The people who voted for Donald Trump apparently don’t see anything wrong with an old man staying up all night using artificial intelligence to compare himself to the first president of the Republic.

This stuff was all over the internet today. You couldn’t not see it. He froze up at one of his rallies, staring unblinkingly, speechless for 21 seconds. He leans forward so far when he walks, he looks like he’s going to fall over, a clear sign of dementia. And yet, there he is every day, our president.

He has taken leave of his senses. I am at a loss confronted with this certifiable insanity.

I’m taking the night off to rest my brain. It hurts.

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Give Donald Trump’s White House credit for its agile imagination to turn out a never-ending series of daily fantasies and would-be solutions, new and refurbished,  that just make things worse.

Announcement that Homeland Security is spending $20 million on electrified gloves – cleverly called G.L.O.V.E. – for border agents essentially to send electrified pain on demand to any recalcitrant migrant or loud-mouthed protester they encounter can only emerge from an authoritarian’s  fertile imagination.

What exactly is the problem that requires taser-like gloves for masked agents running around in camouflage? Does the government truly believe that instant electric shock on citizens upset that the mass deportation program is out of control is a useful response? How about training or some restraint on ICE agent encounters with protestors altogether?

We’re seeing daily disclosures, either by journalists who find a leak in this “transparent” administration or through nutty posts by the government itself, that just make one sit back and remark on inventiveness and excess.

Somehow, the White House offers a constant rollout of program changes to ballyhoo its agenda, but in practical sense do something other than the announced purpose.

Donald Trump, who knows nothing about science and medicine, announced a change of childhood vaccine schedule recommendations, insisting that breaking up shots for measles, mumps and rubella will result in health benefits – at the very time when his administration’s vaccine hesitancy is helping to spreading measles thought eliminated decades ago. To make matters worse, he adds in misinformation about the volumes of liquid contained in vaccines and suggests that dropping recommendations over which he has no control will lessen autism, an unproved scientific link.

There are similar issues with announcements about war and peace (“The Strait is fully open,” says Trump), about inflation, immigration and election security. Ordering the Postal Service not to deliver mail ballot applications or the ballots themselves in states not submitting their voter lists – now blocked by courts – will simply limit voting in a partisan manner rather than enhance election security. On the same day that War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says there is no food and morale problem on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, suddenly there’s a replacement on its way from the Pacific.

As recent primary election turnout shows, the announcements are many, but seemingly unpersuasive to a growing crowd of anti-Trump voters concerned only about who can be the most forceful voices in opposition. Trump is answering questions no one but him is asking.

The Vanity Projects

We long had felt benumbed by images of knocking down the White House’s East Wing to make way for Trump’s self-glorifying and gilded ballroom – to be built with private funds and “not a dime” of taxpayer money. But now here are the bills for an “emergency” ballroom, some kind of presidential bunker, a concrete helipad (now being re-laid because the work was rushed) and a refurbished visitor center coming in at $900 million and oodles of public tax money stolen from other government processes with no congressional authority in sight.

Meanwhile, the whole project is in court.

That total doesn’t include the zillions going into regilding statues around Washington or a gargantuan arch monument to outdo Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. It doesn’t include the price or legal entanglements of repainting the Lincoln Center Memorial Pool or the overpriced renovations at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Ordering new misdemeanor charges over “vandalism” of the Reflecting Pools won’t create new evidence for a crime that even the U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro says didn’t happen, and the revisit to slapping Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center simply draws laughs.

The total certainly doesn’t cover the $1.7 billion estimate for extending the deployment of National Guard units from 23 states through the remainder of the Trump term. What is so galling is the finding this week that while the presence of Guardsmen may be keeping lesser street crime down, there has been virtually no impact on violent crimes.

The idea to sell early access to “market-moving” Trump Social posts before the rest of the world, seemingly institutionalizing insider trading for Wall Streeters willing to pay $100,000 a month, is not only nutty but likely illegal. The inventiveness, however, deserves a gold star along with insisting that a Trump-owned social media outlet is the recognized source for government news even as Trump wants to insist that the posts need not be seen as presidential records required to be logged.

Only congressional Republicans fail to see that making these vanity projects the primary drive for this White House is missing the point of why we have government at all.

Always, The Spin

Steven Miller, Trump’s go-to guy on immigration and domestic issues, has said repeatedly that he and colleagues arrived for Trump 2.0 with bushels of plans and rollbacks already in hand and that the strategy is to continue to roll them out speedily and with fanfare.

The Heritage Foundation’ Project 2025 has been a blueprint for reordering government, Elon Musk’s DOGE effort, while seemingly a failure on its own terms, bulldozed destructive efforts still underway, and JD Vance’s anti-fraud efforts are a mask for partisan punishment of blue states.

The White House continues to roll out its aims, shading the practical impact along the way as to mask concerns about ideology or simple acquisition of power along the way.

Increasingly, however, the announcements are being met with near-instant legal challenges, all of which start what feel like endless hearings, trials and appeals. Even when some issues to the Supreme Court, as with both tariffs and birthright citizenship policies, Trump does not stop re-inventing the same policies under new legal justification and demanding a re-hearing before the court for whom he has appointed three justices.

In most cases, Trump could get what he wants done in a more legally reliable way by going through Congress. But the desire for an all-powerful presidency won’t allow doing so. The simple reason he declares everything an “emergency” is so he can bypass rules meant for others.

Trump may have lost 20 consecutive trials about demanding adherence of voting rules he wants to mandate for state-run elections, but it does not keep him from issuing yet more, restarting that court cycle.

Of course, we expect that Trump, as all presidents, will try to spin events and developments to highlight his agenda. We just need to approach it all with more skepticism.

The issue with whisking Trump from his grifted Air Force One jet to the original only to wheel him off in a catering truck was not presidential safety. We can even give Trump and the Secret Service credit for doing so – though it turns out the CIA had “low confidence” in the reported threats. But playacting and lying after the fact just suggests that he knew he was pulling a fast one on Americans, including those left at risk on a decoy plane.

Trump sees himself as a “president of consequence.” He ought to act that way.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

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Texas previously created an incentive program for National Board Certification of Teachers, complete with $$ "reimbursement" for districts, but it may scuttle that because of scary DEI.  NBTC hasn't been hugely successful in Texas-- only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that's 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because "tolerance."

The state is pushing the National Board to comply with Texas's version of a "Don't Say Gay" law.  The Texas State Board of Education is worried about the diversity, equity and inclusion content-- especially when it comes to gender and sex stuff, as reported by Jaden Edison for the Texas Tribune.  

“About 10% of the training that a teacher would go to is based on DEI, gender identity and sexual orientation — and how to help transition children — which violates our state law and violates parental rights,” board member Julie Pickren said during the April meeting.

Pickensd shared some of the offending passages:

Teachers design and implement lessons that help students develop awareness of, sensitivity to, and respect for others. For example, accomplished teachers are aware that children may begin to question their sexual identity at a young age. Teachers know that acceptance of their curiosity will make them feel safe and secure. In such instances, teachers may feature children’s literature in which diverse gender roles are portrayed.

Yes, that sounds just terrible. Students wrestling with questions about their sexuality should understand that their curiosity and confusion is unacceptable, and they should not expect to feel safe and secure at school. 

Edison has continued to follow this story; I wish more reporters were doing so. I won't pretend the issues here aren't complicated and difficult, but the moment policy makers decide that parents have all the rights and children have none, they've embraced a "solution" that is simple and wrong. Children are not chattel.

It makes me wonder-- if parents have thrown their LGBTQ child out of the house for coming out, would a school district be contradicting parental choice and thereby violating one of these parental rights laws by trying to help the student deal with homelessness? 

Remember when 60 Minutes star correspondent Scott Pelley yelled at the show’s puppet executive producer, freshly appointed by freshly appointed CBS News chief Barri “I’m Woke Allergic” Weiss that the new management was bent on “murdering” 60 Minutes?

Boy, was he right.

Weiss took over 60 Minutes and one of her first moves was to load it up with right-wing fatheads like Ross “Me and JD Converted to Catholicism and Look at Us Now” Douthat. Now her boss, David Ellison, who used daddy’s money to buy Paramount, is throwing a great big temper tantrum and threatening to move CBS out of New York and Paramount out of Los Angeles if he doesn’t get his way in his attempt to merge Paramount with Warner Brothers Discovery so he can fuck up CNN, too.

I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. Naturally, the name of Jared Kushner comes into this mess, because why not? He’s running the entire Middle East these days, doing real estate deals in the guise of making “peace” in Gaza and getting the place ready to build high-rise Trump-branded condos; he’s working with his New York real estate buddy Steve Witkoff to make “peace” with Iran so the Strait of Hormuz will reopen and help make all his Republican buddies in the oil business even richer; and now he’s got his fingers in the Paramount-Warner Brothers-CBS-CNN deal by using his Affinity Partners investment fund to help aid Ellison’s takeover of both Paramount and Warner Brothers, along with his buddies from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar, Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who threw money to Ellison as well.

You’ve got to wonder how Kushner finds enough time in the day to slip into his loafers and straighten his tie, he’s got so many fingers in so many pies. And isn’t it nice that a couple of spoiled rich shitheads like Kushner and Ellison, who inherited their way to top, get to play in the sandbox with the big boys? I mean, there’s nothing like sitting down with princes and deputy kings from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and carving up not only the Middle East but the media landscape of the United States to make you sigh with contentment when you put your head down on the pillow at night, right?

But back to New York and Hollywood. Can you imagine the bullshit egomania of a brat like Ellison stomping his feet and threatening to move CBS out of New York City and two of the biggest studios in Hollywood out of L.A. because he’s getting sued by some blue states who object to the consolidation of so much power in the uncalloused little fingers of the likes of Ellison? CBS employs about 1,200 people worldwide, a very large percentage of whom live and work in its headquarters in New York City. God only knows how many people are employed by Paramount and Warner Brothers in L.A., but it’s got to be in the thousands.

So, Ellison, who can buy apartments and houses the way you and I buy a Coke and popcorn at the movie, he’s going to tell thousands of middle class employees of CBS News and the Hollywood studios they’ve got to uproot their families and take their kids out of school and Little League teams and Girl Scout troops if they want to keep their jobs.

And move them where, exactly? Well, Ellison isn’t saying where the movie people would have to go. Maybe some cozy red state hellhole in Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas? One of his hand-puppets, a guy by the name of Makan Delrahim, who works as CNN’s chief legal eagle, even told Politico yesterday that selling CNN itself is “on the table” if that’s what it will take to get the Paramount-Warners merger done.

And who would buy CNN, you might ask? Maybe Sinclair Broadcasting, another Trump-loving television media company that established itself as a kind of diversified Fox News and specializes in spreading lies and right-wing nonsense on the 180-plus local television stations they own. Sinclair Inc. has its headquarters outside of Baltimore in a place called Hunt Valley, so maybe all the CNN employees down in Atlanta and everybody working at CBS News in New York will be calling around Maryland trying to find apartments and houses to buy – at a time when interest rates on mortgages are headed into the stratosphere with rents right along with them.

All this pain to so many people’s lives because Little Ellison is having to contend with a lawsuit that asks a simple question: is it a good thing for so much news media and entertainment power to be concentrated in the hands of one ideologically bent spoiled brat who has never had a real job or done a day of legitimate work in his life because daddy gave him an inheritance the size of West Virginia?

All this on a day that the board of the Kennedy Center announced that they plan to carve Donald Trump’s name in the marble façade of the building, this time celebrating that he “renovated and rehabilitated” the place. The judge who ordered Trump’s name off the building in the first place will have something to say about the new plans to put Trump’s name where it does not belong. But it’s all of a piece, isn’t it? Donald Trump has nothing to do with the Kennedy Center, which was established to honor a president who actually did things while in office.

David “Gimme-Gimme-Gimme” Ellison hasn’t done anything of note with his life, either, other than being born the son of one of the biggest right-wing assholes who ever bent over to kiss Trump’s ass while he slipped millions in his pocket.

No one knows where all this crap will end. There are judges with gavels and laws on the books that still stand between this country being turned into Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And there are midterm elections coming up in November, giving ordinary American citizens who did not inherit billions of dollars from their daddy a chance to cast their votes for reason and democracy.

In the meantime, certifiable right-wing lunatics such as Bari Weiss and David Ellison and Jared Kushner and the Trump sons and who knows how many other grifters have their hands out grabbing at everything that isn’t and is nailed down. They’ll want to carve Trump’s name into the Washington Monument next. Why? Until his power is limited by a Democratic House and Senate, because they can.

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There’s a phrase people use to describe their inability to take in the incredible firehose of shit that floods our lives every day: I can’t wrap my head around it. The phrase sums up in a way that perhaps nothing else can two aspects of our modern lives – as everything has become more complicated and hard to understand, the way our leaders have chosen to deal with uncomfortable situations is to lie about them, thus adding to the confusion and discombobulation.

My job as a writer is to figure things out and write down what I find. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I cover politics and wars and frequently both at the same time. The stories I write seek to find truths when none seem to be there by sifting through conflicting accounts of who did what and when and why and to whom.

Lately, I’ve been trying to answer questions about the insane war Donald Trump decided to wage on Iran. Didn’t anyone think about how pissed off the Iranians would be when their religious leader and most of his family and the top officials of the government were killed on the first day? Why didn’t anyone add up the amount of munitions we had and make an estimate of how long they would last? Why didn’t anyone think that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and strangle the world’s oil shipping in and out of the Persian Gulf? Why were U.S. bases in the Middle East so poorly defended from Iranian attack after the war started? Who planned, or did anyone do any planning at all, for the economic fall-out from this war?

The way that the Trump administration has attempted to answer these questions and others is to flat-out deny what they suggest and lie about their consequences. But even when you get answers to difficult questions, new ones always arise. Today, one of the questions is, why is the United States so far behind when it comes to drone warfare? The Pentagon just announced it would begin flooding drone manufacturers with orders and loans intended to step up the number of drones made in this country. Today, the White House imposed 100 percent tariffs on imported drones with military capabilities. The President’s sons are major investors in several companies associated with drones, AI, and defense manufacturing. Their investments thus increased in value exponentially.

See how complicated these things get? Each decision has consequences; those consequences develop more consequences; shortages cause gas prices to go up. Down the line, as the war goes on and on, profits are made, and certain people with foreknowledge of what will happen in the war and at the Pentagon get richer and richer.

Meanwhile, soldiers, sailors, airmen and women, and Marines are out there on the front lines of this war as it starts and stops with ceasefires and new attacks and another ceasefire, and more attacks.

The big story today is about the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that has been at sea for over nine months without a port call. Stories have been published about sailors on the Lincoln attempting suicide by jumping off the ship. So far, no one has succeeded, but the stories themselves emphasize the seriousness of what is happening to the sailors and Marines who have been at sea for so long without relief.

More stories from families of sailors on the Lincoln describe food shortages that have caused meals to be missed, spoiled and rotten food, broken toilets, lack of hot water, mold and mildew in areas where sailors and Marines are quartered, lack of essential personal items like toothpaste and soap and deodorant…the list goes on.

What has happened on the USS Abraham Lincoln is our clarifying moment. Everything that has gone wrong on that ship is the responsibility of failed leadership that goes right to the top. We have a president who in a time of war is obsessed with erecting monuments to himself, putting his name on buildings, putting marble and gold leaf all over the White House, punishing people he considers enemies, enriching himself and his family, and playing golf at public expense.

Everyone in the military sees this. Everyone knows what Trump’s inattention to the war and to them represents. He had fired generals and admirals who have experience and replaced them with ideologues who swear loyalty to him and not to the Constitution. Leadership at a basic level, especially in the military, is a copycat business. Trump doesn’t care about people in the military, so the leaders beneath him don’t care. That is why sailors and soldiers and airwomen and men and Marines are suffering.

I know I have written about this before, but it bears repeating. The military is different from civilian life in all kinds of ways, but perhaps the biggest way it’s different is that there is no profit motive in the military. They don’t pay you more if you do your job well. You do your job because it is your duty. Everyone is dependent on each other. You keep things clean and neat because everyone lives close together, often in the Navy, in very close proximity on both submarines and surface ships. You do your job well, because if you don’t, someone else is going to suffer, and somebody will have to come along after you and do the job you didn’t do right in the first place.

That’s what is happening on the USS Lincoln. The leaders of that ship are in charge of making sure toilets work and showers have hot water and are free of mold. There is no excuse if they aren’t, because sailors are there not only to use the facilities, but to clean them and make sure they work. They can’t do this if they lack cleaning and repair supplies. Leaders are in charge of ordering enough food for the 5,000 souls who live and work on the Lincoln. Leaders are in charge of ensuring that each sailor has enough to eat and gets enough rest and has all the necessities of life such as toothpaste and shaving cream and soap and the necessities of the lives of the females on board. Periods don’t wait for resupply of sanitary napkins. They happen every month whether the sailor is at sea or on land.

Food is so important in the military it bears special mention. It was Napoleon who was supposed to have said that an army marches on its stomach. You could say in turn that a navy sails on its stomach. When I was growing up as an army brat, the son of an army officer and the grandson of a famous general, I was told over and over again how important food is in the military. My grandfather had a saying about it. I remember being at dinner in his house with retired generals and civilian officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms sitting down the table from him. Grandpa would hear someone say something about war that he found wrong or even stupid, and he would bang on the table and say, “It’s simple. First, you feed ‘em, then you put a roof over their heads, then you train ‘em, then you pay ‘em, and only then can you send them off to war. But first, you feed ‘em.”

I heard him say those exact words again and again. When I got in the army and became a platoon leader and was assigned as mess officer, in charge of the mess hall, I found it, to put it bluntly, a mess. I decided to follow grandpa’s orders. I made sure the mess hall was mopped and every surface was cleaned after every meal. I ordered the cooks to change the lard in the deep fat fryers every day, and to use different fryers for meat, fish, and potatoes. The coffee was terrible. I was told that the ancient coffee maker, a huge cylindrical machine with pipes coming out and going back into it strange angles, was to blame and couldn’t be cleaned. I told the cooks to disassemble it and ream out every pipe and remove every scrap of scale and other buildup and reassemble it. The coffee went from bad to good overnight. I put in the first salad bar in any mess hall in the Army. We had to build it using 2 by 4’s and welded tin, but we got it done, and there was fresh salad with two or three kinds of dressing every day, and it was made spotless every night. We rerouted gas lines to move two griddles from the back of the kitchen to the serving line, so soldiers could order their eggs cooked any way they wanted in the morning, and fresh meat like chicken and hamburger was cooked the way they wanted.

The morale of the cooks went up. The morale of the whole company went up. Six months later, we won best mess hall in the whole division. Soldiers from other companies and officers from other battalions and brigades came to eat at our company mess hall. So did the commanding general.

Grandpa was right. If you feed ‘em and respect ‘em and treat ‘em right, soldiers honor you with their respect and their service.

There is absolutely zero reason the Abraham Lincoln can’t be run the way grandpa said. Here is the reason that the USS Lincoln is in so much trouble as a combat vessel: The president, the commander in chief, doesn’t care. He thinks people in the military are suckers and he treats them that way. He is wrong. Everyone in our military, and the sailors and Marines on that vessel deserve to be treated with respect and honor. That isn’t happening, and it’s why the U.S. military has lost the war Trump started with Iran.

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Recently, there has been a spate of mainstream Democrats pooh-poohing the progressives and warning that they threaten this fall’s widely expected blue wave in the midterm elections.

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein were on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago claiming gains by leftists as “a 911 call for the Democratic Party and America.” Penn, pollster, and Stein, New York City Council president 33 years ago, are ideal WSJ Democrats, which is to say, Republicans-lite. Thomas Edsall was in the New York Times saying the socialists “threaten to limit potential center-left gains in voting in the midterms.”

And just this week, the Times was absolutely giddy over a razor-thin 0.47-percentage point victory—3,500 votes out of almost 800,000 cast—by “moderate” David Crowlkey over his democratic socialist rival Francesca Hong. Neither candidate broke the 40% mark.

But the problem the Democrats have isn’t with the leftier wing of the party. No, it’s the right wing, the so-called “moderates” who abandoned the party’s long-term policy goals 30 years ago. It was Jesse Jackson who, rightly, diagnosed the problem in the 1988 Democratic presidential debates. He said his opponents—who included Al Gore, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and the eventual nominee, hapless and hopelessly bland Mike Dukakis—were all talking about “managing Reagnomics” rather than rolling it back. The managers have been in charge ever since.

Starting with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the mainstream of the party moved so far to the right as to become unrecognizable as the party that dominated the government for 50 years. It’s been nearly that long since Ronald Reagan was elected president, and Reaganomics became the foundational philosophy of both political parties.

Here’s a distillation of the core policy goals of the Democratic Socialists of America. Is there anything here that any working-class Democrat of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s would disagree with? Clinton moved the party to the right, and it lost its hold on the white working class because it abandoned the economic goals of the workers and left it to the Republicans to replace them with fake “social” issues. Look at this list and tell me what any proud Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson-Carter Democrat would object to:

• Universal Public Services: Implementing a single-payer Medicare for All system, making higher education tuition-free, canceling all student debt and expanding free universal child care.
• Labor and Workplace Democracy: Expanding labor union rights, raising the minimum wage and instituting a 32-hour workweek without a reduction in pay.
• Housing Justice: Establishing universal rent control and expanding massive public investments into multi-income “social housing” to treat housing as a human right.
• Climate Policy: Enacting a Green New Deal to transition the United States to a 100% renewable energy economy while guaranteeing jobs for displaced workers.
• Racial and Social Equity: Defunding traditional police structures in favor of community reinvestment, and eliminating systemic oppression based on race, gender and sexuality.
• Democracy and Foreign Policy: Eliminating corporate influence in politics through publicly funded elections and reducing the U.S. military footprint overseas.

While Americans may be spooked by the term “socialist,” the policy goals of the Democratic Socialists and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party were fundamental Democratic positions through most of the 20^th century. The objections to the left-leaning policies have far more to do with the label than the objectives.

If the Democrats seriously want to win Congress this year and the White House in 2028, the moderates better get with on the left side of history and become Democrats again.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

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