unraveling

31.March.2026

Time running out

Many of my best friends are septagenarians or better, but there comes a time, you know? Looking back through my heap of (mostly) unread bookmarks, this late-February NYT item was at the top: Justice [Clarence] Thomas Bemoans Incivility as Security Prompts Cancellation of In-Person Speech. He video-phoned it in from Sen. Mike Lee's office to American University, which is also in D.C. (who knew?), a liberal arts college that celebrates itself with a dancing hero video of "endless possibilities" and a lot more diversity than can be found in the big houses with columns in D.C. these days.

Wikipedia's synopsis tells us AU was "chartered by an Act of Congress in 1893 at the urging of Methodist bishop John Fletcher Hurst, who sought to create an institution that promoted public service, internationalism, and pragmatic idealism." Those were the days! It took 9 years to break ground, and another 12 to open for instruction, as a graduate education institution in 1914. It branched out to undergraduates just over a hundred years ago, and now comprises the School of International Service; the College of Arts and Sciences; the Kogod School of Business; the School of Communication; the School of Professional and Extended Studies; the School of Public Affairs; the Linda A. and H. Kent Baker School of Education; and the Washington College of Law.

Pretty storied. The front page features its distinguished alumnus Lonnie Bunch III, who earned a BA, MA, and PhD there (it seems; but they don't mention the PhD in the photo caption, that's odd), and was appointed the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. That's about Embracing the Rough Edges of American History, and comes not quite one year after the doddering thug in (nominal) charge of the executive branch of the federal government issued a contrapuntal order for "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," directing his man-in-waiting, J.D. "JD" Vance "to review SI for what it described as "improper, divisive, or anti-American" ideology. The only thing mentioned as "done" in the Wikipedia section was to remove a temporary label from 2021 addressing the two impeachments of thug from "The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden" exhibit.

We are reminded that the Republican caucus in the US Senate had two chances to the do the right thing, in 2020, and 2021, and could not muster the courage to honor the oaths to our Constitution, a sorry cigar in the punchbowl of our 250th anniversary celebration.

And then there's Clarence Thomas, 77, closing in on the record for longest-serving associate justice, who is "not a fan of opinions that he described as 'too edgy,'" preferring instead to greenlight an unbridled unitary executive able to whitewash his felony record, avoid accountability for an insurrection and grand theft, and remove any and all "improper" ideology from history.

In spite of security concerns scaring him away from a public appearance (or facing the small, peaceful protest outside), Thomas was "upbeat and gregarious" in his unironic remarks about his decades-long battle against affirmative action. (We look forward to 2081.)

"When [Gene] Schaerr asked the justice how he would celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, Justice Thomas said Americans should recommit to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He said people needed to do a better job in “being candid” about their differences and said his remote appearance suggested “we have come a long way in the wrong direction.”

Oh yes, we're not "candid" enough these days. At least we can agree about the long way in the wrong direction. Term limits for members of the Supreme Court might help, a lot. The 25th Amendment is also waiting to be put in gear.

30.March.2026

Rethinking the messaging rethink

Eliss Slotkin came to Idaho this month and was a featured speaker at the largest-ever (I'm pretty sure it was) Frank and Bethine Church gala, the Idaho Democratic Party's biggest annual fund-raiser. (Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was the keynote speaker; it was a great event.) I thought she was well-spoken, but did not take notes. She was part of the six Democrats who reminded members of the military that it's their Constitutional duty to refuse illegal orders, an idea which lit up the current corrupt regime to try (and fail) to prosecute them.

Think all the way through that idea, why don't we. As we continue to murder boaters in the Carribean, and wage wider war with the quiet acquiescence of the sycophantic Republican caucus in congress.

I have had reservations about her counter-programming to the general party direction. "We need to do something different" seems well-taken, but that doesn't say just what. This morning, Jason Sattler on LOLGOP has pushback for her latest trope. "Last week, Elissa Slotkin posted a theory [on Threads, which I don't do, but including the link, if you do] about why Democrats keep losing.

“What works in the middle of the country will work on the coasts,” she wrote, “but not in reverse. That’s why we need to hear from people in places like Michigan, Idaho, and Kansas City.”

She may well have used that line in her speech at the gala; I've heard that everything's up to date in Kansas City, and she's the junior US senator from Michigan, and hello Idaho! would have been a good applause line in a very friendly crowd of Democrats in our too-red state.

What "we've heard" from most of the people in Idaho lately, and the super-majority of Republicans running our legislatuer is that they really like the MAGA psychopathy of punching down, and hurting people who they deem "other" for whatever reason.

"The argument sounds so humble. “Finally, a Democrat willing to call out Democrats!!!” swoons the press, big donors, and Bill Maher.

"Of course, it is actually a dog whistle nested inside a strategy argument. “What works in the middle of the country” means: soften the message on immigrants, trans people… You’re making flyover country uncomfortable! In this framing, the coasts are where the ideologues live. The middle is where the real Americans are. Democrats just need to listen to “the real Americans” and stop being so … much."

The punchline is in bold, as the first subhead: Becoming your opponent isn’t a strategy; it’s surrender.

"The non-stop hate machine — the talk radio, the Facebook algorithm, the local news gutted and replaced by Sinclair feeds — has manufactured positions that feel like settled conviction but are, in Shenker-Osorio’s data, nothing of the kind. The correct response to a propaganda environment is not capitulation to it. It is a counter-narrative with enough force to overwhelm it."

Sattler highlights Anat Shenker-Osorio's work in communications, with the starting assumption that among "the base," "the opposition," and "the persuadables," the last category is the largest. "60% [of the electorate] doesn't have a fixed position."

"They are capable of believing multiple contradictory things simultaneously. In the same survey, a majority will support mass deportation, and an even larger majority will support a pathway to citizenship. There’s no thing that they already believe.... They are waiting to be organized, not mirrored with messages they can already get from Hannity any night.

"The job of a message, Shenker-Osorio says, is not to say what’s popular. It’s to make popular what needs to be said. And the way it gets popularized is through the base, who act as a choir, spreading the message to their neighbors, wearing it on their shirts, and going out to protest it. A message so cautious your own base won’t repeat it is already dead. It will never reach the persuadable middle because the choir refused to sing."

Then he gets to Hannah Arendt, and you should take the jump and read the whole thing. This is not the way forward:

"Fascism offers coherence: one enemy, one story, one answer to the contradiction you’ve been made to feel ashamed of. Join us, and you’ll never have to hold two ideas at the same time again. That’s the pitch. And it works because we’ve been trained to experience our own contradictions as embarrassments rather than as evidence of being fully human."

Stick with it to the end and you'll find Andrea Pitzer's Next Comes What episode with Shenker-Osorio.

"If you want to know who took your money, it's the people with all the money! That's how you can tell! If they can convince you that it's anyone else that you need to point your finger at, newcomers, or at black folks, or at trans people, then they can keep picking your pocket."

29.March.2026

Incompetence and corruption like the world has never seen

What Mike Levin said (on Xitter, I guess; I saw George Conway's repost):

"An estimated 95,000 scientists and researchers have left federal agencies since [thug] returned to the White House. These are the people tracking hurricances, studying pediatric cancer, and modeling the climate tipping points that determine whether we can still prevent catastrophe.

"We lost them because this administration defunded their work, shuttered their offices, and made clear that finding out the truth is no longer a government priority."

I made a note of that, went off to church (where "Joy is the Secret of Resistance" was the topic), got out for an afternoon ride in the foothills (where the bitterbrush are expressing their joy in this new season), and eventually got back to reading a piece in The Atlantic with a seemingly irresistable teaser: One Word Describes Trump. (After I'd been far enough—spoiler alert!—to see that it was "patrimonialism.")

"In his day, [Max] Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong."

Now see if any of this sounds familiar:

"In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.... [P]atrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave....

"[T]he damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor....

"To say that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal.

“He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark."

I'd noted the "/02/" in the URL and thought well ok, this is like a month old, but still sounds pretty cogent. Then I noticed it was "/2025/02/"; the dateline is 13 months ago. Damn.

The inevitable incompetence of thug's patrimonialism is deeply shocking, and hitting hard about now. But the corruption is less obvious, and "requires relentless messaging" to be a vector of weakness. My emphasis added:

"Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.”

And here we are, a year deeper into the bottomless swamp of that accurate prediction.

27.March.2026

Forever drug wars

Been following Jason Sattler's "The Cause," and his LOLGOP pseudonym for a good while (maybe back to Twitter days?) but a video conversation he posted this week seems like the first time I've seen him speak. Never mind the risible teaser in the headline, it's worth the 33 minute watch: From Erectile Dysfunction to the Iran War: A Brief History of Drug Policy and Empire. But then maybe the ED is relevant, what with chickenhawks starting wars around the world these days.

His interlocuter is new to me, Sanho Tree, "a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a former World War II historian, one of the most consistent voices on drug policy and U.S. foreign policy in the Western hemisphere, and an irreplaceable follow on Bluesky.

"He’s been sounding the alarm on Cuba, Venezuela, and the drug war’s role in driving migration for years, long before any of it became unavoidable news....

"Putin has been a ... massive beneficiary of this, right? But I think part of it, part of it is that I think Trump got drunk off of Venezuela. Yeah. He thought, oh, we can do anything. It'll be simple. We'll just, you know, wham, bam, bing, bong, and it's done. And boy, is it not done."

Their conversation "on the illegal blockade of Cuba, Trump's buzz from Venezuela, and how Trump lit every fuse at once" provides brilliant analysis and insight about war crimes and criminals, drugs, exploitation, and the damage from demonizing (and eliminating) expertise, in favor of dumb loyalty to our thug. It puts the "war on drugs" that's been going on my whole live and more in a more comprehensive frame.

The theme was "popularized," as Wikipedia puts it, by the media after a June 17, 1971 press conference with Richard Nixon connecting the drug abuse dots to "public enemy number one," which was "popularized" before my time, starting in 1930, when Prohibition was failing to quell the civil war on alcohol. La plus ça change.

Not to get too distracted, but I noted that in the (1919!) song there, Every Day Will be Sunday When the Town Goes Dry, John Barleycorn makes an appearance. I met him in the title track of Traffic's 1970 studio album, a lovingly covered British folksong, not that long after my first taste of Pabst Blue Ribbon. You know, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. After China had made opium famous by trying to enforce its old prohibition destroying opium stocks owned by British merchants and the British East India Company, and suffering defeat in two actual wars, the second, 1856-1860, resulting in China being forced to legalise opium. Those were the days.

In the Sattler-Tree convo, we fast-forward to "drugs" once again being an all-purpose casus belli, no need to fuss with facts like where the latest and greatest opioid—orders of magnitude more powerful than straight-from-the-plant stuff isolated in 1804—is actually manufactured or who's delivering it to whom.

Pete Hegseth, possibly dry drunk (but definitely drunk with power), major war-fighter, unleased drone warfare on defenseless boaters in the Caribbean (and then the Pacific to boot) last year, delivering the due process-free death penalty to more than 150 humans since last summer. "Operation Southern Spear" has been a war crime program from get go, including a "double tap" to shoot survivors on opening day. Now the "operation" can barely raise a headline over the mayhem in the middle east.

There is this, in the Trinidad Daily Express, marking the 47th lethal boat strike. SouthCom has a 15-second clip, posted to its social platform, and presumably part of the daily 2-minute montage of "stuff being blown up" that reportedly delights our demented thug, and distracts from any bad news. We read there that Trinidad and Tobago's

"Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has in the past expressed explicit support for the US’ counter-drug efforts and the lethal boat strikes, in September stating that all drug traffickers should be killed violently."

That brings the story around to the book featured top right, Maria Ressa's How to Stand Up to a Dictator. It's worth noting that the dictator she and her media organization stood up to, Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested by police authorities based on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on March 11, 2025, and extradited to The Hague on the same day. Last I see on the story, coincidentally at the same time that Hegseth started the Operation Southern Spear extrajudicial killing campaign, was that they were evaluating whether "the octogenarian [was] fit enough to follow the pre-trial proceedings in his case."

26.March.26

More barking mad

Thug talking smack about "a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money" and that's pretty much the whole story of thug 2.0, innit? His Team of Weevils is feeding him filtered "good news about the war" pabulum in two-minute video montages of "stuff blowing up," the lesser minions are doing what looting they and, and whoops, the DOJ leaked some of the Jack Smith evidence about thug 1.0 stolen documents his chief Savior "Judge" Aileen "loose" Cannon had worked so long and hard to keep under wraps. From the HCR March 25 daily brief:

[Rep. Jamie] Raskin [of Maryland, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee,] noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now–White House chief of staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that at about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and a state-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had “classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.”

"Raskin wrote: “It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”

Not that thug's pet AG will actually do anything to uphold her oath or represent the people of these United States.

OG Russian connection Mike Flynn got some kind of payoff for his time and trouble lying to the FBI and compromising national security back in the day. Stephen Miller is working red state legislatures "to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot," and a reminder about the days before supposedly onerous government regulation on the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911.

Welcome to Thursday.

25.March.2026

Not just profiteering, but doing it with national secrets

The lede from Heather Cox Richardson's daily, dated March 24:

"This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it: “People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets.” Another word for that, he said, is “treason.” The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P 500 and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S. and Iran were in negotiations to end the war—an announcement that turned out to be false.

"The oil futures trade alone was worth about $580 million, the Financial Times estimated. As Krugman notes, exploiting confidential information for financial gain, otherwise known as “insider trading,” is illegal. But exploiting confidential information about national security for private financial gain is something else again. It puts profit-making above Americans’ safety."

Robert Reich shows the spike in trading activity 15 minutes ahead of thug's "truth" posting two days ago, in graphs.

Decline and fall

From the stack of things I was reading when a squirrel got cross-wise with a nearby transformer yesterday morning, Carlos Lozada's opinion in the New York Times: America Has Become a Dangerous Nation.

Not exactly breaking news, but our claim to "leader of the free world" has been well and truly obliterated by the mental excursions of our psychopath-in-chief and the abetting toadies protecting their access to inside training while the world is burning.

"Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can. In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled Iran’s theocratic leadership in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump in his second term is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business....

"Under Trump, the idea of U.S. leadership has indeed been remade — but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them.... “We don’t need anybody,” a peeved Trump said last week when European leaders initially declined to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them.”...

"In place of the Pax Americana we are seeing a sort of Lax Americana, a world in which a careless and uninhibited and incurious U.S. superpower struts across the chess board, threatening old friends and enabling old rivals, seeking short-term gains, heedless of the dangers it is creating for itself and for the world."

I would have said "across the checkers board," but ok.

"[L]legitimacy is part of what made Pax Americana possible. Lax Americana, by contrast, doesn’t just waste the nation’s legitimacy; it hardly recognizes its value."

I suspect Lozada wrote his piece before the latest blockbuster, yesterday's news that one of the murderous autocrats who's friends with thug and his crime family is "advising" him to keep the war going. A "historic opportunity" for another Middle East makeover, don't you know. That seems to have flitted right off the headlines in the way these things do in the fog of war.

(Saudia officials said to have "rejected the idea that Prince Mohammed has pushed to prolong the war," and their kingdom "has always supported a peaceful resolution to the conflict, even before it began." That has a real "We have always been at war with Eastasia" feel to it.)

Disgusting

That was the subject line on a solicitation from VoteVets, an organization I respect for speaking truth to power, resistance to the ongoing saga of chickenhawks and psychopaths and forever wars. What they said, with my emphasis added to theirs:

Every American should be absolutely disgusted by this, Thomas.

First off, Trump started a war on his own. He didn’t justify it, he hasn’t gotten congressional approval for it, and he didn’t build a coalition of allies for it.

(Remembering the run-up to the war in Iraq, and Colin Powell's debacular presentation to the United Nations Security Council, set up by Dick Cheney and George Tenet.... Did any good come out of cocked-up justification, getting Congressional approval or building a coalition of allies?)

Then, Americans started getting killed. Allies across the region were attacked. The Strait of Hormuz was shut down, markets fell, and gas prices spiked.

Now, Trump and Hegseth are trying to use the fallen as a shield for their own failures. Trump is fundraising using images from the dignified transfer of our war dead. Hegseth is making up stories about families of the fallen telling him to “finish the job,” when no such thing happened.

Worst of all, they’ve asked for another $200 billion dollars and haven’t ruled out sending American troops into combat.

We haven’t seen anything like this since the height of the war in Iraq, but there’s one big difference. It took years for Iraq to spiral out of control, and Trump managed to completely botch this in days.

What comes next is going to make all the difference.

VoteVets is fighting it out on Capitol Hill to limit Trump’s ability to escalate this war, and whipping votes against funding for it. We’re reaching out to Veterans every day to build a coalition against Trump. And we’re readying millions of dollars to defeat every Republican who lets Trump put American troops in harm’s way.

These are the moments VoteVets was made for, but we can’t do this work alone. So, today, we are humbly asking for your support.

We've supported a lot of candidates, and causes, and I so wish I could measure "success" in that support, but here we are. I'm happy to share their donate link, at least. Support them if you are so moved:

If you can spare a donation — $3 or anything you can afford — it will go directly towards the fight against Trump, the MAGA Right, and this war.

1st Equinox, 2026

Corruption, sabotage, treason

The hits keep coming, relentlessly. ICYMI, the so-called Department of Justice has been utterly cuckolded by thug. (His giant mug-banner, hanging over the door, provides homage to Joe Stalin's Soviet Union.) Our criminal Attorney General, a long-time accessory to thug, and he to her, when his so-called "university" was being exposed for a fraud. A $25,000 illegal campaign contribution lead to a $5,000 fine, and there was a $25,000,000 settlement "ending nearly seven years of legal battles with customers who claimed they were misled by failed promises."

Yeah, that Pam Bondi. She popped into Congress for a "briefing" to James Comer's committee, trying to forestall the subpoena she's been served, to testify, under oath. Do we need all that to impeach her for lying, already? The sword of "Contempt" has been blunted and broken when there is no DOJ willing to enforce against any ally (but happy to try for any enemey), let alone the head of the department.

She and her department are openly violating, and thereby mocking the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by the perpetrator-in-chief. As Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) summarized yesterday's melodrama, “it’s very clear that the purpose of this entire fake hearing, this fake deposition, is the attorney general trying to weasel herself out of sitting in front of us under oath, under a bipartisan subpoena…. We asked her multiple times, ‘Are you going to come and speak with us under oath?’ She would not say yes.” So that's a hard enough no.

Frost pushed back on Republican colleagues who argued that the briefing should be enough. “We want her under oath because we do not trust her. Why don’t we trust her? Because she’s a liar.”

Heather Cox Richardson's daily Letter continues with three administration officials who did get sworn in to artuflly dodge Congressional oversight, DNI Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

"Gabbard tried not to contradict Trump," skipping the "obliteration" that thug had claimed after last year's USA-Israel bombing campaign on Iran. She dodged Angus King's question about Russia sharing intelligence with Iran. And she made thug the ultimate arbiter of any and all "imminent threats," such that his increasingly demented capacity is the be-all and end-all of maybe all, if he decides to use our nuclear arsenal with nothing but yes-men and yes-women surrounding him.

It seems anticlimactic to continue after contemplating WWIII, but remember when the Republicans were super worked up about Hunter Biden and his dad supposedly something something billions? Or when a dual US-Israeli citizen named Alexander Smirnov turned out to have "extensive" contacts with Russian intelligence agencies and pleaded guilty to four felony counts and was sentenced to six years in prison? And then went "missing" from FCI Terminal Island in LA, apparently "furloughed" with no forwarding address?

What's new in corruption, then? Jared Kushner, whose "corruption is so thorough and vast that America hasn’t even begun to reckon with what a disaster it is for everything this country once aimed to stand for." The $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund a few months after Thug 1.0 was just the ante, it seems.

While dancing a friendly jig for Putin and continuing the betrayal of Ukraine, Kushner and his fellow real estate developer Steve Witkoff also managed to kibosh negotiation with Iran, 36 hours before our Department of War launched a new one on them, post last July's "obliteration."

You won't be shocked, shocked, to discover that Kushner's Dec. 2024 claim claim that he would not raise additional money during Trump’s presidency to avoid conflicts turned out to be a lie.

Kushner has a talent for playing everyone to the advantage of his own account. The New York Times just reported that Kushner is soliciting funds for his own company as a side hustle while working as Mideast "envoy."

"President Trump’s son-in-law is trying to raise $5 billion or more from foreign governments and others for his private equity firm."

While at the same time, thug Rewards Russia for Helping Iran Target US Service Members. On March 12, SecTrea Scott Bessent "lifted sanctions on any Russian oil currently stranded at sea (including oil that Russia managed to “strand” at sea between [March 9], when Trump spoke with Putin, and [March 12]).

18.March.2026

Hard to comprehend

The lead letter in the half dozen put in print yesterday at the Idaho Press, from Doug Sweeney of Caldwell combines a snapshot of the deepening partisan divide in our country, and a trolling self-parody that is chef's kiss. LIBERALS' HOSTILITY TOWARD TRUMP HARD TO COMPREHEND.

It starts with the need for parents "to teach their children defensive crossing principles," presumably so school zones and crosswalks don't make them weak. Then he gets after the "sissies and wimps" demanding a railroad "quiet zone." He "find[s] the drone of the train and the horn quite pacifying," so shut up, people.

Something something Fox News liberals did not stand on command at thug's two hour dog and pony show? Finally, he owns the libs with UPPER over lower case. "Conservatives" vs. "kamela"[sic]—BOOM! And the invitation to "imagine, my friends if kamela[sic] would have won."

Ok, I'll play. What if we had an uncorrupted Department of Justice, thug awaiting sentencing to jail for his proven felonies, and on trial for more, a burgeoning world economy without mindless tariff wars going BING BING BONG BONG every week, no killing people in boats in the Caribbean, no regional war in the middle east, no mindless persecution of Cubans, no deployment of untrained, masked militia in US cities, gas ticking along under $3/gallon, science, public lands, education, medicine, the VA, all functioning normally. You know, a liberal hellscape.

Idaho's legislative bullies

Idaho Press columnist Judy Ferro's Just who's winning now? starts with our "anti-war" warmonger's most spectacular debacle, in process.

"Our Department of Defense says the first two weeks of war has cost $11 billion, and it now needs another $500,000,000,000 (aka $500 billion). President Trump says we’ve bombed everything there was to bomb, so we’ve won. But Iran claims to have weapons to keep going for another six months.

"How could the U.S. have no plan to keep the Strait of Hormuz open?...."

But most of her column is about our legislature's annual clown show, where killing a bad budget bill is one of their better results. Requiring SNAP recipients "to prove their eligibility every four months or, in some cases, every month" passed the House by a wide margin. At least HB764, the "prosecute good Samaritans" bill died in committee, that was nice. There's another go at repealing Medicaid Expansion to end insurance for 90,000 Idahoans.

And then HB822, the PEDIATRIC SECRETIVE TRANSITIONS PARENTAL RIGHTS ACT, threatening schools and providers of medical and child care with $100,000 fines for failing to notify parents and guardians when their child is attempting a “social transition.” The House passed it 59-9; there are 9 Democrats in the 70 member House, but one member from each party was absent. Jack Nelsen, Republican of Jerome, joined the Dems in voting no.

Ferro notes that after the vote, the Republican super-majority Republican (who had crafted their procedural move in caucus) barred a Democratic statement opposing the bill from entering official records." The Idaho Democratic Legislative Campaign Committe presser captures justifiable outrage for being denied their opportunity to weigh in on legislation that's "constitutionally vulnerable, operationally unworkable, and harmful to the very children and professionals it purports to protect," and (this is just the super-majority business as usual), failing to ensure a proprtionate number of people signing up to testify in opposition were heard in committee. They're just not that interested in hearing from the opposition, you know?

"House Republicans egregiously abused their supermajority power to suppress dissent and silence our voices. They suspended House Rule 27 to keep a Minority Report on House Bill 822 out of the official journal because they do not want Idahoans to see the serious legal, constitutional, and practical problems this bill creates....

"If Republicans were confident in the merits of this bill, they would not be afraid of a report in the journal. That is not transparency. That is censorship."

They provide a link to the full Minority Report on HB822 from Minority Leader Ilana Rubel (18), Reps. John Gannon (17) and Chris Mathias (19), running just over 6 pages, and making clear what they want the record to reflect as this bad legislation goes on to the Senate. Their Summary of Recommendations, emphasis in the original:

1. H822's penalty of up to $100,000 is disproportionate to the nature of the offense and is likely unconstitutional under the Excessive Fines Clause of Idaho Const. art. I, § 6 and the Eighth Amendment, particularly when compared to Idaho's own statutory penalties for more serious conduct involving children and schools;
2. The definition of “social transition” is overly broad and vague, creating unworkable compliance standards for covered entities, exposing teachers, counselors, and health care providers to unpredictable liability, and chilling the lawful expression of Idaho's young people;
3. The undefined terms “facilitate,” “contribute,” “appearance,” and “mannerisms” leave covered entities without fair notice of what conduct is prohibited, inviting arbitrary enforcement and costly litigation;
4. The “aid or abet” provision likely restricts constitutionally protected speech, imposes undefined liability on licensed professionals, and risks unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by permitting professionals to discourage gender-affirming care while penalizing any discussion of it as a medical option;
5. H822 contains no safety exception for children at risk of abuse, parental violence, homelessness, or suicide, stripping licensed professionals of the clinical judgment they are trained and ethically required to exercise;
6. H822’s mandatory disclosure requirements constitute compelled speech that conflicts with HIPAA, state medical privacy law, and the professional ethical obligations of Idaho’s licensed health and mental health care providers; and
7. The House Judiciary and Rules Committee failed to ensure a proportionate number of Idahoans who signed up to testify in opposition to H822 were heard, depriving the committee of critical expert and community testimony and falling short of the standards of meaningful public participation that representative democracy requires.

17.March.2026

Up and down some not-so-lazy rivers

Late last millennium, William Least Heat-Moon finished his third book, River-Horse; A Voyage Across America, and somehow it was only in the last couple months that I got wind of it. I was familiar with the trope (at least) of his 1982 book, Blue Highways, about a three-month road trip on lesser highways, familiar with "less is more" from my own, pedal-powered cross-country trip 6 years earlier. I'm not sure if I actually read his first book, as I was embarking on my own wandering journey, 30-some years in hardware-, and then software-engineering. I should have read it; I'm sure I would have enjoyed it, now that I've read River-Horse.

His third book is (less poetically) "blue waterways," connecting our (eastern) sea to shining (western) sea. Sort of. It was a wild idea to stitch together a crazy quilt itinerary of the Hudson, the Erie Canal, a bit of the Great Lakes, the Allegheny, Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri and up into the Rocky Mountains, then down the Salmon, Snake, and Columbia, all in one "season," and it makes a great story, well-told.

Patrick A. Smith put up a nice review which you can read on the bookreporter website, with more detail than I'm prepared to recount for you today. He niggled about "purplish" prose, and "sentences perhaps overlong and stuffed to bursting with the myriad thoughts and feelings that flow through Heat-Moon's head"... as if that were a bad thing? I did not find it so, and Smith's "forgiveness" is a presumptuous blot on his job as a reviewer. We all have to decide for ourselves, and I found the read a delight for all that, and more. I'm not accustomed to having to "look up words" as I go, but (especially now that it's easy-peasy) I enjoyed building my vocabulary, too.

Most of all, Least Heat-Moon has inspired me to do more than just get around to putting the journal of my own cross-country trip in "regular" order, after blog-serializing it on its 40th anniversary, ten years ago. Can I turn it into an actual book? Stay tuned!

Barking mad

So many alternate headlines, I can't stop with just one.
FORTY-FIVE! FORTY-SEVEN! ALERT! ALERT! TWENTY-FIFTH! HUT! HUT! HUT!

Heather Delaney Reese's substack blog posts run longer on Facebook (where I usually see them) than I can wade through in the poor font, but today's is worth the trouble to jump to it. (I'd subscribe, but I'm kind of already one toke over the line on subscriptions, you know?) Not to put too fine a point on it, Nobody trusts the President of the United States.

Because, you know. Have you heard the one about how he talked to someone else who's been president of the United States and who told him, “I wish I did it.” In a dreamy nap, maybe? Now that nap time was over, it was play time.

During the same fifty-four minutes behind the Resolute Desk, Trump turned his attention to a model B-2 bomber someone had placed nearby and asked if he could keep it. Then he hugged it. Twice. Right there, in front of the cameras, while talking about dropping bombs. And not like a world leader describing military strategy. Like a small child collecting toys. “Give me that bomber over there. Thank you. You knew immediately which one.”

Then it was Megalomaniac time.

He told the room, “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba. That’d be good. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I could do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth?” He said “taking Cuba” four times. Not freeing. Not supporting. Taking. And then he followed it with this:

“I think Cuba, I don’t know, in its own way for, you know, tourism and everything else. It’s a beautiful island. Great weather. They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change. You know, they won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.”...

"This isn’t just incoherent babble. This is what it looks like when a president is so distrusted, so reckless, and so unstable that other governments have stopped telling him what’s happening. Not even his own intelligence community seems to feel he can handle this level of information, or they, too, are not being told. Because they’ve seen what he does with classified information. They’ve watched him reveal sources, expose operations, sabotage alliances, and turn briefings into weapons."

16.March.2026

At least we can count on the calendar

Charlie Sykes starts off his March 14 podcast by saying if you're watching, you survived Friday the 13th, and aren't we having a lot of those lately? Two out of 3 months to start the year! That happens one out of every seven non-leap years on average. And then what happens? November will bring the third of the year. Given the election that month, there will be some misfortune for some of us. Hopefully not all of us, as the most criminal of the right wing have been planning.

Fun fact, the 13th has a one in seven chance of being a Friday, so an average year (of which there are none), will have twelve sevenths Fridays the thirteenth (not to be confused with Friday the 13ths), right? That's less than two, so this year is already punching above its weight.

If you're like me (ha ha), you're wondering what the rest of the patterns are. (If you're like my next older brother, you've probably already figured them out.) In non-leap years, there are seven possibilities:

• January & October
• February, March & November
• April & July
• May
• June
• August
• September & December

In leap years, there are two different patterns that supplant the first two items on the list above. Those are:

• January, April & July
• February & August

Still twelve months in the stack, so the odds remain 12/7ths in a year. It doesn't matter that 97 years out of 400 are leap years (century '00 years not divisible by 400 being exempt). But it does matter, apparently, the luck of the draw on how we sliced the overall 400 year calendrical pattern, that goes into a rerun every 4 centuries. Magnus Bodin toted 'em up in 1998, and found that "the 13th day of the month is very slightly more likely to be a Friday than any other day of the week," as Wikipedia put it. I'm confident if that were wrong, someone would have corrected it by now. (And also that it doesn't really matter very much.)

So instead of 12/7ths, we get 43/25ths chance. Lucky us!

10.March.2026

Two grifters and a psychopath

The other Heather, Heather Delaney Reese, captured the next-level Bizarro scene of thug's press con at his Doral golf resort where the "Congressional Institute" had its "Republican Members Issues Conference" in private session, funded by taxpayer dollars flowing to thug's real estate wing. (It's a hell of a system, innit?)

Trump Told Us Who's Really in Charge for the punch line of a remarkably shambolic half hour+ for a guy who used to have some Sham-Wow about him but has now curdled into Sham-OMG. Setting the scene:

"...As he moved from one room to the next, his movements were noticeably heavy, his mouth hung open, his lips parted tight, pulling in shallow breaths between each step. His hair was also visibly streaked with his signature orange foundation, which had pooled at his hairline and dusted across the top of his scalp.

Over the 34 minutes and 14 seconds that followed, 79-year-old Donald Trump struggled to catch his breath and slurred his words. His thoughts drifted and collapsed before he could finish them."

Not easy to top his calling out Iran, who "were very strongly involved in all of the people that died through the roadside bombs. Died and are right now walking around with no legs, no arms, a face that’s been so badly damaged.” Or skipping over the 168 people killed at a school, "because I just don’t know enough about it" more than a week after it happened. But this:

When asked why he made the decision to go to war with Iran, the President of the United States gave us this: “The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return and the United States found it intolerable, in my opinion, based on what Steve, and Jared and Pete and others were telling me.”

It's a hell of a read. We're in a hell of a state, with the psychopath in that triumvirate gleefully boasting about ignoring laws, conventions, and "punching down."

"What makes this moment so dangerous is that the people around [thug] know he’s declining, and not only do they not care, they are exploiting it. They’re using him. They don’t need him sharp or coherent. They need him standing and signing."

9.March.2026

The rush to war and now what?

It's what Thug would have done if only he could, not that Junior, or Eric, are chomping at the bit, or Barrronn is old enough. Or that our sadistic narcissist is ready to do something nice for anyone before he stumbles off to oblivion. Top clerics selected the son of the old ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, despite thug's warning that he was “unacceptable.” Iran's leadership is not ready for "unconditional surrender" just yet.

This morning's "LIVE" update says a surge in oil prices has rattled markets, la plus ça change and all that for the last 50 years. $120 a barrel, "their highest level since the Covid pandemic, as [Thug's] plans for the next steps in the war, let alone its endgame, remained unclear."

Jason Sattler has caught my daylight savings time attention this morning, also evoking the "Covid Before Times." His teaser shot of the Mal-a-Lardo black "sit room," Suzie Wiles holding forth for something ball cap-clad 45-47 looks slack-jawed in his attempt to comprehend, while the ghost of Marco Rubio hovers out of focus like Banquo after dispatch.

"There is a specific interval between when a catastrophe begins and when it becomes personal, and we are very bad at it. Everyone is. It seems the human brain is better at processing small worries than big ones. But no one is worse at it than [Thug].

"In February 2020, the people whose job it was to read the incoming data from Wuhan knew, and some of them said so in public, and most of us went on living that sparkling Covid-free existence we’ll never be able to explain to anyone else or ourselves.

"That interval has a name now. We called it the Before Times, meaning the period just before everything changed, when we still thought it wouldn’t."

Yes, I remember watching the web tracking of Covid reports, as they came toward Idaho from western Washington along the freeway corridor, and that what turned out to be out last Sunday of "in-person" church when I shared the fresh-popped thought that "everything is about to change" with our minister afterwards. Six years ago yesterday, in fact. I haven't had a ton of seemingly prescient moments in my life, but that was one.

That's not quite the same league as Sen. Tom Cotton's 47 year-old "imminent threat," which, shouldn't that have been ended by the White House's article last June about how Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated? Multisyllabic words are hard, it seems.

"In the last few weeks, we’ve been offered a kaleidoscope of justifications in rapid succession and with equal confidence — none of which justify this completely illegal war that the GOP-controlled Congress has refused to check: the nuclear program, the missile and drone program, the need to preempt Israeli blowback on American forces, forty-seven years of grievances, roadside bombs from 2003. Alibi-shopping in real time is its own kind of confession....

"But here’s the wild part that history must remember. Someone tried to tell us the actual story the day before the bombs fell.

"That’s when Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with news that should have been front-page everywhere. Iranian negotiators, he said, had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium and offered full IAEA verification — a concession, he was careful to note, that went further than anything achieved under Obama, further than anything achieved before. A deal, he said, was within reach. He had flown to Washington to say this in person because he didn’t trust Trump’s proxies (Kushner and Witkoff) to relay it accurately.

"Economist Michael Hudson, who wrote about this in CounterPunch the day after the strike, draws the only conclusion the timeline supports: the attack was launched because the negotiations were succeeding....

"[T]he attack on negotiators mid-breakthrough — the second time America has done this to Iran — was not a miscalculation. It’s another confession."

As Thom Hartmann noted on March 5: Did Jared Kushner Negotiate Peace — or Set a Trap for Iran’s Leadership? And who knew all this about Bibi and Jared?

"Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as The New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

"And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Jared Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War."

Sattler's blog has a link to Reuters' Maps and charts of the Iran crisis, including the tabulation of Countries that have been attacked by Iran (Bahrain, Cyprus, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, UAE, UK, Azerbaijan, all of which have US foreign military bases), and those that attacked Iran; the U.S. and Israel.

There's a ton of intel in that ongoing feed, including a map and a brilliant data graphic about the Kurdish opposition on Iran's border, and this, captured in a brilliant datagraphic:

"Kurds form one of the largest stateless populations in the world, estimated between 30 and 40 million, spread across a region that includes parts of Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey."

There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle that aren't on the daily radar. But the price of oil is embedded in nearly everything (including—who knew?—fertilizer). Which is where the Covid connection is made. Moving at the speed of international shipping is by definition slow motion (even before a critical waterway is shut down). And "the shipping math is unforgiving in much the way the initial spread of Covid was." So, "Just what our affordability crisis needed. Another affordability crisis on top of it."

"[T]he Federal Reserve is now facing what Brusuelas calls a genuine stress test—a large, persistent energy shock layered on top of the hiring slowdown from Trump’s trade and immigration policies. The specific combination that the Fed has no good tools to address. Cut rates to fight the slowdown, and you pour fuel on inflation. Raise rates to fight inflation, and you accelerate the slowdown....

"The bombs have already fallen. The tankers have already stopped. The fertilizer is not loading. The oil price shock has begun to be priced in, and the food shock is six weeks behind it. The specific comfort of the Before Times—that the catastrophe is real but not yet yours—is the only comfort available right now. And unfortunately, it has an expiration date."

Lest you wander astray through all the links and distractions of Epic Epstein Fury (hello? are you still reading?, a call to action from Sattler:

"Call your reps and tell them no one will forget if they do anything to keep this unwinnable, unnecessary, unconscionable war going."

7.March.2026

The main story is raging authoritarianism

The headline teaser in Jason Sattler's email for an LOLGOP piece was "Stephen Miller’s authoritarian handbook has turned Trump into an Extra Crispy Duck," and I was chuckling even before realizing it was a riff on "lame duck," territory that thug seems to have invaded early. Taking the jump, They're planning concentration camps. Ordinary people are shutting them down. "On Stephen Miller's immigrant ancestry, his authoritarian handbook, and why Trump's approval is extra fried." It starts like this:

"Twas the night before Christmas when the Washington Post published a list of proposed sites for a nationwide network of warehouse detention centers capable of holding 7 to 10,000 people each. By Christmas Day, activists in Merrimack, New Hampshire, were already organizing. Within a week, they had thirty groups and nearly a hundred volunteers on the case. That warehouse deal collapsed."

His link was to the home page, but months later, the story is still on, DHS feeds talking points to Republicans as opposition to ICE warehouses swells. Of course there is lying involved. Aka "talking points drafted by a DHS staffer and forwarded to local officials."

DHS has spent "more than $890 million" to buy 10 properties, out of 23 it was after. 10 have failed, so they're batting about .500 to date. Someone's tabulated this somewhere? Here's Wikipedia's list, with Idaho's contribution—so far—being three small town jails. News search for "ICE detention facilities" has a lot about the resistance to them, from ordinary people who are not being bused in, nor paid to say hell no.

The American Immigration Council has a report detailing "ICE’s Expanding and Increasingly Unaccountable Detention System" in mid-January. It's "now on track to rival the entire federal criminal prison system," that says. Late last month, the PBS Newshour covered the story, noting that the current acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, was aiming high. He "compared his aspiration to Amazon's system of moving packages. He said, we want to be able to move humans around the country as efficiently as Amazon ships packages."

Developers and commercial landowners are ready to get while the getting is good: ICE is paying 'eye-popping' prices for warehouse detention centers. It seems "fair market value" has doubled and more what with a new buyer with $tens of billions in hand from the GOP-controlled congress. Not to put too fine a point on it:

“They’ve got money to burn,” said Rick Su, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina and an expert in immigration and local government. “When you double or triple a budget, this is the kind of spending spree you would expect.”

The Brennan Center for Justice's Expert Brief, How ICE’s Budget Boom Is Changing Immigration Detention notes the rapid expansion is using "private contracts and investments in its own infrastructure."

"At the same time, it is finding new ways to evade oversight, leading to greater risks to the health and safety of the people in the government’s custody.... Barely two months after the inauguration, DHS effectively eliminated the Office of the Immigration Ombudsman and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which performed critical oversight of ICE operations.... There are also gaps in oversight of private detention facilities, including being exempt from requests under the Freedom of Information Act."

Back to LOLGOP:

"Here’s what we’re learning in real-time about the deterioration of a failing authoritarian project: it doesn’t slow down. It can’t.

"In a week, the administration banned Anthropic from federal contracts for refusing to remove safeguards—“mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons”—then the Pentagon used Anthropic’s model anyway to coordinate bombing strikes on Iran. OpenAI’s Sam Altman cut a deal that appears to give the government most of what it wanted all along, with better optics, then Congress tried to leverage a war nobody voted for to fund a DHS that just lost its secretary amid a crisis of confidence that even reached Trump, either around or through the person who is usually the last man in the room with this failing president, Stephen Miller.

"As Andrea Pitzer explains in the most recent episode of her podcast Next Comes What, which I produce, “The attacks on Iran and the weakening of safeguards on using AI for domestic surveillance—all this is tied together.”

"...[S]trongmen often rely on two tools to quell domestic opposition: foreign wars to unify and domestic surveillance to intimidate. George W. Bush had ninety percent approval and a traumatized nation and the world behind him in 2001 when he began his military adventures abroad and spying at home. Trump is running the same playbook with a disastrous approval rating that dips as low as minus-30 with independents. And what does this war gain for any American, this war in which multiple schools and hospitals have been wrecked, the Strait of Hormuz is strangling global oil supply, and munitions are reportedly running low, but not low enough for war crimes?"

The policy program is "the ideology Stephen Miller has spent his adult life building and is now, with unprecedented legal power behind him, finally implementing by whispering it into Trump’s ears and then having Trump think he decided to order it."

"The warehouse concentration camp system is where Miller’s ideology meets his terrible knack for logistics. Miller’s deportation machinery is currently arresting people faster than it can remove them, which is why the warehouses exist, not as a temporary measure but as a permanent infrastructure of ethnic engineering at an industrial scale....

"Miller’s handbook is looking more like a cookbook for the regime. But the logroll of rich and powerful supporters who put Trump back in power sees fading support for the regime as not a sign to stop but to speed up and loot all they can while they can, hoping the act of looting itself will overwhelm any resistance to them. Bibi Netanyahu, Big Oil, the tech authoritarians. They all have so much to gain from Miller’s playbook for Trump, and the urgency created by Trump’s failures."

6.March.2026

Counting coups

Before I launch into the wider war, it should be noted that among the grab-bag of justifications for the war started by our rogue thug, the basic wag-the-dog distraction from the Epstein files not being fully released as required by a law that thug himself signed is not being mentioned by administration spokespeople.

It's more than halfway down the long NY Times home page this morning before "Epstein" makes its sole appearance, and you've probably already heard the salacious accusation, that our cuckolded DOJ "mistakenly" withheld. Now, the Justice Dept. Releases Missing Interviews With Woman Who Made Claims Against Trump. A woman who was a "teenager" back then, as the NYT put it, or "a minor" as they put it middle of last week when they reported that the files were missing. She was 13 years old. The FBI had conducted four interviews with her in 2019, after Epstein was arrested that summer on charges of federal sex trafficking, and she came forward.

"But only one of those interviews, in which she described being assaulted by Mr. Epstein, appeared to be included in the initial release, raising questions about why the remaining three were missing."

Yes, "questions." Or really, one question: how much of the FBI/DOJ review of the reams of evidence they gathered over the years has been deliberately filtered to protect thug?

With outrageously dark comedic timing, thug and his flaks insist he's been "totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein." Not so much.

Now then. This is just "some guy," but he kept his Facebook post shorter than one of those AI-gen'd clickbait things, and Carrick Ryan's sketch résumé is ok: "Former Federal Agent come Political Commentator and Blogger. BA (Media) MA (International Relations)." The teaser image is of a big salvo of ship-launched missiles, your tax dollars being lit up for Freedom. The lede:

"The cost of war can be counted in many ways, but strangely for a nation obsessed with its eye watering debt crisis... very few people seem to be talking about the very literal monetary cost of Trump's unauthorised venture in Iran."

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when Iraqi oil revenue was going to pay for that Saddam Hussein WMD dust-up. This time around, a $billion a day has been mentioned comes (apparently from the Pentagon's "preliminary estimate").

Ryan breaks out some components of the "more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours" cost, before cutting to the chase (spoiler alert!) that "For context, the entire U.S. foreign aid budget is about $50 billion a year." (Does that include the bribes to gulf state potentates to send $billions of vigorish to the thug crime family? Asking for a friend.)

200 Tomahawk cruise missiles x $1.5 million. Patriot interceptors for $4 million a pop. THAAD interceptors $12 million each. "[M]any of these interceptors are being used to take out Iranian drones that cost less than $20,000 to produce."

Chaos is easier to create than it is to clean up.

US AN/TPY-2 radars in Jordan and the UAE "cost roughly $500 million to $1 billion, depending on configuration." Those three USAF F-15E Strike Eagles Kuwait accidentally shot down, $95 million apiece. Looked up one of the items he cited, and link added:

"We haven't even begun to consider the costs of fuel, maintenance, logistics, and personnel deployment costs, nor the impact on the global economy. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated the first four days of US attacks cost about $3.7 billion."

The CSIS has a handy tabulation, including the fact that $3.54 billion of the $3.71 billion estimate was "unbudgeted." The "offensive strike muntions" are categorized as "Ground-launched" (1 to 1.6 $million each); "Plentiful" (a mere $35-85 thousand ea); "Mid-tier" ($2 million ea); and the "Exquisite" cruise missiles, ($3.6 million ea). Then there's the list of "Air Defense Munitions," toting up $1.7 billion in round numbers. All in the first 100 hours.

4.March.2026

House Bill 764: REJECTED!

Butter my butt and call me a biscuit, Idaho's House Jude and Rules voted 9-7 to hold the Heritage Foundation's "model" bill to criminalize any assistance to "aliens."

That kills it for the 2nd year running. I guess that testimony I sent in yesterday morning did the trick! Ha ha. The Idaho Capital Sun's coverage fills in some details, including that "many people who testified in favor of the bill work at conservative lobbying groups."

And our once upon a time "Solicitor General" (when AG Raúl Labrador added that office to Idaho's kit), and now Heritage Foundation fellow Theo Wold, was in town to try to promote the bill. So reassuring that

“It doesn’t require investigation for the provision of services open generally to members of the public, whether they’re citizens or not,” Wold said. “That means soup kitchen lines are safe, and it means that lawyers advocating for their clients aren’t concealing anything. They’re openly advocating for lawful solutions; that isn’t prohibited.”

As if we could assume equal protection under the law and not vindictive prosecution.

3.March.2026

Excuse me while I vomit

Nick Feik: "You couldn't make this up. And if you did, everyone would say it's too much."

Well, it is definitely too much to have thug "talking about this conflict in remarkable personal terms," and insisting he won't get bored. Is it better, or worse than when you battled venereal disease, sir? Also, as reported in the august New York Times, Shawen McCreesh reporting from the White House,

After just a few minutes, [Thug] has moved on from his war in Iran to the curtains he's picked out for the White House and his new ballroom.

"I picked those drapes in my first term," he says. "I always liked gold." There's light chuckling in the room.

House Bill 764: criminalizing assistance

Idaho's version has the working title of CONCEALING, HARBORING, AND SHIELDING ALIENS, and mirabile dictu (not), that's right out of the Heritage Foundation's "model statute" collection. Dated Feb. 10, 2025: Concealing, Harboring, and Shielding Aliens.

The first thing that struck me was that "alien," defined as "any person who is not a citizen or national of the United States," includes more than a few people I know. People who I attended college with, people who I worked with over the years, people who came to visit our great country, and do things like stand on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, or hike in the wilderness.

The definitions list is limited to "alien" and "organization." Did not get around to "illegal," or "inadmissible," but see here: should you be any person or organization that "knows or recklessly disregards the fact that the alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of federal law, including being an inadmissible alien," rendering assistance will make you a violator. Two strikes, and you're a felon. (But hey, you could be that and still get elected president, right?)

I didn't compare line-by-line, but it looks like this year's right-wing extremists in Idaho's legislature took last year's Heritage Foundation's "model" verbatim. I sent in my "opposed" testimony this morning (with the emphasis I would have added, if only their testimony web form provided for that):

I am vehemently opposed to this legislation, and the outrageous premise that underlies it: that each of us must act as a deputy for the sociopathic campaign of demonizing the "other" among us. We will need to rewrite the Parable of the Good Samaritan, to begin with.

"I can see you're in a bad way, mate, waylaid, robbed, and beaten bloody here by the side of the road. I'd like to help you, but I need to see your papers, first."

I am ashamed for the authors, the committee, and for the great state of Idaho that this is before our legislature.

We have plenty of "aliens" among us, and the bill is sloppy about tossing in the all-purpose "illegal" modifier. That we're all supposed to adjudicate before offering assistance to another human being. (Excepting law enforcement taking them to one of our new gulags. And "official" medical care providers keeping them alive long enough for confinement, deportation, or whatever.)

2.March.2026

Not every dream is worthy

Mine this morning had a vague golf connection, some kind of contest to make an alt-golf ball prompted me to assemblage, and I was trying to wire various wood scraps and other junk together to make it mobile, in spite of absurd contradiction. Was that part of a picnic bench? And a small television set, a dream of my misspent youth. That wouldn't be easy to tie in. I suppose it was longing for channels that I could control, rather than depending on adults or older siblings to let me have my way. Even though I do remember having my way for Saturday morning cartoons. Once a week wasn't enough? Mom said "go outside and play" too often? (Such wonderful advice, that I have now taken to heart.)

When "how to tie this together" well enough for it to be propelled somehow to the next hole was too obviously ridiculous, I woke up, and the moral of the story presented itself.

But it still left me looking for an explanation for how things could have slipped out of control so badly, morphing from putting a few pieces of scrap together, and then some bailing wire, and then a drill, and so on. It cycled around to the current, waking nightmare, crying for (mercy, compassion, antidote, and) explanation. How did we get here?

How did a grifting family of real estate developers, cheating contractors and tenants and city government vomit out the second coming of 20^th century murderous dictators all wrapped into the Willy Lowman of the Seven Deadly Sins? (ICYMI, Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth.) The transition from low-class "playboy" with a chip on his shoulder to megalomaniac seems to have snuck up on us, even as it unraveled in plain sight, with his most strident critics becoming his most pliant cuckolds. (One of so many examples: Senator and one-time presidential aspirant Ted Cruz: "I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father," later going all-in for that habit.)

Reality TV, no less. The signature line of "You're fired!" tapped into our dark desire for retribution against slights, or failure of any kind. The joy of punching down. The big man's way was the right way, and those contestants who fell short, tough luck. For the winners, the prizes seemed abundant, at least for a moment. Omarosa Manigault Newman arrived to a first-name (only) basis with the nation in 2004, on her way to a career in reality TV, and an ever-so-brief stint in Thug 1.0 ("director of African-American outreach" for the campaign, escorting some former NFL stars into a "transition team" meeting with the big man, and then "assistant to the President and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison"). Later, she combined Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration from Southern University Law Center into her still-swirling career in the surreal genre of "Reality."

Her time at the White House ended with then Chief of Staff John Kelly firing her, a claim that no, she resigned, but also made a secret tape of her firing, shared for minor dramatic effect with Meet the Press in mid-2018. It was done in the Situation Room, oddly. Some heads got explodey about that security breach, and now we fast forward to launching a war (or "Operation Epstein Fury," they're calling it, kind of like Putin's 4-year-old invasion of Ukraine) from one of thug's golf clubs with a faux-Situation Room created by throwing up some black curtains, somewhere near the toilet with the boxes of classified documents. The new Chief of Staff had her Dick Tracy two-way radio Apple Watch on her wrist.

Omarosa has an official Facebook page, of course, and there's art imitating dream life for me, her cover picture shows her swinging a big driver on a tee box, with a one-hundred watt smile. Her feed is well-curated, sporadic posts now focused on positivity, an about-face from what made her star ascendant. Just after she got those big degrees, there's a dip into a political thing, "addressing the violent arrest of William McNeil Jr. in Jacksonville, Florida.

That didn't really stay on the national radar very long, but looking for an update, I see the officer involved was "exonerated" and is now back on regular duty. Smashing McNeil's car window and punching him in the face no big deal, except ok, a written reprimand for not including the punch in his report. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office "said [Officer] Bowers told investigators that "he did not think of the strike as a 'use of force' but as a 'tool'" to distract McNeil, Jr.

So many rabbit holes. Have we come to where we are just because President Obama's merciless ridicule of thug at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011? Because the Nobel Prize committee refused to give thug his own Peace Prize after his bombing countries around the world, threatening allies, murdering boaters in the Caribbean and Pacific, and so on. What were they thinking?

I imagine Idaho's junior Senator Jim Risch aspired to his important role in the majority, as Chairman of the Foreign Relations committee. It looks good on a resume? As opposed to on the ground. His website's top 5 image slider entries are: condemns US District Court ruling to lower hydropower generation on the Columbia River system; naming a Small Business of the Month; telling the BLM nominee "Idahoans Do Not Want Their Public Lands Sold"; Risch and Gallego say Nuclear Bill is Critical to Meet Growing Energy Demands; and the ever-popular "Lowering Costs for Idaho Families." As the Mideast conflict widens across multiple fronts, and Officials Say Iran Operation Is in Early Stages. Our murderous Major Major SecWar "opens the news conference saying 'we didn't start this war.'"

War is Peace.

1.March.2026

Welcome to meteorological spring

It seems more closely aligned with the astronomical than it used to be, but the eastern US getting most of our western snow this winter (it seems) would probably disagree with my SE Idaho take.

The first day lion-lamb adjudication came out LAMB. Balmy in the mid-50s in the afternoon, as a gentle, mist-like rain slipped across the valley before the temperature eased to mid-40s. Quietly.

raveling

Tom von Alten