national news, political news

TDS is real … and I’ve got it!

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My name is John and I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

There. I’ve come clean. Critics of this blog might rejoice in my acknowledgement of what they have accused me of having. Fine. Let ’em crow all they want.

Donald Trump has afflicted me with a condition I’ve never experienced before. Richard Nixon didn’t do it. If Tricky Dick couldn’t bring about an NDS — Nixon Derangement Syndrome — I figured I might have been free of the affliction. Silly me.

Yep, Trump has done seemingly the impossible. I’m a pretty cool customer most of the time. But when it comes to this guy, well, just toss the playbook out the window.

He speaks in mindless platitudes. Trump is unable to offer a significant reason for endorsing or condemning an individual or a policy. He prattles on and on with nonsense. He makes promises he knows he cannot keep. Indeed, he has no intention of keeping them.

Remember the crap he said about ending “forever wars?” Dude just started one. He said he would end the Ukraine-Russia War on “day one” once he took office the second time. He couldn’t possibly do a thing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Besides, the POTUS admires the Russian thug Vlad Putin who invaded Ukraine.

One High Plains Blogger critic has suggested I seek treatment for TDS. Hah! I have no intention of being “cured” of a condition I am proud to wear.

I detest Donald Trump. He has no business sitting in the Oval Office. He should be kept far away from the nuclear codes. Why in the world should I seek a cure for understanding the obvous?

national security, political news

Don’t underestimate this fool

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For sure I have learned a lesson or two about Donald J. Trump, which is that never — not ever — believe he is finished when the whole rest of the world is saying as much.

He was supposed to have been done during the 2016 presidential campaign after a number of ghastly personal performances. He managed to pull off the biggest political fluke in U.S. history by scoring enough Electoral College votes while losing the popular vote by 3 million ballots to Hillary Clinton.

He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but has sown enough doubt about the integrity of our electoral system to cast a pall over it that lasts to this day.

Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2028 and this coming November we’ll have the midterm election. Control of Congress is at stake. The odds favor a Democratic takeover he House of Representatives. The odds of a Democratic coup in the Senate are longer, but still doable. Trump won’t be on the 2026 ballot, either.

Make no mistake that this charlatan, this election denier in chief, this ghastly pretender to the presidency is pulling out all the stops to deny Democrats the victory they deserve and are expecting. He’s seeking to nationalize the midterm, which I have noted already in an earlier blog post is an impossibility. However, it is a mistake to dismiss this moron’s ability to make it so.

That could result in the House flipping far fewer seats to the Democratic column. And it could mean the GOP keeps control of the Senate. Many of us want the Democrats to win the day in contests for both congressional chambers. I say that, though, knowing full well that Trump’s ability to dodge political freight trains is nothing to dismiss.

That’s what makes him so damn dangerous.

Beware, y’all.

environmental news, national news

DST here here for keeps?

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Well, gang … it looks as though we might have permanent Daylight Saving Time in our immediate future, as Congress appears set to send a DST law to Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

I’ve written on this matter before. Truth be told, I don’t have a particularly strong preference, but were you to ask me and demand an answer, I guess I would say that if we’re going to have one measure of time each day, I prefer Daylight Saving Time over Standard Time.

DST long has held up as a more environmentally conscious method for humankind to keep track of time. It’s generally invoked to save energy because we keep the lights turned off later in the day than we would under Standard Time.

I hear the arguments against DST, such as it delays the rising of the sun; it means children have to wait in the dark for school buses. Maybe I should be more sensitive to that issue, given that I have one school-age child in my immediate family. I also know that my granddaughter’s parents also are highly sensitive to the issue of her safety, so I don’t believe they would ever expose her to undue risk.

As for the inconvenience so often expressed by those who bitch about the time change every spring and autumn, that is a non-starter for me. I learned to live with the change in my body clock that occurs when we switch from DST to Standard time and vice versa. The change is not a big deal, man … you know?

So, I suppose that Congress is going to mandate that our afternoon daylight hours will extend a bit longer throughout the year.

My prediction? We’ll get used to it.

local news, national news, political news

Nationwide electoral theft? Impossible!

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Let’s visit briefly — shall we? — Donald Trump’s continual harping about the 2020 presidential election and how the result, a victory by Joe Biden over Trump, was an act of electoral theft.

It didn’t happen. Here’s how I know that to be so.

To suggest that a federal election was orchestrated to produce a winner ignores this undeniable fact, which is that our elections are conducted by individual states. Each state operates independently from other states. They all have their own system of counting ballots. They abide by rules set by their legislatures, and signed into law by governors.

Collin County, Texas, where I have lived for the past seven years, has a perfectly fine election system. It’s modern, it’s secure, and it’s free of the kind of corruption that Trump seems to believe exists in counties throughout the nation. He’s full of mule dookey.

The county’s election system is run by Stacey Kemp, a competent county clerk who oversees a staff of deputy clerks who are committed to upholding the oath they all take to defend and protect the Consitution of the United States.

Trump, though, sees this issue as a national matter. Indeed, he is looking for crimes that simply cannot exist in our electoral system.

I also should point out that our state electoral systems are not connected to the Internet, which Trump alleges is a prime source of the shenanigans he says occurs.

The POTUS went on the air the other night to relitigate a six-year-old gripe that has been tossed out in more than 60 lawsuits filed in courts from coast to coast. Let me also note here that many of the federal judges who have ruled against Trump have been nominated for their seats by Donald Trump … which tells me quite clearly that these men and women understand the law far more clearly than the dimwit who sits in the Oval Office.

national news, political news

Trick knee is throbbing again

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Many of you know about my trick knee. I have relied on it on occasion when I feel something unusual might be about to happen.

I want to remind you that “might” is the operative word. I cannot predict anything. I dare not try. My record of predicting outcomes is pretty shabby. I mean, I was one of many so-called pundits who said Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in to capture the presidency in 2016. Wow … we missed the mark on that one!

What might occur in the immediate future? Bear in mind once more that I am no shape to predict a single thing particularly where it regards the individual I am about to mention.

The individual is Donald Trump. What could happen is that the 45th and 47th POTUS might not finish his term in office.

I have listened to him incessantly since he took office the second time in January 2025. When I listen to his speech patterns and compare them to what he blurted out during his first term and prior to that, it is clear as mud to me that he no longer is firing on all cylinders.

How does that occur? I might suggest the 25th Amendment could come into play, but that requires a unanimous approval by the Cabinet. To be honest, I have difficulty imagining Trump lackeys such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or FBI Director Kash Patel signing on.

There could come a moment of private reckoning when Trump realizes his legislative agenda is dead. That death would come when the House and Senate both flip from Republican to Democratic control. If the House flips, I would bet real American money that impeachment is on the way.

I believe all Americans can see for themselves what is painfully obvious. It is that Trump isn’t half the politician he once was. The POTUS who is obsessed with “ratings” will find out what low ratings mean to him personally. He cannot cope with being a loser.

It is happening.

national news

More of the same trash from Trump

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I won’t pattycake this issue with you … but so help me when I heard that Donald Trump had a big announcement to make during his prime-time TV talk I was hoping for something really spectacular.

That would be an announcement that he was quitting the presidency, that he’d had enough of the negativity surrounding him and his administration. Truth be told, I was hoping for a sort of an “LBJ moment,” that might remind us of the time in March 1968 when President Johnson announced on TV that he was suspending the bombing of North Vietnam and then dropped the biggest bombshell of all by declaring he “would not accept” the Democratic nomination “for another term as your president.”

I musta been living in a dream world. I get it. What we got from Trump instead was a warmed-over speech about unconfirmed and unprovable claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. What a crock of sh**!

Trump has no more ideas left in that vacuous, pointed skull of his. He is relying now on the raw emotion of the MAGA morons who have bought into his election theft rubbish.

He said he would release documents that never have been seen. That was his “major announcement.” Big fu***** deal, Donald!

If anyone on Earth is guilty of attempting an election theft, it’s Donald John Trump. And, brother, we had better wake up to the fact that the incumbent president is the thief in chief.

medical news

Candidates’ health is of major concern

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I can’t claim this as an original thought, because I am stealing it from a friend of mine, but candidates’ health must become a major issue in determining their fitness for a job.

We’ve had too many presidents of the United States taking office while hiding serious illness. My friend notes that President Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke during his second term, President Cleveland suffered from cancer, President Franklin Roosevelt sought to conceal his wheelchair, President Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease.

All those ailments were serious enough to consider even now, so many years after these men served in the highest office in the land. Indeed, FDR won election to a fourth term in 1944 while suffering from an ailment that would kill him a month after taking office in 1945. He was virtually a dead man when he planned the final assault on the Axis Powers near the end of World War II.

We had those phony questions about President Biden’s mental acuity during his term in office. Leading that charade was former White House physician and current Texas Panhandle congressman and loudmouth Ronny Jackson.

But my point is that a candidate’s health must be front and center on the issue to be discussed and examined. The candidates ought to be required to present physicians statements as to their physical well-being … as well as their mental alertness. And they should be prepared to refute any claims of ill health if they arise during the campaign.

national security, political news

Game of election denial … breathtaking!

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Never in my life — not ever! — have I witnessed a rhetorical game being played out to the extent that it has been regarding the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

I’ve been around a bit, as I am now 76 years of age and have been following politics pretty closely for, oh, about the past 60 years.

Donald Trump’s choice to become the next director of national intelligence was merely the latest Trumpkin to play the word game with Democratic lawmakers. Jay Clayton, in testimony this week to a Senate committee, refused to say that President Biden won the 2020 election.

Here’s how Al Jazeera reported the exchange between Clayton and senators:

“Senators pressed Clayton about his views on the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, and he acknowledged that Biden had been ‘certified’ as the victor. But he avoided directly saying Biden ‘won’ the race.

“In one exchange, Democrat Jon Ossoff asked Clayton point-blank, “’Who won the 2020 election?’

“’I’m not going to do this with you,’ Clayton responded.

“’This is a job interview. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee,’ Ossoff replied. He then repeated, ‘Who won the 2020 election?’ Clayton responded that he had ‘already answered the question.'”

Clayton danced the same two-step with Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. He refused to say Biden “won” the 2020, but that he was “certified” the winner by virtue of the electoral votes he received.

It baffles me to end in sight why these individuals would choose to damage the integrity of the electoral system based on the Big Lie being fomented by the liar in chief. This game has been going on since that election, which President Biden won a slim but undeniable Electoral College majority and a 7 million popular vote majority. Trump, though, still has none of it and, of course, he instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that injured hundreds of people and killed several others.

Trump’s team has repeatedly refused to answer the simplest of questions regarding the 2020 election. They have demonstrated their disgusting fealty to a convicted felon over the U.S. Constitution. They make me sick.

national news

ICE goons are back at it

The individuals who comprise the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency do not deserve to be called “law enforcement officers,” as they routinely break the law with actions that result in the deaths of innocent U.S. residents.

I’ll stick with terms I believe more closely describe the character of these masked, heavily armed and unidentifiable individuals.

You know, terms like goons, thugs, creeps, crooks … and toss in a**holes.

These ICE goons keep killing people they should never have stopped in the first place. At last count, I’ve heard 11 people have died at the hands of ICE thugs. This also shouldn’t surprise a single American patriot, which is that Donald Trump — the POTUS who elevated ICE to the front of our discussion on immigration — never says a word that is remotely critical of what we can know about the deaths of these victims.

ICE agents continue to run amok among us. They continue to pounce on residents hiding behind those masks while adorned with body armor and carrying weapons designed to inflict maximum pain on those who dare to resist. Many of them don’t bother to inform the arrested the reason they are being detained. Their task, seemingly as defined by the Homeland Security department, is to intimidate the public.

Nothing I say on this blog will change anything. Trump will continue to deploy the thugs to seek migrants from sh**hole countries. Just know that ICE only disgraces itself in the eyes of Americans who are repulsed by the behavior of individuals who break the law while pretending to enforce it.

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