Sooner or later, this America of ours will either raise tax rates to post WWII levels, and tax billionaires massively, or we will have to declare bankruptcy, as we owe more than we can or will pay with current taxes in place.

No doubt some horrendous murderers in the bunch, but all in all, I agree with what Newsom did. Broken children grow up to be broken, dangerous adults, and in the end, our culture bears have the blame for such crimes.
Older I get, the more I understand the power of love and the commonality of our humanity.

I would rather have NATO protecting my back rather than Trump, truth be told. He has divided this country internally, he has done what he could to weaken our alliances, to the point of absurdity as with hating on Canada and Mexico and Greenland.

Going to be like having Strom Thurman and Roy Cohn in the White House, and with Putin in the shadows at Trump's shoulder.

I am in absolute awe of those who ran for office in this last election, for the Democratic, democratic, side. Lots of hard work, lots of in your face hate...but in the end, at least this time, hope prevailed over racial and misogyny.

And here I want to praise our American media, both national and local. This last election was very antiTrump because the people were shown just how stupid his policies and hiring policies are. In Russia, they murdered the independent media so that the people were fed propaganda night and day.
Of course, one doesn't include Fox Propaganda News in that praise.
I think Trump will go after the media with everything he has, including getting out the more violent of MAGA, to shut down the truth tellers.

At the top of the list of "what happened" things, I would put the cowardice of most of today's Congressional Republican Party members who didn't represent the people of their state, they just didn't want to anger Trump and thus lose their jobs..
Not sure what I would have done in such a situation, but at this point, to be a Republican Party member in Congress and nominally supporting Trump is to be a traitor to the Constitution. They know it, and we know it.
I still think he will resign, but even if he does, there is no way the Republican Party recovers until after the 2028 elections.

Old man desperate to build his legacy monuments so for all time the country, the world, can remember him as it remembers FDR and JfK and I am sure, President Obama.
The more the old man in the White House, the same age as me, acts out, he insures that future history will remember him as it remembers the really bad leaders of nations. He is the Strom Thurman of Presidents, and by naming Miller to be his Chief of Staff, Trump is signaling that that is really who he is.

If I were the newly elected Governor of California I would be taking a moment to try and get my bearings...getting and keeping the people unified is going to be tough, and the Republican Party is going to be obstructionistic all the way.

What kind of America are we living in, where a bully trillionaire cannot get his way, by bribing the powerful? I mean, are people really taking this democracy thing seriously? That could mean change and safety for the poor and it certainly would mean higher taxes for the oligarchy.
Maybe forget Mars, except for robotic work, maybe stop throwing billions at Musk and instead..., Oh, I know, start paying down the national debt. We must tax the billionaires and take back the "big beautiful bill" as we are facing bankruptcy as a nation.

Still, if JD stays as vice President, and is in conflict with Trump, there is no way that Trump could trust him to deliver the needed pardons, so no way Trump would be able to resign in the hopes of doing what Nixon did, and leave without law enforcement chasing him down.

War is the enemy, not each other. We sent millions of young men from America to fight and kill or die for...the right of a poor country to end the domination of a foreign power, in
Vietnam's case it was the French Catholic minority in the South who ran things for the rich. Ho and the North were doing what George Washington did, to push out the British King.

Billions for Mars, less and less to feed and cloth and educate and heal Americans. Trump lied through his teeth when he said no more forever wars, when he said he knew what he was doing. Mars is a boondoggle, pure and simple, but in the meantime we are not working on the deadly truth that human caused global warming is coming for us all.

Most people don't join the American military in order to be, in effect, Al Capone's enforcers.

Sure, a guy who had the money to tell people to build things... he is who we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with Hegseth as life and death decisions are made. If we put thousands of Marines in harm's way we may be once again in a war where we win every battle, but lose the war.
Netanyahu was the guy who wanted the war, let him pursue it. Our involvement in the Iran war is a clear war crime.

One huge lesson here, to hire a person for the job of President they must have exhibited talent in some areas, and above all, devotion to the people rather than to themselves. No more hiring corporate kings of boardrooms who rule over personal kingdoms and make sure that the profit goes to them and their gang. Trump, like Vivek Ramaswamy , brings/brought nothing to the job, no experience, no plan, nothing but...wait a minute, I will think of one thing positive that Vivek Ramaswamy offers.
Elvis now, on the other hand, there are those who say there was a king, and that a young Elvis.

The Supreme Court said that money is speech and corporations are people and Delaware is looking at certifying that a company of AI software can be declared independent and so no human can be sued it that AI goes off the rails.
At least I think that is how the courts are ruling, have ruled.
Rich Ai is far more important than poor citizens in this Trumpified world.

So massive is the profit taking one has to wonder if Iran is our "Oceania", the perpetual war of "1984" that kept the fascists in power.
Should be a windfall profits tax on what is going on, billions going from American pockets to big oil investors.

The worst President in American history doing what he can to weaken our resolve, our military, and certainly our unity. And along the way he seems to be doing things as if Putin were at his shoulder advising him. Maybe the deal is Trump gets to run away to Moscow the way a former Ukrainian President, Yanukovych did after the Ukrainian people arrested him.
War, either we are killing each other in massive numbers or we are in a "Cold War" working like hell to prepare for the next "hot war".
Imagine putting your life on the line in a battle with Trump as Commander in Chief and Hegseth as his guy with the strategy.

You know all those tv cop shows where they follow a person or a car using all the cameras in a house, or in a neighborhood? Yeah, one figures it is just another door for hackers to knock on.

Probably the design of some of the underwater drones the Chinese have, capable of being armed with tactical nukes, with fire and forget.
I suspect that surface Navy ships are obsolete, when it comes to protecting the homeland.
We humans are stupidly great at designing machines whose only purpose is to kill.

Well, letting Russians participate tells the world two things..that wars of aggression are fine and dandy no matter how many people get murdered, and it would tell the world that fascism is no longer out of fashion.
Good for those nations who refused to bend a knee.
Good for Ed Miliband.

As the Soviet Union became bankrupted by insane foreign wars, its oligarchs started looting everything in sight, until finally all that was left was Russia, the super rich, and the dictator.
Here, as our American Empire falls, the same exact thing is happening. Change cannot come about unless there is a crisis, so the Trump gang is spending us into the poorhouse, and when the economy really tanks, the oligarchy loots everything that isn't nailed down. They do that, did that, with massive unneeded tax cuts for them's that got.
I cringe when I look at the changes, from the destruction of our once "light in the darkness" public colleges, to making our military, well, one would expect them to adopt brown shirts at some point.
Happens to most countries in late stage capitalism...great wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer greedy hands, and the economic pyramid becomes weird. At the end the Russians couldn't pay the power bills for their foreign bases...

Truth be told, we Americans were fantastically fortunate to have a Black Man, MLK Jr., to lead a peaceful civil disobedience change in America. We could have been Israel, with apartheid being the lot of those in the South who had Black Skin.
As someone nearly the same age as Trump, even though I am a lifelong Democrat, I cringe when I watch Trump these days. Yes, it is simply too difficult for some people, some organizations to take the keys away...
But amidst the Trump blather is a truth, that maybe 30% of his base is wildly racist, and the coded language Trump uses day in and day out are to get hate out to the ballot box.
Many of us were surprised in the last election when they turned out to be the majority of voters...America, in some ways, hasn't changed from its founding when slavery was a way of life, women were second class citizens, and hate and violence were perfectly fine to steal land and kill those living on that land.

One wonders if Crypto will one day be examined and be determined to be such a Ponzi scheme. Certainly it is an enemy of the dollar.