Episode Details

Hope is what happens when policy finally lines up with common sense. Tonight Damon Roberts opens with Bruce Blakeman's New York tax plan: wipe out state income tax on the first $50,000 for singles and $100,000 for couples, cut middle-bracket rates, and argue affordability is the fight that decides November.

 

Blakeman is selling the largest income-tax cut in state history while Hochul's camp calls the math unfinished. Damon's First Word: relief people can feel, or a campaign promise that still needs a funding map?

 

Israel says a bloody cockpit fight on a FlyDubai flight from the UAE to Tel Aviv was a thwarted hijacking. One pilot stabbed another, the jet plunged thousands of feet, Israeli jets scrambled, passengers and crew retook the cockpit, and the plane diverted to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu says the attacker tried to crash a plane full of Israelis.

 

CENTCOM says the last U.S. troops completed an "orderly departure" from Erbil, ending the Iraq chapter of the anti-ISIS mission. Baghdad calls it sovereignty. Washington says Iraqi forces now own the threat—and Iran-aligned militias are watching.

 

Senate Democrats blocked a House-passed bill to limit lawmakers' stock trades after Republicans attached a voter-ID provision. 53–47. Short of 60. Dems call the trading rules toothless and the ID language a poison pill. GOP says both are what voters already want.

 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announces a deeper cut to general and admiral billets—doubling last year's target to 20% by January. He calls it accountability. Critics call it a purge in the middle of a shooting war.

 

Plus sports and the rest of the board with Damon Roberts, Rick Delgado, Rick Ammirati, and Paul Nolan.

 

Would you take Blakeman's tax cut as written, or do you want the pay-for spelled out first? Drop it in the comments.