Trump did it!

I never did buy the "vandals!" bullshit that Trump was peddling to explain why the Lincoln Reflecting Pool looked like shit. What do you expect with a "no-bid" contract, especially to Trump's "friends?" That is not how the government should be conducting business. Do you think Trump will ever apologize and admit he/they fucked up? Ha! Never. It's not in Trump's DNA to EVER admit a mistake of any kind. Thank you Roy Cohn.

Found this story at "Occupy Democrats."

BREAKING: OMG LOL! IT WAS TRUMP WHO RUINED THE POOL ALL ALONG! New photographs from the drained Reflection Pool show no gashes but instead show TIRE TRACKS from when Trump took a vanity drive in 10-ton vehicles across it!

No wonder he’s so defensive about it…

For over a month, Trump and his minions have been pushing outrageous conspiracy theories about imaginary antifa vandals who have been cutting “350-foot gashes” in the Reflecting Pool, ruining the $14 million paint job that was rushed and done poorly.

Now that the pool has been drained once again, we can see that the only damage to the bottom of the pool is from when Trump had his motorcade drive over it, for some inexplicable reason.

It turns out there is a reason we use asphalt on roads and don’t just paint the ground blue.

“As a retired tile installer of 44 years, I was mortified to see President Donald Trump in his 15,000- to 20,000-pound armored SUV, along with a dozen other security vehicles, being driven across the just-resurfaced Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to ‘inspect it.’”

“It is never okay to drive a motor vehicle over a hydrostatic coating designed to hold water. The weight and pressure on the armored vehicles’ tires will absolutely shear and delaminate the newly recoated surface!” writes Brian Walkowiak in a letter to the Tampa Bay Times.

Literally anybody with half a brain could have figured that out…but it appears the President lacks even that, and all of his sycophantic yes-men are too terrified to tell him no.

He should be forced to pay back every cent of the cost to fix this pool from his own personal account…and then have the rest of it seized for being the proceeds of a criminal enterprise.

What a disgrace!

more on Lindsey

Lindsey Graham and Joe Biden used to be good friends, until Lindsey sold his soul to Donald Trump. I am reminded of a time not so long ago, prior to Trump's pestilential appearance in politics. A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say: "If you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, you've got a problem. He's the nicest person I've ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created." Trump certainly put an end to all that.

The Great Betrayal

There is an old saying that we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. I’ve never believed death is some sort of celestial pardon. It doesn’t erase a lifetime of decisions. It doesn’t absolve betrayal. If we celebrate people after they’re gone because they spent their lives lifting humanity, then we owe history the same honesty when someone spent their public life diminishing it. Death deserves dignity. Legacies deserve scrutiny.

Lindsey Graham died suddenly after suffering an apparent cardiac emergency at his Capitol Hill home. Emergency responders attempted to revive him before transporting him to George Washington University Hospital, where he later died. His office described it simply as a brief and sudden illness. That is where the medical story ends. The political story ended years ago.

For me, Lindsey Graham didn’t die on a Saturday night in Washington. The Lindsey Graham I once respected disappeared the day he surrendered his conscience to Donald Trump.

I remember the senator who stood beside John McCain and spoke of honor, alliances, constitutional responsibility, and moral leadership. We often disagreed politically, but I never questioned that he believed what he was saying. Somewhere along the way that man vanished. In his place emerged someone willing to explain away almost anything if it meant remaining close to power. I didn’t watch a politician evolve. I watched a man slowly negotiate away pieces of his character until there was almost nothing recognizable left.

That is the tragedy I see. Not simply that Lindsey Graham died, but that he had already abandoned the very qualities that once made him worthy of respect. He traded independence for obedience, integrity for influence, and conviction for proximity to a president he himself once warned Americans about. When I think about Lindsey Graham’s legacy, I don’t think of the man who served beside John McCain. I think of the man who chose to spend the final chapter of his career defending nearly every excess, every assault on democratic norms, every attack on truth, and every excuse offered on behalf of Donald Trump.

I have never believed democracy dies only because of men like Trump. Democracy dies because intelligent people who know better decide that preserving their own political future matters more than preserving the institutions they swore to defend. Trump didn’t create this movement alone. He required willing participants. Lindsey Graham became one of the most indispensable among them.

His transformation always struck me as one of the great political collapses of our time. This wasn’t someone who lacked the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It was someone who understood the difference perfectly and chose expediency anyway. That is why I find it difficult to summon much sympathy for his political legacy. I don’t celebrate his death. I mourn what he willingly became.

History, I believe, will remember Lindsey Graham less for the legislation he sponsored than for the example he set. Future generations will study these years and ask how so many elected officials could watch constitutional guardrails buckle without intervening. His name will almost certainly appear somewhere in that answer. Not because he was powerless, but because he possessed influence and repeatedly chose to spend it protecting power instead of principle.

The betrayal wasn’t of Democrats. It wasn’t even of Republicans. It was a betrayal of the American people. Every oath of office carries an implied promise that the Constitution comes before any individual. Lindsey Graham had countless opportunities to honor that promise. Again and again, he chose otherwise.

Some men leave behind monuments.

Some leave behind cautionary tales.

I believe Lindsey Graham leaves behind the latter.

Michael Jochum

Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Music, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

Lindsey Graham

Surprise, surprise, surprise. The Grim Reaper took a swing at Trump and missed, hitting Lindsey Graham instead. He's in the neighborhood. Maybe he was looking for Glitch McConnell. Anyway, Lindsey died allegedly of an aortic dissection. Yes, I remember the old saying, "If you have nothing good to say about someone, don't say anything." Ok, I will leave that to another online friend, identified here only as "JZE." He has plenty to say about Lindsey.

Anyone who pretends politics isn't personal is either a fool or crooked as the day is long. Of course it's personal. You cannot deflect culpability and responsibility by pretending you're operating on some higher Platonic plane or playing an abstract intellectual team sport without real consequences.

I don't care if Lindsey Graham was a nice man or nice to his sister or a good tipper at restaurants. I don't care if he was an excellent golfer. I don't care if he correctly supported Ukraine. I care that he was a racist bigot who worked his entire life to make my country worse. He fought to keep Americans from having universal healthcare like civilized countries have. He fought to remove women's rights over their own bodies. Whether he was queer or not, as has often been rumored, would be absolutely irrelevant except that he also fought against LGBTQ rights loudly and vociferously. If he was in the closet, then he wanted other gay people in the basement under the foundation slab. Damn him for that, if nothing else.

And maybe he was just performing the will of his constituents - I suppose it's entirely possible that the people of South Carolina are really just that stupid and vicious, like junkyard dogs that someone taught to snort fentanyl and spray piss on their meat and call it BBQ sauce. Certainly he was very popular there, if the voting record is any indication. Maybe South Carolinans adored a spineless unprincipled gutless weathercock who not only failed to stand up to someone he himself knew and said was nothing but a schoolyard bully, but polished the bully's wingtips with his forked tongue and held his victims down for him.

But the entire point of a representative democracy is that we are meant to elect people who are the wisest, best version of our collective soul; people who do the right thing even when it's unpopular. By that token, Lindsey Graham was an abject failure as a politician and as a human being.

The gerontocrats who run America now are always insisting that their great value to their respective teams are their decades of experience in the business of governance. If that's really true, then the greatest gift Lindsey Graham ever gave the American people was keeling over right when his Scut Farkis overlord is at his most unhinged and unpopular. We no longer have Lady G to be our Dipshit Whisperer for us, to try to turn the old pig's senile psychotic doomposting into something his party can even pretend displays any hint of leadership or concern for anything but himself.

I can't return to America because there is no affordable healthcare in my own country: Lindsey Graham enthusiastically helped make that our reality. He lobbied against my queer friends' right to not only marry but even exist in public. And as for carrying on the foul racist legacy of his mentor, Strom Thurmond, I'll just quote the Guardian's obituary of Graham, published today:

"When Israel was accused of genocide, Graham, on a conference call in 2024 with the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, told him: 'This court is for Africa.'"

So yes, I think it's a good thing that he's dead and no, I don't believe he deserves more respect in death than he ever showed me or millions of other Americans in life. I don't care if he lived and died without ever knowing I existed: he had the arrogance to think he had the right to dictate the course of my life to me and every American, most of whom didn't live in the misbegotten place that kept electing him.

Lindsay Graham was a coward and a bigot and a destructive force and a horrible cunt and the world is a far better place already, now that he's not in it. If the rest of the mudsoaked pigs and Nazi vultures in his cohort really admired him so much, they'd follow his lead now, same as they have everywhere else.

And if there were any justice in this universe, at least Lindsay would be doing us all the favor of burning down in Hell long after the rest of us extinguished the inferno he and his bastard brethren have made of America.

Brooke Rollins

How many times are Republicans going to try to force people who are on Medicaid into the fields to pick crops? It appears our Agriculture "Secretary" Brooke Rollins is unaware of history and is ignorant to boot. Immigrants built this nation. Immigrants take the jobs that regular Americans do not want, like picking crops in blisteringly hot fields, or in a meat-packing plant, or working on a shrimp boat at sea for three weeks at a time. But time and again, Republican try to stoke anger from their voters by claiming stupidly that immigrants are taking jobs from regular Americans or immigrants are living off the government dole. And racism gets reinforced. And there is no fucking way that America will EVER get to a "100% American workforce."

Yes, our Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins sees an easy solution to how we will replace all the immigrant farm workers we are removing from the fields. Just implement "automation." And put all those able-bodied folks soaking up Medicaid to work picking crops.

So, I would like someone to ask Sec'y Rollins to describe the automation that is waiting in the wings, all ready to be hauled into place (overnight, if we want to continue to see food in our grocery stores).

While agricultural automation is advancing, it is nowhere near a plug-and-play solution for the entire industry. Row crops like corn, wheat, and soy are already highly mechanized, but specialty crops - fresh fruits, grapes, berries, and delicate vegetables - still completely rely on human hands to harvest without destroying the produce.

So, someone needs to tell us which specific, commercially viable automation technology exists today that can pick delicate fresh produce at the speed and scale required to prevent immediate supply chain collapse.

And, when it comes to the "34 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid," here are some more realistic stats:

To estimate how many non-working, "able-bodied" adults are currently on Medicaid, researchers look closely at working-age enrollees (ages 19–64) who are subject to the new federal work requirements under the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law.

According to data tracking from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and recent independent health policy studies:

There are roughly 20 million adults enrolled in the Medicaid expansion group nationwide.

The vast majority of these working-age adults already meet the standard. KFF data indicates that about 63% (or roughly 12.6 million) work at least 80 hours a month or attend school.

This leaves approximately 8.3 million adults who do not meet the 80-hour monthly work requirement.

But are they "able-bodied"?

While the phrase "able-bodied" is frequently used in political debate, medical and economic data reveal that most of the 8.3 million adults who aren't working face significant, verifiable barriers to employment.

According to a comprehensive Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess analysis using federal health expenditure data, the non-working pool breaks down as follows:

Illness or Invisible Disability (About 2.7 million): Roughly one-third of the non-working group report a physical or mental illness that severely limits their ability to work. However, they are not technically classified as "disabled" under the strict rules required to receive federal Social Security (SSI/SSDI).

Caregiving and Family Demands (About 2.5 to 3 million): A large portion consists of parents or adult relatives who do not work because they are primary caregivers for young children or disabled family members.

True Disconnection from the Workforce (About 1.6 million): Only about 1 in 5 of the total expansion population are adults who do not work, do not meet current exemption categories (like being a student or caregiver), and are considered genuinely unemployed.

The Bottom Line: Out of 20 million adults in the expansion pool, only about 1.6 million are technically "able-bodied" adults without another job, caregiving duties, school enrollment, or underlying chronic illnesses preventing employment.

But then there are other questions. For instance, how many of those live close enough to farming areas? How many have transportation? How many are suited for this kind of work? And how many, if able to work, will choose a different form of work? Also, who will train an entirely new workforce quickly?

Add to this the historical question: What about the documented failures of "Welfare-to-Work" in agriculture?

We have tried this before. When states passed aggressive anti-immigration laws in the past, they attempted exactly what Rollins is suggesting.

The Georgia & Alabama Precedents (2011): When Georgia and Alabama cracked down on immigrant farmworkers, they tried to fill the gaps with local unemployed workers and people on public assistance. It was a disaster. Farmers reported that local workers walked off the jobs after a single day due to the extreme physical demands, leaving millions of dollars in crops to rot in the fields.

The Nisei Farmers League has already publicly pointed to the total failure of the 1990s "welfare-to-work" programs when trying to introduce unskilled, non-agricultural labor into heavy field production.

Given that state-level experiments to replace farmworkers with domestic welfare recipients have universally resulted in rotted crops and massive financial losses, what specific structural changes make anyone think a national version will yield a different result?

So here's what needs to happen: Someone needs to hand Secretary Rollins a pair of boots, point her toward a California strawberry field in July, and ask her to demonstrate exactly how "easy" this transition is going to be. Until she can show us the hidden army of urban Medicaid recipients currently packing their bags for seasonal field labor, or unveil the magical, delicate-fruit-picking robots waiting in a secret USDA warehouse, she needs to stop trading agrarian fantasy for economic reality. Our food supply chain isn't a startup pitch; you can't disrupt it with buzzwords without leaving the country hungry.

***

This KFF report is titled "Tracking Implementation of the 2025 Reconciliation Law Medicaid Work Requirements":

https://www.kff.org/.../medicaid-work-requirements.../

This GoodRx article is titled "How to Meet the Medicaid Work Requirement: A State-by-State Guide":

https://www.goodrx.com/.../med.../medicaid-work-requirements

This Guardian article is titled "US agriculture secretary says Medicaid recipients can replace deported farm workers. Brooke Rollins also claimed automation can replace the immigrant labor force despite repeated evidence of failure":

https://www.theguardian.com/.../trump-agriculture...

Here is a YouTube short of Brooke Rollins stating the President's and her policy on replacing immigrant farmworkers with automation and Medicaid recipients:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WScHzMMzV28

This Center for American Progress piece is titled "Top 10 Reasons Alabama’s New Immigration Law Is a Disaster for Agriculture. Major Industry Will Rot Under Law’s Provisions":

https://www.americanprogress.org/.../top-10-reasons.../

This article from America's Voice is titled "Georgia’s 2011 Anti-Immigrant Law Left ‘Crops Rotting in the Fields.’ Trump Wants To Make It Worse ":

https://americasvoice.org/.../georgias-2011-anti.../

Here is a PBS NewHour video titled "Alabama Immigration Law Spells Trouble for Farmers":

https://www.pbs.org/.../alabama-immigration-law-spells...

Here is the Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess analysis about the non-working pool of Medicaid recipients, from The American Journal of Managed Care:

https://www.ajmc.com/.../least-healthy-medicaid-enrollees...

the heat!

Damn, it's been a little warm lately, hasn't it? If you're a Democrat, you probably agree. If you're a Republican, you probably deny it's anything to worry about. Isn't that stupid? People making decisions based on their ideology? The Republicans are going to deny us right into a catastrophe. But they will likely still make excuses, and as long as it "owns the libs" they have no problem. Stubborn stupidity on a grand scale.

There is a kind of heat that kills you even in the shade, even with all the water you can drink. Last week it parked on top of half the country. Here's how it works.

When the air gets hot enough and humid enough, sweat stops evaporating off your skin. Sweat is the only cooling system your body has. Once it fails, your core temperature just climbs until your organs quit. It's called wet bulb heat.

World Weather Attribution, the scientist consortium that does the rapid math on these events, measured last week as a once-in-200-years humid-heat extreme, and concluded a heatwave with these specific impacts would not have happened at all in a preindustrial climate.

They titled the report "Fossil Fuels Are Heating America's 250th Birthday."

The tally from one American week. Atlantic City hit 106 on the Fourth of July. New York and DC saw their hottest temperatures in over a decade. 180 million people sat under major or extreme heat risk. At least 25 deaths are being investigated as heat-related, 19 in New Jersey alone.

Hundreds of thousands lost power. Officials ordered environmental limits bypassed and emergency diesel generators fired up to stop cascading blackouts.

And the nights are the real killer. When overnight lows sit near 80, the body never resets. Chicago, 1995: that mechanism killed 739 people in five days.

We were still the lucky ones. Europe spent June counting bodies. Early estimates put the heatwave's toll between 15,000 and 25,000 dead. France alone lost roughly 2,700 people. Records fell in thirteen countries. A train derailed in Sweden because the heat warped the tracks.

Fifteen to twenty-five thousand dead is five to eight September 11ths, in one month, on one continent.

June in France ran hotter than the climate models projected. Reality is outrunning the math. This is not a heatwave anymore. This is the climate.

Now the part nobody in Washington will say out loud. The heat is coming for the food. Europe's record June scorched its corn and vegetable crops. Corn futures in Paris jumped to contract highs. Fertilizer prices are up 35 percent this year.

An estimated 363 million people are already at risk of acute hunger. And the World Bank warns the El Niño building in the Pacific could slash rice output 20 to 50 percent in affected regions. That is not doomer talk. That is the World Bank talking.

Washington's answer? Trump fired roughly 600 people from the National Weather Service. Forty percent of forecast offices were left short-staffed. Some offices go unstaffed all night now. Past day four, some forecasts now run with "little to no human intervention."

He is unplugging the smoke detectors while the house fills with smoke.

So take care of each other. Drink water before you feel thirsty. Cool the wrists and the back of the neck. Check on the people around you, especially the ones nobody else is checking on. Heat kills quietly, and mostly it kills the people no one is watching.

Exxon's own scientists predicted this warming with deadly accuracy in the 1970s. The industry buried the science and bought the politicians. Every tenth of a degree since was a boardroom decision.

A second heat dome is already building over the West. NOAA says this El Niño could become one of the strongest on record.

This summer is the warm-up act.

And it's only July.

The Other 98%

Texas Reporter

The Texas Reporter (TR) is not to be confused with the Texas Country Reporter (TCR). TCR is a weekly TV show that highlights cool places and people around the state of Texas, now run by J.B. Saucedo. TR is an online presence that describes itself as follows:

News, views, and insights from every corner of Texas and over 99 nations. Travel, national, and global coverage with a Texan perspective.

The main person behind TR is still mostly anonymous. I've read many of his articles, which are often left-leaning, but still don't know his name. Hateful radical terrorist right-wingers target people like him continually. 

Texas is far from a one-party state. Of the 17 million Texans who are registered to vote, 46% are Democrats and only 38% are Republican. Another 16% are registered as Independent. Even with figures like that, the last time a Democrat was elected to a statewide office was November of 1994. How is that possible, I hear you ask. My suspicion is that the Republicans (who control the machinery of voting) have been suppressing Democratic votes and have flat-out been cheating. Do I have proof? Fuck no. If I did, I'd be screaming it from the rooftops. Another factor is that Democrats simply do not vote in high percentages like the Republicans do. That would do it.

Maybe this year we will finally elect another Dem to statewide office, like James Talarico to the Senate to take John Cornyn's place. It's looking good so far, and there will be no pop-up sexual allegations against Talarico as there were against Graham Plattner of Maine. Talarico's opponent, current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is almost as corrupt and bad a person as Trump.

Below is a recent column published in TR, and what follows that is another column published as a defense for the first one. 

Sign hanging from a building in Tehran, Iran.

I do not support political assassination. I do not wish death on anyone.

But Americans need to stop acting shocked when people in other countries hate the leaders who bomb them.

We attacked Iran. We fired missiles into their country. We have threatened to “obliterate” them. We talk about ancient civilizations like they are disposable, inferior, or somehow less human than us.

And Iran is not some empty spot on a map. It is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth. It is Persia. It is Cyrus. It is Xerxes. It is poetry, architecture, scholarship, faith, history, and culture stretching back thousands of years before the United States existed.

I’ve read about pre-revolutionary Iran, post-revolutionary Iran, the Iranian Revolution, and Operation Ajax, when the United States and Britain helped overthrow Iran’s elected government in 1953. That history matters.

So no, I’m not celebrating anyone threatening to kill Donald Trump.

But I also understand that when the head of state of the country bombing you and threatening to destroy you is viewed as a terrorist by the people being bombed, that anger did not come from nowhere.

You do not have to endorse violence to understand cause and effect.

You do not have to support the Iranian government to recognize the humanity of the Iranian people.

And you do not get to bomb people, threaten their country, mock their poverty, interfere in their politics, sanction their economy, and then act confused when they hate you. 

And then we have an addendum

Every time I post something about Iran, I get comments asking some version of the same question:

“What about ‘Death to America’?”

Fair question. But I think too many Americans stop there and never ask the next question:

Why?

I’ve spent a lot of time reading about Iran. The Iranian Revolution. The Shah. Operation Ajax. U.S. and British involvement in overthrowing Iran’s elected government in 1953. The SAVAK secret police. The events that led millions of Iranians to conclude that foreign powers had too much control over their country’s future.

You don’t have to agree with the Iranian government to understand why that history matters.

So let’s put the shoe on the other foot.

Imagine a foreign country helped overthrow the U.S. government.

Imagine they helped install a ruler many Americans viewed as a dictator.

Imagine they trained and supported the security forces that monitored, arrested, intimidated, and sometimes tortured political opponents.

Imagine that went on for decades.

Then imagine Americans eventually rose up and overthrew that government.

Do you think Americans would have warm feelings toward the foreign country that helped create the mess?

Or do you think there might be a little resentment?

Maybe a lot.

Understanding that doesn’t require supporting the Iranian government. It doesn’t require agreeing with every slogan, policy, or action that came afterward.

It simply requires recognizing that history did not begin yesterday.

One of the biggest problems in American discussions about foreign policy is that we often view other countries only through the lens of what they have done to us, while ignoring what we may have done to them.

If we’re going to have an honest conversation about Iran, we should be willing to look at the entire story, not just the chapters that make us feel comfortable.

History is rarely as simple as good guys and bad guys. And nations, including our own, are rarely innocent spectators in the events that shape the world.

Texas Reporter