Progressive Dems wanted Biden to just shut up and disappear in 2024, and nothing has changed

 They have learned nothing.

When you adopt the narrative of your enemy, you lose. 

Jill Biden’s Book Is Last Thing Dems Need Right Now

Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian

Jill Biden Still Trying To Gaslight Us

Washington Times

 

There is almost nothing Athenian about China, nor Spartan about the United States

But here we are.

Does THE GRAUNIAD even know that Sparta won that war?

Does Xi? 

Meanwhile "Make America Great Again" handed our adversaries the rhetorical cudgel of decline wielded by Xi against Trump. 

America is great when it stands for human freedom, something Trump is too shallow to grasp. The very word strikes terror into the hearts of the Chicoms, and is our greatest weapon against them.

But under Trump America has betrayed freedom in Ukraine, and acted more like imperial Athens in the Persian Gulf than like Sparta.

The attack on Iran is looking more and more like the failed Sicilian Expedition every day. 

Aftermath: Trump Is Wrecking the U.S. Military

If Xi wants to win, he'll act more like Sparta and let the real Athens destroy itself. 

 

 

 

Dirty Rotten CEOs in the news

CEO pay soars 20 times faster than workers... 

 

... The average CEO received $8.4m in total compensation in 2025 compared to $7.6m in 2024. ...

 

For 384 CEOs in the S&P 500 where CEO compensation data was available, pay increased by 25% from 2024 to 2025, while average hourly earnings for workers at private companies increased 1.3% in the same period. ... 

Leon Panetta: Trump has no choice but to go big or go home

 ... He advises Trump to abandon his magical thinking and “face the fact” that he must use the military to open the strait, neutralise Iranian defences along the coast and deploy ships to escort oil tankers through.

“There’s no question there’s going to be lives lost and it’s clearly going to expand the war but I don’t see the alternative. He’s got to do it. He’s talked a great deal about the strength of the United States. This is a test of whether the United States can be able to deal with that situation which otherwise is not only going to prolong the war but create a lot of economic damage to the United States with those soaring fuel prices and cause what some have said is a potential worldwide recession.”

Panetta added frankly: “There’s not much choice. You’ve got to do what you have to do and, if you can open the strait, it might give you a better chance to then have a basis on which you can negotiate hopefully some kind of ceasefire. That’s the only way that he can go at this point; otherwise he will clearly have failed to find a solution.” ...

More.

He's right. 

 

ICE Barbie makes travelers suffer for DHS shutdown

 'HOMELAND' suspends TSA PreCheck, Global Entry airport security programs...

 Update:

DHS reverses course on TSA PreCheck suspension after confusion...
 

Why is NBC afraid of the truth?

 

World heard JD Vance booed at Olympics. Except for viewers in USA...

... NBC has denied editing the crowd audio, although it is difficult to resolve why the boos so audible in the stadium and on other broadcasts were absent for US viewers. ...

 

 

Lunatic progressive Democrat, but I repeat myself, complains about Harris' massive failure to get 6.8 million Biden voters from 2020 after people like him forced Biden out

Norman Solomon here: 

... Voter disenchantment: Losing 6.8 million voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 proved pivotal in the close 2024 election. Harris’s inability to mobilize those pro-Biden voters was a massive failure.

Biden’s betrayal: Biden’s stubborn decision to seek re-election, and his refusal to step aside until very late in the process, robbed Democratic voters of open primaries and undermined Democrats’ chances. ...

 

Progressives did the betraying here, not Joe Biden.

No one in his right mind would expect Biden voters to turn out for somebody else, especially someone else put in at the last second of a campaign which was announced more than a year earlier. Biden did have primaries and won 14 million votes of confidence. And as I've said before, Harris was decisively but narrowly defeated.

Progressives should think about how many of those 6.8 million voters might have still showed up for Joe Biden in 2024 had they not thrown him out, even if he ultimately lost.

Some of those 6.8 million votes might have been the difference between a Republican U.S. House with a five seat majority and a Democrat one, and if the latter, the difference between passing Trump's Big Ugly Bill under reconciliation by just four votes, or it never seeing the light of day in the first place.

Democrats lost five seats in the U.S. House to Republicans in 2024 by 1.62 points or less, the difference between stopping President Trump in his tracks and the madness he is unleashing now, all because progressive elites like Solomon and his ilk betrayed Joe Biden and forced him out:

PA-8:  1.62%

PA-10:  1.26%

PA-7:  1.01%

CO-8:  0.73%

IA-1:  0.19%.

  

Senator Tom Cotton calling the September 2nd drug boat strikes righteous is utterly contemptible: The US military waited an hour to kill the shipwrecked survivors

 US airstrike survivors clung to boat wreckage for an hour before second deadly attack, video shows: Footage seen by US senators shows two unarmed, shirtless men struggling to stay afloat before they were killed, sources say

Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according to a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.

The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters.

The pair desperately tried to turn a severed section of the hull upright before they died. “The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said. ...

The US Department of Defense’s Law of War manual forbids attacks on combatants who are incapacitated, unconscious or shipwrecked, so long as they abstain from hostilities and do not attempt to escape. The manual cites firing upon shipwreck survivors as an example of a “clearly illegal” order that should be refused. ...           

 

These aren't even combatants. The military has no business in any of this. That's why we have a Coast Guard in the first place.  

Trump isn't interested in Venezuela because of the drugs, it's the oil

 

This entire drug war is a charade. 

Trump, April 2011: "I'm only interested in Libya if we take the oil".

He just pardoned the former Honduran president sentenced to 45 years over cocaine, but he's going after the Venezuelan president over drugs?

Venezuela has 4x the proven oil reserves of the United States, tops in the world, and it's right in our backyard.

Trump isn't interested in peace and freedom in Ukraine, either. All he wants is a piece of action.

All that lizard brain cares about is money. 

 

 

Trump hits new second term low -17 in Rasmussen Reports Trump Approval Index

It's been a story of a bad week just getting worse every day in this Trump-friendly poll.

People are in a foul mood in the aftermath of the government shutdown, which ended on Wednesday. 

But it could be a lot worse. 

Trump's all time low in this poll was -26 on 3 August 2017, after the U.S. Senate had just days earlier failed to overturn Obamacare and then recessed for August without one legislative accomplishment in Trump's first year in office to date.

Still, Democrats this week failed to get what they wanted from the shutdown on the Obamacare tax credits, which is a victory for Trump and should be showing up more positively in this poll, but it is not. 

Trump has been his own worst enemy this week, AGAIN!, defending H-1B visas because America doesn't have enough talent in his opinion, defending foreigners and especially Chinese taking up seats in America's college classrooms, gaslighting about consumer inflation coming down, and handing out bonus money like water to air traffic controllers and DHS employees who kept working during the shutdown.

But Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, now on Trump's shit list, caused an uproar this week because she said the increases in Obamacare premiums in 2026 are going to wreak havoc on her constituents. Trump promptly kicked her off the plantation after she appeared on The View to talk about it.

Maybe the politics of Obamacare tax credits have flipped for the GOP rank and file and Trump and the Republican elites are going to be the last to know about it.  

 

World's biggest bedbug detained in cell infested with bedbugs

 

The Grauniad wants you to worry about a far-right civil war in the United States employing drones because of one guy on Substack found by one analyst with a vivid imagination

 Alarm: Far-right extremists eye drones for domestic attacks...

 

 ... the far-right American terrorist movement sees off-the-shelf or home-built first-person viewer (FPV) drones as a critical weapon in their own future war against the US government ...

... talk is commonplace of how these cheap drones are revolutionizing current wars and will be the critical tools of a so-called second civil war ...

... Multiple sources told the Guardian that the FBI has major concerns about the accelerationist neo-Nazi sect on the far right – one calling for an insurgency against the US government – and other ultra-violent actors in the same ideological space, eyeing the use of FPV drones for domestic attacks. ...

... evidence has emerged of military-trained neo-Nazis with relevant skillsets having pinpointed the drones as a potential tool ...

... [Joshua] Fisher-Birch first spotted the Substack and vouched for its credibility. According to him, the writer’s alleged background is not only “significant” but “violent white supremacist groups would find his drone experience to be useful”. ...

 

  

The end of the show isn't the nail, Colbert himself is the nail

 

End of Late Show a Concerning Nail in Coffin for Comedy

Jesse Hassenger, Guardian

 

And just what is a concerning nail?

 

Is there an unconcerning nail to make the comedy inside less dead? 

 

The Grauniad on this topic suffers from the same thing Colbert suffers from: seriousness where it doesn't belong. 

 

In becoming political, comedy has become serious, while at the same time the leaders are no longer serious enough. No one wants to get ready for bed being reminded of that.

 

Back in the day when the population was a lot smaller, Johnny Carson regularly kept 15 million people awake laughing. Colbert today is lucky to get 3 million, in a much bigger country.

 

Carnac the Magnificent was funny and enduring. The rip-off from Steve Allen was in its turn ripped off from Carson by Howard Stern. And Wikipedia redirects you to "Late Night with David Letterman" from "Stupid Pet Tricks" for a reason. People remember that stuff.

 

Colbert belongs to a small minority, the jaded left. 

 

Put funny back on late night, and people will stay up to watch it. 

Don't hatchet your AfD before you count, Friedrich

 Germany’s Merz fails to be elected chancellor in shock first-round parliamentary vote

... “Friedrich Merz became the first chancellor candidate failing to be elected in the first round of voting in the Bundestag. However, he remains likely to win sufficient support eventually,” Carsten Nickel, deputy director of research at Teneo, said. 

Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg, described the situation as a “bad surprise.” He echoed comments suggesting Merz would still become chancellor eventually, but “the unprecedented failure to be elected in the first round would still be a bad start for him.” ...

AfD ‘extremist’ label sets up political high-wire act for Friedrich Merz

... Merz’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, has been torn over how to deal with the AfD. Merz tacitly cooperated with the party earlier this year – despite insisting he would not – to push migration policies through parliament. And on the local level, his party and the AfD have cooperated on issues such as a ruling that the German flag should be hoisted in schools. ...

This number seems wei tu lo

 

IMF Warns Trump Could Cost the World a Trillion Dollars

The Guardian

 

Is that all?

 

World GDP in 2023 was $106.2 trillion according to the World Bank, whose graph shows that the 2009 Great Recession contraction was $3.34 trillion. The Grauniad is worried that the Trump trade war will cost a third of the 2009 contraction, based on an analysis by the IMF, "the most sober of global institutions" lol.

 

Meanwhile there was a 2015 contraction in global GDP which was much larger, $4.55 trillion. That was much worse than the so-called Great Recession. And much worse than the global impact of COVID in 2020, which was $2.39 trillion according to the World Bank's data.

 

Why isn't this popularly discussed?

 

AI laughably tells me "global GDP did not actually contract in 2015".

 

 

 

 

 

But the World Bank itself traces the 2015 global GDP hit to a massive contraction in trade, at the heart of which was the forced restructuring of the Chinese economy under Xi Jinping, who is a communist reactionary.

 

The sizes of the tariffs of Donald Trump, which far exceed those of the Smoot-Hawley era, especially with trade hegemon China, seem uniquely poised to wreak havoc on a world whose experts today can't draw the obvious parallel to the right year.

Trump's tariffs mean that the skies will be empty, along with the shelves

 Boeing hopes to find new buyers for up to 50 planes returned by China

... Two Boeing jets have returned to the US from China, with another on the way, after the imposition of steep 125% tariffs on American imports. China imposed the levies in retaliation to the White House’s 145% rate that threatens to significantly slow down the world economy. ...

Blank Sailings Rattle Trans-Pacific Trade as China Imports Nosedive

... Container shipping companies have blanked at least 80 sailings this month, compared to 51 in March 2020, when volumes crashed amid early Covid-19 lockdowns, Sea-Intelligence said. ...

Ron Klain says Biden's brain was applesauce, but still believed Biden should have stayed in the race after the bad debate with Trump

 Well, that doesn't make any sense.

From the story here:

... Even after the disastrous debate, by his own telling to Whipple, Klain believed Biden should have stayed in the race – a statement that jars with Klain’s account of debate prep at Camp David. ...

 

All I can think of when I read about Democrats wanting a more angry, a more centrist candidate, a more combative leader who meets the moment, is that they had all that in Joe Biden and they dumped him

The outright treason against their own president is the Democrats' real problem with their own voters, who lost faith in them and voted for Trump instead.

 

 

Democrats have never been so angry. Who will step up and lead them?

Democrats are furious. And they want their leaders to get mad, too.

“I wish you’d be angry,” a constituent told representative Gil Cisneros, a Democrat of California, at a recent town hall. At an event in Minnesota featuring a panel of Democratic attorneys general, an activist voiced a similar sentiment: “Get angry, man,” punctuating the message with a profanity.

The anger roiling the party, slow to build, is now a forceful current coursing through the electorate and pulling in Americans terrified that the country is descending into authoritarianism. Democrats – with no leader to guide them and little power to wield in Washington – are scrambling to harness the sudden fury. ...

 

Of course, we all know that that Joe Biden, especially the centrist Joe Biden, didn't really have control of his own White House, covering up which until it couldn't be covered up anymore just shows that the incumbent wasn't really trustworthy either.

 

Another Trump MO is his perverse demand for reimbursement from totally wrecked countries which we "helped"

 

Rosie throws in the towel and BlackRock declares the boom and bust cycle over

 Gee, when have we heard that before lol?