MAGA MIGA and MAHA

 Sounds like a science fiction movie.  Pass the popcorn. 

Don't mess with the Zohran.  Former dishonored Governor of NYS Andrew Cuomo yesterday lost the Democratic NYC Mayoralty primary race to this guy Zohran Mamdani who I never heard of.  I'm guessing Cuomo has some kind of law background to fall back on or maybe his brother Chris can help.  Maybe he can become the custodian at an auto dealership or slice deli meats.  It appears a fair number of New Yorkers still wanted him as Mayor but that's it for the comeback groper.  Maybe he can run for Yonkers Sidewalk Commissioner.

Trump has made Americans less safe

 Iran did not threaten us.  We were not at war with them.  Iranian Foreign Minister meets with Putin although other reports say Russia is unlikely to enter the conflict.  UPI reports however that other countries are willing to supply Iran with nukes after Trump's act of bellicosity.  Now as we all know Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently testified before Congress that it is the consensus of the intelligence community that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons as the Ayatollah suspended that program in 2003.  After Trump dumped on Tulsi however she now says new intelligence has come to light (read: whatever Netanyahu says) in order to keep her post.  Call her Flipper.  People can't withstand the wrath of the Orange Man I guess.  I get concerned when I'm running low on the Christian Brothers.  For Hegseth it's the hair gel.  The last question when does Trump take Greenland?

Every president likes to use the military

 But Trump promised to be different so why throw rocks at a junkyard dog?  Trump campaigned as an anti-neocon non-interventionist America Firster.  Instead we get a saber-rattling Israel First foreign policy, impulsive interventionism.  Trump has claimed on his Truth Social overwhelming success in totally obliterating Iran's three nuclear facilities.  He has ignored the advice of his own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard who recently testified before Congress that Iran was really not that close to developing an actual nuclear weapon.  She's probably on her way out.  Now we have to worry about a protracted conflict with Iran and possible terrorist reprisals.  Pakistan has just nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize why I don't know.  Troubling times but kind of took Homan off the front pages.

Is it anti-semitic to not want to go to war with Iran?

 Trump mulling over possible strikes against Iran including the use of bunker busting bombs to target Iranian nuclear facilities.  What happened to no new wars and America First?  An Iranian missile struck a major hospital in southern Israel.  Oh the humanity!  Meanwhile Netanyahu just attacked Gaza's last functioning hospital.  Never fully understood countries with nuclear weapons telling other countries they can't have nuclear weapons.  What only we know how to use atomic bombs in a moral way?  All that and more on today's episode of Stranded.

Will Trump go to war?

Are Trump and Musk still hot for each other?

 Musk has expressed misgivings, deleted some tweets and says he may have gone too far.  Trump says he might be open to a reconciliation.  Defense Sec'y Hegseth says the US has contingency plans to occupy Greenland if necessary.   Israel attacked Tehran targeting their nuclear facilities and chain of command.  ICE agents are chasing farm laborers through strawberry fields and going into meat production plants.  Big military parade tomorrow.   Trump's birthday.  DHS Sec'y Kristi Noem doesn't like to be interrupted.  What's up with Dr. Phil?

The USS Diddy

 Some candidates for the renaming of the U.S.S. Harvey Milk Navy ship:

The USS John Wayne

The USS Kate Smith

The USS Pat Boone

Something safe.  Can't send a gay ship into battle.  Read somewhere that one of Trump's political advisors says there's some signs of a little cognitive decline going on and he may not finish out his second term.  However what does it say about the Right these days that they may have been vigorously defending the mutterings of a cognitively declined man all this time?

If we're living in great times I must be missing something. 

Why Dems pick up the midterms

 Still aways away but closer than you think.  Dems currently in disarray and panic mode but they really don't have to do much if President Trump continues on his present course.  Every time I go to the grocery store it hurts.  Bought a few things today and it came to just under $100.  Didn't even buy cat food.  Trump is focused on other things though.  He changed the name of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  He's fighting Harvard.  Changing geographical names.  A bloated budget bill with ai deregulation.  Tariffing the world.  Building more ICE centers and a laundry list of other things.  Cultural tangential stuff with no real impact on the average American.  No trans soldiers.  Scale back the Jackie Robinson walks through history.  Just let Trump be Trump.  MAGA becomes a historical footnote.  Maybe a future category on Jeopardy. 

Conservatives got everything they ever dreamed of but didn't know what to do with it.  No focus or narrow pragmatic workable agenda just Righties gone wild.  The freakoff should end around the midterms.  Patience.  They'll blame the immigrants in the end;)

If this is conservatism then I have tits

 Got off the Trump train awhile back ever since Gulf of America.  Many of you are still on it happily blowing the whistle.  A new OTA channel came on my TV the other night - Newsmax 2.  Must be important.  Watched a little bit and my impression is I don't think Newsmax fully understands the idea that people have the right to protest proposed Medicaid cuts.  A few channels over I have OAN.  It's usually at this time I'll watch the infomercial for Omega XL or the Emeril Lagasse air fryer.  Don't know why almost the whole conservative movement has hitched their wagon to Trump.  Sure there are some lone critics and holdouts here and there like Glenn Greenwald and Candace Owens but for the most part it's this massive nonstop collective right-wing orgasm.  A real freakoff.

I'm not against the idea of a Golden Dome but how do you fire tens of thousands of federal workers shutter entire agencies and then say we need a multi-billion dollar Golden Dome to maybe even include our neighbor up North? The tariffs are confusing and need to end but Trump wants businesses to just shut up and absorb the extra costs without passing them along to the consumer.  Executive orders don't strike me as having the quality of durable law, comes totally out of his whimsy and not the Congress but he feels this is the way to govern and on and on it goes.

Geeeeeez......

This blog lags behind a little bit

 I'm not a political junkie.  I follow politics in a tangential general sort of way but I don't follow say every bill working its way through the Congress.  My cats need to eat.  I have yardwork to do.  I'm not like the old people who look at the TV screen all day and follow the news 24/7.  I see the headlines on my devices that's enough.  Ok so the leader of South Africa met with Trump at the WH.  Trump has given refugee status to some white Afrikaaners.  Trump has accused the leader of some kind of genocide.  Perhaps Trump is projecting onto him what he should be saying to Bibi but I'm not a shrink.  I know way back in the day the South African government was harassing the white landowners but again I'm too busy of late to dive down these rabbit holes.  Media calling it false.  Again I'm not up to speed on a lot of stuff.  I'm more likely to google lizards of New York State as I have varied interests.   I don't discuss politics with my vet or when getting an oil change.  FWIW I don't think Biden was healthy enough to hold the most important position in the land but at the same time I don't think it amounts to treason so you can call me not a team player.

Just some light opining here.  Pour yourself a drink and let's have a chat.  Not everything is binary.

Word on the street

 Is President Trump will soon officially recognize a Palestinian State.  Angling for a Nobel Peace Prize to show Obama.  Meeting with the Saudis, the new Syrian president putting Netanyahu on the back burner for now.  Helped free the last American hostage without his help.  Rumor has it he has cut off direct contact with Bibi.  As part of the nuclear energy agreement with the Saudis he has dropped the Biden era stipulation that they recognize the State of Israel.  Also got a major investment deal going.  More than major.

Down through the decades with each succeeding president the Middle East has taken up way too much of our foreign policy time.  If he does officially recognize the State of Palestine I'll give him more than a few points for this.  Would be a good legacy if he controls the other zaniness.  So far Trump is an assortment. 

Trump's First 100 Days in Office - Take a walk on the wild Right

 Arresting judges.  We don't need no Education Dept.  Bomb the Houthis.  Hey hey ho ho DEI has got to go.  You're fired then rehired.  Deporting the wrong people.  DOGE it baby!  Tariffs.  Trade wars.  Funding freezes.  Bibi.  Gaza.  Zelensky.  Putin.  Harvard.  You wanna protest on campus?  STFU.  Have you checked your cat for anti-semitism lately?  Executive orders.  Homan.  Cap'n Crunch.  Food dyes.  Measles.  Gulf of Trump.  Greenland.  Have you caught up on your texts today for maybe secret Yemeni war plans?  Closing USAID.  Who needs to eat?  Scale back the medical research grants already.  Cancer shmancer.  Low polls blame FOX News.  Tell the judges to go fuck off.  Bondi.  Patel.  Lawfare.  Trump vs. trans soldiers.  Canada as the 51st state?

Can Fall Out Boy make a song out of all of this?

The media made me do it

 Yes the left-wing media doesn't like Trump.   Never did.  This was really obvious during the campaign.  My daily newsfeeds were saturated with anti-Trump stuff.  If the media could have gone with Trump ate somebody's dog they would have gone with Trump ate somebody's dog.  Having said that Trump has tracked a nuttier course than I would have expected but conservatives are still blaming the msm.  Trump lost me after Gulf of America and Greenland.  The media didn't make him almost trigger a worldwide recession.  Not speedily correcting deportation mistakes.  Squelching free speech on campus etc. etc.  To paraphrase Flip Wilson's Geraldine the media made me do it.  Not good enough.  Doesn't wash anymore. 

Oy vey! - Team Trump giving off those creepy Orwellian vibes

 Fresh on the heels of almost ruining millions of Americans 401k plans (90 day tariff pause) Team Trump has announced they are going to be monitoring the social media accounts of immigrants seeking permanent legal status as well as the online musings of foreign students.  They're going to be looking for antisemitic posts.  Watch them conflate legitimate criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza with support for Hamas and Hezbollah and other terror groups.  No wonder Bibi was grinning on his recent trip to the WH.  I say this if the Trump Administration is going to get all pervy about people's privacy at least include a middle finger emoji at the end of the post.  The Peeps Administration:)

Anti-semitism on campus and Trump's Gestapo

 "Anti-semitism" being rather loosely defined these days to include legitimate criticism of the State of Israel.  Trump Administration now going after perfectly legal people who have all the right paperwork.  Pro-Palestinian foreign students on visas now being detained and actively deported for protesting Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.  Over 50,000 Gazans already dead including scores of women and children.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of revoking the student visas over 300 at last count.  Homan's goon squads.  Tufts U. student arrested or should we say kidnapped by masked ICE agents in the middle of the street in broad daylight.  Her crime?  Simply writing an op-ed piece in the university newspaper calling on Tufts to divest itself from companies that do business with Israel.  The horror stories go on.  The banality of evil.

We tend to forget that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza.  On at least two occasions Netanyahu has cut off all water and electricity into Gaza most recently even well after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for him.  He's doing what he wants regardless and is now singing the praises of Trump's crackdown on campus speech and says other governments should follow his example.

This is quite possibly the most shocking episode of our government censoring perfectly valid speech in modern times.  Unless Trump fires some people (e.g. Rubio, Homan) it means the downfall of the Trump Administration imo and the end of MAGA.  A blot on the history books.

4 more years for a political hemorrhoid?

 Trump wants to invade Greenland and is thinking about a 3rd term in office.  On the first score the military should simply disobey and on the second it's ludicrous.  Who does he think he is FDR?  You're witnessing a man in his dotage with psychotic tendencies.  I think at this stage you can slowly build a case for a potential 25th Amendment Section 4 scenario.  Not being dramatic here he just belongs in a ward and not leading the free world.

There is nothing inspiring about the Trump presidency

 The dismal 2nd term continues.  I honestly thought Marco Rubio was a decent choice for Secretary of State but he's turned into a dick.  He's boasting he revoked 300 Visas of foreign students who have engaged in pro-Palestinian protests on campus.  Actually it may be more he lost count.  He says those coming here from abroad to colleges and universities are here to study and learn and to earn a degree.  Has he never heard of intercollegiate sports?  The Vietnam War protests?  Thou Shalt Not Criticize Israel.  Rubio somehow conflates condemning the ongoing genocide in Gaza with support for Hamas.  Expect more judicial spanking.  Meanwhile RFK Jr. in his mission to make America healthy again has cut about 10,000 jobs from his own agency.  So where are all the Fruit Loops cops gonna come from?  On the Greenland front Trump is now making almost daily veiled threats against the island nation.  Denmark is not amused.

You can't make this shit up.

Maybe next time add a Houthi to a group chat?

 Maybe someday you'll be able to get Yemen war plans on your Smart TV.  If I was new to blogging struggling to come up with a name during the early days of the 2nd Trump Administration it would have just hit me in the shower,

You Can't Make This Shit Up

Meanwhile JD Vance is going to join his wife Usha in Greenland for a creepy visit upcoming. See the sights dine on whatever Greenlanders eat and exert some pressure.  A kind of friendly Mafioso sitdown.  Is  Musk going to abolish the DMV?  The dismantled DOE workers where do they wind up slicing deli meats?  I get the OAN channel crystal clear in these parts and some nights host Riley Lewis looks like he's going to uncork one.  The erstwhile sensible National Review is all MAGA now.  Lonely.  Maybe I'll go smoke a pipe with Mitch McConnell. 

You know it would all make sense if I was involved in a horrible car accident and wound up in a comatose state and this was all a bad dream.  The Orange Man is real though.  It'll all be over in 3 years and 10 months if we have a country left.

Keeping it psycho

 Trump's Greenland obsession

I was thinking about blogging about other things today as a break from the Trump Follies but this caught my attention.

Will probably go down as the weirdest Administration in U.S. history

 At the risk of making a low-effort post scanning the newsfeeds this morning and it's hard to make a coherent post about Trump because his actions are incoherent.  Do you want to spend an extra 12K for a new car?  Would Kamala Harris have pushed us into a recession?  Meanwhile Bibi has cut off all food, supplies and electricity into Gaza (again) but Trump wants to crack down on pro-Palestinian speech on campus instead.

If Biden truly was the worst president in U.S. history as Trump says Trump seems to be vying for the #2 spot.

Rubio fights with the punkass Musk at Cabinet meeting

 Read all about it

Also Trump considering sanctions against Russia to pressure Putin into reaching ceasefire deal with Ukraine.

From the ticker.