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1 min read
Annihilation Is an Appetizer
Read more . . . →“Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not?” That’s a real quote from the President of the United States, about a country of 90 million people, delivered like he was choosing between appetizers. Seven months into a war he started. The man treats annihilation like a coin flip. The same week, his administration approved a $24.3 billion F-35 deal to Saudi Arabia. First time an Arab country has been cleared for fifth-generation stealth fighters. Lockheed Martin’s stock ticked up. Pratt & Whitney gets their cut. The defense contractors are having the quarter of their lives....
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The Building Is a Hostage
Read more . . . →The Kennedy Center has been closed since July. The National Symphony Orchestra is scattered across six venues in the DC suburbs because its home is shuttered for a renovation that Congress approved $257 million to pay for. And this week, Trump said the renovation won’t happen unless the courts let him carve his name into the building. When a judge blocked the inscription for the second time, calling the board’s efforts “linguistic gymnastics,” Trump was photographed with a poster reading “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED” and told reporters the place could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get “recognition.” Congress funded the...
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Nobody Leaves the Table
Read more . . . →Donald Trump signed an order yesterday to strip all Canadian-origin goods from federal procurement, $280 billion in contracts, because Canada had the nerve to launch a Buy Canadian policy after he tariffed them. The same day, he told reporters that if the European Union goes ahead with its plan to make Canada an associate member, he’d consider it a “hostile act” and hit Europe with tariffs too. Read that again. He’s kicking Canada off his shelves and threatening to punish anyone who puts them on theirs. This is the trade-policy version of the guy who dumps you and then shows...
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1 min read
Day 196 and a Tee Time
Read more . . . →It’s Day 196 of the war with Iran. Twenty-nine people have been executed in connection with anti-war protests. And the President of the United States is at a golf tournament in Doonbeg, Ireland, at a course he owns, the one that paid him $20 million last year. Five cargo planes full of armored Secret Service vehicles flew across the Atlantic so the man who started a war could sit in a hospitality tent and watch the Irish Open. Ireland footed a €20 million security bill for the visit. The Secret Service is booking rooms at his hotel, buying food at...
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1 min read
Small Potatoes
Read more . . . →Eighteen American soldiers are dead and the president called it small potatoes. That’s a direct quote. Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office on Thursday and said the war he started with Iran is “small potatoes” because only eighteen Americans died. He compared it to Vietnam, the logic being that because fewer people died than in a war that killed fifty-eight thousand over twenty years, this one barely registers. Eighteen is a rounding error. Eighteen is within the margin of acceptable loss. He delivered this with the same energy you’d use to explain why you’re not tipping. Those eighteen people...
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The Child Was Infrastructure
Read more . . . →The US military bombed a wedding in southern Iran on Monday. Five dead, including a child. Sixty-eight wounded, fifty of them women and children. The Pentagon called it a strike on Revolutionary Guard infrastructure. The infrastructure was a family home in Kuhestak where people were celebrating a marriage. The guests were infrastructure. The child was infrastructure. Central Command released a statement about “IRGC assets.” An asset, in Pentagon English, is whatever was standing where the missile landed. This is the third time a US strike in this war has hit a civilian gathering. In Minab they hit an elementary school...
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Your Laptop Is a National Security Threat Now
Read more . . . →The Trump administration is considering tariffs on every laptop, gaming console, and server that touches a semiconductor, which is all of them. The pitch is that this will bring chip manufacturing back to American soil. The reality is that a chip fab costs $20 billion, takes five years to build, and employs fewer people than a regional hospital. Your next laptop costs 20% more by Christmas. Intel gets a talking point for its investor call. You get the bill. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary who used to run a Wall Street brokerage, is the one designing this. His plan ties...
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They Broke the Complaint Box
Read more . . . →The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 on Tuesday to strip federal employees of their right to a hearing when they file a discrimination complaint. The agency whose one job is to hear you when your boss discriminates against you just voted to stop hearing you. Chair Andrea Lucas called the complaint process “susceptible to abuse.” The abuse she’s referring to is federal workers (prison guards who got groped, FBI agents who got passed over for being the wrong color) asking for their case to be heard by an actual judge. That’s the abuse. People using the system the way...
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He Kidnapped the President and Took the Oil
Read more . . . →Trump announced “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” yesterday: majority US control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, at “no cost to taxpayers.” Quite a deal. All it took was starting a war with Iran that drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest point since 1983, abducting Venezuela’s sitting president and flying him to New York for trial, installing his VP as a compliant “interim leader,” threatening her with the same fate if she didn’t cooperate, and waiting for her to rewrite the country’s oil laws to Washington’s specifications. Free of charge. The reserve is sitting at...
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He Renamed the Water
Read more . . . →Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” The name Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io (“beautiful lake”) and it’s been on maps since before the Declaration of Independence existed. Four hundred years of Indigenous naming, erased because a man who can’t find most countries on a map decided a body of water shared with another country needed a more patriotic brand. The Interior Department has 30 days to update the federal database. Canada is not required to adopt the change. Canada will not. This is what happens when you run out of leverage....
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