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 ...