More: Technically, officially, Mr. Hegseth's $1.5 trillion was a budget request, and it had thousands of pages of figures and line items to go with it. But what's even more astonishing than its size is that it wasn't really a budget, not in the way you or I would think of it.

The word "budget" ordinarily implies picking among options, living within your means. Earlier military budgets, even the most gigantic ones, made trade-offs " canceled weapons programs, deferred maintenance, smaller fighting forces, to name a few. Mr. Hegseth's plan avoids those choices almost entirely.

It would funnel more money to the traditional military contractors that Mr. Hegseth previously called out for feasting on a wasteful, bloated system. It would bankroll President Trump's weirdly retro military wish list. On top of all that, Mr. Hegseth has asked Congress for $350 billion that would come with far less oversight or accountability than the rest of the sum. And that's before the bill for the Iran war comes due; the Pentagon estimates it has cost $29 billion so far, up from an estimate of $25 billion a few weeks ago.

"They're just doing an all-of-the-above approach," says Todd Harrison, a military budget expert at the traditionally right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, so that they "don't have to make difficult choices."

Mr. Hegseth's team says it needs flexibility in order to keep up with the head-snapping pace of change in technology but promises the budget will be "fiscally responsible." Angus King, the usually hawkish independent senator from Maine, said that a quarter of the budget was "essentially a slush fund." It's a giant blank check with "Trust me" penciled in. So let me ask you: How much do you trust Pete Hegseth?

"we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure," he told me recently.

Religion is evil.

If only they had been warned. Repeatedly.

Good read. Trump's DOJ will just ignore this though.

#9, I'd agree completely if the Clinton years weren't after Reagan. You can't ignore the success of his fiscal policy, his administration had us in the black and GWB et al. screwed that all up.

Reagan and his policies were terrible for our country but we had a balanced budget not long after his and GHWB's disastrous presidencies. We were cheated out it of by SCOTUS's coronation of GWB.

While I do agree the 70s were peak America, I think it's more correct to say the decline started in earnest in GWB's administration. Say what you want about Bill Clinton, but he had us on the right path before SCOTUS appointed Jr and he screwed it all up.

#3, How many hundreds of percent is that in Trump math?

During a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday, Gov. Jeff Landry (R) was pressed about what would happen to the roughly 45,000 ballots that were cast prior to the high court's decision.

"This country has held elections during the Civil War, during two world wars, elections still went on," correspondent Cecilia Vega said.

"We'll have an election, and we're actually gonna have an election on election day," Landry responded.

"But voting was already happening," Vega said, cutting Landry off. "As we sit here right now, more than 45,000 ballots have been returned. What happens to those?"

"Oh, those ballots are discarded," Landry said. "And those people will vote again in November."

Vega seemed to take issue with the cavalierness of the governor's response.

"You say that like it's not a big deal," she said.

"Well, it's not a big deal," Landry responded. "It's not my fault. If anyone has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court."

More: China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi's worldview centered on "the rise of the East and decline of the West."

For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked.

Mr. Trump's ascent and his volatile second term shattered that image.

In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump's first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: "Thank Trump."

The report called Mr. Trump an "accelerator of American political decay," with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even "Latin American-style instability." His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a "reverse booster" that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.

"At this turning point in history," the authors wrote, "what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire's evening bell."

Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.

More: The consumer price index rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.6% for the month, putting the one-year pace at 3.8%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. The monthly rate was as forecast, but the annual rate was 0.1 percentage point above the Dow Jones consensus.

Excluding food and energy, core CPI increased 0.4% and 2.8% respectively, keeping inflation well above the Federal Reserve's 2% goal.

The annual headline inflation rate was the highest since May 2023 and was up half a percentage point from March. Core inflation rose 0.2 percentage point annually.

Hard to think of something less suited to modern warfare.

He's half right. Social media has helped open the eyes of many who would otherwise never have know how barbaric Israel really is. But it's not some other country making them look bad it's the IDF and the fascists ruling Israel that are.

More: Donald Trump wins, Republicans lose. The Indiana primaries on 5 May, in which five of seven Trump-backed candidates ousted stalwart conservative Republican state legislators who had refused his command to redraw congressional districts, has been the only victory Trump can claim recently. Indiana, happily for him, is not Iran. His appeal still prevails at least over the increasingly narrow band of Maga voters. But the persistence of Trump's domination is a sign of mounting haplessness. His victory is an augury of repudiation. Maga devotion is hardening in response to his dwindling popularity, a telltale reaction of true believers to a failed prophesy. The cult survives, the party withers.

On the same day the Indiana Republicans went down to defeat to sate Trump's vengefulness, a Democrat won a bellwether Michigan state senate seat by 20 points in a district that Kamala Harris carried by less than a point. The bell tolls for thee.

The Republicans have no instinct for separation from Trump, no will to stage an intervention, no ability to muster an ultimatum. They have been complicit in their captivity, co-conspirators in their demise.

Just calling it illegal without holding anyone accountable is meaningless.

How long before Trump claims credit for this?

This is going to sound harsh but these people don't deserve to have children.

No one is quite sure when it started

The Reagan administration. Mystery solved.

#5, Don't get too excited, they didn't keep him in jail.

Hunt will serve 36 months of supervised probation and bear the associated costs. If he remains current on payments by the 24-month mark, the judge said he can request unsupervised probation. He will also be registered as a sex offender for 30 years in accordance with state law, undergo a sex offender evaluation, and participate in a related program. Despite the offense, the judge allowed Hunt to live with his child.

More: The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration's public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said.

Iran retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.

More: The package, which is included in the state budget deal announced on Thursday, prohibits state and local officials from entering into formal or informal cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and forbids law enforcement agents from wearing masks.

The rules also prohibit ICE from using local jails to house detainees and from searching New Yorkers' homes, hospitals, churches and schools without a warrant signed by a judge. But they will not affect the ability of law enforcement officials to coordinate with the agency on public safety issues.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Thursday that the changes were necessary given the extent of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.

"They didn't just target hardened criminals and gang members, which I would have supported " we did support," Ms. Hochul said. "They also targeted mothers still nursing their infants, separating them, an 85-year-old widow in her nightgown."

She said that ICE had used intimidation tactics to evade responsibility, adding: "New York will no longer stand for it."

#3, You're confusing this hate crime with another. This was an assault on a real woman in Jerusalem not the IDF soldier desecrating a statue of Mary in Lebanon. Zionists commit so many that it's hard to keep them straight.

More: The nun suffered bruises on her face and leg due to the attack, the statement said.

The attorney's office asked the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, where it filed the indictment, to hold the man in detention until the legal proceedings against him conclude.

Jerusalem's Old City in recent years has seen frequent incidents in which religious Jews spit on Christian sites or otherwise try to intimidate Christians and Christian clergy in the city, members of the city's Christian community say.

When he got arrested a while back this made the local news here in Charlotte, I saw lots of signs disappear from yards.