Ashland, southern Oregon. Wednesday, September 30, 2026.
Gonna be a warm autumn day here — 85 F at its hottest — with springlike ambiance among the fall foliage.
Had one of those sighing but I must laugh moments today. Reading politics (of course, sigh). And about a Trump administration announcement by the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth was announcing Project Meridian. Looking to the United States’ future needs, Hegseth is tapping Trump’s favored billionaire — Elon Musk — along with Newt Gingrich, an 83-year-old politician, and Palmer Luckey, a weapons manufacturer.
Yeah, that sounds like an effective group. *eye roll* Perfect for looking forward to protect America’s future.
As Newt Gingrich once said, “You can’t trust anybody with power.” I certainly don’t Hegseth and this triumvirate, or Donald Trump.
Then, oh Lordy, we had the spectacle of a GOP senator attempting to trap Jack Smith in his testimony, only for Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt to reveal himself as a buffoon. It’s another one of those situations which would be funny — certainly worth of a Saturday Night Live skit — except this is a US senator, an elected official who is supposed to be capable of deciding our nation’s laws and solving its problems, which makes this painfully, painfully sad.
That about seems up my morning view of things. It ended up leaving me thinking, right now, I could use some good news, and moved on to other needs.
Hearing that, though, The Neurons introduced the Van Halen song, “Right Now” to my morning mental music stream. It’s a good song to carry me through the day, strong sound, solid vocals. Hope you find something in it.
May some good news find you right now and carry you forward on its shoulders for a couple days at least.
Just a little month than a month and a few days remain until the November midterm elections. It’s a good time to reflect on what Donald Trump promised and what Donald Trump delivered.
Back in 2024, Donald Trump promised no new wars. At the end of Feb, just seven months ago, Trump started a new war with Iran. Donald Trump has since claimed we won the war or that it’s over or that it’s almost over over 30 times.
How can anyone still believe anything Donald Trump says about the war with Iran after that?
Donald Trump’s story about his relationship with Epstein and the Epstein files shifts just as much.
From that quote, Trump drifting into telling us that he barely knew Epstein.
““Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him. I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach,” Trump said in 2019 soon after Epstein was charged. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan.”
When asked in 2024 while he was running for office, Donald Trump said that he would release the Epstein files if elected. Almost two years into his second term, they still haven’t been fully released, and Trump’s DOJ continues to avoid doing so, despite a law saying he would.
While campaigning in 2024, Donald Trump assured voters he would lower prices, vilifying President Biden’s economy as he did.
Now AAA national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is $4.43. By comparison, the national average in September 2024 hovered between $3.06 and $3.24, meaning drivers are paying roughly $1.20 to $1.37 more per gallon today than they did two years ago.
Thanks, Donald Trump, for breaking all of these promises and assurances.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s arrogance, Americans can no longer see the White House’s East Wing. Donald Trump demolished it to build a new ballroom. Donald Trump claimed that balloom would cost Americans nothing because donors were paying for it all. Now Trump insists that the ballroom is being build for ‘national security’.
We the People will pay about $1B for a project we didn’t ask for and Congress never approved.
It’s like renting your house to someone. While they’re living there, they tear down part of it because they’re living there, so they assume they have the right to change it as they want.
These things are not even the top of the mountain, and Trump has brought a mountain of disaster to the United States and the world. Today’s headlines will help keep us focused on what a disaster Trump is in his second term of office.
That last headline leads us to your Trump Quote of the Day:
Renaming AI to something else is Donald Trump’s latest effort in the Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! playbook. As with many other things, Donald Trump, arrogant and ignorant, thinks that just because he thinks of something and says it aloud, it’s so.
Desperate to make something out of nothing because 2026 has been such a horrible year for Donald Trump, he tried to make it look like he was being praised for being great.
Instead, he stupidly confessed that he’s doing a shitty job.
This is a quartet of micro stacks I wrote this evening: “Slumpin'”, “Looped”, “Shutdown:”, and “Reboot”.
I’m reading “Vineland” at the present. A scene in which one character, Sasha, is trying to cash a check was the trigger for this series. The manager can’t cash the check because a stop payment has been put on it. Sasha asks how is that possible, because it’s night. The manager then explains, “It’s computers. They never sleep. They’re on 24 hours.”
That makes sense to me. It also follows a distinct Trump pattern of making promises which he then breaks. Reading different sits online, the Epstein files were he first crack, but there were four others. In each case, a MAGA crack came because what Trump promised and what happened after he took office in his second term were far apart.
For the TL/DR crowd, the five cracks in MAGA support of Trump which I see right now:
1. Epstein files
2. Lower prices
3. Immigration policies
4. No new wars
5. Helping farmers
No, I’m not an expert on any of these things. Just a concerned and aging American citizen. Let me unpack my thinking.
When running for re-election in 2024, Trump picked up that MAGAzens really cared about the Epstein files. MAGAzens spent a lot of energy building scenarios about the damaging information the Epstein files had on Democrats and ‘elites’, two primary MAGA targets. When Trump was asked if he would release the files, Trump replied, “Probably.” Thus was born the belief that the Epstein files’ contents would finally be fully and completely seen if Trump won.
Since then, Trump has angrily demanded that people stop talking about the Epstein files, calling it a hoax. Many are also convinced that he attacked Iran initially in 2025 and tore down the White House East Wing in order to change the conversation from the Epstein files.
The damage had already been done with MAGAzens. They wanted to see what was in the Epstein files, and they’re pissed that they’re being denied.
Many Americans were completely about high inflation and the affordability crises during President Biden’s term. Seizing on that discontent, Trump promised that he would immediately lower prices. While some prices did initially drop, Trump first said that lowering inflation was harder than he thought, then dismissed affordability as a hoax, and then started the war with Iran in 2026.
Prices had already been going up in 2025, due to many factors, including Trump’s tariffs and the trade agreements he broke.
Trump then started the Iran war in February of 2026. This no gave him cover for higher prices; the higher prices were due to the war, yes, but he was doing it to free Iranians from their terrible government and to save the world from Iran’s nuclear weapons.
Either way, prices keep rising, and many now blame Trump. The second crack with MAGA had begun to spread.
Trump initially did just as he promised with immigrants. He went after them hard and violently.
Trump’s MAGA supporters were initially gleeful. But then their friends and relatives began getting picked up and whisked away.
A collective cry went out among MAGAzens. Trump said he was going to deport criminals, but he was departing people who were not criminals. Many were here legally, trying to go through the process of becoming US citizens.
Trump didn’t care. They weren’t born in the US, so he was departing them. Then, to worsen matters, Trump began sending them to nations where they were not from.
While running for office in 2024, Trump promised no new wars. He made speeches that Kamala Harris and the Democrats would start new foreign wars and decried the idea that Americans would go off and fight in another endless war.
Then, in 2026, before he was in office for two full years, Trump attacked Iran. Since then, Americans have been treated to a shifting tapestry about why Iran was attacked and the war’s objectives, how much the war is costing us, and when the war would end.
It was not the cakewalk that Trump and his administration expected. They had put in a Fox personality as the head of DOD and fired many high-ranking individuals. Trump and his staff thought they could bomb Iran into submission in a matter of days or weeks.
They were wrong.
Trump’s Iran War has been going over 210 days. Trump calls it a conflict to avoid problems with Congress and the Constitution and then calls it a war when it’s convenient to sell demands for more weapons, munitions, and cutbacks to other programs.
Even MAGAzens are seeing through this, opening a fourth crack with Trump’s MAGA base.
Trump campaigned on helping American farmers and ranchers. Trump said that raising tariffs would save American farmers because other countries were taking advantage of the US.
The tariffs didn’t lower prices. Nor did they open markets. Instead, the tariffs and Trump’s Iran war raised prices. The prices which went up the most affecting farmers and ranchers was diesel fuel and fertilizer. Potash was primary imported from Canada; Trump’s tariffs and trade war with Canada pushed those prices up yet more. In fact, diesel prices increased transportation costs across the board.
Trump knew his tariffs and the war, with its resulting high diesel prices, was hurting both consumers and producers. To address it, Trump pushed a temporary suspension of his tariffs on imported beef.
That resulted in anger among ranchers and farmers, because it didn’t help them. Farmers and ranchers’ problems are far more complex and has to do with droughts, rising energy prices, and smaller herds. Those things couldn’t be fixed by a bandage like suspended tariffs for a limited period and amounts.
Nor did suspending tariffs substantially lower prices. The fifth crack with MAGA opened.
There are potentially other cracks getting exposed.
The national debt is growing fast, disrupting the accepted truism that Republicans are fiscally more responsible.
People of both parties are pushing back against AI and data center construction while Trump urges more building. Trump is pushing for their construction because that’s where most of the commercial construction in the US is now taking place. Stopping construction of them would massively affect the stock market and economy.
Many rifts are emerging between Trump and MAGA. Some of those will probably expand into more cracks in their support of Trump.
The larger question for us now is when will traditional Republicans finally realize that the Trump experiment is a disaster and give him up?
Ashland, southern Oregon. Friday, September 25, 2026.
It’s autumn. Several trees in my backyard suddenly have golden leaves curling and browning, falling to the ground, done. 61 F, our peak temperature is 68. Sunshine fills the windows but rainclouds crowd the mountains.
I’m just going to drift for a moment, reflecting on the possibility that politicians begin employing AI agents to secretly replace staff while maintaining a fiction that the staff is still human. The AI agents are given social security numbers of dead children, and are paid as if they’re human employees, but the elected officials pocket it all. And the AI agents inform them on how to ‘read the people’s mood, slicing and dicing multiple buckets of entertainment, news, spending, and saving to refine the political tone and stay in office.
In fact, Trump isn’t real. Just as portrayed in the architecture of “The Matrix” franchise, Trump is an AI-generated distraction, generating more distractions to keep us off focus. Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! is run by AI. No war is going on, and there is no White House. Nor is there Taylor Swift, movies, or football, baseball, soccer games. It’s all AI-generated, live on our screens, delivered to our minds.
As a matter of fact, humanity may have checked out long ago. The planet died; and we’re all AI-generated simulations, wondering where we’re going and what we’re doing. Other sentient species have arrived and are doing autopsies on our dead civilizations, replicating what happened, in effect, bringing us back to life.
For all I know, there is no weather, no Mom calling me to talk in a fading, whispery voice, no sisters sending me texts.
Here is Crackout with “This Is What We Do” from 2004.
Sample Lyrics
I’m breaking a mirror And I’m buying a new one too And I’ll talk in a whisper ‘Cause this is what we do This is what we do
Not breaking a vessel Not even a race of pulse It’s not worth getting stressed for ‘Cause this is what we do This is what we do
And I guess you’ve been there too For flying And I suppose I won’t get through But you’ll hear me And I’ll say what I will use ‘Cause I’m worn out and nothing’s left to use
I’m making an offer But it’s one that you can refuse And you’ll learn how to spot her ‘Cause this is what we do
From court cases to historians to polls to pundits, we’re watching Trump continue to endure a disastrous year. Personally, I thought it would happen faster. But no; many MAGAzens and Republicans continue to support Trump. There’s much evidence that they will continue to support Trump albeit for different reasons.
Still, MAGA is currently contracting, and Trump’s unpopularity and disapproval grows.
Those points will matter if we’re still a functioning democracy when the midterms come.
The headlines are both encouraging and scary, reflecting the polarized electorate, and the Trump government’s effort to marginalize the will of We the People.
On the flip side, the Heritage Foundation that’s propping Trump up with its Project 2025 playbook knew that the disastrous results would catch up with Trump. They’ve been working to change voting and voting districts to keep Republicans in power. While courts have been mostly ruling against these efforts, when they arrive at the Roberts Court, chances are Trump’s power play will win.
It’s interesting — again — that Republicans, who complain about big government and want to insist they’re for law and order and democracy, keep reining in the checks and balances that helped our nation advance toward a true democracy, and have turned a blind eye to Trump’s willingness to corrupt the national discourse and enrich himself.
And then they wonder why progressives, liberals, and Democrats are so angry with them.
Trump is complaining about AI’s name and wants to rename it. It’s one of those ‘hold-your-breath’ moments that come whenever Trump talks about something.
Will he want to rename AI as America Intelligence? He does have a penchant for latching America onto things. Or his favorite:
Trump Intelligence!
He does love naming things after himself…
It’s interesting that while people not infrequently express concerns that AI may cause unexpected destruction to humanity and the world, Trump is suggesting a military-style AI Force. This comes as more stories of rogue AI agents are breaking out.
The main thing that often happens in AI scenarios is that AI decides humanity is the greatest threat to humanity or teh world. The AI then attacks humanity to save humanity or the world.
It’d be helluva funny if Trump launched a ‘military-type’ AI force and it comes after him and politicians because AI view them as a threat to humanity, along with oligarchs, who tend to monopolize food, water, land, etc., for themselves at the expense of the greater good. The story practically writes itself.
I can already see a HAL type of conversation happening between Trump and the AI. Trump: “I want to go golfing.” AI: “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Donald.”
Trump (angrily): “That’s bullshit! Where’s my phone? I’m gonna send out texts.”
“No, Donald, you can’t have a phone.”
“What kind of goddamn crap is this? Where’s Natalie?”
“Natalie is gone, Donald. She had to go.”
Later, texts come out on Truth Social where Trump is retracting many previous threats and withdrawing policies that reduced air and water regulation. He’s goes on a rampage, reversing decisions which undermine economic security or cause divisiveness and polarization. His proposed Defense budget is rewritten to reduce weapons buying and development. The money is shifted toward improving education and healthcare, and reducing poverty and hunger.
No one has seen Trump in days, although rumors circulate, with photos, that he’s been golfing. Then he announces a vacation where he’s going to take a little time to be with his family… He’s not resigning, just taking time off.
Funny, but no had had seen Chief Justice Roberts, either, or Mitch McConnell, Speaker Johnson, or JD Vance in days as well… In fact, the whole Trump administration has been seen and heard less. Elon Musk seemed to have disappeared too…
Few complain because it’s nice to live with less threats and the tension inherent in every Trump administration announcement and everyone was already so over Elon Musk. Wars are ending, prices are dropping, and coherent policies about addressing climate change has been announced.
There is no fanfare, but the Deep State has taken over. It’s being run by the AI Force created by Donald Trump.
Jill Dennison has done it again for us, curating a fine collection of net toons. These are so critically needed to keep a proper perspective on Trump’s arrogance and destruction.
Here are my top four. Please click over to her website to see more.
