[ Posted Friday, January 30th, 2026 – 18:47 UTC ]
We're going to begin today with a prediction that is completely unrelated to what happened last week. Because next Friday the 2026 Winter Olympics will begin. Our prediction: the U.S.A. is going to get booed. Loudly. It'll probably be most noticeable during the opening ceremonies, but will likely sporadically pop up throughout the games. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump decided to skip the whole thing and send JD Vance in his place? Maybe Vance -- who is not as well-known worldwide -- won't get booed as loudly as the catcalls would have been if Trump had been there?
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[ Posted Thursday, January 29th, 2026 – 16:14 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 28th, 2026 – 16:49 UTC ]
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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[ Posted Tuesday, January 27th, 2026 – 16:02 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Friday, January 23rd, 2026 – 19:16 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 – 17:04 UTC ]
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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[ Posted Friday, January 16th, 2026 – 18:55 UTC ]
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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[ Posted Thursday, January 15th, 2026 – 17:50 UTC ]
Donald Trump is approaching his own Rubicon, it seems. The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. "Burning your bridges" is a slightly-different metaphor with a similar meaning. For Trump, the Rubicon he is contemplating crossing is invoking the Insurrection Act to send in U.S. armed forces to an American city.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 14th, 2026 – 17:26 UTC ]
The Democratic Party -- and liberalism in general -- needs to take a stand. So far, they have mostly been reactive, fighting back against Donald Trump and his administration. Trump will do something outrageous, and Democrats then react to it. But there's no cohesive plan to any of it -- nothing that ties it all together into an actual political agenda. So it would behoove them to steal a page (actually a whole lot of pages) from the Republicans, and come up with a "Project 2029" document that lays out what their vision of the federal government would be, if they win the White House and Congress.
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[ Posted Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025 – 17:28 UTC ]
A U.S. military website showing Santa Claus delivering his presents while guarded by warplanes has some children's advocates worried.
In a twist to its tradition of tracking an animated version of Santa Claus' sleigh and reindeer as he flies around the globe on December 24, the military is adding the animated fighter plane escort to give a realistic feel to the popular feature, said a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
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