Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) committed to block House floor proceedings unless House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) inserts the SAVE Act into a must-pass piece of legislation, Punchbowl News reported on Friday.Luna has pressed for the SAVE America Act – a bill that mandates voter ID and citizenship checks while adding new restrictions on mail-in ballots – to be folded into the annual defense policy bill."We should be doing all of the above," Luna told Punchbowl News for its report published Friday. "Why not try? It's crazy."Luna has already disrupted leadership's plans once – she helped defeat a rule that would have inserted SAVE Act language directly into the defense bill, despite House GOP leaders having spent three years working to keep unrelated amendments out of it.Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have grown frustrated with inter-party disputes. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Punchbowl that Republicans "need to be very careful" about how they message the standoff, arguing that Democrats – not Republicans – are the ones blocking the SAVE Act's passage.“The message we need to convey to our supporters – it’s not Republicans that are preventing the SAVE America Act from being passed. It’s Democrats,” Johnson told Punchbowl News.
Angela Nikolau, 33, and her beau Ivan Kuznetsov, 32, the daredevils who got engaged atop the Empire State Building’s antenna were sprung Wednesday after getting hit with a slew of charges for the cringe Instagram stunt.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the federal government cannot cap how much a political party spends in direct coordination with its own candidates. National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission struck down a Federal Election Campaign Act provision that had limited coordinated party expenditures since 1974, overruling the court’s 2001 decision […]
If President Donald Trump was hoping for a good jobs report to boost his party's spirits, he didn't get it.As the latest survey results came in, economic reporters and other observers were quick to note that, while not every figure in the report was bad, it was well below what Wall Street had been hoping for."A disappointing jobs report," wrote Navy Federal Credit Union chief economist Heather Long on X. "The US economy added 57,000 jobs in June (below expectations of 115k). Hospitality jobs decline by -61k. Plus, April and May were revised lower by -74,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2% --> the lowest in a year, but mainly due to a big drop in people job hunting." Also rough, she noted, is that "Wages aren’t keeping up with inflation," only rising 3.5 percent vs 4 percent price increases.As the far-right financial site Zero Hedge put more bluntly, "The jobs print was below all but one forecasts."Wall Street Journal chief economic correspondent Nick Timiraos wrote, "The U.S. economy added 57,000 jobs in June and revisions subtracted a combined 74,000 jobs from the previously reported figures for May and April. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.2%. Leisure and hospitality employment declined by 61,000 in June."Industry analyst account The Kobeissi Letter noted that "The unemployment rate fell to 4.2%, below expectations of 4.3%," but that "May's jobs number was also revised down by -43,000 jobs. The labor market remains in a volatile situation."
The Wall Street Journal reports that not only did President Donald Trump make a cool $1 billion off his connections to the White House, he managed to do it in a way that made his MAGA fans and supporters catch the short end of the grifting stick.Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (WLF) last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire. But the WSJ reports the value of those tokens instead tanked.“While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week. “In crypto, people say a game is a game,” said Christensen, a digital-asset entrepreneur. “He played a better game than I did.”Others were much less generous over their losses.“My investment is trash now,” one user said of their WLF tokens."People backed Trump because they believed he would fight for them and were hoodwinked into thinking he cared about the working classes who brought him into power,” said a longtime Republican activist familiar with grassroots sentiment among Trump's MAGA base. “Seeing billions tied to crypto makes some loyal supporters uncomfortable and most of them have no idea what crypto is, let alone have the resources to invest in it. They feel this isn't public service anymore."“The president raked in cash by issuing new assets — World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto,” reports WSJ. “Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.”All told, roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent thousands of dollars on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token. Nansen’s analysis of 26,663 wallets shows a whopping 85 percent of World Liberty’s $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater. This, said WSJ, was a big step away for a president who in 2021 described bitcoin as a “scam” that threatened the U.S. dollar. Now, however, Trump leads a White House that has pledged to make America the “crypto capital of the world.”“As his administration lightened regulation of the notoriously boom-and-bust sector, the Trump family’s sprawling crypto business reached into nearly every corner of the industry, drawing conflict-of-interest concerns from ethics watchdogs,” reports WSJ. “Bitcoin prices also plunged.”The White House, meanwhile, has sworn to unleash "an unrelenting, full-scale assault on the fraudsters, scammers, and corrupt operators who have looted billions from American taxpayers," with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud moving "at unprecedented speed and ferocity to root out the waste, abuse, and criminal exploitation ... "that have drained billions from hardworking taxpayers."
