Category: News

On Thursday, Politico reported on Republicans seeing it as “crucial” to tout the One Big Beautiful Bill this month as part of a messaging war:

The party sees this month as crucial for gaining ground in the messaging war with Democrats over the new law, which pairs an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts with some of his campaign promises like “no tax on tips,” plus more funding for immigration enforcement and the military.

The story also talked about an event that JD Vance would be holding later in the day in Georgia to promote the law. At that event, JD Vance strikingly never mentioned the law as the One Big Beautiful Bill. Instead, mentioning it as the Working Families Tax Cut three times. That goes against how Donald Trump refers to it, but is something that has been pushed by Republican strategists. NBC’s Peter Nicholas, Garrett Haake and Olympia Sonnier reported on that in July:

Two Republican strategists said they are advising lawmakers to sell the act to a wider audience using different titles: the “Working Family Tax Cuts” act or possibly the “Trump Working Family Tax Cuts.”

That split between Donald Trump and JD Vance was largely ignored by the press. Possibly because they think so little of JD Vance. Or perhaps because they are bad at their jobs.

When Donald Trump took over policing in Washington, DC on Monday of last week, there had been 99 homicides so far in DC in 2025. Later that day, August 11, there was another homicide. That received coverage from national outlets and local ones. That shouldn’t be surprising, considering what had just happened to policing in DC. Two days later there was another homicide, which didn’t receive almost any coverage. That should be shocking, but with the state of journalism, especially in covering all things Trump, it isn’t.

We didn’t find any coverage of the homicide as the 101st. And the largest outlet we found that covered it at all was DC News Now, which is part of Nexstar Media Group.

The homicide of Mignon Brown-Masse is currently one of 48 of DC police’s “Major Case/Unsolved Homicides.” They provide this information about the homicide:

On Wednesday, August 13, 2025, at approximately 11:01 am, Ms. Mignon Brown-Massey was shot and killed in the 3300 block of 15th Street, NE.

They also released a reward flier.

The location of the homicide is far from the areas that appear to be the focus of Trump forces.

Yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined “Trump says he will set tariffs on steel and semiconductor chips in coming weeks.” Someone who has followed the Trump tariff saga would be confused, because Donald Trump already set tariffs on steel. In the seventh of ten paragraphs in the story, that is noted:

Trump in February raised tariffs on steel and aluminum to a flat 25%, but he announced in May that he would double the rate to 50% to boost domestic manufacturers.

The next paragraph sort of deals with the contradiction:

It was not immediately clear if another tariff increase on the metals was in the offing.

Somehow they realized that Donald Trump might not know what is going on with his own tariffs, but they ran a story not about that, but focused on a claim that might have no basis in reality.

Continuing the oversized role of promoting Kristi Noem by DHS, they released a series of posts on “[Kristi Noem’s] accomplishments from her historic 200 Days on the job.” Notably absent was any mention of a critical part of the DHS, FEMA, and its role in disaster relief. Here is what they highlighted instead:

THE MOST SECURE BORDER IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

Daily Southwest Border encounters have plunged by 93%.

In May, June and July, U.S. Border Patrol reported ZERO parole releases.

The Biden administration’s catch-and-release policies have ENDED.

More than 352,000 illegal aliens have been arrested and more than 324,000 removed.

Over 13,000 unaccompanied children have been located.

DHS has partnered with the State of Florida on Alligator Alcatraz and the State of Indiana on the Speedway Slammer to expand detention space to lock up the WORST OF THE WORST.

HISTORIC self-deportations have been incentivized—1.6 million illegal immigrants have left the United States population.

.@Sec_Noem has signed 16 agreements with other countries that advance President Trump’s agenda of making America safe.

The Golden Age of Travel has arrived with the new “Shoes-On” travel policy and Families on the Fly campaign aimed at enhancing traveler experience while maintaining the highest security standards.

The also released a companion video featured Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Can’t Stop”. They almost certainly didn’t get the rights to use that.

On February 21, the CDC started updating a page with stats on measles cases on a weekly basis up from monthly. That happened on Fridays and was later happening every Wednesday. This week there was no update. Instead, a message now appears at the top of the page stating that:

The data on this page will not be updated on Wednesday, August 13, 2025. CDC will resume updates as soon as possible.

No further information was provided as to what led to the change.

That comes as the US has already had the highest number of cases this century so far this year, despite nearly 5 months remaining to go in the count:

You have to go back to 1992 to a higher number of cases:

The large outbreak of measles has reached across 40 states this year: