Category Archives: national news

Donald Trump, national news

Judicial system stands tall

Before you declare the death of our system of representative democracy, allow me — please — to offer these words in the form of a pre-rebuttal.

The federal judiciary.

The court system has stepped up and performed its constitutionally mandated duty in reigning in the overreach of the executive branch of government … precisely as the nation’s founders said it should.

Federal judges have ruled this week that (1) Donald Trump has no constitutional authority to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to spend at his discretion, and (2) there is no way the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts can have Donald Trump’s name installed without a constitutional approval.

On top of all that, the D.C. rumor mill has kicked into hyper-high gear with reports that Trump might have to vacate his office with worsening health conditions and the stress of an agenda that is getting the better of him.

I don’t know about you but my head is spinning. I cannot begin to keep pace with what I see and hear coming from the nation’s capital.

Trump also is reportedly going to offer pardons to several convicts who were tried and found guilty of crimes involving the Jan. 6 assault on the government, the attack that injured several DC police officers. Such a pardon, according to the courts, would be an arrogant flouting of constitutional law.

I am not a constitutional scholar. I have no law degree. I know, though, what the document declares about government finances. It puts that authority solely in the hands of Congress. Trump doesn’t seem to get that fact. Article I, Section 7, says this: “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives … “ Throughout Article I, there isn’t a single word that reveals any wiggle room on the issue of congressional authority on budget matters. Congress owns it exclusively … full stop!

Keep standing tall, federal judges. Keep doing your job. Our founders gave you the power that never ends.

national news, political news

How’d we go from best to worst?

This point deserves to be repeated, so … therefore I will do so.

I will go to the Great Beyond never understanding how the American voting public could stop insisting on selecting the best among us for high office and settle for the worst among us.

Our values have been turned on their ears. We no longer care if our president is a serial philanderer, or that he is a convicted felon, lacks any semblance of a moral compass, or mocks war heroes, disabled Americans.

We set aside his lies as long as he tells us what we want to hear.

I am not going to give up on the idea that our quest for the best of us is a lost cause. It can return. Indeed, it did briefly with the election in 2020 of President Biden. Then he was gone. We got the nimrod he defeated in 2020 back for a second term after he pledged in plain English that his next term would be run with a vengeance.

Many of us said, “Hey, that’s OK! As long as he delivers the goods.” Donald Trump hasn’t delivered a damn thing!

national news

GOP finds its spine

Great day in the morning … as it appears the congressional Republican caucus has discovered its spine and perhaps even grown a collective set of stones.

What prompted this late-blooming coming of age for the GOP caucus? It’s the slush fund founded by Donald J. Trump, the lame-duck POTUS who has found a way to potentially reward the traitors who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Trump settled a $10 million lawsuit he filed against the Internal Revenue Service claiming the IRS violated his rights by demanding he release his tax returns. But he also managed to squirrel away nearly $1.8 million for a slush fund he can use for whatever purpose he wants.

This act has actually enraged congressional Republicans. They seem sincerely angry about it, avoiding milquetoast terms like “unacceptable” or “disappointing.” Oh, no. Sen. Thom Tillis, the retiring GOP member from North Carolina, calls it “stupid on stilts.” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who lost his primary bid for re-election to a MAGA fanatic, predicts this act is going to push the House and Senate into Democratic hands this November. GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas predicts that millions of Republican voters will cast their ballots for Democrats, ensuring a flip of congressional power.

It’s futile to ask, “What the hell took ’em so long?”

What is remarkable, though, is that the GOP is speaking out even as Trump continues to flex his muscle and doom otherwise faithful GOP candidates’ chances against even more radical foes. Indeed, Cornyn might face that fate tonight in his runoff race against scandal-ridden Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

I don’t know where all this is heading. I hope it produces a congressional result that suits my bias. Time will tell on that matter. Still, it does make me smile at the thought of Republicans finding their voice as it relates to the shameless corruption that continues to flow from the White House.

military news, national news

Stop this ego project!

This item popped up on my Facebook feed this afternoon, and I want to share it with you.

Donald Trump is planning to build a 250-foot golden monument to himself right in front of Arlington National Cemetery, blocking the poignant view from the Lincoln Memorial to the graves of our fallen. After dodging the draft five times, he now wants to force our honored dead into his own shadow. Veterans are already suing to stop this vanity project, and we need your help to back them up.

It came from a group called VoteVets, and they have been pillorying Trump whenever the spirit has moved them. I presume they moved frequently to remind us of Trump’s shameful history with regard to war and peace.

I don’t know where this moron’s ego limits can be found. He slaps his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He is building a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House stood for centuries.

Now this. The draft dodger in chief wants to desecrate Arlington National Cemetery with his towering gold image. Good grief! The men and women who are buried at Arlington would spin in their resting places.

Let us recall briefly how Trump has denigrated those who have been wounded in battle, how he refuses to be photographed in their presence. Or how he refused to visit the American military cemetery in Normandy, France, because the rain would have messed up his weirdly coiffed hair. He also declared that those of us who served in Vietnam were “stupid” to do so.

For this clown to erect a statue at Arlington insults the memory of those who had the courage to fight for the nation that Trump seeks to mold into something the heroes wouldn’t recognize.

national news

Yes, on ‘career pols’!

I am going to stand briefly and speak well of a sub-species of human beings who, in my view, are vilified too often simply because of the profession the choose to pursue.

I am talking about your run-of-the-mill “career politician.”

One of the latest victims of this ill-informed epithet happens to be U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who’s in the fight of his political life trying to fend off a challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who wants the seat Cornyn has occupied on Capitol Hill.

The TV ads Paxton is running refer to Cornyn derisively as a career politician. I am weary of that put-down of men and women who choose a career in public service.

I say this being well aware of the scoundrels among us who take more than they give back. There happen to career pols who are in it for themselves. We also have bankers, lawyers, insurance brokers and any number of private professions full of individuals who don’t give a rat’s ass about anyone other than themselves. Politicians, though, become fair game because they do so while collecting public money, taxpayers’ money, to do their jobs.

Think for a moment of those who forgo private-sector careers — where they could earn many times the salary they collect in public office — and choose instead to pursue less lucrative careeer in public life.

Don’t call me a Pollyanna because I choose to stand for those who serve the public. My eyes are open to what I know exists in the world of politics. I merely am trying to cling what is left of the nobility of a profession where its practitioners mean it when they take an oath to serve the public good.

national news

Term limits? We have ’em already!

Congressional Quarterly used to be known by those who covered Congress as the “Bible of all things related to Capitol Hill.”

Its reporting was so solid it did not require reporters to attribute facts found in CQ to the publication. It once reported that that issue of term limits was in reality a non-starter because the average length of terms for senators and House members didn’t merit much debate.

I saw a survey recently from CQ that put the average term length for House members at less than nine years; senators serve for a little more than 11 years on average.

I want to post this info as my statement that congressional term limits is a non-starter, in my view. We have term limits already. They are contained in the congressional elections we have every two years. The founders established elections every two years for House members. Senators serve for six years and one-third of the Senate is voted on every two years. The founders didn’t set term limits for the president, but they came after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, who succumbed in April 1945 after beginning his fourth term in the White House.

I get that some of the longer-serving members now make for vigorous debate fodder. They are few in number.

Let us look, therefore, at the larger view of Congress. It’s not a cesspool of individuals clinging to public office. Most of them serve their time and and then leave to do something else.

national news

We will survive this madness!

Allow me to restate what I have stated already, which is that the founding fathers knew what could happen to the nation they created after the American Revolution.

That is why I continue to believe that the U.S. Constitution will hold up under the pressure being applied to it by those who support the Dipshit in Chief who is seeking to undermine the document he has sworn to “defend and protect.”

The founders built a nation they knew would bend, and bend and bend some more. It set aside the three co-equal branches of government that they designed to check each other if any of them reached beyond their grasp. During the current crisis, we see the executive branch as reaching way beyond what the founders ever sought or allowed. The problem lies at the moment in a legislative branch that refuses to act on what many of its members know to be unconstitutional acts. They also are illegal. Yet they continue to allow the leader of the executive branch, the Imbecile in Chief, to get away with crime after crime.

All is far from lost, however. The third branch of government, the federal judiciary, so far has held firm at least at the lower-court level. Dozens have lawsuits have been tossed into the crapper by lower courts, sending a clear and unambiguous message to the POTUS that his legal claims have little or any standing.

The Constitution also allows for Americans to elect a full House of Representative every two years. We elect one-third of our U.S. Senate every two years. This year looks as though we could see a wholeshale change in the makeup of Congress. The House is poised to turn from Republican to Democratic control. Same could occur with the Senate. Right there lies the safeguard against the power grab we are witnessing in the executive branch.

The United States Constitution will do its job. Of that I remain supremely confident … and it is giving me hope that we will survive this madness and hopefully emerge from this cesspool stronger than ever.

national news

FBI boss did this?

FBI Director Kash Patel, who long ago earned this blogger’s designation as the most disgusting Donald Trump appointee has outdone himself.

This idiot decided to go SCUBA diving at the Battleship Arizona Memorial in Hawaii. This memorial happens to be the final resting place for about 1,000 sailors and Marines who died during the Dec. 7, 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor by Japanese warplanes. The attack brought us into World War II. The rest, of course, is history.

But the seriously boorish behavior by the FBI director to go SCUBA diving at the memorial denigrates beyond measure the heroes who are interred in the wreckage of the battleship on which they served.

Kash Patel should be fired immediately by Donald Trump. This behavior is absolutely despicable.

national news

Can’t forget the epithets

Man, it is difficult for me to remove my mind from the imaginary flashback machine when I hear the GOP suck-ups heap praise on a man many of them once labeled with a number of highly unflattering descriptions.

They included terms such as: racist, narcissist, pathological liar, fraud, phony, ignoramus, moron … and my favorite, sniveling coward.

That was then, when Donald J. Trump was one of many Republicans seeking the party’s presidential nomination for the 2016 run for the U.S. presidency. A Democrat, Barack H. Obama, had just completed two successful terms as president and Trump lurked amont a large field of GOP contenders in the fight to succeed a man they once vilified with another set of epithets.

Trump got elected in 2016. He lost his bid for re-election in 2020. He won again in 2024. What became of all those name-callers? They joined the president’s MAGA cult and now label as Republican In Name Only anyone who dares speak ill of the guy who once provoked an insurrection in an attempt to overturn the2020 election results.

We’re in the midst of another election cycle and the former Trump critics today can’t stop cheering loudly for the guy who they once labeled — correctly, in my view — all those mean things I listed at the top of this blog post.

Our airwaves are being flooded at the moment by Republican runoff candidates seeking to “out-Trump” other Republicans. Ted Cruz stands behind Chip Roy who’s running for Texas attorney general by calling him the most dedicated Trumpkin in the U.S. House. Cruz, I should tell you, once labeled Trump a “sniveling coward.”

Well, Sen. Cruz, which is it … sniveling coward or the greatest statesman since Daniel Webster?

national news

On the verge of letting go

Just to be clear, the headline on top of this post doesn’t mean I am going to leave this world. I intend to stick around.

I am about to “let go” of efforts to shame Donald Trump with harsh rhetoric. I have found that my vocabulary isn’t descriptive enough to capture the attention of the POTUS, nor that of his closest aides and fans who live near in the heart of Trump Country.

Instead, I believe I shoudl rely on the moxie and the smarts of a former politician. Ex-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – a former Trump ally — recently noted that it’s foolish to pile onto a politician who is committing political suicide. Christie asserts that Trump is committing suicide at thi moment. Therefore, Christie said, it’s good to let the POTUS continue to inflict the wounds that eventually could spell the end of the nimrod’s life as a politician.

It is clear as the deep blue sky that Trump isn’t as sharp as the guy who burst onto the political scene in 2015. Listen to his public comments then and compare them to what he says now. In the old days he at least was able to string sentences together. Today? What flies out of his overfed yapper is a colletion of non-starters and at times is utter and absolute jibberish. Criticism of this guy now is useless. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t understand why so many of us are horrified by the nonsensse that poisons the air we breathe.

He is dying politically. I find no need to join the amen chorus of critics. I’ll be ready to weigh in when he goes way beyond the pale. The guy is a has-been.