subsidies

Ready For Day 1


POST 1260

 

Dreams Of A Better Tomorrow

I’ve had many of them and perhaps you have, too. They all start with a new president cutting, crumbling and demolishing every Trump executive action.

My professional writer and right thinking boyhood pal Kirk Landers has thought about such things, too, and offers the following Guest Essay. Many thanks to him for allowing me to share it with you.

Note that Kirk’s offering is about January 20, 2029 at 12:01PM when the nation will sing Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, but the same principle and with the same urgency to reverse national direction both domestically and internationally apply to January 3, 2027 at 12:01PM, immediately following the new Congress being sworn in.

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One thing the MAGAs got right was their preparation for taking action as soon as they took office. Yes, it was a Nazi agenda, but they created a model for democracy advocates to follow: a list of changes the President can invoke by himself, with the wording ready to go on Day #1; a list of Congressional bills in order of priority, with submittable language ready to go on Day #1, etc.

New Day #1 Priorities
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  1. Fill key cabinet posts immediately.
  2. Demolish the ballroom and restore the East Wing.
  3. Sue the donors who paid for the ballroom to cover demolition and restoration costs.
  4. Remove Trump’s name from everything in Washington DC and all federal properties, including the White House.
  5. Contravene every single Presidential order issued by Trump by restoring prior regulations. Every. Single. One.
  6. Name a blue-ribbon panel of serious judicial minds to immediately begin reviewing candidates for six new Supreme Court justices. This panel would include liberals, conservatives and moderates, but all will have a proven track record of judicial gravitas and none will be advocates of screwball theories about how the constitution is to be interpreted.

There’s more, but that’s Day 1.

New First Month Priorities
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  1. Create and fund a special counsel to investigate and prosecute illegal actions taken by Trump and his  administration.
  2. Create and fund a special court to hear cases against Trump administration people charged with crimes against humanity.
  3. Offer to cooperate with legitimate International courts pursuing charges against American officials, including military leaders, who participated in the various murders on the high seas of people who had not been tried or even indicted for a crime.
  4. Add six new justices to the Supreme Court.
  5. Fund a task force to investigate corruption on the Supreme Court
  6. Pass huge tax increases for the Epstein class.
  7. Pass bills that restore environmental norms for the country.
  8. Initiate legislation to nationalize the holdings of the tech bros. Just to fuck with them.

There’s more, but you get the idea. No more four-year, sloth-like “progress” at correcting the hideous mess these Nazi bastards created.

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We can add plenty to Kirk’s beginning list, like

– term limits for all elected or appointed officials

– the return to the U.S. of all illegally incarcerated, renditioned and disappeared victims of Trump’s revenge, retribution and self-satisfying cruelty and ethnic cleansing.

– the invitation to the stupidly fired government workers to bring their expertise back to us and their jobs back to them.

You get the idea. Be sure to add your notion of what needs to be done pronto in the Comments section below this post.

Oh, Kristi

Yes, I think the queen of photo ops in front of illegally and cruelly imprisoned men, standing brazenly wearing her too tight top stretched wide by her possibly augmented breasts deserves imprisonment, but for more substantial reasons, like her crimes against humanity, U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.

Her job was falsely described as having something to do with immigration, but she used it for plain Jane ethnic cleansing as she was directed to do by Trump.

What do you suppose her intake will look like at CECOT, the El Salvadoran torture prison?

For one thing, I think they’ll shave her head because they don’t want some louse to harbor lice and infect others. They can’t take away her artificially puffed up lips or her dental implants, but they can refuse cosmetic touch-up for her bionic eyebrows and eye lashes. The present ones will be allowed to deteriorate and fall off. Likely, though, the breast implants won’t fall off.

Her often displayed artificially large cowboy hat and her $75,000 Rolex watch won’t get past the door, nor will the aforementioned too tight top, nor will her too tight fashion jeans. She’ll have to get used to scratchy fabric, shapeless tee shirts and baggy orange prison pants.

The poor little darling of mean girls is going to find out what it’s like to not be in the billionaires’ circle of privilege. She’ll lack the ability to screw her “assistant,” Corey Lewandowski, in the bedroom at the back of a government B-737 Max. Yeah, Kristi’s gonna find out what it’s like on the other side, where not everything is fixed to her delight. Just like she inflicted on all those wrongly harassed, deported and locked up Hispanics and Blacks.

If You Do ONE Thing To Fight Trump This Week – From MoveOn

Boycott his State of the Union address. On Tuesday, February 24, President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address. We know what to expect: more lies, as well as blame-shifting meant to divide and disempower all of our communities. But this time, we’re not giving him any airtime, and neither should you.

That was written before the Supreme Court ruling smacking down Trump’s illegal – that’s the word they used – and deeply harmful illegal – that’s a word I use – tariffs. The Constitution makes clear that only Congress can levy tariffs. But in his overtly infantile way, Trump is pissed at the decision. He doesn’t like when his toys are taken away from him and he vows to find some other path to give him the right to do what the Court has said he does not have the right to do. In other words, his State of the Union speech is destined to be an hour and a half of temper tantrum and mind numbing bloviating.

So, don’t watch. Don’t give him any satisfaction of big viewership numbers, even though he’ll brag that he had the most viewers of a SOTU speech ever, that nobody ever had so many viewers even if nobody watches.

But do catch the Democrats’ rebuttal by Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) for a delicious serving of truth and reality.

And Another Thing

It has never made sense to me for cities to subsidize professional sports teams. Each of those teams is just another privately held, for profit business (except for the Green Bay Packers). I started and ran my commercial and industrial water treatment business for 25 years and no government anywhere offered to build a new plant for me. Now, why is that?

But that is exactly what various municipalities are offering to do for the Chicago Bears. They’re even offering to build roadways and other infrastructure to enhance the likelihood of the Bears’ profitability.

Much is made of the benefits to hotel, restaurant and other businesses that will flourish through having a local professional sports franchise, but all that will be true regardless of who pays for the infrastructure. I just can’t think of a good reason for sucking all those millions of dollars out of local wallets – like yours.

So, click on the link and sign the No Public Subsidies for Megaprojects! petition.

  • Time for action is dwindling

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    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.
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    JA


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

Cut The Crap – Part One


Broken News

In a stunning display of muscular, applause sucking fantasies, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) announced that he is a candidate to become his party’s nominee for President of the United States.

He dutifully blamed President Biden for all problems, stopping just short of blaming Biden for mosquito bites. As significant, he claimed credit for everything that has gone well, including the things that most or all Republicans voted against, like the infrastructure projects they tried to kill, then went home and bragged to constituents about how they had brought home the bacon for them.

Cut the crap, Tim.

More Broken News

THIS PICTURE IS A FAKE

The May 22 AI generated picture of a FAKE bombing of the Pentagon (to the left) isn’t even a good fake, but it was good enough for Bloomberg News to pick it up. It went viral on Twitter and elsewhere and first responders had to show up before it was announced that this is a completely FAKE picture. There was no fire or harm done to the Pentagon or to any personnel.

The technology to produce fakes is only going to get better and we stand to be fooled so often that we’ll learn to distrust news reports, government – everything. That leaves us with this core question:

Who stands to benefit from the undermining of public trust?
.

Post your answer in the Comments section below.

Pig Troughs and Justice

We’re being played for chumps by industry and by political toadies who are in the pocket of Big Money. Here’s the key to what needs to be done for We The People.

Reverse the Citizens United decision – the one that reinforced the Boston v. Bellotti decision that legalized political bribery*. And while we’re at it, impeach Chief Justice John Roberts for

– lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in his  confirmation hearing, saying that he believes in stare decisis (honoring past Supreme Court decisions, like Roe). Same for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito and Coney Barrett

– lying to that same committee, saying (or implying) that Roe is settled law. Same for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito and Coney Barrett – probably Thomas, too.

– and most egregiously, for causing the lawyers to return to the court following the CU decision on the case that was presented to the court. This time Roberts directed the attorneys to argue rights for corporations, something that was not in contest in the Citizens United case. That debasement of our system of justice and the Court’s decision on it gave corporations the same rights as people like you, including the right to give huge sums of black money to PACs that distort our election system in favor of rich guys.

In his dissent from this nefarious decision, Justice Souter said that in addressing an issue that was not raised by the litigants, “ . . . the majority changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” Souter was right. This is a prime example of right wing manipulation of our laws and institutions for the purpose of destroying our democracy.

For all their wailing about spending, Republicans don’t want to touch programs that line the pockets of their big money donors. Instead, they want our poor and disadvantaged to carry the load. Here’s what that means.

McCarthy and his hollow-headed, far right extremists have figured out that the American people like Social Security and Medicare A LOT and that cutting those programs would be political suicide, so they want to cut other stuff instead, like veterans medical benefits and

” .  .  .  public health; food safety inspections; air traffic control operations; the administration of Medicare and Social Security; housing and other assistance for families with low incomes; education and job training; and scientific and medical research, to name just a few.” – Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

They want to cut everything that helps actual people.

Kevin McCarthy and his co-conspirators are trying to bring down the government of the United States in every way possible. Right now they are attempting extortion using the debt ceiling approval process to get budget concessions like those listed above. “After all,” they say, “spending is directly linked to our national debt.” That’s like saying that we can’t send a rocket to the moon because there’s that gravity thing on Earth. Moronic.

If Republicans were serious about wanting to trim spending they could have done so with their congressional majorities during the Trump or the George W. Bush years. In fact. with the support of his congresses, Dubya piled up more debt than all previous administrations combined. Don’t forget there were those two “off balance sheet” wars.

Both Dubya and Trump increased spending every year while cutting taxes for the ultra rich and thereby ballooning our national debt.

So, no, the Republicans aren’t serious about dealing with spending or debt. They just want to bludgeon Democrats by cutting programs that help people in order to prove how tough they are. They want to brag about their phantom fiscal responsibility and crash our government and our democracy so that they can take over in a fascist putsch. You know: fusing industry with government in a despotic rule over We the People.

Cut the crap, Republicans.

Because these industry representatives (meaning senators and representatives in the pockets of Big Money) will not cut the crap, we’ll have to dump them and replace them with people who will cut the crap. Repeal and replace is the phrase the Republicans like to use about Obamacare, so let’s use it for what We The People want – to repeal and replace these Republican industry toadies.

The replacements will be the same people who will create sensible gun safety legislation, will restore abortion rights, will refuse to abandon our most vulnerable, will honor and keep faith with our military .  .  . you know the list. It’s all the stuff that the vast majority of We The People want. We’ll only get it when we dump the bad guys who are doing the crap – delivering minority controlled tyranny – and replace them with those who will serve We The People.

BTWs

In case you were thinking Biden would get rolled by right wing extremist Republicans who want to hold our nation hostage, take a look at this, posted last Sunday.

And here’s a love tweet for Kevin McCarthy, who still hasn’t replied to my request for all those January 6 videos he sent to Tucker Carlson.

 Watch for Cut The Crap – Part two this Wednesday, May 24.

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* From Thom Hartmann:

“The following year Richard Nixon put [Justice Lewis] Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v. Bellotti decision that claimed corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: it was speech.”

And that “speech” is way louder with orders of magnitude more money powering it. Citizens United took that farther and wider and has effectively silenced you.

Today is a good day to be the light.

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  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

    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, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

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

    Thanks!

    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 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. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


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

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