“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Keep in mind that four years ago we were in the teeth of a planetary health crisis, made worse by Trump’s handling of it. But Trump made that a legitimate question, and people with selective memories answered in the negative.

If all Trump plans on doing is to repeal popular laws and withdraw from strategic global agreements and consolidate power into the Executive Branch, then why is he back? Why did people choose four more years of him if all he’s going to do is exact revenge and undo things that are already done? Seems, at a bare minimum, a waste of our time.

Matt Gaetz as AG. Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of something called The Department of Government Efficiency. Sounds Third Reich-ish to me.

Project 2025 must be going swimmingly. And we have ourselves a waking nightmare.

I’m sure Trump’s picks for various cabinet posts and other critical positions are top notch brains, knowledgable and insightful experts all. But I have to believe that many are looking at Kristi Noem and Elon Musk and the immigration guy, among others, and thinking …

Hell, I don’t know what they’re thinking. But I’m sure the choices are both predictable and unsavory, unsurprising and disappointing.

Oh, who am I kidding? They’re all fish out of water, ridiculous and frightening. A Who’s Who of Trump lackeys and sycophants and loudmouths and pretty faces who get to play “Governing” for a while, who were probably long ago plucked by the people involved in the creation of Project 2025. And we all get to watch it unfold without recourse, unless there is somehow resistance in the confirmation hearings.

But to hear Rachel Maddow tell it, Trump is already priming the Supreme Leader pumps by demanding that Congress be in recess while all his nominees are seated… with only his approval?

What are we in for, as if we didn’t know? He’s not gonna improve most peoples’ financial bottom line. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about needing to put food on a table or pay the bills or bring some relief to those who have to decide between paying for food or medicine and not both. He doesn’t care about those things and they were being told that all along. They were being fed something, though– the pocketbook was an issue because they were told it was an issue.

Kitchen table issues, my ass.

They voted for him by the millions. They somehow dismissed the Project 2025 cloud and voted for the guy because they still think he’s a good businessman and God-ordained and he’s gonna change things for the better.

Too late now. Trump’s not the only one who’s delusional. It’s a character trait in MAGA Nation.

Stellar job, America. A+.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—footnotes, already, in this schizoid melodrama that just keeps on running. It already feels like it never really happened, even though for a time many thought Ms. Harris might just break through, like that was an actual possibility.

Enter Joe Biden, who got greedy and threw a wrench in the works of a normal nomination process. The Dems, as it turns out, were handicapped and doomed.

Nice goin’, Joe.

I hesitate to peruse the latest headlines, because I know that the scuzball recently elected will be making news with his appointments to various high-level positions.

I think maybe a lot of people will decide to check out, when it comes to being news junkies. They’re gonna give up the habit and rid themselves of at least that source of angst. Or I will, anyway.

I’ll get my news from Colbert and Stewart and the rest, until they’re carted off to the gulag.

Which is not the least bit funny– the canaries in the coal mine being thought of in the same derisive way that many of us look at Fox “News,” with the added feature of being on a fucking Enemies List.

Super job, America.

I don’t think I have ADD or anything, but it’s getting harder to sit and watch an NFL game for any length of time. I’ve always been a channel flipper if the game starts turning into a runaway, but lately I’m just turned off by the game itself, no matter who’s playing and what the score is.

Part of it is because of on-field behavior; the other part is an over-the-top amount of advertising. I recently attended the Kansas State-Colorado game and saw that there is actually a standard bearer who comes onto the field with a clock that he/she rotates to let the crowd and teams know how much of the commercial break is left before play resumes. This happened a lot, and most times it was 3-4 minutes, sometimes more, of commercials. So teams get way more than three Time Outs per half, and advertising adds an hour or more to a telecast.

Anyway, football, to me, has become just a bunch of rabid fans rooting on their musclebound “warriors” who are trying to physically punish each other, and then hugging and shaking hands afterwards, like all the head-bashing is forgiven and they’ve all just been through such a battle together. I’ve had my fill of the testosterone-fueled legal mayhem, along with the penalty-worthy end-of-play displays of dominance and something bordering on rage.

I guess I can see why many players declare, “It’s a war out there.” Even though it isn’t. A war.

I’ll give a pass to touchdown celebrations, but don’t get me started on the time wasted celebrating after an interception or fumble recovery. I wonder what the refs are thinking while they wait for that nonsense to subside.

I don’t know. I guess it makes me wonder where the game and a bunch of other things are headed when everyone is always trying to kick things up a notch. There was a time when people just went to a game to watch… the game.

What will be the upper limits of trying to erase all that boredom? Man, I hate that word.

That’s entertainment, though. Gotta give people their money’s worth, right?

Either Trump’s pending cases were simply the result of partisan, whine-soaked politics destined for dismissal on a lack of true merit, or justice has not been served.

It’s confusing, because the message is sent that everything is relative, merely a matter of perspective, and that deep pockets matter more than due process and a guilty verdict that, to many, would have felt like the more deserving outcome.

It’s confusing because January 6 becomes water under the bridge; a phone call to Brad Raffensperger suggesting he find 11,780 votes now counts for nothing; boxes of documents stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago become nothing more than mythic red herrings; misogynistic and criminal assaults on women languish in the ether of “men being men.” Making a stand and the warning shots from former Trump loyalists take on the character of fools’ errands.

Meanwhile, a festering, pus-infected eruption gets to return to the White House, which may sound harsh, but Trump brings out the best in all of us…

A recent editorial in the local paper contained an itemized list of reasons why Trump won the election last week. It was a true litany of grievance and slights, an accumulation of slings and arrows that apparently wounded this man’s soul so deeply that Trump’s victory provided the catalyst for a cathartic release of pent-up venom.

He remembered a lot of things, like Joe Biden’s admittedly ill-timed and ill-advised declaration that Trump supporters were garbage, yet he is apparently OK with a whole island of people being called the same. He remembered the “too liberal” acceptance of transgender people and cross-dressers. He remembered the woman’s march the day after Inauguration 2017 when women had the gall to sport headware that looked like a vagina, while apparently overlooking Trump’s comment about grabbing women by the same. He remembered 95% negative coverage in the news, which means he must be a consumer of at least 95% of whatever it is they’re peddling on Fox.

He said he gets called a racist and a Nazi simply because he has different views than others of us, when, as a counterpoint, it could be because such labels frequently go unrecognized and he probably doesn’t spend much time looking in the mirror.

I guess what irks me about this person’s remarkably detailed and thorough listing of insults and attacks is, first of all, that he must have been keeping a running tally along the way, and, secondly, that what he sees as insults and attacks I and many others understand to be the thin-skinned perceptions of someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid, who hasn’t stopped to evaluate his allegiances, who has taken the bait, hook, line, and sinker, and decided that an angry manchild who is incapable of giving a shit about him and his family is somehow the guy who can solve all his and his family’s problems.

It’s the insidious deception, you know? It runs deep. The net is very large, and the yield continues to mystify and astound.

We, by default, were once again forced to settle– if one chooses to look at it that way. When the main impetus for voting is to keep a metastasizing cancer away from the White House, one’s only option is to vote for whoever the other candidate is, whether they like him/her or not. Whether this person is right for the job or not.

Or they just don’t vote at all, which is an avoidable waste.

The cancer is spreading, the monster wins another one. And the list of reasons why that is so detestable will also continue to grow.

On the 6^th, I was basically relieved that the campaign season was over. There were (and still are) down-ballot races to be decided, but the noise at least had subsided for a time, until next week, when things start ramping up for the 2026 midterms.

I wasn’t really bothered by the fact that a majority of people had decided to cast their votes for a budding megalomaniac and all-around farce of a human being. I’m not sure it was even shock or grief that accounted for the lack of affect. But now, as the dust settles, reality is creeping back in and the realization emerges that we have to watch as Trump once again chooses people to fill certain key positions in his administration.

Family members will likely get a nod again—if they want it. It sounds like Elon Musk will be way over-utilized, put in some position(s) for which he will be some sort of flailing fish out of water. And then there’s RFK, Jr. The vaccine-denying, brain-wormed son of the Democratic Party icon may be put in charge of HHS, NIH, FDA, you name it. Only the best people in the Trump administration.

There will be fewer competent figures this time around, and many more deals with the devil.

The whole process is or should be fraught with vehement disgust, covered for what it is: some sort of grievous, anomalous error in judgment that should have never happened. But instead, it’ll just be another transition from one administration to the next, with the added feature of feeling more like watching one’s own execution.  

Trump doesn’t want to govern. He wants to get even. He’s been given permission to do that.

Nice going, America.

It is tragic—the losses in the Mountain Fire, out in CA. But let’s say out loud that which apparently is supposed to remain unspoken: duh.

People decide to build their dream castles, along with other more modest homes, in the middle of pine forests on the side of a hill, with a view, or just out in the boonies, isolated the way they like it, but also in knowingly risky terrain—given California’s propensity for enduring an expanding wildfire (and mudslide) season that arrives with a predictability similar to that of tidal activity.

A few thousand questions pop up, perhaps none more glaring than why people build where they do, and why such conflagrations border on inevitable. It seems there’s always a spark, or always some idiot either doing something idiotic or intentionally incendiary. The Santa Ana winds do their thing, or climate change-enhanced drought does its thing in conjunction with dry— dry! —thunderstorms that produce lightning only, or there’s a spark from a power line, or something else.

In some ways, this seems like the inland version of building a home three feet from the ocean in Florida. What are people thinking? That it won’t happen to them? That they’ll just rebuild because they have insurance and they’re ridiculously stubborn or feeling entitled and they can’t read the tea leaves?

In all fairness, some of the homes in California may have been built before people started thinking in terms of global warming or accelerated climate change, but the Santa Ana winds arrive like clockwork, so it seems possible that there is just as much of a gambling mindset going on as there has ever been.

People don’t mind playing the odds. They want to build where they want to build, damn the torpedoes.