Good morning on this partly sunny/partly cloudy day. Cool but not unseasonably so. We went to the local meat market to replenish our freezer and pick up Moms prescription refill. Her doctor's appointment went well and he didn't change her medication as well as setting the next appointment for six months from now. Everything is put away and I can sit down and catch my breath. Also I can deal with the e-mail I have largely ignored for the last little while.
Starting off here is a bit by Bill Astore which is absolutely right about our Grifter-In-Chief. I have said before that Trump wanted to PLAY at being President but didn't really want to do the work of BEING President. What we have seen so far is laziness combined with vengefulness, cruelty, and pettiness.
Pat Garofalo at BOONDOGGLE has an interesting piece on state and local efforts to hold the ultra rich and big corporations accountable able for tax fraud. Since the Federal government is gelding the IRS with personnel reductions, somebody else had to do it.
Oh how this piece from ATHEIST REVOLUTION resonates. I have commented often of late how tired I am of ads which either try to sell me on something or pathetically beg me for money for what ever good cause they are marketing. Don't get me wrong. The causes are good but I only have so much money and the demands (soft as they may be) are unrelenting. I am also tired of being treated as that two-dimensional creature: "the consumer."
Stray thought: a bit earlier I read a piece by (I think) Robert Reich which won't link to (because I didn't think to save the link) who speculated that the real aim of the Trump/Musk cabal is to basically bankrupt the country so they can swoop in and buy everything up on the cheap. I had a similar thought looking at the stock market which looks positive for now, though not nearly as positive as the 1000+ points in the premarket futures. I saw it as the triumph of hope and greed. The hopes of those who want to see their retirement savings recover before they die and the greed of those how sold along the downward trajectory and now hope to buy as they buy back stocks so they can make a killing on the upswing. That is why I never played the market (besides never having a nest egg to risk). I am neither hopeful nor greedy.
Bill Astore in the article linked above suggested we follow his link to Tom Englehardt's latest post on Tomdispatch. It is a good one.
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I had intended to post the above but evidently closed down before actually doing so. I got out of the TV early today. It hasn't really got anything interesting. The news shows are all about Trump "pausing" the tariffs for possible "negotiations." I put in the first set of quotation marks because the so called pause didn't take things back very far--the 10% across the board tariffs announced first are still in place and the 125% tariff on Chinese imports is still there. As a couple of commentators said the tariffs on China more than made up for the cuts in the other tariffs. And I don't think what Trump calls negotiations really fit the dictionary definition of the word. I noticed that (as of now) the markets have lost about half of what they had gained back yesterday. What we really have is another 90 days of uncertainty.
Given what has been going on with the politics and economy I am glad we filled up the car the last time we went out to the supermarket and that we restocked our freezer. The price of gas has gone up since and we found the price of the meat more reasonable than we expected. I am cleaning and reorganizing our pantry to check on our stocks and decide what needs bulking up. I will be watching the store shelves more closely than I already have been. I have noticed both price increases and empty shelves in passing. But I think it is time to pay closer attention to what is going on. It almost feels like the COVID days have come again.
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