He's just a bill, and he's very sad
+ Kermit at commencement, luckier pennies, and a grand slam
Welcome back to Hot Tip, and happy holiday weekend!!! ‘Tis the season for big time sales, food you get to eat with your hands, a good book (I’m reading Carrie Soto Is Back, which I was thrilled to find in a little free library), and watching Stanley Tucci on television again (thank goodness, he found Italy.)
Wherever you are reading this from, America or otherwise—and if otherwise, congratulations—I hope this weekend you find yourself with at least one processed meat product (preferably a grilled kosher hot dog covered in fixins, but you do you) and alongside a body of water, whether that’s a pool, an ocean, or just a bucket of cool water to dip your feet into. You deserve it, babe.
And don’t forget to consult the ~official~ Hot Tip Summer Guide, too:
Support Hot Tip by upgrading to a paid subscription today, so I can afford to keep photoshopping images of Stanley Tucci cooking hot dogs for us while staring deeply into our eyes, poolside. Plus, you know, all the other info contained within this here newsletter. xoxo.
This week: The ugly contents of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a steak n’ shakedown dinner, and a muppet with an honorary college degree.
In politics: You remember the sweet lil bill from Schoolhouse Rock? Well now he’s drinking vodka out of a brown paper bag on the Capitol stairs wondering where it all went wrong. This week, in the dark of night—and I do mean that literally—the House GOP passed Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” aka 1,000 pages of legislative garbage.
So what’s in it? Among other things—work requirements for food assistance, massive cuts to Medicaid (which would leave millions uninsured), tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, funding for a space-based “Golden Dome” missile defense shield over the continental US (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii), even more funding for mass deportations, budget cuts that would shutter at least 200 Planned Parenthood medical centers, drilling and mining on public lands, and according to the Congressional budget office, “the bottom 10 percent of Americans will actually be poorer as a result of this bill, with the biggest benefit going to the top 1 percent of Americans.” It’s essentially a direct wealth transfer to the already rich, and will add trillions to the national debt. But at least they won’t be taxing or regulating gun silencers, anymore. (Hot tip: Call the Congress switchboard (202) 224-3121 and let your senators’ offices have it before they vote.)
Church and state will remain platonic, for now. The Supreme Court voted 4-4 (Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself) in an Oklahoma case, and that deadlock means the state cannot launch the nation's first “religious public charter school”—in this case, a Catholic virtual school that wanted taxpayer funding. But this won’t be the last time the issue comes up, so fingers crossed that the unnamed four justices who voted in favor of the school—whom I would bet my entire not very high net worth on being Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito—manage to snag a copy of the Constitution (and actually read it) before the next case.
Quick tips:
Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office this week after making up a “white genocide” in the country, and it didn’t go well.
Kristi Noem can read up on habeas corpus on the new $50 million luxury jet she plans to buy for her own use at DHS, lest she be forced to fly coach on her way to visit the foreign gulags where she’s sending people without due process.
Trump tried to stop Harvard from accepting international students since the school won’t comply with his bullshit, but United States District Judge Allison D. Burroughs swiftly blocked the order. College in Boston 2 — Man Who Can’t Even Dance to “YMCA” 0.
In business: Pennies are about to get even luckier, because the US Mint is done making them. It turns out that letting people finance their burritos wasn’t a good idea for Klarna, after all—many buyers aren’t paying back what they owe. And diners at Trump’s definitely illegal memecoin dinner—where he hosted the top 200+ owners of his cryptocurrency, and whose purchases of said coin to be at said meal drove up the price—were served what this publication would generously describe as the Fyre Festival of presidential plates. Read the full account of the evening from Wired.
In health: FDA Commissioner and my new archnemesis (of several, I’m watching you Bill Maher) Dr. Marty Makary says Covid boosters will only be approved for high risk individuals and people 65+ this fall, leaving out the general population and healthy children: “Should we blindly rubber stamp a vaccine that creates a new protein in the body every year for the rest of our lives, for the next 100 years? I don't think so." Of course, we already do annual updates to the flu shot, so—
Hot tip: Makary is the guy behind the dumb new (much slower) vaccine approval process, and far be it from me to call out a hypocrite—jk, I love it and am good at it—but it’s worth noting that back in 2020, Makary, then a Johns Hopkins professor and slightly lesser-idiot, told Fox News that FDA Covid vaccine approvals were in fact taking “too long,” and the US needed to get shots in arms much faster.
In culture: Biggest gets of the week go to University of Maryland, where Kermit the Frog gave the commencement speech, and Alex Cooper, who had 91-year-old Jane Goodall (yes, that Jane Goodall!!!) on Call Her Daddy. More than 500 rare guitars are headed to the Met, including Leo Fender’s very first one. And all-time cool guy Bruce Springsteen just released a new EP that includes explicit denunciations of our current administration and a call to “rise against authoritarianism” from his concert in Manchester, England.
In sports: The French Open starts this weekend, with Aryna Sabalenka seeded no. 1 and Coco Gauff no. 2 on the women’s side, and Janik Sinner at no. 1 and Carlos Alcaraz at no. 2 on the men’s side—making it an excellent weekend to rewatch Challengers, too. (There’s not not a tennis theme to this newsletter…)
Disassociate with this: Dakota “I love limes” Johnson gets ready for Cannes.
And now, some links!
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