overheard

Marianna Hernandez was waiting in line at the airport...

Delayed flight. Gate C14. And God himself decided to entertain me by placing two men directly behind me solving America's $39 trillion debt problem between bites of a $22 airport sandwich.

Guy #1 turns to his friend:

"If capitalism is so great, why are we $39 TRILLION in debt?"

Guy #2, without missing a beat:

"Because of socialist programs, obviously."

I closed my laptop. I needed a moment.

Because let's actually look at where the $39 trillion came from. Not feelings. Not talking points. Numbers.

THE IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN WARS: $8 TRILLION

No WMDs found. No democracy built. Two countries left in chaos. That's not socialism. That's bipartisan warmongering with a Lockheed Martin logo on it.

THE 2008 BANK BAILOUT: $700 BILLION (+ $12 TRILLION in Fed support)

Wall Street gambled with your mortgage, crashed the global economy, then got handed a check with YOUR name on it. The banks kept their bonuses. You kept your debt. That's not socialism for the poor — that's socialism for the rich.

THE 2017 TAX CUTS: $1.9 TRILLION added to the debt

Sold as a gift to the middle class. Apple alone saved $47 billion. Your check? Maybe $40 a month. The debt? $1.9 trillion heavier.

THE US HEALTHCARE SYSTEM: $4.5 TRILLION per year

America spends MORE per person than any country on Earth — and gets LESS. A hip replacement in Spain? €6,000. In the US? $40,000. Medical bills are the #1 cause of personal bankruptcy in America. That's not too much socialism. That's the cost of having none.

PENTAGON BUDGET: $886 BILLION in 2024 alone

Larger than the next 10 countries COMBINED. Meanwhile your bridge is crumbling and your kid's school has a GoFundMe for pencils.

Now. Let's talk about socialism "failing."

MEXICO — right next door. Nobody's paying attention.

Claudia Sheinbaum became president in 2024. She has a PhD in climate science. An actual scientist running a country. Not a TV personality. Not a failed businessman. A scientist.

She expanded universal pensions, free internet nationwide, and scholarships for millions of young Mexicans. Foreign investment is flooding in. Nearshoring is making Mexico one of the hottest manufacturing destinations on Earth.

And she's navigating Trump's tariffs and border provocations with more dignity than any US politician has managed in years. She doesn't tweet at 3am.

Must be infuriating for some people.

BRAZIL — and this story needs to be told.

Lula was a factory worker. A union leader. A man who lost a finger in a machine press and turned his pain into a political movement. He was imprisoned on charges later thrown out by Brazil's Supreme Court — many believe to keep him from power.

He came back. Won the election. Returned to the presidency at 77.

Under Lula:

• Bolsa Família restored — lifting millions out of extreme poverty

• Minimum wage raised above inflation for the first time in years

• Amazon deforestation dropped 50% in his first year back

A man who came from nothing, survived prison, and came back to feed the poor and protect the rainforest.

That's not a communist villain. That's a story Hollywood would make a movie about — if he were American and right-wing.

CHINA — and this one will really hurt.

Nominally communist. And yet:

• 45,000 km of high-speed rail. The US has zero.

• 5 million engineers graduated per year. The US graduates 200,000.

• BYD just outsold Tesla worldwide.

• 800 million people lifted out of poverty in 40 years — the greatest anti-poverty achievement in human history.

Someone forgot to tell the second largest economy on Earth that socialism always fails.

While America spent $8 trillion blowing up the Middle East, China was building infrastructure, educating engineers, and buying up the debt America kept creating.

Who's actually winning here?

And yes — Venezuela. We know.

A corrupt petro-dictatorship that printed money, destroyed private institutions, and was strangled by US sanctions. Not a social democracy. Not what any serious economist proposes. Comparing Venezuela to these countries is like comparing a gas station hot dog to a Michelin star restaurant and concluding that food is dangerous.

Here's what those two guys at Gate C14 — and half of Facebook — can't grasp:

America doesn't have too much socialism.

America has socialism for the wrong people.

Subsidies for oil companies that made $200 billion in profit? Socialism.

Bailouts for banks that gambled and lost? Socialism.

Tax breaks for private jets and yachts? Socialism.

Free school lunch for a hungry 7-year-old? Suddenly that's communism.

The $39 trillion wasn't built by teachers, nurses, food stamps, or public libraries.

It was built by wars nobody wanted, tax cuts nobody needed, bailouts for people who needed them least, and a healthcare racket that would make the mafia blush.

But sure. Blame the socialism.

Flight's still delayed. They're still talking.

I ordered another coffee.

curated lunacy

I read John Pavlovitz when I can. He, like so many these days, has a Substack. If I was a Paid Subscriber to every author I liked, I'd be running low on money. Must pick and choose wisely. 

I appreciate the writings of those pastors, like John, who have become ex-pastors. They've been "up close" to God (lol) and they've studied it closely (usually) and have seen it for what it is. The Lord has no clothes, neither does the dictator.

Bullets, Ballrooms, and Bedlam: Staying Sane Inside Trump's Curated Lunacy

JOHN PAVLOVITZ APR 27

There is no way for otherwise mentally well, emotionally stable human beings to exist in this kind of prolonged lunacy and extended predation without being internally altered, without losing some sense of normalcy, without developing a persistent PTSD that will likely never leave.

It’s understandable. We are all sharing our home with an unhinged cadre of miserable doomsday cult squatters who will not rest until everyone around them is as nihilistic and devoid of joy as they are.

The toxic cocktail of boundless hatred, prolific malfeasance, and breathtaking incompetence that they continually day drink from spills over into the lives of those of us who still wake up every morning just hoping to do our work, care for our families, and enjoy human existence without having to contend with full-blown Armageddon.

No event comes without chaos, no day arrives free from existential catastrophe, no consequential moment is not leveraged to divide. For the last ten years, everything has been a fraud, a grift, a con, or a weapon, manufactured and stewarded by a collection of broken people who’ve found affinity in their greed, narcissism, and refusal to do the work of self-examination.

Combine this carefully curated chaos with incessant attacks on the media, dubious dissemination of information following emergencies, and never-clear investigatory procedures in their aftermath, and every single moment of crisis is made exponentially worse.

This week has been no exception.

Within nanoseconds of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, hundreds of MAGA influencers, Right-Wing talk show hosts, and Republican politicians began saturation bombing social media with a single message:

This is why we need Trump’s ballroom.

Uh, what?

Conservative influencers were still livestreaming from the site of an alleged assassination attempt on the President and Cabinet, in a monumental breach of what should be the absolute tightest of safety protocols—and the wave of propaganda and disinformation flooded our newsfeeds.

Not gratitude for the incident ending without death.
Not concerns for the safety and well-being of hundreds of people.
Not efforts to bring clarity to the bedlam of yet another supposed targeting of a President.

Such things would be the hallmarks of a collective not addled by cultic tribalism and possessing working empathy. They would have defined any other Administration in this nation’s history.

In the wake of the WHCD, as in every other time of national unease, what we get from Trump, from his soulless surrogates, and his wish-they-were-bots-but-sadly-they’re-actual people, is nonsense and buffoonery.

Instead of factual information, calm-headed discourse, and calls for unity, we get a coordinated virtual building campaign for another bloated, opulent, gold-plated monument to a cognitively-addled felon-rapist, who is rapidly losing his battle with time and gravity and wants to desecrate everything he can with his likeness before departing.

Trump’s cultivated mass delusion has permanently damaged tens of millions of people around us who quite likely would have been reasonable right now if not for having developed Stockholm syndrome and becoming emotionally tethered to their greatest abuser. Their identities and destinies are now inextricably bound to his.

And my friends, that leaves the rest of us; the sleep-deprived, heartbroken, rightfully furious human beings to try and hold onto our right minds while being immersed in the insane, the profane, and the cruel, by people who have nothing else to offer.

And our individual and collective sanity is non-negotiable if we are to withstand this steady onslaught of chaos, be effective in reversing our political realities, and course correct from the greatest error in our nation’s history.

Resist the pull of their nonsensical rage bait, do your best to avoid being distracted by their incendiary bombast, and do not be drawn into debate with people who have abandoned sense and benevolence.

Find times of rest and clarity, taking refuge in stillness and solitude.
Care for your physical, mental, and emotional health. 
Create beautiful things, cultivate gratitude, and fight like hell to stay joyful.
Immerse yourself in meaningful community with your like-hearted neighbors. 
Partner in the redemptive, neighbor-loving work happening where you are.

And above all, refuse to let your mind descend into the spinning maelstrom of madness that has swallowed so many around us. We can’t afford to lose our heads or our souls right now.

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SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is probably familiar to anyone reading this blog. Still, the SPLC is a non-profit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. They fight racism, in short. Hence, Trump does not like the SPLC, naturally, because he's a racist pig, and has told his DOJ to find something to charge the SPLC with. If we still have justice in America, these charges will go nowhere. We should figure out a way to charge Trump with frivolous litigation. This article by Josh Moon of the Alabama Political Reporter sums it up pretty well

Opinion | The SPLC indictment is exactly what you

think it is—pure BS

The Trump DOJ that doesn’t have time to bring charges against anyone in the Epstein files wants to explore a wild conspiracy about the SPLC.

By

JOSH MOON

Published on April 22, 2026 at 7:56 am CDT

It has been said that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Apparently, the way to do so is with pure bullsh*t. 

We know this to be true because the Trump Department of Justice, using grade-A BS, managed to sucker a Montgomery grand jury into a multi-count indictment alleging fraud, conspiracy and wire fraud against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday. 

To put that another way, the guys who don’t have time to bring charges against a single human male for the multitudes of child rape allegations contained in the Epstein files, managed to find a conspiracy to promote racism perpetrated by SPLC because it paid confidential informants who were members of hate groups. 

In so many ways, it is the absolute pitch-perfect encapsulation of the white, male victimhood that has defined MAGA. 

For years now, the SPLC has exposed thousands of individuals and groups for their hateful, disgusting behavior, and has helped pull the curtain back on the underground organizations that have fueled some of America’s most hateful groups. Tuesday’s indictment was nothing more than sympathizers of those groups punching back. 

And then holding a press conference to heap more BS on top of the already smoldering pile of BS. 

To be absolutely crystal clear, despite what the head of the FBI and the acting U.S. attorney general said on Tuesday, the SPLC did not use donated funds to “manufacture extremism” or “stoke racial hatred.” Making such a claim, as both Kash Patel and Todd Blanche did, is something akin to accusing the FBI of manufacturing loan sharking because it paid informants and infiltrated organized crime. 

That’s essentially what the SPLC was doing. Using a series of dummy companies, the organization paid informants who were high-ranking members of various hate groups, including the KKK, Aryan Nation and others, to provide information and documents so the SPLC and its various publications could expose the groups’ activities. 

This isn’t exactly a secret. Some of the organization’s most famous cases utilized documents and information gained from inside sources. Did anyone actually believe that these sources weren’t getting paid for their information? Did anyone think that the sources weren’t being paid to infiltrate these organizations? 

These were dangerous, life-changing risks that were being taken. 

It’s probably also worth mentioning here that for all of the bluster of Patel and Blanche, there is no detail in the actual indictment of the SPLC for manufacturing extremism or paying anyone to stoke racial hatred. 

Instead, the indictment itself meanders through a long list of actions that appear to sit in a legal gray area but certainly do not come close to the fantastic headlines of the SPLC essentially paying people to be racists so it could either report on those actions or litigate against the group. 

For example, in the indictment’s lengthiest entry, it accuses the SPLC of paying an informant who infiltrated the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance and provided a trove of information over more than a decade. In one instance, this individual, who isn’t identified in the indictment, stole 25 boxes of documents from the group’s headquarters, copied them all, provided the copies to the SPLC and then quietly returned the original documents to the headquarters. 

The SPLC, the indictment said, used that information for stories on the group. It paid the informant roughly $100,000 per year to provide information. 

Am I supposed to be mad about that? Is anyone, aside from the National Alliance, Kash Patel and Todd Blanche, mad about that? 

The bulk of the DOJ’s case against the SPLC relies on a broad catch-all charge meant to ensnare fraudsters and other scam artists who flirt with the edges of the law to pull off scams. It’s a law that makes it a crime to knowingly provide false information to a federally insured lending institution. Over the years, the charge has been broadened from providing information to gain a loan or other benefit to include providing the institution with basically any false information. 

The SPLC set up a number of what appear to be phony businesses and used the business names to establish bank accounts. Those accounts were then used to pay off the informants in order to mask the payments. Because it wouldn’t look great if the guy in the National Alliance was getting checks from the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The indictment calls those instances in which the SPLC used the dummy companies to set up bank accounts crimes. That might be the case, although one exception to the law is if the party has control of the entity it used to set up the accounts. So, if those companies were real on paper, that’s not a crime. There are also a couple of other exceptions that could be leaned on, so we’ll see. 

Regardless, though, that’s about the bulk of it. The SPLC paid bad people to give good information on other bad people and bad organizations. Or to put it another way: It did exactly what we all thought the SPLC has been doing for years. 

And really, that’s what this is all about—hitting back at an organization that has litigated against hatefulness, discrimination and bigotry. Because we have the absolute worst people imaginable in charge of our justice system. 

They are on a rampage against decency and against any group of people who dared stand up for it. The SPLC has long been a shining star for exposing hateful groups and awful humans. 

That made it the biggest target.

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Allen Clifton

Trump keeps saying we are in a new "Golden Age." Now maybe if he called it "the 2nd Gilded Age" it would have more impact. If you are a billionaire, this is in fact a very good time to be a billionaire, maybe even a "Golden Age." Only the extreme wealthy are seeing any kind of a rise in their wealth and income, in large part because Republicans keep shoveling tax cuts their way, while the vast majority of this country, and the planet, are not extremely wealthy. Far too many are barely scraping by. But you never hear Trump acknowledge that. Indeed, his "Liquor Cabinet" only tells him what he wants to hear. Any discouraging word will get you tossed out on your ass. Is this any way to run a country?

Here's another one from Allen Clifton along the same lines.

We’re seeing firsthand why nearly all of Donald Trump’s businesses were complete failures that ended in bankruptcy and embarrassment.

You know, like Trump Steaks, Trump Water, Trump Shuttle, Trump Magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, Trump Entertainment Resorts, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump: The Game, Trump Network, Trump.com, and the Trump Foundation.

You can pretty much put “Trump” in front of a common noun, and you’ll likely name one of his many business failures.

Imagine having a CEO of a company who doesn’t listen to anyone, thinks he’s the smartest person in every room he walks into, and only wants to be told what he wants to hear — which, of course, is that he’s a genius, everything is great, and if anything negative is happening, it’s definitely not his fault or the result of his decision-making.

It’s like if someone walked up to the captain of the Titanic and told him there was an iceberg they needed to avoid — otherwise the ship would strike it and sink — prompting the captain to fire the person who relayed that information he didn’t want to hear, replace them with someone who told him no iceberg could sink the ship, and then order the Titanic to continue on the exact same heading… right into the iceberg.

That’s effectively who Donald Trump is — the Dunning–Kruger CEO: an idiot who thinks he’s a “genius” because he’s too uninformed to realize how uninformed he actually is.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, he continues to go out and brag about how “strong” the American economy is, claiming it’s in some kind of “new Golden Age” and better than at any point in history — all while insisting prices are lower, inflation no longer exists, and the world respects the United States, despite the fact that none of that is true.

The economy is a mess, inflation is higher than it’s been in years (driven in large part by tariffs and his war in Iran), and absolutely no one respects this country right now. Our enemies are laughing at us, and our allies can’t stand us.

Even as Republicans lose elections (badly) all over the country, or win by much smaller margins than they normally would, he takes no responsibility — instead blaming anything and everything but himself, outright denying reality, or, as usual, claiming it’s all “rigged” whenever an election doesn’t go his way.

I’ve said it plenty of times before: future generations are going to look back on this time in American history stunned that tens of millions of Americans somehow believed that a con artist and failed businessman was a “business genius,” despite every bit of evidence proving the exact opposite.

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