[ Posted Thursday, June 6th, 2019 – 17:53 UTC ]
That's enough history, and as you can tell it's a pretty weak attempt to tie the following article to D-Day. This was intended to mask the real reason for both writing the article in the first place and rerunning it today, which was just a sheer love for AMC vehicles and has nothing really to do with the military, World War II, or D-Day at all. So I guess another year will go by without me writing explicitly about "the longest day." My apologies to the "greatest generation" for such irreverence.
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 – 16:49 UTC ]
Even Richard Nixon never dreamed that his "madman theory" tactic would become the entire playbook for a United States president on any foreign policy issue, but that's where we now find ourselves, apparently. Nobody -- including even his own closest aides -- has any idea what Donald Trump is about to do next. Will he slap a five percent tariff on Mexico next Monday, or is it all just a big bluff to increase his leverage in trade talks? Nobody knows. White House aides say one thing, and the president then contradicts them within hours. Then they say something different, and Trump contradicts that, too. Sometimes Trump seems incredibly determined to levy a new tax on imported Mexican goods no matter what the outcome, and sometimes he seems like it's all just a giant ruse. Welcome to "madman trade theory," in other words.
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[ Posted Friday, May 31st, 2019 – 18:03 UTC ]
Robert Mueller broke his two-year silence this week, as he strode boldly to the podium and loudly announced: "ITMFA!" and then withdrew. 'This caused the term to spike in Google searches to a level never seen before on any subject, ever.
Well, no. That's not what happened. Many now think that's what should have happened, but unfortunately it did not.
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[ Posted Friday, May 24th, 2019 – 17:29 UTC ]
What do you do with a president who wants to be impeached? That's a surreal question, but then again we live in surreal times. Donald Trump seems more and more like a man begging the House Democrats to impeach him. It's like every political decision he makes is designed to be so outrageous that it'll surely goad Democrats into starting an impeachment committee.
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[ Posted Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 – 17:30 UTC ]
That headline can, of course, be read two ways. One is very serious, since America has experienced multiple natural disasters over the course of the past year which have not yet been adequately addressed by Congress. And the other is, well, ironic. As we all lurch to the end of another "Infrastructure [...]
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[ Posted Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 17:33 UTC ]
It's always amusing when the inside-the-Beltway pundits realize with astonishment that they've been wrong about something. What happens is that one of them decides they know "what the American voter is thinking" and then all the rest of them stampede to the conclusion that this is really what's going on out in the heartland. They write articles and make television appearances corroborating each others' opinions, and it soon becomes virtually accepted fact among the cognoscenti. Then, reality interjects itself and their house of cards collapses -- leaving them to construct yet another false narrative to run with (which they almost always immediately do).
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[ Posted Friday, May 17th, 2019 – 17:23 UTC ]
It's been yet another week of life so bizarre it'd be hard to even imagine it as satirical art. Who would best be able to capture the lunacy and doublethink emanating from Trump's White House? Joseph Heller? George Orwell? Douglas Adams? Or perhaps Dr. Seuss? In other words, just another glorious week in Trumpland, folks.
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[ Posted Wednesday, May 15th, 2019 – 17:03 UTC ]
What does "co-equal" really mean? That is a basic constitutional question that has never adequately been answered. We are supposed to have three co-equal branches of government in the United States, the legislative (Congress), the executive (the president and all executive branches), and the judicial (the Supreme Court and all other federal courts). Theoretically, none are supposed to be held above the other, hence the co-equal designation. But what does that really mean?
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 14th, 2019 – 17:02 UTC ]
Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state, just signed into law the first-ever statewide experiment with a "public option" in heath insurance. This is a momentous event, but so far it hasn't been getting that much attention in the media. Inslee is also a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, so it will now be incumbent upon him to become the champion spokesman for instituting a public option nationwide.
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[ Posted Monday, May 13th, 2019 – 16:46 UTC ]
Donald Trump's trade war with China reached a new level of intensity over the past week, as the trade deal talks all but collapsed -- instead of, as had been promised, leading to an imminent signing ceremony of the best trade deal ever struck in all of history. Trump suddenly announced he was more than doubling the tariff on Chinese goods entering the country, and then for good measure threatened to slap the same 25 percent tariff on everything else China sells in America. This morning, China announced its own retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products, and the stock market sank 600 points. Trump continues in his role as cheerleader for the tariffs, which means Democrats are left to make the case -- once again -- that the emperor's new clothes don't actually exist. So far, they haven't been doing all that great a job in doing so, however.
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