Actor Kevin Spacey claims that Bill Clinton flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet alongside numerous “young girls”
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1948861357161623750
johnny maga
@_johnnymaga
🚨 BREAKING: The two California surgical center workers seen in this viral clip blocking an ICE agent from arresting the center’s landscaper have been federally charged for impeding federal agents.
The man has been arrested, while agents are searching for the woman.
https://x.com/_johnnymaga/status/1948784512038506787
Justin Trudeau's doppelganger father: Castro
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1949010224527859896
Nice welcome for President Trump in Scotland
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1949105780386382132
Are you eligible for the new $6,000 senior tax deduction?
Joint filers over 65 will be able to deduct up to $46,700 from their federal return.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has supersized the standard deduction for seniors.
Starting with 2025 federal returns (filed in 2026), taxpayers 65 and older can claim up to $6,000 in addition to the extra standard deduction for seniors enacted back in 1948.
The latest write-off is available whether you itemize or not. It’s also per eligible individual, so married couples filing jointly can claim $12,000 total.
Currently, the deduction is set to expire in tax year 2028.
read moar:
https://www.cnbc.com/select/new-6k-tax-deduction-for-seniors/
The 10 most ‘impossibly unaffordable’ housing markets in the world—5 are in the U.S.
Living in The Golden State is not cheap.
It’s “impossibly unaffordable” to buy a home in four major California metropolitan areas — San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego — according to a May study by the Chapman University Center for Demographics and Policy. The study compared the median home price to median incomes of 95 housing markets in the third quarter of 2024.
The Honolulu area, where the median home price is 10 times the median income, also made the top 10 list of unaffordable housing markets.
Of the markets analyzed, 12 were classified as “impossibly unaffordable,” and not a single one was deemed “affordable,” the study found. “Impossibly unaffordable” housing markets had price-to-income ratios of nine or higher, while an “affordable” market was one where the median home price was no more than three times the area’s median annual income.
The most unaffordable market was Hong Kong, where the median house price was more than 14 times the median income of a worker in the city. Australia was also notably unaffordable. Metropolitan areas of Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne were all in the top 10 as well.
Top 10 least affordable housing markets and their house price-to-income ratios:
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Hong Kong 14.4
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Sydney 13.8
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San Jose, California 12.1
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Vancouver, Canada 11.8
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Los Angeles 11.2
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Adelaide, Australia 10.9
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Honolulu 10.8
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San Francisco 10
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Melbourne, Australia 9.7
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San Diego, California 9.5
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/25/the-10-most-impossibly-unaffordable-housing-markets-in-the-world.html
US Health Officials, Tech Executives to Launch Data-Sharing Plan
Top Trump administration health officials are expected to bring tech companies to the White House this week to roll out a plan to encourage more seamless sharing of health-care data, according to people familiar with the matter.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz are expected to host executives at an event on Wednesday, said the people, who did not provide names of the attendees and asked not to be named because the details haven’t been made public.
The plan was developed in coordination with the White House, building on a May effort by CMS to get public input on addressing barriers to sharing patient data.
The initiative was led by Amy Gleason, acting administrator of DOGE, the initiative known as Department of Government Efficiency, and Arda Kara, a senior adviser at CMS. Both worked for health-tech startups before joining the Trump administration.
“This initiative aims to build a smarter, more secure, and more personalized health care system — one that improves patient outcomes, reduces provider burden, and drives greater value through private-sector innovation and aligned federal leadership,” CMS spokesperson Catherine Howden said in a written statement.
Companies will commit to a voluntary framework around what’s known as interoperability, or how different health technology systems connect to one another and share data, the people said. Improving the flow of data across the fragmented US health-care system has long been a policy goal of both Democratic and Republican administrations seeking to improve quality and reduce waste.
The pledges will involve principles around patient and provider access to health information, and data sharing standards, among other elements. CMS will share additional information next week about the timeline for the plan, Howden said.
https://archive.ph/Fprhr#selection-1495.0-1535.237
Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years, WSJ Poll Finds
Republicans preferred on most issues that decide elections despite unease with Trump over the economy, tariffs and foreign policy.
The Democratic Party’s image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.
The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.
That is a far weaker assessment than voters give to either President Trump or the Republican Party, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively. A mere 8% of voters view the Democrats “very favorably,” compared with 19% who show that level of enthusiasm for the GOP.
Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.
On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.
In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.
Voters have significant concerns about the centerpiece of Trump’s agenda—his immigration policies—opposing some of his deportation tactics by double-digit numbers. And yet they trust congressional Republicans more than Democrats on immigration by 17 points and on handling illegal immigration by 24 points.
The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans, among the 10 tested in the Journal survey, are healthcare and vaccine policy.
“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Journal survey with Republican Tony Fabrizio. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”
This week, the House of Representatives started its summer recess, and Democrats are planning to use the coming weeks to hold town-hall meetings across the country, including in Republican-held House districts, to make the case against Trump’s agenda and norm-breaking governing style. They are hoping for a repeat of this spring’s recess, when angry voters flooded into town-hall meetings, heckling Republican lawmakers and challenging them to do more to push back against Trump.
Because anger is a stronger motivator to vote than satisfaction, the angry town-hall gatherings suggested to many Democrats that the next election could look something like Trump’s first midterm, in 2018, when Republicans lost at least 40 House seats and their majority in the chamber, restoring Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi to the speaker’s office. The party needs to win only a few seats to retake control of the House, where Republicans hold a 219-212 advantage, with four seats vacant. Democratic prospects are more remote in the Senate, where the party and its allies hold 47 of the 100 seats.
But the new Journal survey shows that the political environment today looks different now than in Trump’s first term.
At about this point in 2017, more voters called themselves Democrats than Republicans by 6 percentage points in Journal polling. The Democratic tilt meant that many Republicans, in a sense, were running uphill even before they started, depending on the makeup of their House district.
Now, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats, a significant change in the structure of the electorate—and a rarity in politics. Republicans last year built their first durable lead in more than three decades in party identification, and they have maintained that lead today. In the new Journal survey, more voters identify as Republicans than as Democrats by 1 percentage point, and the GOP led by 4 points in the April poll.
When asked how they would vote if the election were held today, more voters in the new Journal poll said they would back a Democrat for Congress over a Republican by 3 points, 46% to 43%. That is a significant advantage for the Democrats at this early stage. But at this point in 2017, the Democratic lead was 8 percentage points.
Trump’s job approval rating, at 46%, is lower than the 52% who disapprove of his performance in office. But it is meaningfully higher than the 40% approval he drew at this point in his first term.
“We were already watching the tide moving out for the Republican Party by this point in 2017, and that’s not where we are today,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster not connected to the Journal survey. “And that’s worth jumping up and down and trying to explain: how much more competitive Trump and the Republicans are today than in 2017.”
It is still early to consider how voters will make their choices for Congress in the fall of next year. But the Journal poll and other data offer important information that will guide the two parties as they invest billions of dollars—more than $10 billion was spent in the 2022 congressional midterms—in their efforts to influence voters.
Democrats enter the early phases of the election cycle with several advantages in addition to their lead on the question of which party a voter would support today, including signs of higher motivation to vote.
The weight of history favors Democrats, as presidents rarely escape a voter backlash in their first midterm election. McInturff, the Republican pollster, points out that five successive presidents have lost control of Congress, including former President Barack Obama, whose party lost 63 seats in the Tea Party tidal wave in the first election after he took office.
Moreover, voters are continually looking for change. In nine of the last 10 presidential or midterm elections, voters have changed party control of the House, Senate or White House.
Trump, with his aggressive agenda and promises to shake up the political establishment, has been the epitome of a change candidate. But in the new Journal survey, 51% say the change he is bringing is a form of chaos and dysfunction that will hurt the country. By contrast, 45% agree with the alternative statement that he is making needed and helpful changes.
Republicans have built a financial advantage at this early stage of the cycle. Campaign-finance reports out this week show that the Republican National Committee ended the first half of the year with more than $80 million on hand, compared with $15 million held by the Democrats’ national campaign arm. The Democratic committee raised roughly 20% less than it did in the first six months of 2021, a comparable period in the last midterm cycle, and has in the bank a quarter of what it did four years ago.
The Wall Street Journal poll of 1,500 registered voters was conducted July 16-20 by landline phone and cellphone, with some respondents contacted by text and invited to take the survey online. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
https://archive.is/DQEg9#selection-761.0-837.272