Tag archive: Lie

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Trump’s First Thirty Days:  Schlock & Awe

Donald J. Trump’s particular genius for creating chaos and mayhem was on full display in the first month after his second inauguration on 20 January 2025.  A flurry of executive orders mandating everything from the end of birthright citizenship (a constitutionally enshrined right which requires an amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states to alter) to the quixotic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” (and would you like Freedom Fries with that?) was just the beginning.  Most of the heavy lifting of dismantling the federal government was consigned to Elon Musk and his fabricated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who has proceeded to reflexively fire or eliminate thousands of workers with civil service protections and close entire agencies without congressional authority.  Freezes on funding, hiring, and dispensing approved funds have rounded out DOGE’s resume.

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Trump 2.0: Crazy Like a Fox

Donald J. Trump’s second administration, taking power at noon on 20 January 2025 (by constitutional fiat, whenever the oath itself is taken), is likely to be a replay of the first term, only more so.  In 2017 when he first assumed office, Trump was a newbie novice to the Washington scene; he appointed persons with experience and relative competence to help him run the government, individuals who had a respect for its institutions and norms, who served as guardrails on Trump’s wilder, wackier impulses.

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US Election 2024 Postmortem

And postmortem is a good word for it, with many Americans and others across the globe feeling like they’ve died and gone to hell.  For whatever reason, on November 5th, more than half the US voting electorate chose to once again turn over the keys of the White House to Donald Trump, a convicted felon awaiting sentencing on 34 criminal counts, with three more criminal cases pending, an individual adjudicated guilty of fraud, liable for sexual abuse and defamation, a serial sexual predator who has declared bankruptcy multiple times, who spews hate, racism, invective and misogyny with every breath.  And this time, Trump achieved a feat he hadn’t before – he won, not just by the antiquated machinery of the Electoral College, but with an outright majority of votes, having lost that measure by three million votes in 2016 and seven million votes in 2020.  Shame on us.

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The Trump/Harris Debate

From the moment she stepped on stage at the presidential debate held at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia, PA on September 10, 2024, Kamala Harris dominated, striding purposefully across the platform to force Donald Trump to shake hands with her as an equal.  Trump had been evading that moment (as indeed, he avoided even glancing her way throughout most of the debate), but she walked directly into his space and demanded compliance with the time-honored norm.

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Mr. Bowman Goes to Washington? JD Vance Revealed

OK, yes, somewhat redundant, because JD Vance has been in Washington for 18 months already, since his election to the Senate in 2022.  But you all know how much I love punning titles.  “Mr. Bowman” is a reference to Vance’s birth name, which was James Donald Bowman.  Vance has shifted identities over the course of his life with chameleon-like regularity, becoming James David Hamel as a toddler, after his parents divorced and his mother married Bob Hamel, who adopted him.  Vance shed his skin yet again, becoming James David “JD” Vance (his maternal grandfather’s surname) when he married wife Usha in 2014.  But the title also conjures images of that Americana utopia crafted by filmmaker Frank Capra, a land which never existed, but which Republicans still insist on trying to revive.

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The First 2024 Presidential Debate

“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!  Step right up to the Greatest Shitshow on Earth!  Ya pays your money, ya takes your chance!  What will it be?  Who will you choose – the Felon or the Feeb?”  So says the Cosmic Carnival Barker to promote the first (and now likely only) 2024 US Presidential debate.  For incumbent Joe Biden, it was an unmitigated disaster, which is an apt word for an astrologer to use, since its literal meaning is “against the stars.”

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