With China having just been visited by our extraordinarily weak, and increasingly demented chief executive, this really bears watching.
Trump's illegal war on Iran has depleted US weapons reserves massively and wasted them on hard ground targets, something military analysts know is ineffective. We have less of an ability to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan now than at any point since. . . well. . . probably 1947.
The likelihood of it happening his high.
The likelihood of Trump doing utterly nothing if it does happen is also high.
In 1949, when mainland China fell to the Communists, Republicans howled over "who lost China?" In 2026 or 2027 when Taiwan falls, they'll probably just kneel to their beloved, Donald Trump.
I saw an old friend getting hot and bothered by this today. The small Democratic Party is having an internal debate about its members switching their registration over to Republican so that the Wyoming Freedom Caucus candidates stand a bitter chance of losing. Truth be known, almost all moderate Democrats in the state did that decades ago, some later running as fairly successful Republicans. Cowboy State Daily Carpetbagger Dave Simpson has written an op ed about checking the "label" of Republican candidates.
Indeed, check it. Most of the WFC candidates don't belong in the GOP at all. They aren't Republicans.
My old friend is supporting Brent Bien, who spent 28 years sucking on the government tit before taking a retirement (more sucking on the government tit) and is upset with Degenfelder and Barlow. I'm not keen on Barlow either, but if you spend almost 30 years working in an institution that's funded by the taxpayers and then come out with a no taxes policy, you are some kind of hypocrite.
And yes I'm speaking of a military career. Yes, there's a lot that's honorable about a military career, but I'm pretty familiar with it and you never have to 1) send out a bill, 2) worry about the competition, 3) worry your employer isn't going to have money to pay you, 3) work for fifty years before you retire, if you can ever retire, 4) worry that you line of work is just going to cease to exist. Sure, you do have to worry about violent death, that's very true. Like the Potts character says in Major Dundee; "that goes with the pretty girls and the pension", but the chances of that, while very real, are much less than they're made out to be for most career military people, although they are real, and the risk of violent death goes with a host of other professions too for which such worries do exist and you aren't going to get a "thank you for your service!" accolade and aren't going to be regarded as a hero.
Being a logger is actually the most dangerous job in the U.S., followed by being a commercial fisherman. In a location specific sense, being a taxi driver was, and may still be, the most dangerous job in the U.S.
Anyhow, the criticism is that Barlow and Degenfelder might not adhere to, well:
Meine Ehre heißt Treue
Oh my, think for yourself, can't have that.
Anyhow, my friend is no doubt part of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus which is demanding loyalty oaths from Republicans.
But they aren't Republicans.
They're Dixiecrats through and through.
You'd be really hard pressed to find a Dixiecrat issue that the WFC didn't adhere to, somehow.
And you'd be hard pressed to find a Republican here who was part of the party in the Nixon or Reagan era who wouldn't look at the current party with utter disdain.
Ironically, being in the state GOP at the present time must be real torture for people who hold a no foreign wars, American First, white people only, sort of view, when their "Republican" President holds a war of the week, himself first, let's annex Venezuela and make it a state, sort of view.
This has been in the news for awhile, but I haven't posted it yet.
Frankly, the impact of pipelines is mostly in their construction, to it's temporary. At least for the state. These pipelines tend to transport Canadian oil, so the impact is less than it might seem.
And the state has got to get over its addiction to petroleum.
Regarding petroleum, the U.S. is now exporting a record amount due to the war with Iran, which doesn't help U.S. citizens whatsoever, as it cause the price of the product to rise, and accelerates U.S. depletion of the resource. Export of it, save for conditions in which the petroleum cannot be refined here, should be banned.
For that matter, as a resource that nobody contributed to putting in the ground, some thought should be given to nationalizing the resource in some fashion.
Some members of Congress are threatening to ban the import of Chinese electric vehicles as the GOP searches for ways to make a bad situation worse.
May 7, 2026
Headline:
Trade Court Rules Trump’s 10% Global Tariff Is Illegal
A panel of federal judges found that President Trump could not legally impose the tariff on most imports.
No surprise whatsoever.
Anyhow, now this money will have to be refunded too. And Mad King Donny still hasn't refunded the money owed from the last such ruling.
May 13, 2026
Inflation rose to 3.8% last month with the fastest rise in prices in three years, caused by an illegal war with Iran which the demented Mad King Donny has no idea how to end.
Mad King Donny has gone to China. It'll be a disaster. The best possible result would be if he just gets lost over there, thinks the Chinese babes are cute, decides to marry one, and stays.
Henry Mosler's painting "The Lost Cause", depicting an uneducated Southern dupe returning to his destroyed home after having fought for rich Southerners who wanted to keep human beings in barbours slavery.
The biggest political mistake the US has ever made was not engage in radical reconstruction after the American Civil War. To have served in an officer, or frankly even as a volunteer, in the Confederate Army should have been regarded as fully treasonous and never forgiven. Those who did should have been tried and given heavy sentences. Men like Robert E. Lee should never have been allowed to walk the streets as free men again.
Slave holders, no matter how small they were, should have had to compensate their former slaves or their decedents heavily. On the principal that the land belongs to he who works it, a means of transferring agricultural land to the former slaves should have been devised.
This is, I'd note, the second time the country has gone through this Lost Cause crap. The cause of the Southern States during the Civil War ranks right up with that of Nazi Germany as one of the worst causes people have every fought for. The South should have been made to hang its head in shame, as the Germans were after World War Two. And yet, here we go again.
If there's any good thing about any of this is that the rise of the Lost Cause yielded to the Civil Rights Era. Americans thought they'd finally one the promise of the country, although Liberals and Progressives certainly took that claimed victory beyond what it meant and should have mean in other ways. Everyone has been reminded of that, now that the fulfillment of the result of Reagan's Southern Strategy has been afflicted upon the nation in form of the Trump Administration.
And at this point it's hard not to view any Trump administration release of anything as more than a mere distraction. War going badly, fuel prices through the roof, airlines dying, and then there's those Epstein files. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if Trump pushed Melania off the White House roof it it distracted for a few days.
To add to these comments, note the typical Republican comment "you decide" as to what they are. More antiscientific crap from the president of a party of cult that has become hostile to science.
The Trump Administration breaks down crying and asks for help from adults.
The Trump administration is desperately seeking UN intervention in the war it started as the US is on the verge of a complete defeat in the war with Iran.
Remember the much vaunted and completely absurd Board of Peace that Trump rolled out when he liked to pretend he was a peacemaker? The countries that joined were Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Ask them for help. . .
Go ahead Marco, call them up. . .
Go ahead, have him do it.
Yesterday the Trump Administration rolled back into existence the Presidential Fitness Test which Eisenhower had put into effect in 1956 and Obama did away with in 2012, replacing it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program. Trump can't have anying Obama. . . like a peace deal with Iran that dealt with nuclear stuff . . anyhow. . .
Secretary of Batshit Crazy Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a joke about Trump being able to do a fifty mile hike and Trump joked back that he could do it.
Go ahead. Let's see him manage that. . .
Mass Mailings
We've been getting tons of political mass mailings from three candidates. I noted that here:
All three of these candidates essentially have the same message. They love Trump as only Trump loves Trump. They love Trump more than Trump's children love Trump. They love Trump more than Melania, assuming of course that she loves Trump.
Trump retains a hold on the minds of MAGA and the GOP has descended into the Party of Trump. There really aren't real Republicans anymore. As I've noted here already, there's a really good chance that after November the GOP will simply cease to exist.
But is being more Trump, than Trump, a liability in Wyoming? I guess we'll see.
Not that the mailings are all identical. Gray's just asserts his Trumpiness. Rasner, who has a MAGA truckers cap J.B. Welded to his head, takes shots at Gray. Freiss mostly accidentally shows himself to be super rich and not really knowing what, or where, Wyoming actually is.
Anyhow, the mass mailers are so irritating I took a little time to see if I could return them to senders. The USPS Reddit, which isn't an official page, makes it clear that would be pointless. They just throw them away. The topic really irritates mail carriers, as they'd rather you just throw them away yourself. I can see their point.
Apparently a lot of people just throw them on the ground, which really irritates mail carriers also
What do we know about these guys?
It's occurred to me that Wyomingites have been voting for people they know absolutely nothing about.
This isn't true about candidates from other states. We know all about Colorado's BoBo and Alaska's Peltola. Why don't we know more about these people who claim to have all these super duper values that are supposed to reflect the state's?
Take Gray for example Next to nothing about him is publicly known. He could be robbing liquor stores on his off hours and we wouldn't know.
All we know about him is he grew up near Los Angeles and graduated from high school there in 2008, after he went to Wharton, where based on the economic example of Donald Trump, who also graduated from Wharton, must educate its students with Archie cartoons. He spent his summers in Wyoming growing up, and when he graduated from Wharton, he went right to work for his father's radio station where he broadcast political babble. That's pretty darned close to never having had to work in the real world. He rose to his current position by barely beating Tara Nethercott for the Secretary of State by constant hystericaly spewing of lies.
He was a founding member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus which was heavily funded by out of state and rich carpetbagger money. I know that he's a Catholic, but only because when he lived in Casper I'd see him at Mass on odd occasion. My presumption is that he regularly attended Mass, although I don't know that. He went to a different parish than I do. Frankly, if I'd been a parish priest, I'd have called him out for lying.
He's unmarried at age 36 and nobody is ever mentioned as a love interest. Maybe he has one. For all I know he could be dating AoC. But the question is never asked. It should be, as being unmarried at 36 is frankly odd and we have a right to know if people are personally living up to their declared political values. It's one thing if he's so dedicated to work, or whatever, that he doesn't have time for gals. Maybe he just isn't interested, some percentage of people, a small number, aren't. But if on the other hand he hangs out with the dancers from The Clown's Den every night, and I'm in no way suggesting he is, we ought to be so informed.
Press, you aren't doing your job.
We don't know much about Reid Rasner either, although the fact that he keeps suing people for defamation (and people have said some awful things about him) has revealed a little. In one suit he admitted, if "admission" is the correct word, to being a homosexual. In the suits he's filed he's taken grave exception to being accused of molestation of somebody below 18, or molesting anyone, and I don't blame him a bit for that. I suspect that some people just believe that every homosexual does things like that, which is certainly not the case, but suspecting such a thing is just flat out wrong. The suits therefore make sense, although its really risky for a politician. He's some sort of investment businessman. So all in all, we know a lot more about him than we do Gray, which is really odd. I don't like his politics at all, but the fact that he's been open about these things is really to his credit.
With both of these candidates what we don't know is if their mailing appearance matches anything about them in real life. Chuck likes to wear Western cut wool shirts now, but he looks really uncomfortable appearing that way. His button-down and blue blazer looked a lot more natural. He's been videoed on oilfield locations, where he's never worked, and on a four wheeler, which looks unnatural to him.
Rasner likes to be photographed with firearms. So does Freiss. But do they really use them? Maybe, but do we really know that?
Freiss, I'd note, is another one. His father was a super wealthy carpetbagger and he seems to be the same. Go home, carpetbagger.
Balow, who is the best candidate so far, is from Laramie. As already noted, Gray is a carpetbagger from California. Rasner is from Casper. She was a career educator who took over as Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction after the disastrous Cindy Hill, who brought full blown batshit into that office. Balow held that office and then took the same one in Virginia, where the position is (sensibly) appointed. People have held that against here here, which is really ironic. If that's bad, Brent Bien ought to be exiled to the far side of the moon.
We know a lot more about Hageman, Barrasso, Lummis and Gordon, although I'd even question that to some extent. There's some questions I'd ask Hageman and Barrasso which I think are legitimate, but which just aren't done.
Anyhow, Press, why don't you tell us something about these people? You report on them so little, that it's honestly the case that a triple ax murderer could move into Wyoming.
Lawyer, St. Thomas More, who was executed for his adherence to his faith.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts
The Justice Department is going after James Comey for posting a photo of seashells arranged to spell "8647" on a beach somewhere, asserting it was a death threat on President Trump. Apparently this is due to the old use of the term "86" to do away with and "47" for Donald Trump's completely illegitimate but widely accepted illegal claim to be President.
It wasn't.
This prosecution will go nowhere whatsoever, but it is more evidence that everyone in the Trump Administration is essentially a fascist with no regard for reality or the rule of law right now. We are in monumentally dangerous territory. It's 1534 in the United States with Donald Trump our King Henry VIII.
And the spirt of the age has spread:
What Gray did was flat out illegal. Gray is relying, in essence, on the advice of the Attorney General and when that's a defense, the attorney client privilege is waived. The AG's office knows that, but it has to defend the privilege It's being pretty assertive about it.
Nobody is more opposed to abortion than I am. I wouldn't allow for the largely bogus "rape and incest" exceptions that many people will. But this is really beyond the Pale. Powell should be ashamed of itself for even appoint this guy to its city council.
Elsewhere, in a nation where we brought a modern justice system, it's still functioning.
Judges reject Trump push
to obtain state voter rolls
But of course our Secretary of State, Chuck "If you disagree with me you are a radical communist, fascist, monarchist, podiatrist" Gray just handed Wyoming's over.
Since the White House Correspondence Association's Dinner attack, Donald Trump has gone full gonzo on his pet project, a ballroom.
In the United States of 2026, with a massive deficit, declining world status, a war its loosing, a culture that's moved beyond balls, only Trump and his acolytes, most of whom have never been in a ballroom, care about this project. Probably for that reason we're hearing all sort of excuses on why this is an absolute necessity. It's for the safety of the President and for a military command and control bunker.
Both of which are two really good reasons not to build it.
Underneath the ballroom would be a giant command and control structure. It would replace the secret but not so secret Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) dating back to World War II. The PEOC was itself an example of paranoia. It was probably much more useful during the Cold War than it was during World War Two.
It probably is obsolete. Times change.
All of which is a good reason not to build it.
The fact of the matter is that since the start of World War Two security and privilege has attached to the office of the President at an ever increasing rate. Special cars, special aircraft, a dedicated helicopter and a house with a bunker.
In recent years some paranoid Americans who like to imagine the world turning to shit, by which they mean the United States as the rest of the world doesn't count, have built their own bunkers. It's fun. It provides them with a false sense of security. But they can't launch wars.
The President can and he's launched two so far with a third nearly inevitable. Surrounded by security as he is, he probably feels perfectly safe, although the dinner attack would tend that isn't really true. Anyhow, people feeling perfectly safe do dumb and destructive things.
Trump himself is a perfect example of that. His income has made him feel perfectly safe from economic disaster and convinced himself that he's an intelligent man. And during his administration men who raped teenage girls have been safe, due to their association with him. The amount of financial oddities going on during Trump's administration has shown that lots of people associated with him feel pretty safe doing things they would not otherwise do.
And Trump has felt free to participate in a war that murdered the oppositions political leadership.
Nobody should feel that safe.
That is, I realize, as shocking thing to say, but a leader should, at least to some degree, share the fate and dangers of his people. Lots of Americans go about their daily activities knowing they could be killed at random and nobody is going to do anything about it. Servicemen in the Middle East no doubt knew right from the onset that they were not safe from Iranian attacks. Quite frankly, Americans here in the United States aren't free from Iranian attacks either, we've just been oddly lucky so far.
The President of the United States, whomever he is, ought to be in the same situation as the rest of us, no matter who he is. No one man is that valuable such that he should benefit from billions of dollars of effort to set him aside in safety from the people he serves.
And the same for the military. We have command and control facilities already. We have enough. If we don't, well, that would be odd and so be it.
Something really weird is going on with Donald Trump and Washington D.C. architecture.
First he started putting up gold crap all over the White House. Then he ripped down part of the White House in order to build a ballroom. After that, there was the paver application to the Rose Garden. Now he wants to put up a Triumphal Arch. This past week he had this done:
And now we're learning that fountains at Lafayette Park, which the Biden administration estimated would take about $3M to repair, have been repaired at over $15M in a no bid contract.
Of all of these projects, only the fountain really should have been done, and it shouldn't have been done on a no bid contract. Everything else shows Trump to be just what he is, an old demented hotelier with abysmally bad taste.
Why is he doing this?
The longer this goes on, of course, the harder it will be to undo. The fountain, fortunately, won't need to be undone. The gold crap can be tossed into a dumpster. The paver taken to Home Depo and sold as second.
Human instinct will mitigate against tearing the ballroom, if it gets build, and the arch, if it does, down.* It's wasteful. But it will need to be done as a symbol that is a democracy, not a hotel. The reflecting pool will have to be addressed, but that will be expensive.
To the extent that any of this was done illegally, the next administration should file suit and seek the costs of restoration as damages from whomever benefitted. Harrison design should never get another public contract, which is the same for both architectural firms that worked on the ballroom. Not much can be done about the recipients of no bid contracts, and the work on the fountains, seems well done, if very expensive. The contract that turned so expensive needs to be looked at.
Frankly, at this point, if we manage to survive another couple of years of the reign of this demented vandal, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
By the way, the damage to the reflecting pool is permanent, as a practical matter. The industrial-grade, "American flag blue" swimming pool coating bonds to granite and is designed to last fifty years. It'll take over a century for the effects to wear off.
Unless its reconstructed, of course, which a lawsuit to cause Trump to pay for should be contemplated, if possible.
Footnotes:
*The arch will not be solid, so there's one legitimate reason to leave it up, and that's a tomb for those killed in Trump's wars. Both sides.
But not for Trump.
But that won't be done, so it'll just need to come down.
