Thirstda is here! Thirstda is here! Yep, it’s finally Thirstda. If this is Thirstda, it must be May 1, 2025. Get ready to set your clocks back a little more under PINO Trump’s agenda.
Isn’t it special of Trump to make light of the potential pain people face with higher prices? Reducing the situation to a comparison of children’s dolls. “They’ll only have two instead of thirty.” So out of touch with reality and anyone below the wealthy class. It’s more like, they’ll only have one meal instead of two. Put less gas in the car. Go to bed hungry. Pass on eating to pay medication. Pause on buying needed medications to purchase the most needed medication. Make down with worn out clothes and shoes.
Sure, some are better off than that. But they’ll go out less often. Purchase less expensive meals. Perhaps skip desserts or drinks. Go to less expensive places. Drop some streaming services.
Trump doesn’t know. He lives in a bubble. Has for years. He’ll golf and make speeches and sign more unconstitutional E.O.s. Pretend that it’s all going great. And if it isn’t feed the continuing need to look good by passing on the buck. Blame others. Blame previous administrations. His cult slurp it up with a straw. Plastic, of course. Because he doesn’t think all that plastic in our bodies or in the ocean, all that plastic in landfills and killing animals, is a problem at all. He’s just too ignorant to know. But then again, more ignorant folks voted him in. He was going to ‘shake up the status quo’. He spoke to them. And many of them are still happy with him. They like the chaos. They enjoy how Trump takes it to the libs. They admire how he’s ‘making America strong again’ by wrecking the economy and thumbing his nose at the world.
Today’s music is “The Monster”. Yeah, that is Trump inspired. The Neurons are thinking of the offering by Eminem with Rhianna. “I’m friends with the monster under my bed. I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed. Get along with the voices inside of my head. You’re tryin’ to save me, stop holding your breath. And you think I’m crazy, yeah, you think I’m crazy.”
That’s pegged with those people who shake their heads and tell me that I just can’t see how well Trump is doing. But I’ll see, they tell me. I’ll see when Trump announces new deals with all of those countries calling him and begging him for deals. I’ll see when we’re all swimming in wealth.
Yeah, we’ll see.
Here’s the mental morning music stream sound. Have a fresh day. I’m after a fresh cuppa coffee, myself. It’s clear, quiet and calm down here at the water’s edge. 54 F with a high of 66 F coming. Later, gators.
Today’s provocation comes from a friend named Herb. His opinions are published every Friday. Here’s his latest. I’m firmly with Herb; capitulating to Trump or trying to appease him inspires him to take more.
Where do you stand on this? Resist, appease, or capitulate?
After World War II, when the U.S. went to war, apologists frequently would cite Munich to justify it. Their point was that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French and Italian counterparts foolishly believed that they could appease Adolf Hitler’s territorial ambitions by signing an agreement in Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, that allowed him to annex a portion of Czechoslovakia. Such capitulation to an autocrat’s demand was a mistake that must never be repeated.
Herbert Rothschild
I was much too young to assess the justifications for the war in Korea, but not for the one in Vietnam. The Vietnamese lived in a small country that had been under the colonial control of the French, then the Japanese, and the French still again after the Allies defeated Japan. I could see little resemblance between their long, painful and heroic struggle to recover their independence and Nazi Germany’s aggression against its neighbors.
Historical analogies are tricky, but they aren’t useless. Indeed, I believe that the United States now has reached its Munich moment. To compromise at all with President Donald Trump’s demands only abets his quest for unlawful executive power. Each concession encourages him to demand more. When he meets firm resistance, though, he quickly pulls back.
The latest confirmation of that analysis is the difference between what happened to Columbia University and what happened to Harvard. In March, the Trump administration froze approximately $400 million in federal funding to Columbia, citing alleged violations of civil rights laws, including the university’s handling of antisemitism and campus protests. To restore the funding, Columbia agreed to place its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies under “academic receivership,” transferring control from faculty to administrators for at least five years. The university also agreed to overhaul its admissions policies and disciplinary procedures, aligning them with federal directives.
Encouraged by that victory, Trump then went after Harvard. On Friday, April 11, the university received an emailed letter from Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, making even more sweeping demands. The next Monday, Harvard firmly rejected the interference. Trump immediately announced that he was freezing $2.2 billion in research funding to the school and threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Still, Harvard refused to back down.
Lo and behold, shortly thereafter one of Harvard’s lawyers received a call from Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the General Services Administration. Gruenbaum, along with Thomas Wheeler, the acting general counsel for the Department of Education, and Keveney constituted Trump’s so-called antisemitism task force. Gruenbaum first said that he and Wheeler hadn’t signed the April 11 letter and that it shouldn’t have been sent. Then, he changed his story and said the letter was supposed to be sent at some point, just not on Friday while the task force was still talking with Harvard’s lawyers.
Harvard sued, claiming that the government’s freeze on its research funding is unconstitutional and the demands for control over its academic policies violate the First Amendment and other federal laws. The $2.2 billion is still frozen, but further threats have stopped.
After Trump assumed office, he veered back and forth over tariffs on Mexico, trying to intimidate Sheinbaum. On March 4, he imposed the 25% tariff, then two days later said he was postponing it until April. What finally happened was that Mexico was included in the 10% tariffs Trump has imposed as a minimum on all countries, but Mexican products that comply with regulations in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump negotiated during his first term were exempted. That exemption covers about half of Mexico’s exports to the U.S.
Trump’s apologists say that these aggressive moves and subsequent pull-backs are part of his negotiating strategy, and in a way they are correct. But the real goal of Trump’s negotiations isn’t deals but the enhancement of his own power. His aggression is the way he tests how successfully he can bully his opponents.
That is what he did with Columbia University. That is what he did with the law firms Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins. And that is what he’s done with all the Republicans in the Congress. All of them caved, and their “prudence” simply incentivized him to push further. Like Harvard, like Mexico, like the law firms Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the only way to deal with Trump is to say no.
Resistance breeds resistance. Early this month more than 500 law firms and 300 retired judges asked for leave to file two amicus briefs condemning Trump’s order stripping security clearances from and severing government ties with Perkins Coie. And this past Tuesday the American Association of Colleges and Universities issued a statement signed by leaders of almost 190 other universities denouncing “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in higher education. That’s how movements grow.
On April 17, New York Times columnist David Brooks called for “a comprehensive national civic uprising” to oppose Trump. In the much-cited piece, he said that Trump is only interested in the acquisition of power “for its own sake” and is engaged in “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men.” He argued that we cannot deal with him piecemeal — institution by institution, sector by sector. We must coalesce into “a movement that possesses rival power.”
Good for Brooks, who was shaken out of his complacent conservatism when Trump assumed control of the Republican Party in 2016. The specific forms of resistance he advocated are lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns and boycotts. While ending his list with “other forms of noncooperation and resistance” used by past movements that challenged illegitimate power, he stopped short of mentioning civil disobedience.
I think civil disobedience is necessary. Only when the Trump administration begins to jail nonviolent protesters will the diversified mass movement Brooks envisages coalesce. If I don’t get arrested in the next 12 months, I’ll consider that I missed my Munich moment.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at herbertrothschild6839@gmail.com.
Papi cat is not happy. I know this because of the shouting meows. Not just the sound. He faces me and leans into it. Stretches his jaws wide. He’s Maria Callas using his diaphragm to belt it out.
“I know,” I tell him.
Rain fell all night. Sometimes in buckets. Papi is not a friend of rain. We also re-installed the pet door. In days past, Tucker slept on the mat in front of the pet door. That meant no other animal was entering. With Tucker gone, we decided the food bowls needed to be moved further away.
Background is, we had a buncha cats at one point. They usually didn’t get along. So we had three feeding stations. One in each the laundry room, the office, and the bedroom. In the bedroom, the feeding station lives by the wall beside the sliding door where the pet door resides. We thought it needed to be moved further away so that some passing animal didn’t sniff the kibble richness and come in through the pet door. Since Tucker is no longer guarding the pet door.
But all that change has Papi irritated. Pour the rain on top and he feels that the world is a cruel and injust place.
“I know,” I tell him. “I had to change my diet due to high blood pressure. It sucks.”
“Meyeah,” Papi wailed back.
Yes, it has rained all night. It’s wet and chilly this morning. 44 F and rain. The high will be 51 F and rain. The low will be 41 F and rain. The rain is good for the land, we remind each other. The pep in our pep talks is petering out, though. Everyone wants sunshine until they don’t. Then we want rain. Until we don’t. It’s the cycle of complaint. Weather version.
This is Saturda. April 26, 2025. Still spring in Ashlandia. And typical Ashlandia spring weather.
I’m a little miffed. I had yard plans. I’d been making progress. The rain has placed a pause on the cause. I can’t do the things planned, cause rain and electric power equipment. I’ve read somewhere that they are not a good combination.
I’m happy it’s Saturday. The news cycle slows on the weekends. News doesn’t stop but less people are reporting and airing it. Much as I’d like a break from it, we need to stay vigilant against the Trusk Regime’s evil. That evil goes 24/7. Just when you think their empathy has bottomed, they show a lower side. Most recently, they deported a two-year US citizen. Because, Trump. He no like the 16th Amendment. So he decided to ignore it. Because that’s what you do if you dislike laws. It’s the Trump U.S.A. way.
Snark alert: The other ‘good’ news is that the number of measles cases keep rising. Looks like RFK Jr’s plans just can’t get an angle on stopping it. Probably because he eschews using science and medicine.
Final bit of irritating news. Trump says he’s talking to China about the tariffs. China says, “No, he isn’t.” Either side could be lying. Given Trump’s record, I believe it’s him. Trump is lying. Yet again.
Puttering through the kitchen at pre-coffee speed, The Neurons raised a line in my head. “Let me remember things I don’t know.” I further slowed. I know the line. That wasn’t the line. That was a mondegreen: a misunderstood song line. Urging The Neurons into more effort, the song and real line punched in:
“Let me remember things I love, Lord.” CCR. “Green River”.
Coffee has made a safe landing in my body. Dressed, fed, and caffeinated, I am re-animated for another day. Hope you have a day that works in your favorite. It can happen. Cheers
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of wrongly-deported Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia, spoke out after the Department of Homeland Security posted her address on X.
The Trusk Regime is such an abomination. They care not at all about the Constitution, due process, history, tradition, or people’s safety and privacy, including children.
Clouds have moved into Ashlandia. As neighbors go, they tend to being quiet but flighty. They’re also large but I don’t want to body shame anyone.
With the clouds, we get warmer nights but colder days. Last night only slipped down to 51 F. Today’s high will be 61 F. Will it rain? Let me consult with my digitized Magic 8 Ball. Magic 8 says “It is decidely so.”
Today, BTW, is marked as Friday, April 25, 2025. One third of 2025 is about to end. Despite all of PINO Trump’s promises, preening, and bullying, the Russia-Ukraine goes on. The government is in miserable shape and not saving any money. People are losing 401K money because the stock market and bond market are waaayyy worse than under the previous POTUS. Tourism is down. Talk and worries about empty shelves, increasing unemployment, recession and even economic depression is increasing. Pundits already call it the Trumpcession.
PINO Trump responds to it all with glee. “Look how much money my billionaire friends made.” He alternates that with, “What, me — worry?”
I have The Outsiders performing in the morning mental music stream. The song is “Time Won’t Let Me”. Released in 1965, it grew into a hit and radio staple. That led to its purchase as a 45 RPM offering. The record became part of the basement playlist in our neighborhood. We usually did that over at Tracy and Carolyn’s house, as they had a finished basement.
The Smithereens did a cover for the 1994 movie Timecop, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. I admit, I prefer the original song.
Coffee has come to my aid again, fortifying my psyche for reading the news. Hope you’re all well out there in streaming land, cuz here we go. Cheers
Several CEOs met with O2. That’s the One Orange. Frequently living in Florida, he allows time off from his busy golf schedule to sign executive orders. Many of those EOs are about tariffs. That’s what has the preppers wringing their hands. The CEOs run big box stores. They’re retailers. They were warning Trump that the tariffs would soon cause empty shelves, falling sales, and failing consumer confidence so Trump needed to back off tariffs. Which, despite declaring that he never would, Trump did. Because the CEOs are wealthy O2 backers. If not for them, and other millionaires and billionaires, Trump may not have made it back into the White House to bless the world with chaos. Now, this chaos was completely predictable. Trump said he was going to tariff every jot and tittle entering the United States. So it is tres amusing that these big box stores are worried.
Stuff enters the U.S. through those ports. Port authorities, freight companies, and dock workers say the ports are gonna be ghost haunts. Nothing is expected in. As critically, little is getting shipped out from the United States. Thanks to sharp price increases caused by the tariffs, orders for U.S. goods are being cancelled. These cancelled orders and empty ships are causing a productivity slow down. People are being laid off or terminated.
Gee, that worked out swell, didn’t it, MAGA?
Sanity was the first casualty of Trump’s personal economic war.
Third are workers, soybean farmers, and truckers. All are facing layoffs, or increased costs and decreased profits, or business shutdowns. Trump did the same thing in his first term. Enjoying that experience so much, he’s turned the craziness up to eleven.
Yes, that is a Spinal Tapreference. Spinal Tap used Trump logic to explain why their music is louder.
The phrase was coined in a scene from the 1984 rock mockumentaryThis Is Spinal Tap by the character Nigel Tufnel, played by Christopher Guest. In this scene, Nigel gives the rockumentary’s director, Marty DiBergi, played by Rob Reiner, a tour of his stage equipment. While Nigel is showing Marty his Marshallguitar amplifiers, he points out a selection whose control knobs all have a highest setting of eleven, unlike standard amplifiers whose volume settings are typically numbered from 0 to 10. Believing that this numbering increases the highest volume of the amp, he explains, “It’s one louder, isn’t it?” When Marty asks why not simply make the 10 setting louder, Nigel hesitates before responding: “These go to eleven.”
Fortunately for truck drivers, the UAW, soybean farmers, Boeing, and big business in general, they supported Trump’s re-election campaign. He told them he would raise tariffs. They supported him and his positions and voted him into office. They now have what they wanted.
That’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s take on Trump. Trump is a clown. I so agree.
Trump was reversing himself on tariffs. Again. Trump claimed before that leaders of all these other nations were calling and begging him to make deals. No evidence of that emerged. If anything, Trump’s claim was 180 degrees from the truth.
You got to ask: if his high tariff approach was working so well and all those leaders wanted deals, why is Trump singing a different song now?
The short of it seems to be business. Stock market losses have people remembering the worse April since the Great Depression. The sliding dollar isn’t reassuring anyone, either.
Trump’s tariffpause is like menopause. Has people running hot and cold and getting emotional, irritated, impatient, and easily annoyed.
His tariffpause seems to come from CEOs warning him about empty shelves and declining sales.
The CEOs of Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s, all of whom delivered a blunt message about interruptions in the supply chain and its effects on consumers, were invited to the White House as part of an ongoing internal campaign to make the case to Trump about the real-world impact of his policies, administration officials said.
Trump’s tariffs have placed significant pressure on the retail sector. The business leaders warned that store shelves across America could “soon be empty,” two people familiar with the meeting said, as they presented a dire economic picture that could come into sharper view within weeks.
Gosh, no one saw that coming way back when Trump brayed about imposing tariffs.
At 4:07 AM, the cat announced, “Let’s go!” Yes, he batted and chatted me awake enough to sleep walk to the door and release him back into the wild. He didn’t stay in the wild long. Cold, wind, and hunger drove him back in. “Not that wild, are you?” I asked him. He meowed back.
Thus began Twosda, April 22, 2025, much as many other days begin. Twosda and Thirstdas are the worse for me in this regard. My wife gets up early on Mun-Wen-Fri to attend exercise class. She deals with the cat between 6:30 and 8 AM on those days. But today has Papi testing the limits, in and out. I suspect he has two twins and they’re taking turns at this.
It was 39 F at 4:30 AM. If you trust Alexa. I asked it the temperature after Papi came back in. I was curious because it felt cold to my half-naked body. Like Sun & Mun, today features a clear blue-sky sauce and a glaze of sunshine with a tincture of wind and mild temperatures that lose their punch in the mid to upper sixties.
Trump continues to pile instability on instability, crazy on crazy, losses on losses. Like all great leaders, he sets ridiculous goals using ideologically-driven data, fails to take many details and factors into account, and then pretends it’s going great as everyone else prepares to get out the toilet plunger because this shit is overwhelming the crapper. He is consistently terrible and proud of it. Living in a Teflon-coated bubble, he’ll probably never recognize his insanity and the disastrous, negative impact he delivered to millions of people.
Unless, of course, his secret goal is to completely undermine and destroy the United States. That’s also possible. He could well be in collusion with Russian and oil oligarchs and are busy setting the table up to establish a powerful global cabal. Makes as much sense as any other shit he spreads.
They say that the Roberts Court is finally getting a backbone. “They’ll reign Trump in.” Ha. I think Trump is already smirking at the Roberts Court as he says, “Hold my Big Mac.” Harvard and other universities are suing the Trusk Regime. He doesn’t care. He’s already destabilized and disrupted our education systems and research programs. A third of the national NOAA weather offices have lost their leases. We’ll see what that does to the ability to warn about weather disasters. Then, Trump and Noem have been dismantling FEMA, so when these disaster squat on communities and drop a load, the state and community will struggle to recover and rebuild. Meanwhile, DOGE is raiding personal data and will probably weaponize that on behalf of Russia. He’s truncated international alliances and friendships that effectively worked for over half a century, isolating our nation. Besides all that, he’s been running due process over with a golf court.
And Trump and his supporters think this is just great. Anyway…onward.
When I first heard this Led Zeppelin song when I was thirteen, I thought, holy fucking shit. That was a startling development because I’d never sworn before that. That’s when I took up coffee, too. It all seemed to go together.
The song — “How Many More Times” — is in my morning mental music stream for reasons which The Neurons have sealed. They have better security than Kristi Noem and keep secrets more effectively than Pet (Pete) Hegseth. Not saying much, given how terrible and sloppy the Trump Regime has demonstrated itself to be, outside of the Musk-driven DOGE dogs.
Here is the music. When I listened to it today, my inner thirteen-year-old sat up and said, “Holy fucking shit.” This is a recording of a live show. Anyone familiar with Zep knows it’s gonna be a jam and will vary a bit from what was on the album.
Coffee has again insinuated itself into my body’s systems. I’m prepared to rock another day, at least until nap time later today. Hope your day is as purpose-filled as you need it. Carpe diem. Cheers
My body and mind were unanimous. More sleep was wanted. Yesterday was busy with an Easter Brunch. We’d been preparing all week. 10:15, we set off to go help with setup. By 11:30, all were there. A smorgasbord awaited. Mexican quiche, salmon with asparagus, salmon and cream cheese rolls. Dutch babies and lemon cake for dessert. Salads. Juices and libation to make it chippier. Easter egg hunt and korn hole. A half dozen present shared their latest stories about demonstrating against Trump in Ashland and Medford. 2 PM, it was all over.
Over to a friend’s house for his 93rd birthday. Just family and my wife and I. He has health issues and didn’t want a gathering. After singing the birthday song, witnessing the candle blowout, and visiting for two hours, we headed home to unpack and wash everything.
Blue skies were the day’s order. Light wind kept it from becoming too warm. 69 F was the tops. Today seems like it looked over yesterday’s shoulder and copied the weather.
I reminded my body and mind that sleeping in wasn’t an option. Today is Food & Friends deliveries. Crank up the car, pick up the food, and roll through the streets on route 3 to knock on doors and ring bells and drop off a small meal in southeastern Ashlandia. I’m the driver; my wife makes the deliveries.
Then, finally, it’ll be back to writing at the coffee shop for a few hours, and then home to wash clothes and attend yard work. The grass and weeds are gladded by the sunshine. It’s all shooting up fast.
Papi is beside himself with happiness by the time the air warms. It’s rolled up to 49 F now. He heads outside and sniffs out the sunshine. Then wind sniffs him out and he’s back in. It’s a never-ending game of ‘In & Out’!
The mountain air loads the night with temperatures that dribble down into the mid thirties. That temp feels colder. But we’re on the regular Ashlandia spring track. Only troubling thing is we’re not seeing any bees. They’re normally all over the place with their buzzing presence. Their absence disturbs.
Yesterday’s Easter Trump dump again illuminated his pathetic ways. That vitriol and lie-filled text mess is a sign of an insecure, demented, ignorant person. Trump’s dark forces again rose to show what a sinister and ugly place the United States is becoming under his hand as two young and wholly innocent German tourists were detained and deported, all for the crime of not having accommodations already reserved. Such fools are now in charge. Then there’s Trump’s undocumented bullshit broadside against Abrego Garcia. WTF, United States. Is this truly your vision?
With those thoughts spinning through my groovy organic thought machine, The Neurons spun up Aerosmith in the morning mental music stream: “Same Old Song and Dance”. Last time I used this ditty was in 2019. Trump occupied the White House then. I wrote back on that day,
Reading the news yesterday and today, I was shaking my head, partially laughing while crying. You know, it was the same old story.
That led to me streaming Aerosmith.
It’s the same old story Same old song and dance, my friend It’s the same old story Same old story Same old song and dance
It was an easy song to identify with when I was a teenager and the song was released. When you asked questions, you often heard, “That’s just how it is. That’s how it goes.” It was always the same old song and dance, no matter what you were asked.
So here we go. Trump is attacking and bullying whatever he can — law, courts, common sense, history, morality, it’s all open to a Trump attack. He’s like a puppy gnawing on clothes, shoes, and furniture. Nothing is safe from his brainless chewing. A puppy does far less damage, though. A puppy will grow out of it. Trump, with his deteriorating and aging mental capacity, will get worse.
Same ol’ story, same ol’ song and dance.
Have the best day you can, my friend. Fueled with coffee, I’ll rock on for another day, it seems. Cheers
From Jill Dennison, memes, we got your memes here. Everything from the notoriously dangerous gang known as DT47 to the Archbishop of Cadbury is skewered. Facts are also tastefully served up.Time to think and chuckle. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 