For some, New Year’s Day is the time to change things around, to make those resolutions that will alter the way you are living your life. It is a time for renewal and rebirth. Out with the old ways, and in with the new. For others, however, there is another changing-of-the-seasons moment around three months later – and it is a far more magical time. 

All sports have their first games of the season, but it is baseball that looks forward to and celebrates its opening day like no other. Young fans eagerly make their first trips to the ballpark, hope springs eternal, and, these days, online sports betting in Washington does a brisk business. Opening day is a day of hope, and arguably the best day of the year.

There are many reasons why Major League Baseball’s opening day holds such an important place in the hearts of the players and fans. In this article, we will take a look at just why opening day is so magical and some of the traditions and ceremonies that everyone looks forward to at this time of year.

A Time for Dreaming

There is a book by Thomas Boswell called Why Time Begins on Opening Day, and that title perfectly sums up the way baseball fans feel about the first games of the new season each year. It doesn’t matter if your team won the World Series in the Fall before, or if it failed to get past 60 wins in the previous season, everyone is at 0-0 on opening day.

Los Angeles Dodgers fans will be eagerly awaiting to see whether their team can continue its journey to legendary dynasty status, while those who root for the Colorado Rockies will be hoping that their team can somehow improve from the nadir of 2025. Whatever happens in the months to come, both those teams will be at the same level on opening day.

Opening day is a time for a kind of hope that doesn’t need to be based on fact. One of the greatest things about being a sports fan, in general, is that no matter how poorly your team has performed in the past, the new season is a time for rebirth and renewal. Those hopes may well disappear as quickly as the New Year’s resolutions were forgotten in January. But, for one magical day, anything can happen.

Back to the Old Routine

It is not just a time for hopeful fans to pretend that their team is able to compete for a pennant or a title. For many, opening day also allows them to get back into a familiar and comfortable routine. With a 162-game season, Major League Baseball fans may not go as regularly to home games as those of other sports, but there are many who try to get to as many games as possible.

Opening day, especially those where your team is playing at home, provides an opportunity for regular fans to catch up with old friends. Those friends sometimes only exist at the ballpark. But they are people who spend a lot of time together and have known the same highs and lows over the years. 

It may be a complete coincidence, but opening day also comes around at a time of the year when the cold winter days come to a close. Sunny, spring days are heralded with opening day baseball and the opportunity to spend more time outdoors.

First Pitch and Ceremonial Rituals

Opening day is a new beginning for everyone, and baseball has a number of rituals and ceremonials that celebrate the new season. These all make the day even more magical, and many teams have their own bespoke traditions that fans look forward to throughout the long and cold offseason.

One of the most notable opening day traditions is the First Pitch Ceremony. Dating back to the early 20th century, when President William Howard Taft threw the first pitch at the Washington Senators’ home opener at National Park in 1910, it is a ceremony that has been repeated by a number of presidents ever since. But even if your team is not lucky enough to have the president do the honors, that first pitch signals the new season like nothing else.

Some teams treat opening day as a city-wide festival, with parades and other activities designed to bring everyone together behind a common cause – the local team. 

Baseball is All About Nostalgia

As we mentioned before, all sports and leagues obviously have their own version of opening day, as the new season comes around every year. But it is the inherent nostalgia in baseball that makes this sport’s opening day so much more special. Baseball is known as “America’s pastime”, and it is a sport that communities gather around and invest a lot of time in. That is why opening day is so special each year.

The NFL, NBA, and NHL have their own traditions and love of statistics, but the love of the game and its history is manifested in a special way by Major League Baseball. Opening day transcends the sport itself, bringing generations together even if they have very little else in common.

From first pitch ceremonies to traditional songs, opening day is a cultural moment that brings all Americans together, with a common cause for hope and a brighter tomorrow.

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No plan. No exit strategy. Just non-stop lying and praying someone will fix the regime’s mess for them before things fall apart TOO much.

This is what happens when you put morons and imbeciles in power and tell them that they are above the law.

and I have a big show for you this week with all of the angry ranting you know and love. Come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Ogre Nation News Update!

:50 - 26:40 Trump’s stupid war in Iran is spinning out of control, and we are all going to pay the price.

26:41 - 38:20 The economy is on the brink of collapse, and the coming oil shock is going to push it over the edge.

38:21 - 45:29 You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE

45:30 - 1:04:19 Headlines for Short Attention Spans!

1:04:20 - 1:16:46 Self-care of the Week

1:18:02 - 1:23:30 Bonus clip! Florida Woman does not like electric cars.

The Unedited Hot Mess 😜

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The next couple of weeks will tell us a lot about where we are as a country. The price of oil is, as of this writing, wobbling around $92 a barrel. That’s up from the roughly $65 it was just a month ago, but down from the $115 it spiked to last week.

Should the war continue and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remain closed or severely reduced, we cannot just shift oil production to other parts of the world to make up the difference. Oil prices will rise, and global inflation will rise with them.

Some of Trump’s people are in a hot panic and telling him a prolonged war is suicidal for the midterms. We have to declare victory and leave, Lord Emperor Mr. President, or you’ll be impeached again. You don’t want to be impeached again for the third time, do you, sir?! And Democrats in control of the House and Senate will 100% sue to force the remaining Epstein files to be released. You don’t want all of the remaining Epstein files released, do you, sir?!

On the other hand, not staying to “finish the job” means leaving in place a far more dangerous Iranian regime. Ali Khamenei, as Supreme Leader, was hostile to the West and a monster. I could spend all day listing his crimes.

His son, Mojtaba, the new Supreme Leader, is going to be worse.

Mojtaba is more extreme, is far more interested in developing nuclear weapons, and has a real-world axe to grind (as opposed to political and ideological) with the United States (and Israel) since we just killed both of his parents, his wife, and one of his sons in an unprovoked sneak attack in the middle of peace negotiations.1

But we are not prepared for the kind of war it would take to topple the Iranian regime. It would take years and cost thousands of American lives. This was supposed to be quick and easy, not a quagmire. Go in, blow stuff in a manly way, be done, and throw a parade.

Some of Trump’s people are telling him that a prolonged war now is the only way to protect America. Also, ending the war before toppling the government would be seen as surrender, which would make Trump look like a weak sissy. You don’t want to look like a weak sissy like Biden, do you, sir?!

So what does Trump do?

Clearly, he’s swinging back and forth depending on who talked to him last and when the stock market is open. When the market is open, Trump will talk about how this will be a short war. We’re definitely going to be done soon. The market loves that, and stocks go up.

When the market is closed, Trump suddenly remembers how tough he is and talks about how we’ll be there “until the job is done.” How long will that be? Could be weeks. Could be months. No one knows. It’s not up to him. It’s up to Iran to be nice. The market would hate that, but it’s closed, and by the morning, maybe Trump will have changed his mind again.

For a good long while, the legacy press pretended that Trump was running Nixon’s “Madman Theory.” Act crazy, keep everyone off-balance and unnerved, and then play 10-dimensional chess. It allowed them to not ask the scary question. No, not “Is Trump actually a madman?” The question the legacy press has twisted itself into ever-tigher knots to avoid asking is, “Is Trump really as stupid and incompetent as he appears?”

They’ve avoided that question the entire time because the answer is manifestly “Yes.” Trump has no fucking idea what he is doing. Trump 1.0 at least surrounded himself with competent people who could rein in some of his dumber ideas, like dropping a nuke on a hurricane.

Trump 2.0 does not have any adults in the room, and it is no longer possible to hide just how fucking dumb he is. Only an imbecile would look at Venezuela and think, “We can totally do that in Iran! We’ll just kill the leader, and they’ll 100% bend the knee!”

I am no expert in the Middle East, and even I knew Iran wouldn’t fold that easily.

But here we are, in a war with no defined end other than “Iran has to be nice.” Something a child would say. We’re killing hundreds of people a day and creating the conditions for a humanitarian crisis that will lead to tens of thousands of radicalized Iranians, and the end goal is being decided by a toddler.

Said toddler has to choose the two options in front of him now: Maybe save his own skin by ending the war and declaring a TOTAL VICTORY! or continue dropping bombs and…do something else.

TOTAL VICTORY!!!

This option is based on Trump’s desperation. The midterms are just seven months away, and Trump is in deep trouble. If either the House or the Senate flips to Democratic control, a lot of Trump’s corruption will be exposed. If both flip, the hearings will be endless, and how long can the courts slow-walk the release of the Epstein files? Will SCOTUS step in to help? Not guaranteed. Protecting pedophiles is not really a Federalist Society priority and after Trump called Kennedy and Barrett embarrassments to their families, they may not be overly inclined to indulge a man who rapes children.

Even Trump, dumbfuck that he is, understands that high inflation and high gas prices will turn an already uphill struggle in the midterms into a complete rout. All of his plans to tamper with the vote won’t mean anything if the blue wave is large enough. Worse, outright stealing the election becomes impossible if everyone knows Republicans are losing everywhere by 15 points or more.

A little push here, a little push there, and you can “lose” just enough votes to convince people the swing states went for Trump. But in a blue wave of this size? No one will believe Republicans didn’t lose control of their one-seat majority in the House. Overt election interference is just as dangerous as no interference at all for the regime. Tight rope to walk for a fascist regime. My heart bleeds for them.

A prolonged war, even two or three months, would be catastrophic for the economy (on top of all of the people who will die). With an economy that is already floundering, a hard push over the cliff that will send it into freefall, something a competent government with good intentions would have incredible difficulty tackling. Joe Biden managed to do it, and his thanks was to be punched in the face by a country of ingrates and imbeciles who were mad at the price of eggs.

The Trump regime is neither competent nor well-intentioned. The next economic collapse will be met with a clown show alternating between panic and indifference. Panic because it hurts Trump electorally. Indifference because we really do have a “Let them eat cake” regime of millionaire and billionaire elitists detached from reality. I don’t really use “elitist” in my everyday vocabulary, but these people have taken great pains to insulate themselves from the rest of us, living lives of obscene wealth and decadence. Watching The Poors suffer is sport for them. “Elitist” is a pretty good word for that kind of cultivated isolation and cruelty.

Maybe if they had started the war after the midterms and had managed to keep control of Congress, Trump would be more likely to go all-in on a quagmire. But he has finely tuned survival instincts. He’s really going to want to pull out of Iran. If his ego will let him.

Quagmire

This option is Trump giving in to his overwhelming ego and listening to the warmongering neocons who have obviously appealed to Trump’s not-so-inner fascist.

War is fun! War is manly! Killing brown people in faraway countries makes the Evangelicals happy! Iran really made Trump mad during his first time in office. Also, they signed a peace treaty with Obama. Blowing Iran to smithereens scratches two itches at once.

Here, we have Trump deciding that war is the solution to a lot of his problems. Violence abroad makes violence at home more acceptable. Does it? Not really, but Trump may decide to just run with that idea.

The regime has been suppressing reports of possible (likely) terrorist attacks at home. That is a “up is down, black is white” situation. The regime has done nothing BUT fearmonger every second of every day. The only possible reason to suppress this kind of report is because the regime wants the public to be caught unawares by an attack. The more unprepared, the more shocked and afraid people will be. The more shocked and unprepared and afraid, the easier it will be for the regime to declare a “national emergency,” giving itself unlimited power to do anything it wants.

Arrest Muslims. Suspend civil liberties. Make opposition illegal. Put elections on hold. Just for a little while, of course. Just until things calm down and the emergency passes.

It’s Authoritarian 101. The emergency never passes. There’s always a new emergency. Liberities are never restored.

Timothy Snyder wrote about this a few days ago. It’s so obvious what the regime is trying to do; it’s literally in his book, On Tyranny:

We must anticipate, with sadness and resolution. We will be horrified, but we cannot be surprised, if there is a terrorist attack on the United States. If choose to be surprised, we co-create a moment that Trump will exploit to undo what remains of our democracy. If the unthinkable happens, it will happen because some of Trump’s people thought about it, some of them created the conditions for it, and some of them looked away. The responsibility for catastrophe will be theirs. And the responsibility for democracy will be ours.

Trump knows the war will destroy his chances of holding power in the midterms. He may decide his best chance is to use the war to seize control as a dictator. Besides, without the war, the Epstein files will come roaring back. Even with the war, his crimes as a pedophile can only be held off for so long. But without a war and, hopefully, a deadly terrorist attack to justify martial law, Trump’s past will consume him long before he has a chance to steal a single vote in November.

This is where we are right now: Locked in a struggle between Trump’s desperation to win the midterms, telling him to end the war, and his ego screaming at him to stay and fight. Honestly, I don’t know which will win.

I suspect that if there is no terrorist attack in the next month and the regime cannot stage one while oil prices continue to rise, Trump will start to lean very heavily towards declaring TOTAL VICTORY!!! and getting the fuck out of Dodge.

Also, if we run low on interceptors and Iran continues to slam drones into the surrounding Gulf states, they’re going to demand Trump stop the war. They paid billions to destroy their enemy. Being under constant attack was not part of the deal, and they will not have the stomach for it. No more bribes if the war continues, and Trump won’t like that. Although if we’ve already committed ground troops to the fight, backing out will be difficult, and the neocons are pushing Trump really hard for their new forever war.

I won’t say it’s a coin flip, but we are at the whim of a dementia-riddled toddler who has, at most, a third-grade understanding of the Middle East.

Goddamn every single person who said not to vote for Clinton and Harris, the “warmongers.”

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There are only 237 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

There’s plenty of boastful propaganda from and for this Trump administration when things look like a military rout against Venezuela’s Nicolás Madura, drug cartels or now in Iran.

It’s less clear that anyone on Team Trump is willing to stand tall when the news is not so clear. Accountability for a war in Iran is no more at hand than it is for the excesses of ICE tactics or tariff effects on prices or the impact of Epstein files mishandling on victims of sexual abuse.

On Monday, Donald Trump told a CBS reporter, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force.” He added that the U.S. is “very far” ahead of his initial 4-5 week estimate on its “little excursion.”  War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said basically the opposite, that there would be plenty more war.

We can’t even figure out whether we have won.

Yet with each passing day in this undeclared war in Iran it seems clearer that Iran, unlike Venezuela, is not going to stand by passively. The job of winning any victory in a war lacking goals with an enemy that refuses to roll over is going to be problematic to anyone but Trump.

The decision to choose Mojtaba Khamenei as a new leader is a sign of defiance. So, too, are the actions of a dispersed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps even in diminished capacity to continue to lob missiles and to encourage retaliation despite air superiority for US and Israeli forces. Rather than any Washington acknowledgement that the going may be tougher than promised, what we get from our leadership are more dismissive words about lethal domination.

Emerging information that increasingly suggests that it was a “precise” U.S. tomahawk missile that killed 175 schoolchildren draws attempts to shift eyes toward Iranian weapons rather than take responsibility for errant intelligence or aim. Still, Trump and Hegseth blame Iran for killing its own children.

Even the central target in the war — stopping Iran “imminent” nuclear weapons capabilities — is crumbling under review by experts never included in any of the abandoned “negotiations” abruptly ended to send in the jet fighters and missiles. The White House remains silent on the degree to which there was no immediate threat.

There seems no U.S. ownership for any sudden rise in retaliatory attacks on civilian targets in Israel and Gulf nations, on global shipping, on various military bases and embassies, or arising from would-be sympathizers by lone actors seemingly motivated by the violence in Iran.

A bar killing of two in Texas by a suspected Iranian sympathizer and an attack on New York’s Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s home under investigation as an Islamic State incident pass without acknowledgement that the war in Iran is causing ripples globally.

No Need to Own Mistakes

In this egoistic, personality-launched war by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu there is no heed for possible miscalculation and no acceptance for blame.

We are becoming accustomed to the daily repetition that Trump is bravely ending 47 years of bad behavior by Iran to justify preemptive killings and bombings by the U.S. Those decades of ayatollah rule provide the reason for war now, complete with threats of sending in ground troops to achieve nebulous goals that may include retrieval of nuclear stockpiles or control of oil fields.

There is little White House discussion about whether it was Netanyahu whose lobbying campaign for war at a time when Iran had suffered setbacks was the real reason for Trump to push the attack.

In these early days, there is no sign of renewed nuclear weapons development, no sign of uprising from within Iran, no outbreak of demand to take back the country from its dictators or sudden emergence of a more moderate majority.

Instead, there is continued belligerence of a large Iranian military in control acting like a disturbed beehive. If anything, we learned this week through leaks that the U.S. intelligence services were advising that the full-scale attack would not result in Trump’s desired results.

Just Declare Victory

Amid rising gas costs, rapidly inflating prices, and global worries, it seems impossible not to notice Trump’s dismissive attitude towards whatever doesn’t go exactly his way. There is no presidential capacity for complexity — or responsibility. It apparently took all White House hands on deck to get Trump to even acknowledge dead US servicemen at Dover.

This White House seems to mistake military successes for diplomatic persuasion to change Iran’s national outlook and priorities.

We have yet to hear Trump acknowledge that there is something very wrong about reports that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is sharing targeting information with Iran even as Trump continues to withhold weapons aid from Ukraine in its self-defense against Putin. We only hear that Ukraine needs to concede. Trump talked with Putin on Monday.

In a week of shifting explanations and goals, Trump has walked back from demanding an end to a theocratic state, from an anti-democratic government willing to shoot its own people for protests, from a state aligned with Russia and showing interest in China. Trump already has all but declared victory, telling the Brits that their late offer of help is no longer needed.

Trump already has indicated he is ready to move on to Cuba next.

If this is victory, what do we call a mess that requires global cleanup?

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The post Avoiding Any Blame in Iran appeared first on DCReport.org.

It was the bite heard round the world: McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video to Instagram of him trying his company’s new offering, the Big Arch, an ultra-processed sandwich he aptly described as “the product.” He was not lovin’ it. The bite was barely a bite — more of a tentative nibble. “That is so good,” he said — but it did not look so good.

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Chris Kempczinski on Instagram: "The Big Arch might be my new g…

The video went viral. Other fast food companies jumped in, showing their CEOs enthusiastically chowing down on their own “products.” But the McDonald’s moment is an informative one, and a good reminder: The very wealthy corporate leaders who sell you things like McDonald’s hamburgers are not eating that stuff themselves The very wealthy tech entrepreneurs who hawk social media apps and AI tools are not giving their own kids unlimited time online. There is an entire class of hyper-elite who are selling you stuff they know is terrible. The McDonald’s CEO just made it obvious.

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Someone wrote on Facebook – I don’t know who, I’ve lost the post – describing Donald Trump as he walked away from the press conference at his Doral golf resort yesterday. The witness said Trump walked haltingly, his head down, his arms leaden at his sides, with his mouth hanging open. Trump had just described to the press people “who died because of the roadside bombs died and are now walking around without legs, without arms, with a face that is so badly damaged.” He claimed the war is “a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. And I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” before he said that “we could call it a tremendous success right now — as we leave here, I could call it — or we could go further, and we’re going to go further.”

It was pure babble. Most of what he says is pure babble. He can keep only a couple of thoughts in his head at one time before he pivots to one of his favorite subjects, like the “rigged” election of 2020, how he “beat Biden very badly,” that Biden is the worst president “in the history of the world.”

Let me remind you tonight that we are in real trouble.

The mainstream media doesn’t behave like we are in trouble. They just sat there at Trump’s Doral press conference, and at every other press conference or Oval Office “gaggle” for that matter, and they ask him questions, and he cranks out a dozen or so lies, and they report what he says, and the entire machine of our national existence just lumbers forward. The mainstream outlets report that Trump ordered the attack on Iran because Iran was an “imminent threat to U.S. interests in the region.” Then he said Iran was an imminent threat to the United States itself. Then we are told that within a year, Iran would have had 11 nuclear weapons if Trump had not attacked with missiles and bombs and drones.

There is no proof of any of this, because proof does not matter anymore.

Trump tells us that the entire Iranian leadership has been knocked out, even the ones he liked, which is too bad, because now he doesn’t have anyone he can make one of his “deals” with, as he did in Venezuela. In fact, Venezuela starts to come up every day in the administration’s stories about the Iran attack. It begins to appear that Trump thought attacking Iran would be like attacking Venezuela.

All this is reported as if it’s just another day in America. Trump says anything he wants to say. The war is ending soon. We still have a way to go. He answers a question with a “yes.” He answers with a “no.” None of what he says means anything because nothing he says is grounded in reality. Everything that comes out of his mouth is spilling from his brain like the goo inside a Boston Cream donut that has been left out in the sun.

Information and facts and recording facts and talking and comparing facts has been with us since clay tablets were inscribed with information about trading sheep for goats and firewood for wheat in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. We treated information seriously for thousands of years. We even turned information we discovered from the beginning of recorded time into history and declared that history is important information.

But now we have reached a point where information has no value. It doesn’t matter if something is true or false, because Trump will say whatever occurs to him at one moment, and then he will contradict what he said without acknowledging that he said the first thing, and all of it will be reported as if contradiction is normal and lies are acceptable. History doesn’t matter because history has been negated, or changed, or erased, or simply pulped. Trump has appointed one of his cabinet secretaries to the job of disassembling facts proven by science, because science doesn’t matter anymore. The Covid vaccine can kill you. It has killed “thousands” of people. The Covid vaccine has killed more people than it saved. The flu vaccine can make you sicker than the flu. Measles can be cured by taking vitamin D, or is it C? Does it matter? Thousands of children in South Carolina and Texas have not been given the measles vaccine. Hundreds are getting sick. Does that matter? Not if you believe that the cure is worse than the disease, which is what Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services believes.

Trump has established a system in which he has no responsibility for anything. Consider this: His war on Iran is going so well, he’s playing golf on the weekend. He doesn’t have to pay attention because someone is paying attention for him. Then he picks up the phone and calls Vladimir Putin, whose intelligence services helped Iran’s military to target one of our radar stations in Saudi Arabia, and suddenly Trump is acting as if his war on Iran should come to an early end.

Did he excoriate Putin for giving Iran the intelligence that took out one of our radar facilities with equipment that takes several years to construct? Does it matter that Russia’s intelligence led to the death of one U.S. service member? Today we’re told that 140 members of our military have been wounded by Iranian missiles and drones, eight of them seriously, and Trump just talked to the man who is providing Iran with the satellite data to pinpoint where our service members are on the ground.

Does it matter that Trump betrayed our soldiers just by speaking to the man who had a hand in their deaths, and we know that he did this?

Trump is an avowed racist. He is a rapist. He has sexually abused dozens of women. He has been credibly accused of forcing a 13-year-old girl to perform fellatio on him, and when she bit his penis, he hit her on the side of her head and yelled curses at her.

Trump was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, who we know was a pedophile who was convicted of sex trafficking a minor girl and was accused of many more sex trafficking crimes. We know that Epstein was involved in money laundering and concealing money for wealthy people in off-shore accounts. It is very likely that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in helping Russian oligarchs launder money though Trump properties. It is just as likely that Epstein helped Trump recover from his bankruptcies when no one would loan money to him.

Does it matter that we know all this about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump?

We know that Donald Trump ordered the kidnapping and jailing in the United States of President Maduro of Venezuela. We know that Trump approved Maduro’s vice president taking over leadership of that country, even though her election and Maduro’s was corrupt, and another individual won. We know that the new leader of Venezuela “gave” 30 to 50 million barrels of oil, worth two billion dollars, to the United States. We know that Trump announced this “deal” and told us that he would “control” the money. We know that he subsequently sent some or all of that money to a bank in Qatar.

We know that money is not in the U.S. treasury. We do not know if “control” of the money means it is in an account belonging to Donald Trump, but that is very likely.

Does it matter that Trump ordered the U.S. military to carry out an operation to kidnap a foreign leader that resulted in his gaining access to and control of $2 billion?

All this is reported as if these are normal things that happen in the United States. Does it matter that no president has ever taken money from another country and parked it in an offshore account that he alone controls?

About Trump’s ballroom, we are told that he has “raised” $400 million to pay for a ballroom to be built where the East Wing of the White House once stood. The thing is so large, it’s like one of Trump’s skyscrapers laid on its side. Where is this money allegedly “raised” from private donors? Is it in the U.S. treasury? No, it is not, because if it was, the money would be under the control of the U.S. Congress, and that body was not even given a phone call before huge machines started to demolish the East Wing of the White House, part of a building that belongs to the United States and was paid for with taxpayer dollars allocated by a law passed by Congress.

If we are honest with ourselves, we know where that money is. It is in an account, probably in Qatar, controlled by Donald Trump, all $400 million of it.

Does it matter that one man, Donald Trump, without consulting anyone in Washington D.C. – not the National Trust, not the Congress, nobody – has decided to destroy part of the White House and build a monument to himself with his name on it?

Let’s take a moment and go back to that extraordinary day that Elon Musk was permitted to take his young son into the Oval Office and conduct what amounted to a carnival sideshow for the assembled White House press. Musk wore a black MAGA hat and danced around for nearly an hour while his son played on the carpet and picked his nose leaning on the edge of the Resolute Desk, as Donald Trump just…sat…there…with…a…blank…look…and…said… nothing.

What the fuck was that? We know Musk is the world’s richest man. We know that at that time he was running the disastrous DOGE operation that defenestrated the federal government all in the name of saving money that was never saved. We know that the government is having to rehire half the people who were fired by DOGE. We know that the whole thing was a gigantic sham, months of chaos that the government is still recovering from.

Who the hell ordered that? Did Trump allow Musk to take over the Oval Office because Musk had given him so much money, hundreds of millions of dollars, when he was running for the presidency in 2024? Why was all this treated as if it was normal, just another day in the government of the United States, another day at the White House? Why, multi-billionaires show up at the Oval Office and are allowed to run amok all the time, Lucian! Didn’t you know that?

Who has so much power over Donald Trump that he would allow such a thing to occur in his own office and by the look on his face, humiliate him no end? Who has so much power over Donald Trump that he would order the U.S. military into a war for a week and then call the leader of an enemy nation and appear to change his mind about the war he ordered?

Why are all these things being treated as if they are normal?

Does anything matter anymore?

The information we have about what is going on with our own country is valueless because there are no consequences for anything that has happened since Donald Trump took office. Trump opened his mouth at his press conference yesterday and he may as well have been screaming into a huge sucking void, for all that it mattered to the American mainstream media. Hell, we don’t even have a reasonable facsimile of a “media” at the Pentagon anymore, because Pete Hegseth fired the reporters who covered his department when they would not sign loyalty oaths. Hegseth oversaw the U.S. military going to war against Iran with no one looking over his shoulder but a bunch of right-wing podcasters that include an avowed white supremacist Nazi and several alleged “reporters” who do pretty much nothing but spread rumors about the killing of Charlie Kirk. And by the way, Trump just appointed Kirk’s widow to the Board of Governors of the Air Force Academy to carry out Kirk’s “legacy,” whatever the hell that was.

Here is the sum total of what we know about the man who is spending one billion dollars a day of our taxes on a war that we have no idea whatsoever why we’re fighting, for whom, and when it will be over, and what will happen next.

We know that Donald Trump does not get up in the morning and put on his socks and shoes and suit and shirt and tie unless he is going to get paid. We know that he has no friends. We know that he trusts no one. We know that doctors are shooting him full of some sort of drug cocktail through an IV port in one or both of his hands. We know that he spends hundreds of millions of our tax dollars so he can fly away to his own courses and play golf any time he wants to.

We know that someone is running him, but we do not know who that is, and we will still will not know even if Trump himself tells us, because we cannot believe a word he says.

We are living fully and completely in the twilight zone of Donald Trump, and we do not know when it will end, and if it does end, we do not know what happens next.

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