The modern Republican Party defends no virtue, performs no service to others, provides no leadership to our nation in any way.
In every respect, the Republican Party is still dead as a functioning political force. It is now an occupying army, treating other Americans - other humans - as targets for their greed, fear, and hate. Anyone in that party that can claim any rational capability cannot be turned around as a force for good: They have had a DECADE of trumpism to walk away, deny any support of such criminality... and they refused. They are too beholden to "owning the libs" that they cannot break from a corrupt, destructive faction.
This is why I've been screaming to the nation FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. There is nothing there to vote for, only against(against Blacks, against women, against Latinos, against gays/lesbians/trans, against fiscal sanity, against vaccines, against foreign allies, against holding any person of power/wealth accountable for their crimes).
I'm not taking crazy pills. The Republican downward spiral has been going on for decades now, and it's dragging the United States - and the world - down with it.
Just stop pandering to any Right-leaning faction you think you can appeal to. The Republicans killed the better angels of their nature ages ago. They'll just waste your time (and take your money). Just stop that. There's millions of Democratic and Independent voters to reach for to get them motivated to vote. There's millions more who aren't even registered to vote - and who can - that the Dems and other center-Left forces need to reach to get them in enough numbers to drive the corrupt GOP out of power at the state and federal levels.
Those are the Americans we need to stand up for the nation. Go talk to them, get them on board. Save the true Republic, Dems.
Times have changed. Whereas TNR’s Matt Ford once famously compared Trump’s first term to the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes, its second iteration has become a dull monotony. Just about everything this White House does is rooted in the president’s desire to get revenge on his perceived enemies, his quest for self-aggrandizement, and the extreme limitations that arise when your best days—from a pure cognition standpoint—are well behind you. Nowadays, there are only really seven types of Trump story, and they’re all bad.
Linkins notes each of trump's calamities, starting with tariffs:
Of all the kindnesses that the Supreme Court has bestowed on Trump, its February decision to strike down the president’s retaliatory tariffs stands out as advice that should have been heeded: “Hey, don’t do this, you are screwing up the economy.” Trump forsook this wise counsel and continues to wake up on random mornings with the yen for imposing tariffs willy-nilly. This week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods because our neighbors to the north had the temerity to fight back in the trade war Trump started. He followed that up with an announcement that he was going to put a ten percent tariff on 80 other nations. It’s always impossible to gauge whether Trump intends to stick with a tariff fight. After all, it’s in this arena that “Trump Always Chickens Out” was born...
trump would back down from some of the tariff plans he intended to unleash since April 2025 from time to time, but he keeps going back to imposing tariffs because he genuinely believes tariffs work for him. trump revels in the idea of trade wars because he thinks they're "easy to win". And it fits so well into his mob-boss world-view of extorting everybody else to pay up.
...Trump’s decision to wade into an unwinnable foreign war after limply cosplaying as The One Guy Smart Enough to Do That was born from the fact that he’s a dumb asshole who needed a distraction from a cratering economy and the daily effluvia of the Epstein news cycle. But even I thought that the backslappery that arose from the Memorandum Of Understanding that briefly put an end to hostilities might be a sign that the administration understood it had a much-needed off-ramp. Color me naïve: We’re now back in the big muddy, talking about war crimes and taking over Kharg Island, as the president recoils from public inquiry and his congressional allies fret about their political futures. The only question left is the one asked by TNR contributor Joe Cirincione: Can Trump lose the same war twice?
trump of course will never admit he's losing. trump will - unfortunately - keep repeating the same mistakes, because he's convinced only the suckers among the armed forces will pay the price for him.
The other major trauma point for Americans has been trump's - and the Far Right's - war on immigrants, with reemerging signs of ICE violence across more of our communities:
Too many members of the media treated the exile of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem as a credible sign that the administration had overreached in its violent assault on American cities. But the White House’s bloodthirsty deportation machine suffered little if any lull, and ICE is back to its wanton ways, with new high-profile killings at the hand of Trump’s goons in Texas, Florida, and Maine—the latter of which may prove to regalvanize support for Senator Susan Collins’s future Democratic opponent. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant reminds us, the violence is a feature, not a bug. And now, Trump’s FBI has decided to turn a blind eye to investigating those responsible. Far from a drawdown, this looks like the administration is giving carte blanche to the agency to kill at will.
Another growing trumpian scandal is the most obvious and yet the one nobody is in any current position to do anything about it: trump's open graft and money-grabbing in clear violation of the Emoluments Clause and a hundred other laws against insider trading, fraud, and foreign influence:
Trump spent last year becoming a world-class kleptocrat, on the back of self-dealing exploits too numerous to recount (though I did offer readers what I thought were the worst of the bunch). Estimates as to how much his bread got buttered by all the grift and graft are nearly as varied. The New York Times totaled up about $1.4 billion in takings, but this is the low end—financial disclosures released at the end of June put the total at $2.2 billion, while Democratic researchers on the House Oversight Committee estimate that this figure rises to “$9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in” to the equation. Regardless, Trump is still lining his pockets, with new schemes including Kazakh tungsten, Pentagon baksheesh, and what appears to be a pay-to-pardon scheme.
Leading into Linkins' next trauma of note: trump's threats to derail democracy altogether this midterms.
When Trump isn’t trying to steal your money, he’s well-nigh obsessed with stealing your vote, a subject that was supposed to serve as the (very) loose framework for his recent prime-time ramble. The president’s monomaniacal desire to see the SAVE Act—his signature voter suppression bill—pass muster has peppered the headlines with updates on the latest weird scheme to somehow enact it over the objections of all the Democratic lawmakers and not a few of their GOP colleagues. Not long ago, Trump was trying to sneak it through the reconciliation process; now Republicans have backdoored voter ID restrictions into a congressional stock-trading-ban bill. It’s clear that Trump would love to rig the upcoming midterms, though it’s not clear how he will accomplish this...
With all of those ongoing acts of criminality and madness, the next one Linkins mentions seems the most frivolous but is in fact one of the more serious and soul-breaking things trump is doing to our nation: Fucking with our monuments and national landmarks.
Millions now living may not recall that it was once possible to go several years without thinking about the Reflecting Pool. Thanks to Trump, we’re now getting daily updates about algal blooms, phantasmal vandalism, and dubious criminal cases that only show how the administration’s Stasi-like authoritarianism can be extended almost everywhere. The real vandal, as TNR’s Michael Tomasky wrote, is Trump, whose desperate efforts to leave a mark in D.C. have led to a demolished East Wing, a hollowed-out Kennedy Center, and an Oval Office decorated with Temu (note: the KMart to Amazon's Target, if you understand the reference) gold wall appliqués...
That's not even going into the unwanted triumphal arch trump wants erected - not for any given war or national accomplishment, but for trump's twisted ego - and the horrors trump wants to inflict on our museums like the Smithsonian. This is stuff that affects the mental psyche / awareness of many Americans, and trump's playing with all that to mess with our heads (and he knows it, he revels in that kind of sadism).
All leading up to the seventh trauma trump's administration is inflicting upon the American people: literal sickness.
Trump’s second term isn’t without its success stories—if you are the measles virus, anyway. As Axios reported this week, the “U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295—a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker that compiles state and local health data.” This news comes hard on the heels of another public health crisis that also serves as a metaphor for the Trump presidency: the record number of cyclospora infection cases that have turned this into Explosive Diarrhea Summer. This is part and parcel of the long tail of DOGE’s effort to denude the government of its public health capabilities; we see this manifesting in our struggle to contain New World screwworm at home and Ebola abroad. And let’s remember: In the event of a Covid-style pandemic, the adults who were in the room during Trump’s first term have been replaced by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who make the titular character from “Storm”—Tim Minchin’s seminal song about pseudoscience—look like C. Everett Koop.
When the 2024 election turned for trump, a lot of observers knew he was going to bring in the worst of the worst to demolish federal agencies from within, and his hiring of known anti-vaccinations kook RFK Junior was seen as a prelude to this current wave of viral and parasitic infections decimating America. Well, look upon Kennedy's works, America: Along with measles - which is a serious childhood calamity causing deaths and long-term health woes - we're coping with EXPLOSIVE diarrhea (lemme share the Josh Johnson standup routine to give you an idea how to say "EXPLOSIVE" properly).
Everything Linkins mentions, it's literally the crap a lot of us have had to deal with since 2024 2016: the absolute utter nightmare of an idiotic bully ruining our world on his whims on a daily basis. This is why I complain about being unable to blog every day: Sometimes, there's too much of this shit to cope.
If there's any good news, there is a simple solution to all of this: This is a midterms year, and in spite of trump's (and Republicans') efforts to suppress the vote or skew the results there are good odds that a large voter turnout for Democrats - a Blue Wave larger than the one we saw in 2018 - will flip the US House control away from a Republican Party unwilling to enforce the checks and balances of the Legislative branch. The Senate is iffy at this moment, but if the polling gets worse for Republicans the seats for Ohio, Iowa, Maine - even Texas, Alabama, and Florida - could be in play.
This all depends on voter turnout: Every registered Democrat showing up at the polls this November, casting votes in anger against the daily nightmares our nation's been enduring; Every registered Independent showing and refusing to give Republicans any relief; and Enough registered Republicans deciding to either not show up, or flipping their votes to favor Dems out of frustration of all the damage their own party has inflicted on them.
There is hope. We as a nation must act to protect and promote that hope.
Voters, for the LOVE OF GOD, OUR FAMILIES, AND AMERICA: Throw the Republican bums out. It is THE ONLY WAY TO HOLD trump ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE DAMAGE DONE.
The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.
A review of the current list on the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website shows that, despite having been last updated on Wednesday, the number of US military personnel killed during Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the US-Israeli war on Iran that Donald Trump launched on 28 February, remains at 14...
According to a New York Times report, the Pentagon website listed 18 American service members as having been killed during the war on Iran on Wednesday, but was changed on Thursday to exclude three service members killed last Friday, Saturday and Sunday as Iran retaliated for new US strikes with an attack on a base used by US forces in Jordan. The list also excluded a fourth soldier who was killed during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone at Erbil airbase in Iraq...
Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list … because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April”.
A Pentagon spokesperson disputed that contention, telling the Times that the decreased total of service members killed was due to “temporary data disruptions” that would be quickly fixed.
The Pentagon did not immediately return the Guardian’s request for comment.
This is insane. The entire goddamn planet knows this is all one big war instigated by trump's ego and fueled by Netanyahu's ambitions. trump is dodging any accountability - anything that should reign in an illegal presidency - and daring the Republicans in Congress to do something to stop him (they won't).
This is why every voter needs to get out the vote this midterms and kick every Republican congresscritter from the House and Senate from office. Elect a Democratic supermajority as best as possible in Congress to bring goddamn trump to heel.
Before he sends more of our troops into harm's way and ignore their deaths like he's doing now.
The U.S. military has confirmed that three service members have been killed since Friday, following the escalation between the U.S. and Iran.
Two were killed in action when Iran launched missile and drone attacks in Jordan, according to U.S Central Command.
On Sunday, U.S. Central Command said the remains of an unidentified person had been found at the site of an attack in Jordan...
The U.S. military said it had launched new airstrikes against Iran on Saturday evening, at the direction of President Trump, in retaliation for Friday's attack.
"The strikes are designed to further degrade Iran's ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and swiftly punish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces who launched attacks against American service members in Jordan last night," the U.S. Central Command said in a statement posted on social media...
The U.S. and Iran have widened the scope of targets in the latest strikes and the escalation has led to broader concerns that there could be an all-out war amid the fighting for control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has closed the strait and the U.S. military said it has reinstated a naval blockade of Iran.
This isn't going to be the end of it. trump wants total subjugation over Iran and control of the Strait, and those are things Iran's hardline leadership will never gift him.
President Trump threatened on Friday to impose additional tariffs on Canada, accusing the country’s government of “willful negligence” in its handling of massive wildfires that have wafted heavy smoke and worsened air quality in parts of the Midwest and East Coast.
“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post...
(Prime Minister) Carney brushed off the criticism during a news conference in London, Ont. on Thursday, while also taking a subtle jab at the Trump administration’s environmental and energy policies.
“Fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States,” Carney told reporters in French, according to The Canadian Press.
The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, also showed frustration with U.S. politicians’ comments in a press conference on Friday afternoon, stating that Canadian rescue teams helped fight wildfires in California last year, but have not received any help from the U.S.
“I truly believe the Americans are good neighbors,” Ford said. “If there are some politicians out there chirping away, well maybe what you should do other than complain is send support, send help.”
trump is not interested in fighting fires. trump is more interested in starting fires; in bullying nations with tariffs until they give him what he wants (more money and more control).
This is all you need to know: ICE thugs have gone back to killing people in the streets.
This happened in Houston last week (via Lekan Oyekanmi, Jack Brook, and Jeffrey Collins with AP News shared through PBS Newshour):
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for decades, as the homebuilder drove his construction crew to a Houston job site.
His death set off protests in Texas' largest city and calls from Democrats and Salgado Araujo 's family for an independent investigation. The shooting on Tuesday in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood is at least the eighth death during the Trump administration's immigration enforcement campaign.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said federal officers were looking for someone else when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo's vehicle. DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and that an officer opened fire in self-defense.
This is who they killed: an innocent man going to work to feed his family.
Just a reminder: ICE and DHS under trump and Stephen Miller and every other racist MOFO in their administration are NOT going after "the worst of the worst," they're going after workers, families, innocent people many of whom are going through the legal process of immigrating to the U.S.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, the second time in a week that ICE has used deadly force and at least the ninth death since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown.
Immigrant rights groups identified the man who was killed in Biddeford as a 26-year-old native of Colombia. The Colombian Embassy said it was in contact with U.S. authorities about the Colombian national’s death and “is providing the necessary consular assistance to his family.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, said in a post on X that agents were surveilling an address for a person with a final order of removal from the country. When ICE tried to stop a vehicle driven by someone coming from that address, the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the department said.
Prior to the brief ICE statement on the incident, Maine U.S. Sen. Angus King said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against ICE agents in Biddeford, a coastal city roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Portland. The agents involved didn’t have body cameras, he said...
Subsequent video releases of neighborhood witnesses established that ICE and DHS agents are lying about the "self defense" part: There is no evidence the driver was trying to ram anybody, and the ICE thugs kept shooting after the car stopped. It doesn't help that the victim's three year old daughter was in the car, caught in the crossfire and witnessing something no child should ever see.
You should also notice how these federal officers did not wear the mandated body cameras in both situations. All that money in their budgets, all these months of operations, and they're STILL claiming they can't afford them or buy any yet? Christ, you can buy them off Amazon and get them shipped to you two days minimum, shipped in a day if you pay extra for Prime service. They don't want to record the real damage they're inflicting on innocent lives, they don't want anything to contradict their hideous Narrative justifying their violence.
JFC, Homeland Security is lying out of their collective ass here.
NONE OF THIS IS ABOUT PUBLIC SAFETY. None of this is about going after the "worst of the worst." These racist fucksticks are going after workers, families, innocent people many of whom are going through the legal process of immigrating to the U.S.
GODDAMN trump's THUGS.
Abolish ICE. Murder, torture, and criminal conspiracy charges for the whole lot of them. Send them to the deep pit of Hell where the REAL Worst of the Worst deserve to go.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One.
What could be more fitting, then, for Graham—unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning—to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived...
It is perfectly on the nose that Graham’s departure would occur just a few hours before he was supposed to appear on Meet the Press. It would have been his 64th appearance on America’s longest-running public-affairs program. In the Meet the Press greenroom there used to be a prominent photo of Graham yapping away alongside his Senate sidekick, John McCain. McCain, for his part, appeared 73 times on Meet the Press, more than any other guest in history—something McCain was especially proud of.
In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God’s green Earth (or God’s greenroom) was to beat McCain’s record. He never will...
“Try to be relevant,” Graham told me in that same 2019 conversation when I asked how he became such a relentless and essential lapdog to Trump (okay, I didn’t use quite those words). This was an ongoing mystery around Washington, especially given how critical of Trump Graham had been when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016...
Graham was always a first-class political shape-shifter, easily darting between the smarty-pants of Official Washington and the bare-knuckled MAGA Populists of South Carolina. This dynamic extended to the on- and off-camera Lindseys: One minute, he would be chumming it up with a Democratic colleague before their “hit,” and then, when the lights came on, he would be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump’s supporters back home...
It is a pity - in some way - that all of that glad-handing and back-patting - and ass-kissing - never really translated into anything substantive, especially considering how trump as president undid every foreign policy objective or ignored every policy suggestion that Graham tried to support.
When Donald Trump first appeared in U.S. politics, Graham recognized him immediately for what he was: the spokesman for an alien ideology, one radically different from the idealistic patriotism that Graham had practiced and preached since childhood. Trump privately mocked the military that Graham loved as nothing but “suckers and losers.” He put falsehoods, cynicism, and personal greed at the center of his politics, while expressing disdain for transparency, accountability, and democracy itself. In 2015, Graham described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who should “go to hell.” Also as a “nutjob.”
When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak.
But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator. Graham went out of his way to telegraph his closeness to the president. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television, and supported him as he slowly destroyed the alliances that Graham had defended all his life, even as he undermined the institutions of democracy at home. In 2021, Graham refused to vote to convict Trump, even after he assaulted the Capitol and tried to reverse the results of the election...
The simplest thing to say about Lindsey Graham is that he sold his soul to donald trump and he sold it cheap. Whatever morals or personal values he held, he gave it up for access to power and retaining relevancy within a political party that spiraled downward into its own hell of racism, greed, and incompetency. Anything Graham could have stood for got flattened, and he never showed any sign of regret for what he'd lost.
That can be said for any of the Republican leadership that could have chosen integrity over dishonor, that is if any of the aging-out Republican leaders are still alive. We need actual proof of life regarding Mitch, you cowards.
Spend the last couple days uploading them to my YouTube channel (as the Blogger video upload never works for me) so let me see if I can share the videos I got from the trip:
Taken from the pedestrian bridge between Treasure Island Casino and the Pallazo above the famous Las Vegas Strip. The hotel I stayed at - Best Western Casino Royale Plus - is to the south of the Venetian you see with that canal filled with gondolas. Across the street they are building a new Hard Rock Casino... in the shape of a giant guitar. Further down the road at the curve is Caesar's Palace. When I turn the phone northward, you'll see Treasure Island's pirate sails and... I have no idea what that flying saucer is associated with.
The famous Bellagio Fountains. They don't constantly run shows - at least not at that time of day - so you kind of wait around for them to start something and grab the smartphone to record. Was halfway through "Uptown Funk" when I finally got the camera running.
That Thursday May 7th was dedicated to going out to the Grand Canyon, and once we got to the Hualapai tribe's west side of the canyon the tour guide started directing our attention to certain things... such as the Eagle Point rock formation.
So here's my selfie at Eagle Point. I do apologize for the ugly guy hogging the forefront.
The Hualapai consider the eagle formation sacred and part of their origin myth, of a great spirit god becoming a giant eagle to lift up the people from a deadly flood. That part of the park contains a number of other historic elements, I think I shared them on the previous blog article with the pictures.
I planned ahead for the selfie stick for several reasons: Above all, handling any risky over-the-cliff type shots to get a good idea of how steep and how deep the canyon walls go. And yeah, they deep.
Even with the selfie stick, the tribal security people still warned me I was too close. I guess they've had one too many selfie sticks go over... along with far too many people who get too close to the edge period. TEN FEET BACK, kiddos.
At the Guano Point rock formation, I found shade on one side of the hill, and took a long moment - long minutes - just sitting there admiring the view and awed by the peaceful environs. Away from cities, from traffic, from most noise (other than a tour helicopter flying by every 15 minutes)... It was incredible.
They have a tourist eatery at Guano Point where you can sit and eat/drink a lunch... and after walking 6100 steps - based on a walking app my workplace had us use last year for an exercise challenge - for about 5 miles or so... I really needed the sitdown.
Still, I couldn't resist the temptation to belt out the chorus to "Where The Streets Have No Name."
I did get a video clip of the Hoover Dam as we swung by on our way back to Vegas, but part of me wonders if that violates any national security concerns.
On Friday, my big "Roam Around Vegas" day, I had gotten the e-bike rental and started scooting around to see about finding a local gift item I could get for my twin brother for our birthday. Along the way I spotted the Sphere, the latest glowy attraction along the Strip. There's not much else to it, during the daylight and at an angle where you can't see it in full. It had to be a more spectacular sight at night.
And that was it for videos I uploaded for the trip. About an hour after riding the e-bike circling to the Pinball Hall of Fame and the Famous Las Vegas Sign, I got into that accident en route to Omega Mart and that kind of ended most of my visit (there was a Friday night show of Cirque Du Soleil's Mystere I couldn't cancel, but you're not allowed to record the show and I couldn't video myself walking into the theater while handling crutches. I did get a few photos of the stage before the show started).
I may return to Las Vegas someday, if only to complete some of the things I missed doing. Maybe when they finish building the As ballpark and the Tampa Bay Rays have a road trip there, that could be a good excuse to go.
