National politics

As painful as it is for me to say this, congressional Democrats bear a lot of resemblance to the pitiful Oregon State football team that lost a game to Fresno State yesterday it should have won. Unorganized. Mistake-prone. Divided. Listless. After recording the game and watching enough of it to realize how bad Oregon State was playing, I fast-forwarded my way through most of the rest of the game, because it was so painful to watch a team I wanted to win perform so poorly. This also is how I feel about the Democrats in the House and Senate. They…

There are many bizarre aspects to Trump's second term. One among many is this. The Republican Party used to be known for its commitment to limited government, unbridled capitalism, and individual liberty. No longer.  With Trump as president, today's Republican Party firmly supports massive government control, federal interference in business decisions, and unheard of constraints on the freedom of Americans. The party that feared black helicopters and jack-booted thugs when a Democrat occupied the White House is fine with them, now that Trump is the occupant.  I recall the uproar when Republicans claimed that the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, would…

I'm an unhappy Democrat. I have lots of company. Currently I'm stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. I can't stand Trump and what he's doing. I also can't stand the Democratic Party and what it's doing. My irritation with the party I've been a member of since I was old enough to vote is manifesting in various ways. Whenever I get a text message from a Democratic politician asking for money to support some quixotic liberal cause, I quickly press "delete and report spam." If the text is from Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, I press even more…

It was clear that something bad was in store for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) when Trump fired the head of the agency after the BLS reported poor job creation numbers recently. That's Trump's style: fire the messenger when they report an accurate message that the Dictator in Chief doesn't like. Today the bad thing came into view. Trump has nominated an unqualified MAGA loyalist, E.J. Antoni, to be the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is unheard of, since the BLS is a nonpartisan agency that is known for producing world-class high quality statistics on…

It's tough being a Democrat these days. After being depressed over Kamala Harris' disappointing loss to Trump last November, there hasn't been much to raise my spirits on the national level. (Locally and statewide in Oregon, Democrats are faring better.) Just about every Democrat on the national stage either irritates me or fails to inspire me. I get countless,  more or less, text messages and emails every day urging me to contribute to some Democratic cause. I never read them before I delete them. Sure, I realize that Democrats have no power in Washington, D.C. They don't control the White…

In any other presidency, two things Trump did today would be so outrageous to both Democrats and Republicans, our representatives in Congress would waste little time protesting the president's actions. But with this presidency, it's just another day in the Office of Sleazy Goings-On for Trump's acolytes. Outrage #1 was Ghislaine Maxwell being moved to a minimum-security camp in Texas from a regular federal prison in Florida. The move required a waiver of guidelines that prohibit prisoners convicted of serious crimes with more than ten years remaining on their sentence from being in such a camp, which doesn't have any…

Those of us opposed to Trump have lots of choices when it comes to his most dangerous actions. Mass deportations of law-abiding undocumented migrants. Tax breaks for the wealthy paid for by huge cuts to Medicaid. Slow-walking support for Ukraine. Mass firings of career federal employees. To name but a few. But in the long run, I suspect that historians of the future will look back and judge that Trump's most disastrous action in his second term was to engage in a war against science, notably including the science of climate change. The world has already surpassed the 1.5 C…

I've never been a flag-waving sort of American. Yet I consider myself patriotic. I vote in every election. I'm active in my community. I want the United States to be an international leader, helping bring democracy and prosperity to other less fortunate countries.  But on this Fourth of July, when we celebrate our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, I'm not feeling great about my country. I've got a lot of company from my fellow Democrats, only 36% of whom are extremely or very proud to be an American. There's a simple reason. In 2015 80% of Democrats were extremely…

Liberals like me hate what used to be called Trump's Big Beautiful Bill before Senate Democrats deleted that name for an excellent reason (it's big, and a bill, but isn't at all beautiful). Among other things it will: -- kick many millions of Americans off of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act -- make permanent tax breaks for corporations and wealthy people at the expense of poor people-- cripple our country's renewable energy industries, leaving China to lead in this area-- increase the national debt by $3-4 trillion-- throw many billions of dollars into deporting hard-working undocumented migrants Polls show that…

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…