JimBanks1

I am not the seditious representative from Indiana. Constitutional Progressive, KGNU Radio, Colorado and National Politics, Economic Commentary.

[Zach Bye @byesline]

Watching the Broncos offense in the red zone

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🗺️🇮🇷 The Persian Gulf, Now an “Iranian Lake”

Vali Nasr tells Drop Site’s @MazMHussain that the U.S. brought war to the Gulf “largely at Israel’s bidding,” then failed to defend its bases or allies, shattering Gulf states’ confidence in Washington.

“The walls that were containing Iran are broken,” Nasr says, and Tehran’s claim to control Hormuz would turn the Persian Gulf is “an Iranian lake.”

“Unless the U.S. is able to force Iran back into its cage, the entire scene in the Gulf has now changed.”

🔗 Watch the full interview with @Rob_Malley and @vali_nasr on YouTube. Link in the quoted post.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

This is one reason why the attack on empathy is so evil. If we have to wait for person after person to experience the brutality of this administration before we wake up, then we'll inflict an immense amount of pain on our country. But if, instead, we could place ourselves in the shoes of the immigrant in chains, then we can see the injustice more plainly.

And no, this does not mean that we can't or shouldn't deport illegal immigrants when appropriate. It doesn't mean we must have open borders. But we can't lose our own humanity and decency in the process, and we must not use brutality as an instrument of enforcement.

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

That’s crazy, isn’t it?

[Denver Broncos @Broncos]

Can't wait to hear more of this soon 🗣️

[JimBanks1 @JimBanks1]

@JKWeinberg @TheIranianzg3z For a second I thought you were talking about regime change in the United States. My bad.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

One thing that people learned early in the Trump years is that when reason, logic, and/or morality collided with Trump, then Trump had to win. That was the cult's central command.

Do that long enough and reason, logic, and (especially) morality themselves become evidence of disloyalty and are ultimately purged from the movement. It's risky to have ethical lines and standards.

And so here we are, with a "generation of rabid, incompetent idiots" dominating so much of the young right.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

We all knew he was lying about the Reflecting Pool. The problem is that he lies so often that it’s almost impossible to keep up.

So I asked AI to compile claims from just the past twenty-four months and then checked them against official data, contemporaneous reporting and independent fact-checks.

Here is a partial list of 86 lies:
1. He promised to bring prices down “starting on Day One.” Grocery prices remained high and continued rising.
2. After winning, he admitted that prices are very hard to bring down once they have gone up.
3. He said egg prices had fallen 93 percent. They had not fallen remotely close to 93 percent.
4. He said he inherited the highest inflation in American history. He inherited an annual inflation rate of 2.9 percent.
5. When corrected, he changed the claim to the worst inflation in 49 years. That was also false. Annual inflation reached 23.7 percent in 1920.
6. He said there was virtually no inflation during his first term. Consumer prices rose approximately 8 percent.
7. He repeatedly claimed he had already brought inflation down, including during periods when the annual inflation rate was higher than the 2.9 percent reported shortly before he took office.
8. He told Congress inflation was “plummeting.” Prices were still rising overall, including major household expenses such as housing, electricity and medical care.
9. He claimed to have secured $18 trillion in new investment.
10. He then raised the figure to $19.2 trillion.
11. Even the White House’s own tracker listed far less, and its total included multiyear pledges, purchasing agreements, previously announced projects and commitments that might never become actual US investment.
12. He said America was building more factories than ever.
13. He said factory construction was rising.
14. He said the country had achieved its highest growth ever. Manufacturing employment declined, factory-construction claims depended on cherry-picked categories, and economic growth was nowhere near a historical record.
15. He called the country he inherited a dead country. The US economy grew 2.8 percent in 2024, faster than every other major wealthy economy except Spain.
16. He says foreign countries pay his tariffs. American importers pay them and frequently pass the cost on to American consumers.
17. He said the evidence overwhelmingly showed consumers did not pay his tariffs. Economic studies found that American consumers and businesses absorbed nearly all their cost.
18. He said tariff revenue came with “no inflation.” Prices continued rising, and economic research found that the tariffs themselves increased costs for American consumers and businesses.
19. He repeatedly said drug prices were down 70, 80 or 90 percent. No broad measure of prescription-drug prices showed anything close to those reductions.
20. He said Medicaid was “left the same.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would reduce federal Medicaid spending by roughly $930 billion over ten years.
21. He said Americans were “not going to feel any of it.” The Congressional Budget Office projected that the legislation would leave approximately 11.8 million more people uninsured.
22. He said the Medicaid changes touched only waste, fraud and abuse. Independent analyses found that the legislation reduced coverage and federal spending far beyond fraudulent claims.
23. He said he had eliminated taxes on Social Security. The law created a temporary deduction, unavailable to many beneficiaries, that expires after 2028. It did not abolish taxation of Social Security benefits.
24. He said taxes would rise 68 percent without his bill. No credible independent estimate came close to supporting that figure.
25. He then declared, “I’ve kept all my promises and much more.”
26. He publicly promised at least 53 times to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours, or even before taking office.
Continued in replies…

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

We are supposedly at war to stop Iran from enriching the uranium we “obliterated” over a year ago.

Yesterday we signed a deal to help Saudi Arabia enrich uranium.

The first time the United States has ever helped another country enrich uranium on foreign soil.

The Saudis refused the inspection protocol 140 other countries accept. Too intrusive, they said.

Trump agreed. He signed a national security waiver to get around the rule.

The Saudis paid Kushner $100 million. They put $2 billion into his firm. They put another $6 billion into LIV Golf, which pays Trump properties to host its tournaments. They signed ten billion dollars in Trump-branded real estate deals in Jeddah and Riyadh. All in just the last few years.

But sure. My paintings.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I spent the last few months talking to people across the political spectrum, and to people who want nothing to do with politics at all. Here is what I learned.

We are not a divided country. We are a country being divided, on purpose, by an American oligarchy that profits from the fight. They’ve captured our government, denied our healthcare, looted our treasury, and saddled us with crippling debt.

I believe in a New New Deal. Healthcare as a human right. The right of every family to a decent home, and an end to endless wars.

And a dividend paid to every American from the AI economy, because these machines were built on the whole of human inheritance. That inheritance belongs to all of us, and not just to the handful of men playing God with our very existence.

And none of it happens if we just move on. Donald Trump, his family, and his administration are robbing us blind, not just of our money, but of our faith in one another, and they have to answer for it. Truth and reconciliation, not revenge. Then we break the system that let them do it.

The question is not whether we will lose our democracy. The question is whether we will fight to take back what has already been stolen.

I learned in recovery that you can’t heal what you won’t name. Neither can a country.

[JimBanks1 @JimBanks1]

Yup

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled.

You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.

[ABC News @ABC]

Joey Chestnut has been crowned the winner of the 2026 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest for the 18th time.

He ate 66 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. #DisneyCelebratesAmerica

[Dan Shapiro @DanielBShapiro]

Until the text of the US-Iran deal is signed and released, there is going to be a lot of spin on both sides. But here is my initial take.

This war was a mistake, and it needs to end. The President thought that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly, but it did not. In fact, it has been strengthened strategically by its survival against a heavy US-Israeli assault and carrying out some effective counterstrikes. Many countries in the region are now courting Iran and looking to deescalate and rebuild ties. A sign of which way the wind is blowing.

Getting the Strait of Hormuz open is the most important outcome of this MOU. Of course, the Strait was open before the war. Now we are paying to reopen it with sanctions relief. Iran has taken a theoretical point of leverage and turned it into a very real and powerful one, imposing costs across the global economy and rattling President Trump.

As for the nuclear issues, there really is no agreement, other than to negotiate over the HEU stockpile and an enrichment moratorium. Iran knows how to drag out those negotiations, and try to pocket concessions along the way. It is possible that no deal will every be reached, and very likely that if one is reached, it will be worse than what we could have achieved through diplomacy before the war.

Iran is not likely to take seriously that the US would return to war, certainly before the US midterms. So that means we will be conducting diplomacy without a credible threat of force.

If any agreement ultimately reached actually safely puts Iran's nuclear ambitions out of reach, I'll acknowledge it. It's just too early to make that judgment.

Trump is mainly focused on comparing his deal favorably to the JCPOA. But we are a long way from being able to make that comparison, and it may end up no better, or weaker than that deal.

But in some ways, Trump's deal and the JCPOA are already similar. Nothing on ballistic missiles, nothing on proxies, nothing on weakening the regime or helping the Iranian people. And plenty of sanctions relief that will strengthen the regime, and be poured into the missile program and proxy network. Honest critics of the JCPOA will not twist themselves into pretzels to defend Trump's approach.

Israelis are deeply disappointed in this outcome, but they should not be surprised. After some initial overlap of Trump's and Netanyahu's interests, there was a strong divergence. The United States needed this war to end. Netanyahu wanted to continue.

Trump's claim to include Lebanon in the ceasefire and his harsh shutting down Israeli attacks on Hezbollah is also a win for Iran. After the JCPOA was signed, Obama and Netanyahu worked together to strengthen Israel's campaign of strikes in Syria to intercept Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So let's hope we see the removal of Iran's enriched uranium and a long-term suspension of enrichment, with full verification. But to achieve those goals, Trump's team is going to need to engage in far more sophisticated diplomacy, backed by qualified experts, than they have to date. If it is a phase one splash with no follow-up on implementation of later phases, like in Gaza, we will be much worse off after, and because of, this war.

[JimBanks1 @JimBanks1]

https://t.co/S7gxzfnJWE

[Parker Butler @parkerpbutler]

If you’re not already following @TeamTalaricoHQ, I highly recommend.

And stay tuned

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Can we be done with the pretense that Republican primary voters vote for MAGA candidates in spite of their apostasy and corruption? The transgression is a feature, not a bug. It tells voters they don't care about law or morality. Only power.

[JimBanks1 @JimBanks1]

@DavidAFrench Impeachable offenses all.

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

When the tide turns, it'll be a Flood.

[JimBanks1 @JimBanks1]

Clearly an impeachable offense.