Without intended irony, I read about Ann Telnaes’s resignation in the NY Times.
Ann Telnaes is an award-winning, highly-regarded political cartoonist. I’d long cut ties with the Washington Post as Jeff Bezos, the WaPo owner, revealed his colors and moved away from being a supporter of responsible, trustworthy journalism. (I keep ties with the NY Times mostly for the cultural information but they don’t inspire me with their journalism, either.)
The NYT story, by Benjamin Miller, said that Ann Telnaes resigned after her cartoon was rejected. She accurately portrayed Bezos and other billionaires genuflecting at a statue of PINO-elect Trump. Bezos, who would not let the newspaper endorse Kamala Harris, didn’t like cartoon, demonstrating once and for all, that man cannot handle the truth.
It begins to appear that democracy will not end with a bang nor a whimper, but a tweet. There are billions of individuals, mostly men, but peppered with women, who will cheer that. No, I take that back. They will not cheer because they will not know that democracy has ended. The trappings will continue long after the government has been re-shaped into some form of authoritarianism that endorses wealth and greed and treats the wealthy has a separate class, with a better set of rights and more lenient judicial tolerance.
Yes, much of it has already taken place. The groundwork is there. The billionaires are lining up to make it happen. And social media is the engine.
This gloomy view comes out of a new Dame magazine article. MPS brought it to my attention via their post, “It’s the Media”, as did Scottie’s Playground. I new some of the information Dame presented, but they delivered with deeper and harder facts.
The Dame article is “America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal“. The article’s great, overarching declaration is, Millions voted for Trump with a distorted understanding of who he is, what he supports, what his policies will actually accomplish, and how severely his second term will hurt them and those they love.
Yes, many of us were aware of the ignorant, undecided voters out there, wholly uncritical thinkers who were briefly engaged with the election, voted, declared themselves good citizens — I Voted — and helped create a disaster set of circumstances. But their ignorance was firmly aided by the right wing, funded by billionaires like the latest villian, Elon Musk, and gleefully supported by the GOP.
Listen, if the GOP tells you that they love America and support democracy, don’t buy it. They do not. Some Republican voters probably do love America and support democracy, but they’re being conned, and they don’t know it.
Worse, of course, is that this phenomena is not just rooted in the United States. It’s a plague, a virus, that’s spreading around the world, undermining democracy and freedom without any shots being fired. This — a right-wing media composed of angry, hateful males who pose as pseudo intellectual influencers to spread their bullshit — is why we’re seeing right-wing influence increasing. People are being told lies. Immersed in the media speaking to them, they’re unaware of the truth or reality.
I still believe Trump’s administration will implode and he will personally crash. He was a convenience to advance their cause. He will be tossed aside. I’m convinced that many Americans will never realize that happened. I remain certain that the economy will worsen under Trump, but again, right-wing influencers will tell them that its great, and they will believe it so.
And so, the United States of America will become a shell of what it was, an empty vessel that once offered the kind of hope for equality and justice which is theoretically possible, and the right-wing media will tell them that’s great again, no matter what their life is like.
It’s a gorgeous January day. It’s also a sloppy January day, dark and gloomy. Depends. Comparing the day’s weather to other places and their situations, you can easily judge one way or the other. We’re not especially happy because this Friday, Jan. 3, 2025, is sunny, cloudy, and rain, or suncloura. We’ve been having many suncloura days. That’s part of the trick, too: if there’s a succession of like days, it weighs on us. All of this falls onto the final piece, whether you like this kind of weather, or even thrive in it, or you fall into the circle of thought that it’s okay but could be improved. The temp. BTW is 44 F. High will be 51 F.
Another local restaurant went out of businesses on Jan 1. Pie +Vine is the closure. It replaced Piatta’s about ten year ago. Both were owned by the same folk. I’m sad because it means unemployment for some. Conversely, the food has been steadily declining since it opened. Conversations about eating there often mentioned how bad the last meal or the last service was. The same people own several other restaurants. People are not pleased with the owners because they gave no warning to their employees. Just locked doors and put a notice on the door, we’re closed and done. Not the way to treat people, and several employees claim those owners have done the same thing at other businesses across the years.
My wife and a friend are going to see Wicked today. I opted out. Didn’t want to slice another three hours out of another writing day. The movie is two hours and forty minutes but then you need to reach the theater, park, etc. So. They decided they’d first meet for coffee and pastries, so the outing has been extended to about four and a half hours. I’m pleased to have solitary time. I love my wife and enjoy her company but we are together a lot.
Over in the news, I see Republicans making false claims about the New Orleans and Las Vegas terrorists. The Army vets are claimed to have just come over the border. Those lies have been thoroughly disproven but the base will digest it children going after popcorn. Meanwhile, ‘Trump Warned About Invading Mexico’ in a Newsweek headline. “Experts are urging caution.” The article is slanted IMO toward Trump actually using military actions in the way it’s written. GOP talking points about the border are given without any fact-checking or counter-discussion. Piss poor journalism. Seems more like a balloon being floated to see what kind of reaction the idea of invading Mexico gets. It’s been comprehensively demonstrated that the GOP doesn’t need facts to sell their ideas. Given how the Roberts Supreme Court has treated Trump, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump does use military force. Democrats and the international community would condemn it but the GOP would probably crow, “What a man!”
I can imagine such an action quickly escalating into economic arenas, with Mexico retaliating by cutting off the flow of exports, affecting manufacturing, especially cars. Mexico is the number one car manufacturing nation in the western hemisphere. Most of the cars are shipped to the U.S. If car availalability in the US drops, prices go up, driving up inflation and decreasing sales. That would apply to not just new cars but used cars; it’s a ripple effect. The lack of sales revenues would cut into state and local tax revenues. Given all these things, someone might be able to talk Trump and his bloodthirsty Administration down. Hard to say. Trump likes the idea of being ‘manly’ in a corrupted, negative way that was once prized as the epitome of manliness.
Today finds “Missing You” by John Waite circulating through the morning mental music stream (Trademark missing). The 1984 song is all about missing someone while lying to themself and denying that they miss them at all. That’s how it goes with me when the wife is away. The house feels chillier. It’d definitely quieter. I miss turning and saying something or having her ask or tell me something, even if I do also resent it at times. Such are relationships.
Have a proper Frida. Do it up right. It’s the first one of a new year. The new on the year is already fading. Here’s my coffee and the music. Cheers
It’s a gloooommmy glooommmy day here. All rain and descending swirling fog. We’re getting less of it up by my home but the weather down toward the valley floor is icky yuck wet, as a meteorologist would say.
Daily Kos delivered a bright ray through the gloom.Furious Democratic Rep COMPLETELY NUKES Trump’s “Modern McCarthyism” They’re talking about Rep. Melanie Stansbury, NM-D, and her magnificent comments about JD Vance’s bill. As Rep. Stansbury highlights, the bill essentially creates a blacklist of who can’t work for the Federal government, based on their perceived loyalty to PINO-elect Trump.
“Welcome to the new House Committee on Un-American Affairs and the new McCarthyism,” she said. “We have arrived here today with this bill.”
The bill has the support of the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind the notorious Project 2025 policy plan — which issued a letter of support, Stansbury noted.
Led by Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation, supported by Trump and his MAGA base, the United States is goose-stepping back into less free, less democratic times. We’ve been led down this path before. The attached video (same one from Daily Kos) has part of Edward R. Murrow’s editorial about McCarthyism in it.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
We can substitute Trump or MAGA or Project 2025 or the Heritage Foundation or the GOP for ‘Senator McCarthy’. The policies they pursue and the campaigns they use fit McCarthy’s brand of divisiveness, political repression, and fear-mongering.
Good to know that individuals like Rep. Stansbury has our backs.
It’s raining again. Alexa notified me at 8 PM (or 2000 hours if you prefer) that it was going to start raining near me, starting around 12 AM and going intermittently until 8 PM. About 1.3 inches of rain was expected.
I was listening to the rain hitting the roof, pinging off the vents, splattering the windows, and asked, “Is it raining now?”
“Rain is expected to start at 9:30 PM.”
“Alexa, feedback. It’s 8 PM and it’s raining now.”
Rainy, gray, it’s warmish again, 50 F with a high of 52 F suggested and a low of 46 F. The gray light slanting in through the windows does nada to brighten my mood. Fog swirls around mountain pines and peaks. Dark and pretty in a tragic “Wuthering Heights” sort of fashion.
A perusal of news headlines has me opimistic for 2025. (Yes, that was snark.) Things like the costs of owning and driving a car are jumping. This was a California story. The average price paid for a new car was over $47K. Now it’s jumped to over $52K. And insurance is climbing as well. Again, it’s California, but what happens in California usually ripples out. And, this is before any PINO Trump tariffs are issued.
Then a jolly story covered how the Alum Rock school district is closing or consolidating schools. Oh, boy, let me quit reading that.
Another story told me eggs, already pricy, are going up because of the bird flu. And a related news article informed me that animals were dying from being infected with the bird flu from eating tainted meat.
Next came a recounting that those anti-vaxxing efforts in Louisana are having an effect. Louisana is seeing cases of the flu climb. Surprised? No. They’re one of two states in a ‘Very High ILI’ category. The other state is…Oregon.
What? My state. WTF? Chasing that down, I learn, gosh, vaccinations for COVID-19, RSV, and the flu are trailing data from last year, which was already trailing data from the year before. So the flu, etc., are up.
Grrrrrreat. Yes, that is sarcasm.
I got out of the news before I turned to the national and international scenes. Mood was cratered enough, thanks.
The Neurons already had music picked out and going in the morning mental music stream (Trademark sagging). “Forty Days and Forty Nights” is a 1956 blues number by Muddy Waters. The Neurons had it in my head solely on the line, “Sun shinin’ all day long, but the rain keep falling down.” Yes, it hasn’t been forty solid days if I judge on empirical evidence; it just feels like it to the wife, me, and others who engage in conversations about the weather. The ground is saturated. Rivers and creeks are up. Flooding is possible. On the possy side, our drought seems over for our part of Oregon. Other parts of the state remain abnormally dry.
Could be worse, I remind myself. We are not snowbound, etc.
The Forty Days version I selected was a Steppenwolf cover. Mom bought me the album, Steppnwolf 7, for Christmas in 1970, when the song and I were both fourteen. It has sentimenal attachments to me, see.
Okay, coffee and I have worked out an arrangement for this morning whereby I’ll brew it and pour it into my mouth and swallow. Seems like I’m doing all the work here, but I benefit from it. I don’t think coffee gets anything except perhaps some emotional satisfaction from helping me through the day. Here’s the music. Cheers
This is an excellent summary of Trump’s promises before his first messed-up term. Then, as now, Trump belched out grandiose promises and grandly failed to meet any of them. Yes, those of us paying attention knew that going into 2024. Reading it in an orderly, fact-loaded page is a sort of emotional and intellectual comfort food for me. Kind of thing needed as we slouch toward Trump’s second term.
Of course, reading the summary also triggers my anger at Trump voters, minions, and enablers. They’re either so awfully cognitively impaired that you wonder who is dressing them, deliberately obtuse because the truth is an ugly, scary critter to them, or know that Trump speaks shit but delight in the chaos he generates, or finally (looking at you Musk, RFK Jr, any Kushner, and Vivek), are just base, greedy opportunists who care about nothing except making themselves more money at the expense of others.
Well, honestly, I think Trump was swept in on a toxic melange of all of those things. We’re already hearing about voting remorse, infighting, and exclamations of surprise and disappointment, and he’s not even in office. We’re also witnessing some crowing about how he’s already changing the economy and the world, with people acting like he’s already in office.
The latest infighting erupting is about tech right’s desire for more H1B visas. They cite a need for these because Americans are ‘too retarded’ for the work they need. The charge for these is being lead by those billionaires of bullshit, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win,” Musk wrote on X.
“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote in another post on Thursday. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”
Ramaswamy, a first-generation US citizen whose parents immigrated from India, concurred with Musk while defending companies that look outside the US for labor, arguing tech companies hire engineers who were born outside the US or born to American immigrants because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” citing portrayals of smart students in TV sitcoms “Boy Meets World,” “Saved By The Bell” and “Family Matters” as evidence.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” he wrote on Thursday. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Over in deep MAGAland, the reaction was predictably WTF angry. Isn’t the whole thesis of Make America Great Again predicated on Americans being the greatest but undermined by those pesky immigrants, immigrants are who not as great as Americans, who — reminder — are the greatest? Immigrants who are stealing ‘Merican jobs? And here are two MINOs — MAGAs in Name Only, Musk and Ramaswamy, calling for more immigrants.
And so the MAGA base that took Trump to power already begins eating itself and falling apart.
And PINO-elect Trump is not even in office yet.
Brace yourself: 2025 is going to be a wild, wild ride.
I am not a seer, though I often portray one online. But I have some thoughts coalescing around some inputs.
I think the start of PINO Trump in 2025 will be heralded by a huge spike in COVID-19. Deaths won’t be as numerous as before but it will be disruptive. It will affect the economy.
Sidebar: PINO Trump sounds like a bad wine, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I suspect the spike is already underway but will become bigly pronounced next year. First I learned that my sister, a staunch Trumper, has just finished her third dance with COVID. Then I found that two other local couples, non-Trumpers, were down with COVID. Next, I discovered that a local business had to close its doors due to a COVID outbreak.
Yes, this is all anecdotal. Small sample. But combine that with the virulent anti-vax/’COVID hoax’ manifested in the MAGA wing, a position now being empowered in the PINO’s cabinet choices, and the setup for disaster is complete.
Today is Thursday, December 26, 2024. Five more days to the year. A year stamped with historic and personal significance. Wonder how 2025 will compare at this time next year.
Gray. Rainy. Chilly. Call it 44 F. Light rain. This is winter in Ashlandia. Snow hugs things above three or four thousand feet, looks like at a glance. Down here, we’re stuck in the gray. Sunshine muted through gray clouds from mountain to mountain to mountain. Gray clouds as far as I can see, looking down into the valley. And rain.
Yes, I’m complaining.
The cats are not, however. After a night of howling wind and incessant rain, Papi dragged in his wet Butter Butt and found a warm space to sleep off the day. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) had already set the example, staying in, finding a comfy zone, nodding into slumber.
Late post as I spent the morning writing. One of those days when the muses arrived early. The house was quiet and the coffee was hot, so. Seated myself at the laptop and added 2,500 words. Excited by the twist added. See if it stands revision, editing, and further thinking.
Today’s music selection was made by The Neurons after a friend’s comment yesterday. A decade older than moi, she’s not known for her colorful language. But there she was making a risque, off-color comment at the Christmas bash. As we reacted and laughed, she turned as red as Santa’s outfit. Net result: The Neurons have “Dirty Mind” by the brilliant Prince playing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark filthy).
Well, deep breath. Dredge up some positive energy. Here we go again. Let’s start with the music. Cheers
PINO*-elect Trump is calling for buying Greenland. What a goofball. Certainly fun to read about him for the crazy factor. It’s like, what will that crazy monkey say next?
Sidebar: I think that Buying Greenland and Other Insanity would be an excellent title for Trump’s biography. Feel free to use it.
Back to PINO-elect Trump’s idea. My first question is, has Denmark said that Greenland is for sale? Sure that’s not important to Trump. He likes taking things. Remember, he’s the one who suggest that all he has to do to get a woman is “grab her by the pussy.”
Trump: “Yeah, that’s her, with the gold. I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Unidentified man: “Whatever you want.”
Trump: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
I’m guessing that Trump will have to raise the money for buying Greenland in some extraneous ways. Maybe sell some of his bought billionaires on eBay. Putin would probably buy them. Or Trump will do a car wash or bake sale. Can you see a WH car wash? Ten thousand dollars a car. He’ll have the Secret Service do the washing. A bake sale spun right could bring in some cash. First, Trump buys or steals (or calls for them to be donated!) a bunch of baked goods. Then Trump can take a bite of each baked good and sell it for a grand per. “Real Food Certified to have been bitten by PINO Donald J. Trump.” Film him biting each cookie and signing a certificate of biting it. Post it to X. He could sell them for $299 a bite.
I’m sure that whatever he does to raise money to buy Greenland, it’ll be the “greatest and most beautiful thing ever”. Right?
Oh, wait, I know. He can collect and bottle his piss and sell it to raise the money. That’d probably bring in a lot of money. Supporters are sure to buy his bottled piss. I mean, look at how many keep buying his shit.
Michael Seidel, writer 