a hunting and fishing show on the Discovery Channel, they were told. And that CNN could have more pro-Trump voices — suggestion provided.
Just another bit of Trumpian deal-making, Why not?
Business Insider reports:
There’s no evidence that WBD has acted on any of those suggestions. But it’s certainly worth noting that last summer, Zaslav said he was rooting for a president that would allow the media business to consolidate — something Joe Biden had opposed. And that the day after Trump’s election last fall, Zaslav said he was hopeful the new administration “would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed.”
On the flip side, Trump is a frequent critic of WBD-owned CNN, and has sued the news organization — unsuccessfully — multipletimes. And during his first administration, Trump’s antitrust officials sued to stop AT&T from buying Time Warner, WBD’s predecessor company. Media executives in and outside of Time Warner believe that suit, which didn’t succeed but took years to litigate, stemmed from Trump’s distaste for CNN; Trump antitrust officials insist that wasn’t the case.
Something to keep in mind as we watch the network’s non-stop coverage of Joe Biden’s alleged semi-comatose behavior throughout his term — which is coincidentally, Trump’s most relentless attack as he seeks to blame Biden for all of his own screw-ups. It’s a nice little gift.
Mike Johnson blatantly lies on Meet the Press: "You can underscore what I'm about to tell you — there are no Medicaid cuts in the big beautiful bill … what we're doing is an important, and frankly heroic thing." pic.twitter.com/2TCkTtbBYV
What he means is that they are going to make it so difficult to obtain and maintain Medicaid that people will just drop out because of the massive red tape:
Mike Johnson: "Those 4.8 million people will not lose their Medicaid unless they choose to do so." pic.twitter.com/kQfr6Wz3eJ
The rural hospital thing, however, is going to bite him in the ass and it will happen pretty quickly:
While hospital profit margins have reached their highest levels in three decades due to higher commercial insurance payments, hospitals that serve more low-income patients and fewer patients with commercial coverage continue to struggle financially. This is particularly the case for hospitals in rural areas and “safety net” hospitals, which serve a disproportionate share of underserved populations.
In rural areas, an existing hospital closure crisis has already reduced access to care for communities across the country, chiefly in states that did not expand Medicaid under the ACA. A previous CAP analysis indicated that House Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts would threaten rural hospitals everywhere—in particular, the nearly 200 hospitals already at immediate risk of closure in Medicaid expansion states. Indeed, these proposals would grow uncompensated care burdens to levels that would threaten the financial survival of providers serving the nation’s most vulnerable Americans.
Since Republicans are not to be held responsible for anything they do, I’m not sure this will blow back. But if anything does, this could be it. Individuals going uncovered is sort of a moving target. Closing your local hospital is an obvious consequence. Democrats just have to make sure that the local GOP MAGA Rep who voted for this monstrosity wears it like a brand in the middle of their forehead.
There ya’ go. They have finally landed on a more potent complaint than antisemitism which makes no sense for a party full of Nazis. And it shows what’s left of the normie Republicans that the party still respects its long-standing traditions after all. It’s unifying.
