BIG AND BEAUTIFUL: President Trump visited the House Republican caucus meeting yesterday to lobby for his “Big Beautiful Bill” and appears to have come away without the outliers bowing to the king.  

  Trump gave a blustery speech to reporters before entering the meeting and blustering again. He faces several Republican holdouts unhappy with the salad of features in the Big Bill that includes a mix of tax and spending cuts, and spending increases that will raise the national debt. 

  Trump claimed, “There was love in that room, there was no shouting,” and that “Anybody that didn’t support it as a Republican I would consider to be a fool.”

  The bill would extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay, raise spending on the military and immigration enforcement while cutting Medicaid, food stamps, education. and subsidies for clean energy.

  It’s estimated that the bill would rase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

— Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump said he plans to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense system to protect the entire US and finish it by the end of his presidency.

  It would cost an estimated  $542 billion over the next 20 years to build a system of satellites, space, and land based weapons to intercept ballistic missiles. The current budget bill earmarks $25 billion for the project.

  With defense secretary Pete Hegseth standing to his side, Trump said, “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built.” 

— The Trump Justice Department, which killed the corruption indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams, opened an investigation into former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s now running to replace Adams.  The question is whether Cuomo lied to Congress about nursing home deaths during the pandemic.

— A federal judge in Boston yesterday ordered the administration to maintain control of a planeload of immigrants flown to South Sudan in violation of an injunction he issued in April. Trump officials during a court hearing claimed they did not know where the plane was or where it was going. As they have in similar cases, administration lawyers claimed helplessness.

  Judge Brian E. Murphy said, “Based on what I have been told this seems like it may be contempt.” 

—  Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in a senate hearing yesterday failed a pop quiz on habeas corpus, the bedrock principle in the Constitution that says you have a right to challenge the government when it detains or charges you.  

     Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan asked, “Secretary Noem what is habeas corpus?”

  “Well,” Noem said, “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”

  “No,” Hassan interrupted. “Let me stop you, ma’am. Excuse me, that’s incorrect.”

  The senator then schooled Noem: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the govt provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the govt can simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. It is what separates America from police states like North Korea.”

METASTASIS OF TRUTH: While right wingers and conspiracy theorists jabbered over the past several days about how Joe Biden and his aides had to have known he had cancer while he was still president, the truth may be worse. Biden’s office revealed yesterday that he has not had the blood test for prostate cancer since 2014.

  Biden is 82 and the general medical wisdom is to stop testing a man for prostate cancer at about age 70 or so. But you’d think they would keep testing the President of the United States.

  Biden’s camp says his cancer could be manageable with treatment, but Scott Adams, the 67-year-old creator of the “Dilbert” cartoons, says he has the same cancer and expects to die this summer.

THE OBIT PAGE: George Wendt, the actor who played the beer-guzzling barstool fixture Norm Peterson for 11 seasons on the memorable sitcom “Cheers,” died at his home in Studio City, California. He was 76. Everybody knew his name.

  Wendt played the “everyman,” the man with a troubled marriage whose family was on both sides of the bar. Never the star of the show, the stars could not have shined without him. Wendt once told an interviewer, that his character “was terribly overweight, he couldn’t hold down a job, and his marriage was a mess. Still, if more barflies had award-winning Hollywood writers at their beck and call, they’d be popular, too.”

  Wendt died on the 32^nd anniversary of the show’s last episode.

JAIL BREAK: An employee at the New Orleans jail where 10 prisoners escaped was arrested and charged with aiding the prison break. Sterling Williams, 33, is accused of shutting off the water supply allowing the jailbirds to remove a toilet and cut through a wall.  

  Three other employees were suspended. The escape was not discovered for seven hours and investigators say it looks like the guards skipped security checks.

  The Louisiana attorney general’s office said Williams told investigators that an inmate had threatened to “shank him” if he didn’t shut off the water. Five of the 10 escapees are still on the run.

THE SPIN RACK:  Japan’s agriculture minister resigned amidst fallout after saying he “never had to buy rice” because he gets it from supporters as gifts. The Japanese  public is paying record high prices for the country’s traditional food.

BELOW THE FOLD:  Some newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer  published a syndicated summer book list partly generated by artificial intelligence that includes made-up books by famous authors. Only five of 15 books on the list were real, but the fake ones sounded really good.

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