u/FinTecGeek

Neutral summary: In a sudden blurt out, Trump suggested the US is open to "bombing Oman." Oman is a US strategic and defense ally in the Middle East, with US armed forces using air bases and logistical networks within the country to support the US Central Command and US 5th Fleet, among other brigades and detachments that conduct regional security and counter-intelligence operations. Several outlets have inferred from Trump's comments overall that Trump is dissatisfied with Oman's attempts to negotiate directly with Iran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

I will put this bluntly, I think this is even more shocking and disastrous than Trump's comments on "seizing Greenland" last year. Can someone let "@POTUS" know that our own armed forces would be in harms way were he to order a bombing run on Oman? I could not imagine being a parent or spouse of a US servicemember working in Oman today and hearing this from Trump's mouth. Impeach this man.

Good morning all,

I am hoping to BEGIN the process of organizing a group of statewide citizens from any and all political camps and ideally every legislative district who are interested in bringing the issue of automated, warrantless and persistent camera surveillance to the ballot. Often, these are broadly categorized as "ALPR" or just "Flock cameras."

TL;DR: I believe it is time to enshrine in Missouri's Constitution that all Missourians are protected from suspicion-less, automated government surveillance and its downstream uses whatever they would or could be.

The Missouri IP process requires that initiative petitions are both single subject and that the "sum of their parts" properly connect matters to that single subject. Missouri's courts generally construe this liberally and in favor of the citizens leading the petition so long as the amendment in question reasonably implements a change for a single, narrow purpose.

Draft header: The people shall be secure from indiscriminate automated governmental surveillance of their lawful movements, travel, location, and associations. No governmental entity shall collect, retain, acquire, purchase, search, disclose, or use information obtained through an automated surveillance system except as expressly permitted by this article.

I would propose the following "properly linked matters" as the primary content of the amendment:

A. No Revenue Use

Government may not use this type of equipment to impose or collect fines, fees, tolls, taxes, civil penalties, forfeitures of any kind, debts or any other involuntary monetary liability.

B. Evidentiary Prohibition

Surveillance data concerning a person or private vehicle is inadmissible unless surveillance of that individual was authorized by a warrant based on probable cause before the information was captured. Indiscriminate fixed-location or mobile surveillance camera dragnets cannot be retrospectively used by law enforcement to build a criminal case.

C: Local Democratic Control

Fixed surveillance installations must be publicly disclosed, and a defined petition threshold for communities shall trigger a public hearing. If a jurisdiction fails to hold such hearing, operation of any kind of this surveillance equipment shall be suspended. A second, higher petition threshold shall compel a referendum vote on the camera's continued operation at the fixed location.

Anti-circumvention: Government actors nor their agents or associates shall not evade the article by purchasing, requesting, sharing, contracting for, or otherwise obtaining from a private company or separate governmental entity not operating in the state of Missouri data it could not constitutionally collect itself. This article is self-executing.

I am most concerned with how to build or attack part C. Undoubtedly, you are going to have cities, towns, counties, subdivisions, whatever which will challenge this as burdensome or say they have no referendum process in place that could satisfy this, and that they should not have to create one. This is a very, very early draft. I believe the issue is ripe and it would be a mistake not to get a ballot issue OF THIS KIND before voters by 2028, if not sooner.

Anyone else unable to send or receive calls or texts this afternoon?

I am really hoping to see the introduction of a "median turn lane" road. Ideally, a road that is single lane on either side of a center turn lane, and of course the dreaded double lane on either side of a center turn lane since that's a popular feature of most cities (I don't like them that way at all, but they are a practical solution when spending the money/ROW to do a divided road with dedicated u-turns or turning lanes is too expensive or not practical.

Neutral summary: A deadly outbreak of cyclospora from produce in the US continues to spiral out of control. The CDC, the agency Congress placed in charge or preventing and responding to these types of outbreaks, has failed to perform on that mandate. The labs and scientists at the CDC who work with this type of disease were significantly downsized last year as part of the “DOGE” cuts, and today has fewer than 5 remaining employees to respond to a nationwide public health crisis.

My thoughts: This is what it looks like to let unfit people govern. Not every issue should (or can) be reduced to a partisan lens with performative hacks at the helm. The people Congress put in place over decades and decades of compromise legislation to protect public health were not, and are not, there when they should be to respond to this incident. I find it perhaps most appalling of all to see some in the Trump admin criticize the CDC response without acknowledging that it was their disastrous decision making skills that brought us to a place where a billion dollar lab meant to do testing, contact tracing, preventative actions, etc, is staffed with fewer than FIVE people today. That was the President and his highest ranking advisors making that decision, not some nebulous “them” that they can scapegoat.

I am also disturbed that officials in Michigan’s state government learned of the outbreak and its connection to Taco Bell distribution chains on July 2, and failed to share what they knew for weeks while thousands of others became sick, some fatally.

These are not partisan issues, these are competency issues. People not capable of managing a lemonade stand we have elected to high office, and their incompetence doesn’t just reek, it kills.

Kind of a creepy but awakening situation. A group of six of us met for a conference in a city none of us live in. Tonight was the last night, and we decided to spend the evening exploring the city a bit. We visited a very unique bar and had food and drinks, then went several other places afterwards. We returned to our hotel around midnight. That is when I got an alert from my cell phone telling me an unknown device had been moving with us, and was first detected near the bar where we began the evening out. In fact, my phone gave us a map, showing it had been it had pinged in every location we had been to, and all along our Uber route back to the hotel.

No one knew what this device was or where it came from, so before any of us split up, we “pinged” the device by clicking the button to “play a sound” and located it in a group member’s outer pocket of her handbag. It had been with her all night, and we’d all been together the entire time, except for perhaps a few bathroom breaks. We alerted the hotel security in the lobby and they took it very seriously, saying this was not the first they had seen this recently. They reissued her new room keys and contacted the police to have it reported.

The only thing we can think of is that the device was planted on her at some point in the busy bar we started at given the “first detected” time. See, we’d all been together the whole trip, so we would have expected it to be first detected much sooner if it was truly something that came to the city with one of us from home. It honestly creeped all of us out. It didn’t feel “accidental” the device was found on the one female in our group either… but she was also the only one carrying a bag/purse, so maybe there isn’t that much more to it. In any case, we were all super relieved we got the alert and found the device BEFORE we split up. I don’t know if it was luck or what that I got an alert on this literally AS we arrived back at the lobby instead of hours after we all split back up for the night.

Neutral summary: Multiple sources are raising alarms about US strategic oil reserves, which have fallen to around 300mm barrels of oil. For reference, this is the lowest level since 1983. A chart reflecting historical US strategic reserve levels can be found at this link: US Crude Oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Stocks (Wee….

While it is true that Trump seems to have never seen a "footgun" he did not love, this aimless Iran war must take the cake even beyond the tariff "misadventure." The "bill" for this one will be huge, and I predict the vast majority of Americans do not feel they should have to pay for any of it, nor are most able to pay any more for goods and services than they do today. We are looking at a collision with reality in the very near future for pretty much everyone in the USA.

To level set, Trump inherited an economic mess. That is objectively true. But Trump has come to so many forks in the road since taking office and primarily chosen to go "off-roading" and in the case of both the (illegal) tariff scheme and the Iran war, just driven right through the guardrail to see how steep a cliff lies on the other side.

US debt markets continue to heave and buckle, and while that is a complex topic, it has fairly simple (and unpleasant) effects for every American. Markets do not require many things, but some level of predictability is required for the economic and social systems our lives are built around to function at all. The net effect of this level of chaos and "strategic unforced error" on Trump's part is increased costs to do ANYTHING. It costs more for Americans to borrow. It costs more for us to transact, to gather, to organize, to celebrate, to mourn, the list goes on. There is nowhere in our lives the net costs economically and socially are not coming back to find us under this administration.

One does wonder how much further this all must go before there is yet no one who can defend or stand behind the actions of this administration. Trump wants to point the finger at the last administration now that his economic woes are coming home to roost. Fine, there was mismanagement then. But every move Trump has made since then has been ruinous to the nth power. Saying the building already had foundation issues which you campaigned to fix for your constituents can hardly excuse burning the entire place down, and that is what it appears to me that this President is bent on doing. Not to worry, of course, because Trump is hard at work undermining confidence in the election that placed him in the White House for a second term, so we know he is laser focused on preventing an energy supply shock that would bring our entire domestic economy to its knees...

This prime time speech was exactly what I thought it would be. Predictable, nonsensical, meant to inspire fear, but more than that meant to “convince” people to trust no one but President Trump. Frankly, Trump came off as hysterical.

The documents Trump “declassified” are still highly redacted, and what isn’t redacted goes to great lengths to “hedge” CIA intelligence (hedging in intelligence reports means that the author(s) go to great lengths to disclaim they could be completely wrong).

Ultimately, I don’t see what there is left to say to redeem this man or the partisans that stand behind him. His idea of “evidence” continues to be conjecture coupled with any intelligence cable by any author who even hinted at a limited election fraud phenomenon which could (if the sun rises in the west and sets in the east) allow people to master manipulate a US presidential election. Real evidence would involve actual credible investigative reports. Intelligence estimates are not fact, that’s why it’s called intelligence estimates. When intelligence becomes verified, it becomes fact, not nebulous memos between low level CIA desks.

The Republicans have not done enough to distance themselves from the mess that this man is, and I believe they will lose massively in a blowout midterm to their opponents, the Democrats, or frankly Kermit the Frog if that thing decides to run, “not paranoid, dementia-riddled Trump adjacent” will be a winning combination to be sure.

Over the recent past, Missouri's largest school districts have engaged in a sort of "jubilee" of borrowing under the premise of "no tax increase" to the communities they serve. Today I'd like to break down this phenomenon, both why the way it is presented to us (the taxpayers) is mostly a fiction, and also why this is happening.

The following are bond issuance totals under "no tax increase" ballot language for Missouri school districts in the past 3-5 years: Springfield: 220M; Francis Howell R-III: 244M total across two issuances; North KC Schools: 175M; Columbia Schools: 80M; Platte County: 62M; Joplin: 40M. This is not "all" but a few specific examples. A full list does not exist in one place, you need to research issuances for each district individually.

The first thing to address is what does this "no tax increase" language actually mean? How does it translate to reality for the taxpayers? The answer is that it mostly does not mean what voters think it means. All examples provided are for school districts who were already levying higher taxes from their residents than their base tax authority allows for. All are accordingly described as "extension" or "continuation" levies on property. In other words, residents in Joplin were already paying $3.66 dollars per $100 in assessed valuations, and baked into that was debt issued a long time ago to fund the construction of buildings whose useful life was "multi-generational" or roughly the same as the maturity of the debt. Rather than lowering the tax burden to account for rising assessment values, residents will continue to see increases to cover the cost of these new debts. This translates nearly 1:1 for all other school districts listed, although in some districts the levy is even higher than $3.66 per $100 in assessed value. Several Jackson County school districts, for instance, are near or over $5 per $100 in assessed value.

"No tax-rate increase" (or, keeping the levy the same) does not mean that the tax the community pays will not go up. In fact, unless you are expecting your property tax assessments to be adjusted downward instead of upward, it does mean increases are guaranteed in perpetuity. In Jackson County, for instance, residents saw assessed values jump by over 15% for more than 75% of all homes and businesses. Litigation forced the county to reduce these to "just a 15% bump across the board" for essentially the entire county. So while the districts did not impose any increase in %, they collected enormously more from residents overall because the flat rate levy is still near $5 per $100 in assessed value.

Why are districts in Missouri issuing all of this debt in the first place? The answer varies some, but is a flavor of this in every case: existing tax revenues do not sufficiently cover the school's operating expenses, maintenance, upkeep, and replacement of aging systems. This means they must issue debt (or, extend their debt capacity as worded in their ballot language) to cover the general costs to operate. This was, and is, a problem BEFORE any promised cuts to education arrive from the federal or state governments as are being legislated or already enacted now.

Is this a problem? Yes. Municipal bonds for schools are an "old" system. They are designed for conservative financial principles. You build a school building that will last 30 years with a bond that will mature in 30 years. You are paying for the building the entire time you are using it, rather than saving up for 30 years, all the while you don't have classrooms or a football field to use in the interim. However, as schools continue to turn to the private debt markets to fund their "day to day" and general ongoing maintenance costs, the debt will snowball. It is politically unpopular to raise taxes to pay for the general upkeep and maintenance, such as replacing several 50K HVAC systems at the elementary school a block away from you, so instead they "plug the hole" in their boat by restructuring and rolling off debts, and in general just borrowing to kick the can down the road.

We are seeing schools in our state try to operate like private entities, relying on private market debt funding and assumptions about future cash flows which are untested at these debt levels at any point in the past. We do not elect elite bankers or economists to school boards to make these decisions, often people making these decisions have no idea the underlying economics of these decisions will have on the districts and their residents long term. The time for Missouri's legislators to begin finding a solution to these problems is now, not when the tax burden on residents is unmanageable and "penalty" levies are imposed on residents to avoid defaults on these bonds which are only being issued because the state itself is underfunding its school districts by over a billion dollars every fiscal year.

The first people impacted by the increased costs being ran through the private debt markets are renters/people with leased property. While homeowners will be impacted through escrow accounts and less money to spend at local businesses fairly quickly as well, the first point of distress will be rental rates blowing out in cities as landlords are faced with multiple growing tax bills at multiple properties not escrowed (the "surprise bill" effect being passed down the chain).

During an episode of Kristin Fisher's podcast "Endless Void," Rep. Eric Burlison appeared to... go off the rails, espousing absolute psycho-babble about several different "races" of alien life the US government has briefed him personally about as a member of Congress.

Specifically, Burlison alleged that there are a race of aliens called the "Nordics" which are "a few hundred years more advanced than us" and a race called the "Greys" who are more advanced than the Nordics and "on their way to planet Earth now."

Some quotes from the interview by Burlison included:

>I’ve heard those four classifications discussed in meetings in this office by others, but what I wasn’t expecting was for Davis to say it. I wasn’t expecting Eric Davis, you know, respected scientists, to say that.

In that quote, Burlison seems to attribute his knowledge or alleged "briefing" to publicly available quotes from PhD scientist on jet propulsion Dr. Eric Davis. Davis has in past years been cited as a source by multiple cranks and conspiracy theorists, and in each case has denied or divorced himself from these types of sensational claims about alien life.

>These aliens are human-like in shape and size and could be piloting UFOs.

This quote by Burlison is just baffling to me. I cannot tell if he has convinced himself this is true, is acting out some kind of bit, or is in the midst of an actual psychotic break.

In summary, I am of the opinion that Mr. Burlison is either (1) wasting taxpayer time and money with such sensationally untrue claims instead of discussing real legislative issues for his constituents or (2) has had some sort of mental episode while in office. The August primaries are around the corner, and Missouri's 7th district Republican voters will have the opportunity to "pull the plug" on this nonsense regardless. If they do not, perhaps Missouri's 7th could turn blue as Burlison continues to spin out on "aliens piloting aircraft" and false attributions to real US scientists instead of doing anything productive.

The Trump administration has at this point declared a "peace deal" has been reached with Iran today. The details of that deal are still coming together, and Trump himself has vehemently insisted that the version of a deal that Iran leaked in the past few hours is not "the deal" that they have all agreed to (Trump blasts leaked Iranian deal terms, 'very dishonorable' negotiators). Pakistan's Prime Minister has announced that the US and Iran have "agreed" to a final version of a "memorandum of understanding" that grants both parties up to 60 days to continue negotiating the end of the war between the US, Israel and Iran. Primarily, we have heard nothing from the Israeli government about the deal or whether they actually intend to adopt or adhere to its terms at this point. (Pakistan says U.S.-Iran deal text has been reached; Iran holding ‘final’ deliberations).

TL;DR: While a "deal" has effectively been announced, this does not seem to be the most honest way to characterize the situation. Rather, a "memo" may be adopted by two of the three warring countries (no word on Israel in any of this so far) that would grant them 60 days of not blowing anything up to (maybe, possibly) reach an actual deal that covers key concerns like the Iranian nuclear program's future as well as (perhaps most importantly) just how much money Iran will charge their enemies to pass through their Strait of Hormuz going forward.

Some initial notes and takeaways.

1. Despite years of Trump in office, it is still hard for me to wrestle with a "memorandum of understanding" that grants three parties who seem many miles apart from each other 60 days to continue negotiating as "a deal" to be touted and celebrated
2. It is a net positive for the US to quit spending vast sums of money and manpower on a hot war with Iran no matter how we look at it, and if this leads to an actual "deal" as the first step in a long chain of steps, that is positive news for us and the rest of the world in any lens
3. The US entered the war with a sort of "unlimited" objective of destroying Iran's government, and that does not seem to have happened here
4. All of the types of "deals" we have left or available to us "after" this hot war with Iran seem worse for us and our allies than the deal we started with under Obama
5. I strongly believe the Iranians will not concede control of the Strait of Hormuz ever again, for any reason, since it proved as effective a deterrent as the nuclear missiles we seek to keep them from obtaining in this conflict (this is hard to do anything about too, because our near allies like Saudi Arabia can build pipelines to bypass the Strait, but those are big targets impossible to defend from Iranian drones and missiles)

We are here in Southwest Missouri, and were looking to finally replace our wood siding with a polymer siding product. We contacted three separate contractors, and two of them were very close around 12K to do the tear off, new house wrap, new siding, new electrical boxes, etc. The third was Continental Siding... who quoted us over 50K to do the same job. Same color, same scope of job, etc.

When I asked them how they explain this price difference, they were like "well those others are a vinyl product, you are getting a true polymer product here that is superior, and you get a lifetime warranty."

I of course pointed out to them that all three bids are a polymer (or in the case of the first 12K bid, a "super polymer" product). I.e., none of these are bids to install cheap or low-end siding.

Does this company actually legit sell anyone 50K plus siding jobs for normal sized suburban homes? I mean, they have a website and salespeople that visit the home when you call, but it's hard for me to believe this company could operate with whatever kind of overhead and cost structure is causing them to be almost 5x more than their competitors...

We are here in Southwest Missouri, and were looking to finally replace our wood siding with a polymer siding product. We contacted three separate contractors, and two of them were very close around 12K to do the tear off, new house wrap, new siding, new electrical boxes, etc. The third was Continental Siding... who quoted us over 50K to do the same job. Same color, same scope of job, etc.

When I asked them how they explain this price difference, they were like "well those others are a vinyl product, you are getting a true polymer product here that is superior, and you get a lifetime warranty."

I of course pointed out to them that all three bids are a polymer (or in the case of the first 12K bid, a "super polymer" product). I.e., none of these are bids to install cheap or low-end siding.

Does this company actually legit sell anyone 50K plus siding jobs in Missouri? I mean, they have a website and salespeople that visit the home when you call, but it's hard for me to believe this company could operate with whatever kind of overhead and cost structure is causing them to be almost 5x more than their competitors...

Neutral summary: The Trump DOJ has launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, a sexual abuse survivor of Trump, for perjury. Specifically, the Trump DOJ's theory is that Carroll lied when asked if others were paying her attorney's fees. Notably, in a case about sexual abuse, no perjury around the facts she presented as they specifically pertained to the sexual abuse during the same depositions are being characterized as perjury at this time. The current Attorney General Todd Blanche (Trump's former personal defense attorney) has recused himself from the investigation.

Edit to add: Carroll's 2023 sexual abuse + defamation case was (famously) a contingency case for her lawyer. It is unclear how anyone could have been paying the attorney "fees" at the stage when the question was asked due to the contingency nature of the case (contingency meaning if the case is won, the lawyer takes a cut of the jury award or settlement at the end).

I just wanted to say that the custom assets (buildings) have made this game so much more playable again. It is fantastic to be able to get buildings that actually look good to go in my cities. Completely changed my gameplay and has kept me building on a city again rather than just at some point deciding it's hideous and starting over. Very fun.

I am a huge fan of nice looking low to mid rise apartments, office buildings, hotels, especially mixed use buildings. I find that so many assets for this game and in this game are "too damn big" or absurdly tall. That's not really my thing personally, I prefer a more mid-rise downtown core with *perhaps one to two tall towers that are a hotel or office building.

I actually did go and edit my review of this game based on the work that Iceflake has been doing along with the fantastic work of the custom asset creators that keeps hitting the shelf.

Now that I have had time to truly review the entirety of the "case" here, I have a few thoughts to share on it for those who enjoy the finer details on things.

1. The first item is really whether or not Trump had a real "legal hook" in the first place to bring a suit, even if he were not President. I.e., if Trump were just a standard Plaintiff in this case who had never been President at all, is there anything here. To answer that question, we have to look at the statute he sued under. § 7431(a)(1), which relies on interpretations by IRS officers and employees of §6103, grants a form of compensable damages. However, it is cabined to actions related to IRS officers and employees. Littlejohn, who no one disputes in this case "stole and leaked data without authorization" was a contractor at the time, not an officer or even an employee. In summary, Trump has a "factual hook" sank in regarding his tax documents having been leaked, but there is no "legal hook" in the sense that the relevant statute their legal theory of the case was presented under does not expose the US government to any lawsuits at all.
2. If Littlejohn were an employee and not a contractor, does that change anything in this case? First of all, most likely not. The statute in question is quite narrow, and would cover a rather specific scenario where an IRS employee "knowingly did something that violates procedures in §6103" as part of their duties on the job. However, this is not actually what happened. What did happen is that Littlejohn stole the information and exfiltrated it, which was a criminal matter and the DOJ pursued him as a criminal. This was not that Littlejohn received an open records request at CNN and erroneously answered it with a full tax return, in violation of §6103. Rather, Littlejohn was acting completely outside of the scope of any official duty or capacity at the IRS at all, in a criminal way, and nothing in §7431(a)(1) actually creates a liability for the US government in that scenario at all. Trump could plausibly argue that this is still a problem of supervision, of failure to safeguard his data, of improper processes and procedures at the IRS. However, if he does that, he has fully left the statute he tried to sue under behind, because that statute is not about data security, data privacy, or poor management of the agency. There is no remedy for anyone, anywhere in the world for those issues.
3. Trump is suing for 10 billion dollars, but §7431(a)(1) is narrow and cabined to specific types of actual damages. Whether or not punitive damages could be available is another question to be asked between the adversaries of the case and receive rulings to that effect, but most often not when you are suing the US government in district court. Punitive damages under these facts would not be anywhere near 10 billion dollars if they come into being. This is quite a good barometer that the statute they are relying upon to file a suit has little to do with the case they are seeking to prosecute. In fact, it appears that Trump's actual theory is an "omnibus" theory of a weaponized government, sent after him in particular by his political foe or foes. There is no liability for the US government in that kind of case. That type of case does not exist, and the government would need to do little (or nothing) to defend against it except to say "you are not entitled to damages at all here, and even if you were, you are not trying your case with clean hands when seeking to attach 10 billion dollars in damages to a §7431 case, as the statute is narrow and does not cover 99% of the damages you seek compensation for, including reputational, political, etc."
4. There are no adversaries before the court. If you only take one thing away from this, it is that under the Trump admin's widely adopted legal theory of "unitary executive," these hypothetical swim lanes between various executive agencies and the Oval Office do not exist in any way. If you read §7431, it dictates that litigants go to a US District Court (an Article III court) to try their case. This is a problem for Trump in this case that consumes the entire case before it can start. That is, everyone who can put forth a legal theory to defend the US government in this case answers to Trump. This functionally means that there is no adversity in the case, there are no adversaries here to petition for anything, or respond to anything, or for that matter to even have hearings before a judge. The thing actually stopping the case from being moot is that Trump does not have the authority to write himself a 10 billion dollar check to satisfy his own lawsuit. And so, this case exists only as a way to short-circuit that problem of not having any power over the federal purse to pay his own claim.

Remaining questions are whether or not a "settlement," especially one that involved such convoluted concessions as to award almost 2 billion in monetary damages to parties who were never part of litigation or before the court in this case at all, and had the dramatic addendum shielding Trump and hundreds of his associates from IRS audits in broad ways can actually "exist." I mean, I know that this is a confounding question for some, because the DOJ says this settlement exists, they did a "press release" about it, etc. However, the actual root of the settlement (the litigation that led to it) is not, for the reasons discussed above, actually "real" and we will have to "wait and see" if anyone indeed benefits from it either financially or legally in the case of it shielding against any actual IRS actions against Trump, his two co-litigants in the case (his sons) or especially the people who were never parties to the litigation or before the court.

Quick recap: Trump, while President, sued his own IRS for 10 billion dollars for the "leak" of his tax return by a government contractor some years back. The DOJ made quite clear in their "settlement" with the President he is not entitled to any damages from this, however they made the truly strange decision to pay out other people not part of the litigation at any point 1.776 billion dollars to compensate them for "lawfare" and "government weaponization."

First note is that everyone reading this can probably think of a reason to file a claim. The links to reality were so weak with Trump's original case that pretty much anything goes if you yourself wanted to file a claim for a slice of this 1.776-billion-dollar pie. Of course, the Trump administration says that the fund can be "audited" but one has to ask, when they hand-select the five people running disbursements, what would actually be the motivation to say anything negative about those disbursements? I suspect any claim that looks like it was paid out to a person who is (at least rhetorically) an enemy of Biden-era policies will earn that group of 5 another gold star.

Next, we get to the actual concept at play here. Trump is pointing to some kind of "precedent" established under Obama for this. It is true (famously) that Obama employed the "sue and settle" method to affect certain environmental and other even more nebulous ends. However, this was not the going precedent. Trump himself along with every person who he has ever aligned with have spent a decade criticizing that conduct, and Republicans in Congress have said every possible negative thing there is to say about that conduct. That's not even to mention the criticisms of this conduct Obama received from those in his own party who were not comfortable with it. Not that this is a "consistency" attack on Trump. He is inconsistent as a baseline character trait. It is just interesting though to hear the actual plain-language attacks on the Obama conduct of the past make the full arc to now become the defense of the "present thing." I'm not sure I've ever seen any serious person try and do that.

In conclusion, I don't really know any American who has anything to lose by filing a claim and trying to get a slice of the pie they've sat up in the window here. The settlement's "stated aims" in theory open it up to claims for any (literally any) single thing, pair of things, group of things the government ever did under Biden which you could argue affected you in an adverse way. That would be emotionally, ideologically, politically, financially, etc. And the great news is, when they run out of funds from the obvious "run on the bank" they are about to have for any and every claim ever conceived of, they can start issuing "apologies" in place of a check.

Also, somehow, evidently Trump and his associates (still trying to get details on exact scope of this) are forever, for all of their remaining lives, indemnified from any type of IRS audit or investigation. This may not seem as strange to some of you as it does to me, so to make this clear, basically NO contract or settlement ever covers FUTURE unknowable conduct as immune. Past stuff, sure, but not ongoing, future coverage.

U.S. Foreclosure Filings Spike 18%: Delaware Emerges as a Hot Spot

We just sold our house and bought a new one a few months ago. Our house sold above asking, as is, we got several offers within an hour. It seemed like the people buying had been searching desperately for a house and our open house had 57 people show up in 4 hours. Now, all of a sudden, two homes in our more upscale neighborhood we just moved to are sitting, getting no showings, one dropped price by 20K, the other just delisted because of what they said were "lowball offers." Now I see an article about record foreclosures. Am I just out of the loop on this after just a few months? With so few homes being built in most places, it's hard for me to figure out how people would be managing to get upside down or not be able to sell a house.