On the same day that two young lives were snuffed out while in church, praying, and another 17 people were wounded, some seriously, Trump decides that now would be a good time to brag about all of the money what he's hauled in since taking office for a second time:

Let's hope this portends things to come...

OCU

There's no way foreign adversaries or terrorists or drug cartels can ever get to us in this golden age of America.

#6 | Posted by horstngraben at 2025-08-22 02:22 PM

No, all they have to do is get invited to Mar-a-Lago and just sit around listening to Trump telling his guests all sorts of confidential, if not top secret, information. Or they could simply ask where the bathrooms were...

OCU

It appears that the Right is also attacking Cracker Barrel for changes made to their famous peg-board game, which many people play while they're waiting for their orders to arrive (FWIW, I've been able to solve the game, getting to where only one peg was left on the board):

Can't they work in a factory? Manufacturing is coming back to the US.

#8 | Posted by madbomber at 2025-08-20 02:57 PM

Or picking crops and processing chickens, after all of the immigrants have been deported.

OCU

I thought Trump's meeting with Putin was supposed to be about trying to find a way of ending the war in Ukraine, but now we've learned that they talked about how elections are held in the United States and how the 2020 election was probably stolen from Trump. What a waste of time and resources. And now we have Trump bragging on Truth Social about how at no time in history has so many European leaders will have been in the White House at one time, as if it's something to be proud of. After all, he's the one who's created the emergency which has led to this meeting in the first place, and now he's making it sound like he's accomplished some great diplomatic feat.

OCU

About a million, probably more like two or three million by now, Russians "remembered" they are Jewish and emigrated to Israel, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

#3 | Posted by snoofy at 2025-08-14 04:12 PM

One of the guys I worked with, he and his family were Jewish and they immigrated to the US from Leningrad when he was 17-years old. Now they could have gone directly to Israel, with new passports in hand, if they had wanted to, but an uncle had immigrated to the US a few years earlier and they wanted to join him, however, that meant that they had to wait something like seven-months in a fleabag hotel in Stockholm waiting for the US government to process their application for asylum.

I first met Mike (his actual name was Mikhail) years after he had graduated from engineering school and was working for our company out here in SoCal (for a short period of time, he actually worked for me). Anyway, he was quite proud of the fact that he'd learned to speak English without any trace of a Russian accent (I've met several Russians who've managed to accomplish this, which was always a bit scary). The problem was that his family, when they came to the US, settled in New Jersey, and so when Mike was honing his English skills, he was also acquiring a New Jersey accent, which we always kidded him about.

OCU

What does the constitution say about this?

Article 1, Section 9

"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."

#10 | Posted by truthhurts at 2025-08-12 06:18 PM

This actually applies to states taxing goods moving between states. It does not apply to goods moving out of the country. That being said, I do believe that it's shortsighted to impose taxes on exports. Imports are bad enough, but taxing exports just makes American goods more expensive from the get go.

OCU

This is sort of like a reverse tariff, where the government is taxing exports as well as imports.

OCU

We're losing our heroes...

I met Buzz Aldrin at LAX once waiting for our luggage. Didn't get a chance for an autograph so a handshake had to do.

And then in 2015, I attended a conference where Gene Cernan was one of the keynote speakers (I was also one, but on a different day and we didn't get to actually meet face-to-face).

That being said, I was at another conference where again I was one of the keynote speakers along with Homer Hickam, the author of the book 'Rocket Boys', which was later made into the movie 'October Sky'. Hickem, while he was never an astronaut, worked worked for NASA, training Shuttle crews for several missions including the one that repaired the Hubble Telescope, and when he retired from NASA in 1998, he was the payload training manager for the International Space Station. He was speaking at an engineering conference and I had the opportunity to sit next to him at the speaker's banquet the evening before. After the dinner, they previewed the movie 'October Sky' which was open to all the attendees and their families.

And going way back, while in college, Dr. Wernher von Braun came and gave a lecture. And while I didn't get to talk with him much, we did get to shake hands at a meet-n-greet they held afterwards (what struck me was that he was a lot shorter than what he looked in the movies).

OCU

This is just like RFK Jr suggesting that African Americans do not need to worry as much about being vaccinated against diseases since they are hardier and have a stronger immune system.

Sixty years ago today, Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on a small wooden desk which he had brought to the White House explicitly for this ceremony.

The historical significance was that this desk had been once used by Supreme Court Justice Robert C. Grier (1846-1870). Johnson chose to use this desk as a way sending a message and of trying to finally set right an historical wrong. Associate-Justice Grier was one of the Justices who wrote a concurring opinion in the now infamous Dred Scott case where the court ruled that Scott, a Black African slave, could not bring suit in court because he was not only a non-citizen, he was not, under the terms of the Constitution, even a 'person', but was rather, property. It took the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 and 14th Amendment in 1868 to finally overturn the Dred Scott decision.

The desk is now on display at the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, TX.

Thank God this desk is at the Johnson Library and NOT the Smithsonian. With the current attempt by Trump to remove all historical references to events which do not put America in it's best light, it might have soon been disappeared.

OCU

Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics will have no real impact on the labor numbers which are released the first Friday of every month. The actual data is compiled by a large group of analysts and clerks who work based on a long and well designed protocol and in strict secrecy. In fact, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics only sees the numbers the afternoon prior to them being released to the public, and they have have no opportunity nor any authority to make changes. All they can do is rubber stamp the numbers and arrange for them to be released the next morning.

OCU

Yes same thing happened under Biden, crickets from the crew now crowing. But it always said wait for the revisions.

You can never believe government statistics, it's not about because its good or bad, it's that the revisions are atrocious. So why would you even believe the revisions.

Good luck America you can't even count the number of people working correctly.

#13 | Posted by oneironaut at 2025-08-02 03:16 PM

The process where as the numbers for the past couple of months being adjusted after better data has been collected and incorporated into the overall picture has been going on for years, long before the current commissioner of labor statistics has been in that job. In fact, i goes back decades, to at least the 50's, covering both Democratic and Republicans administrations.

OCU

And what's Trump going to do next month, when they adjust the July numbers down, stop issuing the jobs report altogether? And what happens when the tariffs start to really impact the inflation numbers, stop reporting them as well?

OCU

It appears that from Trump and Stephen Miller's point of view, if a job was given to anyone other than a white male, then it was obviously a DEI hire. Racism to them is giving any sort of consideration whatsoever to anyone who's not white and gender discrimination is giving consideration to a female. And if it's a non-white female, they totally lose their minds.

OCU

Revolution? Like the rabid leftist lunatic who set a newly-elected Republican councilman on fire?

#1 | Posted by lfthndthrds at 2025-07-31 11:09 AM

News reports have stated that it was a personal issue and not political which led to the attack. Nowhere have I read where they've identified the attacker's political leaning, only that they knew each other personally and that this came about as the result of something related to neither the victim being on the city council nor his political party affiliation.

OCU

And, fwiw, I found the folk of The Netherlands to be an awesome people. So happy. Even when I was taken into the countryside by my Dutch business associates.

Everybody seemed to be so happy.

#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-07-24 12:44 AM

Yes, and of all of the European countries that I've visited (at least 15), The Netherlands is the most cosmopolitan in that they seem to be equality welcome to anyone from anywhere (Switzerland is a close second). One indication of that is that virtually everyone in the country is fluent in several languages. We once had a company instructor from Holland who had to teach a class for our engineering software to a group of customers from various European countries. There were about eight engineers in the class and between them, there wasn't a single common language, so he proceeded to teach the week-long class in four different languages, simultaneously, none of which were Dutch.

OCU

Trump continues to hollow-out what were once seen as world-class, science-based government agencies.

OCU

Trump is really losing it in terms of what he thinks is appropriate to post this on his Truth Social account.

I'm sure if someone in Congress or a Governor posted something like this only it was he who was being shown arrested by the FBI and then sitting in jail, he would be demanding an investigation and perhaps a lawsuit.

OCU

It seem ironic that we have a Transportation secretary who has a phobia about riding in subways.

OCU

So much for looking out for our military and their families...

OCU