Remember when Donald Trump pitched a hissy fit because he didn't like the way a portrait of him looked, in Colorado? He actually made them take it down and create a new painting. So we're wondering if someone's about to get fired in the White House, after they used an official White House social media account to post an image of Trump as (are you sitting down?) Superman. Now, the idea of "Trump as Superman" isn't all that shocking, since both he and all his acolytes operate at the mental level of a spoiled elementary-school-aged narcissist, but what is truly hilarious is the image they used -- because they didn't bother to edit out his gut. It's just sticking right out there for all to see. Usually when Trump has these he-man fantasies he uses fake images with lots of muscles and a ripped body, but this time someone forgot to tell the A.I. program to slim him down. So, as we said, we're anticipating someone in the White House communications department getting unceremoniously booted from their job real soon now. It's kind of surprising they'd even use the Superman theme in the first place, since the MAGA folks all hit the ceiling when the director of the new Superman movie pointed out the fact that Superman is actually (gasp!) an immigrant. And it is highly doubtful that the Kent parents ever bothered to inform the federal government of the fact, so that would actually make Superman an undocumented immigrant. Oh, the horror!

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Cue the Moby Dick jokes....

Senator Lisa Murkowski was convinced at the last minute to become the deciding vote for the Republican budget by the inclusion of a big tax break for (are you sitting down?) whaling captains. No, really -- whaling captains. As I said, the jokes really just write themselves on this one. Democrats instantly came up with two catchy names for all the Alaska-specific pork Murkowski extracted from her fellow Republicans: the Kodiak Kickback, or the Polar Payoff.

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It's not exactly front-and-center in the news, but Republicans have entered a budgetary crunch time in a big way. The outcome is going to be extremely significant to hundreds of millions of Americans, but reporting on it is time-consuming and detail-oriented, so it's a lot easier to just chase whatever shiny object Donald Trump trots out for the press instead.

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Donald Trump hit two milestones this past week: his first 100 days in office, and his first quarter of negative G.D.P. growth. True to form, he celebrated the first of these with a rally, while blaming the second on Joe Biden. He even tried to front-load any bad economic news in the second quarter as Biden's fault too. Oh, and for good measure, Trump expressed a desire to become the next pope. Which would probably be fine with plenty of Americans -- as long as he quits his current job in order to do so.

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American politics, for better or worse, is built on a two-party system that is occasionally challenged by independent third parties, who never have much in the way of notable successes. How many members of Congress are there from the Green Party? How many did H. Ross Perot get elected when he launched the most successful third-party bid for the White House in a generation? The answer to both is, of course, "zero." Third parties can change the political conversation in major ways (and occasionally even move the "Overton Window" in a big way), but so far none of them has built up enough success to truly challenge the dominance of the Republican/Democratic dichotomy. Instead, what is much more common is one (or both) of the two major parties being dramatically changed from within.

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Today I read the first of what will likely be a number of Democratic post-election analyses, in an effort to identify what went wrong for the party in 2024 and what should be done to fix it going forward. And I've certainly thought about the subject myself in the past few months, so I thought I'd offer up a rather different take.

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