worst ever

I was hoping that Trump would join the three other US presidents who died on July 4. Alas. The three are John Adams (1826), Thomas Jefferson (1826), and James Monroe (1831), all among this country's "Founding Fathers." Trump doesn't quite (ahem) compare to those three, no matter how many lies they tell about him, but it still would have made the 4th even better than it was.

You know why Donald Trump will almost certainly go down as one of the worst presidential mistakes in United States history?

His supporters.

Forget who they voted for. It is what it is. The issue isn’t just that they voted for him — it’s that they don’t hold him accountable for anything. They just move the goalposts, make excuses, and believe whatever drivel he sells them.

Back in 2016, key pillars of his campaign included having Mexico pay for a border wall, a “great” plan for healthcare, passing congressional term limits, and “very easily” reducing the national deficit and eliminating the national debt.

Yet he did absolutely none of that.

Mexico didn’t pay a single penny for the roughly 52 miles of new wall he built (which equates to barely over 10 miles a year). He never had a plan for healthcare and still doesn’t. He hasn’t mentioned term limits for members of Congress since his 2016 campaign. And he not only ballooned deficits — he added trillions to the national debt.

They don’t care. They’ll make excuses.

Additionally, he called the monthly jobs reports “fake” up until he was sworn into office. He then proceeded to take credit for every single one of them, including the one released less than two weeks after he took office, even though they came from the same sources, were calculated the same way, and reflected essentially the same economic growth he previously called “terrible” under Obama.

They don’t care. They’ll make excuses.

He’s literally on video saying he wouldn’t have time to play golf because he would be working so much. Except, of course, records show that he has played more golf during his first five years than Obama did in eight — even though Trump frequently attacked the former president for playing golf.

They don’t care. They’ll make excuses.

Even the 2024 election: after spending much of Election Day pushing lies and conspiracies about “mass voter fraud,” those comments magically vanished once results started moving in his direction and it became a very real possibility he was going to win.

Amazing how that works, isn’t it?

There he is — the person these folks wanted in charge of the country — pushing one conspiracy after another, laying the foundation to deny election results if he were to lose, then suddenly stopping (and seemingly no longer caring about the “voter fraud” he claimed was happening) once it looked like he was likely to win.

Which, of course, is presented as evidence proving that when Trump wins it’s “fair,” but anytime he loses, he claims it was “stolen and rigged.”

They don’t care. They’ll make excuses.

Now there’s his current presidency, where he promised to lower prices on Day 1, end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, lower the national debt (again), pass healthcare legislation (again), and be the one person who wouldn’t get us into a war with Iran — the opposite of every single one of those things has happened.

Prices continue to rise, as inflation has hit three-year highs and wasn't any better before his war than when he took office. The war in Ukraine is worse today than it was when he was elected. The national debt is growing at a record pace. He's still never produced a comprehensive healthcare package, just legislation that stripped it away from millions of Americans. And he started the war with Iran he spent 10+ years saying he was the one person who never would.

But they don’t give a damn. They just make excuses.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of his supporters don’t hold him accountable for anything is why he’s able to lie, cheat, and get away with whatever he wants. And that’s exactly why I believe he will be remembered in U.S. history as one of the worst presidents this country has ever had — twice.

Not just because he's absolutely awful, but because MAGA never holds him accountable for anything. They just buy his bullshit and make more excuses for him.

Allen Clifton

Don't Stop Believin'

An online friend, Joshua Zachariah Ellis, wrote this short one below. Perhaps "The Star-Spangled Banner" should be retired. I never have been too comfortable with bombs bursting in air, not to mention the land of the free and home of the brave, which now seems like a cruel joke. Both of those things - freedom and bravery - seem to be in shorter and shorter supply these days, especially considering our current Congress. Bravery? LOL.

And the other verses, besides the first verse that everyone knows, are in fairly Old English and are a bit difficult to decipher. And then we have the 3rd verse which seems to praise slavery, and I think we could use an update. Just because something "used to be" doesn't mean it should always "be."

I feel like this might be the right moment to once again float my absolutely serious idea that "The Star-Spangled Banner", the national anthem of the United States of America for almost a century, should immediately be replaced by "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey.

You think I'm joking? I'm not joking. It's the most American song of all time - a small-town girl and a city boy meet on a train going anywhere and fall in love. OK so there's not actually such a place as south Detroit - that dismissal of actual reality for what sounds good is American as hell too.

And, let's be honest, it'd weed out a lot of potential awful singers at baseball games too. You think that one high note near the end of "Banner" is rough? Imagine that shmuck kid from your local high school's glee club tryna keep up with Steve Perry on that "streetlight peopu-oh-uh-WUUUUUUUUHHHHHLLLLL".

And let's face it, which one would fill you with more joy to sing along to badly with your hand over your heart at the stadium? Which song makes you prouder to be a god damned American?

So let's make a change, America. Because in these fraught and uncertain times, now more than ever, as a people, as a nation... don't we need, more than anything, to hold on to that feeling?

Happy 4th

Well, one thing is damn certain. We are not going to Washington, D.C. for the "State Fair." Anyone who goes outside in that heat has got to be a little off in the head. If you ain't, you will be after a few hours in that heat. Trump is doing his best to fuck up this country, but he will not be successful, at least not completely successful. We didn't come this far to give up our country to a demented narcissist who continually shits his pants and insults anyone who doesn't agree 100% with him. Not gonna happen. I'm not sure if Oliver Kornetzke wrote this or Jim Fly did. Doesn't really matter.

Oliver Kornetzke tells it like it really is, "250 years. Two hundred and fifty fucking years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.

Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.

Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single fucking thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.

Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.

We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes and then express genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where a reality television star becomes president and a school district cuts its art program in the same fiscal year. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sport team and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.

We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to.

We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We sent young men to die in wars that made defense contractors rich and called it freedom and put a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of the car and called that support. We made the soldier and the police officer into sacred untouchable symbols of national identity and then cut their benefits, denied their PTSD claims, let them die waiting for VA appointments, and sent them back for third and fourth tours because it was cheaper than taking care of them when they came home.

We worshipped the uniform and neglected the human inside it because the uniform is a symbol and symbols are cheaper than healthcare and housing and the therapy that would actually help.

We built bases in a hundred and fifty countries and could not build enough affordable housing in fifty states. We funded a military budget that could have ended homelessness and medical debt and student debt several times over and we did it with bipartisan enthusiasm and called the people who questioned it unserious.

We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next.

Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.

250 years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating.

And the most perfectly, catastrophically, irreducibly American thing about all of it is that anyone pointing at this image and asking what it means will be called unpatriotic by people watching it on a television they bought on credit they cannot afford to pay back, rooting for a sport they cannot explain, in a country they cannot describe, celebrating a birthday they cannot contextualize, for a nation that has spent two and a half centuries confusing the noise it makes with the work it never did, all while claiming to be the greatest country on Earth.

Happy Birthday America! You have never looked more like yourself!"

-Jim Fly

Bernie Sanders

84-yr-old Bernie Sanders is still at it. Still pushing for workers, improved and universal healthcare, equality, and so much more. I hope we will live to see the United States adopt more of Bernie's platform, once we finally shed the stench that is Donald Trump and his crew of sycophantic wrecking balls.

We are on the brink of the political revolution we have been demanding.

It has given me hope that all across the country people understand that, given the dangerous and unprecedented moment in which we live, we need to rethink, rebuild and fundamentally reform the Democratic Party.

We need a party that is not just in opposition to Trump and his disastrous policies. We need a party that is prepared to take on the greed and ideology of the Oligarchs who now control the economic and political life of our nation, and create an economy and government that works for all and not just the few.

We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy and new ideas. We need a Democratic Party that is truly a grassroots party, where decisions are made from the bottom up, not from the top down. We need a Democratic Party which becomes the political home of the working people and young people of this country, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native-American ... all Americans.

And here is the good news. The agenda that we are fighting for is the agenda that the American people want. The vast majority of Americans understand that:

- We must pass Medicare for All because healthcare is a human right, not a privilege.

- We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage so that no worker lives in poverty.

- We must make it easier for workers to join unions.

- We must end Citizens United and reform our corrupt campaign finance system.

- We must demand that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes.

- We must put a stop to endless wars and a bloated military budget.

- We must build millions of units of low income and affordable housing.

- We must address the existential threat of climate change.

- We must make AI work for all of us, not just billionaire Big Tech owners.

So what do we do now?

Short-term, we build on our extraordinary successes by doing everything possible to win the August Democratic U.S. Senate primaries in Michigan and Minnesota for Abdul and Peggy and the remaining primaries that our progressive congressional and down-ballot candidates face.

And then, after the primaries end, we build the strongest grassroots political movement this country has ever seen for a general election. Let me be very clear. At a time when the wealthiest people in this country will spend billions to elect right-wing Republican candidates the only way we win is to knock on millions of doors as we reach out to the working class of our country, to the young and disaffected.

And finally, in January 2027, after gaining control over the U.S. House and U.S. Senate we begin the process of transforming our country.

Let's get it done.

Borowitz

Andy Borowitz seems to be taking a detour, but I like it.

When in the course of human events a tyrant imperils a nation, it is the duty of those who cherish democracy to remove him from power.

We the People refuse to tolerate a despot who threatens our country and the world.

--He has engaged in corrupt schemes to profit from his office, plunder the Treasury, and steal from the taxpayers.

--He has desecrated the People’s House and the nation’s capital.

--He has perverted the Department of Justice to take revenge on his perceived enemies.

--He has vandalized the federal government, replacing experienced professionals with incompetent sycophants.

--He has deployed a domestic army of masked thugs to terrorize, torture, and kill.

--He has shredded aid for those most in need, at home and abroad, spreading hunger, sickness, and death.

--He has betrayed the nation’s allies and collaborated with its foes.

--And he has committed war crimes, ordering unprovoked attacks on foreign countries, targeting civilians, and massacring children.

We reject him and his enablers.

They must be held accountable and brought to justice.

And such tyranny must never contaminate this nation again.

Today we vow to set the United States on a new course.

To eliminate racism, sexism, and inequality.

To embrace honesty, empathy, and kindness.

To form a more perfect Union.

If you agree with this Declaration, please consider sharing.

The Borowitz Report

Fox & Friends

Hahahahaha! Even Fox is getting tired of lying for Trump! Check out this story on Alternet.

'Fox & Friends' ditch Trump’s fair after days of 'bare lawns and thin crowds'

written by David Badash - July 1, 2026

One of President Donald Trump’s favorite shows, “Fox & Friends,” is pulling up stakes after just days of promoting his Great American State Fair, a 16-day event to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday.

According to The Daily Beast, the conservative morning TV show “is back in the studio” after two days, which “it spent talking up over live shots of empty grass.”

One of President Donald Trump’s favorite shows, “Fox & Friends,” is pulling up stakes after just days of promoting his Great American State Fair, a 16-day event to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday.

According to The Daily Beast, the conservative morning TV show “is back in the studio” after two days, which “it spent talking up over live shots of empty grass.”

Wednesday morning, the “Fox & Friends” studio was packed with “an audience of first responders, veterans, and their families” as the hosts returned to the indoor set, The Daily Beast noted.

“We’ve been away for 48 hours. They’ve been waiting for us to return. We appreciate it,” co-host Brian Kilmeade declared.

Trump had claimed that 45,000 people turned out for his kickoff speech, but Fox News’ cameras “blew apart the president’s boasts.”

As did photographs from Reuters, The Daily Beast reported, with them “showing nowhere near the numbers the president had touted.”

“The network’s live shots from the Mall repeatedly framed wide stretches of empty grass behind its anchors, The Daily Beast added. “On other mornings, the walkways and booths behind the set sat all but empty. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, 28, turned up on the show Monday to gush about the fair with a bare lawn.”

On Tuesday, USA Today opinion columnist Rex Huppke wrote, “I love President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. I love its emptiness. It’s expensive food. Its ability to confound Trump-friendly media outlets that keep pretending it’s going great.”

“I love seeing Fox News broadcasting from the fair, its hosts claiming the place is filled with excited patriots while the scenes behind them show a vast expanse of untrod-upon grass with an occasional few humans milling along the fringes.”

Huppke said it was “like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends. It’s a daily humiliation for a wildly unpopular president who coopted what should be a unifying national celebration and turned it into repellent schlock.”

Original.

told ya

Allen Clifton continues to write compelling columns, and now has a Substack too. If everyone going to end up on Substack? Could a billionaire sweep in and BUY Substack and fire everyone?

I get so sick and tired of seeing polls saying that Americans have soured on Donald Trump’s handling of the economy.

Let me say this with as much professionalism as I can possibly present right now: F*ck off.

Oh, I’m sorry — you folks who voted for him are “disappointed” that nearly everything we all told you would happen is happening?

You know, like how he had no real economic plan to lower prices, how his tariffs would lead to higher prices and that American consumers would pay them, and how his immigration propaganda wasn’t “just about the criminals,” but that he was largely going to target any immigrant he felt he could expel from this country — even those showing up to hearings, as they were required to, regarding their immigration status.

Every time this orange moron gets elected and reality inevitably proves what an incompetent pile of garbage we all told everyone who voted for him he was, polls come out with people saying they’re “disappointed” that he’s exactly what we all told anyone foolish enough to vote for him he was.

Trump’s biggest claim to fame during his first administration was taking credit for the economy Obama left him. Now, when he inherited a strong — but more fragile — economic environment and was no longer surrounded by any competent adults, it took him less than a year to turn it into a huge mess and some of the weakest economic numbers we've had in years.

Which is exactly what we told everyone who voted for him he would do.

Why anyone ever believed that a guy who’s mostly known as a businessman for constant failures, multiple bankruptcies, and being a complete slimeball when it came to paying people who did work for him was ever somehow a “genius” regarding complicated economic issues is something future generations will spend countless hours studying.

Hell, he even got us involved in the war with Iran that he spent more than ten years promising he would never start — while claiming his opponents, including his predecessor, would. A war that's led to inflation hitting three-year highs and Americans collectively paying hundreds of billions of dollars more for basically everything due to higher fuel costs.

If you voted for Trump and regret it, that’s fine. I’ll never deny anyone a second chance.

That said, what I won’t do is act like we should accept the fact that those folks ignored everything we said and pretend this is some sort of complete surprise.

That’s like claiming you were shocked by a surprise party we all told you the time and location of.

If you are someone who chose to be willfully ignorant by not listening to others — or denying facts you didn’t like — then you need to own up to that.

I can always forgive someone who’s realized a mistake. What I will not do, however, is allow someone to regret something but act as if they never saw it coming.

Because at the root of why we’re dealing with this orange imbecile for a second time is the fact that people make these mistakes, regret them, are never forced to reconcile what went wrong in the first place (they ignored people, facts, and truths they didn’t like), so they just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t need someone to tell me that I was right, but I do need them to realize why they were so damn wrong.

Allen Clifton on Facebook