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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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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It's happened again. Federal officers have shot and killed a man in broad daylight on the streets of an American city, and from the multiple videos of the event it is pretty obvious that they had absolutely no justification for using deadly force whatsoever. That argument is playing out right now, in the media and in politics in general, and could spark another government shutdown at the end of the week. But I think there is a big and important subject that is largely absent from most of these conversations, although it is understandable why this is (since the death of a man is so serious). That subject is addressing the underlying wrongdoing that happened before the shots were fired.

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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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Rahm Emanuel has apparently launched his 2028 presidential bid. A wonky story about him appeared prominently in today's Washington Post, on the subject of his ideas for fixing education in America. He also recently tossed out a different provocative idea during a recent speech, which further indicates he is in the process of building a political platform to run on. Rahm Emanuel is one of those politicians with an outsized opinion of his own popularity and a strong conviction that the country is ready for him to lead it. That's nothing new -- people like that are a dime a dozen in Washington -- but his new idea is certainly an interesting one: instituting a mandatory retirement age for everyone in the federal government.

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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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Our president's crazy
Did you hear what he said?

-- The Talking Heads
"Making Flippy Floppy"

It seems like the time has now come to at least begin the discussions about invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to remove a president who has, quite obviously, lost all touch with reality.

Some people, when they reach an advanced age, enter into a period some mental health experts call a "second childhood." This is where they lose all adult sense of what is right, wrong, and allowable, and start behaving like a cranky toddler once again. However, it's not accurate to say that Donald Trump is entering into a period of second childhood himself -- but only for the reason that he never seems to have left this cranky toddler phase behind at any point during his entire life. With him, there's nothing "second" about it, in other words.

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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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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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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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