It Could Have Been a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

Posted on June 20, 2026 by 34orion

This could have been, in the words of one of my favorite books, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

Let’s go to the tape.

The mango MAGA signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran. A memorandum. Of understanding. Three hundred billion of our dollars later, and what exactly did the understanding understand? Not the nuclear program — that’s still humming along untouched, which is more than you could say for Obama’s deal, the one we shredded because it was insufficiently humiliating. So we paid the GDP of a mid-sized country to solve precisely zero centrifuges.

But why settle for expensive and useless when you can also be presumptuous? The thing bound Israel to terms Israel never agreed to — a neat trick, signing other people’s names — and the thank-you note arrived as the Strait of Hormuz slamming shut all over again. Then, for the encore, we handed back the frozen Iranian assets that were one of the last real levers we had, because nothing telegraphs strength like giving away your leverage and calling it a win.

And then — because the Grifter-in-Chief has never met a symbol he couldn’t faceplant into — he signed it at Versailles. Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors. The exact room where a flattened Germany was made to swallow full blame for the war, in a treaty so punitive it bankrupted the country and incubated a far worse one twenty years later.

The Provost of Prevarication didn’t just sign a bad deal. He pulled up a chair at history’s most cursed table and ordered the same thing.

And then we found out what literally screwed our cattle farmers and our grocery budget.

Remember Elon Musk and his Musketeers at DOGE, who cut programs willy-nilly with the wealth of experience possessed by twenty-two-year-olds? Turns out one of the programs they cut was for screwworm eradication. It was a $15 million program that released infertile screwworms to keep the population in check. Program cut. Screwworms procreated, and now we’re footing the bill — a $300 million tab to eradicate the screwworms that doesn’t include a 20% increase in beef prices, let alone getting rid of the real screwworms (Mango and Musk).

Clara Peller and James Garner are rolling over in their graves.

And then there are the tarps covering the Kennedy Center façade since the orange narcissist supposedly took his name off the building. I say supposedly because the tarps are still up and no one has seen behind them, and sadly, saying you’re going to do something and then not doing it while violating a court order is right out of the Dimdom playbook.

I could mention the unveiling of the Qatari Air Force One, demonstrating the Grifter-in-Chief grifting — thumbing his nose and giving the middle finger to the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

Let’s not forget our reflecting pool — repainted on a no-bid contract to a Trump supporter — is now an algae farm with peeling paint and a stench worse than Diaper Don’s Depends.

Or the DOJ probes into MLB for being anti-Christian. (Don’t ask. You really don’t want to know.)

And that trust in government is at an all-time low because he personifies the worst of us.

Let’s take a moment to breathe. In through the nostrils. Out through the nose. Feel better? Me neither, but let’s continue.

But then came Thursday. And the opening of the Obama Presidential Library.

It was attended by three ex-Presidents who had very different political agendas than Obama’s but shared the same desire to protect the values of our country in the best way they knew how. But that really wasn’t the headline for me. They seemed genuinely happy to be together and celebrate Obama’s legacy.

Here is a shocker. Obama’s speech was not about himself. His stated hopes ran toward civic renewal. He spoke about our “shared values that make democracy possible” and detailed his hopes for the U.S., while never naming Trump but repeatedly aiming criticism at the current administration. He tied it to the coming 250th anniversary of the Declaration, emphasizing that “we are all created equal” and that in the United States “there will be no kings or lords, no serfs or subjects, but only citizens”

For the place itself, he pitched it as a living campus rather than a mausoleum: he asked people to “make this campus a part of your lives,” be inspired by the art, and check out books from the public library branch — and bring them back on time. The complex includes a museum, the Obama Foundation offices, a Chicago Public Library branch, and a playground.

The throughline — the moral arc quote anchoring the plaza’s arch — is the thesis he wants the place to embody: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

There were no golden statues unveiled. No chorus of “me, me, me.” Instead it was about giving back to the community, in Chicago and elsewhere, that had given him so much.

He made me feel better. He did. But he was not the star that day. Michelle was.

She started with “Barack, you gotta look at me,” she said — and he shook his head with a smile and said he was going to look down instead, as the crowd laughed. He didn’t manage it for long.

It was human. It was real. Not the gold-plated, phony, deep-as-a-puddle fondness that the Tangerine eater of souls is capable of…

She reminded him he’d once told her he couldn’t promise her the world, but could promise her an interesting life — and said he’d outdone himself and given her both. “There hasn’t been a single second through this experience that standing by your side hasn’t left me in awe,” she said, as he began to cry. She praised the “unshakeable values” he embodied — equality, empathy, honesty, inclusion, fairness — and walked through the trials of his presidency, from personal attacks to national tragedies. “Eight years in the crucible, and not once did you melt from the heat,” she continued, before naming the racism he faced as the first Black president — the birther lies, the questions about his faith and patriotism, the claims that a U.S. senator and constitutional law expert wasn’t qualified for the job.

Okay. I will admit it. I am a big crybaby. And at this point the tears were pouring down my cheeks. Sure. Part of it was missing people who speak in complete sentences and can articulate well. I mean, I have been known to weep over a good sentence. But mostly it was because it was a public display of love and devotion from one human to another. Can you imagine Melania giving such a speech? Or, for that matter, anyone within the Hollow Man’s circle?

She closed the frame by insisting the center isn’t a monument to him: “Barack and I have always said that this center is grounded in our stories, but it has never been about us.” At one point he reached up to wipe away tears, glancing up at her before dropping his eyes again.

What Michelle, Barack, and the three living Presidents reminded me on Thursday is that our country is based on the ideal that we are all in this together. That we are at our greatest when we do our best to connect, be real, and come together in the best approximation of our mutual goals. That love, compassion and friendship are best built on what we share and that people like Deviant Don can spew all the hate and vitriol they want. However, as long as we seek to find connection and treat each other well, we will come out ahead.

It could have been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Thursday wouldn’t let it.

So here’s the assignment. In November we don’t beat him because we hate him — hate is his whole act, and you don’t beat a man at his own game. We beat him because we remember what Thursday felt like, and we want four more years that feel like that instead.

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The Real Screwworm:

Posted on June 17, 2026 by 34orion

In which the efficiency experts save fifteen million dollars and spend a billion finding out what the fifteen million was for.

Here is a sentence to tattoo on the inside of every libertarian’s eyelids: the Department of Government Efficiency saved fifteen million dollars by killing the screwworm program, and the bill for that thrift is now running north of a billion.

Do the math slowly, the way they teach it at the business schools these geniuses dropped out of. Fifteen million in. A billion-plus out. Beef up better than twenty percent. That is not a budget cut. That is a payday loan with a flesh-eating interest rate.

Back up, because the screwworm deserves a proper introduction. It is a fly larva that burrows into the living tissue of a warm-blooded animal, then widens the wound so it can invite its friends, then eats the host alive while the host is still standing there trying to use its own body. We beat this thing decades ago. Some unglamorous federal lifers figured out you could breed millions of sterile flies, dump them over the countryside, let them mate to nowhere, and starve the species off the continent one barren generation at a time. It worked. We pushed the bug all the way down to Panama and parked a wall of sterile males across the isthmus. Cost: about fifteen million a year. Savings to American ranchers: somewhere around eight hundred million a year in 1996 dollars, which is closer to one-point-seven billion today. The single best return on investment in the federal ledger, and it was sitting there quietly doing its job, asking for nothing, the way the competent never get on television.

Then came the chainsaw. You remember the chainsaw — held aloft on a stage, the richest man on Earth and his gang of twenty-two-year-olds promising to root out waste. And what is more wasteful, to a mind like that, than three hundred million dollars’ worth of government bugs? Newsmax had practically taken out an ad asking them to kill it. So they killed it. March of last year. Filed it under efficiency and went looking for the next antiseptic to throw out.

You can guess the rest, because the larvae could. The bugs came north. A dozen-plus infections in the States now, the things chewing toward Texas and New Mexico, the ports slammed shut, flung open in February, slammed shut again in May, the whole border policy run like a screen door in a hurricane. And the official explanation, delivered with a straight face, is that this is Joe Biden’s screwworm — that it rode up here on the flesh of migrants, as if the bug needed a coyote and not the unlocked door we personally unbolted after guarding it for sixty years.

So we spent a week down here trying to identify the screwworm. Turns out we were looking in the wrong wound.

Because consider the definition. A parasite is an organism that fastens onto a healthy host, contributes nothing, consumes the living tissue, and widens the wound to invite more of its own kind — feeding right up to the moment the host collapses, by which point it has already laid its eggs in the next one. Read that twice. Then look at who runs this government.

Look at the Mango Mussolini, who treats the United States Treasury like a personal feedbag and the rule of law like a thing that happens to other people. Look at the world’s richest man, who took a literal chainsaw to the one program standing between you and a maggot in your ribeye, billed it as savings, and is now — conveniently, parasitically — somewhere else, off the host, eggs already laid, posting through it. That’s the genius of the real screwworm. It never wants you dead. Dead host, no more meals. It wants you alive and diminished and infested and billable, paying a billion for the surgery and twenty percent more for the steak and listening, the whole time, to a man explain that the hole in your side is the previous tenant’s fault.

Fifteen million was the antiseptic. They threw it out to look thrifty in front of the cameras, and the wound has been widening ever since, exactly the way the wound is designed to.

But here is the thing about the old eradication method, and the reason I’d ask you to hold it in your head until roughly November: it works by overwhelming the zone with sterile males. Flies that look the part and make all the noise and cannot, when it counts, reproduce a single thing. Mate with them and you get nothing — no eggs, no larvae, no next generation gnawing you from the inside. We built entire facilities on this principle. We pushed an entire species to the bottom of a continent with it.

We just forgot, somewhere around last March, that the technique was never really about flies.

Vote like a sterile-fly program. Flood the zone. Give the parasites nothing to breed with.

The host would like its tissue back.

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Additions to the Highlight Reel, Before the Nation Gets Relegated

Posted on June 13, 2026 by 34orion

We all have personal highlight reels.

Moments from our lives that we replay over and over in our minds because they still manage to deliver joy, embarrassment, sadness, shame, or some unholy cocktail of all four. Some of those moments we keep locked in the private vault, where they belong. Others we trot out at dinner parties because apparently human beings need witnesses for everything, including our own nostalgia.

If you are a sports fan, as I am, the reel you are most likely to share is made up of those moments when dopamine surges, endorphins flood your brain, serotonin spikes, and your mind permanently archives the whole thing in whatever dusty storage room passes for your personal palace of memory.

What makes those moments even better is that sports fandom is social currency. It is not a solitary experience. You can share that moment with someone else and, almost instantly, they will counter with their own version of the same memory, because sports fans are incapable of simply saying, ‘Yes, that was amazing,’ and leaving it there.

Those are the moments that connect us, binding us together in a way that transcends whatever divides us, uniting us in a shared experience. Or at least giving us a brief timeout from shouting at each other like children who cannot share a toy.

Since you didn’t ask, let me share a couple of those experiences from my own life.

  • The Jets win Super Bowl III: If you were a kid in 1968 living in the New York metro area, there was no cooler human being on the face of the planet than Joe Namath. He was iconoclastic, larger than life, and behaved more like a rock star than a professional athlete. When he guaranteed that the upstart Jets from the upstart AFL would defeat the old-school Colts — and then actually did it — come on now. Unfortunately, it also sealed my fate as a Jets fan for life, which is less a fandom than a court sentence with merch.
  • The Miracle Mets win the 1969 World Series: I was walking from my junior high school to my synagogue for instruction from our rabbi in preparation for my bar mitzvah and listening to the game on a small solid-state Sony AM radio. The Mets were my team, and up until that season they had been more of a civic punchline than a real franchise. But I loved them. They were a gift from my grandfather, who had adopted them after his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers deserted him for Los Angeles. When Davey Johnson hit the fly ball to Cleon Jones to seal the victory, I leapt with joy, even though I was alone on the street. And when I finally reached the rabbi’s study and told him what had happened, my very serious rabbi and I danced together with joy.
  • Syracuse Wins the 2003 NCAA Basketball Championship: By the time the 2003 NCAA basketball championship rolled around, I had been a Syracuse fan for almost three decades — three decades of the Orange falling just short of the promised land. (Fuck you, Keith Smart. You are not forgiven.) So when Hakim Warrick blocked Michael Lee’s shot with almost no time left to seal the victory, it was a surreal moment of disbelief and joy. The only thing that would have made it sweeter would have been sharing it with my Syracuse classmates, who had suffered — not so silently — alongside me for years.
  • 2004 “Idiot” Red Sox Win the World Series: By this time in my life, I had lived or worked in Boston for years and had become a die-hard Red Sox fan. I hadn’t given up on my Mets, but Fenway Park and Red Sox fans’ absolute hatred of the Yankees had lured me in, because nothing builds community like a shared enemy with pinstripes. And while I hadn’t suffered for 86 years like so many of them, I was at the game where Aaron Boone became Aaron Fucking Boone. The night they won the Series against the Cardinals, I happened to be in Boston on business and had planted myself at the bar at the Sheraton. I was surrounded by Red Sox fans, all of us sharing the same collective thought: somehow, someway, the Sox were going to figure out a way to screw the pooch. So when Edgar Renteria hit a soft grounder back to Keith Foulke, we were all convinced something terrible was about to happen. When it didn’t — when Foulke flipped it over and Doug Mientkiewicz squeezed the final out — there were a few seconds of stunned silence before the bar erupted in absolute pandemonium.

This week I added a new reel to my archive: the Knicks’ impossible comeback from a 29-point deficit, culminating in OG Anunoby tipping in Jalen Brunson’s rim-bouncing three-point shot to win the game with 1.2 seconds to go. OMFG. I must have watched that play and the bedlam that followed dozens of times since then, because apparently my brain has decided that repetition is now a cardio program.

It made me feel good in a way I hadn’t since January 20, 2025. It also defined the current version of the Knicks, whether they win the title or not, as one of the great teams in NBA history.

And when I paused long enough to think about it, which is always dangerous and rarely billable, I realized that one of the fundamental tasks of the President is to unite the country as a team. Which led me to wonder what the Octagon Don has done to bring us together as a team, other than give millions of Americans a shared reason to grind their molars into dust.

One of the things all great teams have is clarity of purpose. They know what their goals are and can articulate their mission in a sentence. You might think Make America Great Again fits that definition, but it doesn’t, because the Dozer-in-Chief keeps changing the definition to fit his personal needs, not those of the country. A slogan is not a strategy. And best it is trucker cap warning sane people to stay away.

A great team isn’t simply the most stacked roster. It is one where skills fit together and gaps get covered. Each person knows their lane and trusts others to handle theirs. Great teams have complementary roles, not redundant ones. Our Karen-in-Chief does not believe in complementary roles. Only his role. Everyone else is either an extra, a prop, or a person who failed to clap quickly enough.

For a team to work effectively, people need psychological safety. Google’s well-known Project Aristotle study found this was the single biggest predictor of team effectiveness. People have to feel safe admitting mistakes, asking questions, and disagreeing without fear of being punished or embarrassed. Clearly not a memo Don the Dis read. Or if he did, he had it shredded, subpoenaed, and blamed on a staffer named Chad.

For a team to work effectively, there also has to be trust and accountability. For the buck-stops-elsewhere President, there is no accountability. He never makes a mistake. Never admits an error. Never owns a consequence unless it comes with a licensing deal. Which is one of the reasons the boo birds sang so loudly when he showed up at MSG and nearly 80% of those polled don’t trust him.

Adaptability matters too. Conditions change — markets, opponents, priorities. Strong teams adjust. That word does not exist in his playbook. The man hasn’t had a new idea since the Reagan administration, and he’s not about to start now. Change implies the old version needed fixing, and the old version is perfect, just ask him. He’ll be happy to tell you. At length. In all caps. At 4AM. In a Tweet.

Teams that win have a leader who serves the team, not the ego. Our supreme egoist serves one master: himself. If he doesn’t see the benefit for him personally, any idea is a nonstarter. Public service, in his hands, becomes private catering with flags.

In other words, with the Diapered Don leading us, our team does not have a chance of winning. And if international sentiment is a guide, we will be cellar dwellers before too long, waving a foam finger from the basement while Fox News tells u the standings are fake news.

Considering all that, no wonder I have felt so adrift since January 20, 2025.

Which isn’t to say, I don’t want to add to my highlight reel this year. In chronological order, I would love to add these:  

  • Knicks winning the NBA championship.
  • Brazil winning their sixth star and the World Cup.
  • A Blue Tsunami on November 3.

The first two are desired. The third is mandatory for all our wellbeing.

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No Good Deeds

Posted on June 6, 2026 by 34orion

I was watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town the other day.

Please don’t confuse it with Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds (2002), which is a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right, but isn’t in the same league as the original. And let’s draw a curtain over the dreadful 1969 television series starring Monty Markham.

I’m talking about Frank Capra’s 1936 classic, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.

I chose it because I needed something to ease my reentry into the United States—a vision of America I still recognized. An America of decency, optimism, and common sense. Not the version currently being narrated by a news cycle trapped in a death spiral and relentlessly cultivated by the Potentate of Perpetual Prevarication.

If you have never seen the movie, you can find it on Prime. Here is a brief synopsis: Longfellow Deeds, played to perfection by Gary Cooper, is a small-town tuba player and greeting-card poet who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and moves to New York City. There, he finds himself surrounded by opportunists, social climbers, and cynical reporters eager to exploit his naïveté. As Deeds struggles to navigate wealth, power, and public scrutiny, he ultimately proves that common sense, kindness, and integrity can be more powerful than money or status.

Yes, Virginia, in this vision of America, driven through the lens of the Great Depression, common sense, integrity, and kindness defeat wealth and power. A concept not really embraced in our current reality, where celebrities are famous for being famous, influencers are famous for being influencers, and actual accomplishment is often treated like an unfortunate character flaw.

Gary Cooper was famous for making decency look effortless. As Irving Berlin put it, everyone was “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper).”

Ninety years later, America could use a few more people trying. (Tom Hanks, keep up the good work. At the moment you’re carrying an alarming percentage of the nation’s decency portfolio.)

One of the lines in the movie that really sent me down a rabbit hole about how different our current reality is from that depicted in the film is when Deeds is told that he has inherited $20 million and is now “one of the richest men in America.”

By our standards, that is not a lot of money. Today it is roughly a single-week Mega Millions jackpot or about three hours of volatility in Elon Musk’s net worth.

John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune at the time was approximately $1.5 billion, controlled wealth equal to roughly 1.5% of America’s GDP.

The richest man in America, let alone the world, is Elon Musk. And he makes John D. look like a piker, with a fortune of over $800 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP. Not being a socialist, I can still say that is a scary amount of money and economic power for a single person to control.

But there is a bigger difference between the richest man in America then and now. By the time John D. died in 1937, he had given away nearly one-third of his total wealth to charities that supported education, medicine, science, and public health.

Elon Musk, by any standard, has given far less of his fortune. To date, the value of his charitable donations is generously estimated at $7 billion, or less than one percent of his fortune. But the actual number is much less because, in many cases, he has donated Tesla stock that he retains control of. In actual cash, he has given approximately $620 million or less than .1% of his net worth.

What a guy. He is making Scrooge McDuck look like Andrew Carnegie and Mother Teresa rolled into one.

What Elon Musk gives to charity is up to him. I don’t think we should force him to give a dime of his fortune to charity. But I think it is illustrative of what he is actually paying in income tax. His donation of stock to foundations allows him to eliminate capital gains taxes. Private donations lower that bill even more.

In other words, he no longer needs to give money to charity because he can avoid taxes by giving the appearance of a donation while still building his own personal fortune. Not something the average citizen can do.

What it means, in technicolor, is that the wealthiest Americans—those who have used the most of our resources—are asking those of us in the middle class not only to finance the running of our government, but also their extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyles.

Clearly, there is something wrong with our tax code. We are in this together, and we all need to pay our fair share.

Longfellow Deeds would have. John D. Rockefeller did.

So what is the solution? Let me throw out a couple of ideas and see if they stick.

Minimum Tax: Regardless of your deductions, you must pay a minimum tax on your income. You can use as many fancy, rich-person tax dodges as you like (I’m looking in your direction, Baron von Bluster), but eventually you must write at least one check to the government that doesn’t bounce off a Cayman Islands shell company.

The problem with this method is that the wealthy can afford to be paid in stocks and other instruments that don’t strictly count as income. They can then borrow against those assets and use the cash to finance increasingly ambitious monuments to themselves, whether those monuments take the form of gold statues, vanity space projects, or social-media platforms purchased at prices normally associated with small nations.

Progressive Tax with No Deductions: Our current tax code is riddled with carve-outs that favor the wealthy. A Republican construct based on the canard known as “trickle-down economics,” which, according to its creator, was utter bullshit but sounded good to the Republican base.

Get rid of all deductions. You pay a graduated percentage of your income based on prosperity, period. This has the added benefit of simplifying tax returns and eliminating a large percentage of IRS bureaucracy.

Wealth Tax: If your net worth is more than $10 million, you pay 5% of your net worth in taxes. A tax like this would raise approximately $3 trillion a year. This would completely eliminate the current annual deficit and contribute $1.5 trillion to debt reduction.

The main criticism of this plan is that it would cause wealthy individuals to flee the country, a threat that is issued with such regularity that one would think private jets are idling continuously on runways awaiting the signal.

While I am tempted to say, “See ya,” a simple way of preventing this would be to add a clause stating that if you spend more than 30 days per year in the United States, you will be taxed as a citizen.

Frank Capra’s America was hardly perfect, but it possessed a radical notion that now seems almost revolutionary: the rich owed something to the society that made them rich. Longfellow Deeds understood it instinctively. Rockefeller eventually learned it. Today’s billionaire class often appears convinced that society owes them a thank-you note for paying taxes at all. Perhaps that is why a black-and-white movie from 1936 feels more modern than the headlines of 2026.

One world celebrated decency and regarded greed with suspicion. The other celebrates greed and regards decency as a branding strategy.

Given the choice, I’ll take Mandrake Falls every time.

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The Department of His Justice

Posted on June 2, 2026 by 34orion

This week the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the woman who beat the Grifter-in-Chief twice in a court of law.

Let’s be precise about what that means. A jury of his peers — Americans, presumably some of whom voted for him (juries drawn from the entire Southern District of NY which includes counties that are deep red) — found that this man sexually abused her. Another jury, in separate proceedings, awarded her $83 million in damages for the defamation she suffered when he opened his mouth, as he always does, to make himself the victim.  His high-priced legal cavalry charged the hill and lost. Appeals went nowhere. He is 0-4. The courts, functioning as designed, said: guilty.

Now prosecutors are examining whether Carroll committed perjury when, in a 2022 deposition, she said no one else was paying her legal fees — a question that arose after it was revealed a nonprofit connected to billionaire Reid Hoffman had covered some of her costs. (The irony here is the Abuser-in-Chief’s legal bills were handled by donors, not him.) But that’s his excuse and he is sticking to it. This is the fig leaf. The Emperor of Mar-a-Lago doesn’t need a good reason — he just needs a reason, any reason, a reason thin enough to fit under a courtroom door to muddy the water, and keep him from taking responsibility for his own despicable behavior.

The Carroll probe joins Donnie’s “Revenge of the Turd Tour” that includes multiple attempts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Comey was indicted on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstruction. A judge eventually dismissed those cases, scolding the Justice Department for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” and potential prosecutorial misconduct. Letitia James, who had the audacity to sue the Debt-Ridden Don and win, was indicted, re-investigated, dismissed, and indicted again. Two federal grand juries and a federal judge threw out the charges, yet the department reportedly pressed on.

Grand juries, to be clear, indict ham sandwiches. When even a grand jury looks at your case and says no, you have not merely lost — you have achieved something special. You have assembled a prosecution so bereft of merit that citizens, average citizens dragged in off the street, looked at it and said: we won’t put our names on this.

This is about the oldest impulse in the authoritarian playbook: using the machinery of the state to punish your enemies, reward your loyalists, and remind everyone else what happens when they get in your way. Where the attorney general’s job title should technically read: Personal Counsel to the Grievance.

Calling it a “revenge tour,” undersells the structural problem. Revenge is personal. What’s happening here is institutional. The Justice Department — an agency founded on the radical notion that no person is above the law — has been converted, in the span of a few months, into a billing department for scores that needed settling. Carroll. Comey. James. Others in the queue. The Southern Poverty Law Center. Democratic lawmakers. The list has the rhythm of a grudge list, not a docket.

And lest we focus only on what the Justice Department is doing to his enemies, let’s spare a moment for what it’s doing for his friends. Earlier this month, the department announced a $1.776 billion fund — drawn directly from public coffers — to compensate Trump loyalists deemed victims of “weaponization.” The money flows through a commission appointed by his own attorney general, with recipient names and payout amounts deliberately hidden from public view. No specific recipients named yet, but the intended audience is obvious: the January 6th rioters, most of whom the Pardoner-in-Chief had already sprung on day one. Capitol Police officers who were beaten during the assault have filed suit. The Treasury Department’s own top lawyer resigned in protest. The lawsuit that generated this windfall — a $10 billion action filed by Trump against his own IRS — was filed months past the statute of limitations and described by the IRS’s own lawyers as one that should have been tossed immediately.

To recap: prosecute the woman who beat him in court, cut checks to the mob that stormed the Capitol for him. Punishment for enemies, payday for loyalists. The two-tiered justice system, now with a budget line.

This is how banana republics are created. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just: a bureaucracy pointed at enemies instead of criminals.

The Tangerine Tyrant has done us the unintentional favor of clarifying something important. Our republic was founded on the concept that those we elect were men of good will and strong character. Our founders did not anticipate us electing a convicted felon who thinks morals are a type of mushroom. He has taught us rules don’t protect us. Laws do.

For decades, the independence of the Justice Department from direct presidential control rested on norms, traditions, and a gentleman’s agreement that presidents would behave like presidents and not like mob bosses with nuclear codes. The Norm-Shredder taught us that norms are tissue paper. He taught us that a determined bad actor can do extraordinary damage before anyone finds a statute to stop him.

We need laws. Not rules.  Here are a few places to start:

Prohibit direct presidential communication with DOJ prosecutors on specific cases. Right now, nothing formally stops a president from calling his attorney general and saying “I want that woman investigated.” There is a memo. There are norms. Memos are not laws. Norms are for people who respect them. A statute criminalizing direct presidential interference in specific prosecutorial decisions would do what the memo cannot: create consequences.

Require Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys to sign off on any investigation of a political opponent, former adversary, or litigation counterparty of the president. The cases against Carroll, Comey, and James all originated in circumstances where the subjects had direct, documented legal or political conflict with the man in the Oval Office. That conflict of interest should trigger mandatory independent review before a single subpoena gets issued.

Create an office of Special Prosecutor with independent standing to challenge retaliatory prosecutions in federal court. Right now, the accused must mount that defense themselves, at enormous personal and financial cost. The Grifter-in-Chief is betting that the process is the punishment — that even failed prosecutions drain the targets of money, time, and dignity. An independent watchdog with the power to intervene early changes that calculus.

Mandate disclosure when the president or his staff communicates with DOJ about an ongoing matter. Sunlight is still the best disinfectant. If the Acting Attorney General gets a call from the West Wing about E. Jean Carroll, America should know about it — not in a leak, but in a filing.

None of this is complicated. None of it is radical. All of it is, compared to what we’ve tolerated, embarrassingly overdue.

The courts have been doing their job — throwing out indictments, scolding prosecutors, upholding jury verdicts. But the courts are downstream and increasingly MAGA stacked. By the time a case reaches them, the damage is done. Carroll is 82 years old and being dragged back into the legal system by the man a jury found had assaulted her. Letitia James has been indicted twice for what amounts to the crime of doing her job well. Comey spent a year as a criminal defendant before a judge ended it.

What protects the next Carroll? The next Comey? Us?

Not rules. Not norms. Not the good intentions of whoever happens to be sitting in the big chair.

Laws. Passed by Congress, signed into statute, enforceable in court. The only things that hold when the man at the top decides the rules don’t apply to him.

As Maya Angelou warned “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

My codicil to her advice would be: “And then do something about it.”

Posted in Humor / satire, personal essay, Politics and Society, Social Media, Trump Opposition | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Six Years Ago, Today

Posted on June 2, 2026 by 34orion

Six years ago today I returned to the United States after being marooned in Brazil because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a hell of a trip. A cab from Rio to São Paulo. A masked plane ride from São Paulo to Houston and then Houston to Newark. Every cough sounded like a death sentence audition. Every surface felt radioactive. But underneath the fear was relief — relief that I was going home to a country that was still recognizable. A place where I spoke the language, trusted the doctors, and believed the adults were at least pretending to be in charge.

I remember the applause when the plane landed and the tears running down my cheeks.

I remember my much, much younger sister showing up masked at my doorstep with a care package like a suburban pandemic resistance fighter.

I remember Rosie first ignoring me out of principle and then exploding into hysterical dog joy five minutes later.

I remember how good it felt to come home. America still felt like home then.

Today, I am once again leaving Brazil to return to the United States.

Like six years ago, I am sad to leave because Elaine is staying here. But this time, going back no longer carries the same sense of comfort or safety. To be blunt, America now feels less like a country and more like a second level reality show where the winner in the octagon doesn’t win the nuclear codes and a drone contract.

The country I loved has become a spray-tanned tribute band version of itself — louder, meaner, greedier, and somehow deeply impressed with its own mediocrity. We are governed by a man whose relationship with truth resembles Tommy Flannagan, Jon Lovitz character on SNL.

We used to admire people who worked hard, raised families, built communities, and quietly carried the country on their backs. Now we idolize hedge fund sociopaths, crypto grifters, and billionaires who cosplay as populists while flying private jets to explain why school lunches are the real fiscal problem.

We used to believe in science. Bell Labs. NASA. The Mayo Clinic. Real institutions staffed by people who actually read books voluntarily. Now public health policy gets workshopped somewhere between a podcast ad for beef liver supplements and a YouTube comment section written entirely in capital letters.

We used to believe in due process and the rule of law — not prosecuting people because they bruised the ego of an overripe authoritarian who thinks the Constitution is a loyalty pledge written specifically for him. The Attorney General was supposed to serve the country, not function as the President’s personal crisis-management intern.

We once understood that war was a last resort. Something entered into soberly and reluctantly. Not because an aging narcissist wanted better poll numbers, cable news applause, or the geopolitical equivalent of jangling keys in front of voters.

We used to aspire to be the shining city on the hill.

Now half the country seems content being the comments section underneath it.

So yes, I may cry when I land tomorrow. But not out of gratitude for returning home.

I will cry for the country we lost somewhere between the lies, the algorithms, the worship of wealth, and the collective decision to hand the car keys to the loudest idiot in the parking lot.

Posted in covid, Humor / satire, institutional poverty, opinion, personal essay, Politics and Society, Social Media, Trump cuts | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Term Limits or Pitchforks

Posted on May 24, 2026 by 34orion

Jon Stewart once described Chuck Schumer as a “human flat tire.”

Seth Meyers described Mike Johnson as “the human embodiment of a forwarded church email.”

An internet wit described John Thune as “having the energy of a man explaining ethanol subsidies at a Marriott bar.”

Earlier this year, just before Whosit’s State of the Union address, Hakeem Jeffries urged Democrats to give him the silent treatment. Stephen Colbert responded:

“For Democrats who did attend, Hakeem Jeffries urged members not to make a scene, an approach he dubbed ‘silent defiance,’ which I believe is a bold rebrand of doing jack squat.”

Great jokes, I guess. But like a lot of humor, they point to something darker: the current leadership of both parties has failed us in nearly every possible way.

Not convinced? Okay. To refresh your memory, here is an abbreviated list of the things Congress has failed to do:

• Stop the ill-advised, poorly planned, badly executed war with Iran. Yes. That is their job. Congress has voted on the War Powers Act four times. And it has failed four times. That is a failure of leadership — not to mention backbone and several other vital body parts — in the face of a despot-wannabe president whose philosophy seems to be: shoot, aim, fire.

• Prevent Don the Destructor from tearing down part of the White House so he could build a $1 billion vulgarian ballroom — one he claimed political donations would fund (aka bribes), but now apparently being paid for by taxpayers.

• Hold the DOJ and the president accountable for failing to release the Epstein files as required by statute, then botching the release they did manage.

• Congress holds the purse strings, not the guy currently farting behind the Resolute Desk. Yet they allowed CheetoMan and his sidekick Muskboy to decimate the EPA, NASA, USAID, Veterans Affairs, and other agencies without reason, planning, or shame. This has led to more pollution, endless waits for veterans seeking treatment, and Musk becoming even richer, but also to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths from starvation and disease. Oxfam estimates that by 2030, a child under five will die every 40 seconds as a direct result of these cuts — the first increase in under-five child mortality this century.

• Allow the baby-in-chief to run the executive branch without adult supervision. He has fired twenty-one inspectors general and replaced only eight. Those replacements have not exactly pledged to be stewards of the public trust so much as interns for the royal court.

• Fail to push back when the midnight tweeter used imaginary crises to overturn treaties approved by Congress.

Congress is supposed to be a coequal branch of government, not a retirement community with subpoena power. But under the current leadership it has become as useful as fact-checkers at a conspiracy convention.

Still not convinced?

Think of all the bills they have passed to help average Americans.

I’ll wait.

You probably will too.

Because other than the bill with the naming convention apparently created by a six-year-old who thinks gold filigree is the answer to every design problem, this Congress seems capable only of naming post offices and forwarding strongly worded fundraising emails.

And let’s not pretend no one is noticing. We all are. 90% of voters disapprove of the job Congress is doing. And those of us who are supposedly wiser because we have more wrinkles are the ones who disapprove most.

• 18–34: 12% approve
• 35–54: 12% approve
• 55+: 7% approve

By the way, and for shits and giggles, this is regardless of party.

• Republicans: 20% approve — down catastrophically from 63% in March 2025
• Independents: 11% approve — essentially flat and low all year
• Democrats: 3% approve — nearly matching the all-time record low of 2%

At this point, you may be thinking what every good boss I’ve ever had has said to me when I kindly and tactfully explained the problem with their latest, greatest, most innovative idea.

“Great Paul. You have identified the problem. Now what is the solution.”

Oh, now you want a solution? How dare you!

Okay. Let me try.

First, each party should pass a resolution that no one in a leadership role should be older than retirement age. This is not ageism. Well, maybe a little. But the world is changing too fast for people who still print MapQuest directions.

I mean really, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “Do we really want the republic run by the cast of Cocoon and the management team from a regional casino buffet?” Or give the board of The Villages subpoena power?

In an ideal world, the ballot box would constantly renew those serving us in Washington. Sadly, the Citizens United decision changed all that. The ruling held that government cannot restrict independent political spending by corporations, unions, and nonprofits because such spending is protected under the First Amendment as free speech.

We can debate later whether corporations should have the same free speech rights as humans, but money pouring into campaigns has tripled since then. Most of that money comes from corporations and billionaires who think democracy is a concierge service.

It means Congress no longer works for the people who elected them. Those people can’t afford the table minimum. They are too busy funding campaigns to care much about we the people. Without a constitutional amendment, we cannot fix campaign finance.

What we can do is limit entrenched power, increase accountability, and encourage citizen legislators by limiting members of Congress and the Senate to 12 years in office through a bipartisan bill. Not perfect, but still more realistic than expecting Congress to suddenly rediscover shame.

And can you imagine a member of Congress trying to explain to constituents why this is a bad idea? Would love to be there for that example of double talk. I assume it would involve a flag pin, three lobbyists, and someone explaining why twelve years is not enough time to get things done. Hey dude, haven’t you heard it’s a gig economy.

Yes, Naomi, this will certainly be challenged in the courts. In America, every good idea eventually is. But I believe it is likely to be upheld because strict constructionists Thomas and Scalia both authored opinions suggesting such a law would be constitutional.

Term limits are no longer a political reform. They are a defibrillator for a patient who has already written its own eulogy. Congress, in its current form, is not a coequal branch of government — it is a green room for lobbyists, a billionaire donor-funded daycare for the professionally shameless, and a monument to the proposition that mediocrity, if sufficiently funded, is eternal.

The Founders gave us a republic. We gave it back. We traded it, in fact, for a system so thoroughly marinated in corporate money and cowardice that it can no longer tell the difference between representing constituents and billing them. So yes, term limits. Or pitchforks. History, as it turns out, is not particularly picky.

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VE Day: The Thread We Lost

Posted on May 9, 2026 by 34orion

Eighty-one years ago, this week the Second World War ended in Europe.

Four major powers — the United States, Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom — along with troops from Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and Brazil put troops in the field to fight Nazi Germany. They came together because they understood that one-party dictatorship, state terror, suppression of free speech, and aggressive nationalism were not just bad for the world — they were incompatible with the ideals that made them free people.

They were committed. They sacrificed their youth so that, to paraphrase Lincoln, their nations might live. Or as Churchill put it: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

That cost was enormous:

  • Soviet Union                  11,000,000
  • Yugoslavia                      300,000
  • United States                185,000
  • United Kingdom           265,000
  • France                              210,000
  • Poland                              240,000
  • Canada                            45,000
  • Australia/NZ                  30,000
  • Italy                                    30,000
  • Greece                             20,000
  • Brazil                                 1,000

But it was not just the warriors who paid the ultimate price for this war. Nearly fifty million civilians died during the war.

Numbers this large are hard to comprehend. Consider this: if the entire population of the United Kingdom were to vanish today, that would still fall short of the total lives lost in World War II.

Their sacrifice was not in vain. It created a better world.

It created NATO. An organization that has kept Europe from fighting each other for over 80 years. The greatest sustained peace on that continent since the dark ages.

It ended colonialism. At the end of 1945 there were only 50 countries. Today there are over 193 nations within the UN. I am not saying that American democracy led the way. But our example of country that used to be a colony now being the most powerful nation on the planet did not hurt.

It created the greatest economic boom in the history of mankind. It ended the Great Depression. It retooled the United States and the world through the Marshall Plan. The GI Bill created the largest and most powerful middle class in the history of the world. It built institutions — the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) — that established free and fair trade so that nations would become economically interdependent, and interdependence would reduce the appetite for war. Harming one nation would harm them all.

I am ashamed to say that eighty-one years later, the United States has lost the thread — not only on why we fought World War II, but on the institutions and alliances that have kept the peace ever since.

Let’s start with the statement the White House released on VE Day. It was not about the sacrifices made by all of the Allies. It was about how great the United States was, to the exclusion of others’ sacrifice. Perhaps its most ominous line is this: “Their feat reminds us that the freedoms we cherish were paid for by sacrifice and must be resolutely defended both inside and outside the country.” 

Who are we fighting inside our country?

I believe the only people those soldiers would recognize as the enemy today — the ones who fit the definition they fought and died to defeat — are the people currently controlling our government.

Let’s boil it down.

We fought WW2 to overthrow a one-party dictatorship that concentrated power in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How is that different from the state-mandated gerrymandering that has already been enacted in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio — and is now being actively pursued in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia? These states are not even pretending otherwise. The stated goal is to keep the House and preserve Trump’s grip on power. You can’t quite call it a dictatorship yet — but it isn’t what “Willy and Joe” fought for. (If you don’t know Willy and Joe, they were the battle-worn GI characters in Bill Mauldin’s legendary WWII cartoons — the best portrait of the ordinary American soldier ever drawn.)

But gerrymandering is just the mechanism. The deeper assault is on speech itself. In WW2 we recognized the suppression of free speech as an existential threat to freedom — the thing that had to be stopped before everything else fell. The current administration has threatened Kimmel, The View, Colbert, Comcast, CBS, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Pulitzer Board for the crime of speaking their minds. Has anyone gone to jail? Not yet. But when companies and individuals are frightened into silence, the jail is the fear itself. Free speech doesn’t require a prison cell to die.

And then there is the matter of what the state does to its own people. Our soldiers fought and died in WW2 because they understood that state-sponsored terrorism against citizens was wrong. Sending people to concentration camps was wrong. Discriminating against people because of their race, creed or color was wrong. Today our government practices all of those things. It explicitly or implicitly declares the country has one religion: Christianity. ICE terrorizes, brutalizes and murders citizens with impunity and anonymity. MAGA serves as a street-fighting force in precisely the same way the SA served Hitler’s rise — doing the dirty work the state prefers not to put in writing.

Which brings us to expansion. Hitler’s aggressive nationalism found its ultimate expression in his Lebensraum — “living space” — the doctrine that Germany had a natural right to seize the territory of lesser peoples. It was the justification for invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. There is no meaningful difference between that logic and this administration’s use of military force in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Ecuador — or its openly stated desire to take Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Canada by whatever means necessary. (I have left Iran off this list because the nuclear argument is at least worth debating separately — though I will note: if it truly was about nukes, why did he tear up the Iran Nuclear Deal the moment he took office?)

Here is my point.

We celebrate VE Day to honor a victory over fascism. The men and women who made that victory possible — who gave everything Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion — did not do it so that eighty-one years later we would debate whether what is happening here at home meets the technical definition. They did it so we would know it when we saw it. And so we would have the courage to say so.

Here at home.

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Meet John Doe

Posted on May 3, 2026 by 34orion

 I was searching for comfort on my streaming services the other day.

You all know what kind of a week it has been.

  • The former director of the FBI being indicted by the Justice Department because he posted a picture of seashells on the beach that “whomjamacallit” didn’t like.
  • Frat Boy Pete raspberried Congress, which attempted to get him to answer serious questions about our national security, the war in Iran, and his use of the Bible as a prop.
  • The Supreme Court ruled that it was okay for states to gerrymander districts to disenfranchise people of color because prejudice doesn’t exist anymore.
  • One of whosits’ nominees for the federal bench couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t answer whether a president could run for a third term. Whether he is a dolt or just a toady is unclear, but either should disqualify him, though it probably won’t.
  • The King of England gave a master class on what American democracy is all about. The King of England. The guy we fought against to create our country, lecturing us on why we fought two wars against his five-times-great-grandfather. Let that sink in.

You get the point. And while we are at the point-making part of this ditty, you may have noticed that I have decided not to mention the guy who can’t speak in full sentences and whose tie is too long by name, because he puts his name on everything. Why should I contribute to his terminal narcissism? For that matter, the mention of his name has become a triggered response that leads to anxiety, nausea, along with a whiff of despair. Who needs to do that to himself?

———

Where was I? Yeah. I was looking for solace from my streaming services because, after I took the anti-doomscrolling pledge three weeks ago:

I hereby pledge:

To stop scrolling like breaking news personally depends on me.

To recognize that “just one more headline” is the internet’s second-oldest lie.

To treat outrage as junk food—fine in small doses, nauseating in bulk.

To remember I am not on the editorial board of the apocalypse.

To remember a stranger’s bad opinion is not my emergency.

And to occasionally look up and verify that the world is, in fact, in 3D.

One of the only places that I can find peace from the emotional sciatica caused by this administration and the deplorables who continue to act like everything is copacetic is in movies and television.

Here is the problem. There is just too much of it. I subscribe to Netflix, Paramount, Peacock, Apple TV, HBO Max, and Disney. That is between 25,000–30,000 different shows and movies for me to choose from. Instead of being distracted from the rampant toxic masculinity and incompetence (redundant?) of the Red Tie League, I was doomscrolling movie and television titles. It almost caused me to relapse. At least doomscrolling had some satisfaction, but a quick call to my sponsor, Ron Swanson, put me straight again. He suggested that I imagine social media didn’t exist and choose a movie that I had enjoyed in the past and watch that. It would be like getting reacquainted with an old friend.

It made me recall what it was like to grow up in NYC when there were only six channels, and they had to fill major portions of their programming with classic movies from the thirties and forties. It made me nostalgic for programming—someone with a better sense of cinema than me picking what I was going to watch. (Okay, the Three Stooges are not strictly “cinema,” but the physical humor was top drawer.) No stress. Just enjoyment. Just what I wanted right now.

I made a mistake. I typed “Classic Movies” into the search bar of Netflix. It seems my definition of “classic” is somewhat different than theirs. My idea of a classic movie is a black-and-white film from the ’30s or ’40s with actors like Gable, Stanwyck, Stewart, Bogart, or Bacall. The Netflix bot thought I meant movies from the eighties and nineties like Smokey and the Bandit and Kindergarten Cop. I thought, “How can these be classic movies?” Then I realized that the movies I watched on New York television in the sixties and seventies were thirty to forty years old. And so were the movies Netflix was suggesting I watch.

It made me feel ancient. Thanks, Netflix. See if I renew my subscription.

———

Enter Frank Capra

I decided I needed a more directed approach. Directed. Director. Who was my favorite director from that era? That was simple: Frank Capra. His movies all shared a common theme—an ordinary, decent man, slightly naïve and stubbornly principled, gets chewed up by a corrupt system that mistakes his decency for weakness until the moment it doesn’t. His movies were about goodness and how it was more durable than cynicism.

After sixty-six consecutive weeks of watching the most indecent man ever to occupy the White House, I need a Capra infusion. But which one should I choose? It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas movie. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is great, but I’d want to watch it back-to-back with Adam Sandler’s remake, and I didn’t have the time. It Happened One Night—Colbert and Gable—it doesn’t get better than that.

But then it hit me. Meet John Doe would be the perfect movie to lift me out of my sixty-six-week funk and perhaps give me hope for the next one hundred forty-two.

———

The Plot (Stay With Me)

A fired reporter, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), fabricates a letter from a fictional “John Doe”—an everyman who threatens to jump off City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest society’s indifference to the common man. To keep the story alive, she and her editor hire a down-and-out drifter, Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), to play the role.

The hoax unexpectedly ignites a genuine grassroots movement—ordinary Americans form “John Doe Clubs” across the country, rallying around the message of neighborly decency and democratic ideals. But the movement gets hijacked by D.B. Norton, a wealthy, fascist-leaning media mogul who funded the whole operation and plans to ride the John Doe wave to political power.

When Willoughby realizes he’s been a puppet for a proto-fascist machine, he tries to expose Norton—and is destroyed for it. The film ends on an ambiguous note of fragile hope: the “real” John Does, ordinary people, pull him back from the ledge.

———

Sound Familiar?

“Dumbasadoor” in the White House is D.B. Norton—the wealthy publisher who bankrolls a populist movement, genuinely believes he’s the people’s champion, and is completely blind to the fact that he’s the thing the movement was supposed to be fighting. Norton doesn’t think he’s the villain. That’s what makes him dangerous. And that is what makes “whozit” dangerous too. Well, that and the fact that he has dementia, is blatantly corrupt, and has the IQ of a garden snail.

The only thing that bothered me about the movie was the ending. The corrupt publisher walks away clean. The system that produced him is untouched. A man almost died, and nothing changed except that one man chose to live.

We can’t let our movie have that ending.

Our John Doe Clubs need to fight for real change in Washington that “shitforbrains” has revealed. We need to fight for tax reform where the rich and uber-wealthy pay a minimum tax on their income. We need a constitutional campaign amendment that reforms campaign finance laws so that our representatives consider people, not corporations, first. We need to hold social media responsible for what they publish like any other form of media.

We need to ensure that our government returns to being by and for the people…

And Hollywood, would you please get busy and make a remake of this movie—but this time, give it a more satisfying ending.

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Posted on April 26, 2026 by 34orion
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