2025 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The Trump Administration wants to create an "Office of Remigration": Say what?!? — It's being reported that while Musk was on a "daily high of ketamine and psychedelics," it appears that Trump and Musk are letting 103 people per hour die and two-thirds of them are children. — A Texas cop searched license plate readers, including in Blue states where abortion is legal, to find a woman who he thinks had an abortion. Say what?! — Canada declares independence from the US military in a shock move that'll damage the US defense industry as much as it humiliates Trump. — Bob Kennedy must be using ChatGPT to write his reports to the American people. — Crazy Alert! Trump posts meme saying he's "on a mission from God" featuring the racist alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.

From Greedy Kings to Corporate Conglomerates – It's Always Been the Same Fight Yesterday, I wrote about how the mental illness of hoarding syndrome afflicting a few hundred of our nation's rightwing billionaires has destroyed a large chunk of the American middle class and is threatening the health of our biosphere. But the overall story is larger than just that. Trump is embroiled in a bribery scandal that has the entire world agog. The potentates and dictators of the Middle East are openly contemptuous of his willingness to defy Congress and sell them advanced American weapons systems in exchange for billion-dollar Trump hotels in their countries. Putin and his state-owned media ridicules Trump daily, pushing his attacks on Ukraine in Trump's face. And federal workers and our military are aghast at the incompetence, corruption, and even the alleged alcoholism of the people Trump has scraped off the floor of Fox "News" to run their agencies and make federal prosecutors. All of this corruption and incompetence has one major goal: the enrichment of the Trump family and the people close to them. It's an old, old story, that dates back to the earliest days of human prehistory.

Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise? You don’t. Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…” When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag. It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable. This kind of rhetoric isn’t new, and it’s not harmless. History has shown us—again and again—that when political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.

In 1935, Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the National Labor Relations Act, often referred to as the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions in the United States for the first time. It was referred to as “the most radical piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”[lvii] New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Wagner was the new law’s main author, and his legislative aide, Simon H. Rifkind, told Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1986 that there were several reasons for the law. First, there was considerable labor unrest across the nation; it had been particularly bloody over the preceding fifty or so years since the labor movement first emerged in a big way in the 1880s. Employers would hire private security companies or pay off local politicians and police to harass, beat, and often even kill workers to prevent unionization.