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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In keeping with the "world turned upside-down" nature of this week, we are going to start with a few things that haven't been front-and-center, then we'll circle in to a bigger-picture take, and finally we'll fit in the big story of the week at the end.

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That headline is obviously meant as a callback to a time when Republicans expressed all kinds of alarm about top secret information being mishandled by high-ranking government officials. In particular, Hillary Clinton's emails. Republicans in Congress gleefully investigated Clinton's email server and what had been sent via a non-standard communications channel -- six ways to Sunday, in fact. They denounced the breach of national security in the strongest possible terms. Later, it became the go-to "whataboutism" response to just about anything Democrats would bring up in relation to just about any Republican. The phrase: "But what about her emails?" or just: "But her emails!" became such a cliché that it was even mockingly morphed (by elision) into merely: "Butter emails!"

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While the biggest political spectacle of the week was the president's big speech to Congress, the biggest political news of the week was actually the American economy reacting to Donald Trump's on-again-off-again, now-you-see-them-now-you-don't tariffs. The whiplash began at the start of the week and hasn't fully subsided yet. Taken together with all of Trump's other disruptive wrecking balls, economists are now starting to talk about the possibility of an upcoming "Trump recession."

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Remember when the Republican Party, as a whole, absolutely revered the memory of Ronald Reagan? It really wasn't that long ago. Their devotion was so pronounced that we even took to using the term "Saint Ronald of Reagan" whenever we wrote about Republicans lauding him to the skies, just to poke fun at their deification (or at the least, canonization or beatification) of a politician that, in our humble opinion, really didn't deserve such devotion.

Jumping forward to the present, each incoming president gets to choose how to decorate the White House, which includes the art on the walls of the Oval Office. We have to say it was somewhat of a surprise to learn that Donald Trump in his second presidency chose to hang a painting of Reagan on the wall overlooking the same desk Ronnie used to sit behind. We learned this fact from the following article, which (please note) was written before what just happened in the Oval Office today:

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The first month of the second presidency of Donald Trump is now over. Only forty-seven more to go!

That, of course, is a daunting prospect, but we can at least open with some good news this week: Trump is already wearing out his welcome with the public. The presidential "honeymoon" period is apparently over (almost before it began). Trump started off his second term with historically dismal ratings, although they did best one previous president -- himself, in his first term. His job approval numbers were actually at 50 percent or just above when he was sworn in this time around (which, as mentioned, every other modern president has beaten), so he could at least claim a majority of the public was behind him. Not any more.

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It's hard, as each new week goes by, not to get distracted by all of the chaos emanating from Washington. This week, we're going to begin by connecting a few dots that really need connecting, and (so far) haven't gotten enough attention (in our humble opinion).

Before Donald Trump became president again, both he and his MAGA choir spent a lot of time decrying "censorship" and wailing about their "free speech" being somehow suppressed. This was largely due to social media sites policing their allowable content, and occasionally removing objectionable or flat-out false posts and even kicking people off their platforms.

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How close are we to a constitutional crisis? Has one already begun? Is it imminent? Or does it merely loom somewhere out on the horizon? Welcome to Week 4 of the Trump administration, folks!

President Donald Trump and his team of henchmen certainly hit the ground running, issuing an absolute flood of executive orders and new policy announcements, which has now led to a resulting flood of lawsuits against them. Federal judges, some of them acting with impressive speed, have already blocked (temporarily, at least -- none of these cases has been fully heard yet) a number of Trump's actions, including the ban on birthright citizenship, a freeze on federal spending, the resignation offer Elon Musk sent to federal workers, dismantling U.S.A.I.D., and the transfer of transgender prisoners. Many of Trump's other actions are still being considered by judges who haven't ruled or issued injunctions yet.

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We aren't even three weeks in to the administration of President Elon Musk, and already he has instituted an ideological purge the likes of which America has not seen since the time of Senator Joe McCarthy. Except this time they're not rooting out communists (or suspected communists, or communist sympathizers) but instead just "people they don't like." Or maybe "people who have pissed off Elon" -- that's probably closer to the reality of it.

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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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