Trump makes America 1969 again

February 2026 might as well be July 1969, when the percentage of Americans working hit 59% for the first time.

America does not even come close to working up to its potential. 

(geek note: population estimates get updated at the beginning of each year, which means current percentage calculations and comparisons such as this one will not exactly match previous ones posted here in 2025, 2024, 2023, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera) 

 

People are right to doubt government data when Trump's Treasury Department under Scott Bessent leads off with this chart crime of September 2025 federal outlays

 You can access the Treasury's Monthly Treasury Statement here to see for yourself.

The OUTLAYS BY FUNCTION for September 2025 in the Figure 1 graphic DO NOT ADD UP TO $346 BILLION, as stated.

They add up to $560 billion.

The receipts DO ADD UP, almost, to $543 billion.

That the graphic indicates $544 billion, not $543 billion, is another clue that the entire thing is a tendentiously fabricated interpretation of the data from within the report, obviously. 

Well duh.

Meanwhile that "Other" category isn't a Red Flag for nothing!

"Hello! Hey! Yes, you! We're about to pull a fast one! Pay Attention!" 

In the end outlays of $560 billion minus receipts of $543 billion = a September DEFICIT of $17 billion, NOT A F^@KING SURPLUS OF $198 BILLION.

They are asking you to deny the evidence of your own eyes, and they know it. 

It's a total lie, as in Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

When you can't trust the U.S. Treasury Department, who can you trust?

 

The upshot is that Fiscal Year 2025 ends with a deficit of $1.973 trillion, far worse than FY 2024's $1.816 trillion . . . by 8.6%.

But the Trump Regime wants you to think the deficit is smaller than in 2024, at $1.775 trillion, that they're cutting spending by closing agencies and departments and firing federal employees, and increasing revenues through tariffs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that the Big Ugly Bill is working.

LIES, DAMN LIES, I tell you. 

 

Trump thinks winning a war is about killing people when it's about killing their ability to make war

Afghanistan could have been over and done with before the end of 2001 by destroying all the infrastructure: roads, water projects, dams, electric power stations and grid, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, nuking the poppy fields on the way out.

Not one American life need have been sacrificed, nor 10 million Afghan lives, not that we should care about the rag-headed heathen bastards.

But we are not a serious country.

The Detroit News is pushing Kethledge for Supreme Court, the guy who reversed a deportation order of a criminal alien

The Detroit News, here, suffering as it does from a mental disorder known as libertarianism.

Kethledge is being pushed by the Republican Establishment as easier to confirm, in other words by the open borders crowd. For a reason.

The nitwits out there are getting into the weeds of "aggravated" in order to explain this away, some ignorantly equating "aggravated" in the law with "violent", which is hardly controlling. All sorts of things which aren't inherently violent are defined as aggravated by the law, including things which are obviously violent. For example, illicit trafficking in controlled substances and firearms are aggravated, as are money laundering, receipt of stolen property, disclosing classified information (Hillary), fraud (Obama), forgery, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Kethledge ignored the meaning of aggravated in the law in the case described, which suggests he might well dismiss the law in other circumstances when it is attractive to do so, for whatever reason.

There are better candidates than Kethledge who would enforce immigration law instead of try to find an excuse to get around it, which is also what Obama tried to do with the DACA executive order. 

The false question remains "Why did Trump win?"

Two examples from today.

Liz Peek of FOX reassured Steve Gruber this morning on his radio program in Michigan that Trump won in 2016 primarily because the voters were most concerned to ensure we had a Supreme Court seat filled by a Scalia clone.

And then Josh Brown assures his readers in the line up at Real Clear Markets that the most important reason was class warfare: a tax cut for the middle class and a big tax increase on rich speculators.

It's been five months since the election and we still can't agree about the political state of the country. Hint: libertarians don't agree about very much.

One could go on. Ann Coulter would tell you it was the promise of The Wall and an end to indiscriminate invasion by illegal aliens. Independent small business owners and self-employed people would tell you it was the promise of repeal of Obamacare. Veterans . . . veterans' affairs. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

These various opinions tell us more about the values of the individual coalitions Trump cobbled together to win, not why he won.

Meanwhile the narrow character of Trump's victory in key states, the result of former Democrat voters boycotting Hillary by the millions, goes underestimated by the winners . . . and the losers.

That's fairly typical, even for otherwise prudent presidents.

George Herbert Walker Bush thought victory in Kuwait made him golden, promptly raised taxes after we read his lips, and was shown the door.

The same will happen to Trump if he doesn't deliver on his program.

And because his program is a Duodetrigintapus, the question is really "How many of my twenty-eight legs can I get away with chopping off and still have enough left to strangle my opponent with in 2020"?

He's already cut off three. Repeal of Obamacare has failed. DACA has not been reversed (what, did they run out of pens in the White House?), and suddenly we have to burn $100 million worth of cruise missiles because someone used a politically incorrect weapon.

What's next, an assault weapon ban?

There's still plenty of time for Trump to prove that he isn't some suicidal sea monster.

But at the rate he's going he'll be a legless jellyfish by Christmas.

Academic Ann Douglas' analysis is a cloister-f*^k: "Even some white men feel they've been left behind"

Here, where her attachment to the ideology of "sexism" blinds her to the real consequences of Obama's intentional inattention to the fate of the white middle class of both sexes, no sex, homosex, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera:

Yes, Hillary was a flawed candidate. Her penchant for privacy—not surprising given what the Republicans and the national press have put her through since 1992—was her Achilles heel, leading to the use of a private email server that came to symbolize her alleged untrustworthiness. It also led her to be not adroit enough with the media. Hillary misread the country: the fury about the wages of neoliberalism—which, yes, she embodied—that was gripping people, young and old, on the Right and the Left. Thus, she didn’t have a galvanizing progressive message that, as the Sanders campaign demonstrated, millions were hungering for, even some white men feeling they’ve been left behind.

Even some white men? 

How about 4 million whites of both sexes, Ann, in the core of the working population aged 25 to 54 years, who've been left behind in fact and don't just "feel" they have:

One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.

European Project Has Been Hijacked To Prop Up Insolvent Banks

So says an angry Irishman, Declan Ganley, who is none too happy that despite being in an economic depression, Ireland continues to bailout failed banking institutions elsewhere, here:

“[On Tuesday] Ireland paid, once more, another half a billion euros to unsecured, un-guaranteed failed private bank holders — we don’t know who they are,  some of them are French banks, some of them German — it’s not even disclosed [to whom] Irish tax payers money is going.  So Irish taxpayers are bailing out failed banks."

“The whole of the European project, it would appear, has been hijacked to subsidize and protect an industry that needs to go through its insolvency purge [and] needs to go through bankruptcy."

Well . . . yeah!

His faith in American-style banking bankruptcy arrangements for Europe, expressed elsewhere at the link, is touching, but we don't really practice them here either, sorry to say, in the cases that really matter. American taxpayers remain on the hook for failed behemoths like Citigroup and Bank of America, and Fannie and Freddie, GM, AIG, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Some French readers will be amused by these additional remarks:

“You cannot take the path that Hollande is taking in France of dropping retirement ages and putting in exploitative, extractive taxation and creating a hostile environment for business [because then] there will be no growth in Europe and the whole European project will fall apart.”