And Other Notes From the Past Couple Weeks
Donald Trump is really pitching for that Nobel Peace Prize. This month, he sanctioned Russia’s two top revenue-producing oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. Both are blocked from doing business with any American company, and all foreign companies are blocked from doing business with them.
Combine that with a threat of Tomahawk missiles, which could strike deep into Russia, being supplied to Ukraine, and all in all, it leaves a few new items on the table for Putin to think about. Of course, Putin’s problem is one that he has created for himself by attacking Ukraine in the first place. Now he can’t back down and give back the parts of Ukraine that Russia is occupying without losing face.
Zelenskyy is stuck with the same problem in that he wants to stop the fighting but can’t until Russia gives back substantial chunks of land it has occupied.
It would seem to be an easy problem for a self-proclaimed genius like Trump to solve, especially after all those other wars he keeps telling us he’s ended.
What wars? you may ask, because that’s what just about everyone else is asking. The only wars of any significance, the one in Ukraine and the one in Gaza, are still a long way from being solved, which means the Norwegian Nobel Committee cannot even think about giving Trump a prize because if they do, even if he somehow earns it, he will stop whatever efforts he is making and go back to trying to turn the rest of the world into a Trump money-making machine.
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Illinois Governor Pritzker was all over the tube this past week explaining the illegality of the move by the Trump administration to infect American cities with National Guard troops, ostensibly to fight crime. Of course, that isn’t the Guard’s job, but Trump just isn’t bright enough to acknowledge this. All he knows is that he wants to establish a military presence in Blue cities
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So, Donald Trump had barely finished telling the world about what a hero he was for stopping the thousand-year war in the Middle East when Hamas was out in the streets killing anyone who looked sideways. They had already failed to produce any of the dead hostages, and why not? It was a very considerate but really braindead idea. Some of those dead had been deceased for almost two years. It’s obscene. It was a bad idea from the beginning aimed at causing the peace to fail, and that’s just what might happen. Does anyone even know where the bodies had been buried? Any accurate record-keeping is extremely unlikely.
And while we’re struggling on the brink of other wars, Trump set the Coast Guard on Venezuelan shipping by blowing up the fifth boat since the persecution started. Were there actually drug dealers on any of these boats? Who knows. Are we supposed to take Trump’s word that there were? That would be the same word that told us that the war in the Middle East was over even as Hamas was killing people in Gaza this morning.
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J.D. Vance appeared on Face the Nation recently and babbled incessantly about how the entire government shutdown and firings were the fault of Chuck Schumer, which is typical of Vance’s inheriting his positions from Trump, the idol of the untrue. The fact is that Schumer allowed the government to close because the only way to keep it open was to allow the GOP to kill a huge chunk of medical coverage, especially for the poor.
Vance is slick as whale shit, and he makes the administration’s case against Schumer sound plausible, but the facts are the facts. The administration wants to cut Medicaid and they are using this situation as a weapon to do so.
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Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said on Face the Nation that the Democrats are acting like they don’t believe the GOP can walk and chew gum, which is why they won’t help the GOP open the government. She’s right. The Democrats, having seen a half century of the GOP unable to walk OR chew gum, have given up on their ability to do anything right and are not willing to allow Trump to screw up more of the government than he already has.
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I find it unbelievable that Donald Trump has browbeaten his justice Department into indicting John Bolton for almost exactly the same crime that he was guilty of when he hid classified files all over Mar a Largo at the end of his first term in office. Where does he get the chutzpah, or is it just that he’s too stupid to understand the similarities of the two actions? It will be interesting to see if this is brought up when Bolton’s trial starts.
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And speaking of chutzpah, where does Zohran Mamdani get the balls to look to be mayor of the greatest city in the world when he’s never even held a job? This spoiled brat of rich parents, who have supported him into adulthood, has an awful big mouth for someone who has produced nothing to this point. His position on affordable rents could, if the city is dumb enough to elect him, destroy the rental housing market the way the city did in the fifties and seventies when it turned a bustling middle-class neighborhood in the South Bronx into a still existing slum and then did the same thing to the Upper West Side in the Sixties. The Upper West Side was saved because of a wealth of redeemable housing stock that had value on its own. This isn’t true with most neighborhoods.