I was driving through northern Colorado yesterday and noticed that in a small town, Walden, a flag was at half mast.
I didn't think much of it. I had been pretty busy down there on work and I assumed that somebody important in Colorado had died, or perhaps nationally and I'd missed it as I had been so busy.
Nope, Dolly Parton.
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
As a mark of respect for the memory of Dolly Parton, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, September 1, 2026. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half‑staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fifth day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fifty-first.
DONALD J. TRUMP
This has gotten completely stupid.
Now, I have nothing against Dolly Parton. I don't like country music and I wasn't a fan, but I wasn't an enemy of Parton's, if there is such a thing, either. She was certainly a well known figure in the culture.
But it's not as if she was some sort of important figure to the well being of the nation. She was an entertainer. Did they fly the flags half staff for Jimi Hendrix? Given his iconic Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, there certainly would have been a reason to do so.
In Wyoming it seems like flags are at half mast constantly. There's the national orders put out by Presidents, some of which are due to tragedies, some due to well known figures dying. Then there's the local ones, often when an obscure politician from some point in the distant past dies. Half mast ought to be reserved for really important observations.
While this will aid beef producers, it doesn't address the existential problem of the packing industry monopoly. Breaking that, and particularly breaking that on Distributist principals, would have a massive impact. That won't be happening, however.
Instead, this basically would allow producers to sell their own beef across state lines. While some people will buy beef in that fashion, most people won't, and that doesn't do much at all for the cost of beef sold at restaurants and the like.
As noted, applying the Sherman Anti Trust Act to the meat packing industry would have a real impact. A bigger one would be limiting corporate ownership to a single packing facility.
Small herd size is a problem, but it will take years to address. By that time, given the very small herd size, we may very well be seeing a meat production climate that hasn't existed since the introduction of refrigerated rail cars in 1878. The massive increase in the Western herd during the Civil War and the invention of the refrigerated rail car shifted the American diet from pork to beef. Various factors have been making inroads on beef for years, and the price at the counter, which this will certainly not immediately address, is shifting it once again, and has been for many years.
Whether this will serve as a salve on farmers and ranchers so they can justify voting for a party that has screwed them for years is yet to be seen.
I can't really say that Donald Trump ineffectual, moronic, but potentially expensive attempt to rename Lake Ontario into Lake America (and by the way, "America" is not the name of the United States) is the absolute last straw for me. That straw was broken years ago. It was obvious right from the onset that Donald Trump was not qualified to hold any elective office. However, in his first, and only legitimate, term as President, there was still a Republican Party. Now that party doesn't exist. It's just a bunch of ass kissers.
At least on the national level.
I'll frequently say that "I'll never vote for another Republican as long as I live", and I don't want to. A party that will not renounce and remove a person like Donald Trump, who is mentally ill, from the Oval Office cannot be supported. It's horrific. But the problem, then, is when you get down to the local level.
We just saw in Wyoming a real Republican Party toss out fake Dixiecrat Republicans from office. The only real survivor of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus bloodbath was Bill Allemand. Some of the really good Republicans who wiped out Freedom Caucus members, like Luke Reiner who tossed out Steve Johnson, will face Democratic challengers. And at the state level, a really good Republican who took the GOP nomination for the Governor's office, Barlow, is facing a challenge from a Democrat and Rebecca Bextel, the clueless Double Secret Constitution Party candidate. So the irony we now face is that the majority, but not all, of the recent Republican victors are good candidates and probably think that Donald Trump is in need of mental help. Given that, an enraged vote for a Democrat here, or not voting for the office at all, would in fact be a bad move.
But that's no excuse to vote in favor of every Republican on the ballot here.
It's particularly not an excuse to vote for Harriet Hageman or Chuck Gray. Indeed, there'd never be an excuse to vote for Gray. Gray doesn't deserve any votes.
Hageman really doesn't either. She's got in office acting like an enraged MAGA harpy even though she probably isn't. In office, she's been the distaff variant of her late father. A smart hyper provincial politician whose drank deeply of the hardworking pioneer myth to the extent that she's drunk on it, and like most of those of that belief, basically believes that farmers should own the whole state and you don't count. She's been, frankly, mean in her public personal and her political one.
Stuff like this really puts Catholics in a spot.
We need to participate for the common good. Sometimes we hear: a good Catholic is not interested in politics. This is not true: good Catholics immerse themselves in politics by offering the best of themselves so that the leader can govern.
Pope Francis.
For a long time, we've been in a spot due to abortion and, more recently, gender issues.
Abortion is murder. There's no two ways about it. Mutilating the body to change genders isn't murder, but it is a mental disease and entertaining it is gravely wrong. At one time there were Democrats who acknowledged these things. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas is the last pro life Democrat in the body. Generally, Democrats are in favor of seas of infant blood flowing out of doctors' offices everywhere.
Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated
Pope Leo XIV
Undeclared wars of aggression are also gravely wrong. Under at least Pope Leo's view, only defensive warfare is morally licit. Attacking Iran was not only illegal under the U.S. constitution, it was not morally licit. Attacking Venezuela was illegal and illicit. Murdering people in boats off South American coasts as they're suspected of being drug runners is illegal and immoral. The people ordering these things are committing homicide, as are the people doing them. The US is killing people illegally and immorally as a matter of national policy, or rather the policy of handful of illegally acting people.
Threatening to take property? or life because we can is gravely immoral. Threatening to steal Greenland, or whatever, is immoral. Taking the mineral wealth of Venezuela is immoral.
We are a deeply immoral nation.
How does a person weigh these thing?
Well, in my case anyhow, it means that I will not vote for Republican members of Congress. I just won't. I won't vote for people who are supporting military murder or extrajudicial killings.
Indeed, I do not think it's morally licit to do so.
Nor is it moral to demonize people based on their race or inclinations, which this administration has done and continues to do.
Finally, as a Catholic, and the same would be true for an Orthodox Christian, or a Mainline Protestant Christian, this administration is thickly populated by a certain sort of Evangelical thought that would convert the nation into a Calvinist theocracy. People find that, it seems, to far fetched to consider, but it's a fact and many other things that were only recently too far fetched to imagine have now occurred.
Moreover, abortion, at the Federal level, is no longer constitutionally protected. That takes that fight down to the state level, at least for the time being, although it is certainly not impossible to imagine a Democratically government, House, Senate, and Oval Office, acting to protect it on that level. Whatever is going on in regard to transgenderism seems to have sort of stabilized and there doesn't seem to be anything going on with same sex "marriages". Indeed, nervous Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in one, putting him in the same category as Pete Buttigieg who was routinely lampooned by MAGA for being a homosexual in a same sex union.
Indeed, it's hard not to notice all the hypocrisy in the Republican Party on all of the remaining moral issues. Bessent is homosexual and in a homosexual "marriage". Vance is a Catholic but was boosting IVF. Trump is a serial polygamist. Republican politicians engage in marital infidelity and misbehavior with the GOP ignoring it ,while the opposite is true for Democrats when they transgress.
And finally, Trump, in order to remove the threat from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made a deal with him to appoint him to the head of the nation's health, resulting in a further moronic decline in vaccinations and a major boosting of health stupidity.
All of this, again, haunts the Apostolic Christian. Does a person vote for Republicans on the threat of abortion reviving, and thereby vote for war, childhood death by disease, ICE shooting in the streets, and on and on, let alone just voting for the patently stupid.
Of course, the two party system really isn't. And often you really don't have to vote for the Republican or Democrat. I haven't voted for a GOP nominee for White House in at least the last three elections, nor have I voted for the Democratic one. I voted for the candidates from the American Solidarity Party.
The trouble there is that there often isn't a ASP candidate on the local level. There are none here. The third parties that show up here are the Libertarian Party and the idiotic Constitution Party. The Constitution Party is worse than the Republican Party, and always has been.
So for this year, I will vote for Barlow for Governor He's a good choice. I'd like to vote for Byrd for Senate, and I won't vote for Hageman, but I have yet to decide what I will do. For House I'd like to write in Christensen and I won't vote for Gray while I want to avoid Kinney.
All somewhat tough races to face.
Locally, I'm lucky that I don't have to make such decisions for my local legislative districts. The City Council race is non partisan. The County Commissioner race is partisan, however, and one of the finalists is simply awful, and I'd guess, quite frankly, actually extremely liberal in spite of running as a Republican, and another nice but not a great candidate. That leaves the two Democrats to consider. Abortion and whatnot will not be a county issue and while I have not made my mind up on who I will vote for, I won't vote for two of the three GOP finalists.
If any come by, I'll flat out ask; "why are you in a party which picks on Canada, declares illegal wars, and hates the original native name for a large lake?"
By Self-created photograph by Jonathunder - Own work, GFDL, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64543672
If this is a match of intellects, and it likely is, Canada has already won the trade war.
Carney is undoubtedly a genius and the only international leader currently in office, maybe ever in office, to have run the economies of two different countries. Trump is increasingly obvious of rather low intellect and a real estate developer with a very narrow understanding of the economy, who is in turn heavily influenced by Peter Navarro, a 77 year old economic theorist who uniquely champions tariffs. To make matters worse, Trump is suffering a rapid dementia related mental decline.
The US right now is destroying its own economy.
August 26, 2026
Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. steel, aluminum, furniture and clothing (50%), cheese, appliances and some seafood, (25%) and on electronics and tools (15%), effective September 8.
It also pledged aid to Canadian workers.
It was a dollar per dollar match on US tariffs, which it basically offsets.
As a side effect of this, the price of household paper products, toilet paper and paper towels, is climbing.
Thanks Don.
On the contest of intellects, the petulant baby in the Oval Office threatened to rename Lake Ontario the Lake of America or something. Trump actually thinks he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, even though it remains the Gulf of Mexico in reality. The Lake Ontario thing is incredibly stupid. Nobody reacted positively to it, although I'm sure that administration flunkies will pretend it's a great idea. Curtis Hertel Jr., chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, stated:
Donald Trump has been America first in name only his entire presidency. He promised lower prices, higher wages, and no foreign wars … all of that is bull shit. Renaming th fourth best Great Lake isn’t going to change that.
Americans aren't impressed with the latest Trump stupidity.
On Trump dumping American cattlemen, John Barrasso, Senator from Trump, oh, um, Senator allegedly from Wyoming, posted this on Twitter:
Americans want US beef on the table – not foreign imports. Wyoming ranchers produce the highest quality beef in the world. Our ranchers don't ask for special treatment. They simply want a fair marketplace. It needs to be easier – not harder – for Wyoming ranchers to feed America. I will continue to fight for policies that strengthen Wyoming beef producers and invest in the American cattle herd.
Barrasso is a Trump suck up and hasn't really done much for Wyoming in years. During election cycles he's for whatever he thinks Wyomingites are for and is otherwise a rank cowards pretending he thinks Trump is brilliant when he knows that he's not. Last time he ran he became worried about gadfly candidate Reid Rasner and accordingly pulled to the hard right.
Barrasso must regard the Wyoming livestock industry as sufficiently powerful enough to actually hurt the GOP, or this an issue near enough to the hearts of Wyomingites, that he needs to speak up. He didn't do that when public lands were on the table. It's interesting in part because the Wyoming range cattle industry in particular, and agriculture in general, have been so pro Trump and pro GOP that it's quite literally actually stupid. We posted on this the other day.
Hageman, of course, has incentive not to. She's a Trump endorsee and is now running against James Byrd tof Lummis' seat. This makes her exposed on this issue. If she speaks up, and she's going to have to, it puts her between somebody that supports here that she probably thinks is a heaping bowl of stupid in reality, but then exposing her to voters who she probably figures are more heaping bowls of stupid. Byrd is perfectly suited to exploit this as Hageman comes from a farm/ranch and can't stay silent before she looks like a traitor.
Lummis, of course, comes from a ranch too, but as she's nto running, she doesn't have to say anything. She seems to be bucking for a Trump cabinet post, anticipating that people will jump the Trump ship post election.
On other economic fronts, the US came out with its "Economic D-Day" against Iran, which are really sanctions against Iranian trading partners, but not really. It delayed the imposition of them to January 1, 2027, which means they won't happen at all.
In a blistering opinion, a Federal Court judge ruled that President Donald Trump improperly used a $10 billion lawsuit he filed against the IRS to extract personal benefits from the government and prevented the terms of a settlement agreement from taking legal effect.
71 Wyoming attorneys signed onto the letter. Lummis and Barrasso will ignore it.
August 1, 2026
Charges against an Olympic kayaker for vandalizing the reflecting pool have been dropped.
That was predictable, but what the Justice Department admitted was not. It admitted the damage was the result of "flawed installation by the contractor" as well as "the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026."
Every lawyer associated with this should be dismissed and disbarred. Trump should be impeached. The victim of these false charges should sue for malicious prosecution.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges against David Hearn, Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers for the pool vandalization that never occured. Donald Trump had previously described these people as “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE". He's the sick deranged people, but people who aren't victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome and think he's something other than a rampaging deranged narcissist know that.
Now, even after the Toddler's tantrums, no charges are pending at all. They never should be.
Lawsuits should, and I predict will, be filed against the government over this.
August 8, 2026
The DC Circuit ordered Trump to halt his illegal ballroom construction but, in a wussy move, stayed its decision for fourteen days in order to allow Trump to appeal, which he, or rather his administration, will.
The Court, in its decision, noted:
Whether or not a massive ballroom should be constructed is for Congress to decide and is not a matter for Executive self-help.
August 11, 2026
It's not that there aren't some really issues here.
Gray violated the law on this and needs to be held fully accountable. Courts looking at this issue have uniformly supported the states that refused to provide the information.
Gray should be made to recover the information he supplied. This was illegal.
But coming when it does, it may very well be the law in a practical sense this election cycle, and impact the election. It's specifically designed to frustrate Democratic voting. However, as Amy Howe reports:
A separate ruling by the same judge, in a case filed by a different set of plaintiffs, temporarily prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from implementing one provision of the executive order anywhere in the United States. That ruling remains in effect, at least for now.
The decision is flat out wrong and the Supreme Court will regret it. The Democrats are increasingly like to win both houses of Congress this Fall and they will begin to work on major Supreme Court reform. Trump can prevent that while he's in office, but he's becoming the political kiss of death for GOP candidates and when a new Democratic President comes in, this order will come off and the Supreme Court will be radically reformed. Perhaps first up will be age limitations, likely 70 years of old, which will wipe out the conservative majority on the court.
A decision like this one will help bring about that downfall. So does stuff like this:
The mail in voting one at least has some think judicial reasoning Staying ballroom construction was the obvious choice here and the Court didn't do it. That probably signals that they'll let this insane project go forward.
Republicans are flocking to decry it, after having participated in causing it.
They didn't cause it on their own, but they sure helped. And Trump has spent money like a drunken sailor.
Part of the reason that Trump spends this way is that Trump drank deeply of Peter Navarro's economic kool aide.
Navarro believes heavily in tariffs and Trump, whose always liked the concept of tariffs, but who appears to no longer understand how they work, liked what Navarro had to say.
Tariffs have always existed as a means of boosting local businesses. What they really are, is a species of sales tax. The concept is to make stuff coming in expensive so that people won't buy it, and will buy something made locally instead. That's about it.
The problem is that when you do that, you have to actually be making the things locally. Tariffs might have made good economic sense if the US had started easing them in during the late 1960s when the post World War Two economy started to fade. But we didn't, as we saw no need to.
By the 2020s, it's really a little bit late. In fact, it's way late. The world's economy is now highly integrated, surpassing the level that had only previously been obtained prior to World War One. We don't have what people complained about, for example, in the late 60s and early 70s of cheap Japanese products taking the market (something that wasn't anywhere near the threat it was imagined to be). What we have instead is an economy where anything serious has parts made all over the globe. Nothing you are using, if has multiple parts, was "made in America". It was made all over.
Given that, what tariffs really do is simply make everything more expensive. It'd take at least a decade for high tariffs to "bring back manufacturing", if it can do that at all.
Whether it can ever bring in jobs is questionable at this point. Since January 2025 the US has in fact lost manufacturing job, with about 75,000 departing . Trump likes to claim that new factories are springin gup all over the place. In fact, a factory construction boom peaked in 2024, under Joe Biden, and has been crashing since.
It may just be that it isn't the late 1890s any more.
So all the Trump administration has really done is ineffectively switched income tax for a national sales tax. It's hurting everyone, and it is largely illegal, resulting in a lot of the money being collected, having to be sent back out.
Congress can fix this, if it has the will. Republicans right now are pretending that they do, but with few exceptions, like Thomas Massie, they're rank cowards and voted for Trump's economic fantasies. It may take a Constitutional Amendment to force the matter, which at a bare minimum should provide that save in the time of war and bona fide emergency, the budget must balance and retire a portion of any built up debt, with taxes to automatically rise to balance any budget that isn't balanced.
What needs to be done first of all is to get the budget under control. That would technically be easy to do. And part of that needs to be a sincere effort to eliminate the debt. It's now completely impossible to do so rapidly, so it'll have to be done slowly.
On expenditures themselves, the Federal budget breaks out this way:
Social Security: 22%
Medicare: 15%
Net Interest (on the national debt): 15%
Health (including Medicaid): 13%
National Defense: 13%
Income Security: 10%
Veterans Benefits and Services: 6%
Social Security is in trouble due to slow down in population growth. Nothing can be done about that or should be. Medicare is in the same boat.
National Defense should be cut by 2/3s. That can be done by eliminating the insane level of weapons expenditures and by going to a reserve based defense. That'd help, but that won't accomplish everything, obvious. Military retirement age should be changed so that thirty years rather than 20 are the qualifying number. That'd help a bit.
Indeed, there are actually a fair number of Federal jobs that require twenty years in order to retire at some level. Save for policing roles and military ones,. Fed retirement should require thirty years and only be capable of being drawn when you reach 60 years of age.
And yes, this is a crisis.
So, you might perhaps note, you are a Distributist. Does this square with Distributism?
Overall it does. At one time I would have considered tariffs a policy option to address foreign manufacturing, but nothing fails like failure and its obvious that isn't the solution to that. Boosting U.S. manufacturing has to come some other way, and frankly technology is probably what would do it. Technological revolutions tend to bring industry to where they occur. Our problem here is that this is entirely in the hands of the super wealthy right now, who don't have your interest or that of the country's in mind.
Additionally, our current President is addled and looks back with romanticism on the past . He's actively working to destroy American industry as a result. Electricity is the future of transportation, not petroleum. Wind, solar and nuclear are the future of power generation, not coal (Trump does support nuclear). We need to really get with the program and we can do that through regulation. Phasing out fossil fuels should be an economic priority for obvious reasons, and an environmental one for obvious reasons, and a defense one for obvious reasons.
Trade talks between the US and Canada ended and the countries are now in a trade war. Canada has made it clear that the US is about to suffer through energy imports.
August 24, 2026
From the CST:
Well boo hoo, cry me a river.
I'm a cattleman and frankly we're amongst the most reliably stupid voters for the GOP there is.
An old friend of mine who is a rancher has been somewhat active in this year's election cycle. He is, of course, a far right Republican.
I say of course as just about every rancher and farmer in Wyoming over the age of 40, and quite a few over the age of 35, are diehard right wing full blown MAGA Republicans. Below the age of 40 things start to change a lot. Most are Republicans, but a lot aren't diehard. They're Republicans the same way everyone in Wyoming is a Republican, pretty much. Generally conservative.
But above 40, they're in lockstep with Donald Trump.
My friend, this cycle, had a big Chuck Gray up near the DOT fence. This wasn't too surprising as his grandson works for Gray.* **
Well, now, all of a sudden the noted friend is posting on the disaster of letting foreign beef into the country. So are a bunch of other ranchers I know.
The Republican Party has been pretty much screwing ranchers and farmers since 1929. It was the Democrats who save farmers and ranchers during the Great Depression. Most small and mid sized ranches would have been utterly destroyed but for the Taylor Grazing Act.
The Trump Administration, for its part, looks at farmers and ranchers the way the Democrats once looked at African Americans, people who could reliably be counted on to vote for the party no matter what. In recent election cycles African Americans proved they were no longer reliable. So far, people in Agriculture aren't showing any thought at all.
Indeed, they're showing cognitive disconnected.
This morning I've seen all sorts of complaints from ranchers about how they're getting killed in this economy, as noted.
And now Trump's bringing in below market cost foreign beef.
No shit. YOU VOTED FOR IT.
Inflation, particularly of fuel, caused by Donald Trump's pet illegal war. The same with fertilizer costs.
WAKE THE CRAP UP.
The GOP is not coming to save you. It's coming to screw you.
Indeed, trade talks just broke off with Canada.
Double digit inflation, caused by a massive rise in energy costs, is about to occur.
Footnotes:
Gray has more affection for Trump than Natalie Harp and Melanija Knavs combined.
The grandson is an interesting case in and of himself. He's undoubtedly the first member of his extended family to go to university. He's in law school right now. He's also a diehard MAGA, and indeed, maybe even beyond that. Now the question of how that happens is another matter.
The common myth, and it is a myth, about young people in conservative homes is that they go to college, where they lose all of their values, and their faith, emerging hardcore screaming liberals if not Bolsheviks. This is, it is believed, because they're indoctrinated in college by leftist professors.
It's largely bull and in the scientific disciplines definitely bull. Majors in geology, for example, aren't going to have time for liberal indoctrination.
For that matter, majors in English probably don't either.
So what's going on here.
Well, a person from a really conservative Protestant background may in fact find a lot of what they learn in college shocking. The Earth isn't 5,000 years old. Evolution isn't a fib. Conquering the West wasn't bringing enlightenment to an oppressed people and, in fact, some of those being conquered where already Christian. The US isn't bestowed by God with a new Israelite like mission, and for that matter, the modern state of Israel does some outright horrible things.
Faced with that onslaught, young people are in fact faced with the choice of accepting that Pastor Jim back at his own do it yourself Evangelical Church is flat out wrong on a lot of stuff, and Mom and Dad are ignorant, or concluding that everything they're being taught is a fib.
Most will conclude, to some degree, that Pastor Jim is wrong on a lot, and that Mom and Dad are ignorant on a lot of stuff.
Now, I'll note, this shouldn't impact member of the Apostolic faiths at all, but in the US some Apostolic Christians are heavily Protestantized and have bought in, through ignorance, to a lot of what the Evangelical far right believes.
Anyhow, a lot of this is about to collapse on an enormous scale, as we'll soon see.
**There was a good Republican candidate running against Gray, Christensen. He had worked for the BLM.
Well, we're getting instead a Californian who worked for his daddy's radio station.
He's completely correct.
Cattlemen and farmers will sit around in gatherings and support Trump on every other horrible thing he does, and then they're surprised when he turns on them.
Now they can share the pain they helped bring about.
On Canada, the Canadian government is absolutely furious over demands that were made of the country, including that Canada abandon the use of French and that it agree to mirror the US's trade polcies.
One Canadian figure called the demands "insane".
This administration at this point is so stupid on these matters its indescribable.
August 25, 2026
It's pretty clear that the Trump administration has no idea whatsoever as to what it's doing.
