Ron Howard nailed it. Let me hear an amen if you agree.
Twosda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
Bit of good news on Oregon’s political front. The Trump et al hates the mail-in ballots. Although he has used them to vote, he claims that he doesn’t trust them. Thinks they’re vulnerable to cheating. Facts show it’s otherwise, that Oregon’s voting by mail system works well. Facts, along with loyalty, empathy, history, and intelligence, have never mattered to PINO Trump, so he HATES Oregon’s voting system. (Trump also hates mail-in voting because mail-in voters tend to vote Democrat. That makes Donald sad because he’s all GOTP.)
Well, that Trump hatred drove loyal trumpdog and Oregon Sen. David Brock Smith to introduce SB 210 2025 to change Oregon’s system. Smith wanted to force us to vote only on election day, only in person.
I am proud to say that Oregon voters responded. We sent in so many comments against changing our voting system, we swamped the legislature’s website, brothers and sisters and everyone else, and the matter is being dropped.
Well done. Very well done.
Notice

Borrowed from John Eller on social media.
Saturda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
I caught up on reading several posts by Heather Cox Richardson that I’d missed. I appreciate the historic angle she brings to news about Truskzilla’s destruction of the United States. Reading her, I belatedly realized, gosh, I’ve been normalizing Trump and his supporters.
I thought they cared about the United States and its founding principles. Wrong.
Or that the history and heritage of this nation matters. Nope.
That they worry about the Federal deficit and trade imbalances and the stock market. No way.
That usual barometers such as court rulings, disastrous economic results, or opinion polls would have an impact. No fucking way.
That the usual things like how history will judge them matters. It doesn’t; they believe, winners write history. We’ll be the winners. We will write the history.
I did understand that they didn’t care about democracy or voter rights. I did understand that they’re racist, sexist, misogynists, and reactionary. But that was mostly to unite people and put them in office. They needed racist, sexist, reactionary misogynists as their voting base to get them in through the front door.
Those are all normal terms about the normal course of events. Using them in terms of what Trump and the Trusk Regime is doing is normalizing them.
They are not normal. Nor can what they’re doing be called normal.
The Trusk Regime is interested solely in being in power. This is a coup. They’re interested in remaking the United States as an imperial power under a dictatorship. They suggest to each other, why build that mighty military if you’re not going to use it?
Like many dictatorships, the Trusk Regime and GOTP will put up window dressing as a democracy and a republic. But they are setting up the nation to be a military force. Cutting away the things we depend upon as a society — a working and reliable Federal government, healthcare, a safe and healthy environment, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, to point out some — destabilizes us. Growing unemployment increases people’s desperation. Rising prices limits their options and undermines food and shelter security. Sending children back to work breaks family. Ripping apart the education system reduces the nation’s collective intelligence, and with it, its will. All of these actions, taken in blitzkrieg fashion, demoralizes a growing number of people and spreads an increasing sense of helplessness.
That makes the people ripe for propaganda.
With the economy in shambles, other nations can and will be blamed for the growing poverty and starvation. Trade wars and political differences will be magnified and amplified. Trump, a prolific liar, has perfected the arts of projecting, deflecting, and blaming. That’s why he’s been boosted into position as the head of this monster.
They have X to help spread their misinformation. AI bots. Facebook. Threads. A weakening, capitulating media, itself owned by corporations and oligarchs, has already begun joining the effort.
A frustrated, starving population provides ample troops. And just as we saw with the Cheney/Dubya Iraq and Afghanistan wars, marketing can sell false causes. Helpless people hungry for someone to blame other than themselves will be served other nations as targets.
The clock is ticking. And the war drums have already begun beating.
Thirsta’s Wandering Political Thoughts
“Fat, dumb, foolish country”: Trump says US has been “pillaged” via trade deals
I agree with PINO Trump: the United States is a fat, dumb, foolish country. It’s led by fat, dumb, foolish Republicans who nominated this obese obscenity of lying, walking meat to be the country’s leader, and conned fat, dumb, foolish hoopleheads into voting for him.
Now this fat, dumb, foolish cocksucker and his regime are pillaging the nation.
As always, when Trump speaks, he projects what he’s doing onto others.
Thurzda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
Look! Quick! PINO Donald J. Trump admitted that he was a fool.

It’s been so long since he’s told the truth by calling himself a fool that confusion was rampant over what was going on around the world.
Fortunately, the net knew that Trump was right, and was telling the truth: he’s the one who signed the 2019 agreement with Mexico and Canada.
And he’s a fool.
Patterns
This was stolen from Mastodon resident Wiley Miller @Wileymiller, creator of the comic strip, Non Sequitur.
Can you spot a pattern here?
4-14-20 – Trump declares he has total authority over state decisions.
12-8-23 – Trump declares he’ll only be a dictator on Day 1 in office.
2-18-25 – Trump declares himself King.
Visit Wiley Miller for more. It’s well worth it.
Sunda’s Wanderin’ Political Thoughts
As observers watch the Trusk Regime’s Great Shitstorm of 2025 and the Great Undoing, we await the Reciprocal Wave. History, economics, science, have all demonstrated again and again that for every action, there are reactions.
This is an era of networks. The age of the old factory plants have faded. What we have now are multiple assembly locations. Subassemplys are built and then shipped into other countries, where they’re added to other subassemblies. Those subassemblies are folded into a final component which is then shipped to an assembly plant for final inclusion into finished goods, such as a car. This is true not just in the automobile and aircraft industries, but in many electronics industries, medical device manufacturing, and pharmacueticals. Wasn’t governments who did this, either; this was the capitalists, although they worked with governments to make it so, often encouraged by tax breaks and subsidies.
Likewise, the farm-to-table model is a simplistic concept for much of the food that reaches our tables. While we do have local economies with organic farms and farm-to-table can happen, nature still commands where some things grow.
The Trusk Regime has issued orders. Broken treaties. Damaged alliances. Withdrawn from marketing and trade agreements. Bullied allies and threatened and launched tariffs.
Tariffs will drive up prices. History has demonstrated it. Higher prices bring inflation. Inflation causes less buying. People just don’t have enough money to buy more.
Less buying equals less retail volume. Lower volume means less income for businesses. Businesses compensate with increased prices to sustain operating and profit margins.
But less sales volume is less business. Less tax revenues at all levels.
Less sales translates to less need for employees. Job layoffs and terminations follow.
To ice the cake, the Trusk Regime has cut Small Business Administration funds. Too much DEI for them. Without those loans and grants, small businesses will close. Unemployment will climb. Fewer businesses means increased scarcity and less competition. Prices rise out of that equation.
That is just the tip of that egregious economic situation. Think of what that does to consumer confidence? Imagine the impact on the stock and commodities markets, and the strength of the dollar.
But you don’t need to imagine that. History is full of these things happening. They have been studied. The cause and effect is well understood. With less tax revenues and less Federal funding coming down, roads and infrastructure fall into disrepair. So history says. Hello, if you were paying attention, you know that was one of the things Trump 45 promised to do and failed to do. And, if you’re paying attention to your history, you know that President Joe Biden delivered on that promise with a bi-partisan infrastructure repair act.
The things you can learn from history.
If you’re willing.
Beyond food scarcity, high prices, and small businesses shuttering, visualize what that does to small towns and cities. Imagine what happens to farmers and their businesses with their markets closed to them in China and elsewhere.
There will be backlash and more reciprocal impacts. Unemployment will rise. Homelessness will increase. Begging on street corners will climb.
The Trusk Regime has already made that situation worse by shuttering the USAID. Through it, charities helped with lunch programs. Religious charities depended on money from the USAID to help communities cope with homelessness, unemployment, and scarce resources.
But Trusk cut that. That now traditional source of help will not be there. Forced into starvation and desperation, violent crimes will rise. That’s a fact right out of history. So will an attitude. What do I care if the world burns down? I have no future in it. Because they can’t afford college. Even if they can get more education, to what end would they put their degrees with businesses terminating employees. They will begin to work as part of an under-the-table gig economy. Take low paying jobs to get a meal.
Imagine the impact of increasing homelessness and growing unemployment will have on new car sales and new home sales. But you don’t have to: history has shown us the impact.
The Trusk Regime has already made that situation worse by terminating hundreds of thousands of Federal employees. You don’t think that’s not going to affect the unemployment numbers, consumer confidence, and the economy? People without jobs don’t spend much money. The Trusk Regime likes to offer a scenario where these hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed individuals go out and get a new job.
Where?
Especially since the Trusk Regime also cut government contracts. Schools, businesses, and communities were depending on those contracts. Some of them were still rebuilding from natural disasters. The money had been allocated by Congress. The Imperial Presidency said, no. So those projects have stopped.
They’re not hiring anyone.
That’s what Project 2025 and the Trusk Regime wholly ignore. We experienced all of this things and built networks of state, local, and Federal government with rules, regulations, and experts to deal with these problems. The Trusk Regime decided it was fraud and waste and took a chain saw to it.
Now we wait. The Great Reciprocal Wave is coming. Its form is uncertain. Could be open warfare. Massive rioting. A military coup. Other factors of the Great Undoing will come into play. Like health crises. Say avian flu. Flu, RSV, and COVID-19. New diseases. So it could be another pandemic.
This is all just a tiny piece of it. Natural disasters will begin. Tornados will tear through towns. Wildfires will start burning. Flooding. Places will be evacuated. Productivity will fail more. Scarcity will increase. Tax revenues will plummet. The economy will sag. The fires will burn on with no to little help from the Trusk Regime. They don’t think those federal agencies were useful.
Hurricane season will begin. Storms will wreck whole areas. Scarcity will increase. So will demand. Inflation will rise. Tax revenues will plummet. Homelessness will increase.
What do you think that will do to the insurance companies? Not sure? Ask the good people of Puerto Rico, Oregon, California, Florida, Texas, and other states affected by natural disasters in recent years. They’ll give you a history lesson.
While you’re talking to them, ask, too, what it did to their health and their healthcare systems. Ask them what it did to their local economy and local inflation. Ask them what it did to their state of mind.
The Trusk Regime thinks that cutting federal agencies like FEMA is a good move. They think local citizens ‘on the ground’ in those locations will be able to ‘make better decisions’.
Yes, because the people of Asheville, NC, for example, have such a deep familiarity with recovering from disasters. *head shake*
Making decisions about how to help communities is only a small element of what FEMA does. They keep stockpiles of emergency food and water supplies on hand. They keep emergency housing on hand in the form of trailers that can be moved in to solve the housing problems for a while.
Those stockpiles will still exist. But with FEMA cut or its personnel cut, who will manage those inventories? Who will ship those supplies?
And we know that this will happen.
Because history taught us. You can learn a lot from history, if you’re willing. Just cast your mind back to 2005, Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans. Twenty years ago. Pause to remember Michael D. Brown of FEMA fame and the disastrous job he did because he didn’t have experience. “Heckuva job, Brownie,” President Bush told him.
So you can learn from history. But right now, instead, voters decided to fuck around and find out. They were willing to take an ax to all of these programs, agencies, federal employees, alliances, trade agreements, and expertise.
Well, here it comes, brothers and sisters. You’re about to find out.
Here comes the Reciprocal Wave. I’d tell you to brace yourselves but do I need to?
History has already told us.

