Category: Corruption

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Abolish the Senate? — Too many other things must happen first

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 29th, 2026

There’s been an uproar this week over an acknowledgment by DSA co-chair Megan Romer that among other things, the party platform advocated for ending the Senate as we know it. The political right and center are horrified at the notion, but it’s one that bears examination since over the past 70 years, the American fascist right have exploited the anti-democratic bias built in to the nature of the Senate and used it to create the ineffective and now almost-failed government we have today.

James Madison defended the role of the Senate in the proposed Constitution in Federalist Paper #62, For the Independent Journal. Wednesday, February 27, 1788: “In this spirit it may be remarked, that the equal vote allowed to each State is at once a constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual States, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty. So far the equality ought to be no less acceptable to the large than to the small States; since they are not less solicitous to guard, by every possible expedient, against an improper consolidation of the States into one simple republic.

“Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of the Senate is, the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation. No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States. It must be acknowledged that this complicated check on legislation may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial; and that the peculiar defense which it involves in favor of the smaller States, would be more rational, if any interests common to them, and distinct from those of the other States, would otherwise be exposed to peculiar danger.”

Even Madison was leery of unrestrained democracy, something that hadn’t been tried anywhere in over a thousand years. Thus he signed off on this, along with such anti-democratic measures such as the electoral college or the provision that permitted slaves to be counted in the decennial census but not as citizens in order to increase representation for the South.

Back in 2001, I wrote, “The Constitution, with its much stronger federal presence, supplanted the Articles of Confederation.

“But the mistrust among the states was high, and the weaker states wanted some guarantees against the

stronger states dominating them economically, politically, or militarily.

“Thus the constitution contained all sorts of provisions to prevent such from occurring. No state could

conduct foreign policy. No state could place any tax or tariff on trade with any other state. No state could coin money or establish other rates of exchange. The power of the states was considerably weakened.

“Further, the Senate granted determination in the Senate to state governments. Each state legislature

could appoint two Senators to the upper house, which meant that Delaware had as much say in the Senate as Pennsylvania. At a time when Delaware had legitimate reason to worry about conflict with Pennsylvania,including embargo or even invasion, it seemed like a good safeguard.

“There were two legislative houses. One was to be elected by the people of the states and apportioned

by state population. The other was to be appointed by the state government, and apportioned in equal measure to each state.

“Given the measure of mistrust among the states and the general shakiness of the nascent nation, it

seemed a good compromise, and indeed served the nation well for the next 127 years, when an amendment made the Senators elected by popular vote. There is no evidence that having Senators popularly elected was harmful, either.”

Now, there is absolutely no disputing that the House of Representatives routinely passes truly idiotic bills. Just this week alone, the House, under Mike Johnson (Trump’s only functioning penis) did this, per Brave: “Stop Insider Trading Act (H.R. 7008), passed on July 22, 2026, as a weak ethics bill that fails to require full divestment while bundling unpopular voter ID laws. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) faced opposition for provisions that critics claim deepen military integration with Israel and include partisan amendments regarding LGBTQ+ issues and state law preemption. Commentators have further criticized the House for voting to undermine the American Community Survey, arguing that eliminating this data source impedes scientific understanding and effective governance.”

I could provide thousands of examples of House fecklessness. At various points in history, they tried to outlaw charging interest on loans (t’aint biblical!), outlaw a variety of unpopular religions, ban margarine, or forbid women to wear pants. The Senate usually shot down most of those hare-brained schemes, leaving the rest for the courts or public opinion to eliminate.

Of course, these days the Senate is in equally bad straits. Just a glance at the incredible shit show Rand Paul put on with his Doctor Antony Fauci hearing, trying to use some 1,200 purloined pages from the doctor’s personal notes to show…well, presumably that Fauci conspired with China to create and propagate the COVID-19 virus. Sheer nutball stew stuff, right? The notes show nothing of the sort, of course, but they did show the utter and deep contempt Fauci has for conspiracy nuts, and his utter frustration at trying to get Trump to react to the crisis in a mature adult manner. Fauci took the Fifth over 100 times, sensing, correctly, that Paul wanted to lay a perjury trap (Paul, ever the idiot, had openly stated that intent the day before). Now, having thrown Fauci’s lawyer out of the chamber for the crime of giving Fauci legal advice, he wants to file criminal charges against him for pleading the Fifth, and won’t explain why he doesn’t mind that Trump did the same thing 450 times in testimony on the Epstein matter.

It’s an extreme example, but it’s obvious the Senate is broken. So badly broken that the media is asking the former Majority Leader and still Senator Mitch McConnell to show that he is still compos mentis, or even just still alive.

Now Romer feels the US would be better served by a unicameral (one house) legislature. It’s an attractive idea, one I’ve espoused myself. (I argued in a piece written about 2002 that the House should have 435 members, plus 200 ‘at-large’ member from the top 200 vote-getters in national elections to reduce the regionalism). Abolishing the Senate is a good subject for legitimate debate, but now isn’t the time.

You see, both the House and Senate are broken by design. Both have been reduced to rubber stamps for Trump and the fascists backing him, with vast amounts of money poured into elections making it nearly impossible to break the grip of the Senate.

The House has always been something of a circus. Ambrose Bierce in 1842 remarked, “Congress is in session and many a village is missing its idiot.” But now it is broken on purpose, part of a 70 year effort by fascists in America to break the United States government and thus create a power vacuum for churches and corporations to fill—to the detriment of the people, of course.

Breaking the Senate was easily done because the Constitutionally mandated gerrymander institute gives the least educated and most rural populace an outsized voice. In effect, only 16% of the voting population, the states electing 40 of the Senators, control the Senate. Gullible and uninformed, they were an easy target. (There’s a REASON Rush Limbaugh provided his three-hour-a-day show free to rural radio stations.)

Before we discuss Senate reform (or much of any reform, really) we have to break the power of corporations, plutocrats, and the fundamentalist churches. Until that happens, nothing else matters.

If the Democrats can win in November (and I hope many of them are democratic socialists!) their top priorities must be to get rid of Citizens United and put strong controls on campaign finance, to start enforcing antitrust legislation and break up the massive consortia that have a near-death grip on everything Americans consume, and resurrect the wall of separation between church and state. The tech bros have to be brought to heel, and outfits like Paramount broken up. No entity should be allowed to own more than a handful of broadcast stations, and internet giant such as Amazon and Google should be broken up into competing parts.

Until that happens, reform is a polite fiction. Do these things first, and then the rest will follow.

Do you want a government that protects your interests, or a fascist oligarchy who sees you only as a unit of consumption and values you purely on a profit/loss basis? Because that’s what Trump’s handlers want.

It shouldn’t be a difficult choice.

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Dead Men Balking — Secrets and lies don’t create transparency or honesty

Dead Men Balking

Secrets and lies don’t create transparency or honesty

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 12th, 2026

I won’t miss Lindsey Graham. It wasn’t just because he became a blind, pitiful Trump supporter. It was because he assumed that role even though he knew better. In 2016, he was saying things like “There’s only one way to make America great again. Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He called Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”

He was right, of course. And then he pissed it all away in a cringing desire to cling to power.

When the inevitable collapse of America’s nasty little experiment in fascism comes, many Republicans will find themselves having to answer for their actions, and Graham would have been one of the prime examples of the perfidy, hypocrisy and viciousness of the sick converts to Trumpism. Basically, he’s lucky he’s dead.

Of course, there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories floating around, and most come from Trump’s orbit, whether psychotically (Laura Loomer blaming the Russians) or from spotlight-grabbing incompetence (Kash Patel talking about a federal investigation). Occam’s Razor doesn’t need whetting for this one: he was a guy with a heart condition who was getting on (71 years old) and he had just taken a long flight from Kiev to New York. Air travel, because of the varying cabin pressure and oxygen levels, is an elevated risk for people with cardiac or breathing problems. That’s what killed James Gandolfini and Carrie Fisher.

But this is an administration and government of secrets and lies, one that has resurrected the old Cold War tradition of Kremlinology needed to unravel the paranoid psychosis of a government running on paranoia and fear. Trump himself wasted no time taking Graham’s death and using it to promote one of his pet projects, and told us that immediately before his death, Graham called Trump to aver his support for the SAVE project, Trump’s ploy to disenfranchise millions of American voters, and promised to help herd it through the Senate. Only Trump Toadies will believe that, of course, and I’ll bet long odds there was no such phone call, and that Graham looked at the Senate, with 45 Democratic votes, 6 Republicans who were retiring and no longer needed to play up to Trump, and a Mitch McConnell gone MIA and possibly KIA, and knew the SAVE Act was dead. Graham had many faults, but stupidity wasn’t one of them. Doubtless exhausted from his long trip, he wasn’t going to call Trump, a man he did not respect, to spout chipper bullshit about one of Trump’s more treasonous fantasies.

That brings us to Mitch McConnell. Is he dead? When I first heard the rumors two weeks ago, I dismissed it as the sort of paranoid bullshit that infests the web (Cyclospora, which causes explosive diarrhea, is a plot by Big Med to scare everyone into getting vaccines, or Tallerico is a transgender vegan).

But this is a government of secrets and lies, and pretending to be alive when you’re actually dead in order to subvert democracy is about the most Mitch McConnell thing you can imagine. This, after all, is the same shameless manipulator who refused to entertain a supreme court nomination because it was less than six months until an election, but who turned around and made a supreme court nomination three years and five months later, a month before an election.

You’ve probably heard the more salient elements of the “Mitch is dead” story. His wife, Elaine Chao, was traveling in China for a long-planned sortie when her husband had a heart attack on June 14, 2026. She returned to the US on July 7. Her spokesperson said, “The Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US.”

OK, so maybe she isn’t the real dutiful and caring sort. Or maybe it was just indigestion, and they’ve been holding him incommunicado in the ICU until they’re sure the Pepto-Bismol has kicked in. No sensible wife is going to hurry all the way back for a minor four-week hospitalization for an upset tummy. After thirty-three years of marriage, a wife learns to tune out the drama.

Then there’s the video of Mitch being loaded onto the ambulance. Usually, when the patient is having a heart attack, there is an understandable atmosphere of urgency in getting the patient under oxygen and if possible, stabilized. These guys were doing the Meat Wagon Saunter. It’s end of shift. Maybe they’ll stop for a burger and beer on the way back. Oh, wait, they’re professionals. Make that a burger and soda.

While McConnell’s staffers have been maintaining that he is alive and pursuing his duties as a US Senator, nobody from his family has spoken out, which seems odd. He has three adult children from a previous marriage, any of whom might normally be willing to say whether the old man is alive or not. The only person outside of McConnell’s party apparatus willing to claim the Senator was, to his immediate knowledge, alive was CNN’s Trump flag waver Scott Jennings, who claimed, “[McConnell’s] still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about Iran, Ukraine, the unfolding situation in Maine, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history…I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible.”

That story was so widely disbelieved that Jason Miciak at RawStory speculated that Jennings’ whopper of a story might amount to ‘professional suicide.’ He expanded on what Jennings said of the call, quoting him as saying “I wasn’t really expecting him to call this morning to be honest, so when the phone rang and I was able to talk to him, I was frankly pretty grateful. All the rumors about him being dead or brain dead or, you know… That’s obviously not true because he picked up the phone and called me.”

Four weeks in the hospital and that was the only person McConnell has called, apparently.

Well, that’s why America has a new cottage industry in Kremlinology. This is a paranoid, dying regime, a government of secrets and lies. Don’t expect clarity, or even common sense any time soon.

 

 

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In Hot Water — The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes

In Hot Water

The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 20th, 2026

For some reason, an old golden-age science fiction story has been going through my mind this week as I watch the antics of the rapidly-disintegrating Donald Trump. The 1941 story was called “Bullard Reflects” by Malcolm Jameson. It’s available free to read at the link, and is worth it simply because it has one of the greatest closing lines of all time. Jameson’s story also played a significant role in naval strategic operations going forward.

Now, Bullard’s antagonist was “Egon Ziffler, chief of secret police of the Jovian Empire—the Torturer.” Egon was vicious, vainglorious, with a wildly inflated sense of self-worth and utterly abysmal strategic or tactical skills. So, OK, there’s a lot there to remind me of Trump. But I think it’s because of the use of the word “reflect” in the story that brought it to mind.

It’s a weird situation in pretty much any context, but the fact is that Trump has probably taken more political damage from a vanity project to pretty up a Washington landmark then he has from his catastrophic defeat in his ill-considered foray against Iran. It takes real talent to put a minor refurb project ahead of America’s greatest military and diplomatic defeat in the eyes of the public, but Trump managed.

I’m talking, of course, about the Reflecting Pool. I’ve already had a couple of Trump supporters complain that “liberals never gave the Reflecting Pool a second thought until they saw an opportunity to embarrass Trump.” There’s a certain amount of truth there: most people, including most liberals, just sort of thought of the Pool as one of those pretty sites that was part of DC’s character and that was about it. It was more a matter of good taste and ambiance rather then the sort of deep significance of the Lincoln Memorial or the Vietnam Wall. So no, I never gave it much thought beyond, “Oh, that’s pretty.” I doubt most other people did, either.

Until Trump, as part of his monomaniacal and egotistical drive to reshape DC in his image, declared the Pool a disgrace and blamed its allegedly deplorable condition on Obama and Biden and any other Democrat nearby. As with his other ‘renovations’, he moved unilaterally, without regard to whether he had authority, funding, or if the property was his to reshape. Other presidents, following set procedures, have made similar changes, and nobody ever heard of them. But this is Trump, and the public, already deeply outraged by his destruction of the East Wing and the Kennedy Center, were, at best, deeply skeptical. Experts weighed in, noting that granite couldn’t hold paint well and noting that making the shallow Pool darker under that Washington sun would make the water much warmer.

The rest you know about. The algae exploded, and in an effort to contain it, they dumped in hundreds of gallons of hydrogen peroxide. It killed the algae, but, as Matt Viser at the Atlantic explained, it was replaced by “Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed ‘Skinny Dead Mouse’ by scientists.” It’s much harder to kill. Even worse, the lining of the Pool laid out by the contractor, the aptly-named “Greenwater, Inc.” began to disintegrate and bob to the surface. The lining was the same stuff used in truckbeds, and usually works pretty well, assuming it’s given time to cure, isn’t under water, and isn’t exposed to hydrogen peroxide.

So another Trump-created crisis has turned into an utter fiasco. At last word he had stationed National Guard troops around the Pool to prevent souvenir takers from making off with the erstwhile Pool bed while his flying monkeys swamp the social media with screams that Democrats somehow sabotaged the project. This is farce of the purest ray divine.

A court blocked him from closing the Kennedy Center for two years for ‘renovations’–a move on his part to hide the utter fiasco of his renaming the center and alienating all of the world’s higher art community. The running joke was that he only had the option of 900 consecutive nights of some country and western twat yodeling “Proud to be an American” in lieu of all the other performances. He had to hide the utter failure. While the court was at it, they ordered his name removed from the center. He had that done, behind a tarp so the public couldn’t see, a calculated three hours after the court deadline. The tarp is still in place, which is having the opposite effect of what Trump hoped for by paradoxically keeping it in the public eye. There’s already rumors he didn’t really remove his name. Eventually someone will paint “8647” on the tarp and he’ll have to replace it and station more troops to guard it.

Then there was the G7 conference. It was an even bigger fiasco than the Reflecting Pool, and while the stakes are far higher, the nuances were less obvious. Hell, the Pool may have distracted the public enough to spare Trump a greater humiliation.

First, he tried, on camera, to kiss French First Lady Brigitt Macron. He looked for all the world like Uncle Pervy trying to lay a big wet on on an obviously flustered and unwilling twelve-year-old niece. But French President Emmanuel Macron already had the last laugh, arranging for the historically illiterate US leader to sign his agreement with Iran at Versailles, a place that enjoys a certain infamy when it comes to bad treaties and French vengeance.

In another extraordinary diplomatic gaffe, he claimed that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the closest thing to an ideological ally he had in the G7, ‘begged’ him to have her picture taken with him. Understandably infuriated, Meloni called the Trump claim ‘fabricated’ and wrote, “As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you. My popularity depends on my ability to defend Italy’s national interest, and that is exactly what I have always done.” Trump, ever the fool, reiterated that she begged him, ‘over and over.’ The US just lost one of its few remaining friends.

Did I mention Trump called Netanyahu a ‘motherfucker’? Yup. One of the few things he got right this week, but not particularly helpful.

Another image caught a seemingly oblivious Trump standing in the midst of other world leaders who were affably greeting and meeting, as isolated and spurned as the proverbial turd in the swimming pool.

And back to the Pool: It just came out that Olympian David Hearn was just arrested. He stopped by the Pool to see for himself, and apparently reached in and felt a chuck of the lining fragment. He then released it, stood up, and walked back to his bicycle. Park Police promptly arrested him for “destruction of government property”! You can’t make this up!

Trump apparently never heard the Charlie Chaplin quote, “The tyrant fears the laugh more than the assassin’s bullet.” But he does have some dim, rat-like awareness that looking like a fool is very dangerous for him. And in increasingly frantic efforts to counteract that, he acts like a greater fool with every passing day. And the laughter grows.

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Birthday of the Strait Man You can make a street walker think, but you can’t make a Hormuz

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 13th, 2026

Tomorrow, June 14th, is Barack Hussein Obama Day. Everyone alive and decent back then has a good memory. Mine was of him singing “Amazing Grace” at the church in South Carolina where a racist gun nut killed a dozen people, including Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, State Senator and pastor at that church. Very moving, and I’m not even religious.

People who hate Obama are welcome to express their thoughts, as well. We can laugh at you, and let’s face it; smearing Obama is a hell of a lot easier these days than praising Trump.

The Orange Shitstain turns 80 tomorrow, and of course he’s celebrating with all the class and dignity of a Dogpatch Kickapoo Joy Juice festival. (Oh, look it up; it’s the sort of Boomer shit the Internet was born to immortalize).

Fresh off his triumph at The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Trump announced that a peace deal with Iran would be signed tomorrow. That, or he would deploy the ultimate weapon against them. It was quite vague, which with Trump is a bit of an improvement.

I was puzzled at first. Usually Trump announces a peace deal in order to manipulate the markets for a bit of insider trading. But the markets are closed Sunday. Then it hit me: right. His big 8-0. He wants a big “peace is at hand, inflation is done, and it’s all Biden’s fault” speech for his White House Cage Match. Yes, “White House Cage Match.”

Trouble is, Iran holds the whip hand. They control the Strait of Hormuz. Even if Trump’s recent unfounded claim that the US was able to sneak 40 million barrels of oil through (even assuming tankers can tip-toe, 40m/bbl is about a month supply for California alone) was true, Iran’s control is pretty much absolute. The regime is very firmly in control, since opposition dropped out of sight. (That tends to happen in countries where you try to influence them by bombing them. Ask any Londoner). And major financial dislocation is expected to really hit in August. That’s when the last of the tankers that sailed through the Strait in late February arrive at the more distant ports—including Long Beach or Galveston or, well, you get the idea.

Trump doesn’t want massive economic dislocation six weeks before the midterms. So if he’s desperate enough, he might just accede to Iran’s demands, which include control of the Strait, $300 billion in war damage reparations, release of another $35 billion or so in frozen assets, and an agreement to reestablish the nuclear proliferation agreement that Obama negotiated and which Trump unilaterally tore up.

Yes, I’m sure they included that last as a deliberate insult to Trump, but why not? Assuming they don’t really want to build nuclear weapons—and the fact that they haven’t in the past 45 years that they could have is suggestive—the agreement costs them little and helps ensure stability in the region.

Of course, Trump is almost certainly lying. Isn’t this the fortieth “peace is at hand” declaration he’s made since it became obvious he wasn’t going to get a quick-and-dirty win like he did in Venezuela? So whatever he says at tomorrow’s trash-fest, don’t believe it.

Suppose we all get a giant surprise tomorrow and Iran announces that a deal has been reached? That the Strait of Hormuz is now open for business, with Iran getting $10 million per supertanker and all the rest of it. Trump will strut and dance like a lobotomized Robin Williams on Quaaludes, Republican congressmen will drop to their knees if not already there and sing hosannas, and on Monday the markets will explode, making “irrational exuberance” look like mildly amused.

Only…well there’s a fly in the ointment. Remember what I said about the last ships to clear the Strait in late February arriving in August? There’s about 2,000 ships awaiting passage. The Strait in normal times can handle 100 ships a day, so there’s a three week backlog just to clear the existing traffic. So normal shipping wouldn’t resume until early July. Now factor in what I call “transit latency” – the amount of time needed for ships to reach their destination ports. While two months is average, some destinations lie five months away.

So trade won’t even begin to reach normal levels until…hmm…September. Careful calculation reveals that that comes after August, the point where things start to come apart in earnest.

So even if the crows of an agreement being signed tomorrow actually are more than the usual Trump duck-and-weave bullshit, it’s too late. Trump probably doesn’t have the brights to understand any of that, but his handlers certainly do, and after a brief pause for the sell-short guys to weigh in, the markets will, as well. An actual market crash in June is possible. Then the fun begins in earnest. Come August, we’re screwed.

It comes at a time when we already face: A screwworm invasion, a massive disruption in medical supplies, a super El Niño that may start making significant disruptions by September—including, yes, shipping lanes—and several financial bubbles—housing, AI, and derivatives—all nearing the point of the inevitable implosion. And it comes at a time when the government is crippled by the self-serving malice of the Trump crime syndicate and the sheer libertarian foolishness of the tech bros headed by trillionaire Elon Musk.

I used to joke that I didn’t write summer solstice pieces because if the message in the winter solstice piece was that the sun was coming back so there is hope, a summer solstice theme would have to be “it’s all downhill from here.” My winter solstice piece preceded a planned two-month hiatus that extended to six months because I’m a lazy bastard, but here we are approaching a summer solstice, and here I am, with a message.

And that message is: “Cheer up. Most of us will get through this.”

 

 

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Solstice 2025 — The end of the beginning is not the beginning of the end

Solstice 2025

The end of the beginning is not the beginning of the end

To say we’re in perilous times is a bit like saying that crossing the Sahara on foot presents challenges. Even if you only know a small portion of the possibilities, it’s a daunting prospect.

Historians are all too familiar with what we are going through right now. Most nations on Earth have, at one point or another, had a leader who was utterly mad, utterly corrupt, and utterly contemptuous of the damage his actions were causing.

Just as the specifics of such misrules are as varied as human psychopathology, so too are the end results. The spectrum can range from utter ruin to widespread reform that restores sanity and a functional society and economy. Determinants include how much the Mad Emperor gets away with before the inevitable collapse, the strength of the saner and more stable traditions of the nation so afflicted, and the extent of the damage.

European history is full of Mad Emperors, and the results cover the full panoply ranging from the Emperor being executed or deposed to widespread war, an emptied treasury, and even occupation by annoyed neighbors. England had both the mildest and one of the worst examples of such; in 1688 the generally incompetent and egotistic James II was bloodlessly overthrown by William and Mary of the somewhat better-behaved House of Orange. It was done so competently and peacefully that few Britons realized they had staged an invasion and coup. To this day the “Glorious Revolution” is seen as a peaceful transfer of power, much like Presidential inaugurations were. At the other end of the spectrum was Charles I, who led England to a civil war followed by a vicious republic of religious fanatics. You could say he was in over his head.

In fact, England is noted for its monarchs of misrule. I could easily give as horrible examples Edward II, Henry VI (who also caused a civil war), Richard III, Henry VIII, and George IV of whom one of his aides wrote,‘A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist. There have been good and wise kings but not many of them and this I believe to be one of the worst.’

That last one might sound familiar to most of us. Wikipedia says of him, “He led an extravagant lifestyle that contributed to the fashions of the Regency era. He was a patron of new forms of leisure, style and taste. He commissioned John Nash to build the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and remodel Buckingham Palace, and commissioned Jeffry Wyatville to rebuild Windsor Castle. George’s charm and culture earned him the title “the first gentleman of England”, but his dissolute way of life and poor relationships with his parents and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, earned him the contempt of the people and dimmed the prestige of the monarchy. He excluded Caroline from his coronation and asked the government to introduce the unpopular Pains and Penalties Bill in an unsuccessful attempt to divorce her…George’s rule was tarnished by scandal and financial extravagance. His ministers found his behaviour selfish, unreliable and irresponsible, and he was strongly influenced by favourites.”

Hoo, boy. And good old George IV would actually be an improvement over what we have now. “The first gentleman” is not a phrase that springs readily to the minds of most Americans when it comes to The Leader.

But if you take a look at the map, you’ll notice that it still says “England” on that portion of the British Isles. Similarly, other nations that have had even far worse and more destructive rulers are still there: France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Russia, and Italy. All suffered horribly at various junctures because of vicious and incompetent misrule. But they survived, and while all cultures change and evolve, none were annihilated by Mad Emperors. Even the most extreme recent example, Germany, came out of Hitler’s horrific 12 years and eventually became the prosperous and peaceful land it is today.

I can’t begin to guess how much damage this regime has done to America at this point. I strongly suspect our national security is now at best a joke, with most of our most strategic secrets available for Kremlin perusal. Project 2025, the thinly disguised rape of the national treasury and elimination of those pesky civil rights, has proceeded apace, and millions of Americans are facing financial ruin and deprivation as a result. All America’s allies are estranged, and rivals are picking our bones. We’ve lost, perhaps for decades, the advantages of free trade and good will.

Mad rulers die and/or are deposed sooner rather than later. Many bring doom upon themselves. Without the mesmerizing toxic attraction of the madman (or as John Randolph once wrote about Henry Clay, ‘like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, he both shines and stinks.‘) public fury against the architects of Project 2025 will explode.

I can’t predict how much more damage we’ll take, or how harsh or prolonged the recovery will be. All I can promise is that there will be a recovery. Many nations have suffered worse than America is going through now, and survived to tell the tale. America will, as well, and with great good luck, will emerge with its core values of democracy and justice still intact. That will speed the recovery.

And yes, there will be a recovery. It may be painful, but those that live to see it will be the lucky ones.

The sun rises again tomorrow.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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But his emails…! — House Oversight releases twenty thousand documents

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 13th 2025

We expected to glean from yesterday’s release that Trump was vile, amoral and an inveterate liar. Of course, many of us knew that already, but the new light would shine so brightly that even the most gullible true believers in MAGAland would start to have serious doubts about their fuhrer and savior.

I will mention that the vast trove of Epstein’s emails are on-line and searchable at https://splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app/ It’s free to use.

And there are such reports: hours spent alone with Virginia Guiffre, the late author of “Nobody’s Girl.” Reports of him in company with a 14 year old “who looked much younger.” Evidence of him engaging in transactions with Jeffrey Epstein as late as 2017, long after their supposed falling out and after Trump had become President of the United States.

In one email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (Victim’s name redacted, but believed to be Guiffre) spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”

The White House is declaiming yesterday’s release as fake news, of course, and Baghdad Barbie even came up with the amazing claim that it wasn’t her boss they were talking about, but someone ELSE who was ALSO named “Donald Trump.” Even by the standards of this regime, that may mark a new record in the realm of idiotic bullshit.

In the searchable tranche above, Trump is mentioned over 1,000 times (the round number leads me to suspect the counter only went up to 1,000). By way of comparison, Bill Clinton is mentioned 756 times, and of course there is a fair bit of evidence showing that he took many trips to Epstein’s island, reportedly because Epstein owed him some favors.

But what is striking is that even among the rich filth pervading Epstein’s racket, Trump was considered a step too far in terms of creepiness and moral depravity. Epstein in 2018 wrote that Trump “feels alone, and is nuts !!! , I told everyone from day one. beyond belief mad, and most thought i was speaking metaphorically, its obvious he could crack. stormy daniels. ? lies after lies aflter lies.”

What does it tell you when a serial child rapist and sex trafficker calls you “evil beyond belief.”? This doesn’t exactly fall under the category of ‘glowing reference”. Apparently, based on what he wrote there, Epstein had been repeatedly and publicly calling Trump ‘mad’ for quite some time.

Per the Guardian’ “I have met some very bad people,” Epstein wrote in a 2017 email. “None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.” In other messages, Epstein described Trump as a “maniac” showing signs of “early dementia”.

In a Thursday, August 9 2018 email to someone named BS Stern, Epstein forcefully argued for a third party candidate in 2020 as being greatly superior to Trump being reelected or the Dems finding a winning candidate, something Epstein wasn’t willing to bet on. His politics were vaguely liberal-centrist and he clearly didn’t want to see Trump redux. Of course, most people didn’t.

Other, heretofore uninvolved public figures may be ensnared in the vast trove of data the House Oversight Committee released. For example, Brett Kavanaugh, Supine Court Justice. Sean Morrow wrote on Bluesky yesterday, “Jeffrey Epstein advised Steve Bannon that the lawyers representing Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing should accuse Christine Blasey Ford of being on medications that cause false memories or memory loss.” Obviously Epstein was an expert at discrediting women (and girls) who made accusations of rape, and while this exchange doesn’t even hint that Kavanaugh had any knowledge or consent of the exchange, the question must be asked: Why would Epstein volunteer his vile expertise to the cause of ramming through the Kavanaugh nomination? Conspiracy, or just a perverted sense of professional courtesy?

It will get even worse for Trump going forward. The House will vote on the discharge petition to release all the Epstein files, since Squeaker Johnson’s belated and highly reluctant swearing in of newly minted Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, brought the vote to the needed 218. With Trump’s sway over the party disintegrating in earnest, there are reports that some 50 to 60 Republican members will vote for the release. Trump, who campaigned on releasing the files “on day one” of his new term reportedly tried pressuring two members, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, to retract their signatures on the petition without success. Anyone who still thinks Trump is innocent and has nothing to hide has to be as crazy and/or dishonest as he is.

The country might survive the damage Trump and the Republicans are doing, over time. But Trump himself is unlikely to survive this.

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No Tariffs? Oh, SNAP! — Revolt against Trump grows

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 2nd, 2026

Trump got two ginormous setbacks in his efforts to turn America into a libertarian paradise with himself as the Howard Roark figure this week.

The first was a court ruling, when U.S. District Judge John McConnell ruled that the administration had no right to deny use of emergency funds as a stopgap measure to continue SNAP, and that the administration acted illegally in denying SNAP benefits to some forty million people, noting that those benefits had continued without a hitch during the 2019 shutdown.

The administration, intent on blackmailing the country, is complaining that they need court guidance on how to dispense the funds, since they have apparently forgotten how to do it since the last time, a month ago. The admin has to give the court an accounting tomorrow, Monday.

The larger issue of Trump’s capricious reallocation of SNAP funds already allocated by Congress is before the Supreme Court. In normal times, the case would be a no-brainer. Rescission, or reallocation of funds, is permitted only in emergencies and on a limited scale. Trump has simply reallocated (stolen) hundreds of billions in already-allocated federal funds. But knowing this Court, they will rule that they “need to study the matter” further while permitting Trump to continue gutting the country.

Trump, meanwhile, wants to force millions into starvation. At the very least, it would take his lie about how “they’re eating the pets” and turn it into truth. Not that Trump is any big lover of truth.

And the Senate somehow worked up enough nerve to challenge Trump’s takeover of the Congressional power of assessing tariffs and revoked all of his tariffs. As if that wasn’t a big enough slap at his pumpkin face, the vote happened just a day after he was frantically negotiating with China’s Premier Xi in an effort to get China to import at least some of the American soybeans. He had just gotten Xi to agree to import roughly 35% of what it had been importing before Trump came alone, in exchange for who knows what? [Hint: keep an eye on Intel stock. China wants some high-end chips that American heretofore had not wanted them to have because of cyber and military uses]. Xi will doubtlessly hold Trump to whatever they agreed, even though he will no longer have to pay the tariffs.

Soybean farmers are overjoyed, but that will be short-lived. It’s still only 35 or perhaps 40 percent of prior sales, and few business can survive a 60% cut in revenues, especially farmers. Meanwhile, tariffs have jacked the prices of farm equipment and fertilizers, and the draconian ICEcapades of this hateful administration mean a large labor shortage. The farmers are still badly screwed by Trump policies.

Even baseball bit Donald on the ass. He wanted to make a thing of the fact that the two teams were respectively from California and Ontario, since he was already punishing both locales for not being pro-Trump. (A joke making the rounds up north goes: “Canadians are so smart that not one of them voted for Trump.”) He is mad at Ontario Premier Doug Ford (Canada’s answer to Ron DeSantis) who aired an ad accurately portraying Ronald Reagan as being largely opposed to tariffs. Trump riposted by slapping a completely arbitrary 10% additional tariff on Canadian goods, a move so gratuitously capricious that it may have been what sparked the Senate revolt. And he’s mad at California and California governor Gavin Newsom because…well, heh, you’ve seen the things Newsom’s staff have been putting out on social media. Trump may love Trump, but he hates having a mirror put up to him.

If he was hoping to use the World Series to humiliate and insult Canada or California, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays had other ideas. This World Series was a classic, hard fought, not decided until the final out, exciting as hell, with two wildly popular and talented teams. And even the most xenophobic of Trump’s followers couldn’t make some nativist thing out of it: I’ll bet the Blue Jays have more American-born players than do the Dodgers. Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Sasaki are all Japanese, and of course Freddie Freeman is Canadian. LA also has players representing much of Central and South America, as well.

Public sentiment regarding the shutdown, and the House being in extended recess, is turning rapidly against the Republicans. The propaganda outlets all demand the Democrats end the shutdown and pass “a clean CR”, and the Democrats simply note that a “clean CR” would gut medical coverage for tens of millions of Americans, and destroy many vital government services that DOGE hadn’t already ruined. They also note that until the House reconvenes, no meaningful negotiation is possible. Squeaker Mike Johnson (R-What Christianity Might Look Like if They’d Crucified Ayn Rand Instead) is now saying he may not reconvene the House until January 2026. Between that and the increasing gaps in services and funding the government provides for vital social function, public support for the GOP is plummeting. There are off-off year elections this week, including a critical district reallocation vote in California, and while the scope of the elections is small, Republicans are bracing for bad news as public dissatisfaction mounts.

Keep pressing. They’re starting to crumble.

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Unbalanced Battle — A ‘civil war’ would be uncivil

Unbalanced Battle

A ‘civil war’ would be uncivil

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 27th 2025

I’ve been hearing more talk of late about an actual civil war breaking out in the United States. An actual war, and not the ongoing struggle that has been the 150 year legacy of the Civil War. There are, sadly, reasons for this. Trump and his backers are pushing more and more to create or at least plausibly claim an insurrection so Trump can declare martial law and sweep the bill of rights and elections aside for a fascist dictatorship.

Certainly in the lead up to the No Kings protest October 18th, there were a lot of people openly hoping for widespread violence that could provide the impetus for Trump and his Project 2025 backers to shut down the United States once and for all. (Oh, people would still have their flag and anthem and even fake elections, because empty symbols are all that’s needed for a lot of people).

But the American people did themselves proud. Of the seven million plus protesters who turned out, exactly ONE was arrested nationwide. And he wasn’t arrested for violent or seditious behavior: Alabama cops hauled him in because he was dressed as a giant inflatable penis. Truly, he stood tall and proud for his country, but even Trump would have trouble calling that violent rebellion.

[Zeppnote:  An alert reader contacted me to tell me this:

The only thing wrong with your post is that the person in the penis costume was a woman!  https://1819news.com/news/item/court-appearance-pushed-back-for-woman-arrested-at-no-kings-protest-wearing-penis-costume
OK, so SHE stood tall and proud…!]

Interestingly, twenty-two others were arrested that day. All of them were Trump supporters who threatened or harassed peaceful protesters.

Needless to say, the online propaganda about how the protesters were domestic terrorists who hated America vanished in a puff of smoke. But have no fear—it will return. This bunch of wanna-be dictators lack creativity or originality—all of their tactics and even the phrases used in their propaganda are straight out of the well-worn Nazi playbook. They can’t even create their own agitprop, but this sack of losers think they can run a 21st century economy?

Still, the danger is very real, and so talk of an actual insurrection and possible civil war will continue, on both sides of the fence.

People tend to think of war as having distinct sides, along with battle lines and territories that are identifiable as being one side or the others. But even in the case of the actual Civil War, it was far more complicated than the simplistic maps in the history texts suggest. Both sides of the Mason-Dixon line had groups of resistors; saboteurs, propagandists, assassins. While the military lines were distinct, the populace was far more amorphous, with towns, neighborhoods, families and households all having their own civil strife. It’s unlikely that any state in the war had better than 80% support amongst its peoples.

It’s unlikely that the sort of strife being bandied about in America now would even have military lines. World War II was probably the last war that saw that phenomenon, and in an era of drone warfare and satellite surveillance, “frontlines” have become meaningless.

What is far more likely is an asymmetrical war, such as the ones the US fought (and lost) in Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. It’s unlikely any states will formally secede until things have well and truly collapsed and it may be that a counter-coup occurs before such an eventuality.

What you will see the the rise of resistances nationwide. They will employ the timeless tactics of resistance fighters, planting IEDs, blowing up bridges, powerlines, roads, and canals. They will conduct whisper campaigns, claiming atrocities (some real, some not), and terrorizing suspected traitors to the cause. On local levels, Trump loyalists would be likely to adopt similar tactics.

Psychological warfare will play a big role. Trump will continue wildly waving the flag, the bible, and warning of “others” out to poison the pure blood of MAGAts. The resistance will hobble Trump forces anyway they can, and in a time-honored tactic bound to be extremely effective with Trump, try to poke the government forces into vicious overreactions. Does anyone for an instant think that Trump can’t be provoked into doing something really stupid and ill-thought out? Anyone? Remember, this is the toddler who just slapped an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods because the premier of one province aired a commercial that accurately showed Ronald Reagan warning of the destructiveness of tariffs! (BTW, remember all the red-baiters who screamed about communism meaning the government took over the economy? They’re all supporting Trump’s strongarm economic tactics!)

Militias will play a role, although from what side will vary widely. Only the most utterly deluded would seek open battle with US military units since even the ones with military training would be no match at all.

The position of the military itself is of considerable concern. Morale under Trump is eroding rapidly—I see just today that members of one National Guard unit deployed to an American city to “restore order” are openly saying they will not obey any illegal orders and will uphold the Constitution. And I honestly have no idea how the Pentagon will go on all this. They know Trump and Hegseth are jokes, and that both stand in opposition to the Constitution. But we’ve seen other institutions take the knee: law firms, universities, the big news stations (granted, bought out by cowardly and/or malevolent corporate forces) so it’s by no means certain that patriotism and loyalty will carry the day for the United States.

It’s a future far too likely to happen. I hope it doesn’t, because it will ruin tens and possibly hundreds of millions of lives, kill millions and possibly tens of millions of people, and wreak so much damage on the United States that it will take generations to recover—if it ever does. And the safety and security of anyone reading this will be gone. For your sake and your family, let’s hope this scenario doesn’t eventuate.

Right now the resistance is peaceful and thinking very clearly, and hopefully that will be enough to defeat Trump.

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No Kings Day — With luck, it will become a national holiday

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 18th ,2025

I was watching a clearly rattled Trump tell a Faux News reporter, “No, really, I’m not a king. Not a king.” He somehow failed to be very convincing.

The “No Kings” protest is under way, with possibly ten million people turning up in at least 2,600 locations to protest the Trump regime. There are another 100 locations in Canada and across Europe. The people are rising, and the Trump regime is fearing them.

There’s a saying in America: “The government should fear the people. The people should never fear the government.” Millions of people across the country have remembered that lesson.

The final pre-demonstration note of the regime’s efforts to frighten, anger, gaslight and lie to us came yesterday when Trump commuted the sentence of the repulsive and disgusting George Santos, who emerged blinking into the sunlight this morning. Trump wanted liberals to erupt in fury, but he’s been to that well so many times that liberals didn’t take the bait. We already knew that Trump was a vicious, amoral, senile piece of shit, and nobody excepts him to be any better than he ought to have been.

He wanted anger and loss of control from the demonstrators. What he got was weary disgust, loathing, and contempt.

For the rest of the GOP, things are just as bad. The leaked emails from the Young Republicans, thousands of lies, smears, hate and self-pity, merely cemented the public perception that the GOP had not only lost its way, but was completely in thrall to the worst humanity has to offer. These aren’t young Ayn Rand idealists: these are the sorts of people who shot Jews in the back of the head and kicked their still twitching bodies into corpse-filled ditches. JD Vance did himself no favors with his avuncular chuckle and a “boys will be boys” defense; it just shows what an utterly empty and amoral vacuum this slick little opportunist really is.

ICE may have begun its campaign of terror aimed at undocumented workers, but as it became more and more obvious that the effort to frighten and cow was aimed at everyone in America, the campaign has backfired. People saw the images of politicians and judges being arrested and roughed up, innocent bystanders trussed and thrown to the ground like sacks of potatoes, and naked, bound children being herded into Uhauls to be taken who-knows-where, and recoiled in disgust. These pitiful, masked, vicious little Nazi cowards, some of them the desecrators of Congress on January 6th, were the antithesis of everything America stood for.

There’s a brilliant meme circulating on the web that anyone who believes the ICE propaganda should read.

It goes, “ If you’re using undocumented people’s tax records to find them and kidnap them, then it was never about them not paying taxes.

If you’re showing up at their place of employment, then it was never about them not working.

If you’re showing up at courthouses, it was never about getting them to do it the right way. If you’re kidnapping women and children, it was never about criminals.

If you’re not giving them due process, it was never about the Constitution. And if you’re spending billions of dollars to do it, it was never about the economy.

And if you’re doing all of this in the name of a 34-time convicted felon, then it was never about following the law.”

History has tales of such police state bullies, be it Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (better known as the NKVD), or East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (aka Stasi). All eventually fell, and the members spent the rest of their lives hiding their gruesome past, living in constant fear of exposure, knowing friends and neighbors would spit on them, and children disown them, should details of their past emerge.

That is what the future holds for the strutting cowardly bullies in ICE. They will suffer for what they are doing now.

Decent people are repulsed by the scapegoating and cruelty of the Trump regime against immigrants, gays, and trans. Knowledgeable people know this is just the start, and they will come for the rest of us.

The Lord Ha-Has of the right wing media, oblivious to what eventually became of Lord Ha-Ha, continue to pump the party line that the “No Kings” rallies are “Hate America” riots, and that the demonstrators are all paid to be there, and that protest has become an industry. Let’s see: ten million demonstrators at $500 a head would be five billion dollars. About the only people who could afford that would be the over-entitled dirtbags who inflicted Trump upon us in the first place. Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Let’s face it: they aren’t about to return anything to the people who made their obscene wealth possible in the first place.

The shutdown was supposed to be the GOP’s final consolidation of power. The idea was they could use the shutdown to avoid any accountability to Congress, blame Democrats for the shut down, and use it as an excuse to further dismantle the United States. At the very least, it would be enough to keep their own followers in line, and they saw no need to give a fuck what any non-Republican thought.

But that’s disintegrating as the shutdown approaches its third week. They tried claiming that Democrats simply preferred to “waste a trillion dollars in tax money.” And of course the usual dim-wits tried claiming that if the government shut down, nobody would miss it.

Of course, tens of millions of people are already missing the thousands of services and programs, big and small, that have been halted by the shutdown.

And an unlikely ally has shown up: Health insurance providers. In thirteen states this week, they projected the increases in premiums people would face if the effort to dismantle Obamacare hidden in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wasn’t rescinded—the main point the Democrats are fighting the budget update on. For the luckiest people, the new rates are horrifying. For most, they will be devastating, and may, for thousands, be a death sentence.

According to Health System Tracker, “Enhanced premium tax credits that make coverage more affordable will expire at the end of 2025, driving up out-of-pocket premium payments by over 75% on average. This is expected to cause healthier enrollees to drop their coverage and create a sicker risk pool.”

In some cases, out-of-pocket premium costs could quadruple. For some people, this seems a poor trade-off for richer, happier billionaires. The people who made who made Trump, the senile pederast, possible.

Family matters meant I had to stay home this morning. But it didn’t stop me from making my own voice heard through this piece, and to show my solidarity with the protesters.

As they say in Portland, “Ribbit!”

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Cornered Rat — More dangerous to deal with

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 27th 2025

This week’s offensives against George Soros and the city of Portland reflect, not a disintegration of America, but a disintegration of the Donald Trump regime.

The Epstein files aren’t going away, and now, with the election of a new Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona (in a deep red district that went for Trump by 30 points!) Congress now has the votes to force a floor debate and vote on the matter.

Mike Johnson, perhaps the greatest coward in the history of Congress, has suspended congressional business for a week while frantically trying to delay swearing in newly minted Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva. This would under normal circumstances, be the sort of chickenshittery you might expect from Johnson-without-a-Johnson, but what makes this far more remarkable is that it means Congress cannot do anything to avoid a government shutdown on October 1st. Trump is, incredibly, trying to make that part of his plan, which apparently involves firing most of the people that made government functional. While the shutdown would not affect Social Security or Medicare or Veteran Affairs (already damaged by Trump and Musk’s sweeping rape of the government) it would bring to a halt most of the government’s most loved elements—national parks and reserves, monuments, and most other non-essential functions.

We’ve been through this contrived “crisis” a dozen times or more since Newt Gingrich realized it was a great way to extort the country. And sometimes the government has shut down, and Republicans have taken it on the chin each time because the public, for the most part, realized who the extortionists were.

This time is different. Not only can Congress not come up with a last-minute solution to the crisis, but Trump’s answer is to fire all the non-essential workers, ensuring the crisis becomes permanent no matter what Congress does.

The Republicans rigged the “Big Beautiful Bill” to ensure that the most vicious fallout wouldn’t occur until after November 2026, and this will undo in one swipe the palatability for the stupid people who love Donald Trump.

Donald announced a military invasion of “war-ravaged” Portland, Oregon yesterday. This will come as news to Portland residents, who probably thought their greatest adversary was forest fires—and this has been a relatively mellow fire season.

He also declared AntiFa a “domestic terrorism” organization. He needs to set up a new PAC: “Fascists against AntiFascism.”

He has also declared war on George Soros because decades of antisemitic “pro-Israel” propaganda from Faux News means most of his supporters have heard of Soros. But then, Soros is supporting Newsom’s redistricting battle after Texas’ Trump-sponsored move to steal five Congressional seats.

And last week was an unmitigated fiasco for Trump. First, there was the Jimmy Kimmel thing. The only thing stupider than losing to a comedian with twenty million followers is picking a fight with a comedian with twenty million followers in the first place.

Then there was the catastrophe of the UN address. Bad enough that Trump’s staff fucked up the teleprompter, which meant that the wingless Donald had to fly solo, but he went on to tell the assemblage their countries were all “going to hell”, and whined about the teleprompter, an escalator that stalled, and that the UN rejected a remodeling bid from Trump FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

One Blue Sky wit wrote, “Lead your life in such a way that if the escalator breaks, it isn’t because someone wants to kill you.” Seems easy enough advice to follow, doesn’t it? Well, funny story…

So, Donald is on the ropes. He’s scared, he’s desperate.

That isn’t necessarily good news: cornered rats are considerably more dangerous than regular rats. Remember that.

But murderous desperation is showing up in Congress, too. Marjorie Taylor-Greene posted a tweet today telling her members that In the Event Of, she wants them to know she isn’t even remotely suicidal and any unexpected death should be met with a healthy skepticism. Now, MT-G is noted for histrionic persiflage, it is true, but this sounds more like someone who is genuinely frightened. I’ve little love for her, but I wish her a long and healthy life!

Meanwhile, another nasty clown in the GOP, one “John Gillette (R-Kingman), wrote on the social media site X that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was calling for the government to be overthrown and should be hanged. ‘Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged.. it will continue,’ Gillette said in response to a video of Jayapal.’’ [excerpt from Huffpost]

Jayapal’s ‘crime’? Calling for people to get out and demonstrate. That’s all.

I have a feeling that we are rapidly approaching a climax to the rise and hoped-for fall of Donald Trump. But I won’t breathe freely until he is out of office and in prison where he belongs.

Best of luck, everyone!

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