economic news

Shut the f*** up about tariffs, Donald

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If Donald J. Trump gave a rat’s righteous red-ass damn about ordinary folks — such as, oh, me for example — he would stop yammering about threatening to impose tariffs on countries to get what he wants.

He did so again overnight, threatening yet again to launch a worldwide trade war over EU and NATO opposition to his desire to annex Greenland. I am watching my retirement income fly out the window today as the markets react to Trump’s bellowing, bluster and bloviating over tariffs.

You see, Trump doesn’t give a sh** about those of us who have worked hard, played by the rules, invested money in markets and hope to have it available to enjoy in our retirement years.

Just shut the hell up about tariffs, you delusional piece of mule dookey.

Donald Trump, national news, political news

Wackiness keeps building

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Our fragile world is getting wackier by the day, week, month or whatever measurement of time you choose to identify.

For instance, I saw a poll this weekend — and I believe it’s a reputable one — that said 41% of Americans approve of the job Donald J. Trump is doing as he pretends to run the country. OK, you’ll know by that previous statement that I am not one of the 41 percenters. Those who oppose Trump number in the mid-50s.

Yes, 41% of Americans would still vote for Trump, I presume, even as his retribution tour in his second term as POTUS picks up steam. You’ll recall that he telegraphed that punch during the 2024 campaign when he said he would be the “revenge” and “your retribution” were he elected president.

He has delivered … and then some.

It absolutely astounds me that the dipshit in chief continues to reap the support of 41% of those surveyed. I have been a “never Trumper” since before he entered the political arena in the summer of 2015. He and Melania rode down the escalator and the candidate then announced his intention to ban travelers from Muslim countries from entering the United States and said Mexico is sending rapists, murderers, thieves, drug dealers and sex traffickers to this country.

He’s out of control. He is off his well-coiffed rocker. He is as unfit — maybe more so — to be POTUS as he ever has been. That is just my view. He apparently appeals to other Americans who have swallowed the swill he offers promising them things he cannot possibly do … you know, things like lowering the price of food, ending a savage war in Ukraine and producing a health insurance plan that actually works.

Dude is a con artist.

International news

Delusion is getting dangerous

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Donald the Delusional continues to sound and act like someone intent on taking over an 800,000-square mile island that is an exclusive piece of property belonging to an ally of the United States.

Allow me to clear the air. There is no way, not a chance in hell, that Donald Trump will succeed in his effort to annex Greenland. He dare not try to take it by force, for doing so will spell the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Yeah, yeah. I know that Trump has expressed little regard for NATO. His lack of regard is based on stupid ignorance. He seems to have little understanding of NATO’s importance as a hedge against aggression from — hmm, let’s see — oh yes, Russia!

Denmark owns Greenland. It also is a valuable member of NATO. For the president of the U.S.A. to say out loud that he might put boots on Greenland’s icy ground to secure the island’s annexation raises the temperature to intolerable levels.

None of this is silencing the blowhard in chief. He keeps talking in a voice loud enough for the whole world to hear that he well might send in troops to annex another sovereign nation’s legally owned territory.

It makes me wonder … what the hell is driving this clown?

He declares the United States is revered around the world. It isn’t. He keeps saying the economy was the worst shape in U.S. history when he took office a year ago. Uhh, no … it wasn’t.

Trump also says Russia and China have their eyes on Greenland and he wants to annex the island to keep Russia away from the United States. Earth to Donald: Look at a map and take a gander at Alaska’s proximity to Russia, which is my way of reminding the numbskull in chief that Russia already is in the neigbhorhood!

media news

Texans of the Year? Yes!

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I am cheering loudly for the Dallas Morning News’s selection of its 2025 Texans of the Year.

Notice the plural reference because the DMN went outside its norm in making its latest award. It chose the parents and assorted loved ones of the 100 victims of the Hill Country floods that overwhelmed Central Texas on the Fourth of July.

These men and women didn’t spend a lot of time grieving over the loss of their family members and friends. Instead, they got to work pressuring Texas legislators to write laws that they hope will prevent future cataclysmic tragedies of the type that inundated the region near Kerrville, Comfort and the rest of the Hill Country.

Most of the victims were girls who were staying at a Christian camp — Camp Mystic. They got caught in the torrential current of the Guadalupe River.

As a general rule, I often think of these group awards as something akin to participation prizes. Not this time.

The men and women who lost their precious family members and friends chose to use their grief and their anger for something noble and constructive.

They responded like true-blue Texans.

Donald Trump, national news

Time to pray … for our leaders and our nation

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I am going to enter into a period of prayer … yes, even for an individual I happen to detest with every fiber of my being.

That would be Donald J. Trump.

Why pray? Why now? The first answer is easy. I am a man of faith. I am a baptized Christian and I adhere to the notion that prayer isn’t the “least I can do,” but rather it is the “most I can do.” I don’t proclaim my faith loudly. I merely seek to live it quietly.

It could be argued that Trump is the most immoral, amoral, conscience-lacking man ever to hold the nation’s highest political office. Therefore, one might surmise he doesn’t deserve the prayers of the nation he’s been elected twice to lead. I’ll disagree with that view.

You see, the consequences of praying for Trump could bode well for those who watch him from afar. President George W. Bush famously told his successor, President Barack Obama, that despite their deep political differences that he would pray for the new president’s success. The reason was because prayer could produce results that benefit us all.

It must have worked. The new president enacted policies in 2009 that helped lift the nation out of a deep economic recession.

I will admit I haven’t prayed much for Trump over the course of his time in office. He has angered me beyond all I can grasp. The insults, the lack of dignity, the heartlessness, lack of humanity — all of it — have made me an angry American patriot. I think I have peaked out on my anger quotient.

That means I can now pray for success that the nation can grasp. Is Trump capable of change? Not a chance!

I am going to pray, though, for success. Trump might not deserve it. The rest of us certainly do.

national news

Life lesson bites suddenly

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Most of us likely are guilty of this from time to time. It’s a form of projection, where we project our own life experience into situations that have no tangible meaning to the here and now.

For example: How many of you have said, “I could never do what the pioneers did in the 19th century, which is pack up everything I own, throw it into a covered wagon and travel way out west to an unknown destination, battling Mother Nature and people who don’t want us mingling among them.”

How does one make that determination? They make it based on the creature comforts they enjoy right now in the 21st century. What we all need to do is take the long view and understand that the pioneers did not experience what we have today, that they knew nothing but the life they had. I have to remind myself that moving across country in a bumpy, flimsy wagon was just part of their life. Do you suppose they thought: Gosh, I wish I could transport myself into the future where I had all those comforts that I would have to leave behind just to fulfill this manifest destiny.

Why am I venturing into this realm? Hell, I don’t know. I just am taking a breather from the daily political barrage I am absorbing … and then passing along to readers of High Plains Blogger.

My point of this post, I suppose, is to advise everyone that they cannot control either the past or the future. So, let’s avoid spending a moment wondering how we would fare if thrust into situations with which we have no connection, or which we never will have a connection.

My life today presents plenty of challenges for this old fella.

Donald Trump

Time to work for all of us, Mr. POTUS

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Donald Trump keeps insisting wrongly — and stupidly — that he won the 2024 presidential election in a landslide over Vice President Kamala Harris.

He did no such thing. He finished with a couple million more votes than Harris. Yes, he did capture all those “battleground states.” However, his vote total didn’t add up to a majority; he won by a nominal plurality over Harris.

So … let’s toss the landslide talk aside. It just didn’t happen.

This is my way of saying, therefore, that it is time for Trump to govern as the only elected official — oh, yeah, so is VP J.D. Vance — who is elected nationally. If he is going to say that he won in a landslide, then he absolutely needs to pull away a bit from the MAGA cult that constitutes his base of supporters. It fascinates me to no end to watch the MAGA bloc begin to fracture, which tells me that Trump is even weaker than he lets on.

Still, he clings to the fantasy of a landslide victory. If he is going to continue to persuade himself of such idiocy, then he ought to govern accordingly. End the immigration crackdown in major cities; roll back those moronic tariffs; stop insisting we are a Christian nation when we clearly are a secular state; end the fixation with ridding the statutes of the term Obamacare, which MAGAites detest because it carries the name of the 44th president of the United States.

You and I know none of that will happen. Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to figure out that if he’s going to say he won big, then he ought to govern the same way.

local news

Two cities now in the hunt for new managers

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So … just like we have two neighboring North Texas cities looking for the right person to lead municipal staffs and guide their cities toward the future.

Ben White, who had served as Farmersville city manager for 15 years, resigned suddenly the other evening. I called him the day after to wish him well, but he said he couldn’t discuss the details of his departure, telling me he had agreed to a clause that keeps him quiet. I get it.

Mike Mashburn had quit the Princeton city manager’s position a few days earlier after serving just shy of two years. I didn’t know Mashburn well enough to call him and I doubt he would have taken my call. His departure has the scent of a forced resignation, although the city council noted specifically he had resigned “voluntarily.”

I have worked in both communities for the past few years as a freelance reporter for weekly newspapers that serve the communities. I know Farmersville a good bit better than Princeton, where I live.

My sense is that Farmersville’s council thought it was time for White to call it a career. I believe the city is well run and lacks much of the turmoil that bedevils Princeton.

I now shall reissue my call to both city councils as they begin their search for a new chief administrator, which is to insist they do so in the open. Do not spring anyone on the community without first giving us a chance to give them the once-over. Mashburn took the reins in Princeton without any prior exposure to the public. That was a bad call.

Ben White has been a dependable hand, but Farmersville does have nagging issues with which it must deal.

Streets! They are in terrible condition. Gotta get ’em fixed and made passable.

So, change is afoot in these two communities. I wish the city councils well as they embark on the search to find a new person. Just don’t mess up the process.

crime news, military news, national news

Impeachment: good for nation

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If the midterm election produces the result many millions of us want, I am quite sure we are going to get a needed boost to our constitutional democracy … which has taken a battering for the past year under the heavy hand of Donald J. Trump.

The boost well could come in the form of an impeachment of Trump. Yes, it is going to produce plenty of vicious anger. But I am OK with it. Why? Because we are going to have what I hope is an open debate on the usurping of power we have witnessed in real time since Trump took office in January 2025.

That power grab is in itself grounds for impeaching a president who, in my view, has violated the oath he took when he returned to the Oval Office for a second time.

He wants to censure a sitting U.S. senator for speaking the truth about following — or not following — unlawful orders. Trump wants the Justice Department to investigate the Fed chairman on the pretext that he oversaw cost overruns on remodeling the Federal Reserve Board. Trump has sent military personnel into harm’s way against Venezuela without seeking congressional approval. Trump appointed a U.S. attorney unlawfully to launch investigations into a former FBI director and the attorney general for the state of New York.

And this just happened in 2025, the year that has just passed into history’s dust bin.

Democrats appear poised to regain control of the House. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Senate control could flip, too, when they count the votes for the midterm election.

The debate over the charges that could come forth will be spirited. Probably angry. Maybe even vicious and personal. The Constitution will see us through the pending rough ride.

Our founders built a government that is resilient enough to bend a great deal … without breaking. It is strong enough to endure a presidential impeachment while allowing Congress to do the rest of the work to which the Constitution empowers it.

military news

War crimes mounting, too

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My noggin is being overwhelmed with reports that continue to boggle my mind. Here’s what I mean.

There are now fresh reports that the dipshit masquerading as defense secretary might have committed another serious war crime. Reports say that the United States disguised a military assault aircraft as a civilian plane. It snuck up on alleged drug dealers and smoked a boat.

The rules of war say categorically that disguising weapons of war in such a manner is a no-no. The law is meant to protect civilians who often get caught up as “collateral damage” in the middle of firefights between combatants.

Defense boss Pete Hegseth already is facing heat for ordering a “double tap” strike on survivors of an earlier rocket blast fired by U.S. jet fighters off the coast of Venezuela.

We well might be watching the consequence of Trump hiring an unfit, unqualified and untethered moron as defense secretary. His only saving grace in Trump’s perverted world view? He does what POTUS tells him.

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience