Donald Trump fears impeachment should Democrats take majority control of the House of Representatives this November. There are a few Republican grumbles about his presidency but nowhere enough for the Senate to then convict and remove him from office. Eight of them would have to join all the Democrats to reach the needed 67% super majority.

Jim Vondruska, New York Times.jpg
Nevertheless, it seems that Mr. Trump is troubled by a third impeachment damaging his reputation. So, he who persistently but falsely calls elections "rigged" and ridden with "horrible corruption" is marshalling every weapon and contrivance to be the one who actually rigs elections.
To know what’s coming, here’s a round-up of the several tactics Trump is employing to minimize Democratic votes. As the election approaches, keep a link to this and watch for what it describes. It wraps up in an apocalypse that Trump’s cohort has already planned for us, discovered by The Washington Post.
shut outWe can start with gerrymandering, taken to a new extreme. At Trump's urging, Texas has redrawn its election maps to deliver five more districts safe for Republican candidates. That set in motion a gerrymandering war, with California countering with a referendum to temporarily suspend its redistricting commission so as to engineer five more seats for Democrats. Virginia contemplates doing the same. Indiana notably refused to comply despite Trump's pleading. Six states have redrawn their maps. No matter the outcome, gerrymandering, which could easily be replaced by agnostic software carving up each state by equal population counts rather than party voting patterns (as we have written of repeatedly), is the most cynical corruptive of what we like to think is our democracy.
ban voting by mailEven earlier than he did in 2020, Trump… Read More »
The rush to lying after the execution of ICU nurse Alex Pretti a week ago made it clear that lying and cover-up have become the norm of the current administration. Just as happened after the murder of Renee Nicole Good two-and-a-half weeks earlier, top officials concocted false narratives of the Pretti killing as if that could turn all the video shot by bystanders into deep fakes.
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who 
Stephen Miller absolved himself of any
blame for the killing of Alex Pretti
saying that Border Control had not
followed protocol.
sets the arrest quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), went straight to social media to call Mr. Pretti a “domestic terrorist who had tried to assassinate federal law enforcement”.
On Thursday came the startling discovery of videos of Alex Pretti in a confrontation 
Alex Pretti
with federal agents 11 days before he was killed. He had allegedly kicked out the tail light of one of their vehicles and had been wrestled to the ground then, too. That he is revealed as someone more than a peaceful protester hardly justifies his killing, as hosts at Fox News are bound gleefully to contend.
Miller knew nothing of this, and knew nothing about Pretti when he tweeted three hours after… Read More »
Donald Trump told the world the U.S. and Israel had launched their attack on Iran at 2:30 a.m. February 28th not even from the White House but from Mar-a-Lago and in a post on Truth Social.
The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war, but Mr. Trump had launched "Epic Fury" as a single individual without the authorization of Congress or even any consultation we know of. He would later say it would last four or five weeks or maybe longer, maybe into the fall. The objective has still not been stated – oil, regime change, missiles, drones. He claimed in a G7 call that Iran "is about to surrender"; 24 hours later Iran's new supreme leader issued his first public statement, a vow to keep fighting.
Trump began calling it an "excursion". Families of service members killed in his war are thus told they died for an "excursion". He said the terms of any negotiated end to the war would have to be "unconditional surrender", evidently not knowing what that meant for lack of his knowledge of our history. The last unconditional surrender by a fanatical nation like Iran was in August 1945 and it took atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trump was born a year after, so how could he know?
Not to worry. When Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade asked, “When are you going to know when it's over?”, Trump responded,
”When I feel it. Ok? Feel it in my bones.”
It used to be guts, how he said he made decisions. Now it’s bones. That’s how this one man decides to war or not to war. He went on:
”Look it's all gonna work out. We took an excursion, we have to do a little excursion to get rid of mad people, crazy… Read More »
The panjandrums of Silicon Valley see a future, largely of their creation, that prompts this warning: If you want to get rich, you'd better be about it, because it won't be possible once AI takes over.
Having spent trillions building an archipelago of data centers across this country and beyond, they will own the technology that runs the world. They few foresee that their infinite wealth will make them a superclass well removed from the rest of us. We will get the crumbs. AI will destroy work and eliminate opportunities for us to generate money, much less get rich. Well get to what that leads to, but first a look at the here and now.
current dataThe effect on jobs is already making itself known. New college graduates are having difficulty finding employment with companies deciding that AI can handle entry-level work.
In January 130,000 net jobs were created. Significantly, health care, not, say, manufacturing, accounted for more than half. The number that drew greatest attention is that, after backward revisions a from laggard data that trickled in, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says only 181,000 net jobs (new hiring offset by jobs lost) were created over the entirety of 2025, about 400,000 fewer than the… Read More »