Reflecting Pool

Potpourri – v25.0


POST 1301
The Cure For Your Ennui

Click me – First check Note #5 below

Sure, you’re discouraged. We’re being hit by American right wing terrorists undermining our country in every way, as they cheat and scheme to take away the America we believe in. They’re taking away our rights and even our lives. But, honestly, there really is some good news, and it isn’t only Marc Elias beating the snot out of Trump in court over and over. This part is more about we Americans and our supposed polarization that so many talk about.

Ambassador Michael McFaul is fresh off a long national book tour for his new book Autocrats vs. Democrats and he wrote about the tour in his post What I Learned on My Book Tour Across America. I haven’t read his book yet and plan to so do soon. What you need to read right now is his “What I Learned” essay. It is full of optimism and reasons to believe in us. We aren’t nearly as fractured as pundits and the few loud extremists and cowardly politicians would have us believe.

Most of all, you’ll learn that we Americans really do still care. Go read his essay.

The cure for despair is action.

Fascist Red Warning Flag of the Month

Read Thom Hartmann’s post that’s scarier than it at first seems, That Sign in Front of the Smithsonian is More Dangerous Than You Think. Your freedom of speech is at risk. Again. Still.

July Jobs Report

From Jim Acosta:

CNBC anchor Rick Santelli was blown away by a disastrous July jobs report that showed Trump’s economy not just missing the expected 85,000 or so jobs gain — but actually losing 23,000 jobs — and another hundred thousand in downward revisions.

On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a July jobs report that was a disaster for Trump:

And still [Trump] tells us that this is the greatest economy ever.

Trump Fantasy Post of the Month – So Far

This was a real post on Trump’s blabbing platform:

I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT

Nah – I’m betting that the dark reality is that Trump is an embarrassing illegitimate descendant of fictional character Captain Queeg and that the whole VANDALIZED! Reflecting Pool claim is equivalent to an imaginary theft of strawberries. Blame others and twiddle those steel balls, President DJT!

It Won’t Cost Taxpayers Anything

After Trump’s Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack on the East Wing of the White House he announced his grand plan for a ballroom for his presidency-built-on-spectacle, a structure that would dwarf the actual White House. It is to be a gilded monument to himself which he claimed would cost just $200 million. He told us that funding for it would be supplied by private donations.

Now we find out that – surprise! – it will cost over $900 million and we taxpayers will pay most of that, The cost will likely to grow to well over $1 billion as construction and the Trumpian lies and overreach grow.

Construction has been partially stymied by the courts, with only “underground and security related” construction allowed to continue. You don’t suppose such a claimed purpose might be used by Trump to get around Congress and the courts, do you?

This classic dishonesty is a valuable warning siren for why we need a Democratic Congress to stifle Trump’s “I’m the president and I can do whatever I want” ongoing anti-America tantrum.

Click me

Why Does the MAGA Culture Hate Dr. Fauci?

Lucas Bean lays it out for you in this short video.

Unwitting Decoys

Imagine you’re a journalist traveling home from the NATO conference in Turkey aboard Air Force 1. It isn’t until you’re back in the U.S. that you learn that you’re been used as a decoy, a target to attack, in order to sneak the president away,

Click me

Nobody on Air Force 1 other than those riding in the presidential section, not the staff, not Secretary of State Rubio or Treasury Secretary Bessent, nor any member of the press knew that the president was not on that plane. He left you all to be a potential target of an Iranian missile.

You were put in mortal danger without your knowledge, much less your consent. You were left to be a sacrificial pawn for a president who thinks only about himself.

We all agree that presidential safety is a real issue. But is that all that your next of kin would be focused on after they learned that you were used as a disposable, your demise an acceptable cost of doing business? Perhaps there are other real issues, too.

The Best Call To Action

Yes, even better than, “Grab a bat – You’re up!“

From the closing words of Rick Wilson’s post, Trump and American Enshittification:

The [democracy] machinery only starts working again when enough people decide that being a citizen costs something, and start paying it.

Whose Voting Rights?

The President of the United States is begging the Supreme Court to allow him to kill all mail-in ballots in all states where they refused to hand over confidential and protected state voting records for Trump’s SS to purge.

Red states everywhere are in gerrymander overdrive and are purging legitimate minority voters and women from voting rolls at hypersonic speed. I say it’s time to stop pussyfooting around with these weenie methods and drop the voting rights nuclear bomb.

Congress must initiate and pass a law that allows only White (as in: northern European ancestry), Christian male citizens to vote. Enough of pesky Voting Rights and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts! This is a White, Christian country, dedicated to all control and power to be held by men, especially rich men, the way the Founders wrote – somewhere, I think. To Hell with the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments! It’s time for us to enshrine our well practiced voting suppression into one supreme law that will supersede whatever laws for the benefit of We The People might still exist.

For Residents of Northbrook, IL Only

There is some suspicious stuff going on that has the potential to dramatically and adversely affect our village. It’s a local matter akin to Trump’s sneaky trashing of our national historic treasures.

Watch local resident Lee Goodman’s video explanation here. Then decide that being a citizen costs something. Let’s start paying for it with our voices.

The time for action is NOW!
Keep standing up,
speaking out
and taking action

Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe (IT’S A FREEBIE!), because it’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not necessarily mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine, but I do wish that I could blame someone else. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. I am neither offered nor do I accept funding of any type from candidates, online blabbers, organizations with or without any position or opinion or from any other origin other than from my own meager resources.
  5. Book links to Amazon or Barnes & Noble are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
  6. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source material.
  7. Do not look to these posts for “both sides” idiocy. I don’t have life to waste on such foolishness, such disingenuous nonsense and you shouldn’t either. You can find “both sides” misdirection in any cowardly publication. I post what I believe to be true, sarcasm and snark sometimes excepted. I make no pretense nor allow any space for the idiocy of insisting views to be somehow balanced for reporting or opinion presentation fairness, because doing so would be grossly unfair and of no value.
  8. If you disagree with anything I write, if you think I’m inappropriately biased, puff up your courage and put it in the Comments section. But see Point #9 below. On the other hand, let’s agree that I, like you, am biased.
  9. Comments offered by readers, whether in agreement with my opinions or opposing, are encouraged and greatly appreciated. All comments are reviewed prior to going live. I reserve the right to edit for readability, punctuation, typos, voluntary idiocy and to exclude those comments I deem inappropriate or offensive solely for someone taking the opportunity to be offensive. It’s my post, my rules.
  10. We do not sell, give away, lend, share or otherwise allow the disclosure of the identity of our subscribers or of their information. Never have, never will. That should not have to be said, but the times have taught us that the words do need to be declared. At the last, all we can cling to is trust in one another.
  11. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine. Unless it’s a guest essay, in which case, blame the guest.

Click me

JA


Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

What Smart People Are Saying


POST 1294

Your Sunday Review of Commentary

From Inae Oh of Mother Jones:

Anyway, back to negotiations with Iran—and the Obama-era inspections that Trump broke and are now apparently returning. Anyone else see a theme here?

The big mouth spews his demeaning accusations, he spews his lies, then he at last finds out he really can’t do any better. Or he makes things far worse. For some reason he doesn’t spew that.

Also from Mother Jones is a piece by Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore explaining the fetid pond apocalypse besetting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Trump Is Losing His War On Algae. This is a truly astonishing piece displaying Trump’s finest skill: everything he touches dies. Maybe we should wrench his little hands off our country.

As if that isn’t enough bad news about Trump’s “my name on everything” mania, read the piece from the Washington Post entitled, A dead duck was seen in the Reflecting Pool. Then two more were found nearby. That Trump Reflecting debacle is yet another of his “Fire, Ready, Aim,” narcissistic and thoughtless acts, just like putting his name of the Kennedy Center.

Now he claims that “radical left lunatics” vandalized the Reflecting Pool. He always needs a villain to blame for his constant failures and he’s handling this one just like he handles his 2020 election loss. He and his critical-thinking-impaired fawners still claim that the election was stolen by fraudulent votes of immigrants, voting machines that switched votes and the rest. The voting loss and the Reflecting Pool disaster are the same, in that he makes fantabulous accusations and never offers any evidence to support his hollow claims because there isn’t any.

This is exactly like his brain-free war against Iran. No forethought, no plan. no reason. He just blasts away and lets the destruction reign supreme. Watch for his long list of people to blame for that war failure, too. He has the vermin, his imaginary far left terrorists, the worst of the worst brown skin immigrants and more to cruelly blame. He just can’t show any of them to you or connect them to his failure, again because there aren’t any. Like Inae Oh asked, “Anyone else see a theme here?”

Speaking of no forethought, plan or reason, read this from Thom Hartmann’s Post of June 23.

On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.”

By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door.

Not oddly, I have not heard an apology from the Murderer-In-Chief for his killing of those little girls and the rest. What Trump did say when questioned about what happened was, “I don’t know about that. Maybe ask Pete.” That’s Pete Hegseth, his blundering Secretary of Defense. If you have evidence of an actual apology from Trump, an acknowledgment of his mistake, any form of accepting responsibility for the murders of those little kids, please post a link to it in the Comments section below. I don’t expect much help with that request.

Now from Rick Wilson’s post, Trump Trashes Washington:

The once beautiful Ellipse. It’s your park. Click to see a full perspective on Trump’s destruction.

President’s Park South [i.e., the Ellipse]. The same patch of ground he packed in 2021 with the crowd of angry and deluded Trumphadis that he aimed at the Capitol like a loaded weapon. When the [gladiator] party left [last Sunday], it left the park looking like Woodstock ‘99 in a drought, a brown wasteland with a few sad islands of green hanging on. Scotts’ Miracle-Gro tossed in a million bucks and a “proprietary grass blend,” which is corporate for “we’ll figure it out.”

The Park Service paperwork about hauling off the [gladiator stadium] equipment somehow forgot to mention restoring the lawn. Nobody has said who fixes the Ellipse, or when, or with what. It just sits there, scorched, a public park burned down for one night of an 80-year-old man watching younger men hit each other for his amusement.

You really should read Wilson’s entire piece for a full perspective on what actually happened.

Finally, read Morgan Freeman’s (yes, that Morgan Freeman) post, Trump’s $500+ Billion Surrender Disguised as Victory: The Man Who Keeps Losing While Taking Victory Laps.

Since this war began, Trump has been on an endless victory lap. He told us Iran had “no military left.” No navy. No air force. No anti-aircraft capability. “Totally wiped out.” Then Iran attacked ships in the Strait of Hormuz anyway. [Trump] said the Strait was under total control. Then they hit vessels and threatened the critical shipping lane again. He said the war was finished. Then reality laughed in his face.

This is the Trump pattern: Start a war with maximum chest-thumping, declare victory 20 times, then act surprised when the enemy he claimed was destroyed keeps fighting. How many times can one man claim he “won” the same war before even his own supporters get tired of the bullshit?

Reminds me of Dubya’s “Mission Accomplished” banner when the “mission” would not be completed for almost 9 more years. That’s a lot of warring and a lot of phony bluster without the mission being completed.

Trump is unable to apologize, accept accountability, say he was wrong, back up or back down. That isn’t leadership; it’s cowardly insanity. Read Freeman’s post.

All of Trump’s ruination could have and should have been checked by those with the power to stop it, including the enslaved legislators missing their backbones and millions who, perhaps blindly, voted for it.

Conservatism is just this side of dead, all but a sliver of it murdered by the selfish and the violent. There remain only a few lame and gravely wounded conservatives, straggling along, leaning on tree branch crutches like the remnants of the Confederate army after the shooting stopped. We actually need the decent and honest ones among them to come home. We need them to step up to help save this shaken and endangered experiment in freedom, this last, best hope.

If you look hard to the horizon, maybe squint just a bit, you can see the possibility still glowing. It’s time to saddle up and ride to it, to capture it and bring it home. While we still can.

The time for action is NOW!
Keep standing up,
speaking out
and taking action

Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe (IT’S A FREEBIE!), because it’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not necessarily mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine, but I do wish that I could blame someone else. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. I am neither offered nor do I accept funding of any type from candidates, online blabbers, organizations with or without any position or opinion or from any other origin other than from my own meager resources.
  5. Book links to Amazon or Barnes & Noble are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
  6. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source material.
  7. Do not look to these posts for “both sides” idiocy. I don’t have life to waste on such foolishness, such disingenuous nonsense and you shouldn’t either. You can find “both sides” misdirection in any cowardly publication. I post what I believe to be true, sarcasm and snark sometimes excepted. I make no pretense nor allow any space for the idiocy of insisting views to be somehow balanced for reporting or opinion presentation fairness, because doing so would be grossly unfair and of no value.
  8. If you disagree with anything I write, if you think I’m inappropriately biased, puff up your courage and put it in the Comments section. But see Point #9 below. On the other hand, let’s agree that I, like you, am biased.
  9. Comments offered by readers, whether in agreement with my opinions or opposing, are encouraged and greatly appreciated. All comments are reviewed prior to going live. I reserve the right to edit for readability, punctuation, typos, voluntary idiocy and to exclude those comments I deem inappropriate or offensive solely for someone taking the opportunity to be offensive. It’s my post, my rules.
  10. We do not sell, give away, lend, share or otherwise allow the disclosure of the identity of our subscribers or of their information. Never have, never will. That should not have to be said, but the times have taught us that the words do need to be declared. At the last, all we can cling to is trust in one another.
  11. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine. Unless it’s a guest essay, in which case, blame the guest.

Click me

JA


Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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