Category Archives: national news

Musk poses grave danger

Elon Musk is emerging as the most dangerous man in America, thanks to the weird kinship he has formed with the next president of the United States.

Musk, as we all know, is the world’s richest man. He has filled Donald Trump’s vacuous noggin with notions that he can fix what’s wrong the federal government. He — along with right-wing blowhard Vivek Ramaswamy — leads a government reform project, or some such thing, that seeks to cut trillions of dollars from the government coffers.

Americans have elected Musk to no political office. He has no political standing other than his strange relationship with Trump. Musk has emerged as a sort of de facto co-president, if you dare swallow that bit of information in one bite.

The guy frightens the hell out of me. He ought to scare the bejabbers out of anyone who has this sort of love affair with good government. That should be all Americans who prefer that the president and Congress go back to what the late Sen. John McCain would call “regular order.”

There is not a damn thing that is “regular” about the way the next POTUS and Congress are getting ready to take the reins of power.

Trump figures to rely on the machinations of Musk — and, of course, Ramaswamy — as he proposes spending cuts.

This dude Musk, though, is one scary son of a … well, you know.

Forget about bipartisanship!

Donald Trump has made abundantly clear what he intends as he prepares to take the executive reins of the federal government.

Any effort to include Democrats in solving the issues of the day will be met with stubborn refusal to accept the other side’s help.

Trump and his rich-guy sidekick Elon Musk have just derailed a bipartisan spending plan that members of Congress had negotiated to keep the government from shutting down.

No can do, said Trump and Musk, declaring the spending proposal contains too much “fat” to suit the president-elect and his economic team led by Musk.

The deal is now dead. House Speaker Mike Johnson and his colleagues vow to keep working to keep the government open. They won’t get any help from the president-elect and team of obstructionists.

Trump campaigned this year on a promise to be “president for all Americans.” I took that to mean a pledge to work with members of Congress who represent Americans who did not support Trump and his MAGA cult of followers.

Silly me. I forgot we were dealing with an individual who is a total stranger to the truth.

The disruption a government shutdown would bring cannot be measured.  It doesn’t matter a damn bit to Elon Musk, to Donald Trump or to the rest of the MAGA cult who see their public service as being built on making lives miserable.

Trump, Congress: miles apart

Never in my wildest imagination, not ever, could I have thought that an incoming president would be so far removed from the Congress with whom he is supposed to govern as Donald J. Trump and the legislative body that takes office in less than a month.

Consider all the venom that has been spewed — by Democrats as well as from the Republican president — in the campaign that brought us a second Donald Trump term in the White House.

How do they get past the hatred? How do they set aside the anger expressed outwardly toward the other side?

Trump, quite naturally, has decided to ratchet the hatred up beyond all reason by saying that every individual who served on the Jan. 6 House committee should be tossed into jail. The criminal charge? He has none. They should be jailed, Trump said, merely because they opposed the way he flouted the Constitution by instigating the mob assault on the government on Jan. 6, 2021.

Oh, he fabricated a lie about the committee destroying evidence. Baloney! The committee did nothing of the sort.

It is that backdrop against which Trump will take office on Jan. 20. Congress will be seated earlier in the month. Presumably the House will choose its speaker, although that once again seems dicey, given the GOP’s paper-thin majority that might shrink to zero before Congress takes its seat.

All campaigns produce winners and losers. It used to be that losers would dust themselves off, reflect a bit on what went wrong, then got back to the work of governing. Democrats are still in shock over losing to a man so deeply flawed. Trump, meanwhile, is embarking on the revenge he promised he would seek.

Good government is gone. I am going to hope for its eventual return.

New morality defined

Republicans have redefined morality, creating a version of the term many of their elders wouldn’t recognize.

The Grand Old Party that once campaigned for public office on a “character matters” platform and once went after a Democratic president hammer and tong because he messed around with women other than his wife now stands foursquare behind a president that has done far, far worse.

And no one seems to care.

Donald Trump has been called a man who builds his relationships on a “transactional” basis, in that he always is looking for something in return for his “friendship.” Let’s say his followers believe in a “transactional morality,” meaning that it doesn’t matter that the man is a slug as long as he adheres to public policy to their liking.

We have elected twice an individual who has denigrated a legitimate Vietnam War hero, mocked a handicapped New York Times reporter, admitted to serial philandering on all of his wives, acknowledged he has sexually assaulted women by grabbing them by their private areas, admitted he never has sought God’s forgiveness, been impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, convicted by a jury on 34 felony counts, been found liable for the rape of a woman … and on and on it goes.

What’s the problem, the MAGA cultists ask. He selects judges who will toss aside a woman’s right to control her body, he does nothing to stem gun violence and vows to be “your retribution.”

Yes, we have entered a new era of morality in which we no longer judge a candidate on his behavior but only on whether he is a good fit politically.

This is a sad time for our still-great country.

POTUS still has prerogative

You may choose to believe or disbelieve this notion — given my intense criticism of the current president of the United States — but I do believe that elections have consequences.

One of those consequences allows presidents to build their administrations with men and women with whom they feel comfortable.

However, basic qualifications for a high-level Cabinet post must be included in whomever gets the nod from a president. That brings me to a central point of this blog post, which is that several of Donald Trump’s choices lack any experience pertinent to the job to which they have been chosen by the POTUS.

Pete Hegseth has never run anything in his life, let alone a massive bureaucracy like the Pentagon; RFK Jr. has zero experience administrating public health policy; Tulsi Gabbard has no experience in espionage; Kash Patel wants to destroy the FBI, an agency Trump has selected him to run.

President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas in 1991 to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. He called Judge Thomas “the most qualified” man in America to succeed the nation’s first Black SCOTUS justice. I disagreed with his description of Thomas, but I wrote then that he was the president and he deserved to nominate who he wanted. Thomas at least was qualified in the strictest sense of the word to serve.

Trump is including a cast of clowns to join his administration. Yeah, elections have consequences, but they appear to be biting back on the man who claims a “mandate” that enables him to pick a team of losers.

That is not how anyone ever should define “good government.”

No mandate here, Donald

Donald Trump and his collection of MAGA goons/cultists keep yapping about a “mandate” that the Nov. 5 presidential election delivered to the GOP ticket.

Mandates are born from electoral landslides. Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, while significant, doesn’t constitute a mandate.

To wit:

  • 1952, Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower scored a landslide win over Adlai Stevenson. His mandate was to build an interstate highway system that revolutionized motor vehicle travel in this nation.
  • 1964, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson won election huge over Barry Goldwater and then embarked on the Great Society effort that produced landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.
  • 1972, Republican President Richard Nixon swept to re-election over George McGovern and then managed the following year to end our combat involvement in the Vietnam War.
  • 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan capitalized on President Carter’s bad luck with the Iranian hostage crisis and high inflation. His mandate enabled him to restore national confidence in our government. Same for the mandate he secured with his 49-state landslide in 1984 over Walter Mondale.

So, if Donald Trump is going to boast about mandates in the 2024 election, I must remind y’all that all the examples I cited came from campaigns that produced enormous popular vote margins, not to mention Electoral College wipeouts of historic proportions.

At last count, Kamala Harris is continuing to whittle Trump’s vote margin down to less than a majority and a plurality that stands at 1.55%.

Will the new president heed those numbers as he continues to assemble his executive team? Hardly.

Will senators grow some courage?

Matt Gaetz is gone from Donald Trump’s newborn Cabinet, as he was toast from the moment the new POTUS announced him as attorney general.

Trump, though, still is far from finding his way into the clear.

He’s got Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and maybe a half-dozen others with skeletons in their closets.

Senators have the right to confirm these picks. Trump, though, also has the right to grant recess appointments if the Senate is adjourned. It’s fair to ask: Will the Senate allow Trump to launch a political flea-flicker by denying them the right under the Constitution to debate and then vote on these nominees?

Something is whispering in my ear that senators won’t take kindly to being denied that right by a president who just might try some razzle-dazzle, particularly with the remaining troublesome appointees whose names are still under discussion.

That’s my hope, anyway. The other option would be for them to roll over and allow Trump to flatten them on his way to the Oval Office.

We’ll see what our senators are up to doing … and whether they have stiffened their spines.

Trump: Slipperiest man alive

Donald J. Trump has just earned a new title that smacks of royalty.

I hereby crown this guy King Donald, The Slipperiest Man Alive. The dude received this unofficial title when special counsel Jack Smith announced today he would move to dismiss all the federal charges leveled against Trump.

They include his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on our government as well as his keeping of classified documents at his Florida estate.

What happened to force Smith to make this decision? Near as I can tell, it was the Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump immunity from prosecution while he sits in the Oval Office.

So, the two federal charges appear headed for the dustbin. All that’s left to prosecute is the Georgia case alleging that Trump sought to pressure state officials to “find” enough votes in Georgia to swing that state’s total in 2020 to Trump’s column.

The feds have no authority over DA Fani Willis’s right to prosecute that case as an elected state official. Then again, that case appears to be sucking wind at this stage.

Here we stand. A man who was impeached twice during his first term in office, convicted of 34 felony counts in New York on a hush-money payment to an adult film actress and then was charged in multiple cases on state and federal felonies has been re-elected to the nation’s highest office.

He now wears the crown awarded to the Slipperiest Man Alive.

Stunning … simply stunning.

Biden shows his class

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is a much better man than I am … and he’s a damn sight better man than the nimrod who will succeed him as president of the United States at noon on Jan. 20.

I was frankly moved by the demonstration of class and grace that Biden showed toward Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office the other day when the two men met to discuss policy matters and the transition of power from one administration to the next one.

This was the sort of photo op media event that Trump denied Biden four years ago after Biden defeated Trump’s bid for re-election to the presidency. Accordingly, after what Trump did on Jan. 6 and after all the phony claims of being robbed of victory by unproven voter fraud, I would have expected Biden to say something crass to his successor. He didn’t go there … to his enormous credit!

I am going to say something nice about Trump, too. He accepted Biden’s hand and said that “politics is tough” and “not always nice,” and added that he looked forward to a smooth transition of power. As with almost everything that Trump declares out loud, it good to question his sincerity. I won’t do so — just yet!

Biden’s reverence for the institution of the presidency steered him toward the show of grace and dignity. To be honest I do not know what guided Trump’s demonstration in response to the president.

I want the new president to turn the page and act like a man who reveres the office he will inherit. Wanting it and expecting it, however, remain distant possibilities.

Trump loses majority vote? Pffftt!

The media are making some noise about Donald Trump losing a majority of the popular vote victory he earned with his Nov. 5 presidential election victory.

His popular vote margin has slipped from about 3% on Election Day to around 1.6% as of today. He has earned about 49.8% of the total vote. It is far from the “mandate” he keeps suggesting he won.

But here’s the deal. He was elected legitimately by earning 312 Electoral College votes; he needed 270 of them to secure victory. The Constitution says candidates need to win a majority of Electoral College votes.

I get it. Begrudgingly … but I get it.

What’s more, earlier presidents also have failed to win popular vote majorities. The most recent example was George W. Bush, who in 2000 finished second to Al Gore, but won just barely enough Electoral College votes, thanks to the infamous 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that stopped the recount of ballots in Florida.

Bill Clinton won election and re-election with fewer than 50% of the popular vote. So did John F. Kennedy in 1960. Same for Harry Truman in 1948.

You get the picture, I am sure.

The media need not spend so much effort wondering about the “mandate” that doesn’t exist for Trump. A mandate occurs when presidents score landslide victories, a la Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Trump’s victory, while significant, doesn’t fall into the category of sweeping mandate for wholesale change.

When they count all the votes and Kamala Harris ends up with more actual votes than Trump, well … then we can talk some more.