Tag Archives: politics

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Texas Congressman Picking People’s Wallets With Deceptive Pleas

Congressman Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican in office since 2021, knows how to pull a fast one in the fundraising festival.

Rep. Ronny Jackson

He’s blanketing email inboxes with a deceptive, plaintive plea from Team Ronny. This one came to me in Oregon:

Ronny’s no stranger to controversy.

In March 2021, a scathing Pentagon inspector general report said he engaged in “inappropriate conduct” while serving as a White House physician, made sexual comments and “disparaged, belittled, bullied and humiliated” subordinates. The report also said he “engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol during two incidents” on overseas presidential trips in 2014 and 2016.

President Trump nominated Jackson to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs during his first term in 2018, but Jackson withdrew his nomination after accusations of drinking on the job and over-prescribing medications to patients. 

Texas voters in the heavily conservative 13th Congressional District later elected Jackson to Congress in 2020 anyway with a strong endorsement from Trump. 

Now Jackson’s out there playing tricks with emails ostensibly seeking the opinions of recipients on the midterm elections:

“Patriot, we’d like to invite you into the inner circle,” the message says. 

“You’ve gone above and beyond to display the traits of someone who truly cares about their country, their community, their family, and the future of traditional conservative civilization. Therefore, we wanted to reach out to you personally, one-on-one, to get your thoughts on the outlook of the upcoming midterm elections.” 

To lend a patina of legitimacy to the message, the plea then includes a series of questions:

❓DO YOU SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PLAN TO DEPORT ILLEGALS?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE OUR NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT RISK IF AMERICA LACKS BORDER SECURITY?

❓ARE YOU PLEASED WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP’S JOB PERFORMANCE SO FAR?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE DOING MORE TO STOP ANTI-AMERICAN IDEOLOGY FROM BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?

❓ARE YOU GLAD DONALD TRUMP IS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?

❓DO YOU SUPPORT THE SECRETARY OF WAR, PETE HEGSETH?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE REPUBLICANS WILL MAINTAIN MAJORITY CONTROL IN CONGRESS AFTER THE 2026 MIDTERMS?

❓If the 2028 Presidential Election were held today, who would you prefer to win?

Then, of course, comes the real message. “Add Your name and submit your answers” along with a $20.26 contribution or show your dedication with a contribution ranging from $47 to $3,500. 

 “Your contribution will benefit Texans for Ronny Jackson and Trump National Committee JFC”, the email assures recipients.

Ah yes, but how much to each? In tiny barely readable text, the message says you have click through to find out. If any recipients do, they will discover that $19.25 of a $20.26 contribution will go not to Trump, but to “Texans for Ronny Jackson TX-13”. Only $1.01 will go to “Trump National Committee JFC. The same percentage division applies to all contributions.  A $1000 contribution will send $950 to Jackson and just $50 to Trump, a $3,500 contribution will send $3,325 to Jackson and $175 to Trump. 

To add insult to injury, unless you are careful and uncheck a box, the pledge will become a monthly recurring contribution with an indeterminate end date. In adopting this scheme, Jackson joins other politicians who have been criticized for manipulating contributors. 

In 2021, the New York Times reported that the Republican National Committee and the campaign committee for Donald Trump had refunded $12.8 million collected from people in the first half of 2021 who thought they were making a single donation. Instead, the online solicitation signed them up for weekly contributions. 

Four state attorneys general have begun looking into the online fund-raising practices of both political parties, specifically seeking information about the use of prechecked boxes to enroll contributors in recurring donation programs that spurred a wave of fraud complaints and demands for refunds last year.

The attorneys general for New York, Minnesota, Maryland and Connecticut sent letters to WinRed, which processes online donations for Republicans, and ActBlue, which processes online donations for Democrats, asking for documents related to the practices.

In 2023, researchers at Columbia University who analyzed millions of campaign contributions found that about half of top Republicans had signed donors up for automatic recurring contributions.

Critics allege that the practice is an attempt to intentionally manipulate small-dollar contributors. In May 2021 the Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted unanimously to recommend that Congress officially ban pre-checked recurring donation boxes, demanding mandatory “affirmative consent”. Congress has not, however, taken action to ban the practice.

Similar efforts at the state level have failed, too. In 2025, for example, the New Jersey assembly considered, but didn’t pass, Assembly Bill No. 5559 (the “Political Donation Transparency Act”) which would have prohibited automatic enrollment in recurring political contributions and established penalties for violators. A 2026 effort in Missouri failed as well when  HB 1788, which would have restricted recurring contributions, passed the Missouri House, but ultimately died in the Senate.

Jackson is seeking another term in November. He will face Democratic candidate Mark Nair, who ran unopposed for his party’s nomination.

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Their Blood Is On Our Hands: Trump’s Terezin

It wasn’t designed to be a concentration camp with gas chambers for mass annihilation. It was intended to be a waystation, a stopover before prisoners were moved elsewhere.

Terezin, contained within the walls of the fortress Theresienstadt 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic, was established by Germany’s Gestapo.

Terezin concentration camp

More than 150,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark were sent there, including 15,000 children. They were held for months or years. An estimated 33,000 died there from extreme crowding, malnutrition and disease. About 88,000 were sent to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland, as well as to smaller camps elsewhere.  Less than 150 children survived.

Access to Terezin during WWII by outside impartial investigators was denied until the King of Denmark demanded it in late 1943 to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there earlier that year. 

In late 1943, Christian X, the king of Denmark, demanded an inspection of Terezin to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there in October of that year. According to the organizationTerezin: Children of the Holocaust, to hide their cruelty, the Germans initiated a beautification program, “Operation Embellishment,” a ruse intended to mollify the king’s concerns.The area was cleaned up, many of the Jews were sent to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding and even fake shops and cafes were built to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. 

A photo of Jewish children in Terezin during the
inspection by the International Red Cross.

The International Red Cross carried out an inspection hosted by Adolf Eichmann on June 23, 1944. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Red Cross issued “a bland report about the visit, indicating that the representatives were taken in by the elaborate fiction”.  Today’s visitors to ICE detention centers should we wary of ICE “cleaning things up” to deceive them.

Today, President Trump’s mass deportation push has resulted in the detention of a massive and growing number of alleged undocumented immigrants in the United States. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports holding an average of approximately 65,000 to 73,000 people daily in its detention facilities. It’ is a vast network with detainees constantly being shifted around multiple times far from their homes. In theory, all these people are subject to deportation.

KING 5 Seattle television recently reported that ICE is repeatedly flying detainees back and forth across the country. The station cited a case where a Cuban man detained in Florida was subsequently flown from Miami to Denver, Colorado, then to Florence, Arizona, back to Denver, then to Florence again, then Denver, then back to Florence. “A lot of lawyers and judges around the country…believe that ICE is intentionally doing this to put people away from families, from legal representation and just honestly to try to encourage them self-deport,” the station reported.

For concerned people trying to keep track of the detainees the process is a nightmare.

The more frightening nightmare, however, bringing up memories of Terezin, is the use of American detention centers as waystations for deportations back to home countries where great danger lurks and to third countries where they are not citizens, frequently don’t speak the local language, have no personal ties and are subject to God knows what brutal conditions and even death.

More than 23,000 people have reportedly been sent to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, and according to Third Country Deportation Watch, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the United States to take deported immigrants. The Trump administration pays other countries with documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses millions of dollars to take in deported people under “third country” agreements. As Jonathan Capeheart has said, “…the stories from immigrants swept up in third-country deportations should shock the conscience of a nation that says it believes in equal protection and the rule of law. “

The Guardian recently reported that in August about 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of a major third-country deportation arrangement. When six of them refused to get off the plane, they were dropped off in another African country, Equatorial Guinea, “one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt regimes, where armed men took them to a former luxury hotel turned detention centre in the capital, Malabo, where they have been held ever since,” the Guardian reported.

ICE has deported over 200 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador and deposited many of therm into CECOT (the Center for Terrorism Confinement)—a notorious maximum-security mega-prison. The migrants have testified that they were shot with rubber bullets and beaten on a regular basis. Many of them have alleged that they were routinely raped and tortured.

ICE has also deported migrants originating from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to volatile regions like the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The U.S. State Department warns “Do not travel to Central African Republic due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health, and terrorism” and “Do not travel to South Sudan due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, and health risks”.
  
Detainees have also been sent to the African nation of Eswatini, where they were held in a maximum-security prison without charge and with no access to legal counsel. And last year U.S. immigration and federal authorities tried to deport nationals from Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines to war-torn Libya until a federal judge blocked the planned flights.

Even in cases where ICE is deporting people to their home countries, the situations are often dire. There’s been an escalation of deportation flights to Haiti since the  June 2026 Supreme Court decision that allowed the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), stripping legal protections from an estimated 330,000 Haitian immigrants. The humanitarian and security crisis in Haiti will expose all such deportees to harm. According to the New York Times, some 3,000 people were killed there in the first six months of this year, many of them in gang-related violence.

“Millions of people in Haiti continue to face a compounding crisis of food insecurity, forced displacement, deadly disease outbreaks, and surging violence,” says Alice Ribes, the International Rescue Committee’s director for Haiti.  “Public services in many areas have collapsed under gang rule, leaving people with limited or no access to clean drinking water, food, medical care, and education.”

ICE attempts to minimize or conceal the conditions in America’s detention centers and the threats faced by deportees to their own and other countries are America’s “Operation Embellishment”.

The blood of those in harm’s way will be on our hands.

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Trump’s Shameful Attempts to Define American History

Of all things, an article in The Cut, a digital section of New York magazine, about the death of Gloria Steinem on September 2 at 92 spurred me to write this piece about Donald Trump and the Smithsonian’s interpretations of history.

Frankly, I’ve never thought much about Gloria Steinem, but for some reason I was intrigued and pored over the entire 5,948-word article. What a fascinating life!

“She was a talented, driven, and powerfully charismatic emblem for a movement that was always more complicated and sometimes more radical than she herself was,” wrote Rebecca Traister. “Her life, her work, and her contradictions together provide a remarkable illustration of the political and social disruption mainstream America is willing to tolerate, occasionally celebrate, and also revile.”

Traister wrote that Steinem frequently said she hoped to live to 100. “I’ve so loved being here,” she said in the HBO documentary. “I love it so much. I never want it to end.”

So what’s the connection of all this with Donald Trump and the Smithsonian?

The Washington Post reported on September 2 that the Trump administration is threatening to cut off executive agencies’ cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution “…if its leaders do not abandon what the administration described as “an ideological agenda that seeks to transform both the Smithsonian and the country.”

Trump set off a misguided attack on The Smithsonian when he launched his campaign against the institution last March. that was when he signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that instructed his administration to eliminate what it called “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and restore it as “a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”

The executive order instructed Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, to work with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to withhold funding for exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”

What the order really did was order that the telling of America’s history conform to Trump’s ideological view that there be just one public interpretation of American history, his.

But the fact is history is constantly being reviewed, re-interpreted, revised, re-thought. Topics of intense interest to one generation slip back as new topics emerge. Historical revisionism is a fundamental element of the discipline as new evidence emerges and societal perspectives change. Interest in some figures declines as new heroes and villains emerge.

My decision to examine more closely Gloria Steinem’s life was a reflection of a new interest in somebody with whom I was only vaguely familiar. In a similar vein, I’ve been tackling books that offer new perspectives on historical events.

For quite a while there was a widespread belief that North America, for example, was some vast, wild, untouched wilderness barely populated by primitives before more sophisticated and civilized Europeans arrived. You will be dissuaded of that notion if you read Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by archaeologist Timothy R. Pauketat. Research has revealed that in pre-Columbian America native civilizations built massive urban centers like Cahokia in southwestern Illinois which was populated by tens of thousands of people.

I long admired Apple’s leaps into China to grow its business, but I got a new perspective, and new concerns, on the implications of Apple becoming so deeply intertwined with China when I read “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” by Patrick McGee.

As the son of a man who served proudly in the U.S. Navy during WWII, I have always been interested in President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb, wondering whether it was the right decision, particularly as some revisionists have challenged it. I’ve read multiple books on the war and that decision, arriving at the conclusion it was the right one in the face of up to a million American casualties if an invasion went forward. And, by the way, historians have been constantly re-evaluating Harry Truman the man and his presidency.

I’ve read the first two books of Rick Atkin’s trilogy on the American revolution, Bernard Bailyn’s “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” and countless others to better understand that world-changing event.

Before seeing Ken Burns’ documentary, The American Revolution, were you aware of the astonishing effort led by Boston bookseller Henry Knox to haul 59 heavy cannons and mortars from captured from British forces at Fort Ticonderoga across 300 miles of frozen wilderness to Boston, forcing a British evacuation of the city without a shot being fired? Wow! It spurred me to read an entire book, Henry Knox’s Noble Train by William Hazelgrove, about the endeavor.

The Noble Train

I’ve been taken aback to read of the extent to which slavery extended far beyond the South into into New England, even into the Norman Rockwell-perfect small town of Wallingford, Connecticut where I grew up. As Anne Farrow wrote in “The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory”, In Connecticut and elsewhere in New England, “All the best families owned ‘captives’.”

Slaves on a tobacco farm in Connecticut

I grew up as a child idolizing Charles Lindbergh for his single-handed crossing of the Atlantic to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis. I even made a special trip during a later visit to Hawaii to visit his grave on the grounds of the Palapala Ho’omau Church at the end of the road to Hana on the coast.

t wasn’t until I read numerous books about his life that I learned he was a leading spokesman for the America First Committee that opposed America’s entry into WWII. Also, although many Americans shared his early opinions, Lindbergh went further, blaming “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” for pressing for American intervention. I also learned after he died in 1974 that he led a double life, starting a romance with a woman in Munich, Germany in 1957 and having three children with her who knew him only as ”Mr. Careu Kent”.

Charles Lindbergh speaking at an America
First Committee rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana,
October 3, 1941.

Suffice it to say, every time I turn around I find stories that challenge my views on people and issues of historical significance.

On July 4th, of all days, White House Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley released “Saving America’s Story,” a 162-page report accusing the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism”. The report’s key finding: “museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

What ought to dispirit all Americans is something else. That’s the Trump’s administration’s impulsive and capricious efforts to shut down debate on America’s glorious, and yes, flawed, history.

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Are Socialists Taking Over Colorado And Beyond?

In Colorado’s June 2026 primaries, 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros unseated 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in the dark-blue 1st Congressional District, which consists largely of Denver residents. 

As the overwhelming favorite against her Republican opponent in November’s general election, Kiros, 29, is expected to be the first self-identified socialist to be elected to Congress in Colorado history.

“We just proved that if you organize the people, you can beat the organized money,” Kiros told Colorado Newsline after her win. “And we’re going to replicate it in races all across the state.”

Will they?

Before pundits and the public accept this assertion, let’s step back and examine what just happened in Colorado’s 1stCongressional District. 

The numbers suggest that the real victor was voter apathy, as in so many political contests across the country. Non-voters default to being led by the preferences of voters. That, combined with the creation of safe party districts, is increasingly turning primaries into the real elections. 

Bear with me now.

In looking at the 1st Congressional District race, it’s important to recognize that it was limited to registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters. There are 477,098 active registered voters in the district. Of those, 187,317 are registered as Democrats and 236,454 are registered as Unaffiliated voters. So, the number of eligible voters in the Democratic primary totaled 423,771.

But only 157,645 people, or 37.2 % of those eligible, voted in the primary. 

That translated into 83,855 for Kiros, 62,715 for DeGette and 11,075 for the Democratic party candidate, Wanda James.  In other words, the Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros won the primary with just 19.79 % of eligible voters, only a few more than would fit in the Denver Bronco’s stadium.

Overwhelming? A massive sign of a cultural shift? A rejection of a more moderate political climate?  I don’t think so.  

A similar situation in New York City is why caution is warranted in interpreting recent races.  

“Turnout in New York’s closed primary races is typically small—even Mamdani  won last year’s Democratic mayoral primary with less than 7 percent of the city’s overall population backing him,” City Journal reported. “Tuesday’s results do not prove, then, that the majority of residents in New York are hard-left socialists. They instead suggest that, since most potential voters remain politically apathetic, a small but well-organized machine like the DSA’s can deliver big results.”

There’s a parallel here with Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George’s victory in Washington, D.C’s mayoral Democratic primary, which has led some to declare her win a mandate. There are approximately 357,000 registered Democrats in Washington, D.C., making up roughly 75% of all registered voters in the District. Only about 38% of registered Democrats voted and George won with just 75,000 votes. A mandate? Hardly. 

So, calm down folks. 

This isn’t to say that the new socialist legislators in the House won’t be able to muck things up. 

As commentator Gerard Baker has observed, “The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic  primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia. Sure, we can overstate its importance. New York isn’t America. What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country.”

In addition, if Democrats retake the House in November, their margin is likely to be slim and an enlarged cadre of disruptors will be able to challenge leadership. Republicans are also likely to try to tar the entire Democratic Party for its association with the Democratic Socialists. President Trump has already called the socialist nominees “godless” communists who are threatening the country. At a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, he urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms,saying his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power. 

Hang on. 

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Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park: Don’t Fence Me In

Lafayette Park north of the White House is one of the most prominent hubs for political protests in the country and a beacon for the first amendment.

So, of course, President Trump, not content with destroying the Rose Garden and the West Wing, is continuing his rampage through Washington’s landmarks with a move to permanently surround the park with an 8-9 ft. fence. That would allow the park to be closed at Trump’s discretion.

On Thursday, July 16, the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal design panel stuffed with Trump supplicants, indicated support for the plan. 

“This is definitely the president’s park, but also the people’s park, and it’s to be made open, but also closeable, so that it can be made safe,” James C. McCrery II, the vice chair of the Commission, told the New York Times.

Safe for whom? Safe from whom?

The park has long been the site of multiple political protests, including picketing by suffragists demanding voting rights, protests for women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), demonstrations by civil rights and anti-war activists, LGBTQ activists, anti-nuclear war encampments, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

In 2021, the National Park Service and the White House Historical Association added three wayside markers on the north side of the park that tell the story of protest in the park, the construction of the White House by free and enslaved laborers, and the influence of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in preserving the character of the park.

In this Library of Congress photo from 1917, suffragists march with banners, picketing outside on the sidewalk in front of the White House.

The Secret Service, the Executive Office of the President and the Department of the Interior claim they want to install the permanent fence so the park can be closed during “heightened conditions.”

A demonstrator hold up flags at a rally for D.C. Democracy in Lafayette Park near the White House in Washington, Saturday, June 25, 2011. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)

NPR ran the AP photo above by Luis Alvarez of a rally in Lafayette Park to show how close protesters were able to get to the White House without barriers in 2011. Trump wants to push them back, way back.

“What this fencing represents, to me, is the worst of what the new attitude toward politics represents,” Marty Pearl, 83, who brought a “Hate Won’t Make America Great” sign to the area, told NPR. “And that is imperialism, fascism, dictatorship, because what dictators do is isolate themselves from the people they rule. That is not, for me, the way democracies can possibly work.”

He’s right. Putting our political leaders more and more behind barriers and keeping them more and more distant from the people they serve diminishes our democracy. 

And Trump doesn’t want to stop with the fence.

In June, the Washington Post disclosed that Trump is secretly planting a monument to himself in Lafayette Square in the form of 47 maple trees as a nod to being the 47th president. 

Enough!

Postcript:

Clay Pearce · on Facebook

J͏u͏l͏y͏ ͏3͏0͏ ͏a͏t͏ ͏5͏:͏5͏6͏ ͏A͏M͏ · 

I felt a profound sense of sorrow as our plane descended into Washington, D.C., last Thursday. I hadn’t been to our nation’s capital since 2008.

As we drove to our hotel, a deep heaviness settled over me. We passed National Guard troops stationed on street corners and around monuments. It was deeply unsettling to see armed American soldiers patrolling the streets of our nation’s capital.

Passing the Labor Department, I saw two enormous, Stalin-esque banners of Trump and Teddy Roosevelt hanging from the building. I couldn’t help but wonder how we had reached a point where the president of the United States was being glorified on government buildings in a way that felt more like a personality cult than a democracy.

The next morning, we walked toward Dupont Circle and saw more armed troops, ICE agents, and Secret Service personnel patrolling the streets. When we headed toward the White House, police and military vehicles blocked the usual road.

We were directed to a small viewing area where we could barely see the White House through a sixteen-foot fence surrounding Lafayette Park.

Americans, Australians, Colombians, and people from around the world were gathered there, straining to catch a glimpse of the people’s house through the massive barrier.

I was horrified.

The White House belongs to the American people. Lafayette Square belongs to the American people. These are symbols of our democracy—not private property to be barricaded and hidden from the public.

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Are Socialists Taking Over the Democratic Party?

Hyperventilating political prognosticators don’t always get it right. 

“(New York City) Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his Democratic Socialists of America are now the most capable political force in the Democratic Party heading into 2028,” John Ketcham and Christian Browne at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy think tank, just wrote in City Journal. “In yesterday’s primaries in New York, his three endorsed candidates beat better-established adversaries, demonstrating how Mamdani and the DSA have become the face of the party’s progressive wing.”

“…the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists,” says Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a suburban New York House seat.

Zeteo, a left-leaning digital media company, says “a new politics is brewing. And the epicenter is New York City.”

Wait a minute. Before other pundits and the public accept this assertion, let’s step back and examine what just happened in New York City, focusing on one of the winning socialist candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier.

32-year-old Chevalier is no shrinking violet. In 2020, she branded Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and called the US a “fucking disgrace”. The day after the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel, she joined a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square organized by leftist groups that appeared to celebrate the event. In posts onTwitter from 2018 through 2022, she maligned interracial relationships. She’s written that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States had “been bullying Russia”. In a tweet disparaging America, she wrote, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”. 

Voter apathy in primary races is the culprit here, as in so many political contests across the country. That, combined with the creation of safe districts across the country, is increasingly causing primaries to be the real elections.

In looking at the New York primary race, it’s important to recognize not only that the race was limited to registered Democrats, of which there are 373,000 in the District NY-13, but that only 67,473 voters participated in the primary, or 18.09 percent. That allowed the Democratic Socialists to wield disproportionate influence. Of those, who bothered to vote, just 32,790 voted for Chevalier, who came out ahead of her main challenger, Adriano Espaillat, by only 2,326 votes.

City Journal acknowledged this in a post on June 27: “Turnout in New York’s closed primary races is typically small—even Mamdani won last year’s Democratic mayoral primary with less than 7 percent of the city’s overall population backing him. Tuesday’s results do not prove, then, that the majority of residents in New York are hard-left socialists. They instead suggest that, since most potential voters remain politically apathetic, a small but well-organized machine like the DSA’s can deliver big results.”

There’s a parallel here with Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George’s  victory in Washington, D.C’s mayoral Democratic primary, which has led some to declare her win a mandate. There are approximately 357,000 registered Democrats in Washington, D.C., making up roughly 75% of all registered voters in the District. Only about 38% of registered Democrats voted and Janeese Lewis George won with just 75,000 votes. A mandate? Hardly.

So, calm down folks.

This isn’t to say, however, that the new socialist legislators in the House, largely a result of voter lethargy, won’t muck things up.

As commentator Gerard Baker has observed, “The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia. In it we see a Democratic base, relatively small in number but energized by anti-Trump rage, that has decided that the Black Lives Matter, No Such Thing as a Woman, Mostly Peaceful Rioting that the party nourished under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is too timid for their tastes.

Sure, we can overstate its importance. New York isn’t America. What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country.”

Also, even if the Democrats retake the House in November, their margin is likely to be slim and an enlarged cadre of disruptors will be able to challenge leadership. Republicans are also likely to try to tar the entire Democratic Party for its association with the Democratic Socialists. President Trump has already called the socialist nominees “godless” communists who are threatening the country. At a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, he urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms, saying his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power. 

And right on cue, Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for National Republican Congressional Committee, said, “Tonight wasn’t just a bad night for so-called ‘Leader’ Hakeem Jeffries. It was the night the Democrat establishment officially surrendered to Zohran Mamdani and the socialist wing of their party. Every House Democrat, in safe and competitive districts alike, will now answer to the radicals calling the shots. And Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”

Hang on.

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Kotek A Winner? Please, No.

A YouTube channel called Election Time recently ran an item showing Democrat Tina Kotek polling at 45% and Republican Christine Drazan at 44% in the governor’s race. 

And this isn’t the only outlet saying Kotek has the advantage. 

“While Oregon’s 40-year history of electing Democratic governors and the state’s strong distaste for Republican President Donald Trump suggest Drazan has a difficult road ahead of her,” the Oregon Capital Chronicle opined on May 26. And I recently heard a couple political analysts on OPB saying Kotek will likely win it all again. 

They can’t be serious. 

This is the “Tax Everything that moves Kotek” who just tried to pull a fast one on Oregonians by shifting a despised transportation tax measure to May in hopes reduced voter participation would doom it, but still saw more than 83% of voters across the political spectrum reject it. 

This is the leader of Oregon’s Democratic party that has fostered an  anti-business climate for decades, enabled horrendous K-12 school performance despite high per pupil spending, filled the state Supreme Court with liberal judges ever since the administration of Republican Victor Atiyeh, whose term ended in January 1987, and exploded the state budget since then, increasing it from $12.57 billion in 1987-1989 to $138.9 billion in 2025-2027.

It’s the party that gleefully accepted, and then stalled returning, a $500,000 contribution from a disgraced and bankrupt crypto company after the U.S. Attorney’s Office requested it return the money to the federal government. 

This is a party so beholden to unions, which represent just 15% of working Oregonians, that it enacted a law to pay striking public and private workers unemployment benefits, that has watched Oregon’s business reputation tank in national rankings, that tolerates underperforming K-12 schools while suspending the requirement that high school students must pass standardized proficiency exams (the “Essential Skills” requirement) to graduate, that has watched the projected cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement project swell from $4.8 billion to $14.4 billion, and potentially $17.7 billion.

Oregon is in trouble and continuing Democratic Party control isn’t the solution.   

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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

President Trump doesn’t just make a mistake once in a while when he speaks. He’s a veritable fountain of blunders, a gusher of goofs, steadily adding to the nonsense his administration spews out.

When he took some time off during a May 7 drive over the surface of the drained Reflecting Pool in his 22,000 pound presidential limousine, nicknamed “The Beast,” to deliver some remarks and answer questions from the press, the event was, as usual, a cavalcade of small and large misstatements from start to finish. Here’s a snapshot of things he said in just that one case, while a grinning, tuxedo-clad Secretary of the Interior Doug Bergum, who is overseeing the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, stood by.

  • Trump: “The Reflecting Pool (on the National Mall at the Lincoln Memorial) was built in 1922”. Close, but no cigar. The original was completed in 1923.
  • Trump: “The Reflecting Pool is 2400 ft. long.” Close again, but no cigar. It is 2,030 ft. long. 
  • Trump: “It is taller than any building in the world laid on its side.” Nope. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is the tallest building in the world at 2,717 ft, followed by the Merdeka 118 building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at 2,233 ft.
  • Trump: “Obama spent 38 million dollars over 2.5 years (renovating the pool).” A 2012 renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool cost $34 million and took roughly 18 months.
  • Trump: “The estimate to fix (the Reflecting Pool) was $300 million, we’re going to do it for $1.8 million.”  The Biden administration studied replacing the iconic pool’s granite, which had an estimated cost of $301 million, but never embarked on the project. Trump has said at various times that his renovation, involving cleaning the granite lining the basin and coating it in an “American flag blue” will cost $1.5 – $3 million. The government has already agreed to pay the company doing the job, under a no-bid contract, $6.9 million and the Park Service’s internal estimates indicate the cost could exceed $12million. On May 11, The New York Times reported that on May 8 the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm, Atlantic Industrial Coatings. Then on May 12, The New York Times reported Trump was downplaying his connection with the firm. “Mr. Trump did an about-face early Tuesday, distancing himself from the company. “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform,” the NYT reported.
  • Trump: “We didn’t have a safe (Washington, D.C.) city in my first term. Crime is down now 88% – 92%.”  Data indicates that crime in Washington, D.C., has experienced a significant decline during 2025 and early 2026, but the 88%–92% figure is a fictional, exaggerated number. Allegations are also being investigated that DC police have manipulated data to show lower crime numbers. As of May 2026, multiple DC police officials face discipline over allegations of manipulating crime classifications.
  • Trump: “My triumphal arch (proposed for Memorial Circle on Columbia Island, a traffic circle on Memorial Drive between the end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery) will be number 60 in arches in the world.” Trump’s proposed “Triumphal Arch” or “Arc to Trump”, designed to dwarf the 164-foot Arc de Triomphe in Paris, is planned to be 250 feet tall, over twice the height of the 99-foot Lincoln Memorial, which would make it the largest triumphal arch in the world, but not the 60th. 
  • Trump: “They (US military) are on average knocking out 8 Iranian fast boats a day.” Secretary of state Marco Rubio has said U.S. Forces recently destroyed 7 Iranian Fast Boats in an incident in the Strait of Hormuz, but that rate is not occurring each day. 
  • Trump: “I got Americans out of foreign countries and I don’t pay $6 billion dollars to get somebody out, like Biden used to do and Obama, they gave 6 billion dollars to get some person out.” The Biden administration facilitated the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets in September 2023 to secure the release of five American citizens detained in Iran, though the funds were Iranian oil revenues, not U.S. taxpayer money.
  • Trump: “We’ve taken in hundreds of billions in tariffs, and we’re taking it from countries that have ripped us off for years.”  U.S. importers and consumers bear 94%–96% of the tariff burden, not foreign countries, with the costs essentially functioning as a tax on American households.  Foreign exporters bear a very small fraction of the cost, sometimes reducing their prices slightly to remain competitive, but they do not pay the tariff directly.
  • Trump: “Gas prices have come way down.” As of early May 2026, U.S. gas prices have not been coming “way down” and are actually elevated. On May 7, AAA reported drivers are seeing another sharp increase at the pump, with the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline rising 25 cents for the second consecutive week to $4.55. Pump prices are now $1.40 higher than they were a year ago. 
  • Trump: “The stock market today, for the 59th time since I’ve been president, hit a new high.” The stock market did not, in fact, hit a new high on May 7. All three major indexes dropped. The S&P fell 28 points, the NASDAQ fell 32 points, and the Dow fell over 300 points on Thursday, bringing it back below 50,000 after its surge the previous day.
  • Trump: “The construction workers, they all voted for me. I’d say 99-100 %.” Non-union construction workers are a large and influential voting bloc and a significant number voted for Trump in 2024, but union members and their families largely stuck with the Democratic presidential nominee, with Vice-President Harris winning 54% of union household votes.
  • Trump: “We think we’re going to have it (the ballroom) done by July 4th.” On July 31, 2025, the White House issued a statement that a 90,000 sq. ft. addition would be made to the White House to incorporate a 650-person capacity ballroom.The project was set to begin in September 2025 and planned to be completed “long before” the end of the President’s term in 2029. In December 2025, a National Park Service report said a much larger ballroom would be completed by 2028. The project’s above-ground construction has faced legal challenges, with construction as of April 18 being allowed to continue only until June 2026.

And as usual, Trump took an opportunity to bash a woman reporter, ABC’s Rachel Scott, who asked, “Why focus on all these projects as gas prices are soaring? Part of Trump’s response – “Such a stupid question that you asked. Maybe you can understand dirt better than I can baby, but I don’t allow it. This is one of the worst reporters. She’s from ABC fake news and she’s a horror show. A question like that is a disgrace to our country.”

Another day in Trump-world.

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Trailblazer Buyers Will Make Out Like Bandits; Taxpayers Not So Much

Don’t cry for Tom Dundon. He just pulled a fast one and he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

The Texas billionaire is purchasing 80.1% of the Portland Trailblazers at a $4 billion valuation and the remaining 19.9% at a $4.5 billion valuation. To push the deal along, the Blazers lobbying group, Rip City Media, secured $365 million in state tax bailouts to remodel the Blazer arena at the Moda Center. Portland and Multnomah County tax pledges could bring the total tax bailout to $600 million.

“This is a great day for our community,” said Dewayne Hankins, Portland Trail Blazers President of Business Operations, after the legislature approved a bill to subsidize the deal.

We are such rubes. To be honest, it was more a great day for Dundon and his investment group, which stands to reap billions from the acquisition down the road. What makes ordinary people who would never go along with subsidies for billionaires become willing supporters of such rewards when they become politicians?

The payoffs for other buyers of NBA teams who have subsequently sold their teams have been eye watering.

  • Boston Celtics: Bought by an investment group, Boston Basketball Partners L.L.C, led by Wyc Grousbeck that purchased the team in 2002 for $360 million; sold to an investment group led by private equity mogul Bill Chisholm in August 2025 for $6.1 billion.
  • Phoenix Suns: Bought by Robert Sarver, leading an investment group called Suns Legacy Partners, in 2004 for $401 million; billionaire mortgage lender, Mat Ishbia, purchased the majority stake of the Suns and the WNBA’s Mercury for $4 billion in 2023.
  • Dallas Mavericks: Mark Cuban purchased a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks from H. Ross Perot Jr. in January 2000 for $285 million; Cuban sold a majority interest in the team to Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont of the Adelson family casino empire for $3.5 billion in 2023.
  • Charlotte Hornets: Michael Jordan bought a majority stake in the Charlotte Bobcats (now the Hornets) from founder Bob Johnson in March 2010 for $275 million; sold his majority stake for $3 billion to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall in July 2023.
  • Golden State Warriors: Bought from Chris Cohan by Joe Lacob and Peter Guber for $450 million in July 2010; current valuation estimated at  $10.8 – $11.3 billion.
  • Milwaukee Bucks: Bought by former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl in 1985 for $18 million; sold by Kohl to Wes Edens and Marc Lasry in 2014 for $550 million; current estimated valuation $4.1 – $4.5 billion.
  • LA Lakers: Bought by Jerry Buss in 1979 for $67.5 million; in June 2025, Buss family agreed to sell controlling interest to Mark Walter, a minority owner since 2021 and owner of the L.A. Dodgers, for $10 billion.
  • And then there’s this deal. In August 2026, Mark Walter sold the Los Angeles Lakers to Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO and Los Angeles noble, and Josh Kushner, a venture capitalist. The deal came together in three days: $12.5 billion for a team that Walter bought less than a year ago for $10 billion. 

So, weep for taxpayers, not billionaire Dundon and his team.

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The Perplexing Resignation of Joe Kent

Joe Kent

Today’s resignation of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, a two-time failure as a Republican primary candidate for Congress in Washington State, is perplexing.

Kent said he couldn’t back Trump’s Iran war “in good conscience” because the country “posed no imminent threat” to the United States. and accused Trump of starting the war because of “pressure from Israel.”

Some people who observed Kent during his political campaigns must be confused.

In September 2022, he blasted out a statement in strong support of Israel.

“Joe Kent Statement on Support for Israel and Opposition to Antisemitism DATE: September 16, 2022

Israel: A Mutually Beneficial Ally and Close Friend

The United States and Israel share common enemies in the Middle East, from terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah to the totalitarian government of Iran,” Kent said in a position paper. “Building close economic, diplomatic, and military relations is in the United States’ best interests and something I will advocate for as a member of Congress. One of the best things that President Trump did for the security of the United States and of Israel was terminating President Obama’s Iran Deal. I support working with Israel to apply maximum pressure against Iran’s government and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, and to prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

Kent even went so far as to say that if elected he would “introduce legislation to strip the most vile antisemites in Congress from their committee assignments.

Even back then, however, some were wary. Jewish Insider, a Washington, D.C.–based digital news outlet and newsletter covering U.S. politics, foreign policy, and Jewish affairs, warned that Kent “has pushed an isolationist foreign policy vision, has otherwise argued in favor of scaling back U.S. involvement in the Middle East” and “has been critical of the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and said that candidates who accept its support cannot serve the needs of constituents.”

So who are you really, Joe?