[ Posted Thursday, July 3rd, 2025 – 15:21 UTC ]
So Donald Trump just got a big political win, as the House Republicans held their collective noses and voted for the Senate version of their budget bill today, which will allow Trump to hold his Independence Day signing ceremony on schedule. This is a momentous development, and in fact it might wind up being the defining issue for the midterm elections next year. Democrats know this and are already planning on politically capitalizing on the worst aspects of the bill.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 1st, 2025 – 15:23 UTC ]
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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[ Posted Monday, June 30th, 2025 – 15:38 UTC ]
In Washington, all eyes are on the Senate today. They are currently going through the procedure known as "vote-a-rama" (which is right up there with the "Byrd bath" when it comes to cutesy-poo terms for legislative activity). The vote-a-rama is taking place on the Republican budget bill (which is not cutesy at all, because it is filled with poo).
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[ Posted Friday, June 27th, 2025 – 18:14 UTC ]
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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[ Posted Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 – 15:52 UTC ]
A political earthquake just happened in New York City last night. Zohran Mamdani seems to have won the Democratic primary in the mayoral election, defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo. The results won't be final for another week, and the margin of victory will change (since the voting was by ranked-choice ballot), but last night Cuomo conceded defeat. This morning, there is plenty of buzz about what this all means to the bigger Democratic Party picture, but while it was a stunning upset for New York City it may not be a harbinger of much of anything in the rest of the country. I say this because the circumstances were so unique, and because New York City is not the rest of America.
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[ Posted Friday, June 13th, 2025 – 17:55 UTC ]
It has been a week of dangerous precedents being set -- and it's not over yet.
One precedent that didn't get much media attention (but which is truly disturbing) was Donald Trump giving a nakedly political speech to American soldiers in uniform, where he pre-screened the crowd for both looks and ideology. One memo sent out before Trump arrived specified: "No fat soldiers." Another stated: "if soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience, then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out."
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[ Posted Friday, June 6th, 2025 – 18:31 UTC ]
The world's richest man and the world's most powerful man got into an online fight yesterday, which began when Elon Musk tweeted out: "Donny Trump is a poopyhead!" -- to which Donald Trump immediately responded: "No YOU'RE the poopyhead Elon!!!"
Well, no. That's not actually how it happened. But it's not that far from the reality, sad to say.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 5th, 2025 – 16:52 UTC ]
While I do realize that a very entertaining playground fight between the world's most prominent schoolboys is currently raging, I am going to exercise a monumental amount of restraint and not address the dustup between Elon Musk and Donald Trump today. Besides, by tomorrow, there'll probably be several more amusing developments to talk about, right?
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 4th, 2025 – 16:35 UTC ]
So there's a public gathering in Washington this week that aims to fix what's wrong with the Democratic Party. It is called "WelcomeFest" and is yet another effort to make the party "more moderate" (they talk of being "partisan centrists"), while admittedly trying to emulate the amount of energy from the progressive side of the party. One of the founders of the "Welcome Party" summed this up: "We respect the very robust and multifaceted effort on the progressive faction of the party over the last few years. They had a lot of clear coherency behind it, and there was a lot of action. We are essentially just trying to emulate that faction of the party." However, one has to wonder what they really mean when they talk of being centrists and moderates, since the lion's share of the funding behind the effort comes from Democratic deep-pocket donors, instead of being supported by any sort of authentic grassroots effort.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 – 16:20 UTC ]
Elon Musk is back in the news. He's upset over the Republican budget bill and he's having a hissy fit about it online. Musk seems destined to lose this battle, since by coming out against the bill he set himself at odds with Donald Trump -- and Trump is a lot more popular with the Republican base than Musk. On the other hand, Musk has an almost unlimited amount of money and he's quite willing to toss millions at political causes when he feels like it. So it's tough to really predict how any of this is going to play out.
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