Friends, it’s Travelogue Time. Join me in Southeast Asia, where we will find maximum law and order.

Singapore is arguably the most lawful country on earth. The tiny city-state could fit into the Atlanta metro area about 30 times, but has the same population (about 6 million), bringing its population density to a steamy 21,350 sweaty humans per square mile. In order for a place like that not to fall quickly into “Lord of the Flies,” there must be law and order: Maximum law and order.

Singapore requires all its citizens to serve in its military. It maintains an army of about 45,000 troops. The SAF is known as the most technically advanced armed forces in the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) states. It boasts about a dozen F-35B advanced fighters, and eight F-35As. Singapore must protect its interests, as it cannot support itself with food, water, or other resources. It is heavily dependent on Malaysia for water.

In Singapore, the Misuse of Drugs act mandates the death penalty for a variety of drug crimes, including possession of 15g of heroine, 30g of morphine, half a kilo of marijuana, or 250g of methamphetamine. Murder always yields a death sentence, as well as kidnapping, gang violence, or assisting a youth or impaired person to commit suicide. The Arms Offenses Act makes use of a firearm in the commission of a crime a death sentence. Terrorism in Singapore is punishable by death. If you want to live in Singapore, don’t do any of these things. Lesser crimes are punished by physical violence, like caning.

Yet, you won’t find the SAF invading other countries. It’s not really needed, as Singapore is rich, and other nations respect its sovereignty. Begun as a British colony in 1819, it remained in the empire until 1942, when the Japanese occupied it during World War II. After the war, political support for independence led to self-governance in 1959, but its dependence on other Southeast Asian nations forced an unwanted union with Malaysia in 1963, which lasted less than two years—Malaysia expelled Singapore from its federation due to cultural and ideological chasms that could never be reconciled.

Singapore goes it alone and the nations leave it be.

Not so with Israel, or Iran. Or America for that matter, at least these days.

Iran is also a lawful country, inside its own borders, and by that I mean Sharia law. There are all kinds of civil laws, but the ones with bite are the ones that prohibit women from going out in public without wearing a hijab. A woman cannot legally obtain a passport or travel document without their husband’s approval. A man can legally marry a girl as young as 13, and fathers can bind their daughters to marriage even younger than that, with court approval.

When it comes to its own sovereignty, meaning the ruling regime’s authority, Iran is lawful to the extreme. Anyone, under “wartime conditions,” which is basically anytime the Supreme Leader says so, the authorities can arrest anyone suspected of standing against the authority of the state. Since the end of February, over 6,000 have been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or executed. And use of force in Iran is perfectly legal, meaning killing tens of thousands of its own people who gather in unity against the regime.

It’s also legal in Iran for the state to fund the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Constitution of the Revolutionary Guards, adopted in 1982 defines IGRC’s mission as protecting the Iranian Revolution, guarding its achievements, and ensuring the integrity of the Islamic Republic. Note that has nothing to do with the civil state of Iran, among nations. The IRGC recognizes no national boundaries in its mission. It can operate wherever it needs to: Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, or underground in western nations. The IRGC reports directly to the Supreme Leader, and is separate from the army (Artesh).

What Iran does is perfectly legal according to its own laws. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is considered their legal right, in their own law.

International law is quite another thing. Flat out, Iran doesn’t recognize it, as it falls outside the regime’s religious foundation. What other countries agree to is useless when the nation’s entire regime is informed by Islamic law and the vision of their religious leaders. Yes, Iran will abide by laws when it benefits the regime’s goals, but those laws are for other nations which are founded on, let’s just say other principles.

So when Iran goes to negotiate “deals” with the U.S., which the U.S., by its own law, when it says it is removing all oil sanctions against Iran, will generally keep (at least for today), Iran doesn’t have to keep any of its own promises, and according to its own law, that’s completely legal.

The U.S., by the standards applied to Iran, is a lawless nation. We make laws and then the very government that passes them, breaks them, ignores, them, subverts them, subrogates their enforcement with parties not constitutionally charged with authority for that purpose, and overall just acts criminally.

I don’t have time, room, or inclination to fill page after page with all the times and deeds of the first, and the current, Trump administration’s violation, trampling, or just plan ignoring, this country’s laws, and getting away with it because Congress doesn’t do a thing about it. From demolishing the East Wing of the White House, starting a war with Iran, renaming the Kennedy Center and then when a judge orders Trump’s name removed, obscuring the building with a tarp. Or attempting to fire the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or to appoint people to run agencies who have not been confirmed by Congress. Of course, Trump is not the only president to do such things, which is why we have the Supreme Court to clip the executive’s wings (or push back on Congress when it does something counter to the Constitution). But the sheer volume and intensity of Trump’s indiscretions and flooding the zone with illegal acts is—well, admirable, that is if you’re a caudillo in a banana republic.

What the U.S. does tends to affect the world. If we erect massive tariffs on foreign goods, as the biggest consumer nation in the world, that affects global commerce. If we bomb a nation that can mine a 28-mile wide strait through which about 50 percent of the world’s raw materials flow, in one form or another, then that nation ends up closing the strait, and the world suffers. If we apply our prodigious special forces capabilities against a South American regime, then that leader ends up wearing a prison jumpsuit.

It is vitally more important to the world that the U.S. be a lawful nation, and not just lawful, but, as so many role-playing character games term it, lawful-good. That we use our laws to do good things, not to advance barbarism, or the religious visions of one sect that seeks to bring about a paradise for their own followers, but death to all others.

I’d go so far as to say that in the post-WWII world order, the United States is the most important nation in the world for the maintenance and validity of international law. If we acted like Iran, not only would we violate our own laws, but we would irreparably damage international law. Said another way: Iran acting like Iran does not affect international law, but we do.

When America decides to attack boats in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, because we suspect the operators of those boats to be drug runners, we are not only violating our own laws, which protect the rights of those accused with criminal action, but international law, which protects the rights of civilians against being struck by another nation’s military. These laws get stretched a lot when it benefits whoever is in the White House’s plans. For example, when President Barack Obama ordered drone strikes against a U.S. citizen living in foreign nation.

When the U.S. military does such actions, they are guilty of murdering civilians, but that guilt flows down from the top. The Trump administration calls the 200-plus who have been killed “narcoterrorists,” but that has not been established by any of our laws, judges, or juries. It’s simply a designation that the administration uses to mean “people we want to kill.” That’s lawless.

And when the U.S. is lawless, then international law suffers. And that hurts our ally in the Middle East, Israel.

Depending on who you ask, either Israel is an empire-seeking apartheid state, or it is defending itself from historical and continual efforts to wipe it off the map, along with all its Jewish inhabitants and the diaspora Jews around the world. If pressed, I am certainly in the second category. If you lined up 20 18-year-olds, dressed similarly, with 10 from Israel and 10 from Gaza or the West Bank, I don’t think most Americans, and even Israelis or Arabs, could pick who is who based on appearance. This is why Israel has to be so strict on checkpoints. If it was easy to pick out Palestinian terrorists from Israelis based on eyeballs, it would be a simple matter to remove terrorists from Israel’s streets. But that’s not so at all. Semitic, Middle-Eastern races look the same. It is the Eastern European and lily-white American Jews who stand out to Tzabrim (Sabras, or native Israelis) as well as Palestinians.

Israel keeps the division of land it controls because it must for its own security. It does a poor job dealing with Israeli settlers building in uninhabited West Bank areas (the land plan based on the Oslo Accords is complicated). It does a poor job protecting the rights of law-abiding, peaceful Palestinians. But so does the Palestinian Authority do a very poor job of protecting those rights, never mind Hamas, who uses its living citizens as human shields, and the dead ones as propaganda. Israel’s situation doesn’t make an apartheid state, where one race believes in its inherent superiority over another. Yes, there are racists and religious zealots in Israel, but they are not the majority. In the Palestinian areas, those who wish to see Israel destroyed and believe that Jews should all be killed are in fact, the majority.

Does Israel have the right to defend itself against this threat, a permanent gun to its head? Of course. Under international law, Israel’s war in Lebanon is legal, and it is supported by the United Nations charter. Not everyone agrees with that conclusion, however. But their objection is not over the fact that Israel should defend itself, it is in the proportional nature of the response versus the threat. The assumptions inherent in the objections don’t hold water, in my opinion. They assume that peace is possibly if Israel does something to appease Hezbollah or Hamas. They assume that since Israel has massive capacity to destroy both civilian and terrorist infrastructure, that it should destroy neither and pull back within its borders, because Lebanon cannot defend itself from the IDF.

What will that accomplish? Hezbollah and Hamas will rearm, and resume their attacks on Israel, and one day, another October 7th will happen again, to the children of those who suffered through the one in 2023. The cycle can only be broken if Hezbollah and Hamas are completely obliterated. Either that, or they win and commit a real genocide against the Jews. The assumptions baked into objections is that those attacking Israel would not commit genocide if they won. I fail to see anyone who can provide the slightest proof of it, as Hamas and Hezbollah have put that particular goal in writing as part of their founding documents. The opposing theory is already proven, however: if Israel wanted to commit genocide and kill every living thing in Gaza, it could and would already have done so. It could similarly make southern Lebanon into the equivalent of the Berlin Wall, with dead-man lines and no-mans land, killing anything that dares to cross.

Israel would rather have a buffer zone, where it controls security but does not kill everything. This has been tried for decades with the U.N. and it has been not only ineffective, but the U.N. “peacekeepers” have been on the payroll of Israel’s enemies. What should a nation do in this situation?

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Back to my original point here. If the U.S is busy sinking speedboats in the Pacific, murdering the people on the boats, in violation of international law. If the U.S. is disingenuously attacking and then giving away the store to Iran, Israel’s neighbor, then what good is acting within the good faith of the U.N. charter, or relying on international law to provide a framework for self-defense?

It’s no good. If the U.S. resorts to “jungle rules,” or more accurately, the way of the Cosa Nostra, to get “a piece of the action” in every situation, then there is no moral foundation for Israel to rely upon. It’s totally an emotional, or racial, or historical argument, and nobody wins those.

At least Iran can say they are being consistent within their own worldview, and hewing to their own laws, if not the world’s understanding of them. The U.S. is breaking its own laws, and trashing the international order to bring about chaos. Perhaps some of the end goals of this are valid—but the methods are not. I can debate policy, but not murder on the sea, or backstabbing allies.

If Israel cannot rely on the U.S. to uphold and validate international law, then it cannot rely on its own morality and laws to protect itself. Our intransigence has betrayed all the goodwill we’ve shown toward Israel. We should repent of it before things get beyond repair.

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The Democratic Socialists have won three Congressional districts from Tuesday’s elections in New York, all endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. From the AP:

The mayor said it was a question of electing “better Democrats” who would “put working people back at the heart of politics.” The approach consternated some in Democratic leadership, but the outcome showcased Mamdani’s rising influence.

What does that mean? It means the insanity will continue on both sides of the aisle, at least for a while. It is also bad for Israel.

There is reason to hope, though. Congress, in a rare show of bipartisan unity, passed a housing bill. Maybe the good feelings will warm hearts and they’ll decide they really can work together again.

Even in the Senate, some Republicans crossed the aisle to rebuke President Trump and his proto-war in Iran, which we’ve already surrendered. Voting to stop a war that we’ve lost before Congress can even act seems an empty victory to me. But at least they are voting for something together, and that’s important. Isn’t it?

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Several polls from this year, including Pew in April and Gallup in February, show that American backing of the Jewish state has softened in recent years and now lags behind American sympathy for the Palestinians. I think there are a multitude of reasons for this shift, including growing anti-semitism on both the left and right, but much of it can be traced to Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks generally and the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu in particular.

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October 7 undoubtedly looms large in recent Israeli actions. The barbaric sneak attack by Hamas was akin to Pearl Harbor or September 11 in American history, but on a much larger relative scale. The 1,200 fatalities on October 7 make it the third most deadly terrorist attack in history, but it ranks first on a per capita basis, with about 1.07 fatalities per 10,000 Israelis (not all of whom are Jewish). Put another way, that represents about 0.01 percent of Israel’s population at the time, roughly equivalent to a death toll of 35,000 Americans from a single event.

There was never any chance that Israel would not respond strongly. We spent two decades fighting a war on terror after a much smaller proportional loss.

It may be that a strong Israeli response was exactly what Hamas (and its Iranian masters) intended. One of my longtime theories is that October 7 was a calculated attempt to kill not only thousands of people, but also an imminent peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Newly unearthed Hamas documents seem to confirm this theory.

Like Osama bin Laden with George Bush, Iran and Hamas may have underestimated the strength of the Israeli response. It’s also possible that Iran was willing to sacrifice Hamas and the people of Gaza for their overarching strategic goals.

Whatever the truth, the tragedy of October 7 was followed by an even greater tragedy in Gaza. It is difficult to determine the true extent of the civilian deaths in Gaza due to Hamas’s nature as a paramilitary organization that blends in with the populace and uses innocent people as human shields, but it is without question horrific. As of May 2025, Israeli military figures estimated 53,000 dead in Gaza, of which only 17 percent were Hamas fighters.

The very nature of the war against Hamas meant that a lot of noncombatants would be killed. Hamas has a long history of hiding its military operations in hospitals, schools, and even United Nations facilities, but Israeli strategy has also led to unnecessary loss of life.

David French, formerly a US Army lawyer, pointed out in 2024 that Israel was making the same mistake that the US made in Iraq (and in Vietnam, for that matter) by clearing areas of Gaza and then withdrawing. Hamas then recaptured the territory, and Israel had to go back and clear them out again. Having to fight repeatedly for the same urban territory rather than using a clear-and-hold strategy means that a lot more innocent people get killed. Occupation is politically unpopular, but it is probably better for the people of Gaza than endless, repetitive war. (As a footnote, Israel occupied Gaza between the Six-Day War of 1967 and 2005 when it unilaterally withdrew. The withdrawal set the stage for two decades of low-intensity conflict with Hamas before October 7.)

Israel has also historically had very strict rules of engagement to minimize civilian casualties, but those rules were loosened after October 7, though the IDF says it still adheres to the Laws of Armed Conflict, something that Hamas does not do. The changes led to attacking targets that were previously off-limits, and predictably, caused more civilian deaths.

Further, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, other causes of death followed the fighting in Gaza. Famine and disease added to the death toll, while the difficulty in getting food and humanitarian aid into the area, sometimes due to Israeli blockades, contributed as well.

Israel’s decline in popularity correlates very closely with its aggressive response in Gaza and mounting civilian deaths, but Israel’s problems don’t stop there. Benjamin Netanyahu’s role in drawing the US into its unpopular and unsuccessful war with Iran has almost certainly added to Israel’s PR problems.

Many believe that Trump did Netanyahu’s bidding in attacking Iran, but that now seems overly simplistic. Netanyahu, working with the Iran hawks in the US government, definitely seems to have driven Trump’s decision to involve the US, but Trump’s break with Netanyahu to pursue peace at any price is evidence that Israel does not pull the strings on US foreign policy. Indeed, Trump seems to have frozen Netanyahu out of the peace process.

At the same time that the US and Israel were attacking Iran, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon in April. Despite the peace deal with Iran, Israel has continued to attack targets in Lebanon and apparently plans a long-term occupation of the southern parts of that country, possibly out of the realization of the failed Gaza strategy. The fighting in Lebanon was likely intended to neuter Hezbollah while Iran had its hands full, but it hasn’t made Israel look any better to the world.

Israeli foreign policy post-October 7 is reminiscent of the scene in “The Godfather” where Michael Corleone takes control of the family business and exacts revenge on the heads of the other crime families, even though he had previously aspired to go completely legit. What is happening now is both a settling of old scores by Capo Netanyahu and an attempt to render the opposition incapable of threatening Israel in the near future.

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That isn’t how things are done in the civilized parts of the world, where uncivilized and murderous terrorist groups don’t sit within missile range right across the border, though. It arguably breaks quite a few international laws to carry out this policy, not unlike our own unprovoked attacks on Venezuela and Caribbean fishing boats, which the US government now admits may have killed victims of human trafficking rather than drug smugglers. We’re still attacking boats, by the way.

In the grand scheme of things, I think Israel is becoming more unpopular because Benjamin Netanyahu is at the helm, and like Donald Trump, Netanyahu does bad things. In fact, the two seem to share a lot in common, including a disdain for democracy and a disregard for the law.

Many may not remember, but before the Gaza war started, Netanyahu was in the midst of his own power grab. Back in 2023, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party forced a bill through the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that would have stripped the Supreme Court of the ability to overturn acts of government. The law drew widespread protests before being narrowly struck down by the Supreme Court.

Even before that, Israelis protested Netanyahu’s corruption. He faced trial on three criminal counts, a situation that is still ongoing, even as the war(s) continue, and he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, for which he will probably never be tried. With all of his scandals, Netanyahu’s trust (approval) rating is at near-Trumpian levels (meaning “not good” for those of you from Rio Lindo).

Republicans in Congress seem tone deaf to the mounting opposition to Netanyahu and Israel. A component of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would more closely link US and Israeli military research and development. Further, the upcoming Intelligence Authorization Act of 2027 would mandate increased intelligence sharing with Israel in a sweetheart deal that would limit presidential discretion not to share data, a detail unique to Israel. This special treatment at a time when most Americans have serious concerns about Israel provides fodder for conspiracy theorists and may further erode trust between the two countries.

Both Trump and Netanyahu share blame for Israel’s increasing unpopularity due to their government corruption and their trigger-happy foreign policies. Further, there is often a slippery slope between criticism of Israel and more general anti-semitism. The Venn diagram between the two contains a lot of overlap, and there are indications that anti-semitism is rising on both sides of the political spectrum.

I’d like to see the US and Israel maintain a special relationship, but also stay at arm’s length. While our national interests often coincide, they often differ as well. Most of all, I’d like to see both countries reject militaristic nationalism, authoritarianism, and corruption. At the moment, Trump and Netanyahu seem to present similar threats to both nations.

I’m reminded of someone who observed a while back that the Bible makes it clear that God loves Israel and the Jews, but it also makes it clear that God does not approve of everything that Israel does. There is no reason that our individual view of Israel should be any different. We don’t do our friends any favors when we rationalize and excuse bad and self-destructive behavior.

PEACH STATE FALLOUT Among the fallout from Georgia’s primary runoff on Tuesday was the decision by state Republicans to step away from their plans for mid-decade redistricting. It isn’t clear whether the redistricting plan is dead or whether it might reemerge in a lame duck session or in the next General Assembly. I would not be surprised if a redistricting plan is passed if Republicans win the state offices in November or if a lame duck session limits state executive powers if Democrats pull off a victory. For details on the redistricting retreat, listen to this episode of Politically Georgia by the AJC.

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Of course, there was a whole series following the takeover of the machines - built by the hands of men, which ultimately became man’s doom. It’s great stuff for the big screen, but not really what you want to see unfolding in real life.

Far from a luddite am I, continually amazed and entertained by emerging technology, I see the advances of humankind on so many fronts, and in myriad ways, our lives have been made better.

I mean, my robovac – PEAK LOVE.

Without an outright condemnation of the tool, let me say AI is fast becoming a danger, as are many forms of technology in the hands of corrupt, unscrupulous, and ultimately, stupid men.

Getting back to art-as-real-life, the background on Skynet is that it was an advanced AI system created to control the nuclear arsenal of the United States. Its initial purpose was for good – national defense. When the machines became self-aware and sentient, they saw humanity, itself, as the real threat, and began a nuclear war, created killbots called “Terminators,” and set about to wipe humans from the face of the earth.

Again, awesome for the big screen, but not so much for real world application.

I’ve gone through all of this to set up for this bit of news recently posted in The Independent.

According to top-ranking defense officials with the Pentagon, the U.S. approved of launching thousands of missiles into Iran, based on guidance from Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok. For those who still delve into the cesspool of white nationalism and MAGA brain-suckling that is the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, you’ve probably used Grok to create funny memes or ask if Musk is a Nazi. The results of what you get back are varied. Most seem to treat it as a party favor or another social media feature, but not something to be utilized in highly sensitive U.S. war maneuvers. Then again, most of us aren’t the blubbering, bumbling, wannabe tough guy, Pete Hegseth. The embarrassingly incompetent, self-named “Secretary of War” has spearheaded countless attacks on unknown civilians in open waters, and has led one war, and by all accounts, lost.

To be clear, I’d trust the local pizza delivery guy to draft war strategy more than I do Hegseth, but even for him, this is beyond the pale. The fact that Musk has been greatly enriched by our government through subsidies and other handouts and was able to push this monstrosity through says a lot about the lack of real leadership or accountability at the highest levels of the administration.

From the article:

In a sworn statement defending the trillionaire from a lawsuit alleging xAI data centers are illegally polluting Black communities, the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence chief said the chatbot’s continued operation is “a matter of paramount national security” — and was used to fire more than “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.”

Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, is among four AI models “currently capable of supporting national security applications,” according to Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer.

The emphasis there is mine.

Is this not Skynet?

For anyone who has dabbled with AI, you’re probably quite aware that it is not a perfect entity, and it is very capable of making mistakes. In fact, many AI sites come with a warning that AI is imperfect, makes mistakes, and suggests double-checking the information it gives.

Getting back to the early days of the war-of-choice with Iran, we must consider the school that was targeted and the lives lost there.

U.S. military investigators believe American forces were likely responsible for a strike on an Iranian girl’s school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, in what analysts and human rights officials believe is the deadliest incident for civilian casualties since the U.S. and Israeli forces began attacking the country in February.

Outside analysts have suggested that the Pentagon’s AI-driven targeting — in addition to human error that failed to check whether target maps were up to date — may have played a role in the bombing.

How lazy and irresponsible must you be to employ flawed technology, with no human hand on the driver’s wheel?

There is a push by some members of Congress to enact legislation that puts more safeguards in place for the use of AI.

A bill from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand would ensure that human commanders would remain in control of making life-and-death decisions and would ban the use of AI entirely when it comes to nuclear weapons, domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons systems.

She saw the movie, obviously.

“The most critical decisions affecting our national security and the lives of our service members must always be made by human beings, not unaccountable machines,” she said in a statement earlier this month.

Skynet. Say it. Skynet.

“Right now, the Pentagon is moving toward deploying incredibly powerful AI technology without commonsense guardrails in place, which could have catastrophic consequences that make all of us less safe,” she added. “We must act now – not to stifle technological progress, but to establish clear rules of the road that keep humans in charge and keep AI’s use in warfare smart and safe.”

Call me crazy, but putting our national security in the hands of a tiny, puffed-up peacock of a man, like Hegseth, and a drug-addled welfare case, scamming our taxpayers out of billions does not seem like the kind of moves that ensure a peaceful and prosperous future. Truly, nothing in our nation seems safe or moving in the right direction, at this point.

I must insist that just like the film, “Idiocracy,” “The Terminator” was not meant to be a blueprint for the future, yet, here we are.

.

It’s easy to grin
when your ship comes in
and you’ve got the stock market beat.
But a man worthwhile
is a man who can smile
when his shorts are too tight in the seat.
—Judge Elihu Smails

If you are under 40 years old, it’s likely you have never heard or read the above, which I say could be apotheosis of all literature. Me? I have it memorized, along with most of the entire script of “Caddyshack,” possibly the best comedy ever filmed, other than “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” Sigh. How I miss Gene Wilder, Rodney Dangerfield, and especially Ted Knight (who very well may be the funniest actor in history). Pardon me for my Boomer sensibilities, but the world today just isn’t as funny as it used to be. I mean, sure, we laugh at it, but there’s a thin-skinned quality to everyone these days that used to only attach to people like Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard M. Nixon.

But let’s talk about another tent full of clowns, and by that, I mean the Georgia Republican Party. If that didn’t wipe the smile from your face, it’s likely you are blissfully not paying attention to politics, and bully for you!

Mike Collins represents the Donald J. Trump district of Georgia in the House of Representatives, and buddied up with Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who has fortunately lost the Republican gubernatorial primary. He’s as much a MAGA man as anyone in the House, and now he’s going to run against Sen. Jon Ossoff, a man whose political rise I have followed with interest for a decade.

In 2017, Democrats poured $30 million into Congressional District 6, which at the time included my home, as an unknown Ossoff took on Karen Handel. At the time, it was the most expensive congressional race in history. Ossoff had the most votes in the jungle election, where all candidates were on the ballot regardless of party, but he fell short of the 50 percent plus one vote to win outright. Handel had the second highest vote count, so they went to a runoff, and Handel won by 9,282 votes.

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Handel only served one term in the House, and was roundly beaten by Democrat Lucy McBath in the midterms. Handel lost again to McBath in 2020, while Ossoff set his sights on the U.S. Senate. Learning from his stinging loss in the runoff to Handel in 2017, I believe Ossoff must have planted a speaker under Donald Trump’s pillow, calling in favors from the White House stewards with whom he forged a drinking relationship during his time as a staffer for Rep. Hank Johnson. I kid—I made that part up. In any case, Trump ordered his MAGA minions to remain home and not vote in the runoff election, which the star-crossed incumbent David Perdue would likely have won, but lost. Both of Georgia’s red seats in the U.S. Senate flipped to blue in a single day due to Trump’s political malpractice.

Sen. Ossoff, the darling of Democrats—young, educated, good-looking, and (as far as we know) with no totenkopf tattoos (Ossoff is Jewish)—is being groomed to run for president. He will be difficult for Collins to beat. Ossoff has a war chest of about $31 million, and will raise much more before November. I am sure Republicans will open up the piggy bank and $100 million is not out of the question, so the race might hit $250 million total. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went higher.

Gov. Brian Kemp endorsed the man who lost to Collins, Derek Dooley, who lowered his sights from being head coach of Louisiana Tech and the University of Tennessee football programs, in order to enter politics. I hope he learned his lesson, along with Herschel Walker and anyone else who thinks it’s a good idea to switch from a high-paying sports job to running for office. Just because Tommy Tuberville can do it doesn’t mean it works for anyone.

Kemp also endorsed Burt Jones. I don’t know what spider crawled into the governor’s brain for that decision, but I think it might have something to do with having Rick Jackson, billionaire, ticking him off. My original strategy was to vote for Brad Raffensperger in the Republican primary for governor, then pivot to Jackson if it ended up in a runoff between Jones and Jackson. But I changed my mind after Jackson’s hubris made itself evident. Plus, Jackson seems to be willing to say or claim anything to win—his $100 million personal investment has to pay off. He said he wants to be a mini-Trump. He implied Gov. Kemp supported him. Both Trump and Kemp endorsed his opponent.

Nonetheless, Jackson’s money won the race, on the backs of Fulton County Republicans, where he won by 20 points. In the general election, he faces Keisha Lance Bottoms, who goes by just Keisha Bottoms now. Bottoms will get no love from MAGA voters, but I believe she will be a solid candidate for Jackson to beat. Democrats will again pour a bank vault of money into the race. The billionaire versus the Black woman, former mayor of Atlanta versus the healthcare tycoon, will be an interesting campaign.

What I do know is that Jackson won’t be able to count on Fulton County, it’s going to go Bottoms in the general election. The question is if he can be MAGA enough to carry the rest of the state, which voted for Burt Jones in the primary and the runoff. I expect Jackson to drape himself in the Trump flag and claim he will be best buddies with people like Ken Paxton. Or whatever he has to say to win. The question is: will it be enough? I don’t know.

But I feel like Judge Smails’ grandson Spaulding ordering at the snack bar. “You’ll get nothing and like it!” Either I will have a governor who will say or claim anything (and I can’t believe any of it) to get the job, while his company has multi-million dollar contracts with the state he would govern, or a governor who wants to legalize casino gambling state-wide, and presided over a city that had its entire computer system hacked on her watch.

In the Senate, I’ll either watch Ossoff prepare his presidential aspirations, or watch in horror as MAGA keeps the senate majority. If I were a party man, I’d try to muster some joy. But I am not a man worthwhile after all.

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In the American Revolutionary War, the 42nd Regiment of Foot (Black Watch), a Highland regiment of Scots, fought in several battles. The 71st Regiment (Fraser’s Highlanders) fought in the south, all the way to Yorktown. None of the Highlanders fought in Boston. Had they, perhaps Henry Knox would not have had his cannon on Dorchester Heights, and maybe history would have gone a different way in 1775. We’d be drinking to the King of England, God Save Him!

Well, the Scots have conquered Boston in 2026, not with arms, but with kilts and love and beer. God bless them! Fifty thousand Highlanders have descended upon the Hub, partying, drinking, wearing kilts, and giving the Boston Red Sox a dose of their incredible fan energy. And it works: Scotland’s World Cup team beat Haiti and gets to play again in the stadium where the Patriots will return later this summer.

Again, I am so happy that the world is here in America for the World Cup. They are giving us so much to be thankful for, and they are feeling the love here too. It’s the best 250 celebration we could ever ask for.

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This deal could be the worst deal ever, and Trump would still tout the fact that a deal was made and call it the greatest diplomatic victory in world history. Assuming that the end is finally here, which is not necessarily a safe assumption with Netanyahu and Israel not playing ball, those predictions seem to have been fulfilled.

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As I pointed out, Trump really needed to make a deal to get oil flowing again and keep gas prices from skyrocketing before the midterms. There are several big questions about the deal, not least the question of exactly what Trump just agreed to, but also whether the framework will restore the oil trade and save the Republicans from midterm voter anger.

Right now, we don’t know a lot about the contents of the deal, but we do know that a lot of Trump supporters (and anti-anti-Trumpers) who are Iran hawks are angry about what seems to be a capitulation, while other, more cultish Trump supporters are simply cheering the fact that a deal was made. More ideological Trumpists are concerned about the future of the Persian Gulf, while Trump partisans, who applaud anything and everything Trump does, are just concerned about Trump’s popularity and the effect on the midterms and his continued power.

I think one thing that we can be sure of is that oil prices will decline in the short term. Over the past few months, it has become apparent that the markets like hints of peace. Oil prices fall at the mere suggestion of a possible deal, and financial markets soar when oil prices fall. At the very least, it seems likely gas prices will not be astronomical for the remainder of the summer travel season, but they probably won’t be as low as the status quo antebellum.

Don’t expect Trump supporters to make this distinction. They’ll credit Trump for the fact that gas prices are coming down without any regard for the fact that Trump caused gas prices to spike in the first place. It will be another case of “Trump Solves Problem Created By Trump.”

The next question would be how long the peace will last. Netanyahu refuses to be bound by the deal and says Israeli troops won’t be withdrawn from Lebanon. If Israel keeps fighting in Lebanon, and Iran retaliates by striking targets in the Persian Gulf or clamping down on access to the Strait of Hormuz, this may be the shortest peace deal since Trump’s last Persian Gulf ceasefire.

Let’s assume the current ceasefire does more or less hold and that Iran allows shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Will those relative victories avert a Republican cataclysm in the midterms?

That’s a nah from me, dawg, and I’ll give you a few reasons why. Most obviously, Trump and Republicans will still need to answer for why they started - and lost - an unnecessary war. All other things being equal, Republicans are going to have to explain why they spent hundreds of billions of dollars (not counting the money they may or may not be giving to Iran), killed 13 and injured scores of American soldiers, depleted stocks of munitions that leave us vulnerable elsewhere, and, in the end, left Iran richer and strategically stronger than it was before the war. Trump’s war achieved none of his stated goals, and it doesn’t look like Iran will even give up its enriched nuclear material.

Voters may not care about theoretical issues on the other side of the world if there is no active shooting and dying, but that still does not mean that Republicans are out of the woods. Prices are still elevated, and not just for gas. Food prices were up even before the war, driven partly by Trump’s trade wars.

The price of food will likely remain high for the time being and may get worse before it gets better. Much of the world’s fertilizer came through the Strait of Hormuz, and the supply was effectively cut off during the war. Prices spiked for the available supply. This means that the cost of growing food was more expensive this year, and crop yields may be lower. Those costs will be passed along to consumers.

In fact, many of Trump’s policies directly contribute to higher prices. In addition to the war and its associated energy and fertilizer spikes, the tariffs that Trump schemes to keep in place despite court rulings that strike them down and the war on immigrants also create upward pressure on prices.

Pocketbook issues often drive voters. If that’s the case this year, Republicans can expect a shellacking as voters watch grocery prices rise while they see clips of Trump saying, “I love inflation.”

Nothing seems to be going well under the Trump regime. From disastrous foreign policy to spending millions on the reflecting pool only to have the water promptly turn green from an algae bloom, the meme that Everything Trump Touches Dies (#ETTD) is on display on a daily basis, and with Trump putting his name on everything, it’s difficult for voters to avoid making the connection.

Even traditional Republican issues like immigration have seen an erosion in voter approval and trust. In particular, there has been widespread dissatisfaction with Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement, especially among the independent and Hispanic voters who helped put Trump and Republicans over the top in 2024.

As it stands now, Republicans will be arguing that inflation is good, food prices aren’t as bad as consumers think they are, pallets of cash for Iran were bad under Obama but even more cash from Trump is good, and that taxpayers should pony up $600 million for a presidential ballroom at a time when many are worried about how to pay for their next meal. That’s not only tone-deaf, it’s also politically disastrous. Republicans might as well campaign under the slogan, “Let them eat cake.”

And all this assumes that Trump will be on his best behavior and won’t do anything to create more bad news for Republicans before Election Day. Friends, I’m here to tell you that won’t happen. There is no way that Trump can go four months without creating a plethora of new messes. By next week, let alone four months from now, he may have declared war on Greenland or who knows what?

There are not many consistent things about Donald Trump, but there are a few. One is that he will never give up on tariffs, no matter how much they strangle the economy. Find someone who loves you as much as Donald Trump loves tariffs (and himself).

Another major point of consistency is that Donald Trump cannot go long without being in the limelight. That’s true even if he gets in the limelight by doing crazy and destructive things. That’s going to be true between now and the midterms as well, and you can take that to the bank.

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In a secret deal, President Barack Obama authorized the release of $1.7 billion dollars from the Judgment Fund, which exists to settle claims against the United States. That fund holds taxpayer money. The money was wired to the central banks of Switzerland and the Netherlands, where it was converted into a combination of Euros and Swiss Francs—cash money. This cash was loaded onto pallets and moved to the tarmac of the Geneva airport.

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On word from U.S. officials, Swiss personnel loaded the pallets of cash onto the Iran Air 737, which then flew to Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran. The money was deposited into the Central Bank of Iran. The Iranian regime didn’t use it to better the lives of Iranians—it was ordered to be transferred to the Iranian military. That money was given to the IGRC and used to fund terrorist activities. The U.S. gave Iran terrorist blood money in exchange for five prisoners. We paid $340 million per hostage for people few had even heard of.

The cash payment deal was kept secret for a whole year and made public only days before Donald Trump was sworn in as 45th President of the United States.

Not to be outdone, now President Trump, as 47th POTUS, has signed a secret deal with Iran. We all know there’s a deal, because both Iran and Trump have announced it. What we don’t know it what’s in the deal. Iran claims that the U.S. has agreed to release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Trump posted on Truth Social:

The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow! President DONALD J. TRUMP

The “deal” is a one and a half page Memorandum of Understanding, an MOU, that sets a framework for a more permanent agreement. Trump denied that Iran would receive cash as part of the deal, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. Again on Truth Social, he posted:

Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon! Also, the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!! President DJT

The deal to open the Strait of Hormuz juiced the oil market, lowering prices on Brent Crude to $83/bbl and U.S. crude to $80. Average prices at the pump have dipped below $4 per gallon. But the strait is not fully open, and won’t be for months. It takes a lot of time to clear mines from the narrow waterway, at least to do it safely (and there’s no other way and sane ship captain would do it).

And then there’s Israel. Israeli officials and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assert that Israel is not bound by the U.S.-Iran MOU, if the terms include a cease-fire in Lebanon. Israel plans to keep its troops in southern Lebanon and to keep striking Hezbollah, while Hezbollah shows no intention of stopping rocket fire and drone activity against Israel. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC. The Israel factor could sink this deal.

But $25 billion is a strong incentive for Iran to play along, at least until it has the cash.

My problem with this deal is that it’s secret, and there’s cash involved, and we know where the cash will go. President Obama gave Iran $1.7 billion that funded the IRGC and terrorists. Now President Trump may outdo that by nearly a factor of 15 times. We need to know what’s in the secret unpublished MOU. We need to know it before one red cent flows into the Central Bank of Iran, and gets transferred to the IRGC to be used to attack our interests—and Israel. The money will undo everything that this entire military operation sought to accomplish.

President Trump: Reveal the deal.

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In fact, I think it’s far more pernicious for aliens to mess with your mind, overriding your humanity in order to make you their slave, or at least a docile accomplice in your own abduction, than for them to simply snatch you.

Forty-nine years after Steven Spielberg made “Close Encounters,” he has circled back to what I’d say is his favorite topic: alien life on earth. If you dismiss three of the four Indiana Jones movies, as the first one was a favor to George Lucas and two of the others were to make bank (and work with Sean Connery), aliens is Spielberg’s top plot topic. After “Close Encounters,” there was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “War of the Worlds,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” and the newest, “Disclosure Day.”

Out of 32 Spielberg-directed movies (again, not counting three of the Indiana Jones films), no other topic is returned to again and again more than aliens. Many of the movies have the same elements: a government agency that knows the truth, a hero who makes contact and escapes or thwarts the antagonist, and with the exception of “War of the Worlds,” the knowledge or contact with aliens improves mankind. But “War of the Worlds” is itself a remake, and I’d say Spielberg was true to the original—the aliens were terrifying, and the ending was exactly as the story demanded.

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“Disclosure Day” is more like a fusion of “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” which, by what I’ve read (I have not seen the movie) comes out looking like “Men in Black” as a horror film. The world finds out that aliens exist, and the mysterious “Wardex” organization is thwarted in its mission to keep that information secret. Good movie stuff, and as usual, exquisitely directed by Spielberg, the master storyteller.

It’s Sunday, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t link this to faith.

Movies are fun, but there’s a spiritual element to the stories we enjoy and tell ourselves over and over again. Are there aliens? I don’t know. A better question is “are there aliens that people on earth know about and haven’t told us?” I’d say no. Alien life would be the biggest story in the history of news, and other than the resurrection of Jesus Christ, would occupy a singular point on a calendar where the world was changed forever. There is no way this story could be covered up. “Disclosure Day” is more accurate in its plot that someone, somewhere, would seek to leak it.

Where the world and movie stories differ is that there would be no way a government agency, or a multi-government consortium, would be able to control, murder, or otherwise silence people who know this truth, were it true. There would be no possibility of herding enough cats to keep the aliens story under wraps. Their best play would be to put it all out there and let people not believe it. There’s plenty of people who don’t believe we landed on the moon. If the government released pictures of actual aliens and their technology—especially this administration—a large number of people would dismiss it as lies.

The fact that the current administration has released files regarding aliens and it’s a big nothingburger indicates to me that there’s no story there, no actual news. There is no government or agency on earth that has definitive proof of alien life, otherwise it would be known. That’s my argument and I’m sticking to it. Feel free to disagree.

But the spiritual aspect of this is also evident. The Bible says that at the second coming of Christ, we will all know of His arrival, all over the world, at once. And at that moment, “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.” And then, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” This was recorded by Paul, in his first letter to the church at Thessaloniki. He said we are to encourage one another with these words.

It’s always been a mystery how the entire world will know of the Lord’s return at the instant it happens. In Romans 14, Paul quotes the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah 49:18:

Lift up your eyes around and see;
they all gather, they come to you.
As I live, declares the Lord,
you shall put them all on as an ornament;
you shall bind them on as a bride does.

Paul wrote, “For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God,” then “each of us will give an account of himself to God.” (Romans 10:10-12.)

It’s been a bigger mystery to me how the entire world will be under a massive delusion. In 2 Thessalonians, Paul wrote extensively in the first 12 verses of chapter 2 “concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him.” Those verses conclude with “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” In what manner will the delusion arrive?

You might think I’m crazy, but I see the delusion is already here. The world has instant global communication. Nearly everyone has a smartphone, and information can be delivered simultaneously throughout the entire planet. This has never been possible through all of history, but it is now, and it’s becoming so pervasive that there will soon be nowhere on earth we can go without instant access to information.

The return of Jesus Christ will certainly be the biggest news story in the world. So will the appearance of aliens. I believe these stories will happen nearly simultaneously. And while not every Christian believes the rapture of the church will happen in a particular time—before the tribulation and the great tribulation, where awful things happen on the earth and many will perish—what would the world of unbelievers think at the disappearance of possibly a billion people? Is it aliens? Is it the fulfillment of scripture?

Either way, the entire world will know, instantly.

The delusion is not a new idea in scripture. King David wrote of it in Psalm 62:9; the prophet Jeremiah wrote of it three times, in 3:23, 10:15, and 51:18. Isaiah wrote:

Who declared it from the beginning, that we might know,
and beforehand, that we might say, “He is right”?
There was none who declared it, none who proclaimed,
none who heard your words.
I was the first to say to Zion, “Behold, here they are!”
and I give to Jerusalem a herald of good news.
But when I look, there is no one;
among these there is no counselor
who, when I ask, gives an answer.
Behold, they are all a delusion;
their works are nothing;
their metal images are empty wind.

(Isaiah 41:26-29.)

In Jerusalem, and to the ends of the earth, we will have two competing stories, that will consume the entire world. There will be the story that Steven Spielberg and so many others are obsessed with, that aliens exist and will make themselves known, and the other story that Jesus Christ has returned for His church, and at that point, what each person believes will determine their eternal destiny. For at the time of His revelation to the world—the real disclosure—every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess, every mind will understand, that the end has come.

For centuries none of this was decipherable. It simply could not happen. But “in the fullness of time” that Paul wrote of in Galatians 4 regarding the birth of Christ, and when the time will arrive for His coming, it is more plausible, even likely, that we will know how we will learn of it. The “trumpet of God” could mean many things, but there is no doubt we will know of it.

Steven Spielberg’s alien tale may be a story of secret organizations and “disclosure,” but all has been written down two millennia ago. Christians only need to wait and remain faithful to the Word of God. When the aliens are in the kitchen, I am convinced we will know the truth.

Or believe in aliens. Your choice.

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A US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed into the Persian Gulf and the pilots were rescued by a drone boat, an apparent first. Trump blamed an Iranian drone for the crash and called for retribution, even though it wasn’t apparent that the collision was intentional.

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Trump launched attacks, and the Iranians launched counterattacks. Trump went to the brink, once again threatening to invade Kharg Island, raising the hopes of war hawks once again before abruptly canceling further strikes and, once again, claiming that a deal was imminent.

You can be excused if you’ve lost track of how many ground attacks have been averted and how many peace deals have been imminent. You can also be excused if the brief flare up in Iran seems a convenient distraction to the bad economic news that also includes a growing trade deficit. I mean, what are a few more Iranian lives in grand scheme of midterm elections?

Things aren’t going well, either at home or abroad. Trump is out of his depth and acting erratically. His policies aren’t working, just as most experts warned, and now he has no idea what to do except lash out at his enemies and cling to his alternate reality.

Republicans are heading into midterms with messaging that inflation is good, high gas prices are good, and endless wars are now not so bad, especially when they end every few weeks.

I haven’t written this week, partly because I’ve been busy at work, but also because I don’t really know what to say. If this was a movie, no one would buy the plot because it’s so stupid.

The Democrats are pretty obviously going to win the midterms, but we chose Donald Trump, and now we have to deal with the consequences of our actions. Barring a sudden attack of stiff spines among the remaining Republicans, we are stuck with Trump for at least another two years. All I can really tell you is that it’s going be a wild ride.

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One time years ago, I flew a rented Cessna 172 down to Homosassa Springs, Florida, to check out a business deal. I had my young employee with me. We tried to make it home ahead of the weather, but couldn’t get through the line of storms stretching from the panhandle to Jacksonville, despite a lot of trying all night. We were offered the couch at a small airport FBO, but one of our attempts ended up locking us out of the building. We really wanted to get home, because it was my employee’s birthday the next day. About one in the A.M., we walked about five miles to the closest motel. On the sign-in, they wanted a license plate number, so I wrote the tail number of the Cessna. The next morning, bright and early, we checked out and began the long walk back to the airport. The motel clerk changed out of her bathrobe, got in her minivan, and caught up to us: “get in.”

People here are that way. In New York City, if you’re lost, someone will spend an hour leading you to your destination. Sure, 99 percent of people will ignore you, on their way to somewhere, but someone won’t, and every New Yorker knows it. People in L.A. (the ones not on drugs and homeless) will give you food if you’re hungry. In just about any town in this country, the locals will go out of their way to be friendly to strangers. You know the phrase “the European mind cannot comprehend”? Yes, there are friendly people in Europe and other places, but not like here. I’ve been to Europe, all over. I know.

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Our president has tried so hard to make America’s 250th birthday into a glitzy, shiny celebration. Not even D-list has-been one-hit wonder groups that can’t get a gig at a Bar Mitzvah will associate themselves with the president. At the Knicks-Spurs game at Madison Square Garden, President Trump was roundly booed as his image appeared on the jumbotron. That’s America, the place that’s free.

This year, America turns 250, and the our gifts are to the world. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV, is an American from Chicago. The World Cup (all rights reserved to FIFA) is here in the U.S. That’s our gift. The world is coming here to see a place, a society, like nowhere else in the world, with a people that have never existed in the history of mankind. A country that was “written into existence,” wordsmithed by the best, brightest, and most radical colonists who could no longer bear the weight of rulers an ocean away. At the time of our revolution, European nations had colonies, and that’s how the world ran. We broke the system.

Europeans and others who love Futbol (soccer to us) in a way the American mind cannot comprehend, other than to compare it to the most ardent Georgia Bulldogs fan who never misses a game and tailgates like a pro, are flooding into this country, all over America, to watch their sport. Their minds are instantly blown if they’ve never been here before.

A road trip around America is inconceivable to most non-North Americans. Drive all day, still in the U.S.A. Drive all night, you’re still here. Drive eight hundred miles, and you’re still in Texas. You can start in Scotland, take the Chunnel, and drive all the way to Madrid and it still wouldn’t get you from Boston to Miami. America is truly huge, in a way we, who live here, don’t understand from the rest of the world’s point of view. We are continentals.

I was reminded of this watching the X account FreddyLA7, who has been traveling around the U.S. to watch World Cup games. He was recently at Auburn, in their football stadium, watching the War Eagle fly around and fireworks blast from the scoreboards. Mind blown.

What other place has Buc-ees, a giant gas station that sells really good brisket, and practically everything else. A Buc-ees store manager makes above six figures in salary, for keeping the customers happy and the bathrooms sparkling. And like me, Freddy (a German) got picked up by a hotel desk receptionist and driven five miles to the stadium, because she noticed he and his friends were walking to avoid the Uber charge.

This tweet sums up America 250: “The World Cup is quickly reminding Americans how amazing our country is, how lucky we are to be American and able to call this place home.”

It’s not just home, though it is to us. It’s a place the rest of the world can come to and be treated to our friendship, our generosity, our gigantic hearts, over-the-top displays of riches beyond their imagination, and take that positive experience with them.

Anyone who drives around America knows this, first hand. And literally a million people from everywhere are coming to America to help us celebrate our 250th birthday. We don’t need anything else, thank you. Our gift is ‘Murica, not our military might, or our money, or “respect” on the world stage. Our gift is that we are a people who have never before existed on this planet, born 250 years ago in ink, treasure, and blood. We have walked through a garden of sin and evil, and still emerged able to treat visitors kindly, and give rides to German soccer fans.

If you’re too ate up in politics, ask someone who is not from here how much they love this place, not for our politics, but for everything we are.

‘Murica is beautiful. It is the best country in the world, without peer. Don’t you forget it.

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One thing observant readers might notice is that the top four companies on the humongous list are intimately involved with AI. Part of that is because OpenAI has not yet completed its planned IPO, though it’s current estimated value is about $850 billion, after massive investments from Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia, all of which are in the top five. Anthropic just raised $65 billion in a funding round led by investment capital firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, putting their valuation above OpenAI at $965 billion.

And the king of them all is Nvidia, which makes the chips that power the servers that sit in the data centers that train the generative AI neural nets, which we, the public, use to fix our toilet, or pick stocks, or sell our home. At least Nvidia actually makes a physical product.

By now, you’re asking what the headline is about, because, Steve, you know SpaceX makes a physical product, right? Yes, I know, they make rockets. Good rockets. The best rockets on earth, I’d say. And as Elon Musk posted in response to Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explosion at Cape Canaveral, “Rockets are hard.”

But rockets are not the main product SpaceX sells these days, at least not from the point-of-view of cash flow. SpaceX’s xAI component runs all the massive data center capacity and the Grok AI, including the giant 785,000 square foot Colossus facility near Memphis. Inside, there are 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs training that AI, among other things. SpaceX just signed an agreement with Google, where Google pays SpaceX $920 million a month to lease “compute,” which is the industry slang word for computing power. The three-year deal is worth about $30 billion, or about 160 percent of SpaceX’s latest annual revenue (2025, $18.65 billion, according to SEC filings).

Based on these revenues and the growth of SpaceX’s rocket business, and its StarLink Internet service, Morgan Stanley predicted a salivating number: up to $3.4 trillion in revenue by 2040, making it four and half times the size of the current leader in annual sales, Amazon, and five times the No. 2, Walmart. Such numbers raise the eyebrows of people in the financial industry, and certainly people who understand both rockets and the economics of data centers and the future of AI.

I must say that Elon Musk’s strategy of placing his most cash-intensive business under his most valuable leader in technology is brilliant. SpaceX is a cash cow that can feed its money, and leverage its massive valuation to fund the AI boom, while keeping itself completely insulated as basically the only human-rated rocket company capable of keeping America in the space race, and getting our astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station.

But “brilliant” doesn’t mean it’s a good investment.

Let me delve into a little history, 672 words of history, which, if you like, you can skip, by going forward six paragraphs.

Have you ever heard of Jay Cooke? If you’re not a student of Gilded Age or Civil War history, or a fan of 1860s-80s railroads, or a geek who watches YouTube videos about The Bizarre Race to Build the Transcontinental Railroad, you may not have heard of him. Cooke was a small-time banker, whose younger brother Henry published a newspaper in their native Sandusky, Ohio. Cooke’s political connections with Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase got his tiny firm, Jay Cooke & Company, the exclusive contract to sell U.S. “Five Twenty” war bonds during the Civil War. From this, Cooke became immensely wealthy. His opulent wealth and public fame (he owned a lavish estate, Ogontz, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and a private island on Lake Erie) made him the very profile of a Gilded Age financier.

But Cooke’s main historical connection is in railroads. He is a major and recurring character in historian Richard White’s book “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.” He was part of one of the largest fleece operations, of both the government (the U.S., Canada, and even Mexico), and mom-and-pop investors, that built the Transcontinental Railroads, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Those roads were completed in the most slipshod, and fastest, methods, in order to garner the generous per-mile bounty paid by the U.S. government, along with enormous land rights running ten miles on each side of the tracks. The railroads were paid to meander their tracks as long as possible to gain the most bounty, as long as they did it fast. Both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific used immigrant labor (mostly Chinese), and the Union Pacific paid Civil War veterans to kill buffalo and American Indians.

The list of crimes and sins of these two companies are far too long to delve into here. I recommend you read White’s book if you want more detail.

But the biggest sin is perhaps decades of lies by many people who became filthy rich from the construction and raping of the American prairie and mountains, while they connected (sort of) coast-to-coast in our Manifest Destiny to own this continent. The Central Pacific railroad for years filed fictional, completely fraudulent annual reports with the California Secretary of State. The infamous Credit Mobilier, which built the Union Pacific railroad, created a back-slapping, interconnected group of businessmen, politicians and families who all said to each other “we’re not criminals!” as they proceeded to commit every possible financial crime imaginable, from stock manipulation, to causing entire banks to fail, in order to protect their ring of lies.

The group of owners of the Central Pacific included such revered people as Leland Stanford, the former California governor who founded Stanford University. He was in on every lie, manipulation, and financial shakedown that laid tracks from Sacramento to Promontory Point, Utah, a ghost town that never really existed except for the public photos of Stanford hammering the “golden spike” that sent a telegraph message to across the continent to both shores. There is literally nothing at Promontory Point other than the Golden Spike. The cycle of fleecing went on through the Canadian Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad, which was one step over the line: there is always a pin that pops the bubble.

In 1873, when the entire railroad speculation bubble burst, Jay Cooke was ruined. He went, in the span of one week, from hosting President Ulysses Grant, to ordering his Ogontz estate to be shuttered. This event kicked off years of economic downturn, bank failures, and depression in America. The criminals who engineered the bubble were never prosecuted, punished or jailed. Gilded Age figures such as Jay Gould and Leland Stanford kept their respect and their wealth—Gould left $72 million ($2 billion today) to his children, who promptly squandered it over decades of mismanagement. The only judgement these people faced was the one each of us faces when we meet our maker. But don’t worry about Cooke, he rebuilt his fortune by investing in a Utah silver mine.

The losers in 1873 were the people who bought Jay Cooke’s bonds, which were used to finance a railroad that could not be built, because there was no economic reason for it to exist. There was also no economic reason for the original transcontinentals to exist, because nobody lived in the places the railroad went, other than American Indians. But our patriotic duty was to build the railroads and connect our continent. So people invested. The people who knew railroads did not invest. The ones who put up other people’s money to build the roads profited off their financial deals, while the banks and investors repeatedly got fleeced by the lies and illegal operations of the financiers.

There is a reason SpaceX’s IPO has reserved 30 percent of the shares for retail investors, far more than most public offerings. There is a reason the underwriters and investment bankers are okay with the public buying up SpaceX shares, and why Morgan Stanley has advanced such ridiculously sanguine estimates of the company’s potential. This is because people with money who know the AI industry, data center economics, and space operations don’t value SpaceX at its $130 initial share price.

Like the Credit Mobilier, which was created to profit off the building of the Union Pacific railroad, which was guaranteed by government bonds, and paid for by bounties authorized by Congress, while absolving itself from the responsibility of actually running a profitable railroad, SpaceX is a company which is absolving itself from the current AI bubble, or having to run a profitable rocket company. In fact, the money spent on data centers and AIs will keep SpaceX in the red, up to around $60 billion, for years.

Elon Musk is the Jay Gould, or the Leland Stanford, of today. He, along with the people running OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, and yes, even Jeff Bezos of Amazon, are the club that curries favor in Congress, at the White House, and with people who suffer from FOMO, who will plunk down cash to buy SpaceX shares, and be part of the effort to go to Mars. We simply must go to Mars, because Elon says so. It is the destiny of the planet. We must build Starlink V3, using Starship rockets, which will (?) take us to the surface of the moon.

The unholy cluster of self-promoting, cross-investing, and market manipulating companies that make up the top of the valuation list today is heading for a bubble pop. Nvidia makes the chips that are used by companies building data centers to train generative AIs that have little to no chance of being the vehicle that carries compute to General Artificial Intelligence. Generative AIs hallucinate, make terrible mistakes, write wooden literature, and create visual slop that is frequently damaging to real people, and used by actual criminals to commit cybercrime.

Like the railroads of 1873, there is always a pin to pop the bubble. I don’t know what that pin will be, but I can guarantee someone is concocting a scheme to make money off it. Some people will be ruined, only to rebuild their wealth. Some will get off scot free (likely Musk, Bezos, Sam Altman and their buddies).

The ones who will be left holding the bag are the people emptying their life savings to go to Robin Hood and buy SPCX. Those are the people, the marks, the suckers, that the new Gilded Age industrialists and barons—Elon Musk is today’s Collis P. Huntington—who lie as easily as they wag their tongues, count on to place their trust, their confidence, in projects that will make money for nobody except those who foist their grand plans on the public.

If you buy SPCX at the offering price, y’all are suckers.

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A few weeks ago, I said that the Iran war was ending with a whimper, rather than with a bang. Even before that, when the war first started, I said that war with Iran was easier to start than finish, noting, “The US excels at tactical warfare. It’s the long-term, strategic thinking that we tend to have problems with.”

Three months later, my observation from early March that the “most likely scenario is that Trump finds something to call a victory and walks away” seems to have hit the nail on the head.

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I’ve lost count of the ultimatums that have been demanded and ignored over the last couple of months. Iran hasn’t given an inch to Trump’s demands, and now the president says he “couldn’t care less” if negotiations are over. With no negotiations and no fighting (at least not serious fighting), the war with Iran seems to be in a Korea-like limbo, with the exception that Iran is now strategically better off than it was before the war started.

Yes, Iran maintains a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz with only a trickle of shipping running the gauntlet. Both the US and Iran are letting a few ships transit in their respective lanes of protection, but the numbers remain about 90 percent below pre-war levels.

The low number of tankers leaving the Persian Gulf has resulted in steadily declining stockpiles of oil. The price of oil has remained relatively steady since hostilities simmered, based on the assumption that Trump is ending the war and reports that a deal is near.

“When the President forces this conflict to a successful end, gas prices will drop back to multi-year lows and global energy markets will be much more stable in the long term,” White House officials told the Washington Post.

But ending the war is proving to be difficult. Iran has reportedly broken off negotiations, demanding that Israel halt its attacks in Lebanon. Iran’s action has caused a rift between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, with Trump confirming that he called the Israeli leader “crazy” in an expletive-filled phone call in which the two discussed their “tactical disagreements.”

If you want to understand who is winning and who is losing, just look at which side is ignoring the other’s demands and which is scrambling to make a deal.

As I’ve pointed out previously, Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place. He can’t afford to openly admit defeat, but he also can’t afford to let the energy crisis drag on. Both are poison for the midterms.

And now the corner that Trump has painted himself into is getting smaller. In a bipartisan vote, the House passed a war powers resolution on Wednesday that would limit the president’s ability to launch new attacks. The measure must pass the Senate to become binding, but does not have to be signed by the president. Even without passing the Senate, the measure’s passage in the House is an indication of the war’s unpopularity and Republican division on the issue.

Many of Trump’s Iran problems are self-made. The Administration’s plan seems to have been to follow the Venezuela model of a decapitation strike, followed by replacing Iran’s leadership with an ally, in this case, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whether this was a good idea to begin with or not is moot, because the plan fell apart when Ahmadinejad was injured in airstrikes in the early days of the war. The former president is no progressive, even though he was under house arrest by the current regime, and was a bogeyman of the right for years while in office.

Likewise, Trump created difficulties with Congress and the public by choosing a go-it-alone approach. Trump failed to even attempt to make a case for war before launching the attacks, probably gambling that the Ahmadinejad gambit would win the war before opposition could build. When the secret plan failed, there was no Plan B.

Trump also did not attempt to talk Congress into supporting the war. The end of major hostilities coincided closely with the 60-day limit specified by the War Powers Act, and the Administration made no serious attempt to get congressional approval for extended hostilities.

Large-scale strikes may have ended, but a low-intensity conflict continues. The US maintains a blockade on Iranian oil, an act of war in itself, and Iran continues to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides are also still shooting. The US recently attacked Iranian air defense sites, and possibly in retaliation, Iran has attacked Kuwait and Bahrain.

The status quo might last indefinitely if not for the elephants in the room: The energy crisis and the dwindling oil supplies. At some point, Trump is going to have to make a decision to either go all-in and restart the war in a major way to force open the Strait or to make a deal to get oil supplies flowing again.

There really isn’t much question as to which course he will choose. Even without increasing constraints from Congress, the president would likely order the TACO from the menu. If Trump had any intention of escalating the conflict, he would have done so two months ago. The chances of escalation are inversely proportional to the length of time until the midterms.

In the meantime, the Trump Administration has adopted the Alfred E. Neuman attitude of “What? Me worry? with a social media post saying, “It will all work out well in the end - it always does.” Or maybe it’s a dog whistle to the QAnon slogan, “Trust the plan.” There is really no evidence that Trump has a plan, however, and, as Republicans used to tell Democrats, hope is not a plan.

The irony is that Trump was elected in large part because Republicans saw him as a fighter. What will happen to the movement when MAGA realizes that he not only lost the only real fight that he’s ever had but that he backed down in the face of Iranian resistance?

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Pelley, 68, could have retired to his former Connecticut estate, an 8,000 square foot, five-bedroom, seven-bath home on 2.4 acres—well no, he couldn’t. He sold it in 2021, at a loss of $1.25 million; Pelley paid $4 million for it in 2007. He now lives at a 24-acre ranch in Texas, which Page Six reportedly was told was a “vacation home” when he bought it in 2016. As Jonah Goldberg likes to say, Pelley is one of those rich journalist celebrities who like to piss on his audience from a great height while enjoying all the benefits of their generosity in making his career in television.

(Also, I wonder about the timing of Pelley, along with so many other wealthy celebrities, fleeing the northeast for the tax haven of Texas. But that’s a different story.)

I am old enough to remember Dan Rather, the pater familias of “60 Minutes” throwing away the entire book of journalistic ethics in order to try to throw an election against George Bush. I mean George H.W. Bush, who was Vice President at the time. Rather had Bush on for a live interview, and ambushed him with the Iran-Contra scandal. Bush heatedly replied: “I want to talk about why I’m qualified to be President, not a rehash of an eight-minute segment on Iran.” That made Rather, and “60 Minutes” no friend of the Bush family.

Again in 2004, Rather hit George W. Bush, just two months before the election, with blockbuster accusations of playboy treatment by his Texas Air National Guard unit. The evidence was documents signed by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s commanding officer, who at the time, had died so he could not validate or invalidate the documents. CBS’s fact-checkers knew the documents were not authentic before Rather’s broadcast, but nobody wanted to be steamrolled by the anchor. Rather didn’t care; he pressed on, hoping the controversy would sink the second Bush.

Neither time did Rather’s political chicanery succeed.

It’s well-known and backed by data that “60 Minutes” leans left.

They aren’t hyper-partisan left, but they border on strong left. “60 Minutes” plots about even with “PBS News Hour,” but lower on the “Reliability” axis than either PBS or CNN’s “The Situation Room.” The only major network shows that are further left—and also less reliable—are Anderson Cooper and anything on MSNBC (MS NOW). It’s also interesting, but not unexpected, that the chart would be a horseshoe: the more extreme a show on either side, the less reliable its news and content.

Ratings-wise, the show has not done badly. It remains No. 3 on CBS with an audience of between six and nine million, skewed mostly toward older viewers, though some episodes hit well in the 25-54 demographic. “60 Minutes” is a solid performer for the network. The problem for Paramount is that CBS is a television network, and its news division had been run like a television network, one that had been airing for 85 years.

For the generations of viewers coming up today, network television is effectively dead. You can even watch the Super Bowl on YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, or NBC’s Peacock service. Gen-Y and Alpha are not going to sit in front of a television and watch a show. To be future-proofed, CBS has to appeal to a wider audience, or at least that’s what the suits at Paramount Skydance think. Paramount+ is competing with Netflix, Disney+, Max, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Peacock. CBS has a solid sports lineup, but its news division is old and faded compared to the rest of the business.

The new owners brought in Bari Weiss to shake things up and change the direction of the news division toward a wider (read: younger) audience. And Bari Weiss brought in Nick Bilton, who has strong media chops in the documentary, investigative, and digital space. But Scott Pelley didn’t like Bilton’s pedigree (or his politics, apparently).

“60 Minutes” could continue exactly as it was, and watch the slow erosion of its audience as they age out. It could morph into a zombie, posting segments to YouTube (giving its ad revenue away to Alphabet), and become just another voice in the wind, competing with Mr. (Matt) Beat, Marques Brownlee, and Peter Santenello. Or it could leverage its considerable assets and be a leader, but that means shedding the 85-year-old model and doing things differently.

I can’t attest to Bari Weiss’s, or CBS News President Tom Cibrowski’s vision under Paramount Skydance, but it’s certainly not crazy or beholden to MAGA, or “right wing,” unless the person making those claims is themselves further left than the show’s reporting. I think Scott Pelley tend to side with Dan Rather on that score.

Instead of accepting the change, Scott Pelley would rather retire to his comfortable Texas ranch. He could have done it with less drama. Perhaps the drama might help—there’s no such thing as bad media, says people like Roger Stone.

“60 Minutes” is not dying. But if it does die, it won’t be Bari Weiss or Nick Bilton who killed it. It would be the long, slow suicide of network news.

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At first, the Maine native seemed like a dream candidate for Democrats, but he quickly became a nightmare. The blue-collar oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan may have had broad appeal on the surface, but things quickly went awry when it was learned that the surface of his body was decorated with a Totenkopf (death’s head) tattoo associated with the Nazi SS.

Graham Platner (in orange) with Maine Senate president, Troy Jackson, at a Portland Hearts of Pine match on September 27, 2025. (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Nazi tattoo has apparently been covered with a Celtic knot, but Platner got worse from there. The candidate, who has become known online as “NTG” for “Nazi Tattoo Guy,” seems to have a talent for finding controversy. This past January, he was interviewed by an anti-semitic podcaster and said he was “a longtime fan” of the show. More recently, he has become embroiled in a sexting scandal that stemmed from his wife allegedly telling a campaign aide that he had sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women early in their marriage. They married in 2023.

All that is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more bad decisions in Platner’s past that we know about and probably a lot that we don’t… yet.

Having said all that, if I were in Maine, I’m not sure how I’d vote. Normally, a candidate of Platner’s obviously poor quality would not get my vote. Normally, I wouldn’t vote for someone with Platner’s progressive policy positions or who had described himself as a “communist,” which is just as troubling as his dalliance with the Nazis. (Platner and Nick Fuentes may be the only people to pick both sides in the Nazi-Soviet debate. The proper answer is “neither.”)

These aren’t normal times.

I’ve written before that I believe that most Republicans need to lose in the next few elections. I am far from certain that Donald Trump intends to peacefully exit the White House in 2029, and I think we need a Congress that is prepared to resist his lawlessness both until and after the next presidential election. I’m not sure that Susan Collins can be trusted to do that.

To be fair, Collins is one of the least trumpy Republicans left in the Senate. She has opposed him at times, such as voting to convict in his second impeachment, and sided with him at other times, such as voting to acquit him in his first impeachment. Collins has opposed Trump’s actions in Iran and his ballroom funding, as well as being “disappointed” in the president’s endorsement of Ken Paxton, but how she’ll vote if and when these issues come up in the Senate, especially after the election, is anyone’s guess.

Susan Collins is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get. She might stand strong on principles that other Republicans have long since abandoned, or she might fret, express her disappointment and frustration, and vote the party line anyway.

As a Never Trump guy, I’m concerned about decency in politics. But as a Never Trump guy, I’m also concerned about authoritarianism and lawlessness in our government. For people like me, the Maine Senate race is another Fezzik’s choice: We obviously can’t vote for the candidate who is deeply morally flawed, but we also obviously cannot support the candidate who has enabled the president in his lawlessness all too often.

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Some would choose not to vote or vote third party. I also reject those choices. I’ve voted third party in the past, but the reality is that one of the major party candidates is almost always going to win. It’s better to choose from the duopoly candidates and try to get the lesser evil, which after all is also the greater good if you’re a glass-half-full person.

The best solution seems to be a Kobayashi Maru scenario. Maine Democrats should change the facts of the situation.

Janet Mills, the governor of Maine and Platner’s former primary opponent, recently hinted that she never formally dropped out of the race. She only suspended her campaign.

“People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning,”Mills said in a recent interview. “I am still on the ballot.”

At this point, a lot of Maine voters would like to see Mills unsuspend her campaign.

A restarted Mills campaign should be paired with a Democratic push to encourage Platner to drop out. So far most Democrats seem to be standing by Platner, but that could change. They stood by Biden up to a point, and then the dam broke.

Unlike with Biden in the presidential primary, Maine has not held it’s primary yet. Election Day is next Tuesday on June 9, but early voting has been going on for several weeks. (Scenarios like this are the best argument against long periods of early voting.)

To add to the tension, Maine has a ranked-choice primary. Voters could rank Mills above both Platner and David Costello, the third Democratic candidate. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the lowest scoring candidate is eliminated and the totals are refigured until someone gets a majority.

There is still a chance for Democrats to avoid a disaster in Maine, but time is running out. Given the gravity of the situation, hopefully they can manage to dump Platner for the good of their party and their country.

I’ll add that Platner, along with Trump, Paxton, and many others, is a good argument for scrapping the failed primary election experiment that has yielded candidates of inferior quality time and again. The parties should start looking at alternatives to the current system (although giving Trump more control over the Republican Party would not be good in the short term).

Primaries in the internet age give us candidates that deeply politicized internet junkies want rather than candidates who are good for the country or even competent at basic governance. That’s an indictment of both sides, and the Maine race is the choice between a bad candidate or a better candidate who will back a bad and possibly fascist president.

Maine voters have a tough choice. I’m glad I don’t have to make it. I hope their choice in November will be better than it looks like it will be at the moment.

Never trust a guy with a Nazi tattoo. That’s especially true if he’s a politician.

SHAMELESS PLUG The Racket News has a new online friend. Stan Mitchell, a military and Christian podcaster, recently made our acquaintance and mentioned one of my online observations on an episode of his podcast (that segment begins at about 25:30). Check out Stan on the platform formerly known as Twitter or Blue Sky.

PERSONAL NOTE I haven’t been around much for the past few weeks. My daughter graduated high school, and we had a lot of family and friends come to help us celebrate. That included my son, who came home on leave from the Air Force. I stepped away for a while to take some much-needed family time.

Steve and I haven’t met face-to-face many times, but our families did recently get together for barbecue before the Thornton bunch attended a Weird Al Yankovic concert. It was great to visit with the Bermans, and Mrs. Yankovic’s boy still puts on a great show.

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Beat is not alone in his assumption. Nobel winner Paul Krugman (who is wrong about just about everything anyway), Allan Lichtman, Julian Zeilzer, David Mayhew, Bendan Nyhan, et. al., have all noted that voters think presidents control the economy, but in fact they don’t. Voters blame bad economic news on the sitting president, and an incoming president gets credit for his predecessor’s good policies (or just plain dumb luck) when things are rosy. Right?

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Except it’s not true. Presidents don’t control the economy generally because they don’t try hard enough. Most presidents either stay within the bounds of constitutional law, or they seek consensus, which dampens big moves. Many presidents possess a degree of integrity regarding self-serving or corrupt actions that keeps their hands off economic levers, or they, in general, want to leave people alone to live their lives, to prosper, or to fail on their own.

But there’s plenty of examples where they didn’t. Back in 1807, our fledgling republic nearly foundered after President Thomas Jefferson signed the Embargo Act, cutting off nearly all foreign trade. That didn’t get repealed until Congress declared war on Great Britain in 1812, a war where we got whupped, but it did stop the British from impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy.

In the early 1930s, President Herbert Hoover ran his campaign on the issue of tariffs to protect American farmers. The Republican party was high on tariffs and determined to hoist the U.S. out of the worldwide depression after the crash of 1929 by extracting money from foreign countries. The Smoot-Hawley bill horrified economists; over a thousand of them signed an open letter warning Hoover that the bill, if signed, would lead to ruin. Hoover signed it, fulfilling his party pledge. And the economists were right. Global trade’s post-crash slide continued, losing 65 percent in the face of retaliatory tariffs set by other nations. Banks failed, farmers went broke and lost their land, and unemployment left millions of Americans impoverished.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt felt he had a calling to fix America by putting the government in control of the economy. His first New Deal moves included control of prices, wages, and production, which many economists believe held recovery back rather than stimulated it. But the New Deal stuck, primarily because FDR was committed to joining the Allies in Europe during WWII. Our Lend-Lease program kept the Soviet Union from succumbing to the Nazis (not necessarily in Moscow or Leningrad, but certainly in Stalingrad). Beginning in 1941, war production ramped up, and during WWII, the U.S. supplied our allies to the tune of $50 billion (over $700 billion in today’s money). Of that, we received about $8.5 billion in direct repayments. The Soviet Union stiffed us, taking until 1971 to pay a paltry $722 million of its war debt. The last Lend-Lease-related debt was not repaid until 2006.

The primary benefit of Lend-Lease was getting people employed, which it did. Then America was in the war, a two-front war, which brought the country to full employment. You can’t blame the war on FDR, but you can look at his policies that put Japan in a difficult place. Again, Imperial Japan was fanatically racist and expansionist. But cutting off oil and steel was not universally supported within the government and by experts. Gen. Douglas MacArthur believed in diplomacy and military pressure, not open war, with Japan. He knew that the Imperial Japanese military would see those moves as a cause for open war.

The reason I bring this up is that a primary economic lever in the hands of a U.S. president is to wage war—not declare war, just to start one. President James K. Polk made war against Mexico, in order to expand United States territory. He succeeded, but in the process, made the schism between slave states and free states a sharper point of contention, hastening the Civil War. That war cost our government around $6.5 billion, a paltry sum—under $100 billion—in today’s money. We don’t know the full cost to the Confederate states, but let’s just say they were ruined for at least half a century. The war also cost us two percent of the population.

President John F. Kennedy got us into Vietnam, but Lyndon Johnson turned it into a full-on war. We all know now that the Gulf of Tonkin was a ruse to expand the war, which Cold War hawks saw as a proxy for keeping the communist domino theory from succeeding (that theory was 75 percent myth). Vietnam cost America $1 trillion in today’s money. It directly led to inflation, then “stagflation” after the 1973 oil embargo.

Wars directly affect the economy. Especially wars embroiled in access to critical natural resources.

Messing with money supply policy and exchange rates also causes major economic change. President Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard, all by himself. That plus the wind-down of Vietnam triggered a recession in 1973 that lasted two years. We didn’t really recover until President Ronald Reagan got the Economic Recovery Tax Act passed in 1981. This is one of the few success stories where a president brought good economic change. Ballooning the deficit was controversial, but Reagan was a realist, and he did not oppose tax hikes after the recovery took hold.

These all apply to today. We have a president in the White House who has messed with tariffs, and not just a little, but a lot; he has pressured the Federal Reserve; he has created a self-serving crypto-currency and embraced government support of it; he has doled out money to various friendly recipients by the billions, and punished those who don’t toe the line for him. He has used military force to obtain access to oil in Venezuela. He has used military force that led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, creating a global crisis in shipping critical raw materials and oil needed for every kind of goods and application.

A president turning all the levers at once like a monkey with an Etch-a-Sketch leads to unpredictable results. But those results are profound and they are likely lasting. President Trump spent all of 2024 hanging the inflation economy around Joe Biden’s neck. What will hang on Trump’s neck by 2028?

We don’t know, but we do know that Trump’s moves, in real time, can sink or juice the stock market. This affects the assets and retirement accounts of scores of millions of Americans. We know that companies won’t hire in a period of uncertainty. We know companies won’t invest in infrastructure without knowing if the investment has long-term return baked in. These companies, currying favor with the guy who can affect the economy single-handedly, make large promises that are never fulfilled. The do it for the photo-ops and the praise of the man who can either reward or punish them.

None of this is new—lobbying is as old as our country. But with this president, everything is in play, including using the South Lawn of the White House to host a mixed-martial arts UFC match.

You know, with economists, it’s all about initial conditions. Political historians and economists have always begun with the assumption that presidents will be constrained by law and Congress, or at least by civil standards. That assumption is proven wrong. And historically, that’s confirmable, except other presidents who violated did a much better job hiding it than the one we have now.

I am convinced that Trump wants what he’s always planned, in his first term, and now. He wants to lower expectations by messing with the economy in ways that cost people, then release those negative effects and show how he “saved” everyone. He is betting on people having memories shorter than a bumble bee. He can be the hero, and everyone will forget that he’s saving them from the past version of himself.

The problem, like it’s always been, is that other countries and other people get a vote in how these policies and actions work as levers in the real world. And it is a jungle out there. Presidents, especially this one, can definitely control the economy, but usually it’s only in a bad way. With our unmanageable national debt, excessive spending, and Congress doing nothing at all, the country is pretty well economically trapped in Trump’s world. That may be reassuring to his biggest fans, but it’s probably not going to turn out to anyone’s liking, other than those who kiss the ring of the King of Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. Beat’s video aged like milk. The Trump economy may age like roadkill.

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For those not in the know, I am from the purple state of North Carolina, born and bred. Go Heels! My location in this wonderful state is close enough to the southern border that all of our local news stations are a heavy mix of North Carolina/South Carolina news. That means I’ve been seeing all the ads for the South Carolina primary races. I see enough to know Lindsey Graham will likely win the primary but lose the midterm election. This would be a major turn for our sister state, as they have been reliably, stupidly MAGA from the beginning. There are cracks, however, as witnessed by their state senate rejecting the last-minute attempts at redistricting. This wasn’t just a slap to King Trump’s face. This was full-throated push back. It was a beautiful thing. The hope is that more red states begin to stand up to the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump regime.

Getting back to Senator Graham, he holds a comfortable, but waning lead over his primary challengers. I don’t see them closing the gap before the election, but there is time. While Graham, as one of the least principled dogs from Trump’s kennel, has his master’s endorsement, he is not without his MAGA detractors. There is a rumble of a MAGA-born movement that has targeted Senator Graham for destruction and the televised ads they have unleashed against him are so shockingly vile that anyone with a shred of moral fiber should be outraged.

A particular ad airing with regularity begins by attacking immigrants as “criminals,” and claims that they “disdain our God,” and “steal our jobs.”

Oddly enough, pretty much everything coming out of the current GOP swamp is disdainful of a holy God, but I digress…

The ad then launches into Graham’s record of [long] past support for immigration and “Dreamers.”

At one point, an image of Graham standing with a rather flamboyant looking young man, with what appears to be large pearl earrings and makeup on flashes across the screen. A stern voice reads the accompanying caption – “He’s never been married!”

Yes, we all know what they were getting at, and we’ve all, at some point, likely made that same assumption, but to have it put out there as a blatant pejorative is a bit much.

The ad does not go on to endorse any primary challenger. It notes that no candidate has paid for the ad. It was put out by a PAC called Courageous Conservatives PAC. After doing a brief search, I found that their last target was Senator John Cornyn, of Texas. Further delving names the chairman of the PAC as Chris Ekstrom, an also-ran from the 2020 Texas Republican primary for District 13. While searching the PAC’s website I loudly guffawed over their core principles statement, which included the line, “dedicated to electing principled conservative leaders.” This was under a slavish endorsement for Ken Paxton.

Ken Paxton.

No. You can’t make this stuff up.

I decided to follow the breadcrumbs and look into the mind behind such ugly rhetoric. Ekstrom has a social media presence that vomits out his position on multiple topics. Most of what you find is drooling sycophancy of all things Trump, more than a few racist dog whistles, plenty of cult reports from OAN and Newsmax, calls for a return to the Confederacy, an end to “black culture,” attacks on the Civil Rights movement (including multiple attacks on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and at least one really bizarre AI campaign ad in favor of Spencer Pratt for mayor of Los Angeles.

OH – and lest I forget – his social media pages have background imagery of Jesus Christ. Those go so well with the page entries that call for a return to the “lost Christian virtue of intolerance.”

This is not a well man. This is not a decent man. This definitely is NOT a Christian man.

I’m no fan of Senator Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, or anyone else in the current stable of Trump bootlickers. When the snakes begin to eat each other, it’s a win for normal, decent society. I didn’t feel compelled to write this as a defense of anyone. I felt compelled to write this to put a marker down. We are seeing our nation devolve into such uncivil, corrupt, profane ugliness. It’s not as if we haven’t been on a downward spiral for quite a while. It is in our nature, apart from a holy God and a firm moral code, to destroy each other. It has been several decades, however, since politicians and talking heads so openly campaigned on racism and intolerance, targeting the lowest among us, appealing to the visceral need to demonize “other.”

Senator Graham is being attacked for his past policy stances, even though he has more than earned his Trumpian kneepads. He’s being attacked for having “never been married.”

*wink, wink*

Remember this moment in time. Remember this PAC, the so-called Courageous Conservatives. The reality is, there is nothing conservative about hate, racism, or a confederate movement that divides our nation, rather than pulling a nation of individuals under one, proud banner of unity.

It is these hateful, ignorant subgroups among us that make this nation suffer. They’re not saving us. They’re not preserving anything of worth. Every value and alignment they adhere to is poison. The fact that so often you see these putrid beasts pimping their garbage under the banner of Christ makes it all the more insidious.

This isn’t a problem that started with Trump or the MAGA cult movement. Trump and the MAGA faithful just gave the wretched scum new courage to slither out from under their rocks and into the light.

The phrase “holding the horses” has its place in a mythology regarding British artillery crews. The story goes that U.S. artillery squads were able to out-fire their British counterparts, and the British wanted to know why. As they studied their process, they noticed some of their team members would stop and step back, pause, and then the gun would fire, and they’d step forward again. When asked, the crews said “that’s how we were trained.” None of the experts could come up with the reason, until one pre-World War I veteran offered: “I know what they are doing, they are holding the horses.” Of course, British artillery had not used horses since the days before the Great War, but the procedure persisted. It turns out this is more myth than fact, but it has been retold many times.

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Militaries have tremendous pride in their ability to produce integrated teams, who know to a fine degree how to operate with each other, and within themselves. This is the result of a huge amount of training, to the point where individual actions, like reloading a rifle, or firing an artillery piece, are muscle memory for those doing it. It also produces people who are deeply ingrained in a particular way of doing things, even when those things are not really the best way to fight a war today.

During World War I, the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau is given credit for saying “Generals always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they had won it.” I can easily find dozens of similar quotes from history, newspapers, and think tanks. This adage gets used so much because it’s undoubtedly true. It’s one of the oldest logical fallacies that Jonah touched on: “victory disease,” “superstitious learning,” “winner’s bias,” “selection bias,” and the “hot hand fallacy.” We do what worked before because if it worked, it must be a good idea.

I go back in my brain to “Fiddler on the Roof,” where Tevye sang in “If I Were a Rich Man.”

And it won't make one bit of difference
If I answer right or wrong
When you're rich, they think you really know

When someone’s rich, people figure they must be smart, because they made a lot of money somehow. It’s a myth and a fallacy, because many people get rich because of blind, stupid luck, graft, or inheritance—or all three. Look at Brian Epstein, who became wealthy by constantly lying and manipulating people who should have, could have, known better (and many times did know better). Any Ponzi scheme has at its core a person who knows how to sell the Tevye fallacy.

Similarly, generals and admirals and people at the top of the military food chain are typically produced by the military, and though we tend to think they know what they are doing, they are really the product of years of military training, based on the way the generals and admirals and military thinkers of years ago taught them how to think and fight. Also, of course, some attain high rank by political chicanery, sucking up to the boss, being in the right place at the right time, or being Forrest Gump—doing what you’re told and sticking around long enough.

In the American Civil War, most of the generals on both sides had attended West Point. This was evident in the early battles, where tactics intended for short-range muskets were applied to lines of troops facing an enemy using rifled barrels and Minnie balls. This resulted in much loss of life. Over those years, troops (and generals) learned to adapt, turning to trench warfare, maneuvering, and proper use of cavalry and artillery to fight. Toward the end of the war, the Gattling gun was used in Petersburg by the U.S. Army, which adopted it officially in 1866. Many European observers were watching the American Civil War and learning from it.

As a result, European armies adopted the lessons learned from America’s fight, and other wars, like the Boer War, in their military doctrine. In World War I, the machine gun killed hundreds of thousands of troops, who were massed for charges through “no man’s land” launched from elaborate systems of trenches and earthworks. Straight out of the Civil War, and a complete disaster. In World War II, the French used lessons from the Great War to build the impregnable Maginot Line, a linear, interconnected series of fortresses, capable of withstanding German artillery. Hitler merely bypassed it completely, maneuvering tanks in the Blitzkrieg attack through Belgium, and trapping the French (and British) from their rear.

This scenario replayed during the first Gulf War, when General Norman Schwarzkopf did an end-run around Saddam Hussein’s army, which was hunkered down in fixed fortifications, while B-52 bombers pinned that army in place. The result was a 100-hour “war” that was completely one-sided. I won’t get into Vietnam, where WWII tactics had much success, when the enemy was willing to come out and fight. The NVA and the Viet Cong effectively used the doctrine of asymmetric warfare, where regular troops and irregular guerrillas were integrated in order to defeat a much better equipped and larger enemy.

Today, we see the fruits of two conflicts that have been brewing for the past few years. In Ukraine, Russia’s use of short- and long-range drones, combined with missiles has made life miserable for many Ukrainians. Russia’s long-held doctrine “quantity has a quality of its own” has failed to produce spectacular results for Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation.” It has become in many respects a war of attrition, but Ukraine has turned it into a military technology and doctrine laboratory. Ukraine’s military is using Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs, by the thousands, to remediate its manpower disadvantage viz Russia. The Modern War Institute at West Point noted Ukraine’s reliance on these vehicles: “In 2025, the Ukrainian industry delivered fifteen thousand unmanned ground vehicles to frontline units, up from two thousand in 2024.”

While the U.S. has UGVs, they are expensive and complex to work with. Ukrainian company Rovertec manufactures the Zmiy demining platform for about $20,000, which is used to dismantle Russian minefields that blanket its frontier, without risking ground troops, who would be picked off by Russian drones.

Both sides are using drones, from the deadly first person drones that take out infantry in an almost preternatural way, to long-range Iranian-designed Shahed drones that can hit targets hundreds of miles away. Russia now produces its own Shaheds, along with tens of thousands of cheap lookalikes, with the same radar cross-section and heat signature, that are meant to fool and distract Ukrainian anti-aircraft and anti-missile batteries.

One innovation, that’s not particularly new, is the use of fiber optic tethered drones to defeat electronic countermeasures. The TOW missile, for example, has been around for about 50 years, and it’s an example of wired technology. Modern tethered drones are made by several manufacturers, like Linden Photonics, Hoverfly Technologies, Zenish Aerotech, Versitron, and M2 Optics. These are particularly bothersome in another theater: the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah has begun using tethered drones against IDF troops, with some success. They are cheap, easily procured, and immune to electronic interference. They are also difficult for Israeli air defense systems to detect, locate, and engage. It puts IDF infantry in particular in a dangerous situation as they push further into southern Lebanon to root out Hezbollah.

While U.S. observers and trainers are present both in Ukraine and Israel, the lessons of those modern battles has not yet sunk in. Sure, our military can do amazing things, like we did in Caracas, but those spectacular raids are only for a very small, very elite groups of special operators. They also consume a huge amount of military planning, equipment, and troops who are there in a support role.

There’s a reason you haven’t seen this kind of raid in Iran. Sure, we can pluck a downed rear-seat aircrew member from the mountains, beating the Iranians in the race to find him. That’s something the U.S. military is very good at—the Air Force PJs are the best in the world. But taking and holding ground, even a small island in a narrow strait, is more than we can handle. Iran has more experience right now making drones that are actually used in combat than the U.S.

All our technological advantage is no good if we can’t adapt to fight today’s war, today. From what I am seeing, the U.S. is very well prepared to fight another Afghan war, or Iraq surge. (Those wars didn’t turn out the way we’d like, either.) But we are not prepared to fight in the battlegrounds of Ukraine or southern Lebanon. We are not prepared to go in on the ground to Iran, which still possesses the majority of its missile stocks, and thousands of advanced drones.

The U.S. is ready to fight the last war. Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and Hezbollah (which is the IRGC) are fighting today’s war. We should keep this in mind when dealing with the Iranians, who have a weapon much better than nuclear bombs. They control the Strait of Hormuz. Our presidents proclamations of naval blockade—an act of war that required congressional approval, by the way—are just preening. We can keep the strait closed, but only Iran can open it, which means they control it. We need it open more than they need to open it.

The U.S. finds itself between a rock and a hard place. We have the world’s biggest sticks, but haven’t learned the proper way to use them in the modern battlefield. All the F-35s in the world can’t hold a square kilometer of enemy ground, or de-mine a 28-mile wide strait through which nearly 50 percent of the world’s raw materials transits.

Like the European generals observing the American Civil War, we need to learn today’s lessons quickly, and be able to apply them at scale, because the next war is going to be nothing like any war fought before. And it’s our children who are likely to fight it.

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It wasn’t that Cornyn was ineffective in the Senate; he could whip like few senators in modern history. It’s that he dared to touch the third rail of Texas politics—guns—in 2022, pushing a gun safety bill through the Senate, that got him booed for nearly a minute at the Texas GOP convention. At the time, Cornyn’s seat-mate Sen. Ted Cruz, smelling the whiff of political death, turned on him.

And like the cyclops played by John Goodman in the Coen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, Ken Paxton smelled an opportunity to beat the snot out of a sucker. Paxton is the kind of guy for whom no debasement or corruption is too much or too far. In MAGA circles, the man is legendary. Allow me to expand on it, just a little.

• Paxton was one of Donald Trump’s chief Kraken-hunters in 2020, putting the odds that Trump could lose in four swing stages at “one in a quadrillion.” MAGA needed a Kraken, and Paxton was more than happy to fabricate one, making a mockery of the legal profession.

• Paxton’s Texas AG office sued Google in late 2020, for bullying Facebook (now Meta), but the real reason was that these social media and advertising giants didn’t give enough air to Trump supporters.

• I described Paxton as “the cockroach in the movie WALL-E; he survives despite the universe’s best attempts to do away with him.” And, I once called him “the very image of a modern MAGA general.”

Honestly, I could continue for another 10,000 words on Ken Paxton’s indelicacies and peccadilloes. I will indulge only a little:

No matter the topic, this Texas lawyer could be reliably counted on to file the most facially embarrassing and legally insulting lawsuits in the service of one Donald J. Trump. The depth and breadth of Paxton’s legal asshattery and general malfeasance is legendary. He will go down in the history books to rival Duke Cunningham or Kwame Kilpatrick. But that’s not enough for Paxton. He wants to upgrade to the big-time, you know, the Nixon or Boss Tweed class, where the real action is. That is, if he can do what Trump has done, and by that I mean avoid prison.

Avoid prison, he did. Despite 20 articles of impeachment passed by the Republican-dominated Texas House of Representatives, the state senate refused to convict him; his own spurned ex-wife withheld her vote.

Riffing prophetically, last July I wrote: “Perhaps running for Senate is just the thing to finally get rid of Ken Paxton. Or perhaps not. There’s still plenty of room for people of his ilk to occupy positions of great power and influence in the Trump puzzle palace.” It was President Trump’s race to call, and he went for the cyclops, not the fence-rider. Of course he did.

And the people of Texas, the MAGA whirlwind, dutifully fulfilled their leader’s wishes, or perhaps Trump merely echoed the desire of the Texas Republican Party to go all-in for the Kraken-hunting, wife-cheating, corruption-loving, self-aggrandizing, master of infidelities of all kinds.

The question is really: did the whirlwind just give enough lift to Democrat James Talarico, the darling of the left’s obsession to look like a Bible-believing, regular plaid-wearing, gun-toting guy, in the mold of Graham Platner, or Beto O’Rourke, or Tim Walz? One thing is for sure: the Texas Senate race’s price tag will approach a billion dollars. The opportunities for grift and taking a few pennies on the dollar off the top are astounding. Even if Paxton loses, he can’t lose.

I would not count out the undefeated MAGA mad dog. He’s got his biggest supporter behind him, along with the hive mind of the Texas MAGA party, and their money. They will have Ken Paxton for many years to come.

But Texas (and the rest of America) won’t have the fence-riding John Cornyn, who in the end was insufficiently servile to the Ballroom Blitz Brother, and insufficiently fringe for his Texas constituents.

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We have wrought this upon ourselves, America. We have stripped our republic of its essential virtue and we’re left with nothing but a utopia fit not for men, but only for angels.

Not my words: I’m paraphrasing a man much wiser than I.

As the rule of law degrades like wet parchment left to the elements, we find ourselves guided by feelings, reduced to 140-character tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram pictures, and Youtube videos. Those tweets, posts, pics and videos are then distilled through the worldview sieve (which only allows liberal thought to pass through) into the mainstream media.

Today’s America is like the Israel of Judges chapter 21. “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

America was founded with the notion that a republic can operate through the will of the people, with no king, but with the bedrock conviction that there is a King in heaven from whom all good gifts proceed. Israel had no king, but it did have the Law. America has no king, and now we have cut off the Law, preferring a distracted democracy instead of a well-ordered republic.

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Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee), Professor of Universal History, and Greek and Roman Antiquities at University of Edinburgh, wrote 224 years ago about the fall of Athenian democracy:

Nor were the superior classes in the actual enjoyment of a rational liberty and independence. They were perpetually divided into factions, which servilely ranked themselves under the banners of the contending demagogues; and these maintained their influence over their partisans by the most shameful corruption and bribery, of which the means were supplied alone by the plunder of the public money.

Our “superior” classes are the political-media elite, while the rest of America enjoys its own form of plebeian ennui. Tytler continued:

The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.

Tytler proposed that there’s a cycle in democracy, starting with bondage, and ending in dependence, leading back to bondage.

America is dangerously close to bondage.

We have abandoned faith and reason, consumed our abundance, and become gluttons in our selfishness. Then, resting on false ideals such as equality and the right to not be offended, we’ve moved into pure complacency and apathy. Large swaths of our culture and population have slid into dependency, and [belief that] the Left’s agenda would demographically engineer the country further into the pit of government control.

Now is not the time to pursue “electability” as a mantra. Foresight demands a pushback against the cycle. And the only pushback is one toward old-fashioned virtue.

Virtue: righteousness, morality, integrity, dignify, rectitude, honor, decency, respectability, nobility, worthiness, purity. Words that the Humanists sniff away with disdain.

A democratic government stripped of its essential virtue is “nothing better than an Utopian theory, a splendid chimera, descriptive of a state of society that never did, and never could exist; a republic not of men, but of angels,” wrote Tytler.

It is instructive for our nation to see the fruits of distractedness: [read this right here by David Thornton].

[They all face off] in all their millimeter-deep billboard smile glory while their standard-bearers occupy opposite ends of a quite broad spectrum of interests.

And apart from those who snipe and snark at the opposition, while supporting our own side, nobody else in America seems to care at all.

Electing candidates like [the ones we see winning primaries] is like plugging a sewer leak with Jell-O. It looks like dessert until you eat a spoonful, and it does nothing to stop the leak.

Above all, America needs a virtuous candidate. One who is not afraid to wade into the fight, with actual righteousness, belief in the rule of law (and the Lawgiver), and a firm knowledge of objective right and wrong. We cannot seek perfection, because humans aren’t perfect, but we can seek virtue.

We should examine candidates and support [the ones with virtue], and find the best leader to advance our cause, because much is at stake, and given our financial fragility, our time is very limited. [I wrote: By 2020, we may not have any options if we choose unwisely.] [Let’s admit it: 2020 is long gone, and now 2028 is staring into the abyss.]

All this talk of third parties and which issues are most important in the presidential race are simply more distractions.

Yes, we want a president who restores sanity to the budget. We want a candidate with a reasonable and lawful approach to our sovereign borders and citizenship (immigration policy). Yes, we want a president who will keep our country safe from enemies, while not making enemies of its own citizens. And we want a president who values the sanctity of life and the freedom of belief and faith.

But we need a candidate who has virtue. Finding one, we should all—as in every liberty minded person in America—get behind this candidate. It’s going to take that kind of push to overcome apathy and the Humanist drumbeat of the media. [And the draw of conspiracies and cultish devotion.]

When Frodo Baggins agreed to take Sauron’s Ring into the heart of the enemy’s territory, he knew it would be perilous. But without one walking with him, pledging his support, the quest was doomed.

“It would be the death of you to come with me, Sam,” said Frodo, “and I could not have borne that.”

“Not as certain as being left behind,” said Sam.

“But I am going to Mordor.”

“I know that well enough, Mr. Frodo. Of course you are. And I’m coming with you.”

Let’s support the candidate we want, but when the GOP selects one to march into Mordor, we need to go too—all of us.

[I fear we have marched into Mordor, and found those we thought allies waiting there to receive us into darkness.]

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The actual results were pretty much as expected. Georgia requires a majority so there will be a runoff if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote. The top two Republican candidates for governor were both MAGA: Rick Jackson, the billionaire who has spent $80 million of his own money to win a job with a $185,000 salary, and Burt Jones, the current lieutenant governor and an unindicted coconspirator in the 2020 fake elector plot. Former Atlanta mayor Keshia Lance Bottoms won the Democratic nomination outright.

Photo credit: Element5 Digital unsplash.com

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MAGA had a good night, and if you know the Georgia GOP, this was no surprise. In one of the more notable results, Vernon Jones, a former Democrat who is black, earned a spot in the runoff with Tim Fleming. Jones has a history of scandal that includes both firing white employees and replacing them with blacks and a history of sexual misconduct that includes a rape allegation. But he’s a black Trump supporter. Fleming, his opponent, is also an election denier. I wouldn’t trust either with the integrity and security of Georgia elections.

A bright spot for Democrats was the fact that Senator Jon Ossoff’s opponent will either be Rep. Mike Collins, a MAGA radical, or Derek Dooley, the son of a legendary UGA coach but a political neophyte. The runoff will test the influence of Gov. Brian Kemp, who handpicked Dooley, over the MAGA preference for Collins. Ossoff will likely beat either option.

One of the most curious, albeit not surprising elements of the evening, was the result of two state Supreme Court races. These nonpartisan races appeared on the primary ballots, and Democrats had placed high hopes on their preferred candidates, who ran afoul of ethics rules regarding statements addressing issues that they might rule on as justices. This scandal broke just before Election Day. (Accusations that Kemp moved the judicial elections to the primary to confuse voters are false. Judicial elections have been held in the spring for at least 10 years.)

Both incumbents won re-election, but the curious thing was that challenger Miracle Rankin ran eight points ahead of her co-Democrat Jen Jordan in the parallel race. There is speculation that this may have been due to the fact that Rankin’s name sounded “black” or that Democrat voters didn’t familiarize themselves with the ballot, but it may just be that Jen Jordan, a former state senator and candidate for attorney general, wasn’t very popular. The loss in the two races even as Democratic voters were more energized and engaged may be due to a hesitance to politicize the state judiciary.

Outside of Georgia, Thomas Massie’s congressional race in Kentucky was closely watched. Massie, a libertarian Trump critic, was targeted by Trump for defeat. Massie lost by about 10 points.

In addition to being a Trump critic, Massie was a bit of a nut. His defeat may be partially explained by his response, in which he attacked his opponent’s support of Israel by claiming that he was in Tel Aviv during the election.

And finally, Texas has not yet held its primary, but Donald Trump endorsed another Vernon Jones-type candidate there. Ken Paxton is a serial adulterer who was impeached by Texas Republicans for corruption. It’s no surprise that Trump likes him, but his strong support from the Christian right is disappointing.

The big takeaway from Tuesday is that the Republican Party is firmly under Trump’s control. Dissenting politicians are being purged, even if it means that it is more likely that Democrats win control of the House and Senate.

This is more confirmation that the old conservative Republican Party no longer exists. There is only Donald Trump’s personality cult and the Democrats. A vote for any Republican is a vote to enable Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

That’s the choice for November.

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