Music Video Of the Wek - April 4, 2025

"Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)" by Leo Sayer  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Liberation?

I have too much to cover in one post, but as I have other things I want to talk about later on on this blog - possibly including comments about my other blog, which I am shutting down later this spring - I'll try.

First, Liberation Day.  Yesterday was Liberation Day, because Donald Trump said it was the day we'd been liberated from foreign domination of  American market.  We were "liberated" from German cars, French wine, Japanese electronics and Swedish furniture because Trump is placing an average tariff of 29 percent on all countries still part of the Paris climate accord.  As a result, every imported product sold here will be priced high above what they should be.  And any products produced domestically, be it by an American or a foreign company, will be priced higher because the manufacturers will know that they can't be undercut.  

Trump, by the way, ordered domestic manufacturers, including the Paris-based Stellantis, not to raise prices of their vehicles.  The muffled sound you hear coming from Detroit is suppressed snickering.

As for foreign products . . .  well, let me use Volkswagen as an example.  Trump's tariffs are meant to discourage us from buying foreign vehicles and en-courage us to buy Chevrolets and Fords.  Apart from the latter half of the nineties, when I owned a Toyota Tercel out of necessity, I have owned nothing but Volkswagens since 1990 because domestic cars are so dull.  Now, more than ever, I'd better hang on to my 2012 Golf tooth and nail because tariffs will raise prices so high on foreign cars that the Golf GTI and R (imported from Germany) and even the once-cheap Jetta (imported from Mexico) will be out of reach.  Parts for my car will be expensive enough, since Trump is imposing tariffs on them too.  And all VW will offer for sale in America are SUVs, just like Chevrolet (except for the Corvette) and Ford (except for the Mustang) now do.

In short, everything will be expensive, some products (including Post Shredded Wheat cereal, made in Canada) may be unavailable completely, and lots of merchants and merchants' employees, along with importers, import-car dealers, customs officers, and virtually everyone else will be out of a job.  And then comes a recession.  I'm luckier than most.  I own my house outright, I have a recession-proof job (as well as a second job that's not recession-proof) and I am single, with no family whatsoever to support.  But my long-awaited and long-postponed trip to Europe . . . well, it might be postponed a bit longer, because Trump's recession will make it impossible to travel.  A depression will also have the benefit (for Trump) to force any Americans ready to undertake the very expensive process of moving out of the country to stay where they are.

And for Americans who already have made the move, to, say, Germany . . . yeah, well, they're going to regret the move when the Russians, having reconquered Ukraine and Poland, march through Berlin a second time.

As for the tariffs . . .  financial institutions are rightfully alarmed, fearing the worst.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.71 percent as I type, with a 35 percent chance of recession.  The Standard & Poor's gross-domestic-product forecasts have fallen as a result of Trump's tariff effects, which could cause the weakest post-pandemic growth since 2022.

I mentioned automobiles . . . prices for cars could rise by as much as 31 percent, and not just imported models - also domestic models with high import content, which could see increases higher than the overall average.  (Forgot about that, didn't you, Trump?)  Foreigners are now boycotting American products, particularly those that come from Republican states.  Tourism is already being affected, as foreigners are canceling trips to the U.S., though Americans (at least those with the means to do so) are likely to continue traveling to foreign locales . . . unless Trump declares martial law in response to anti-Trump demonstrations, in which case no one leaves.

And while all this tariff business was going on . . .  Democratic U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey (above) - my Senator - stopped being a cautious moderate and rediscovered his progressive roots as a councilman and mayor of Newark.  He took to the floor of the U.S. Senate in a 25-hour speech that eclipsed then-Democratic then-Senator Strom Thurmond's record filibuster speech against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (which took place on August 28 of that year, exactly six years to the day before the March on Washington) from his first term representing South Carolina as the longest Senate speech in history.  Senator Booker deliberately wanted to break that record to make a longer speech for civil rights, as well as a speech that chronicled every violation of the rule of law committed by Trump Mark Two.  That is why he was guaranteed to break Thurmond's record, so long as he had a steady supply of coffee - he had more than enough material.  A Senate speech chronicle all of Trump's crimes from January 2025 to the beginning of April 2025 would have to go for a week - in relays. 

For doing something rare among Senate Democrats - standing up to Trump - Cory Booker not only won back the respect of progressives who dismissed him as a centrist hack, he left many Democrats wondering why on earth Charles Schumer is the leader of Senate Democrats.  As for Booker, this speech was definitely a liberation - for himself and any Democrats still taking the advice of an overpriced consultant.  

Well, that's the end of this post.  Did I cover everything that happened this week so far?  I'm not sure.  I think there were other stories, but I probably forgot them after Trump's tariffs flooded the zone.

I'm free.

And freedom tastes of reality.   

Correction: April 3, 2025

In my March 23 post about Time Walz, I said he was term-limited as Governor of Minnesota.  He is not.  He can run for a third term in 2026.  The error, which I deeply regret, has been corrected. 

Meet De Pressing

Kristen Welker is a reason I'm ending my beautiful-women picture blog.

One of the articles of faith the led me to create that blog was that women of all backgrounds, not just actresses, models and dancers, are beautiful.  That would certainly be true, of course, of TV newswomen . . .  like Kristen Welker.  I had always emphasized the journalistic qualifications of women I have featured as much of their beauty, and when I first posted the picture of her above on my beautiful-women picture blog in July 2011, Kristen Welker - then an NBC reporter - seemed to be the perfect example.

And my followers agreed - the post got 56,436 pageviews, the most views any post on my blog had ever gotten.  It was also gratifying and reassuring to see so much interest in Kristen Welker in light of her mixed heritage - she's the daughter of a white father and a black mother.  This led me to write the following paragraph on my blog: 

"I have to say once again that I'm very pleased that a post of a biracial woman, at a time of increased racial animosity in America, has gotten so much attention. Not just in pageviews, but in comments; my original post of Ms. Welker has received ten comments, all favorable (adjectives used to describe her have included 'hot,' 'smart,' 'beautiful,' 'knowledgeable,' 'articulate,' 'focused,' 'elegant,' and 'professional'). Her transcendental quality as a woman of black and white origin proves that racism is slowly dying."

I was wrong about racism slowly dying, of course, but not as wrong as I was about Kristen Welker, who has since turned out to be just another corporate-news-media stooge.  When I posted this picture of her on my beautiful-women picture blog, in 2011, Kristen Welker was just a reporter at NBC.  But in September 2023, she succeeded Chuckles the Clown (also known as Chuck Todd) as the moderator of  NBC's "Meet the Press."  I eagerly awaited her debut on the program, only to see her "interview" Donald Trump and get run off course by his lies and half-truths instead of countering his falsehoods.   That was bad enough.  But what happened this past Sunday was too much - and inspired less flattering adjectives to describe Welker, such as "appalling," "lunkheaded," unserious," "clueless" and "derelict."

She brought up in a phone interview with Trump the topic of Trump's ambition for run for a third presidential term and asked if he was just kidding about that, but he said he was "not joking."  He said that his astonishing popularity in the polls demanded that he run again, and he offered possible end runs around the constitutional ban on third presidential terms that has been in place since 1951.  Welker failed to challenge Trump abut his poll numbers - they're actually in the toilet - and at no point did Welker call out Trump for citing explain to Trump why he couldn't circumvent the 22nd Amendment and how his ideas to do so were, essentially, illegal.  She just blew it off.

Welker also blew something up - her credibility.

Even though my beautiful-women picture blog will be shut down at the end of May, I went ahead and deleted my two posts of Kristen Welker (the second one was an experiment to see if it would get as many views as the first; it never even came close).  My blog may be only be around for two more months, but I don't even want Kristen Welker on my blog for even two more weeks.  I'm actually embarrassed - humiliated, even - that this blog attempted to feature TV newswomen known for their beauty but still celebrated them for their professionalism and substance as journalists . . . though, when you get right down to it, there I was, objectifying for her looks an NBC reporter who demonstrated the Peter Principle by getting Tim Russert's old job. 😧

And somehow it was my most popular post. 😞

Olympic Response

This is not an April Fool's joke. 

I got a reply from my letter to outgoing International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach asking - more like demanding, really - that the 2024 Olympics be moved out not only out of Los Angeles but out of the United States entirely because of Trump and his crimes against the international community, that pompous euphemism for the world. I got a short but decisive reply from Christian Klaue, the IOC's director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs. the letter read as follows:

Dear Mr. Maginnis:

Thank you very much for letter addressed to the IOC.  We have taken note of your opinion.

The IOC, of course, is respecting the democratic decisions of the citizens of the United States of America.

Uhh . . . yeah.

The International Olympic Committee awarded the 2028 Olympics to Los Angeles back in 2017, when the thinking was that Trump would be long gone by then.  The committee members got exactly the situation they had hoped to avoid.

Respecting the democratic decisions of the voters, eh?  The IOC awarded the 1936 Games to Berlin before the 1932 national elections in Germany and before President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor, By the end of 1935, all opposition parties had been dissolved, the Dachau concentration camp had opened, the Night of the Long Knives had taken place, the Nuremberg Laws were handed down, and President Hindenburg had died, allowing Hitler to combine the duties of the German presidency with the chancellorship and create the office of Führer.  He used the Berlin Olympics as a showcase for National Socialist values, and despite black American track stars Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, Germany won more medals than any other country at Berlin.  Hitler was pleased with the outcome.

I understand that the IOC respected the results of the 1979 Soviet legislative elections and went ahead with the 1980 Olympics, awarded to Moscow in 1974, which was full of cheating by Olympic officials, as well as crippled by the U.S.-led boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  The results of the 1979 elections were decisively in favor of the Communists, which should have been expected, given that the Commies ran unopposed.   

Speaking of boycotts, Canadians and Europeans are boycotting American tourism, mainly because they're afraid of getting picked up by the authorities for saying anything bad about Trump in public and getting arrested by Kash Patel's FBI, the new secret police.  If the IOC won't move the 2028 Games out of America, other major industrialized nations - even the British, who have never boycotted an Olympiad ever - may choose not to send teams to LA.  I'm not going to advocate that, however.  I think it would be inappropriate for me to urge foreign ambassadors to the United States to relay the idea of a 2028 Olympics boycott to their leaders back home.  What to do about sending teams to the U.S. to compete in the Los Angeles Olympics under Trump is a decision only those leaders can make.  Besides, Elon Musk might have me arrested.  

In the meantime, Zimbabwean swimming champion Kirsty Coventry, who is white is and the sports minister of the black-majority government of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), became the first woman, the youngest person (at 41), and the first person from an African nation to be elected IOC president.  I'm not going to write a new letter to Ms. Coventry to repeat the same request I made of Herr Bach.  But I do want to say something in the open to the new IOC president:  Honey, you're gonna be miserable.

No Longer "Beautiful"

While March may be going out like a lamb, I'm here to announce that my blog "Pictures of Beautiful Women" will be going out like a light on Saturday, May 31.

"What?" you're asking.  How could I, a self-described aficionado of feminine beauty, suddenly want to give up on this blog after nearly nineteen years?  Well, when I started the blog in 2006, it was a different world.  Popular culture was much less political then, posting pictures of women known for their beauty - actresses, models, dancers - was a more harmless diversion, and appreciating feminine beauty wasn't necessarily misogynistic and problematic.  That is no longer true, for reasons I will explain farther along in this post.  But there's more to it than that, and what triggered my decision to end this blog came from an unlikely source.

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a fellow who runs a YouTube channel featuring nostalgia videos of old TV commercials, each video hosted by a young actress playing a character.  I featured a few of these actresses out of character on my blog, and the gentleman who runs the channel requested that I remove these posts within five business days for reasons that boil down to intellectual property concerns.  Because I'm a nice guy, I removed them not within five business days but within five minutes.  I never realized that someone might object to such seemingly harmless posts, as I have a disclaimer on my beautiful-women picture blog, saying: "Unless specifically stated otherwise, none of these pictures were taken by me. These are merely pictures I like, of women I like, that I want to share with others. They are either from various Internet sources or scanned from periodicals." 

Not good enough.

The truth is, we're living in different times now, and Donald Trump has made it impossible for men to appreciate feminine beauty in even the most innocent and most tasteful context.  Because Trump has repeatedly crossed the line between merely appreciating beautiful women and harassing and abusing them, it's become toxic to even acknowledge a woman's beauty unless you're her boyfriend or husband.  You expected to, when in the presence or at the sight of a beautiful woman, look at her and not acknowledge her looks.  Maybe that's an appropriate posture to take for TV news personalities with movie-star looks like Abby Phillip and Cecilia Vega, but you're expected to do the same for actual movie stars.  The days when you could appreciate American actresses like Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor and European actresses like Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren for their looks as well as for their acting ability are gone forever . . . over a long time ago. 

But there are other reasons.  One is that for every timeless icon I have featured on my blog - Catherine Deneuve, for example - there are at least a dozen women who were famous for two weeks, only to see their TV show get canceled or see their latest movie flop.  Though mostly the former, and, thanks to their failures of their sitcoms, the fan clubs of Jennifer Finnigan and Dreama Walker, for example, no longer need any full-time employees.  Ditto for many former female on-camera meteorologists on the Weather Channel (I still miss Vivian Brown).

Another reason is that it became obvious that filling in my blog with media personalities was not a good idea.  I featured several TV anchorwomen and reporters from national and local news broadcasts and thought I was honoring their profession rather than objectifying them simply because, hey, I was leaving out Fox News and Fox Broadcasting-affiliated newswomen.  Uh, yeah . . .  how can I justify featuring a TV newswoman from South Bend, Indiana or Boise Idaho - two places I've never been to - when I've obviously never seen their work on TV?  I can't.  I'm reducing them to eye candy.  I personally wouldn't be offended if some woman started a handsome-men picture blog and showed some local-news anchormen with chiseled features, but that's still reducing on-air journalists to eye candy when so many of them are trying to be taken seriously.  And Kristen Welker - the most popular subject on my blog - has, as the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," has relinquished any claim to being taken seriously.  I'll address that in a later post.

Another reason is the Grim Reaper.  I have nearly two thousand different women on my blog, and in hundred years they - and I - will all be dead.  I only post living women on my blog, but death will catch up to all of us one day, and in some cases, it already has caught up to many women I've featured.  I don't post any more pictures of them going forward, but the fact they were alive when I first featured them doesn't change the fact that they're no longer alive now.  Leaving the old posts online suddenly doesn't make sense anymore.  

But the biggest reason is this:  Some of the women I have featured turned out to be contemptible horrible people.  For example, I had happily featured pictures of Sheila Johnson, a leading black model from the 1980s, for much of my blog's lifetime. I became friends with her on Facebook and I had a happy association with her . . . .until April 2023, when I found old catalog pictures from her portfolio online - a couple dozen of them - and I posted them to her Facebook timeline as well as to a Facebook group I'd started in her honor. She showed her gratitude toward my magnanimous gesture by unfriending me because she thought I was a pest and invading her privacy . . . when all I wanted to do was share pictures from her own modeling work with her - pictures she hadn't likely seen in 35 years (which she deleted!). In a fit of rage, I shut down my Facebook group for Sheila, blocked her Facebook account, and stopped adding pictures of her on my blog.  My earlier posts of Sheila remained . . . but why would I even want to keep those up?  Despite the fact that my first post showing pictures of her is my second most popular post?  She was one of my biggest model crushes in the 1980s; now I feel a great pang of regret every time her name is mentioned.

I'm sorry to say that I have too many examples of women I regretted featuring on my blog to list in full here, though they include former CBS reporter Lara Logan, who turned out to be a right-wing South African jerk, and Maye Musk, who gave birth to one (and defends him).  And you already know about Joy Reid, whom I removed from my blog for her pert attitude in questioning a Florida politician's manhood and denying the fact that she had done so.  But the top prize for Worst Person On My Blog (a tip of the hat to Keith Olbermann) is MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, whom I featured in 2008.  For over a decade she and her husband Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of MSNBC's morning program " Morning Joe," had been bashing Trump and his far-right views on political power, and Brzezinski carved out a niche for herself  for promoting women's issues and women in business, with a segment on "Morning Joe" about female empowerment called "Know Your Value."

As I now like to say, she doesn't know her own.  On November 15, 2024, she and Scarborough went to Mar-a-Lago for a fence-mending session with Trump after his election victory ten days earlier.  Having kissed Donald's posterior, the couple revealed the visit to Trump's mansion on their next show following the genuflection.  

"It’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but talking with him," Brzezinski said.  She also said, "For those asking why we would speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, I would ask back: Why wouldn’t we?"

Because you and Joe had repeatedly compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, Mika?

While Maye Musk, Mika Brzezinski, and any other women I have featured who either endorsed or capitulated to MAGA don't even have enough awfulness put together to equal the awfulness of Eva Braun - not even when you add the awfulness of women I have disavowed for reasons having nothing to do with MAGA - I believe that, for me, it's time to do something different, and that starts with pulling the plug on my blog.  It also means I'll be setting up fan group pages for some of the women I have featured on my blog on Facebook, which is more enjoyable and far less consequential.  But after having made some dubious choices for my beautiful-women picture blog, mainly due to filling a self-imposed quota of a hundred new subjects a year, I have had enough of celebrating feminine beauty in that medium.  It just doesn't satisfy me anymore.  And it's not fun anymore.

Sorry.    

Not Out Like a Lamb

The end of March used to be a quiet time as winter made the transition into spring and the weather calmed down.  Not anymore.

A cold front is pushing through tomorrow and severe weather is predicted for the East Coast.  The Storm Prediction Center - which, thankfully, has not yet been emaciated by Elon Musk - was looking at the possibility of severe weather in the East as early as this past Friday, which is pretty early and thus rather ominous.  Yesterday was pretty warm, with temperatures in northern New Jersey pushing 80 degrees Fahrenheit - not the sort of temperatures you should expect in New Jersey in March.  Even late March.

The map above shows a NAM projection for 8:00 P.M. tomorrow. While it seems that the worst of the storms will hit the Washington, D.C. area, there's also a clear line of likely potent storms bearing down on the Greater New York area from northwestern New Jersey.  This March will not go out quietly . . . though the power outages this storm front may cause might silence millions. 

The Wheels Come Off

Trump just announced a 25 percent tariff on all imported cars beginning this coming Wednesday.

Well, there goes my hope of buying an Audi this year! 

Now, I kid, as I am not in the market for an Audi, but that is going to make motor vehicles - already too expensive because of the trend toward large SUVs and all of the unnecessary technology the automakers are putting into motor vehicles, be it due to customer demand or government regulations -almost completely out of reach for the average consumer.

So that Volkswagen Golf GTI you've been looking at, already overpriced at $32,445, will set you back about 40 grand instead!  And I don't even want to think of how much a Golf R will cost.

Oh yeah, for the record, a base Volkswagen Golf costs the U.S. equivalent of $26,291 and would cost about the same with Trump's tariff as a Golf GTI without the tariff . . . if you could buy one in These States.

Trump appears to be counting on American consumers opting more for American-made motor vehicles, including those made at factories of foreign companies such as Volkswagen (great, more Altases on the road!), Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai . . . but with GM, Ford, and the Stellantis brand group that used to be called Chrysler reaping the most benefits.  So what if the Big Three own plants in Canada and have domestic-branded vehicles brought over from north of the 49th parallel - long considered domestic vehicles - and these tariffs will make their Canadian-made vehicles more expensive as well?  But they will reap the benefits of the tariffs  - they'll pass the cost onto the consumer.

That's assuming anyone can afford Detroit's wares.  A Pennsylvania Chrysler Group dealership in the Philadelphia suburb of Glen Mills told a TV reporter that a Ram pickup (not a Ford Ram pickup, as Michael Cohen has called it - Ford makes the F-150), which normally would go for $80,000, will go for roughly $100,000 under Trump's tariff.  A lot of people are trying to fathom the ludicrousness of offering a pickup truck for sale at $100,000.  I'm trying to imagine why anyone would pay even 80 grand for a pickup truck.  Hello?  It's a pickup truck!  It's meant to carry bales of hay and half a ton of loose topsoil!  What's up with the leather seating and walnut accents in that damn interior?

I'm also trying to imagine why anyone would want to buy a Tesla Cybertruck.

Trump's tariff will not only make new motor vehicles impossible for the people who voted for him to buy, it may make it very difficult for some foreign automakers to survive in the U.S. market and maybe even some domestic automakers to survive period.  Trump is trying to force the cost of the tariff onto the automakers by not increasing manufacturer's suggested retail prices (MSRPs),c which would cripple their ability to make a profit from sales.  The tariff may even have the unintended consequence of putting Tesla out of business.

This is just a hunch . . . but the 2025 New York Auto Show, which opens in a few weeks, may be the last New York auto show I ever go to.

Music Video Of the Week - March 28, 2025

"Space Captain" by Joe Cocker  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Got the Signal?

The operation against Houthi militants Yemen was a success.  American firepower was able to repel the Houthis and do serious damage to their positions, weakening their ability to attack Israel with long-range missiles and harass shipping lanes in the Red Sea.  And when the attack occurred over a week ago, reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, was following the developing attack from home, rooting for the success of the attack.

Because he'd gotten war plans for Yemen texted to him on the Signal chat app.

Goldberg was given top-secret information in advance when national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently logged him on to a Signal chat in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratliff, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Vice President Vance discussed attack plans for strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and put national-security secrets on an online chat that anyone could have hacked into while it was going on - emojis and all.  

Goldberg knew all about these secrets in advance - kudos to him for sitting on the information until after the attack was carried out.  By releasing details of the chat after the operation, Goldberg has not only preserved national security (not part of his job description), he's made the incompetency of the White House advisers the story.  The national insecurity officers chatting on this Signal conversation blamed Goldberg for the story, insisting that it was a smear campaign against the Republican administration . . . even though the chat has been verified as having actually happened. 

Once Mike Waltz came clean about having added Jeffrey Goldberg - one of his media contacts - by mistake, he explained that he was trying to sign on someone else based on initials - JG - because, that, apparently, is how you store names on Signal.  Waltz was trying to add another administration official, Jamieson Greer.  Who? I looked up Jamieson Greer, I was left wondering why Waltz would invite onto a chat about war plans . . . the United States Trade Representative.

So why didn't these people discuss plans to bomb Yemen on a more secure line?  Apparently they thought it was better to go on an app that the Kremlin could tap instead of going on an ultra-secure line that the President would be privy too.  That was it - they didn't what the orange blob in the Oval Office to know about the particulars.

Even the White House national insecurity staffers don't want the boss to know what's going on because they're afraid he's going to louse things up more than they already are!

Which may explain why Jamieson Greer was supposed to be invited.

Oh yeah, the Houthis just fired more long-range missiles into Israel again.  Guess that operation wasn't a success after all.

Cyberflop

In 2017, when Trump began his first (but, alas, not only) term as President, I was still in the afterglow of having driven a Tesla Model S at a special event sponsored by the brand.  It was at that time that the shark that Tesla would eventually jump started swimming around the company, as Elon Musk began undermining what had been the biggest success story in American auto manufacturing for a new company since Walter Chrysler founded the company that bore his name.  

In 2017, Musk unveiled the second generation of the Tesla Roadster,  and he started taking orders for the car immediately, with a thousand people paying $250,000 for a new car.  That totals to $250 million, a quarter of a billion bucks, that Musk pocketed.  To this day, no one who paid for a Mark 2 Roadster has received a car; it's never been produced.  Instead, Musk focused on entering the truck market with a newfangled pickup that was styled to look like a television remote - the Cybertruck.  What?  A truck designed to resemble a futuristic vehicle in a Hollywood movie?  Why not freshen up or redesign the cars in the rest of the lineup? Nah, too boring.

Musk promised miracles with this vehicle.  The stainless-steel panels would be easier to maintain.  They would be bulletproof.  It would be priced at the same level as and have a bigger payload than conventional pickup trucks.  And the braking system would channel energy used to bring the truck to a stop back into the electric motor in order to make the brakes last as long as the vehicle itself!

Uh, yeah.  The Cybertruck has panels that get dirty easily and are hard to clean, bullets can still have hideous pockmarks on the panels, it costs about a hundred grand, the payload is smaller than an F-150, and Musk's ballyhooed regenerative braking system is an implausible idea that must of come out of one of those sci-fi books he loves.  

I'm tempted to say that Tesla has become the automotive equivalent of one of those real-estate companies that sell worthless properties to land speculators for enormous sums - "You didn't buy any property there, did you?  I swear there was a lake!" - but that's not entirely true, because unlike the second-generation Roadster, the Cybertruck actually got produced.  But not very well.  Not only are its stainless-steel panels worthless, they don't fit properly onto the truck, and their edges are so sharp, you could peel a potato with them.  The single windshield wiper is so pliable, it's limper than an overcooked ramen noodle,, and the slope of the windshield is so low-slung that rain water cascades up it.

Also, the Cybertruck is so big and bulky that one can easily hit a pedestrian if you don't look carefully enough, and if the cameras aren't working (a typical problem with the Cybertruck), you could run over someone and not even realize it until after its too late.  For that reason, the European Union has banned the sale of the Cybertruck in its member states for its failure to conform to EU pedestrian impact standards - standards the American automobile regulatory system does not have, thanks to a lax regulatory culture in Washington and the demand for monster wagons on light-truck chasses.  And when it comes to providing safety for those outside the vehicle as well as those inside, the Chevrolet Suburban and the Ford Expedition aren't exactly all that much better.  And all of those SUVs and pickup trucks posing threats to smaller vehicles are the reason we don't have cars like the Volkswagen Polo and Renault Twingo offered for sale in These States. 

Did I happen to mention the Cybertruck's loose-fitting plastic gas-pedal cover?

Road testers at auto magazine and on auto-news YouTube sites have known about the Cybertruck's defects for months, but the Cybertruck's flaws are only coming to the fore now among the general public thanks to Tesla's current woes and Musk's megalomaniacal  desire to dismantle American government. Tesla has become the auto industry's most discredited brand; the Cybertruck has become the auto industry's most discredited Tesla.

Tesla at this point is probably beyond saving, but Musk will remain unscathed because he'll still have his billons as well as his profits from Starlink and SpaceX (which has numerous government contacts.  Butt the Cybertruck should prove that, far from being another Walter Chrysler, Elon Musk is turning out to be another Malcolm Bricklin. 

Having failed to start his own car company, Malcolm Bricklin decided to sell us the Yugo instead. 

Paranoia Strikes Deep (State)

Trump has been trying to dismantle the government with a vengeance.

In addition, he's also aimed his gunsights at liberal-leaning law firms and Democratic activist groups .  He's even suggested that MNBC and CNN should be illegal.  And what's his explanation for all this?  he says that the Washington elites and the deep state are trying to prevent him from reforming government.

There's actually a precedent for Trump's insistence that the government and the legal system are trying to stop him from accomplishing what he's trying to accomplish in the public sector. The federal legal system actually did try to stop people from accomplishing things back in the 1940s and 1950s - they denigrated people who protested against segregation, the destruction of public transportation (which benefited the Big Three and Big Oil), or in favor of a national medical insurance program that Harry Truman tried to get passed. It wasn't just Joe McCarthy's communist which hunts; how about J. Edgar Hoover, who served under every President from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon and had files on almost all of them? So a lot of people find Trump's argument plausible.

This is what happens when you allow paranoia and conspiracy theories to take root and also allow nefarious people like Donald Trump - and Big Oil executives, to whom he's aligned - to ensure that the system is rigged in their own favor.

Kamala Down, Tim Up

After losing to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, Democrats realized they they had developed a curse when it came to nominating women to run for President involving their male vice presidential running mates - if your you're going to nominate a woman for President, never let her running mate be a guy named Tim. 😉

After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, she remained in the public eye to troll Trump and continue living rent-free in Trump's head.  She did so based on a delusional hope that the Democrats would give her, despite having been a failure as a Democratic presidential nominee, a second chance - something no failed Democratic presidential nominee has been given since 1956.  Her 2016 vice presidential running mate, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, dropped from the radar screen entirely, returning to the Senate and doing, well, Senate stuff.  In that sense, Kaine adhered to the strict American tradition of failed vice presidential nominees of any party whose names aren't Franklin Roosevelt or Earl Warren being forgotten more than actual Vice Presidents.  In the aftermath of the disaster that was the 2024 election, however, the roles have been reversed.

Once January 20, 2025 came and went, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promptly disappeared.  It was easy to see why former President Biden dropped out of sight.  At 82, he earned a nice long rest, and nowadays he's probably kicking back in his basement den, contemplating plans for a presidential library and possibly making notes for his memoirs.  Harder to understand was why former Vice President Harris would keep a low profile to the point of having no profile.  She hasn't trolled Trump online or sent out any derogatory press releases since January 20 - good grief, even Hillary Clinton has been more visible in the past two months.  The most plausible reason is that Harris too needs a rest, and she also needs to decide whether to run for President again or run for governor of California in 2026.  (Of course, the very real possibility of Trump declaring martial law for a trivial reason would make that a moot question.)

And then, there's her former running mate, Tim Walz.   

Walz started his vice presidential campaign ridiculing Trump and James David Vance as "weird" for their public utterances and their world views.  And it registered.  It gave the Democratic ticket a big boost.  Then, inexplicably - unless they were Trump moles - Democratic consultants told Walz to tone down his "weird" rhetoric, and the Minnesota governor retreated a bit in the background, which allowed Harris a bigger spotlight.  When the election returns showed that giving Harris a bigger spotlight proved to have done more harm than good,  Walz was expected to join Kaine, Lloyd Bentsen, William E. Miller (Goldwater's running mate, who was the first Catholic Republican nominated for Vice President, and who appeared in one of the first "Do you know me?" commercials for American Express), Estes Kefauver, Charles McNary, Arthur Sewall, and Theodore Frelinghuysen (gotta mention someone from New Jersey), among others, in the Archipelago of Forgotten Failed Vice Presidential Nominees.  Instead, Walz has begun touring the American heartland, showing up in Republican U.S. House districts and giving speeches ridiculing Trump and his policies - and also ridiculing Elon Musk and his mere existence.  He has been scoring a lot of points for his efforts - especially when he joked about having an app on his phone that allows him to watch Tesla stock as it sinks to new lows.   For from being forgotten - as Jonathan Last of The Bulwark predicted would happen - Walz is a star once again.

One thing Walz hasn't done is explain what Democrats should stand for in 2026 and 2028 as opposed to merely being against Trump and his agenda.  Perhaps one should look at Walz's record as governor of Minnesota - a record that includes universal school breakfast and lunches for the Gopher State's schoolchildren - as a clue to what the Democrats should stand for.

And what office would Walz run for if he plans to seek another office, assuming he doesn't run for a third term as governor of Minnesota at the end at the end of next year?  Walz has already ruled out running for Senator Tina Smith's seat, which is up in Minnesota in 2026, and there's no Senate seat up for election in Minnesota in 2028, so what office higher than a state governorship might Walz be looking at, assuming we're not under martial law before the end of the decade?  The Presidency, maybe?

Franklin Roosevelt.  Earl Warren.  They too were failed vice presidential nominees with brilliant futures behind them. 

Gavin Newscum

That's the name Donald Trump gave the current governor of California.  And these days, alas, it fits him.

Gavin Newsom, long considered a presidential possibility in the Democratic Party, has branched out into podcasting as his administration becomes a lamer duck by the day.  Smart idea - podcasting is in these days, and it's a great way for anyone to get their names and reputations out in public.  And Newsom has always been politically savvy, having pretty much destroyed Ron DeSantis' political ambitions in an on-camera debate with the Florida governor on Fox News.

But when Newsom launched his podcast with its debut episode, his own political ambitions were smashed like DeSantis'.  And again, it was Newsom who did the smashing.  Newsom's strengths as a Democratic politician have always been his support for environmental causes, gay rights, and other issues dear to the hearts of mainstream Democrats and progressives.  So imagine how many jaws in the anti-Trump left dropped when Newsom featured as his first guest on his "This Is Gavin Newsom" (clever title, huh? 😛 ) the right-wing flamethrower Charlie Kirk, whose misogynistic and homophonic remarks have made him one of the biggest rhymes-with-glass-poles in America.  And if that weren't bad enough, his next guest was Steve Bannon, the architect of the xenophobic, authoritarian MAGA movement.  

What Newsom has done is give a platform to two of the most dangerous voices against the democratic system.  I mean, sure, he's trying to expand beyond his Democratic echo chamber, and he wants to understand what makes MAGA tick, but that should not be the objective.  We shouldn't care what drives MAGAts; the fact that they're there and a threat to our system of government should be enough for us to understand and oppose them.  Now is not the time for reaching a hand across the table to the other side when the other side is a fascist plot to take over America.  Newsom seems to think he can charm MAGAts into thinking things through and realizing what fools they've been for embracing Donald Trump.   That's just the sort of politician - a guy who wants so much to be liked by as many people as possible - you should avoid.

And so, Gavin Newsom has gone from being a potential future President to being the Gary hart of the 2020s.  By that, I don't mean that Newsom is this decade's suave, sophisticated Democratic A-list politico from a Western state.  I mean he's self-important and reckless, and he just ended his own political career with an egregiously dumb move.  Having Kirk and Bannon on his podcast suggests what you'd get if the leader of a rising star in the German Social Democratic Party of the 1920s had a radio show and invited Adolf Hitler as a guest to promote "Mein Kampf."

Remember when Gary Hart said that the Western states represented the future of the Democratic Party and America?  Uh, yeah.  First Hart's own Bimini affair, then the complete disappearance of Montanans Brian Schweitzer and Steve Bullock, then Kamala Harris' failed presidential campaigns, now Newsom . . . do Western Democrats have a future left?  Or Democrats from any region of the country, for that matter? 

Music Video Of the Week - March 21, 2025

"Jackie Blue" by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Promises, Promises, Promises . . .

Not too long ago I said that Tesla enthusiasts and owners who wanted to save the brand from Elon Musk should try to buy enough stock to make Musk a minority stockholder.  Uhh, yeah . . . there's just one thing wrong with that strategy - Elon Musk already is a minority stockholder.

How does the Musko Man stay at the top at Tesla?  How does he remain CEO of the company?  Well, you know how's always talking about how features on Tesla cars like self-driving technology are coming soon?  And then it doesn't happen?  That's Musk's game.  He's been promising that these wonderful and fantastic features will be available for Teslas next year for over half a decade.  Because he keeps promising how these features will soon be available, as early as next year, he leaves the board of directors no choice but to stick with him.  Except that, like Paul McCartney's mythical grandfather in A Hard Day's Night, he'll cost you a number of breaches of promises.  

But maybe it won't be Musk's decimation of the federal government or his unfulfilled promises that do him in.  Maybe the thing that does him in will be one of his own products - a product he's actually delivered. 

I am, of course, talking about the Cybertruck, Tesla's first (and likely only) truck model, which receives over-the-air tech updates and looks like a TV remote with wheels.  As with most Tesla products these days, the Cybertruck breaks down a lot, but now it has a newly documented problem, which has led to a recall of 46,000 vehicles produced.  Apparently the problem is that an exterior trim panel can, in the company's own words, "delaminate and detach from the vehicle," which increases the risk of a crash and create a road hazard. 

In other these trucks literally fall apart on the road.

I'm old enough to remember when Tesla quality was celebrated - right about the same time Trump began his first presidential campaign.  Quality has long since fallen by the wayside since then, and the Cybertruck is fast becoming an amalgam of Tesla's manufacturing flaws - all rolled up into one literally and figuratively ugly travesty.

Schumuck

Now that I think of it, I do have a few words of my own about Charles Schumer's decision to give Donald Trump and Elon Musk what they wanted by supporting a continuing resolution for the rest of the 2025 fiscal year's budget with severe cuts and with full presidential authority on tariffs.  Let me be as succinct as possible.

Schumer, as Senate Democratic leader had two choices, both bad.  He could either support a continuing budget resolution sent over to the Senate from the House crafted by Republicans with House Democrats frozen out despite the Republicans' paper-thin House majority, a resolution that ceded most if not all power over the budget and other issues to Trump and Musk, or he could have rejected it and let the government shut down, which would have given Trump and Musk just as much leeway to impose their collective will on the federal government as with a continuing resolution - if not more so - and ultimately seen Trump and Musk get their way, but in the latter scenario, the Democrats still would have gone down fighting.  In other words, Schumer had to choose between caving and fighting a losing battle.  He chose to cave.  When the 2026 budget is debated later this year, he will fight a losing battle.  If, indeed, the Democrats have any more opportunities left to fight. Schumer may have squandered the last one, plus any leverage Democrats may have had in the minority in both chambers.

And yet Schumer is still under the illusion that this fight is about spending priorities and policy, not the fight to prevent Trump from assuming dictatorial powers that it is.  To demonstrate just how clueless Schumer is, he thinks that his personal relations with Republican senators are strong enough that he can cut a deal with a couple of them when they're together in the Senate gym while riding their stationery bikes.

Me and the boys,  just me and the boys!

Liberal Oklahoma City podcaster Jennifer Welch's response to Schumer's perceived ability to cut a deal with GOP senators in his gym shorts was to simply demand in the second party that he resign as Senate Democratic leader.

Also House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.  I, for one, never thought I'd see so littel fight and street smarts in two guys from Brooklyn. 

Is it any wonder that the Democrats have a record-low 28 percent approval rating?

St. Patrick's Day 2025

 

Up Chuck

Today I was going to write a post explaining my disgust with Chuck Schumer's decision to surrender to Trump and to Senate Republicans and allow a horrible continuing budget resolution to fund the government for the rest of the 2025 fiscal year, rather than allow a shutdown that could have caused even more damage than a GOP-engineered resolution giving Trump everything he wanted and make the argument that Schumer should have fought it.

But it turns out that former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer made the argument for me.

Thanks, Dan.

Music Video Of the Week - March 14, 2025

"Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Donald Trump, Car Salesman

I understand there was an auto show at the White House.

Donald Trump probably wanted to be an automaker.  Why not?  Henry Ford.  David Dunbar Buick.  Walter Chrysler.  Arthur and Louis Chevrolet.  John and Horace Dodge.  They all achieved something Trump still hasn't - turned their surnames into reputable brands.

Geez, even John DeLorean was more successful at that.

Trump has never made cars - if he had, he would have made Malcolm Bricklin look like Alfred P. Sloan - but thanks to his buddy Elon Musk, a real automaker, he got to sell them.

The trouble is, featuring the entire Tesla lineup at the White House and presenting an infomercial for the press was ethically dubious at best, illegal at worst.

And to remove all doubt that he wasn't just showing them off, Trump even had a list of the prices of the vehicles in Tesla's lineup in his hand - and made sure a camera caught it.

Better that Trump wasn't at a real auto show, though, because he'd be checking out the spokesmodels and grabbing them by their (*SHUT YO' MOUTH!*) in minutes.

One thing, though - after promoting fossil fuels as the linchpin in our energy supply and getting donations from Big Oil, why is Trump suddenly so simpatico with electric cars?  (Not that he could drive a Tesla - like that other evil new Yorker Robert Moses, Trump never drove a car in his life.)

Trump pulled this stunt at the White House to help his benefactor Musk at a time when Tesla sales and stock prices are plummeting in response to Musk's job slashing in the federal government at a time when he should be slashing prices on his cars.  And who's going to buy these cars as a result of Trump's shameless promotion? Certainly not the average American, who's likely unemployed or about to be and likely couldn't afford a Tesla even with what passes for gainful employment these days. 

Even Tesla owners are jumping ship.  Onetime Tesla owners like Sheryl Crow are selling their cars as a way of getting back at Musk, and Crow donated the money she made off selling her car to National Public Radio.  Those keeping their cars are actually buying badges of other car brands and putting them on their Teslas (well, sure, how about a Volkswagen emblem on a Tesla sedan, seeing as the ID.7 isn't coming to These States after all!).

Only one thing wrong - you can't rebrand a Cybertruck.

Let me get something straight.  I love Teslas.  I always have.   True, the brand may have suffered a drop in quality and reliability since the its heady days in the mid-2010s, when Trump began his first presidential campaign.   I test-drove one, though, and I loved it.  And so you can understand why I'm upset to see what Musk is doing to his own company.  Tesla is too good a car to go the way of the DeLorean, which went down in a cocaine-trafficking setup.  The company must be saved.  And there are two things that must be done in order to save it.  First, Tesla's board of directors must fire Elon Musk.

The second thing?  Discontinue the Cybertruck.

America: Let's Call It a Day

I need to post this map again.

After seven weeks in the White House, Donald Trump has dismantled American governmental agencies and destroyed our alliances with Canada, Mexico and the European Union, and even our once-special relationship with Great Britain.  Congressional Republicans won't do anything to stop him, and  congressional Democrats can't do anything to stop him - and even if they could, Democratic leadership is so weak and spineless that their efforts to stop Trump would backfire as soon as they got started.

I know that folks like Robert Reich are arguing that we should not despair and keep up the fight against Trump, and there is growing antipathy to Trump among the American people, but let's face it; Trump and Elon Musk wouldn't be doing what they are doing if they didn't think they could get away with it.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I think the United States should cease to exist. This is not an attitude of doom or  despair - as I see it, it's our only chance of survival.  Even if one assumes we can survive another four years of Donald Trump and he leaves office as scheduled, a hypothetical Democratic President who takes office in January 2029 will be unable to repair the damage Trump has caused or rebuild the institutions or even the foreign alliances that Trump has destroyed.  We're not respected anymore, we're trusted anymore . . . we're not America anymore.

This country is too big to be united on anything and it never will be united in anything but name. Let's stop pretending that New England has anything in common with Texas or that California has anything in common with the Great Lakes states. Breaking up into ten or twelve separate countries and going our separate ways would enable the states of the current Union to co-exist without living with each other. Florida can be as pro-Trump as it wants to be - heck, he lives there - while a Middle Atlantic commonwealth can be as liberal as it wants to be. But we can't be the United States of America anymore. 

I want out.  I want a divorce.  Let's call it a day.

It Don't Matter To Me

It took seven weeks, but the Trump administration finally did something I actually agree with.

It forced the city of Washington, D.C. to dismantle and remove Black Lives Matter Plaza just north of the White House.

I'm sure I know why Trump wants that public art removed.  You, assuming you've followed my blog for awhile, know why I am glad to see it removed.  Because it's not public art.  It's a piece of overdone messaging.

For those who haven't followed my blog for awhile, let me explain.  Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the painting of the words BLACK LIVES MATTER in big yellow letters on two blocks of Sixteenth Street Northwest just north of Lafayette Square in response to Trump clearing out with heavy-handed force peaceful protesters demonstrating against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The two blocks were named "Black Lives Matter Plaza" and the big yellow letters were eventually made permanent, with a few cobblestones and bollards installed to make it look like a real plaza.

From the perspective of wanting to use public art to make a statement about police brutality, the whole idea of Black Lives Matter Plaza was asinine.  Painting a slogan in huge letters on a public street is an act of heavy-handed gigantism, the effect having all the subtlety of a fist in the jaw to make sure observers Get It.  The letters themselves are so gargantuan and oversized that they're best visible from a helicopter.  Maybe Mayor Bowser wanted to get Trump's attention when he was airborne in Marine One, but the effect of this stunt sort of lost its resonance when Joe Biden became President and the message Mayor Bowser was sending was an act of preaching to the converted.  The method of messaging overshadowed the message, much like Trump's reaction to the protesters a few days earlier overshadowed the message of law and order that Trump was trying to convey . . . and contradicted it.

And can we agree that the "plaza" itself was ugly?  The design of the plaza that resulted was a civic joke,  the cobblestones and rows of bollards  looking awkward and charmless.  Far from being a real plaza, the name suggesting a pedestrian space, the street was still accessible to motor vehicles.  In addition to being ugly, it was also redundant, as, as noted here before, Lafayette Square - a real plaza - stands between the southern terminus of Sixteenth Street Northwest and the White House.  And finally, there's the name itself.  Black Lives Matter Plaza is named for a slogan.  A good slogan, a meaningful slogan, but a slogan just the same.  I mean, of course, the great plazas of the world - Trafalgar Square, the Place Vendome, the Piazza San Marco . . . Black Lives Matter Plaza.  Not as dumb-sounding as the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky, but you get the idea.

Of course the PC crowd is all upset about this.  The CEO of the pavement marking company that originally painted the letters called the dismantling of Black Lives Matter Plaza "historically obscene."  It's obscene to dismantle a "plaza" that existed for less than half a decade?  That's not exactly the same as preserving a house Harriet Tubman once stayed in.  Other defenders of the plaza claim that an important message is being erased.  Uh, can I see you in my office, ladies and gents?  You still have the message.  No one is preventing you from saying the message out loud or continuing the Black Lives Matter movement in other ways.  But painting BLACK LIVES MATTER is big letters on two blocks of a street and naming it Black Lives Matter Plaza - I've said it before, and I'll say it again - does not solve anything.  It just makes people feel better.

Oh yeah, when the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality first started in the mid-2010s, there was the suggestion that their slogan should be "Black Lives Matter, Too," the addition of that fourth word meant to suggest that black Americans were a part of our society rather than a people separate from it. The idea was rejected.  Yeah, that worked out, didn't it?

Mayor Bowser said that the two blocks of the former Black Lives Matter Plaza will be replaced with new murals.  Good, hopefully, they'll be more colorful, more universal, and also more creative that painting giant letters from a cookie-cutter traffic-control font.   

Little Marco

Quick, answer this trivia question:  Who was the U.S. Secretary of State on August 9, 1974, the day Gerald Ford became President of the United States upon the resignation of President Richard Nixon?

If you answered "Henry Kissinger," you're correct.

Now answer this trivia question: "Who did Richard Nixon appoint as Secretary of State when he became President in January 1969?"

If you answered "Henry Kissinger," nice try, but guess again.

President Nixon, upon taking office in 1969, named Henry Kissinger as his national security adviser but he named former Attorney General William P. Rogers as Secretary of State.  There was just one problem: Rogers had no foreign-policy experience.  He was well-liked in Washington, he was respected, and he was a loyal Republican insider - and, he looked the part.  But Rogers was no diplomat.  That was precisely why Nixon appointed him to head the State Department; Nixon and Kissinger pretty much put themselves in charge of American diplomacy, while Rogers did no more than administer to the State Department's mundane operations.  he was little more than a figurehead.  

Marco Rubio (above) is the William P. Rogers of our time.    

The former two-term-and-change U.S. Senator from Florida has the chops for the job, and after having called Donald Trump a con man in the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign, he had to suck up to the Donald big time to become a serious presidential possibility or, maybe, Secretary of State.  When Rubio was named Antony Blinken's successor at the State Department, many in the diplomatic corps breathed a sigh of relief.  Rubio, a Cuban-American, was a staunch anti-Communist, he was skeptical of Vladimir Putin, and he believed in international alliances.  Certainly he would be a strong foil to Trump's worst impulses.

I used past tense to describe Rubio's qualities for a reason; that Marco Rubio is gone.  He demonstrated that in that awful meeting between Trump, James David Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, being able to only watch as Trump and Vance berated Zelensky and scolded him for acting in bad faith while the United States was trying to get the war between Russia, the aggressor, and Ukraine, the victim, to end.  Oh, and slump in into his seat at the sight of such a spectacle.

Perhaps we expected to much from Rubio.  bear in mind that Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the United States from international agreements and institutions as soon as he was back in office, before Rubio was even confirmed as Secretary of State.  And once so installed, Rubio was clearly made to understand in no uncertain terms that he was to be an errand boy for the real foreign-policy team in the White House - Trump and Elon Musk.  Small wonder that Rubio and Musk ended up having a shouting match with each other in the White House just recently. 

William Rogers was no more than a pencil pusher at State Department headquarters.  Rubio doesn't appear to be even that.  And unlike Rogers or the avuncular Rex Tillerson, Trump's first Secretary of State, Rubio doesn't even look the part.  He is indeed . . . Little Marco.  

When Marco Rubio sank into his seat in that fateful- Trump-Vance-Zelensky Oval Office meeting and watched his soul escape, he was no longer Secretary of State.  He was a diplomatic . . . corpse.   

Music Video Of the Week - March 7, 2025

"Young Americans" by David Bowie  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

La Junta

Donald Trump just fired Air Force General Charles Q. Brown (below) from his post as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He replaced him with an underqualified MAGA commander.

In addition, Trump fired several Judge Advocates General who advise the President on what is legal and what's not.  He replaced them with MAGA-friendly military lawyers who are guaranteed to tell him what he wants to hear.

Pete Hegseth's appointment to the post of Secretary of Defense is making more and more sense from Trump's perspective.  With MAGA military men at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military legal system, Trump will be able to have the military shoot peaceful protesters against his regime and use troops to dominate the streets of not just Washington by all major cities in the U.S.  And Hegseth will be at the top to ensure that no one in the chain of command turns against Trump and tries to remove him from office if he violates the Constitution.  Also, a military fully controlled by Trump and Hegseth makes a good deterrent against would-be anti-Trump insurrectionists.

Oh, yeah, and if Trump declares martial law, he can use troops to guard the Canadian and Mexican borders to prevent anyone from escaping.

Good luck, my fellow Americans . . . 

. . . we're going to need it! 😟

The Donald Trump Show

So what was Donald Trump's speech to Congress last night like?  Well, I didn't see the whole thing, but I saw the lowlights.  He bashed the Democrats for their approach to the economy, he compared himself to George Washington, he talked about how his beautiful tariffs will lead to prosperity, and he once again advocated annexation of Greenland.  In short, it was like a typical Trump rally speech.

Quite frankly, the idiotic references to the economy were the most memorable lines from the speech.  Of course - Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress and pledge to make the world safe for democracy; Franklin Roosevelt spoke to Congress in "the unusual posture" of sitting to lay out his post-World War II vision after the Yalta summit; John F. Kennedy announced to Congress that he was challenging the nation to put a man on the moon and have him returned safely to Earth; Trump complained about egg prices and blamed it on Biden.  Of course.  

it was a Trump rally speech because the event actually was a Trump rally. Democrats were a captive audience to MAGA Republicans' applause, struggling to found ways to protest, from wearing colors symbolizing resistance to Trump or for standing with Ukraine, which worked in the context of decorum in the House chamber but seemed awkward to some pundits.  The most effective protest came from Representative Al Green (D-TX), who yelled out that Trump had no mandate to cut Medicaid and was summarily removed from the chamber while Republicans mockingly chanted "USA! USA!" at Green as he was being led out.  (As far back as 1996, a British journalist covering the Atlanta Olympics compared the chant of the initials of the United States' official name to chants of "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" in Germany in the 1930s.  The comparison seemed all the more apt last night.)

There was one bright side to what happened to Representative Green; only he was removed from the chamber, and not the entire congressional Democratic caucus.  If that had happened, the Democrats wouldn't have just been taken out of the House chamber, they would have been . . . taken out . . . permanently.  Fortunately, dissent against Der Amerikanischer Führer is not yet a capital crime.

The most effective counterpoint to Trump came not during the speech but after it, when one of the newest Democrats in the Senate, Elissa Slotkin (above), who proved to be a steely, strong tigress behind her dimpled-little-sister exterior.  Senator Slotkin gave a brief yet pointed response for the Democratic Party in her takedown of Elon Musk's reckless evisceration of the federal bureaucracy and Trump's plan to decimate the middle class as well as her forceful objection to Trump's caving to Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine.  Senator Slotkin said she was glad Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980s and not Donald Trump, otherwise the United States would have lost the Cold War.

Aside from late-middle-age progressives who spent the eighties in college demonstrating against Reagan's Central America policy and nuclear arms buildup, most people should find favor in Senator Slotkin's remarks.  A former CIA operative and U.S. House member,  Slotkin proved to be an effective messenger for the Democrats.  It also helped that she is a national-security expert and also the junior senator from Michigan, a state that has produced so many legendary businessmen in the auto industry - the Chevrolet brothers, the Dodge brothers, David Dunbar Buick, Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler - whose surnames became trusted brands, something the current White House occupant has tried to make of his own surname . . . in vain.

In a party struggling for leaders and leadership, Elissa Slotkin appears to have provided just that.  She's probably the second most effective speaker the Democrats have.  Only Tim Ryan is better, but, of course, he's a hasbeen (for now).

Other Democrats gave effective responses to Trump's the media, like when party chair Ken Martin said that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys could go to hell, or when Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas called Trump a nightmare she was hoping to wake up from, or when Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts called upon Trump to resign.  But not everyone saw individual Democrats taking to reporters.  They all did see Trump's speech.  However, I wouldn't say now that the Democrats aren't fighting back at all or aren't fighting back enough, as Chris Cuomo suggested . . . though the less said about Chris Cuomo, the better.  In fact, Chris's attempt at an even-handed view of Trump and his disgraced brother Andrew's decision to run for mayor of New York City signify the most spectacular drop in credibility and prestige by any political dynasty in American history (the falls of the Kennedys and the Bushes were more gradual).

One other thing.  As late as 2022, whenever you saw President Biden address Congress, you'd see two women - one black, the other Italian, both from California - sitting behind him in their respective capacities as Vice President and Speaker of the House.  Now, Trump is back, and the two people sitting behind him are both white males of Anglo-Saxon origin from the nation's midsection.

Not so inspiring . . . unless you're a red-state MAGA-maniac.