Tag archive: Washingtonia

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Tesla:  Out of Gas?

OK, Tesla makes electric vehicles, which don’t run on gasoline, but you get the idea.  Once valued in excess of a trillion dollars, Tesla Motors stock has plunged in 2025, shedding some $380 billion in value since January, which, not coincidentally, is when founder Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, began his stint with the second Trump administration, as head of the now notorious DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency.  The extra-governmental task force, with no statutory authority beyond the President’s fiat, attempted to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, but came up a bit short. 

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Donald Trump’s 79th Solar Return

US President Kim Jong Don will be celebrating his 79th birthday on Saturday, 14 June, 2025, with a North-Korean-style military parade in the nation’s capital, while simultaneously, 3000 miles away, US National Guard and Marines patrol the country’s largest city, ostensibly to quell “insurrectionists” protesting his administration’s immigration policies.  The dual displays of military power, both unprecedented and controversial, well encapsulate the leading feature of Dear Leader’s Solar Return, which occurs the day before:  a square between Mars, planet of the military, violence and war, and Uranus, planet of shocks, upsets, controversy, volatility, and extreme reactions.

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A Decade of The Donald

Hard to believe, but on June 16th, it will be ten years since Donald J. Trump rolled down that golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for US president, setting in motion a disruption in our political life as a nation the likes of which we’ve never seen before (to use one of Trump’s favorite catch phrases).  As always, the moment encapsulates the future, crystalizing latent potential into manifestation.

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President Musk

Nobody elected him to anything, he is ineligible for the high office he apparently holds, his work in restructuring government is unsanctioned, unofficial, and unconstitutional.  But Elon Musk has apparently effected a successful takeover of the US government, hostile or otherwise.  The head of Donald Trump’s bogus DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk is behaving like a classic Doge, the medieval, autocratic rulers of Venice, arbitrarily cutting staff, stopping funding, and eliminating entire departments at whim.

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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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Aster-Obit: Jimmy Carter

On Sunday, 29 December 2024, former US president Jimmy Carter passed away peacefully at his home in Plains, Georgia; at age 100, he was the longest-lived chief executive in US history.  Carter had been in hospice care for nearly two years, since February of 2023, and had lost his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, that November.  He also enjoyed the longest post-presidency, which was viewed, rightly or wrongly, as considerably more successful than his administration, with the Carter Center promoting democracy, advancing human rights and assisting disease eradication globally.  Jimmy and Rosalynn also partnered with Habitat for Humanity in an annual home-building blitz, which the Carters joined personally.

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