Left Jabs

   We now understand that congressional Republicans are not happy, the poor dears. As with everyone who has ever bought anything from Donald Trump, they have buyers’ remorse. Put another way, they sold their souls to Donald Trump, and got nothing from the sale. Trump screwed them on both the buy and sell sides. That hasn’t stopped them from cravenly rubber-stamping anything the Dear Leader wishes, even when they hate the idea. They’ve gone along with the stupid wars, the grifty tariffs, the plummeting economy, the ballooning inflation, the crazy gas prices, the degrading of our arsenal, the looting of our treasury, and the sabotage of our traditional alliances. All of which was fine with them. But it turns out the “Retribution Tour” was a bridge too far, even for the slavishly servile. Trump went out of his way to primary any Republican who ever crossed him, and a lot of long-time rubber stamps will now lose their seats as a result. This was not going down...

   Sixty nations held an emergency conference in Colombia last month. The United States was not invited. The attendee nations were in a dire predicament — entirely of Trump’s making — and they had no reason to listen to, take advice from, or trust this country in any way. Trump got them into this mess, and they could see he’s not getting them out of it any time soon. So they came to Santa Marta, Colombia looking for a way out of the petroleum era. The phasing out of fossil fuels was something most of them had put off for too long, but further procrastination was clearly not an option. Action was required. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz has been a global wakeup call. It’s become an existential crisis for many of these nations, and a clarifying moment for the rest. Their long dependence on foreign energy sources has suddenly been exposed as a national weakness, and now they’re scrambling to keep their lights on and their populations fed. They were in Sa...

    Panic is sometimes unavoidable, but it’s almost never useful. Which is why we all have to chill about the gerrymander problem and appreciate the position in which we continue to sit. From all indications, the coming midterms will be a wave election, where we can expect people to be voting Democratic in overwhelming numbers. And in a wave election, all bets are off. No district will be safe for Republicans, no matter how cynically it’s been molested by gerrymander. I wasn’t planning to talk about the current orgy of redistricting now taking place in the wake of the odious Callais decision, but then I encountered, in the New York Times, a succession of above-the-fold articles that spiked my blood pressure. Once again, the Times has fallen back on the tired old Democrats-in-disarray model for its framing, the better to scare the clicks out of their readers. Here is one of the headlines, and they’re all in the same vein: Democrats Searc...

  I’m taking this week off, and why not? It’s not like there’s anything happening, like a war or a SCOTUS atrocity or something. Anyway, here’s a repeat from almost exactly a year ago, which foreshadowed just about everything we’re seeing today. What was then a trickle of defectors from MAGA-world is now a deluge of people getting FAFO’d, some surely to death. They’re learning the hard way that they’ve been hornswoggled. Actually, it’s not clear that they’re learning anything, but the Trump regime is reaping the whirlwind, and his idiot supporters are directly in its path. Unfortunately, so are the rest of us.   For nearly eight years, I have regularly ridden my bicycle past a house that has faithfully flown a Trump flag, right underneath Old Glory, without interruption in all that time. The flag has been refreshed over the years — from the original MAGA slogan, to “Keep America Great,” to “Trump 2024”— but the political commitment, and the willingness ...

  T he Ukrainian P-1 Sun interceptor is a small drone that hunts bigger drones. It seeks and destroys the Shahed drones currently being used to such devastating effect by Russia against Ukraine, and by Iran against the entire Middle East region. Shooting one down is no small thing. Just a month ago, the conventional wisdom was that the only way to neutralize a $50,000 Shahed was with a $3 million Patriot missile, which the U.S. has been using up at a rate that has Putin and Xi cackling with glee. Now Ukraine has turned that math on its head. The P-1 Sun can be mass-produced for $1,000 apiece. It’s built from 3-D printed parts and off-the-shelf components. It’s modular, so you can swap out the camera, battery, radio module, and explosive payload, using tools from Home Depot. Every part except the camera is made in Ukraine, and they’re working hard to develop their own camera. They can build up to 50,000 P-1s per month. The P-1 is impressive on a lot of levels...

  Back in the days when there was still a filter, sort of, on Trump’s brain, Nancy Pelosi tried to explain his inexplicable behavior on the world stage, famously concluding that “All roads lead to Putin.” Nothing has changed. The same questions about Trump and Putin that we’ve had since 2015 remain unresolved, which doesn’t mean they haven’t been answered. They have indeed been answered, and in painstaking detail. It’s just that they’ve been neither acknowledged in the legacy media, nor pursued by law enforcement. Trump is, has been, and always will be doing Putin’s bidding. It’s hard to think of any move made by Trump and his toadies that hasn’t in some way been helpful to Putin and harmful to us. Almost as if Putin planned it that way. The list of these betrayals is endless, and most of us know the obvious ones, though it will take decades to unravel the less obvious ones. Still, everything Trump has done fits the basic pattern: bad for us, good for Putin....