Category: American Psyche

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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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Market Markers — How now down Dow?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 11th 2025

 

JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon said he is “far more worried than others” about a correction in U.S. stocks. In an interview with the BBC, Dimon said, “You see a lot of things out there, the amount of uncertainty and I put geopolitics in that category, fiscal spending in that category, politics in that category, the re-militarization of the world in that category. All these things cause a lot of issues that we don’t know how they’re going to sort out…[W]e should be stockpiling bullets, guns and bombs,” as the world’s a “far more dangerous place.”

But remilitarization, while alarming in and of itself, wasn’t the only issue on Dimon’s mind. It’s clear he’s worried about AI, which I consider a multi-trillion dollar economic bubble that could pop at any minute. (My words, not his, just to be clear). He said, “So if the market is pricing in 10%, I would say it’s more like 30%, and I’m not saying next year because the timing of these things is almost impossible.” He considers a “market correction” likely, perhaps in six months, possibly two years.

A “correction” is nabob-speak for a market slump of more than 20%, which in the case of the Dow Jones would work out to a drop approaching ten thousand points.

The very next day, Lev Parnas wrote this: “Trump’s Tariff Shock EXPOSED — The $1 Billion Crypto Heist They Don’t Want You to See. Minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on China, a secret wallet moved over $1 billion into crypto — triggering the biggest market crash in months and revealing […] insider corruption and market.”

OK, it was no crash: the Dow slipped 1,500 points over two days, about 3% of its value. But yes, the timing was almost prima facie evidence that the corrupt and venal Trump gave some insider traders a heads up before making his shock tariff announcement. It’s hardly the first time something like this has occurred—indeed, Trump’s seemingly erratic and capricious tariffs games have made some people, including Trump and members of his family—obscenely wealthy.

This entire administration is run by corrupt plutocrats intent on plundering the entire American economy. This collection of libertarians and fascists have managed to convince themselves that the economy can manage quite nicely without any economic involvement of the society that created that economy in the first place. They’ve spent so much time arguing that workers are nothing more than an economic outlay and to argue otherwise is communism that they’ve taken up believing their own propaganda. Most of them are corrupt, and the rest are delusional. And they are in charge.

Add the vindictive madness that drives Trump and his supporters, the desire to utterly destroy a fifth of the labor force for the crime of dark skin or accents, the sheer paranoia and xenophobia that is causing them to cheer the dismantling of the United States of America (and yes, the democratic constitutional government IS the United States of America, and without it, it’s just another big patch of land with lawless tribes)—combine all that, and the stage is set for an economic catastrophe.

Project 2025, in the form of White House Office of Management and Budget director Russel Vought, is manipulating the latest Republican-engineered government to dismantle huge chunks of the government, firing tens of thousands of experienced and capable government employees supposedly because of the shutdown. There have been a dozen shutdowns, some lasting weeks. Workers got furloughed, knowing their jobs (and in most cases back pay) would be there when the shutdown ended. Vought’s vision of a fascist dictatorship means he must do as much to destroy the government now while he has the opportunity. He is doing this to the open cheers of his senile mouthpiece president, who has openly cheered “the unprecedented opportunity” to dismantle “democrat agencies.”

Most of those supposedly Democratic functions: education, medical care, legal protections, scientific research, and public protection agencies such as the weather service, OPEC, and FEMA, disproportionately serve the people in Republican areas, where state services are thin or even lacking and the overall economy is either weak or exploited by plutocrats in the name of “supply-side economics.”

But make no mistake—we’ll ALL be hurt if Trump and his handlers pull this off. We’ll begin missing meals or end up in the camps just in time for the entire financial structure to to implode, possibly taking the currency and remaining national wealth with it, leaving America—and Americans—bankrupt and destitute. Then, and only then, will the malefactors in the top 1% realize that we were the tide that raised their yachts.

By then, it will be too late. Unless we move to prevent it now.

 

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The Battle to Keep America — A Portland in the storm

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 6th 2025

Trump is was sending some 300 National Guard from California to Portland, Oregon, a city that Trump describes as “war-ravaged” and Trump’s stooges in the Pentagon are claiming are being sent “to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”

Trump had tried to send Oregon National Guard into the city, but yesterday, a Trump-appointed federal judge, one US district judge Karin Immergut, blocked the deployment, citing “a lack of evidence that the recent protests in Portland justified the move.” Governor Newsom of California has promptly filed a motion to prevent Trump from deploying his guard, citing the same specious reasoning.

[Note: this morning the same federal judge, US District Judge Karin Immergut, who banned deployment of Oregon national guard extended her ruling to include the national guard of all fifty states. It remains to be seen if the lawless Trump obeys this, and hope his vicious supporters don’t bomb her home like what happened in South Carolina yesterday.]

Portland is quiet and calm. There are no riots. There aren’t even any sizable demonstrations, and the demonstrations that have been occurring have been small, and sedate.

But the fascist provocateurs at Fox and Newsmax and similar trashy “news organizations” have been playing video of the disturbances from the George Floyd demonstrations five years ago over and over, apparently leaving a hopelessly addled Donald Trump convinced that Portland is in the throes of huge, violent riots. Obeying their masters at the Heritage Foundation and in Project 2025, they want to spark a casus belli in order to provoke martial law.

It’s the same thing they’ve been trying in Washington DC (where demoralized and idle guardsmen eventually were reduced to picking up trash in the parks because DOGE had laid off the federal workers tasked with that job) and Chicago (which has a lower violent crime rate than most cities run by Republicans) and Broadview, Illinois, where ICE thugs apparently shot someone yesterday. The horrific “Hup! Hup! Hup!” ICE raid which involved dropping masked and armored goons onto an apartment complex resulting in the grotesque arrests of dozens of people guilty of nothing more than sleeping in their beds was yet another provocation by an administration willing to risk civil war rather than have it’s dirty secrets and drive for dictatorship exposed.

Trump is a cornered rat, but the real danger are the vicious, sleek fascists propping him up, hoping he can drive the US into the more repressive dictatorship in modern human history.

To that end, they are employing the same tawdry tactics that every repulsive group of despots have used thousands of times to afflict humanity. Push people until they resist, and the call the resistance a “violent insurrection.” Far too often it works. Nearly all the worst, must murderous regimes in history have been built on the foundations of Horst Wessel murders (think Charlie Kirk) and Reichstag fires (something Trump has tried to provoke in Washington, in Los Angeles, in Chicago and now in Portland.

But there’s a reason it isn’t working as well here. Ordinary citizens have an absolutely unlimited ability to record and disseminate the actions and activities of the Trump regime and its thuggish troops. Trump is using the tactics that Hitler and Putin and every other dictator has used to gain power—neutralize and cow the press, rope in the support of fundamentalists, lie constantly, scapegoat and fear monger and falsely claim to be saving the country from nefarious activities.

But the government can’t control the images people are taking on their phones and uploading to the web. No matter how many time the Nazi provocateurs at Fox News put up five year old images of Portland in flames, there are thousands more images showing a city at peace, and with orderly and lawful gatherings to protest.

If Trump can’t control what people see and hear, he can’t win. For every captive news organization Trump controls, like CBS and ABC, there are thousands of voices, armed with evidence, telling different stories. For every Jesse Watters there are a thousand Thom Hartmanns. For every misleading image on Newsmax, there are a thousand more representative images of the same events on social media.

And this is how we defeat Trump and the fascists. Turn out and demonstrate wherever Trump tries to instigate, pull out your phones, and RECORD EVERYTHING. True, 95% of it will just take up disk space and be discarded later, but the other 5% may be vital evidence that helps forge public awareness and opinion, and defeat the propagandists and liars in their efforts to control and narrative and thus control you.

They want to write the history books. But you are the ones who will make the history.

Bear witness. You will win.

 

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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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Trump’s Terrors — Toujours, mon brèves et mon brefs, toujours!

Trump’s Terrors

Toujours, mon brèves et mon brefs, toujours!

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 22nd, 2025

Fearless Leader has officially executive ordered and deemed AntiFa to be a “Terrorist Organization.” Yes, with the capital letters. Scarier that way, you know.

I’ve never really considered myself a terrorist. My idea of a terrorist campaign would be sharply-worded letters to the editor, or snide memes posted for the edification of the local MAGAts. In moments of extreme rage, I have been known to cancel subscriptions. If I was working for Al-Qaida, I would probably be the bloke who writes the ads for the newsletter.

But I’ve been AntiFa since I was five years old, when I learned what fascists were. They were the nasties who were why some of my classmates had rickets, or were missing older brothers and dads. Prime Minister Churchill hated them, and by gosh, that was good enough for me. Down with fascists! Boo! Hiss!

So if I’m AntiFa (and the past seventy years haven’t offered any reasons to change that stance) does that mean that we now refer to them as just “Fa”? I don’t know. They aren’t very nice people. I don’t really want to be on a first-syllable basis with them.

The thing is, the more I learn about fascism, the less there is to like. I slowly evolved from “Hitler was a mean sort who bombed us and was horrid to his people” to learning about the death camps and death marches to the general horrors of authoritarianism.

Turns out that AntiFa was around back in the 30s. Not surprisingly, Germany, the 1930’s version of America Project 2025, had a communist-aligned group, the Antifaschistische Aktion. This was back when communism was fashionable, and people really believed the Soviet Union would become a Workers’ Paradise.

We learned to admire AntiFa terrorist organizations over the first few decades of my life. Of course, we had different names for them: The Resistance. The Underground. Freedom Fighters. The Irregulars. They blew up bridges and trains and best of all, bridges with trains on them. They were masters of sabotage, both passive and active.

If anyone bothered mentioning that the fascist governments considered them to be Terrorist Organizations, we probably just shrugged it off. They were fascists, after all. Bunch of bloody clots, that lot. Who cared what they thought?

Americans generally shared that view of AntiFa until the race riots and Vietnam protests came along, and the vicarious resistance heroes of World War 2 suddenly found themselves perched on the other side of a very uncomfortable fence. How dare those People demand equal rights, and why are those long-haired hippies be upset about being sent to die in the tens of thousands for no good reason at all? Repress! Repress! Repress!

The fascists, discredited by World War 2, saw an opportunity in America’s somewhat naive authoritarian streak, and began a long, systematic assimilation of the American right, beginning with the McCarthy era and the John Birchers and reaching its apex with the Trump coup. The AntiFa rebels of yesterday were now the settled and jealous establishment. And they prefer law and order to rebellion and idealism.

But there’s this one problem: most Americans, at heart, are still AntiFa. They don’t like authoritarians. They don’t like cowards and bullies and vicious hatemongers. In short, they don’t like fascists. And no number of executive orders is going to change that.

And fascists, no matter how much lipstick they slap on, are still pigs. It’s intrinsic to the philosophy, which is that a select few are superior to the unwashed masses. They are entitled to control, supress, and exploit. It’s the will of God. It’s for the fatherland. Resistance is useless.

This past week’s uproar over the removal of Jimmy Kimmel from his show, and the largely unsuccessful effort to deify the reprehensible Charlie Kirk (more on that in a moment) showed that cracks are starting to appear in the Trump coup as people finally realize exactly what it is they are facing.

Kimmel said this to get banned: “The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” He didn’t attack Kirk, or mock his death, or praise the assassin, no matter what the liars of MAGA say. Just that. That’s all it took to scare the fascists.

The reaction to Kimmel being taken off the air was easily the biggest spontaneous explosion of public rage since the George Floyd demonstrations—and it was both totally non-violent and in a form the right couldn’t infuse with violence. It may have been the biggest single boycott in American history. Millions of people canceled their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu, and millions more sent protests to Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group. Sinclair in particular is a far right concern famed for having its television “journalists” chant fascist talking points word for word. People started compiling lists of companies advertising on the stations of either consortium.

Disney, out 4 billion dollars in stock value and millions of subscriptions, backed down and reinstated Kimmel. It remains to be seen if the authoritarians at Sinclair will broadcast him. It’s too early to declare victory, but the administration and Disney got a taste of what damage a determined underground can do.

Then there was the grotesque Horst Wessel rally masquerading as a memorial service for Charlie Kirk. Curiously, few of the speakers, including Trump, seemed to give a wet shit about old Charlie, but instead put on their best Nuremberg presentations. Of particular note was Steven Miller, who for some reason doesn’t have a large black swastika tattooed on his billboard-sized forehead.

He said, “We will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen. We stand for what is good, virtuous, noble.”

He continued: “To those who are against us? “What do YOU HAVE? You have NOTHING, you are nothing! You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are hatred, YOU ARE NOTHING! You can build nothing, produce nothing, create nothing. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk? You have made him immortal.”

I’m sure it sounded better in the original German. It was, almost word-for-word, a translation of the speech Joseph Goebbels gave in a paean to dead Nazi nobody Horst Wessel.

It is no longer possible to disguise what these people are, and the threat they pose to all of us.

There’s a reason Trump calls AntiFa a “Terrorist Organization.” He fears us. We are AntiFa in our tens of millions, those who understand how important freedom and rights really are.

There are reasons we glorified The Resistance in the fifties and sixties. They were brave and steadfast in the face in ultimate evil.

We need to remember that, because Fascists don’t go away if you ask them nicely. Be prepared to resist. This week we showed that it can be done without violence or even defying the law (Executive Orders are not law). But we have to be firm. We have to be resolute. We have to be brave.

Nous sommes toujours la résistance!

 

 

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Sorry Charlie — But We Have Other Things To Discuss

Sorry Charlie

But We Have Other Things To Discuss

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 14th 2025

Charlie’s a good Nazi. That’s all I have to say about that.

Because our servile corporate media can’t think of anything else to talk about this week, let me fill you in on some of the other, apparently less important stories, going on right now.

NATO has invoked Article 4 in the wake of the Russian drone attack in Poland. The Russians claim the incursion of 19 drones, many of them armed, into Polish air space was “unintentional.” The Poles shot four of them down, and the Russians seemed disinclined to object to that. Article 4 isn’t a declaration of war (that’s Article 5) but it’s the equivalent of when a skunk starts tapping his forepaws and lifts his tail. It means “Back off. Now.” Putin clearly thinks that America is too cowardly and weak to call his bluff because he knows the American president is too cowardly and weak. But even without America, the EU has an economy 40 times the size of Russia’s and a military that, while not as huge, uses well maintained equipment and ordinance from the 21st century. Also, if Putin is hoping Trump will support him when the chips are down, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.

Some idiot MAGA wannabe named Tori Branum put in a SWAT call to ICE to raid a Hyundai plant and the Icicles promptly rounded up some 475 people, 300 of which were actual Korean nationals there on Visas to train American workers. Only one didn’t have his papers in order, and there’s no evidence he did so intentionally. South Korea is furious. They got their workers back, but none of them want to return to the plant in what many of them doubtlessly now think of “that shithole country.” It may cost the US a half trillion dollars in planned investments, and Japan and Vietnam are both openly rethinking making manufacturing plants in the US. That idiot congressional wannabee and the cowboys at ICE just negated the whole rationale behind the tariffs.

A district court just ruled that Trump doesn’t have the Constitutional power to levy tariffs unilaterally. That was clear to anyone who knew anything at all about the law and separation of powers, but it came as a huge surprise to the Pedodent, who is screaming that it will cost the US (imaginary) trillions in revenue. Now, the Supine Court may make one of its secret rulings that Trump can continue the tariffs for a few decades while they pretend to think it over (now their favorite ploy for supporting the Unitary Executive, or what historians refer to as “the dictator”).

In a bit over two weeks, funding for the government runs out. This is a crisis we’ve seen far too often, dating back to Newt Gingrich and his scheme to blackmail America, but the difference this time is that because of Trump’s gratuitous and illegal use of Rescission (reallocating or just flat-out stealing budgeted funding) there’s no point in passing a budget and so the Democrats can’t be arsed unless and until someone puts a choke collar on the Trumpster.

In Brazil, where corporate interests haven’t totally neutered the government, the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was found guilty of plotting a military coup. Four out of the five Supreme Court justices tasked with judging the former leader found him guilty. He got over 27 years in prison. Hey, remember when we had a real supreme court that didn’t have six fascist clowns in black dresses? If the Suck-ass Six had been trying Bolsonaro, they would have put him back in office while they spent twenty years claiming to decide if he should have been voted out.

Netanyahu may have finally overstepped with the fascist right that support him, bombing Qatar. Supposedly they were bombing Hamas terrorists with those magic bombs that never hurt innocent people. The Qataris were not amused, and for a wonder, neither was the United States, usually head supplicant to Benji.

California, which still maintains American values, made it illegal for peace officers to wear masks or conceal their identities. In pre-Trump America that may have seemed a no-brainer, but now that Trump has his own secret police made up of January 6 rioters, mercenaries and other bottom-feeder thugs in masks, it’s become necessary. Steven Miller, poster boy for Gay Nazis Who Pretend to Like Jews, is planning to double down on ICE raids in Los Angeles. If they show up with masks, I hope the LAPD arrest them. Not holding my breath, but Californians are going to be asking them hard questions if they don’t.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing the word “Stagflation” more and more. Those of us alive in the 1970s remember it well: 15% annual inflation combined with 8% unemployment, the result mostly of the “oil shock” when OPEC doubled oil barrel prices. Ah, good times. The Republicans (!!!) tried the experiment of government control of wage/price freezes (Whip Inflation Now) which compounded the disaster. Republicans are weird. They hate all the good things about socialism (universal healthcare, schooling, child care,etc.) but when the heat is on, they embrace all the worst elements of communism (wage and price freezes, hiding unfavorable statistics, and economic coercion of corporations). Oddly, they insist socialism and communism are the same thing.

Meanwhile, farm workers, documented or not, are avoiding the fields because of ICE raids, and tariffs are driving the costs of all imported foods up. In July, the wholesale price of produce jumped 38%. Yes, in just one month. And we’re just now coming up on the main harvest time, and tariffs are just starting to bite. Job growth was already starting to slow when Trump took office as the Biden boom ran its course.

So there’s all that to consider while nervous talking heads on TV try to suck up to the MAGAt extremists. Just so you know, there’s more to talk about other than some asshole whose only redeeming feature is that he got shot, or as I like to call him, “2025 School Shooting #46.”

Oh, yes. Release the Epstein files!

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Adolf Jesus Trump — Honks from heaven above

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 8th 2025

I could write a hundred essays about the incompetence, cruelty, corruption and sheer stupidity of Trump and his fascist minions, and the main reason I haven’t is simply because thousands of other people are all writing about it, and a lot of them are doing a better job of it than I could. I’m not going to make a difference of any sort if my content boils down to “What Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Lev Parnas all said.” It’s all I can do to avoid writing in the same cadence with which Rachel Maddow speaks!

It doesn’t mean I’ve nothing to say; I just don’t want to be a “me too” voice in the crowd.

So I watch for something that may not get a lot of attention normally, but which I think is important and could really matter.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) gave me that opportunity yesterday when I found he responded to Christian Nationalist footpad Marco Rubio’s honks about how “’our rights come from our creator…” Kaine, who actually went to school and studied history, called Little Marco’s remarks “extremely troubling.”

If it had ended there, it would have been dismissed as a sincere but utterly ineffectual complaint from a member of a Congress completely neutered by Republican corruption and cowardice.

But then Dim Donald, that exemplar of Christian Nationalism, the figure who Adolf Jesus looks up to from his swastika-shaped cross, decided to jump in with both swollen feet.

He wrote. “Under the Trump administration, we’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God, we are one nation under God and we always will be. The need for this commission has never been more clear than it was last week when the ineffectual senator from Virginia, a man named Tim Kaine, stated that the notion ‘our rights come from our creator’ is ‘extremely troubling’ to him. Isn’t that terrible, how he would say something like that? The senator from Virginia should be ashamed of himself, for many things! For many things, for things even beyond that, but in its own way, nothing is more important than those words, they were terrible words. We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”

Donald has captured perfectly the essence of the philosophy of Christian Nationalism: the arrogance, the intellectual and moral dishonesty, and the towering hypocrisy. He IS the face of Christian Nationalism, right down to the child raping and wanton murder for political convenience.

For any Christians reading this, I’m not talking about your religion. I know a lot of Christians who are good, kind people who respect themselves and respect others. I’m talking about Christianity’s dark cousin, the vicious mean-spirited fundamentalists who in this incarnation call themselves Christian Nationalists. Christian Nationalism bears the same relationship to Christianity that National Socialism does to Democratic Socialism: that is to say, it’s nearly the exact opposite.

They love to claim a God that is responsible for the very rights they are trying to destroy: the right to chose representation; the right to freedom from religion; the right to personal bodily autonomy; the right to fair and equal justice. The “god-given rights” was a rhetorical flourish added to the Declaration of Independence over Thomas Jefferson’s strident objection, Ever since, they’ve done what religion always does and stolen credit for the good & ethical things humanity has come up with.

Want proof? Take a look at the list of rights Jefferson had in mind, and find anywhere in the bible where such rights are mentioned, let alone supported. You can find long lists of offenses for which people should be executed, such as eating shellfish or getting tattoos, and cheerful advice on how a woman should be forced to get an abortion if her husband claims she has been unfaithful, or advice on tearing children apart for making fun of a prophet, but not much about secret voting or freedom of speech. About the only ‘god-given’ right the Constitution had was the right to own slaves, and the Constitution got over that.

I’ve often stated that theocracy is the worst form of government humanity has ever invented. It demands obedience and blind belief to begin with, but unlike regular tyrannies, there is no Leader who must eventually take responsibility for his autocratic cruelty, but instead tyrants dressed as supplicants who can foist any accountability off on an invisible and silent god (and all gods are silent and invisible for the same reason unicorns are), making them much less accountable.

And since most holy texts are utterly horrifying, it’s assumed that any nearby deity will rubber stamp various and assorted atrocities.

Most fundamentalist leaders are utter phonies, and nobody with an inkling of history should be surprised that Donald Trump would be quick to seize the opportunities of being a Christian Nationalist leader. No belief required. Or ethics. Or honesty. Or even humanity. If he does it in the name of God, he can get away with anything.

The only thing more dangerous than a sociopath as a religious leader is a sincere sociopath as a religious leader. The nut who wants to carry out his notion of the will of God is pure schizophrenia legitimized by religious fervor. Fortunately, Trump is just your garden-variety thuggish con artist. That makes it easier to limit the damage he’s doing.

Christians are going to have to stand up to Trump’s ecumenical bullying and take their religion back. They have to join everyone and rise up to bring Trump and his toxic crowd down.

 

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Gavin the Grinner — He who smirks lurks, a danger to the sanctimonious

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 23rd, 2025

“I have trouble buying the argument that Americans have lost their moral perspective. Let’s be honest—who’s being accused here? Isn’t it true that older Americans are the backbone of Trump’s support? And aren’t older people the least likely to suddenly shift their values? If that’s the case, then who exactly is it that supposedly “changed”? Did we suddenly forget God? Start stealing from our neighbors? Did we run to the riots and loot the stores? No—we didn’t. Something else is going on.”

A right winger who normally isn’t very rational wrote that. He’s one of those sorts who thinks anyone who doesn’t support Trump is living in a “moral cesspool.” Not that he would ever generalize, right? But he raises a good point here, I think, one that we should stop and think about.

A lot of people, myself included, say things like “America lost its collective mind” or “The US abandoned morals” in electing Trump, and then electing him again. There is a built-in unfairness to that characterization, of course. Sixty-five percent of American adults did not vote for Trump in either election, and current polls show 62% of respondents think he’s doing a lousy and even criminal job.

And while I might seriously question the values and ethics of anyone who supports Trump, even there would be a few caveats. While a number of Trump supporters are aware of at least some of the myriad failings and nihilism of Trump, many simply disbelieve the reports, or are so low-information they have simply never heard about them.

To pick a seemingly minor example: the number of people sputtering with rage and disgust at California Governor Gavin Newsom’s brilliant take-down of Trump’s ‘style’–the erratic, over-the-top and often nonsensical posts, and the vast library of tractor art showing a buff, tall, noble Donald Trump in a variety of heroic poses doing manly things. They honestly seem to have no idea that Trump himself had been doing exactly that for ten years now, and Newsom was parodying (and mocking) him. Given that this silliness is the beating heart of Trump’s voter outreach, it seems preposterous that so many of his followers knew nothing of it, but here we are.

The cognitive dissonance is encouraged by the paid liars at Faux News and Newsmacks, who feign shock and outrage that an important personage like the Governor of (shithole, failing!) California would stoop to such immature, goofy, even insane antics. After a few dozen such repetitions, their viewers manage to forget all those posts on Truth Social and the often Groucho Marxist executive orders. Trump is noble, mature, reasonable, and measured. It’s that silly little Newsom who created this horrible style!

The dissonance goes well beyond that. Every day, I get mail from people who declaim that California is a horrible place, overrun with drugs, homeless, gangs and “illegals,” and these are people who happily live in California. I always ask them why, if it’s such a shithole, why they just don’t move to a prosperous, well-run state such as Mississippi or Oklahoma, and they inexplicably erupt in rage. At least, the few who even try to answer that one. You should see their faces when I point out the rural California county I live in actually has a higher over-all crime rate than does Washington DC.

People who cheer the locking up and/or deportation of “illegals” always hate when I tell them that using that term to describe groups of humans makes them sound like goddamned Nazis. What a dehumanizing thing for me to say! Unlike Nazis, all we want to do is defend our noble fatherland against vermin poisoning the blood of loyal patriots! They steal, they cheat, they’re like rats! They dwell in their ghettos and conspire to world domination. We’re nothing like the Nazis, who targeted weak groups of people to hide their corrupt Nazi deficiencies!

Voltaire supposedly uttered the phrase, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” The far right have spent billions of dollars flooding the American consciousness with absurdities and flat out lies, repeated endlessly, for years.

The result is that many people who see themselves as sane and decent, and who, without the endless Nazi propaganda, would probably be sane and decent. But they have been persuaded to commit atrocities in the name of sanity and decency. People who revere their right to appear in court to contest a speeding ticket have no problem with forcibly deporting people—some of whom didn’t even have their papers in order—to a horrific skein of concentration and death camps in places like El Salvador and Uganda. The same people appalled by a brief encounter in public between an Attorney General and a President under investigation on an airport tarmac see no problem with a criminal president and his vicious stooge of an Attorney General saying proudly that “We are liberating American cities to crack down on crime, especially by those filthy ‘illegals’.”

They also believe in Trump and his propaganda machine, who work endlessly to convince them to excuse even the most vicious and heinous actions against their scapegoats, against their country, and even against themselves because they, and not the alien and subhuman rabble, stand for all those things.

And now, the notion, rapidly growing, that the child rape allegations are made, not by over two hundred victims and rafts of evidence, but by anti-Americans, probably Newsom and illegals, to defame a noble, proud man. Why, I bet they’re the real child rapists, so there!

As long as Trump and his billionaire backers can continue to mind-fuck the 30% or so of Americans who have fallen into this moral and mental abyss, that 30% will remain convinced that they are resolute and just, and those who oppose them are the ones in a moral cesspool. They don’t rob, they don’t steal, they believe in God, they believe in country.

It’s a solid wall of smug, self-satisfied sanctimony, but it has a key vulnerability.

When does the charm finally break? Credible reports of child rape haven’t done it. History shows that it sometimes requires the deaths of millions and the destruction of entire nations to manage that.

But not always. Mark Twain once said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Another quote comes to mind: “The tyrant fears laughter more than the assassin’s bullet.”

People like Gavin Newsom, Steven Colbert, South Park and many others have found that vulnerability in the humorless wall of right wing hate and lies. And it may be what saves America from itself.

 

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Hiding Bad News — But the hand basket is still going to hell

Hiding Bad News

But the hand basket is still going to hell

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 14th, 2025

Karoline Leavitt, the stooge tasked with saying things that even El Presidente would be embarrassed to utter, said the other day that monthly job reports may be suspended “until they get the data and methodology in order.”

It’s a bit like suspending climatology reports from NOAA while they investigate to find out if thermometers can really measure temperature. It comes just a couple of weeks after the Trump clown show fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for issuing a weak jobs report. They want to replace him with a libertarian hack from the Heritage Foundation willing to praise the Glorious Capitalistic Five Year Plan of Noble Leader. Sure. Minus ten percent unemployment! Take that, Obama!

The administration may not notice this little economic tidbit that came out yesterday because it isn’t as easy to understand as the unemployment rate or the inflation index: sales of cardboard shipping boxes dropped last quarter to the lowest level seen since 2001. That, in turn, is a strong indicator of anticipated shipping activity, which in turn is a central indicator of overall economic activity. A drop that big suggests people in charge of shipping are anticipating a sharp downturn.

I suspect that this administration is going to be shutting down every economic metric they can lay their hands on in order to tell reassuring lies about the state of the economy. I expect us to be in a recession by the end of the year (actually sooner, but you need three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth before you are officially in a recession) and quite possibly in a depression by mid 2026.

Trump and his stooges honestly believe that people who go grocery shopping every week won’t notice inflation, or that more of their friends and neighbors might be out of work. Even sillier is the belief that businesses and factories will play along with fake “sunshine and roses” economic reports even though it’s costing them billions.

In addition to the utterly foolhardy tariffs regime, the Trump administration is working to remove all the economic governors put in place during and after the FDR “New Deal” to stop the economic boom-and-bust cycle. At a time when a move is under way to completely revamp what is taught in America as ‘history,’ the country’s real economic history, already downplayed massively, will probably vanish altogether.

A lot of people these days think of the Great Depression as something of an outlier, something huge and horrible that has been solved by enlightened business practices.

In the days before economic reform produced “the mixed economy” (nowadays called “Democratic Socialism”) depressions occurred every 10-15 years. Each one threw thousands of banks and other businesses out of existence, impoverishing and ruining the lives of millions. While we don’t have the numbers, it’s safe to assume that in any given depression, unemployment reached anywhere from 10 to 25% of the work force. Thousands of mortgages were foreclosed, many farms and small businesses failed. Inflation wasn’t a factor then because the value of the dollar was tied to gold, but it meant recovery was much more gradual and painful. The static value of the dollar CAUSED some depressions!

The New Deal reforms worked. The US went into the era of greatest economic growth in its history between 1934 and 1980, and by the 60s economists were beginning to hope the boom-and-bust cycle, already far milder than it ever had been, might be gone forever. (The math behind that cycle is strikingly similar to the math that explains the caterpillar-like motion of traffic jams.)

Unfortunately, the wealthy became convinced of their own wisdom and infallibility because, after all, they’re rich, aren’t they? In their eyes, it stood to reason that if they got richer, that would prove the system worked, and so let’s lift all those boats, baby! The economic poison of “supply-side economics” (aka “trickle down”) was born. It indisputably lifted the yachts.

The economy still grew, but most of that growth went to the top 1%. This created an imbalance of wealth and power, similar to such imbalances in 1780s France or 1910s Russia.

Such times are referred to as “end-stage capitalism.” The ceaseless concentration of wealth eventually leads to massive melt-downs, economic, social, and political. Most involve government collapse and/or violent revolution.

Trump’s policies are greatly accelerating that process, and like many other vain and foolish plutocrats before him, he hopes he can make the warning signs of the looming catastrophes go away simply by removing the tools used to measure the economy.

It’s a bit like solving climate change by banning the use of thermometers. And Trump is the guy who wanted to ease the COVID crisis by stopping testing.

It won’t work. Government metrics didn’t exist in all the other times of major economic upheaval, but then, people didn’t need them to know food was expensive, jobs were scarce, and everything was going to hell in a hand basket.

Economic convulsions are coming. All Trump is managing is to avoid letting people get any warning when they do come. But he thinks that they won’t notice when it happens because he didn’t tell them.

That will be the death of his movement.

Unfortunately, it could also be the death of many of the rest of us.

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Jerk Release Program — Child rapist 20 year sentence reduced

Jerk Release Program

Child rapist 20 year sentence reduced

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 12th, 2025

Just days after Trump’s corrupt lawyer/slash DoJ assistant attorney general met privately with convicted child sex felon Ghislaine Maxwell, then serving twenty years for child rape and child sex trafficking, she got moved to Club Fed, a luxurious minimum security prison reserved only for the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful criminals.

Now Maxwell’s on a work release program. The sort of thing someone gets if they get a speeding ticket and can’t pay the fine.

Frankly, I don’t expect her to live long, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Someone’s going to kill her—one of her nearly a thousand victims, perhaps, or relatives of same. Or one of millions of Americans who feel death is about the correct penalty for child rapists.

Or, of course, at the orders of Donald Trump. There’s a saying, attributed to Arabia, that goes, “It is unwise to know the secrets of a king.” And Maxwell has known Trump extremely well for many decades; there cannot be any possible doubt in her mind as to what a loathsome and vicious creature Trump is, and she also no doubt suspects he had something to do with the death of her partner, Jeffrey Epstein. I’m sure Trump would love to order her murdered.

I have absolutely no doubt that she has tons of evidence of her exploits, and Trump’s role in them, stashed away somewhere very safe and secure, held in abeyance by a “dead man’s switch.” She probably told Todd Blanche, Trump’s fixer, that someone, somewhere, had the files and other evidence, and they would remain hidden only for as long as she stayed alive.

It wouldn’t have worked with the Biden administration because there wouldn’t have been any evidence to incriminate them. While there were doubtless some Democratic politicians who availed themselves of her young charges, none had the power to entrap the US government into such a sleazy and sordid deal as the one Maxwell was able to wrangle with the once-proud Department of Justice. Yes, Clinton is on a lot of people’s lists of perpetrators involved with all this, but he’s been out of office for twenty-five years. There’s very few Democrats who won’t agree that if he was involved, then they should throw his ass in jail, too.

I suspect Trump effectively put the National Capitol under martial law because he knew this work-release was coming, and he wanted to try to distract the public. I think he has very badly miscalculated, based just on the initial responses I’ve seen on line.

Trump’s relations with his cult following were already badly strained before this. Most were betrayed by his flip-flop on the Epstein files, and this is going to blow that deep unease sky-high. It comes at a time when the general public is deeply fed up and disgusted with his incompetence, his cruelty, and his obvious lack of interest in anything other than scamming more money.

The military are deeply unhappy with him. Many suspect—correctly—that he doesn’t have the national interest in mind, and regard this week’s meeting with Putin with serious apprehension. His stunt of imposing federal troops on Washington DC on the transparently false excuse of a crime wave is going to result in American soldiers being taunted and booed by their fellow Americans. Further threats to deploy troops in New York and Chicago, following the fiasco in Los Angeles, have further angered military leadership.

And with the on-again off-again tariffs finally in place, and the farm labor force effectively scared out of the fields, the economy is going to take a huge hit and prices are going to explode. People who were whining about 12% inflation in 2016 better brace for 20% inflation starting now.

The possibility that Trump may be brought down by a coup is increasing to levels not seen in America since the crisis of 1933. That was a time when the economy was in utter collapse, and nearly a third of states were using scrip and barter, because they didn’t expect the dollar to be around for much longer.

People were pissed at the incompetence and lack of willingness by the Hoover administration to fix the economy back then, and it was several years, and one half-assed coup attempt, and a strong economic recovery on the strength of the New Deal, before the government was out of the woods.

Now, we face similar factors, combined with a deep and rapidly growing moral disgust with the government. Trump is every bit as incompetent and ineffectual as the hapless Hoover was, but at least people respected Hoover as a human being. Trump is moral filth, and his followers are now realizing it, and they, and an appalled military, realize that Congress and the Court are too compromised by the moral rot and cowardice to solve the matter.

Trump must go, or America dies. There’s no middle road any more.

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