Month: June 2025

I had thought of talking about Viceroy Donald Trump’s wannabe-North Korean birthday party military march on June 14, but as the British would say, I couldn’t be arsed. In any event it was not a further escalation toward God-Emperor status, in fact quite the opposite. Because while the “No Kings” protests organized around the country had a collective attendance of at least 5 million that Saturday, the Trump event in DC (ostensibly a tribute to the US Army) might not have gotten 250,000 for the whole area. It was probably best symbolized by the reel of a Sherman tank slowly proceeding down the road, its squeaky treads clearly audible because there was hardly anyone in the stands to watch it. As for Your Own Personal Jesus, Donald Trump spent the whole time with a pinched, pained expression on his face, similar to when he walked out of the closed door meeting with Putin in Helsinki. That is, when he could bother to stay awake.

Happy Birthday, Occupant of the White House. No, I am not going to wish you any more, cause it looks like you wouldn’t enjoy them anyway.

But Trump’s No Good, Very Bad Day happened at the same time (actually June 13) as Israel’s preemptive strikes on the nation of Iran, which in the first stages took out several heads of the Islamic Republic including the head of the “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” and several directors of Iran’s nuclear development program.

And before I go on, I have to say I am of two minds about that.

On one hand, the reason the Middle East is the way it is now is really the reason that the United States is the way it is now, and that is because Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are basically the same guy. Now, to be sure Netanyahu is much smarter than Trump and not quite so obnoxious and repulsive, but they’re in much the same situation: A crooked as hell wheeler-dealer who first made his mark for media savvy (I first remember seeing Netanyahu as a talking head on ABC’s Nightline), who is involved in so much self-dealing, and has used his office for so much self-dealing, that the second he leaves office he is going to be prosecuted and most likely convicted. Which is why he will do everything in his power to never leave office. And the main part of that is catering to the coalition of religious fanatics that currently has controlling interest in his government, and pushing their agenda of ethnic cleansing all the Muslim minorities en route to turning the country into a one-party theocracy. (And if you’re asking if I refer to Trump or Netanyahu, the answer is ‘yes.’)

On the other hand, simply having an evil government does not mean a nation has no right to exist. And the problem with the ostensible “anti-Zionists” is that for some reason they think the Jewish state is the only one whose existence is illegitimate. But if history has shown anything it’s that when Jews are a minority in their nation they risk being disenfranchised and ultimately killed. (Like in the United States, if Trump thought he could get away with it.) There needs to be a Jewish state and there needs to be a two-state solution. Iran flat out wants to destroy Israel. Arab nations historically have always wanted to destroy Israel, but the Sunni nobles want to destroy the Shia Iranian republic more. And it’s not as though Iran’s government are nice guys even by Saudi standards. Indeed, this is a point of similarity between Iran and the United States. One country is technically a democratic republic but is actually run by a cabal of corrupt and ancient theocrats who want to start World War III in hopes that their Messiah will appear in the Middle East. The other is Iran.

So Israel was going to provoke pre-emptive war and get the United States to go along with it, like we always do. After all, it’s not as though anyone can make the case that Iran isn’t a sponsor of terrorism that has repeatedly declared itself committed to destroying the State of Israel. And is developing nuclear energy even though its economy is based on petroleum exports.

But given that Israel had the situation well in hand, it raised the question of why the United States needed to be actively involved. It goes without saying that the president acting unilaterally without Congressional declaration of war is blatantly un-Constitutional, but it also goes without saying that no president of either party has sought a declaration of war since Pearl Harbor, and that would be one of the least unusual things about Trump.

And all this is an example of why I’m not one of those people posting hot takes on the news every single day. (Along with the fact that I have a real job.) Because in just the last few days since last weekend, things have been changing faster than I can keep up.

From June 14 onward Viceroy Trump was making increasing noises indicating he would not only back up Israel diplomatically, but also militarily. His social media posts frequently repeated words to the effect of “IRAN MUST NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” It often happens that elderly men can’t get out of their obsessive prejudices, but few of them have their own nuclear weapons. This deathly fear of nuclear war is in fact a sincere position of Trump, which is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin has so easily manipulated him on Ukraine, because he can always threaten nuclear escalation if the US acts against him. Even if Trump has effectively been immunized to the American justice system, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.

So last weekend after his typical “two weeks” dodge, Trump actually sent bombers out from Missouri to hit Iran nuclear sites in what everyone is already calling the Nobody Came To My Birthday Party War. June 21, after world reaction had gotten sufficiently crazy, he came out of the White House to deliver an official announcement on the mission, backed up by JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, who seems to be more sad and embarrassed every time he gets on camera. The speech was notable for its brevity and for being very inarticulate and “low energy.” At some point during all of this, Trump thanked God, probably because he thought he’d just won the Super Bowl.

Ostensibly the reason Netanyahu wanted his little Donnie involved is because the US has “bunker buster” bombs that have multi-stage explosions which are intended to eliminate targets deep underground. Well, as it happens, “Despite the use of heavy munitions, initial assessment suggests the facilities weren’t fully taken out.” News articles indicated that “it appeared nuclear material at Fordow had been moved in advance of the attack.” Probably because the president telegraphed his intentions by screaming that Iran must have an “unconditional surrender” and then wavering on whether he would get involved.

But Monday, after a perfunctory Iranian attack on US bases in Qatar, Trump declared, on his own initiative, that the two nations had come to a ceasefire, yelling on Truf Censhal, “(Israel) is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

And Monday-Tuesday overnight, the ceasefire ended with Israel accusing Iran of violating it. And Trump posted, “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Less the World’s Policeman and more like the World’s Substitute Teacher.

And once it became clear that our Dominus Mundi could not make a ceasefire happen between two other nations by imperial proclamation, he got clearly upset. On the way to his flight to a NATO meeting in Europe, Trump told reporters “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Let’s all get aflutter and act like the biggest news story on Tuesday was that Donald Trump used the F word in front of reporters. Most of this country has been using the F word in private for the last ten years because of this guy. But hey, at least all the basic-cable news outlets got an excuse to play the recording unedited. It’s NEWS!

Which kind of gets to the real reason we have to put up with this and keep putting up with it: Some people want Trump around cause he’s great TV.

In one of his Bulwark columns, Jonathan A. Last went over the related issue of the Western world outside the US dealing with Russia and Ukraine, and said, “this is what nations have to do: Make long-term plans about an uncertain future based on incomplete information and constantly shifting variables. America is no longer capable of such things because the American people do not want leaders who are capable of them.”

The reason we have a tyrant toddler fucking up every aspect of the world every single day is because this country really IS a democracy and this country didn’t want its favorite “reality” TV game show host to go to prison. The fact that he would be president was incidental. The plain folks of the land selected the best representative of their collective soul.

The premise of the Republican Party and Trump in particular (who as far back as his PLAYBOY Interview praised the Chinese Communists for showing ‘strength’ in crushing the Tiananmen protests) is that democracy doesn’t work and we should get rid of it. The fact that he got re-elected in the first place shows that he might actually be right.

At the very least, millions of people who voted for the Democrat candidate in 2020 against Trump did not do so last year, either because of the Biden-Harris policy towards Israel and Gaza, because they thought Kamala Harris had girl cooties, or they just couldn’t bother to care about the future of their country, which they knew was an issue because they were at least smart enough not to actively vote for Trump. But it doesn’t matter. In our binary political system, when you don’t vote, you vote. Because not voting for A usually means B wins. If you don’t want B to win, you have to get out and vote for A. Since you know damn well that in this case Republicans are going to come out Hell or high water to vote for Republicans to keep Democrats from winning.

If we manage to get this country back without our own pre-emptive strikes on a theocratic government, we really need to change this political system to curb the chance of 2024 happening again. For example: Tuesday night, the Democratic Party primary for New York mayor (which is the only party primary that matters) was a ranked-choice vote, and the establishment candidate was the centrist (and corrupt as Hell) Andrew Cuomo, trying to make a political comeback after leaving office in disgrace. Despite having several other choices, New York Democrats rallied around Muslim “progressive” Zohran Mamdani, getting more than 7 percentage points over Cuomo, a result that caused Cuomo to concede even though Mamdani has not yet cleared the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff. Given the margin, Mamdani might have won with the traditional first-past-the-post primary, but as of Tuesday 984,859 people voted, whereas in 2017 (before the ranked-choice system was implemented) the Democratic primary that was won by Bill de Blasio got only 437,517 votes, which indicates that more people might turn out to vote if they have someone to vote for, and if their “weird” first choice doesn’t automatically throw away their vote.

That would be the main change we need to make on the federal level. Also, qualification tests for candidates. Like a psychological exam. And a civics exam. And a literacy exam. If that seems too invasive, at least make the guy post 50 times on social media without misspelling his own name.

“You had said that you saw no difference between economic power and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, between purchase and plunder, between pleasure and fear, between life and death. You are learning the difference now.“

– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The big news in America right now is that Our Lord and Savior Donald Trump decided to declare Los Angeles a war zone after he sent ICE out to an Hispanic neighborhood to barge in and arrest residents without a warrant and they encountered resistance for some reason. I say “decided to declare” because as Keith Olbermann among others has pointed out, when the LA Lakers won their last championship in 2020, the number of arrests for rioting was 76 suspects, whereas over the last weekend the number of arrests (at a Home Depot) was 42. I mean, the LAPD first put out a statement saying most of the protests were peaceful, and recently put out another statement saying “The LAPD has not received any formal notification that the Marines will be arriving in Los Angeles. However, the possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles—absent clear coordination—presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city. The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively. That said, our top priority is the safety of both the public and the officers on the ground. We are urging open and continuous lines of communication between all agencies to prevent confusion, avoid escalation, and ensure a coordinated, lawful, and orderly response during this critical time.” Basically, ‘hey, we’re the professionals at beating up civilians, and even we think this is overkill.’

[As of Tuesday evening Marines were in fact deployed to Los Angeles.]

But in my mind, this is just another example of Trump doing something big and outrageous in order to scare liberals (and conservatives) so that nobody is thinking about what’s going on behind the scenes. Prior to The Battle for Los Angeles, the big story was the apparent break-up between Our Perfect Lord Donald Trump, who was born from his mother’s side and sent by Dharma to teach the Path of Enlightenment to the nations, and Elon Musk, who is best known for spending multiple billions of dollars to actually make Twitter worse than it already was, in order to spend a mere few hundred million to elect Donald Trump and get a role in his regime (since ‘administration’ is the antonym of what we’ve got even by comparison to 2020).

But how did that break-up happen? Well, several reasons, one being that Elon’s ‘move fast and break things’ ethos didn’t work that well in reorganizing government, not that it worked that well with Twitter, and it really hasn’t been working with Tesla or Space X. Related to that is that Elon and his hired Musketeers in DOGE* became very unpopular even within the Trump regime for their high-handed actions. Related to that is the fact that Elon is, basically, higher than a bald eagle’s nuts most of the time, which was confirmed second-hand due to news exposes fueled by those offended inside staffers, and confirmed externally by just looking at him. And part of that is the specific rumor that Elon poached the wife of Stephen Miller, both professionally and romantically. This may account for the non-rumor black eye that Musk sported in his White House event announcing his alleged retirement from the Trump Team, although he said it was caused by his son, whom I believe he named after a quadratic equation. That kid’s got a mean left. But then, I think of A Boy Named Sue, and when Elon’s son grows up, he’s gonna be able to kick Sue through a wall.

Well, that’s just the behind-the-scenes mess. But then it blew up on social media, which is the only thing either of these two care about. Why? Because Elon objected to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

For one thing, the official title of this thing in the House version is One Big Beautiful Bill. Because apparently the average IQ in the United States is still over two digits, and something MUST be done about that.

The bill in its current form barely passed the House by one vote, partially because two Republicans voted against it which they could afford to do because three Democrats died of old age or sickness during this term of Congress. The current dispute is how much of it the Senate is going to use and how much of that bill will be approved when it comes back to the House for reconciliation. To complicate things further, reconciliation in Washington means that a Senate majority can override an otherwise prohibitive filibuster but only so long as the bill affects mandatory spending, revenue, OR the federal debt limit and can only pass one such bill per year for a maximum of three reconciliation bills, although the subjects are frequently combined, hence Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Now prior to the Celebrity Divorce, this bill was best known (or not) for all the cuts it is going to make to social-spending programs like Medicare. But the Big Bullshit Bill also has little provisions that were either buried in the dross so as not to be noticed, or added in at the last minute, which caused even some Republicans to object after the fact. Like Section 70302 (that’s how big this thing is) stating that: “No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.” In effect this would mean that judges would need to create a bond amount in order to make injunctions enforceable, and since this is retroactive, any current injunctions against the Trump regime in court cannot be enforced. (Technically this applies to ANY contempt citation, not just against Trump, which is a great example of The Law of Unintended Consequences.)

This is not so well publicized, especially by our ‘liberal’ media, cause let’s face it, Donald Trump won the most votes without the Electoral College, so clearly Americans don’t care about homo commie shit like ‘rule of law’ or ‘the Constitution’ anymore.

But Elon Musk still seems to think of himself as a classical capitalist and thinks it’s a bad thing for government to overspend and waste money. I mean, that was the ostensible reason for DOGE, not to send college kids into every bureaucracy’s database to get all their info so that Peter Thiel and Palantir** could have access to it. But apparently the increase in the deficit not only disturbed some Republicans (in private, of course) it disturbed Musk enough to speak publicly. And it’s a real issue.

Largely at the behest of people like Musk, the Big Bullshit Bill (hereafter referred to as BBB) changes the tax laws (including state and local exemptions from federal tax) so that all but the highest income levels will have a net tax increase, Medicare would be cut by $500 billion over eight years, and Medicaid would be cut by $880 billion over time.

The end result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that over the next decade, the federal deficit, which is currently almost 2 trillion dollars, will increase by an additional $2.4 trillion.

You can look at CBO’s pie chart for fiscal year 2024 here. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 In that year, defense spending was only $850 billion. It is dwarfed by the combined cost of Social Security ($1.5 trillion), Medicare ($865 billion) and Medicaid ($618 billion).

For those of us who still consider ourselves right-wing (on the standard that right-wing means ‘there are objective realities that cannot be changed by politics or social consensus’, not ‘Trump is my Shepherd; I shall not want’) the big question over all this is: how does a bill that specifically targets entitlement spending end up raising the deficit by a factor of trillions (with an s)?

Because:

military spending is $150 billion above and beyond normal budgetary increases such that for the first time the military budget would be 1 trillion dollars in itself;

spending on ICE alone is increased $9.5 billion in addition to increases in support funding for Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security;

Republicans are going to renew the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act tax cuts, mainly on the upper percentile, that otherwise would have expired after 2025. (Republicans may fear the wrath of voters but they fear the wrath of the donor class more.)

And in the midst of this, let us not forget that all of this will end up undermining America’s living standards and economic performance, which will undermine our bond market, which will increase the national debt. When the whole premise of conservative anti-tax theory is that economic growth will make tax cuts pay for themselves. (If that was ever true, it was in the glory days of JFK and LBJ when ‘progressive’ taxation was so high that it demonstrated the Laffer Curve.)

So Elon decided to twit about this. First, he declared he could be silent no longer and declared Trump’s budget bill a “disgusting abomination”, a phrase that usually brings to mind Trump himself.

He said that Trump wouldn’t have won without him and he wouldn’t have more than 51 Senators without him. Which is probably true.

And then Musk pulled out the BIG news: The reason Trump hasn’t released the Epstein Files is because Trump is in them. And the country’s collective reaction was: yeah.

Look, Trump is a convicted felon and while technically not a rapist, was found in a civil case to have committed sexual assault. Clearly that wasn’t enough to stop him from getting elected again. Saying that Trump is in the Epstein Files is like saying that your cousin is an alcoholic whose “sister” is really his mom- everyone in the family knows it, you’re just not supposed to talk about it.

And yet that was probably enough to get Trump to pull this stunt in LA. It probably has more to do with Stephen Miller (aka Pee-Wee German) trying to get quotas for arresting “illegals” because there aren’t enough violent criminals to go around. But it’s still part of the Trump technique of flooding the zone with shit and making sure you can’t deal with the last outrage cause there’s always a bigger one around the corner. “Hey, don’t pay attention to that teenager I raped! Lookit all these orphans I killed!”

Who’s going to win the catfight? Who gets custody of JD Vance? Trump, easily. Trump has control of the federal government, and he can and has threatened to cut Musk’s lucrative government contracts. Musk has no equivalent leverage. It’s already looking like Musk is backing off, mainly by deleting a lot of his comments on X, which is apparently supposed to make everyone forget they saw them (or saved them). And this weekend, Musk decided to share a post by Trump against the rioters and the officials in California, apparently finding new solidarity in their shared fear of dark people.

But Musk still has Twitter. Which has undermined most of its reputation and business model under Musk, even before his fusion with Trump, yet it is still used by many influencers, especially the type who care about both Musk and Trump. And those are exactly the sort of people who still care about conspiracy mongering and who were rather annoyed when the FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did an about-face and told the press that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact kill himself.

Meanwhile on June 8, Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky), having some ancestral memory of being “libertarian”, objected to the BBB’s increased funding for ICE. About the same time, Cato Institute think-tank writer David Bier posted that the costs of deportations would by themselves add almost 1 trillion in costs to the BBB.

This week there was a column in The Hill (another outlet that has undermined its reputation in the Trump Era yet still has a following for that reason) saying that the fallout between Trump and his sugar daddy could still have long-term consequences for Republicans as a whole: “Trump was counting on the bill’s passage to be a significant political tailwind that would boost his polling numbers and Republicans’ midterm hopes, particularly given the ongoing chaos over tariffs and trade policy. Now, whichever version of the bill eventually passes, Republicans look like the party of chaos.”

All of which is leading up to the June 14 parade in Washington, ostensibly as a celebration of the US Army anniversary (though they never asked for it), but really as a birthday parade for Donald Trump, because a military parade is the gift you give to the man who has everything, including the most powerful country on earth. Is it right that we turn our military, and our country as a whole, into a monument for one man’s shriveled manhood and even more decrepit brain? Well, we could have had a president who was your stereotype career social democrat who would have run everything business as usual but at least wouldn’t have run every aspect of this country into the ground.

But no, you had to prove you were so much smarter than people who read books and stuff. Well, at least we don’t have a president who’s a doddering old man who can’t keep track of one sentence to the next, who doesn’t know what direction he’s facing and who can’t even climb the stairs.

* – pronounced like the Venetian ‘doj’ by the press, though I always preferred it like ‘dough-GI’. Shoutout to Jonathan Capehart at MSDNC, who has pronounced it ‘dodgy.’ And then of course there’s ‘douche’.

– ** ‘Palantir’ of course comes from the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien, referring to a crystal-ball communications and surveillance device developed in the First Age. According to Wikipedia: “A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to “possess great strength of will and of mind” to direct the stone’s gaze to its full capability. The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy’s hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.”