A day ending in "y"...

So, after a year of magisterial thumb-sucking the U.S. Supreme Court issued it's ruling that confirms, in the same sense that your eyes "confirm" seeing a barn in broad daylight, that, no, the executive branch cannot - simply by calling some random things an "emergency" - grift the power of the purse explicitly assigned to the legislative branch by the foundational documents of the republic.

Tl:dr; fuck you, Fatso, your "big beautiful tariffs" are illegal.

I'll get back to this in a bit, but the most annoying-to-the-point-of-infuriating part of this is the whole "No, duh?" part.

Everyone with a functioning hindbrain knew this the moment the felonious fucker came storming off his gilded toilet to announce that We the People were going to do a big ol' round of McKinleynomics. I wrote a whole post about this idiocy back in April 2025 when the nitwit spammed everything with his first round of them, and then revisited the subject with my own Tariff Tale in November. 

(Oh, and at this point I should throw in the most recent chapter of my personal encounter with Dumbfuck Don's Tariff Turgidity, in which I received a reply to my disputation of duties in January, 2026. UPS sent me the following:

"I am the Post-Entry Researcher assigned to the attached dispute. Your shipment has been flagged for aluminum duties, and U.S. Customs requires the attached Section 232 form to be completed. If the items do not contain aluminum, please enter the commodity name in the description field and indicate “N/A” in all remaining fields."

Okay, now; keep this in mind. The time and expense of all of this nonsense, from the billing for, and initial payment of, the duties on the object (a replica sword manufactured in Japan), the additional 200% tariff demand, my dispute of the additional demand, and now UPS' dispute of my dispute, were being borne by U.S. citizens. Neither a nanosecond nor a penny of this stupidity was coming from Tozando, the Japanese retailer.

Per UPS the duties on aluminum imposed by the administration's both then- and now-clearly-illegal fuckery were, indeed, 200%. Which sent me back to the calculator and, after that, the laptop keyboard, to compose the following reply:

"Here's the Section 232 Form with the information from this item, based on the following:
The item is a replica sword.
The aluminum is contained only in the blade.
The weight of the blade is approximately 5kg
The amount of aluminum in the blade is 13.5% per the manufacturer's declaration.
Based on this the approximate weight of aluminum is approximately 0.675kg.
The price of aluminum in Japan is listed as $86/ton for Q4 2025.
Therefor the value of the aluminum in this item is ($86/907.185)*0.675, or about  $0.14."

At which point I came damn near to dropping three dimes in an envelope and mailing them to the Post-Entry Researcher's address in San Diego. I resisted, but, fuck, it was a damn near-run thing.

I'm debating whether to now go ahead, or turn around and demand my initial $54 back from Felony Fats' crew of gormless idiots).

Here's the larger, and more infuriating, point of my ranting about this. It's just one more goddamn thing that this crew of acephalic numbskulls does every fucking day. And...

What's

The 

Fucking

Value

Of 

ANY 

Of 

This 

Trumpy

Bullshit?

To any of us not 1) in the two-yacht income brackets, or 2) utterly baked in gibbering racist, sexist, xenophobic, Christopathic lunacy to the point where "fucking with those people" is "in my best interests" (i.e. nuttier than a Snickers bar). 

I mean, pick one. Any one. Of the fucking things these treasonous Nazi fucks have wrangled up over the past year and change, like these ridiculous (and now officially illegal) tariffs.

Deporting everything and everyone in sight? Drywallers, bean and pear pickers? Bodega grannies? School kids? (Oh, and ass-beating and murdering random passersby in the process)?

Sluicing tax cuts to fatcats?  

Pimping coal mining?

Deregulating everything in sight so the fatcats and coal miners and all the other GOP remoras get to wet their fucking beaks while the world overheats and the clean air and water disappear?

Trashing things like the vaccinations and the medical care and research and disease control that made 20th Century medical care the safest and healthiest in human history (for those who could afford it, anyway...)?

Doing bizarre, random, vicious and/or stupid acts of violence all over the place, from South and Central America to the Middle East as they destroy the post-1945 Western alliance systems?

And that's just the legal stuff. We haven't even turned towards the grotesquely Trumpy corruption that makes Warren Harding's crew look like rank amateurs and the policeman in Arrijan green with envy.

At least the OG Nazis had World War 1 and Versailles and occupation and hyperinflation and depression to blame. And actual, no-shit Commie Reds right next door.

Doesn't excuse the murderous fuckers, mind. But you can see how Joachim and Marta Mittagessenkasten could see voting for the sonsofbitches.

What's our excuse?

That transsexual illegal Haitian porch pirates are cooking up Labrador au gratin? 

Give me a fucking break.

That, as I've repeated over and over, is the truly infuriating piece of all this Trumpfuckery.

It's more than the destruction. It's more than all the toxic "isms" aimed at people just trying to live a life; poor people, brown people, immigrant people, non-binary people, gay and lesbian people, liberal people, urban people. It's more than the vile, repugnant, evil shit that these fucksticks love and plan and do every fucking day.

It's the obvious pointlessness for everyone - liberal or MAGAt - who's not living off daddy's trust fund or some sort of credit-default swap scam or who isn't, as noted above, so mentally baked as to be functionally an intellectual house plant.

None of this shit "makes America great".

If the average Republican wasn't in a Trump cult the GOP would have been tossed in the trash bin of history after 2008 the way they were for the two decades after their post-1929 plutocratic fellatio made it clear whose trouser snake they were Hoovering.

 (I see what I did there)

Here's the problem for the rest of us, though.

The mention of 2008 dredges up the ugly reality that, much as the non-insane factions of political power are an order of magnitude better than the MAGAtraitors, they're not that great for the rest of us.

It was as plain as a dog in the daylight that the wealthy, the financial rentier class, the finance bros and banksters, the government "regulators" and fiscal manipulators that were and are in their pockets, are largely in control of the government's hand on the economy. Fiscal policy. Tax policy. Employment and education and almost every other aspect of life in the United States is grotesquely tilted in the direction of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".

It's not "conspiracy theory" for those of us not born with a trust fund to suspect that even if every MAGAt was raptured tomorrow the chances of us and ours getting a better deal for medicine, for college, for solid, reliable, good, rewarding work followed by an honorable and comfortable retirement are...not exceptionally high.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has an excellent explanation of the problems with the notion that "we" just need to "take the country back from the MAGAts" by voting out Republicans and then joy and happiness will reign: 

"The approach required by this profounder corruption (the "financialization" or elite capture of the economic as a whole, of the sort that 2008 was a symptom, not a cause) is not recovery: returning to where we were means going back to a state of affairs that was manifestly unsustainable. To borrow from the architect of the Democratic Party’s most enduring platform, any recovery that simply restores things as they were will see us all right back where we are now before too much time has passed. Franklin Roosevelt argued in 1934 that the nation needed not merely recovery but “reform and reconstruction . . . much of our trouble today and in the past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom leadership and business and finance and public affairs was placed.” Reconstruction—Roosevelt was well aware of the word’s legacy after the Civil War—meant that leadership, and the conditions that kept them in place, “had to be corrected.” 

My only quibble is that it needed more ropes and lampposts, just as 2008 should have, but you take what you can. What we need, though, is a thorough cleansing of the Augean stable of corrupt elite wealth and privilege that has metastasized in the American system. A complete revision of the post-Reagan tax-cut-and-deregulation schemes that have returned the nation, economically and socially and politically, to 1929 if not 1899.

The failure of the First Reconstruction must be reversed, and the success of the Revolt of the Rich and the Rise of the Second Confederacy that has taken place over the past forty-six years, must be destroyed.

Can the United States post-2025 do that?

I'm not sure.

But, goddamn it, we have got to fight for it.

Because the alternative is to be ruled by these idiots.

 

No, it's not radio silence...

 ...it's the damn Frontiers post.

How this joint - blog and country - feels at the moment.

I've finally got to the crux of the biscuit - the collision between the German "strong right wing" (the three right wing feldarmee) and the Allied left (principally the French 5re Armee and the British Expeditionary Force).

The thing is (to give away the plot) that there were several critical reconnaissance problems that affected the way both sides maneuver forces assembled, moved, and fought, and to analyze them I had to break the last half of August 1914 into a ridiculously granular level - literally day-by-day - of detail, and that's taking forever.

While I'm doing all this my country is going completely to a madman's Hell in a handbasket, and I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.

Put aside the usual GOP MAGAt bullshit - the basso continuo of stupidity, greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, half a dozen other fucking toxic -isms - and it's the jaw-dropping stupidity of the Second Fraudulency Administration's cunning plans that hits so hard.

Seriously.

It's not the greed. It's not the criming. It's not the fascism.

Those were baked in from the moment this fucking country re-elected Felony Fats.

It's the utterly pointless, pinheaded, stop-me-before-I-shoot-myself-in-the-dick moron-grade dumbfuckery.

Let's gloss over the whole insane "Get Greenland!!!" side arc and focus on the real Krown Jool of Boneheadedness that these fucksticks are chasing;

"Mass Deportation Now".

Stop and think for a moment.

Who does this whole lets-chase-down-brown-folks-and-disappear-them benefit?

More to the point...how in Beelzebub's Fucking Hell does deporting random geezers, bodega grannies, drywallers, tomato pickers, and busboys even benefit you and me, Joe and Molly Lunchpail, Mister and Missus Average American? 

Are these people "criminals" in the "roll you for a nickel and stab you for the extra dime" sense?

Ohhellno. We've been over and over this. It makes no sense for 99.9% of anyone in this country illegally to go around criming and getting a police spotlight shining on them. Most undocumented people are the opposite; trying to keep on the downlow and below the cops' radar so they can make a living.

Are they "taking your..." fill in the blank here; job, house, tax dollars?

Pretty much no. The jobs most of these people are doing are those that legal citizens are largely loth to do; farmwork, meat processing, construction, "hospitality" (read hotel maids and waitstaff). They can't collect entitlements without, again, popping up on radars they don't want to attract. They're not manipulating the rental and housing markets. How? They rent houses or apartments just like citizens, and the cost of those rentals is determined by the owners and landlords, the availability by developers and zoning rules.

So how does 86ing them in job lots help you and me..?

 .

 .

. 

Take your time. I'll wait.

Okay, now. Here's the one place I'll agree with the fucking idiot Trumpkins: having a mass of people in a country who lack citizenship is troubling.

I've written about this over and over, and can't express it better than I did in 2017:

"...to be a stateless person, a non-citizen, in a foreign nation is not a good thing.

It's not good for the person, who has no civil rights, who is outside the protection of the civil law, and who is, therefore, hideously vulnerable to all sorts of malefactors.

And it's not good for the nation, that has this indigestible mass of non-citizens within it prey to crime and violence, exploited by employers and living in fear of taking part in the civil life of the community.

So. The bottom line really is; if you are a citizen of Mexico, or Ireland, or Bali...you belong in Mexico, Ireland, or Bali unless you are a legal resident or visitor of where-ever-it-is-you-are; in this case, the United States."

Yep. Still true. 

In a sane polity We the People would have a simple, orderly process for people who want to come to this nation, regardless of who or what they are, to get on the track to citizenship. Learn the Common Tongue (English) speedily, become conversant with the conventions of citizenship...

(and as a note here, the appallingly low level of civics knowledge of the supposed citizenry in this country is, or should be, a scandal. Way too many MAGAts get away with talking the shit they do because Joe and Molly don't have the fundamental understanding of the principles contained in the founding documents or a knowledge of this nation's history to refute the traitors' bullshit.)

...and become part of the quilt of people and culture and ideas that are the promise of this nation; equal justice under law. Liberty and justice for all.

The surface trappings of all this Trumpian lunacy - masked ICEstapo goons in the street, ridiculous lies about eating pets, secret prisons - is just the foam on the Latte' of Mindless Racist Xenophobic Stupidity of the MAGAt horde. Meaning that we could arrest, convict, and jail Felony Fats and his entire coterie of fools, assholes, and Nazi pals, and we'd still have this problem...because of the millions of the fucksticks around us who luuuurve them this nonsense.

So, nope.

We're not getting out of this with One Weird DeTrumpification Trick.

ICE.

Tariffs.

Antivaxx loonies.

"Entitlement" cuts to finance tax gimmees for fatcats. 

"antifa".

Greenland, Venezuela, Panama, Gaza, Iran...

They're all going to be problems for decades. The plutocrats who are the force that gives MAGA meaning are getting their tax giveaways and deregulation. The Christopaths are getting the Bible-banging. The MAGAts are getting the "I love eating shit so long as the people I hate have to eat more shit" they crave.

Between them the rest of us are fucked.

And, like I've been saying over and over; it's not just that we're caught in the MAGA dystopia.

It's that this is Stupid Dystopia. This is getting handed your ass because you let the world's most ignorant hillbilly chucklefucks into the control room of the nuke plant because you were pissed off that your email signature could include pronouns.

Christ on a fucking crutch.

 

Quiet desperation

I've tried.

I was sure I could get enough ridiculousness out of this idiotic "Portland is burning!" Trumpenonsense to dope up an "Acting 1st Lawes..." piece.

But.

I just can't.

This has become...whatever "reeeally fucking not funny" is.

The President of the United States is an unhinged moron, a complete and utterly lethally dangerous fool, acting on the delusions that exist only in his addled head as well as direction from the dangerously evil, greedy monsters that prowl around him.

And We, the People, can do nothing to stop or deter or delay this.

He's going to send soldiers to peaceful cities, his ICEstapo goons are going to try and gin up unrest to justify violent force, because this ninny has nothing inside his fat head outside greed and bile and prejudice.

And We can do nothing to change that, or to stop it.

I honestly don't know what more to say. We are at the nonexistent mercy of Nazis, the real-honest-to-God-no-shit variety as well as every flavor of other White Christopathic Scum that rides with the old school swastika-suckers.

And We can do nothing to change that, or stop it.

Well. 

We can vote. 

Sure.

In a year. And hope that the Nazis don't do what Nazis do; use force and fear to make that vote meaningless. And trust that they'll do what they haven't for the past year; bend the knee to the popular will and the laws and customs of the nation.

There's armed resistance, of course.

And without an invading army to destroy the occupation forces?

Ask a Soviet partisan or a French resistant or a survivor of the Polish Home Army how that goes.

So what can I say? That if, as they surely will, the MAGAts refuse to allow, or accept the results, of the popular vote, the choice is between hopeless rebellion or desperate inaction? 

Well, here I am, saying just that.

It infuriates me. Infuriates as in the old cartoon where the vulture says "Patience, my ass. I want to kill something."

It provokes nothing as much as murderous rage. Rage at the MAGAt scum. Rage at my own political faction who couldn't be arsed to turn out last year to defeat the MAGAt scum. Just...rage.

I'm sorry.

I wish I had more hope. I wish I had an eloquent prescription for escaping the jaws of this vise of thug fascism, of restoring the promise of the nation I grew up in.

I don't.

I'm going to try and come up with some sort of content this autumn. I still need to finish the "Frontiers" series. I still love to write...I just need to find something to write about other than the state of my nation.

Because if I do I'll find myself right back here, my gaze darkened, my fists clenching in a hate that begs, that longs for, that craves the sweet feel of the parting of throats under the blade. 

Endlösung

So tell me, MAGAt.

What is it called when your police and soldiers just take people from their homes, from the streets. and force them into camps where they never leave until they die?

What the fuck is it called? Say it! Say the name. Fucking say it!
 

Sounded better in the original German, didn't it, you fascist fuck?

But you had to have your Orange Fuhrer back and now the rest of us are so fucked, and faster than I ever believed possible.

That Monday's insane presser didn't immediately result in burning buildings and dead policemen dangling from power poles is a vicious indictment of how supine and cowardly We the People have become.

Tonight the White House should be enveloped in flames, the mutilated bodies of Trump and Miller and Melania dangling head-down from the East Portico in the best fascisti traditions. Terrified MAGAts should be hiding in cellars and alleys, barely pausing to tear the gold Trump-head pins off their jackets in their haste to escape the vengeful mobs roaming the Capitol. Margie Greene should be begging to barter anything, everything, to buy mercy from the cold-eyed citizens who just continue dragging her to the nearest wall.

Christ I wish all these fuckers had one throat so I could slit it in one vicious drawing stroke.

I can barely express how insane with rage this fucking Nazi slime makes me. This is as close as I can come, and it's nowhere near close enough. If I had the power these sonsofbitches would be...

But I don't. So all I can do is shake with rage.

Arming up for the new civil war

Paul Campos has it exactly right:

"Donald Trump won the election, and that reality has to be acknowledged and lived with, because at least for the moment the alternative is worse. But the last thing Democratic elites ought to be doing at the moment is signaling any willingness to cooperate with his completely explicit goal of trying to destroy the democratic process that just put him back in power. When dealing with fascism, the difference between cooperation and collaboration is non-existent, and statements like this obscure that critical absence of a distinction.

The options for defenders of liberal democracy are to resist, flee, or surrender. Bipartisan cooperation isn’t on the menu with Trump and Trumpism, and anybody who claims otherwise is either a fool, or thinks that they can cut a deal with Donald Trump while somehow still keeping their own hands clean at a time like this"

There is little enough I - an old man alone in a shitty Northeast Portland apartment, struggling with late-life health issues, post-divorce loneliness, and the blues - can do to "resist".

But what I can do, I will. Starting here.

I will be "the enemy within" of all things Trumpian, MAGAt, Republican, fascist (but I repeat myself) and any and all who "cut a deal" with them.

I will use my words. If need be, I will use my body.

I cannot see how it ends well. They control all the levers of power and a monopoly on force.

Most partisans are killed.

 

But I can't keep my own hands clean. Not and live with myself.

Troubles here and there

 The past week has been...interesting.

In the "big news" is obviously the conviction in criminal court of a former U.S. president.

Why this is "news" is kind of peculiar, because this particular jamoke has always been and is the most obviously incompetent, corrupt, and criminal individual to ever disgrace American presidential politics, and when you consider that includes people like Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce that's a pretty high fucking bar.

Convicting this scumbag of several of his many visible crimes was, as it should have been, as hard as hitting water when falling out of a boat.

No, what's "news" - in the sense of "revealing" - has been the reactions of the Republican Party.

In a sane world this would give the Party of (Cash, Guns, Jesus, and Whiteness) Personal Responsibility the perfect option; dump the dick.

You want a loudmouthed nitwit for President?

Margie Greene is right there!

The GQP could use this as a lockdown "It's not you, it's me!" moment and pivot towards some other loudmouthed but less facially corrupt nitwit. Gaetz, Lee, Tuberville, Boebert...I mean, goddamn, the party's chock full of 'em.

They didn't. They won't, because it's obvious that they can't.

Because, apparently, Trump scratches some sort of weird precognitive itch in Republicans. It always seems to me to be a sort of reflex rather than a thought-out decision. Tubby is the Perfect Own-The-Libs Storm, and that seems to be what gets the bulk of these people going.

Mind you, the overall GOP pyramid hasn't changed.

As they did in the pre-Q Era of the Eighties through the early Teens, the plutocrats at the top are using all this wingnut id to get the New Gilded Age they crave. They give a shit about trans women and abortion; (or, if they do, not enough to interfere with their pursuit of) low taxes and deregulation are their goals.

They're using these shiny objects to harvest the morons' votes.

And right now all the morons want is Moar Trump. So they'll get it.

And if they can turn that into Electoral votes in November so will we.

Good and hard.

So there's that.

While at home...

The divorce machinery grinds forward.

We've engaged a mediator, and part of that process means collecting every scrap of information on our financial lives. Mojo is doing the heavy lifting there as she has throughout our marriage.

And what's increasingly apparent is that we're...not rich.

Right now we're getting by.

But I'm pulling in retirement - Army retirement and Social Security - and contract work here and there. She's got her paycheck which is less than that...

Given how hard she works, and all she does for little Astor Elementary?

That's a shame and a hissing to you, Portland Public Schools.

As a unit we're doing okay.

As individuals?

Things get kinda scary.

So scary that the other night Mojo was up until midnight, sitting alone on the darkened deck, her mind so filled with fear and worry that she couldn't sleep.

It tore me. I'm not where she is; she's still my dear, still my best friend. It's murder seeing her like that.

So I made an offer. A very odd one by modern marriage standards.

Let's put a pin in divorce, I said.

Not call it off. I get it, you're done with me. But...let's give it time. Let's live together, friends, "roommates", business partners, for four years. Until the kids are through college and our expenses drop to the baseline.

Then? We go our ways.

The thing that had occurred to me as I watched her agony was that this was what millions of people did for thousands of years. They needed to stay solvent. They were rich and wanted to be richer, or poor and didn't want to be poorer. Or merchants and wanted business, or nobles and wanted land.

So they made a deal to work and live together.

This was the deal on offer. A deal that would give us breathing space and time. Time for her to find a better-paying job. Time to grow our investment wealth, time and space to better figure out how to find our ways as single people, instead of the current rush to be separate.

Unlike a lot of those people, we aren't strangers.

We were friends, and so far still are.

I think we could make that work.

I also don't think she'll take it.

But I had to make the offer. She IS my friend, my dearest friend, and regardless of everything else, I owe her every effort to help her to the best life she can.

I already miss her.

And, sadly, I'm afraid both that that will not change, and that, soon, it irrevocably will.

The Formula

 Over at Nancy Nall's joint she complains:

"You guys, I am shocked this story hasn’t gotten more attention from the prestige media. It’s based on a government report, not “sources.” The revelations – that the White House has its own pharmacy, and under Trump, it handed out prescription meds like Smarties on Halloween – are startling. And yet, it seems to have bloomed and withered in one news cycle, and what stories were written concentrated on the cost, mainly of the use of name-brand drugs when generic equivalents were available."

To which my immediate thought was:

Dunno about everyone else, but..."this would surprise you…why?”

Anyone who had been paying attention to Tubby since his Eighties Manhattan heyday knew the guy is a moral shithouse, the reeking one-holer of ethical sewage. So assuming the WH has a dispensary, and knowing how a dispensary run by this human smegma would be run…what ELSE would you expect?

It’s the same way so many other articles about the orange chancre seem incredulous about his lying, or cheating, or petty viciousness, or stupidity…and my response is you’re gobsmacked by this…why? It's not like this is some sort of Scooby-doo mystery. It's all right in front of you.

Look. He’s a garbage human. As such he is surrounded by the sort of people who think “Yes! I WANT that!” So of course this. And the corruption. And the theft of documents and WH gifts. And the racism and sexism and plutocratic…

I guess that's the only thing I don't get; that given how obvious all this Republican QANut fuckery is, how does any sentient human not see it?

The culties do and that's why they love it. But anyone not in the cult should be horrified and furious about it. Yet...here we are. WASF.

 

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - A Reminder

Two years ago this day a mob of Republicans, led by their fuhrer, committed treason.

Since then the entire Republican Party has embraced treason in support of its fuhrer.

I warned you what would happen if we let them get away with it.

By so doing we sowed the wind.

Now we're going to reap the whirlwind.

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

Find Out?

Two things about Tubby finally running into the long arm of the law:

1) the Stormy payoff might possibly be the LEAST illegal thing he’s ever done, because…

2) Everyone who is familiar with the joker from his real estate days in NYC knows he’s crooked as a dog’s leg and mobbed-up. He’s just a sleazy little development hustler and always has been.

That means nothing to the GQP/his cult. They didn’t care before and they don’t care now. He’s their crook, and his cons are their cons.

No, the real question I’d ask is “will this change the REST of the country, particularly the mainstream media?”. So far they’ve treated Tubby like any other Republican, meaning when he lies they report the lie rather than simply noting “he lied again” and when he crimes they report it as just a thing rather than "he crimed again".

IF – and that’s s big if and not a given – this gives the press the chance to actually report that this crooked shitbird is a) a crooked shitbird who is b) likely to be elected president again? 

Maybe suddenly the idiot “center” will wake up and turn out against him.

I’m not betting that way.

But at least this is an opportunity.

Wait...

“Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes."

Okay, we're fucked.