National politics

Today I forced myself to watch a few minutes of Trump's military parade in Washington D.C. I expected that MSNBC and CNN would cover the whole parade, but they didn't.  Probably the reason was that it was exceedingly boring. I've never seen a parade that was more listless and uninteresting than this one. Once you've seen one piece of military equipment roll by, or soldiers marching by, the rest is just repetition.  Well, actually the troops I saw weren't marching. Not in the North Korean or Russian sense. They were merely walking. Boring! Apparently people had the good sense to…

We're not even five months into Trump's second term as president and already the warnings from the 2024 Democratic campaign are coming true: if Trump is elected over Kamala Harris, our democracy will be threatened by authoritarianism.  It's happening faster than I expected. Which means buckle up for the remaining three and a half years of Trump's time in the White House, because he's going to be putting pedal to the metal increasingly forcefully in his drive to become the first truly authoritarian president in our nation's history. This evening the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, issued a warning in…

The reconciliation legislation recently passed by the House and being considered by the Senate is called the One Big Beautiful Bill, because that's the name Trump gave it.  Like just about everything Trump touches, the name is a lie. Actually the legislation is horribly ugly, though it is indeed big. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget summarizes the impact on the nation's debt, which is currently $36.2 trillion.  The House of Representatives’ Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 reconciliation bill – titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBBA) – would add $2.4 trillion to primary deficits over the…

Way to go Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield. Yesterday the lawsuit brought by Oregon and eleven other states challenging the legal authority for Trump's tariffs got a win from the U.S. Court of International Trade. Here's what Rayfield said in a media release. Today, the U.S. Court of International Trade struck down the tariffs imposed by President Trump’s executive orders under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The decision was made in a multi-state lawsuit led by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield. In reaction to the ruling, Attorney General Rayfield said: “The court’s ruling is a victory not just…

There's good reason to argue that Donald Trump has always been an authoritarian. He admires strongmen such as the dictators and quasi-dictators who run Russia, North Korea, China, Turkey, and Hungary. He demands absolute loyalty with no backtalk from people who work for him. He despises central tenets of democracy like free and fair elections unless he manages to win. But after four months of his second term as president, now there's no doubt on which side of the authoritarian fence Trump is on. Just about every action he's taken has either pushed to the limit norms that have been…

I remember well, because it was just a few months ago, when political commentators ridiculed Kamala Harris for placing so much emphasis on preserving democracy in the face of Trump when it was simply obvious that the main problem facing Americans was inflation. Meaning, it was more important for the Harris campaign to talk about the price of eggs than the price of freedom.  Now it is clear that Harris was correct and the pundits were wrong. For Trump is acting more like an authoritarian and wanna-be dictator than was expected by Trump critics like me -- and I expected…

Yesterday was quite an interesting day for my wife and me. We were able to buy a 2025 RAV4 Plug-In Hybrid XSE at Capitol Toyota, but it was a close call -- because of Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars and auto parts that goes into effect next Thursday. The saga started last Tuesday when Laurel and I were picking up her 2019 RAV4 Hybrid (which isn't a plug-in) after service on it was completed, and she asked a Toyota salesperson if there were any 2025 RAV4 Plug-In's that she could take a look at. Laurel has liked her car…

If there was any doubt about the incompetence of the Trump administration, this story in The Atlantic today should squash it. Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic. I'm a subscriber. This gift link to Goldberg's story should enable anybody to read it.  Remember the uproar over Hillary Clinton using her own email server when she was Obama's Secretary of State? Trump and other Republicans thought she should be go to jail for engaging in a breach of security protocols. Well, the debacle described by Goldberg is way worse than Clinton's emails. Hopefully there will be investigations…

There's a lot of anger among Democrats, especially the left wing of the Democratic Party, right now. The anger is divided between Donald Trump and his billionaire buddy, Elon Musk, and Democrats in the Senate -- especially minority leader Chuck Schumer -- for preventing a government shutdown by voting to end a filibuster that would have blocked a Republican-backed continuing resolution to fund federal agencies through the rest of the fiscal year, September 30. That anger is completely understandable. Trump and Musk are doing terrible things. They're taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, to our economy, to international…

We Democrats are notorious for engaging in circular firing squads where different factions of the party take political shots at each other. But the arguing over Senate Democrats voting today to avoid a government shutdown is unusually intense. Yesterday I was surprised to see MSNBC's Chris Hayes, who I usually agree with, telling Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer not only that he was wrong to support ending a filibuster so a continuing resolution passed by the House that would keep most federal agencies funded at their 2024 level until this fiscal year is over on September 30 could pass with…

My wife couldn't believe I was able to do this, but I've watched most of Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress last night. I did so because I believe in knowing your enemy. I wanted to see how Trump came across rather than just read about his speech. I also was curious to see how Democratic legislators acted during the speech. How aggressive would they be in protesting what certainly would be copious amounts of lies coming out of Trump's mouth, not to mention his truthful statements about what his administration has been doing since inauguration day, naturally…

While it wasn't widely reported, probably because it isn't news when Trump says stuff that clearly isn't true, today Trump claimed once again that tariffs are paid by foreign countries.  The Chris Hayes show on MSNBC did talk about what Trump said, correctly pointing out that this is another example, among a great many, where it is unclear whether Trump is incredibly stupid or an incredible liar. My personal conclusion is that he's both, though I admit that in any particular instance, logically it is difficult for Trump to manifest both personality defects.  Tariffs are a great example. At the…