A (or One) Skeptic

So, the Democrats were between a rock and a hard place when it came to the continuing resolution that the Republicans had prepared for them. There honestly wasn’t an easy answer this time around. To understand why, let’s review a little bit about federal budgeting.

The federal budget, commensurate with its size, is quite complicated. Whereas state budgets are fairly straight forward — there is normally one budget (a “General Appropriation Act”) that funds the fiscal year, and various supplemental budgets as certain fiscal needs arise — the federal government divides its budgeting process up into twelve different segments, with separate budgets for various topic areas, such as defense, education, healthcare, and so forth. These 12 separate budgets do not have to be passed at the same time, even though the federal fiscal year runs from October 1 through September 30.

The next thing to note about the federal budget is that the various budget bills are not subject to the normal filibuster rules. Since every budget eventually has to be passed, the Senate may not delay it permanently by filibustering the various budget bills.

The final thing to note is that when Congress cannot come to agreement on its various budget bills by the start of the fiscal year, it can pass a continuing resolution, which continues the pre-existing appropriations at the same levels as the previous fiscal year (or with minor modifications). If it has no changes in spending, it’s called a “clean” resolution, and if it has some changes in spending it’s a “dirty” resolution. The changes are supposed to be minor, but what is considered “minor” is not subject to precise definition. Unlike a budget act, a continuing resolution can, in fact, be filibustered.

And this is the point we reached on Friday night when the Democratic leadership in the Senate had to decide whether or not to filibuster the dirty continuing resolution that the House had sent over to them by the slimmest of margins.

The “dirty” resolution included a $6 billion increase in defense spending and a $13 billion decrease in non-defense spending. 

That $13 billion represents just a shade over 0.2% of the $6.4 trillion federal budget (ignoring, for the moment, that only $1.7 trillion is “discretionary” spending). But even if we divide that amount by only discretionary spending, it still ends up being 0.765%.

In other words, not that much of the federal budget.

So, the question for Democrats was, which of these choices was more odious? In one corner, you had Chuck Shumer and a handful of Senators who thought it would be worse to have the government shut down; in the other corner, you had Hakeem Jeffries, AOC and Bernie Sanders, who thought it was more important not to accede to the changes in the Republican budget without a proper negotiation.

Either position is defensible.

On the Schumer side of the argument, Democrats were concerned (1) that they would be blamed for the government shutdown, (2) that Trump and his “Project 2025” acolytes would have more discretion to fire people and permanently shut the parts of government that they don’t like, and (3) that more people would get hurt during a shutdown.

On the Jeffries side of the equation the concern was that Democrats need to stand up in opposition and start to exercise their political muscles.

In this debate, I think I’m coming down on the Schumer side. Primarily because the Democrats don’t yet have any negotiating leverage. Things have to get much, much worse before Democrats have real leverage. And they’re getting there at a steady clip. But we’re not there yet.

There is a small possibility that Democrats could pick two House seats in Florida on April Fools Day, of all days. But both are in deep red districts (Florida’s 1st and 6th congressional districts) and are still unlikely pickups. However, if either of those districts goes Democratic, then we would have the indication that something real is happening on the ground. And the House becomes a more dangerous place for Republicans.

In any case, this continuing resolution now keeps the budget flowing until September 30th — so basically the end of the federal fiscal year —  at which point the economy may look very differently than it does today.

As Donald Trump’s economic policies start to take hold, with the price of eggs going up and the stock market tanking, we’re going to be hearing more and more desperate attempts of Republicans and Trump supporters to justify what is going on. So, we have people like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, in a recent interview on Fox Business Network, suggesting that previous market levels might have been inflated. 

We were probably over-bloated with the stock market here for a while. We went up quite a bit.

Are you effing serious?

The cognitive dissonance is going to be ratcheting up by the day, as people who really believe that Trump is this great  businessman who plays mental chess while the rest of the world plays checkers discover that Trump is actually a moron. An excellent salesman, but a moron nonetheless. 

It’s not just the economy. As Trump jettison’s European allies and makes his bed with Vladimir Putin (once again), you may hear Trump defenders claim that the Eureopeans need to spend more on their own defense. But they are, in fact, already spending more on their own defense. As reported in the Atlantic:

You’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain. This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.

Or, some conservatives have justified Trump’s support of Russia as actually a grand strategy to counter China. Again, from the Atlantic:

That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

Or, Republicans have tried to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border. Again, from the Atlantic:

The fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement. Maybe Trump’s 51st-state talk is not to be taken literally, but if taken seriously, the message is unmistakable: these are expressions motivated by animus against Canadian sovereignty, not a wish for improved U.S.-Canada cooperation.

I have been arguing since Day #1 that this election was not about the price of eggs, or the economy. It was about half the country wanting to be led by an unreconstructed asshole, who would punish all the people they have come to hate. But he is, of course, going to punish all of his own supporters as well. It’s a circular firing squad. That will make the cognitive dissonance — the belief that “I’m a smart person who had good reasons to vote for Trump” — start to collide with the dawning recognition that they’ve been had by this malignant narcissist, and that (at least when it comes to politics) these people are not smart at all.

Living in this country these days is like living in the following Geico  commercial, a parody of a slasher movie.

Why didn’t we just get into the running car?

That would have been the Harris-Walz administration. 

But no, we hid behind the chainsaws. And now, that’s the reality that we’re living.

I mean, some of us tried to get into the running car, but we were pulled out by the people who insisted that we had to hide behind the chainsaws.

And here we are.

Good luck to all of us.

President Trump is a real chickenshit. For an “Alpha male” whose primary mode of engaging in the world is to bully everyone who inhabits it, this guy is a real chickenshit. I realize I’m not breaking radical new ground here, but it is worth repeating.

You can feel how much Trump wants to impose tariffs, especially on Mexico and Canada. It’s because of that terrible deal negotiated between the United States, Mexico and Canada by . . . President Trump. In his first term.

Oh boy.

So, back on February 3rd, Trump paused his threatened tariffs for a first time based on Mexico and Canada agreeing to do largely things they were already. This was allegedly to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border. 

Then, Trump’s threatened 25% tariffs finally came into effect on Tuesday of this week. The stock market immediately tanked, with the Dow Jones losing over 1400 points in the last week. Since February 19, it is down 2540 points.

Oops.

Since Trump began his second term, the average price of a dozen Grade A large eggs in the United States has increased 80¢ per dozen, up from $4.15 to $4.95. This increase represents a 19.5% rise from December 2024 to January 2025. 

So much for Trump bringing down the price of eggs.

As Trump surrogate Elon Musk continues to shred the federal government with a proverbial chainsaw, loads of fired federal employees are being called back because, it turns out, their function was essential after all.

It’s gotten to the point that House Republicans were told by House leadership to stop attending town halls, because what was going on there was not pretty.

President Trump is still plenty popular with his base, but we’re only 46 days into his 2nd term. Still 1414 left to go. This is going to be some roller-coaster shitshow before this ride is over.

You know, it wasn’t that long ago that I was really optimistic about this country and looking  forward to the November election. Joe Biden had done the right thing and resigned; Kamala Harris had totally reinvigorated the campaign; Minnesota everyman Tim Walz had been chosen as our Vice-Presidential nominee; Trump was finally going to face justice in the cases that he had avoided so long with his “Roy Cohn” defense; and, despite the closeness of the race, we were going to win!

We would finally join countries led by female prime ministers (even if in our case it would be a president), including India (Indira Gandhi, 1966), Sri Lanka (Sirimavo Bandaranaike, 1960), Israel (Golda Meir, 1969), the United Kingdom (Margaret Thatcher, 1979), and Pakistan (Benazir Bhutto, 1988).

Other countries have since joined the parade of female prime ministers, including Bangladesh, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Italy and Denmark. 

Germany had its most consequential prime minister in Angela Merkel; New Zealand had the most welcoming in Jacinda Arden (Stephen Colbert’s visit with her back in 2018 is still one of the most adorable things ever); Finland’s Sanna Marin was definitely the hottest; Italy — always a country willing to do things differently — has the first fascist female prime minister in Giorgia Meloni; and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen is the prime minister who is currently denying Trump’s long-standing desire to purchase Greenland. 

The United Kingdom has had three (even if Liz Truss only counts as half a prime minister); New Zealand has also had three; Poland has had three; Norway has had two; Sri Lanka has had two, and Bangladesh (Sri Lanka and Bangladesh!) have also had two. I mean the first female prime minister was 64 fucking years ago. It’s not like we were going to break some radical new ground here in electing Kamala Harris.

Instead we have this.

As long as I live, I will never get over the fact that half the country (or at least half the voting public) chose this shitweasel, President Asshole, the Obergroppenführer, to be the president of the United States.

We may survive the next four years intact, but it’s going to be a shitshow of unprecedented proportions.

Back in the summer and fall, I had MSNBC playing on my TV while I worked, and when something interesting came along, I would turn the sound up. I’m sorry, like a lot of my friends, I can’t watch the news no more. 

Now I have Norwegian “slow TV,” where you can watch things like an 11 hour train ride up the Norwegian coast from the caboose of the train, or I watch the live stream of Shadow and Jackie, the two bald eagle parents where two of their three eggs just hatched today.

Today!

That’s so much better than watching Trump lie his way through a 90 minute address to Congress. Or watching the gleefulness with which Republicans get to “own the libs,” which will soon turn into owning themselves, as Trump’s tariffs and economic policies start to take hold.

Trump’s approval ratings are now slightly below water. His approval rating stands at 47.6%, while his disapproval rating is slightly higher at 47.9%. The 17 million Americans who voted for him in the Republican primaries are hardcore MAGA. They will always stand by their man. But that represents only 11% of the voting electorate. Trump’s approval ratings can still get much, much lower (although I won’t be satisfied until they drop into the single digits, which, let’s face it, is never going to happen). That  would be like the 4% approval rating that Putin and Trump claim Zelensky has (his actual approval rating is around 53%).

It’s never going to happen. But a boy can dream.

So, for the most part I’ll be ignoring the news and watching baby eagle hatchlings or Norwegian trains while I try to get through the next four years.

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political svengali, recently wrote a column for the New York Times, in which he argued that the best things that Democrats can do right now is nothing. I’ve been saying this ever since the election. Especially when it comes to the budget. The Republicans are — and have been for a very long time — much better at throwing spitballs from the peanut gallery than they are at actually governing. And this time, we’re going to have to let them govern.

The first “governing” thing that the Republicans will have to do is deal with the budget and the debt ceiling. There are currently two proposals afoot: one by the Republicans in the House and one by the Republicans in the Senate. They are quite similar, as they both extend the 2017 tax cuts and cut deeply into Medicaid and the social safety net. The difference is primarily that the House bill deals with everything at once, whereas the Senate bill mostly deals with spending cuts first and leaves the tax cuts for later. The  House also includes the debt ceiling increase whereas the Senate does not.

The 2017 tax cuts are complicated, and if you’re interested in the details I encourage you to look it up on Wikipedia. But they mostly helped corporations, many of which (as we know) already pay nothing in federal taxes. The Medicaid cuts should not be confused with Medicare — which primarily pays for the health care of those already on Social Security — but would significantly impact the payment of nursing homes and the cost of prescription drugs. So, Trump voters, if Grandma is in a nursing home and you have a lot of prescription drugs, you can kiss those benefits goodbye. 

Republicans have (if you remember) used the debt ceiling increases as a cudgel to beat concessions out of Democratic presidents in recent years, but now they’ll have to use it as a cudgel on themselves. Many of them believe that the United States going into default would not be such a terrible thing.

Well, let’s find out.

The “experts” say that having the United States default could lead to substantially increase the cost of borrowing for consumers and businesses (including mortgages, credit cards, and car loan rates), it would increase the national debt, create recessions in a lot of world markets that rely on the dollar, tank the stock market, and substantially increase unemployment. In other words, a major recession if not flat out depression.

Well, let’s find out.

But whatever happens, it will clearly be on the Republicans.

Then we can establish whether it’s more important to argue over pronouns or where a transgender person goes to the bathroom, or to counter every effort made in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion, or more important to stabilize the economy for the middle class.

Let’s finally, finally, finally get real.

Yesterday was the three year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. February 24, 2022. The Russians thought it would be a cakewalk, over in a matter of days. Of course, it has proven to be anything but.

Donald Trump has — no surprise — aligned himself with Putin. In a universe that he sees as completely transactional, he wants to divide the world between the three big powers, which is the USA, Russia, and China. Fuck all the rest. As former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said of him, “He wants to be the sole winner in any type of conflict, and he does not believe in any win-win situation where both sides benefit from a solution.”

Remarkably enough, not all of Trump’s ideas are crazy. Sometimes there is the germ of an interesting idea, although presented in a half-assed way.

Take, for example, the idea that Ukraine could pay for some of their support by allowing the United States access to their rare earth minerals. The way Trump presented it, it was unhinged: have Ukraine sign away 50% of their rights for past and continued United States support. Why not just straight out rape the country, Donald, like you fingerfucked E. Jean Carroll?

The rare earth minerals that Ukraine has — some of which are in territory now controlled by Russia — are estimated to be valued at between 3 and 12 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money. However, allowing the United States to have access to mine some small portion of these rare earth minerals for a limited period of time might be a good way to compensate us for our support. And also to give conservatives in general (and Trump in particular) a stake in the outcome of the war. It’s a way that Trump could benefit at Putin’s expense, and counter the narrative that Trump is Putin’s lap dog.

Likewise, the notion that Europe should take more charge of its own defense isn’t a completely idiotic notion. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) currently has 32 members, with historically neutral Sweden and Finland having been added in the last few years to counterbalance Russia’s aggression. Lest we forget, NATO includes two nuclear powers aside from the United States, which are France and the United Kingdom. While their nuclear arsenals are much smaller than those of Russia and the United States, they have, in fact, plenty enough warheads to wipe Russia off of the map.

With Macron in France and newly-elected Frierich Merz in Germany, the alliance is likely to be strengthened, and to also be fully in support of Ukraine. And with the United States proving to be more and more of an unreliable partner, it may be a good thing for the Europeans to start relying more on themselves.

With 79 years, 10 months and 3 days since the end of the war in Europe, it might be time for the Europeans to become less dependent on the United States.

Of course we, under our Great Leader Donald Trump, may find ourselves more and more isolated and less and less consequential, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Well, here we go again. Elon Musk is taking another page out of his Twitter take-over by requiring federal employees to list five things that they did this week or be fired. That’s what he did at Twitter. 

First of all, federal employment doesn’t work that way. Federal employees can only be fired “for cause,” and most of them are protected by either civil service laws or union contracts. They can’t be fired because they didn’t respond to an email from someone who is not in their chain of command.

But more significantly, comparing the federal government to Twitter is like comparing an ocean liner to a bicycle. Just because you can ride a bicycle doesn’t mean that you can pilot an ocean liner.

On top of which, Musk’s stewardship of Twitter has been spectacularly unsuccessful, from a financial perspective. As of 2024, X (formerly Twitter) reported approximately $2.7 billion in revenue and $1.25 billion in adjusted earnings.However, this represents a significant decline from the $4.4 billion in revenue reported in 2022, prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition. The platform has faced other challenges, including a substantial decrease in advertising revenue and a decline in overall valuation. Estimates suggest that X’s value has decreased by approximately 79% since the acquisition. While specific net loss figures for 2024 are not publicly disclosed because it is  now a private company, the available data indicates that X has experienced significant losses, and that the company is being propped up by Musk’s wealth from other companies.

The former boy genius has been reading way too many of his own press releases, and now thinks he has the answers to everything, when he doesn’t even have the answer for Twitter.

Trump, for his part, barely knows any more about how the federal government works, and is running the country like he did his businesses, which (in case anybody forgot) had to declare bankruptcy six times.

Once Trump runs this country into the ground, maybe we can finally be done with the hopelessly incorrect and demonstrably false assumption that the government should be run like a business.

To use another analogy, that’s like saying a ski resort should be run like a shopping center. The two have nothing to do with each other.

The Republican party will eventually implode from their extended break with reality, especially under Donald Trump. Reality is just an inconvenience for the “alternative facts” that they have been peddling since 2016. We can see this clearly in three simple examples:

1. The “stolen” 2020 election.
2. The January 6th insurrection.
3. The claim that Ukraine started the war.

The “Stolen” 2020 Election

Despite their desperate and repeated efforts to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans have never been able to produce any credible evidence that it was. Sixty-three court cases later, they had zilch, nada, nothing (other than one Pennsylvania court that found that an insignificant number of mail-in ballots lacked proper identification and were “cured” after Election Day, and should not have been counted, even though that in no way impacted the final outcome).

And then, the embarrassment of the 2024 election. Using the same procedures as the 2020 election, Republicans were suddenly eager to accept the election results because the outcome this time was in their favor. Republican “confidence” in the election process was somehow, miraculously improved. Even though there was quite a bit of evidence that voter suppression was a significant cause for the change in outcome, they happily accepted in nontheless.

The January 6th Insurrection

Donald Trump and Republicans want us to believe that nothing of any importance happened during the January 6th insurrection, and that it was largely peaceful, even though it must have been the most photographed historical event ever. There were three sources for this:

1. The vast network of cameras set up inside the Capitol;
2. The live-streamed and extensive news coverage;
3. The cell phone videos from the insurrectionists themselves.

I remember watching it happen in real time, but even if you happened to miss that, you could see hours of it during the Congressional hearings on January 6th, where massive amounts of videos were played.

I mean, this is straight out of the novel “1984”: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Ukraine Starting the War

On Tuesday of this week, we  had the spectacle of President Trump saying this about Ukraine, after his team, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, began one-on-one discussions with the Russians, led by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

I’m not quite sure what “deal” Trump thinks Zelensky should have made. Maybe he thinks Zelensky should have given away the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk preemptively without a fight.

Anybody who has followed Putin’s career even a little bit knows that he’s an unreconstructed irredentist. He fancies himself to be the next Alexander the Great, and wants to reconstruct imperial Russia before the Revolution. He apparently thought that invading Ukraine would be a cakewalk, kind of like the “shock and awe” campaign the United States waged against Iraq.

If you think that Putin invading Ukraine because of the Russian speaking minorities there sounds a lot like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia because there were a lot of German speakers in the Sudetenland, you’re on the right track. Of course, students of history might remember that the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement didn’t keep Hitler from invading the rest of Czechoslovakia. 

Oh yeah, but Zelensky should have made a deal.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified on the grounds that Ukraine was committing a “genocide” against Russian minorities and that their goal was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine. This, while the Jewish Zelensky lost many of his family members to the Nazi’s in the Second World War, as did much of the Ukrainian population.

Unlike Republicans (apparently), the Ukrainians hate Nazis.

Russians are used to their government subjecting them to completely outrageous lies that no one believes, but here in the United States with our “free press,” we thought we were better than that. But not with Donald Trump as our President.

Well, it’s nice of Mitch McConnell to be voting the right way on the nominations of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr., but it’s also completely performative bullshit.

Way too late, McTurtle, way too late.

Mitch McConnell, the man who broke the Supreme Court, the Senate, and arguably the United States, now wants to do the right thing.

Way too late, McTurtle, way too late.

McConnell — if you don’t remember — is the guy who introduced the new theory of Supreme Court nominations, which is to not even give the other guy’s nominee a hearing, and just wait for the next election. Wondering if the Democrats will have the balls to follow that playbook.

Without McConnell, Merrick Garland would have been a Supreme Court justice, where he could have done much more good than he did as Attorney General.

Then, shortly after the January 6th insurrection, McConnell failed to lead his caucus in voting to convict Trump after his second impeachment, when fellow Republicans Richard Burr (North Carolina), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) already had.

I mean Susan Effing Collins got out of her “I’m concerned” neutrality and voted for conviction.

As the Senate Majority Leader and leader of his caucus, McConnell surely could have found nine more Senators to vote for conviction, and bring them to the needed 67 seat supermajority.

But McConnell didn’t do it.

To object now what Trump is doing is way too little and way too late.

(To be fair, a Senate conviction does not automatically bar a President from re-election. However, the Senate has the option to hold an additional vote to bar the individual from holding future federal offices, including the presidency. This disqualification requires only a simple majority vote.)

History will not be kind to McConnell, although a fat lot of good that does for the rest of us.