[ Posted Friday, February 6th, 2026 – 19:38 UTC ]
Today Donald Trump proved yet again that he is nothing short of a stone-cold racist. He reposted a message on social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. That's really all you need to know about it, other than the fact that (for once) it was so unbelievably offensive that, hours later, it was deleted. The White House blamed an unnamed "staffer," to which Black voters everywhere responded: "Yeah, right." Trump's hatred for the Obamas is well-known, of course, but even some Republicans complained at this latest racist outrage from Trump.
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[ Posted Wednesday, February 4th, 2026 – 16:46 UTC ]
Up until now, some Democratic worries about the upcoming midterm elections have been dismissed by the "It could never happen here" crowd as unfounded nightmares. They pooh-pooh such worries as being laughably outlandish and accuse people who express these worries for overreacting about things that couldn't possibly happen right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. But this week should make such scenarios a whole lot less laughable and a whole lot more worrisome.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 – 17:10 UTC ]
The government shutdown is over. Today the House passed the Senate funding bill and sent it to Donald Trump, who signed it into law. Which means all parts of the federal government are now open, and a full-year budget is in place for everything except the Department of Homeland Security (which only has a two-week extension). So the stage is set for the negotiations to begin over the reforms Democrats want to impose on ICE and the Border Patrol and all other federal immigration enforcement agents.
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[ 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 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 Friday, January 9th, 2026 – 18:31 UTC ]
It has been a week of stunning events and dangerous rhetorical excesses. Currently the political debate is divided over the question of when government officials can use deadly force against people who are protesting or ignoring orders from those officials. This question is steeped in politics, as it so often is. Whether a person deserves death at the hands of the state almost always has a political element to it, which is not exactly a new thing.
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