Democrats now stand at one of those rare junctures in politics where things can move quickly and public opinion is pretty solidly on their side. They have leverage, and even more importantly they have a deadline which makes this leverage immediate and potent. Rather than some dragged-out debate that goes on for months, change can be enacted within days (or at the most, weeks). And the opposition is already crumbling. As I said, that is a rare confluence in politics.

The ingredients for this opportunity include the fact that the last government shutdown didn't really solve anything other than punting the deadline out to the end of January. It also includes the negative shift in public opinion over Donald Trump's immigration roundup tactics, which had been slowly building up but then accelerated in a big way after two American citizens were shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis -- with both of their deaths filmed by other citizens from multiple angles. This spurred bombastic overreactions from government officials, who in both cases immediately called the dead people "domestic terrorists," while taking no blame whatsoever for causing their deaths. The stories they told about the encounter were immediately shown to be nothing more than a pack of lies when the videos appeared, because all the videos so plainly contradicted just about every statement the government had been making.

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Remember the last government shutdown? It wasn't that long ago. It was, in fact, the longest such shutdown in American history. The Democrats refused to help Republicans pass a budget because they were making a principled stand on an important political issue. Now that we may be days away from another government shutdown, it saddens me to say that the cause that was worth forcing the previous shutdown seems to have completely fallen off not just the Democrats' radar, but everyone else's, too. And that is a shame, because it will bring continued hardship to tens of millions of Americans.

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A long time ago -- say, back in the 1980s or 1990s -- there was a predominant paranoid conspiracy theory that in the future the government would nefariously use computer chips to track everyone's daily movements and thus control the entire populace. But if you could go back and use a time machine to transport a believer in such a dystopian fantasy to the future, their heads would likely explode when they realized that not only has this come to pass, but that it happened voluntarily, and that people actually pay for the privilege. Not to mention that the new scenario has actually shifted power not to a Big Brother government but against government overreach.

The government didn't wind up secretly implanting computer chips in all our brains. Instead, we now voluntarily carry them around with us in our pockets. And we do indeed pay for the privilege, since a cell phone is worthless without a contract to connect it to the network. The most mind-blowing thing, however, is the shift in power that all of this has caused. Because unlike what was envisioned in the 80s and 90s, we don't just carry around a computer chip that tracks us, that computer can do a whole lot more than just reveal our location.

The fact that everyone has an easily-accessible camera that can shoot video at a moment's notice has changed the power dynamic between citizens and the government in ways that nobody predicted. I wrote about this phenomenon previously, and have appended this earlier article at the bottom of this one, since the points I made fifteen years ago are still pretty valid. The title of this article was: "Big Brother v. Little Brother." It has become relevant once again with the shootings in Minneapolis, because it shows how the power in such situations has undergone a radical shift for the better.

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It's happened again. Federal officers have shot and killed a man in broad daylight on the streets of an American city, and from the multiple videos of the event it is pretty obvious that they had absolutely no justification for using deadly force whatsoever. That argument is playing out right now, in the media and in politics in general, and could spark another government shutdown at the end of the week. But I think there is a big and important subject that is largely absent from most of these conversations, although it is understandable why this is (since the death of a man is so serious). That subject is addressing the underlying wrongdoing that happened before the shots were fired.

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Welcome back to the ongoing saga of "The Arsonist Fireman." In this week's episode, our protagonist lights a fire which could burn down the entire Western world -- starting with its military alliance -- before grabbing a fire extinguisher and singlehandedly snuffing it out. As usual, he then wonders why everyone doesn't congratulate him on having bravely averted such a disaster.

Sorry for the snark, but it's really hard to see the past week through any other lens. This week, Donald Trump followed through on his sword-rattling over owning Greenland (or perhaps Iceland?) by going to Davos, Switzerland, giving a meandering and insulting speech (full of lies, as usual), and then declaring victory before going home.

However, there was no actual victory. Nothing changed. Trump spoke of a "format of a deal" and "concepts of a deal," but there simply was no actual deal in sight. And certainly not one that gave Trump any of what he was demanding. Denmark and Greenland have unequivocally stated that they are not giving up even one inch of their sovereignty over the island to Trump, period. That has not changed. But all of a sudden, Trump was claiming that somehow all of his goals had been met.

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Most of the world is breathing a big sigh of relief right now, while wondering to themselves: "What the heck was that all about?" Well, your guess is as good as mine, since answering that involves plumbing the shallows of Donald Trump's psyche (which is always fraught with uncertainty).

Personally, I am leaning towards: "It was all performative; it was just Trump making sure that all eyes were on him during the Davos conference at the expense of all others," since this fits in perfectly with his own planet-sized ego. He caused a crisis so everyone would freak out, then he "solved" the crisis by backing down. In the meantime, the world's eyes were upon him and his every utterance -- which is exactly what he wanted.

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Rahm Emanuel has apparently launched his 2028 presidential bid. A wonky story about him appeared prominently in today's Washington Post, on the subject of his ideas for fixing education in America. He also recently tossed out a different provocative idea during a recent speech, which further indicates he is in the process of building a political platform to run on. Rahm Emanuel is one of those politicians with an outsized opinion of his own popularity and a strong conviction that the country is ready for him to lead it. That's nothing new -- people like that are a dime a dozen in Washington -- but his new idea is certainly an interesting one: instituting a mandatory retirement age for everyone in the federal government.

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Today marks the end of the first year of Donald Trump's second term in office. One down, three to go.

Looking back, the most notable thing about Trump's first year back was how he has thrown himself fully into the Silicon Valley maxim to "move fast and break things." Trump has indeed moved fast, and he has indeed broken many things -- some of which will take a very long time to put back together and some of which may just stay broken forever.

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Our president's crazy
Did you hear what he said?

-- The Talking Heads
"Making Flippy Floppy"

It seems like the time has now come to at least begin the discussions about invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to remove a president who has, quite obviously, lost all touch with reality.

Some people, when they reach an advanced age, enter into a period some mental health experts call a "second childhood." This is where they lose all adult sense of what is right, wrong, and allowable, and start behaving like a cranky toddler once again. However, it's not accurate to say that Donald Trump is entering into a period of second childhood himself -- but only for the reason that he never seems to have left this cranky toddler phase behind at any point during his entire life. With him, there's nothing "second" about it, in other words.

Most of us learn, somewhere around the age of two or three years old, that sometimes the world says "No," and we have to accept that -- even though we really, really want the answer to be "Yes." When toddlers demand: "Gimme, gimme, gimme!" sometimes adults have to smack their hands down and tell them that no, they can't have that (whatever it is). This is typical human learning and socialization -- a child having to accept the reality that yes, there is a whole rest of the world outside of them; and no, it is not set up to grant your every wish on an immediate basis. Trump never learned this lesson (again, quite obviously).

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In another four days, we will have survived the first full year of Donald Trump's second term in office. That's right -- one down, only three more to go!

(Sigh.)

The defining feature of this past year has been -- just like it was in his first term -- the continuing cycle of being so aghast at Trump's planet-sized ego, flailing insecurities, and toddler-grade tantrums and thinking to oneself: "Well, it surely can't get any worse than this!" -- only to wake up the next morning, read the headlines, and find out that yep, it sure can get worse, in ways you would never have imagined in a million years, pre-Trump.

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