In other news, the Biden administration is reportedly planning to impose sanctions on Cuban officials and paramilitary forces in response to a crackdown on public protests.

Meanwhile, a new study found that two doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are almost as effective against the stronger delta variant of the coronavirus as they are against the original strain.

Finally, Democrats say their reconciliation bill will increase in size to about $4.1 trillion to make up the difference if President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure deal collapses.

“I can’t give you an exact timeline, but I think that we are going to have every Democratic senator on board,” said Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “At the end of the day ... the $600 billion in physical infrastructure, you can do it in the bipartisan bill, or you can combine it with one bill. One way or another, it’s going to happen.”

Programming note... I have another laser treatment scheduled for tomorrow and while that would not normally interrupt my day, my appointment was scheduled for the middle of the day rather than the early morning like usual. I will most likely be offline tomorrow, but I won't be if I can manage. Have a good weekend in any case. I apologize for another slow week.

Chaos Is The New Cocaine -- [Explicit Content] Mary Trump returns! Her new book, The Reckoning, is out August 17. The history that led up to the rise of Trump. The impact of the Civil War and its aftermath. Jody's new jingle. Accountability for the uncontrolled pandemic last year. Post traumatic stress. Surgeon General says the CDC needs to revise its masking guidance, even for vaccinated people. Alex Jones and the insurrection. Chaos and Trump. The KKK and the Texas senate. McCarthy and the rodeo clown caucus. Charlie Kirk's whopper lie. With Jody Hamilton and David TRex Ferguson. And music by Rocky Mountain Mike, Feed Your Wolves, and State to State. And so much more!

Buy the music featured on today's show:
Feed Your Wolves - “I've Been Waiting For You (Silverfox Remix)”
State to State - “Bye Bye”

Support our sponsors:
Chamonix Genucel Serum
The Bowen Law Group
Bubble Genius bath and body products (promo code: BOBC)

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BONUS CONTENT ON PATREON!

Download the mp3
RSS Feed
The Bob Cesca Show Archive
Apple Podcasts
Stitcher Radio

Castbox
Pocket Casts
RadioPublic
Spotify

More specifically, they believe it's the Democratic party's job to responsibly govern this country, not theirs.

We're dangerously close to breaching the national debt ceiling -- again -- and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnnell says no members of his Republican caucus will vote to increase the national debt ceiling.

Unless Democrats can corral the support of at least 10 senators from the other side of the aisle, they will need to raise the debt limit in a package with their $3.5 trillion partisan plan to enact President Joe Biden’s social welfare and family aid proposal.

That package might not pass in time to remedy the debt issue and could force the majority party into a trickier vote on a new maximum for the $28 trillion national debt. So any solution could cut perilously close to the ultimate debt cliff — a moving deadline that could creep up as soon as next month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned. The Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday that Treasury could run out of cash in October or November.

McConnell obviously wants to reserve the right to point a finger at Democrats and say they're solely responsible for our increasing debt. That's why he's withholding all GOP votes to do something that is fundamentally necessary even though the lion's share of our debt can be attributed to foreign wars of adventure and tax cuts for the rich passed under Republican presidents from Bush to Trump.

I believe Democrats should turn that around on McConnell and his GOP; make the argument that Democrats are the only responsible adults in the room. That argument has the benefit of being an empirical fact.

Ideally, there would be no debt ceiling and this wouldn't be an issue, but if Republicans won't vote to increase it they clearly aren't going to vote to eliminate it.

Federal judges in both Arkansas and West Virginia have now blocked bans on transgender health care and participation in youth sports respectively.

In the former case, the judge wrote that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is likely to succeed in their challenge of the law's constitutionality. And in the latter case, another judge strongly implied that a ban on transgender participation in sports violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The law, which was to take effect July 28, also banned doctors from referring the minors to other providers for such treatment.

U.S. District Judge Jay Moody found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed with their challenge and that allowing it to be enforced would hurt transgender youth currently receiving the treatments.

“To pull this care midstream from these patients, or minors, would cause irreparable harm,” Moody said. [...]

Moody’s ruling came the same day a federal judge issued an injunction preventing West Virginia from enforcing its transgender athletes restriction on an 11-year-old trans girl who had hoped to compete in middle school cross country.

Becky Pepper-Jackson said she comes from a family of runners and simply wants to compete with her classmates.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin said in his order that it was in the public interest to uphold the girl’s constitutional right to not be treated differently than her peers “because any harm to (her) personal rights is a harm to the share of American rights that we all hold collectively.”

The fact that these bans are being passed into law sends a terrible message to transgender kids who need all the support they can get, but I am relatively confident that all of them will be struck down.

It's very easy for Republican lawmakers to make fantastical claims about transgender people and write laws in response to their own ignorant claims, but defending those laws in court is another matter. Defending a law in court requires actual evidence that simply does not exist in these cases and, even if it did, it would have to be extraordinary to justify curtailing the civil rights of an entire class of people.

While I am confident that transgender rights are here to stay and expand, the truth is these laws still make me want to literally fight someone. Attacking transgender adults is harmful and unnecessary, but attacking transgender kids is absolutely cruel. Lawmakers who take time out of their bi-annual legislative sessions just to ban transgender kids from existing are wicked and damned.

In other news, the U.S. Senate did something useful and passed additional funding for domestic violence shelters.

Congress’s revision to the Victims of Crime Act -- which now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk -- would add between $4 billion and $7 billion to the CVF by including revenue from deferred- and non-prosecution agreements. It would also raise federal reimbursements to state funds.

Meanwhile, American life expectancy dropped to the lowest level in 20 years because of the coronavirus pandemic according to the CDC.

Finally, officials who spoke to Vanity Fair say Vienna, Austria is now the epicenter of so-called "Havana Syndrome" attacks suspected of being the work of Russian intelligence.

U.S. officials say the number of possible new cases in the Austrian capital—long a nexus of U.S. and Russian espionage—is now greater than the number reported by officials in any city except for Havana itself, where the first cases were reported.

The exact cause of the ailments in Vienna, which U.S. government agencies formally refer to as “anomalous health incidents” or “unexplained health incidents,” remains unknown, but in response to the surge the C.I.A., the State Department, and other agencies are redoubling their efforts to determine the cause, and to identify the culprit or culprits. A C.I.A. spokesperson said that the agency’s director, William Burns, was “personally engaged with personnel affected by anomalous health incidents and is highly committed to their care and to determining the cause of these incidents.” Privately, Burns has called the maladies “attacks” rather than incidents. [...]

Senior officials in the Trump and Biden Administrations suspect that the Russians are responsible for the syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers or smartphones, which inflicted serious harm on the people they targeted. But American intelligence analysts and operatives have so far been unable to find concrete evidence that would allow them to declare that either microwave radiation or the Russians were to blame.

I would like to see a conclusion to this story someday because it has literally shaped our foreign policy. Trump used these attacks to roll back relations with Cuba which were normalized by President Obama.

Prosecutors are reportedly pressuring chief operating officer Matthew Calamari for also accepting compensation in the form of tax-free perks.

Prosecutors started talking to Calamari's legal team before the indictment and have continued those discussions in the two weeks since it was unsealed by a Manhattan judge. [...]

Calamari, and his son Matthew Calamari Jr., who also works at the company, have been under scrutiny by prosecutors over whether they properly paid taxes on subsidized rent and cars they received as benefits from the company, CNN has previously reported. [...]

In his 2018 testimony before Congress, [Michael] Cohen, who pleaded guilty to tax charges and campaign finance crimes in connection with the hush money payments, identified Calamari as one of three people at the Trump Organization who knew that -- according to Cohen -- Trump provided inflated assets to an insurance company.

I don't know that any of this will ever lead to a prison sentence for anyone much less Trump himself, but the more the company looks guilty on a wide scale, the easier it will be to make a case that it should be placed in receivership or dissolved.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is close to meeting a similar end for similar reasons that may even be less significant than what the Trump Organization is accused of. The NRA's CEO Wayne LaPierre was also accused of accepting compensation as tax-free perks, but the Trump Organization is also accused of committing financial fraud by lying about the value of its assets.

Trump's company hasn't been formally charged for that yet, but you can see it coming a mile away.

Please consider supporting the show by subscribing to our bonus content on Patreon.

Encore Interview: Andy Kindler -- [Explicit Content] Our guest for today didn't materialize, so we're rewinding to May 2021 for a replay of my interview with comedian Andy Kindler. You might know Andy from his podcast with J. Elvis Weinstein called Thought Spiral, as well as the Majority Report with Sam Seder – and you've probably seen Andy on shows like Portlandia, Maron, The Larry Sanders Show, and the animated series Bob's Burgers. His comedy album, Hence the Humor, is out now – AndyKindler.com. Meanwhile if you like what you hear today, don't forget to subscribe to our bonus content at patreon.com/bobcescashow.

Download the mp3
RSS Feed
The Bob Cesca Show Archive
Apple Podcasts
Stitcher Radio

Castbox
Pocket Casts
RadioPublic
Spotify

For their part, GOP senators who agreed to Biden's deal say they will vote for it next week even if they won't do so today.

Centrist Republicans are rushing to lock down sufficient GOP support to move forward next week on their bipartisan infrastructure plan, even as Wednesday’s vote to advance the framework is expected to fail.

[Senator Rob Portman] has been working on a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowing to move forward after Wednesday’s likely stumble, but he has not publicly released it yet.

Portman wants to demonstrate to Schumer that Republicans will move forward, just not on Wednesday.

It would be completely understandable to remain skeptical that enough Republican senators will vote for a bipartisan deal, but we won't have to wait very long to find out if they will.

Today's vote will be filibustered, but the real test will come next Monday. That's when we'll find out if Joe Biden's entire presidential legacy will be tied to infrastructure spending. Because if Monday's vote works, a second vote on a much larger reconciliation bill will proceed as well.

It feels fitting for the relatively quiet times we live in now that Democrats are so close to dramatically reshaping the economy and no one's hair is on fire. Republicans and conservative media have barely said a peep about any of it in comparison to the way they reacted to similar spending proposals under President Obama. And I don't think anyone needs two guesses why that is.

Jeff Bezos And His Flying Dick -- [Explicit Content] President Biden's proclamation for Buzz's dad. Jeff Bezos went to space today and we have the mission control audio. Six vaccinated Texas Democrats test positive for COVID. Vaccinated vs unvaccinated. To worry or not to worry, that is the question. Tiny Tucker's latest lies about the vaccine. Tokyo Olympics might be canceled due to rampant infections. Reason for hope and optimism. The pendulum isn't broken yet. Bill O'Reilly and the Red Hats love cancel culture. With Buzz Burbank. And music by Luna Blu and Flying Jacob. And more!

Buy the music featured on today's show:
Luna Blu - “O'Tooles” from Scratch Tracks and Rufff Cuts
Flying Jacob - “Try” from Renew

Support our sponsors:
Chamonix Genucel Serum
The Bowen Law Group
Bubble Genius bath and body products (promo code: BOBC)

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BONUS CONTENT ON PATREON!

Download the mp3
RSS Feed
The Bob Cesca Show Archive
Apple Podcasts
Stitcher Radio

Castbox
Pocket Casts
RadioPublic
Spotify

In other news, daily coronavirus infections in the U.S. have climbed almost 70 percent in the last week to a daily average of about 32,000. Some (mostly conservative) areas of the country aren't getting vaccinated and these are the consequences.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and NATO say state-sponsored hackers in China are responsible for a significant hack of Microsoft's email exchange servers. The Justice Department also filed charges against four Chinese hackers.

Finally, Boris Johnson's government is reportedly close to formally notifying the EU that they intend to break part of the Brexit agreement regarding Northern Ireland.

Deviating from the deal's so-called Northern Ireland Protocol is a risky step: its aim was to prevent Brexit from disrupting the delicate peace brought to Northern Ireland by the U.S.-brokered 1998 agreement that ended three decades of sectarian conflict.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who signed the 2020 Brexit deal, has been dismayed by the protocol which has imposed paperwork and checks that London says could prevent British food staples such as sausages going to Northern Ireland. [...]

The 1998 peace deal largely brought an end to the "Troubles" - three decades of conflict between Irish Catholic nationalist militants and pro-British Protestant "loyalist" paramilitaries in which 3,600 people were killed.

An open Irish land border is seen as crucial to the spirit of that deal by aiming to safeguard peace, free trade and travel on the island.

But that became a problem after the 2016 Brexit vote. The EU could not close the land border between Northern Ireland and Ireland but feared it could become a backdoor into the EU's single market.

Won't someone think of the sausages?