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[Personal update]
- Author and educator Amanda Nelson has a few words about Trump’s no good, terrible, lousy week:
- In Hackwhackers, we now have Schrödinger’s National Defense. Reports say Trump is angry because he wasn’t warned about limits on US munitions before impulsively going to war.
Now he is angry about the report on his anger, insisting there are no munitions shortages.
But that’s not all:
There does seem to be a shortage of US munitions because of Trump’s blundering into war.
So, of course, Trump insists there is no such shortage.
And anyone in the administration who says there is will be charged with leaking state secrets.It’s Trump V. Trump On MunitionsAlso from W. Hackwhacker:
- It’s a very old and somewhat tired joke. But I’m old and somewhat tired, so here goes.
A World War II hidden Japanese sniper has an American Army unit pinned. The sergeant leading the Americans has an idea on how to fire back.
He has his own sniper ready, aiming in the general direction. He yells out:
Tojo can go to Hell!As he hoped, the Japanese sniper is provoked and yells back:
Roosevelt can go to Hell!
Now they know where he is!But the American sniper holds his fire.
The sergeant, frustrated demands: Why the hell didn’t you shoot?!!
The soldier, embarrassed, responds, I just couldn’t fire at a fellow Republican.
Old age often includes being reminded of old things by new things:
Minnesota is suddenly plagued by a cyberattack on its water systems. Evidence tracks the attacks back to Iran.
News Corpse has Trump’s reaction. Iran is completely innocent! It’s Democrats in Minnesota who done it!
News Corpse includes this:
Typical Trump: BLAME AMERICA FIRST!
He is absolving Iran of guilt in a cyber attack and blaming it, without evidence, on Democratic Americans that he despises.
He defends Iran as innocent because they have "bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota." But Trump doesn't? https://t.co/pvR0Mc4bfv
— News Corpse (@NewsCorpse) July 31, 2026
- Disaffected and it Feels So Good reviews Trump’s middle of the night posts on solutions for the Iran war: AI dress up and blame Biden:
Just a few weeks ago Traitor trump posted an image of himself in his teenage cosplay uniform juxtaposed against a young President Obama. Now he’s taken to giving himself a fantasy version of a WW2 4-star General’s uniform, replete with incorrect gear, an indecipherable salad stack of medals on his left breast, and a svelte waist Donnie has never had.
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil, for some unfathomable reason, reacts negatively to RFK Jr.’s helpful advice to those struggling with war and tariff affected grocery prices.
RFK Jr. suggests Americans can more easily afford groceries if they start eating liver instead of beef:
"Most of the cheap cuts of meat are very inexpensive. … You can buy liver"
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) July 30, 2026 at 10:45 AM
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has state by state numbers. Voters in 13 states approve of Trump. 37 don’t much like him, including here in Missouri.
- The Borowitz Report reflects ongoing bad news for Trump in truly icky, funny, satire:
New Poll Reveals Trump Less Popular Than Explosive Diarrhea - tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has the story of the latest Trump lawsuit to go sideways.
Seems Capital One of What’s in your wallet fame closed bank accounts of hundreds of Trump affiliated accounts back in 2021.
So the Trump Organization, and Eric Trump, sued 4 years later (that would be last year) for illegal debanking. So why would the bank do that? Let’s ask Eric and company:tengrain quotes Reuters on Eric’s court filings:
…the accounts were closed because of Capital One’s “woke” beliefs and its desire to benefit from the political mood after the January 6, 2021 riot …AND Capital One notifies the court of their non-woke reasons, along with documentation. Before the suit, those reasons were held as confidential:
…documents and Plaintiffs’ own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (“AML”) reasons. The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team…tengrain brings it together:
Banks like money, even when the money is Woke; but they don’t like being an accessory to a crime, especially money-laundering. - Trump, Doug Burgum, and Trump’s other administration administrators continue to reflect the Reflecting Pool fiction that the pool problems are caused by leftist vandals. Rather than admit that Trump screwed up, they insist that random tourists be arrested and prosecuted.
As U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro finds herself in a hard, dark place, our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit speculates on whether Trump can find a lawyer who doesn’t mind being disbarred. - In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson explores a new obvious but unacknowledged DOJ policy of prosecuting those guilty of bruising Trump’s delicate feelings.
The Department of Justice has been caught repeatedly misleading grand juries or committing misconduct in getting indictments.
She starts with the Reflecting Pool prosecution, dropped last week as prosecutors officially admit in court that the charges were bogus.
She goes on to examine the absurd case against James Comey, charged with the threatening use of felonious seashells, and goes on to instance after instance involving Todd Blanche.
And so it goes in TrumpVille.
The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.
- Trump officials have very little to lose, at least for now, when they publicly depart from reality in order to please Trump.
But Trump lawyers working for the Justice Department can face real consequences for following Trump orders to prosecute people with little or no evidence.
Judges finding out about manufactured evidence, charges brought against people whom officials know are innocent, misleading grand juries, and other misconduct, those judges can impose real penalties right now.
It doesn’t stop there. State bar associations can, and sometimes do, make lawyers into ex-lawyers.
Journalist Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel investigates how deep Jeanine Pirro has already become a captive of the Trump Trap involving the false, now dropped, charges surrounding the Reflecting Pool:
What did she know, and when did she know it?Just one of many danger signs for Pirro as a judge reviews misconduct regarding one witness:
DOJ went to great lengths to blame this on Hearn, both by keeping Hearn’s accuser out of the grand jury and (apparently) by claiming she took a photo that someone else took an hour earlier.Oh my…
- US Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) knows what ails Anthony Fauci.
The man is just plain vain, especially about Covid.…he was so drunk with his own fame that he was emotionally conflicted since he funded this virus.Dave Columbo takes a look at those comic book levels of personal vanity:
- driftglass sees the history of the Republican Party in recent decades as working two sets of books.
The first set has been for the gullible base:
Liberals are baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demons. Trans people are coming for your children. Immigrants are rapists. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The government is always the problem. Whatever scary story or conspiracy theory would keep people angry, frightened, and voting Republican — that was what went into the first set of books.
And there is no bottom to it. No limit. The Republican base will believe whatever they were told, because the Republican Party spent decades training them to believe it. But the point of those lies was never really governing. The point was power.The second set has been for bending government toward the wealthy:
This one contained reality.
That was the book with the spreadsheets and the data and the boring stuff: how economies work, how wars work, how logistics work, how science works, how diseases work. It was the book you actually need if you are trying to run a country.But then, Trump came in and the tightrope snapped.
Trump decided he didn’t need the reality-based ledger anymore. He operated entirely from the first set of books.
He told the base: Yes. I really am going to give you everything you dreamed of. I will punish the people you hate. I will hurt the people you fear. I will break the rules for you. And in exchange, you will let me loot the place.
That was the deal. And it still is.
That’s how we got Covid mega-death, courtroom corruption, Reflection Pool prosecutions, ICE murders, economic chaos, and war based on a whim.
driftglass suggests an end to the fantasy game might begin in November.
- As if to illustrate:
Patience!
Assimilation can take a while.
With time and effort, Ted might still adapt to American values.— Burr Deming – @BurrLand01@mastodon.world (@BurrLand01) August 5, 2026
- Dave Dubya says Democratic Socialists still have an opportunity to transform the Democratic Party in constructive ways, but they are blowing it by going off into tangents, adopting policies and slogans nobody at the ballot box wants.
But come on, when Megan Romer blathered on about having “no borders”, who the hell does she think would go along with that?
Other absurd tenets of the party are delusional and deal breakers for all but the most extreme Left.How about we shape up, guys?
- CalicoJack in The Psy of Life examines what is most likely to influence your member of Congress: a telephone call or participation in protest.
- After James Madison comes back from the grave as a special guest at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
So late to this but I wonder how many nails the White House Correspondents' Association's coffin needs (from: www.readtpa.com/p/dinner-the…)
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 3:15 PM
The WHCA is the very model of an organization that's foregone the rigor of making informed, principled choices (because they're hard and require an effort to defend) in lieu of easy arbitrary choices. What do you mean we didn't defend the 1st Amendment? We had robot James Madison!
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 3:15 PM
Jason Linkins favors the organizers with a helpful suggestion:
the dinner and the org has been washed for years, it's time for everyone involved to walk into the ocean
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 3:41 PM
- Juliet Jeske at Decoding Fox News watches and summarizes so the rest of us don’t have to.
This week, she is interviewed on how Fox doesn’t always lie.
Often, they simply leave out the truth: - At The Onion, Tesla has a new strategy:
- Julian Sanchez goes a bit philosophical with a quick argument about AI consciousness…
…then progresses to practical advice:
Don’t Fall in Love With Your Toaster - Professor PZ Myers has a low tolerance for students using Artificial Intelligence to compose homework assignments they are supposed to research and write themselves. So he’s more than a little angered at the result of a simple experiment by another college instructor. It seems a very high percentage of students were found to have used AI to cheat on a specially designed bit of assigned homework.
- In Rural Missouri, Jess Piper experiences a traffic accident, but she is still able to listen to an audio rendition of an Atlantic article reminding her of America’s decline in reading skills.
Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book…
She thinks of a book from which she once taught, a novel by Ray Bradbury over 70 years ago. In Fahrenheit 451, firemen are assigned to burn books.
From the book (unburned thus far):
Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. - Brian Beutler acknowledges the real problem some MAGA folk have with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is racial.
Those who are more cautious base their objections on Nolan’s lack of cultural fidelity to ancient Greeks.
They’re right about this much: Nolan does not portray Odysseus as a remorseless conqueror, but rather an exhausted, regretful, traumatized elder, who bears little resemblance to Homer’s protagonist.
Ergo, something something, the movie does not deserve acclaim.Even those critics reveal something about themselves. They crave a human existence in which Conan the Barbarian is real.
To make the claims they’ve fallen back on, and stick to them, you’d have to believe very childish things about human nature. At some level, you’d have to believe there is no human nature at all, apart from what culture forces upon people. You have to believe that frailty is a choice; that He-Man would be possible, if only the right people were in charge. - The Propaganda Professor reluctantly (he says) participates in the debate about Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey. This review reviews the reviewers.
He begins with one thing he especially likes: the departure from a faithful rendition:
I’m particularly pleased with how Nolan solves the problem of Homer’s anticlimactic trajectory; fully half of the epic poem takes place after Odysseus has already returned to his homeland. All the episodes we associate with the story — Circe, the Cyclops, and so on — occur in the first twelve books, while the second twelve have Odysseus just hanging around and mostly playing a game of keeping his wife Penelope in the dark about his homecoming, while plotting revenge on the MAGA-mentality suitors. In the movie, however, the reunion occupies a considerably lesser percentage of the footage, and the section chronicling the wanderings of the title character are well developed and nicely paced.
After entertainingly quibbling with the quibbles, the final verdict:
Let’s face it, the vast majority of the ginned-up outrage over Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t really inspired by the film itself or anything in it. It’s inspired by the incessant, obsessive, unhinged right-wing “culture war” that also generated so much idiotic “controversy” over such earth-shaking matters as Barbie and M&M’s and Sesame Street. It will never stop, not even if these people succeed in getting things 110 percent like they want them — they’ll still find something else to work themselves into a froth over. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.By the way, a pretty good headline:
Enough About the Odyssey Already (But Since Nobody Will Stop Talking About It, Here Are a Few Random Thoughts that Really Ought to Be the Last Word On the Topic) - North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz notes that some Trumpers are leaving MAGA. The bad news: it is not because of a new‑found empathy.
No, the only reason Trump supporters are forming any kind of oppositional response to Trump is that the pain has become personal.
As they abruptly lose their jobs, see their companies move overseas, watch their 401(k)s evaporate, reckon with the skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, find their own voices silenced, and see their healthcare options dissolve, they are magically finding themselves becoming the resistance that decent human beings have been for a decade now. - In Scotties Playtime blundersonword sees much of humanity divided between those who seek to dominate how others must live, and those who seek to lighten the load.
He asks: How Can We Be the Light for Others?.
- Right Wing Watch brings us conservative Christian activist Seth Gruber, who explains that liberals are not exactly like Nazis, we are actually worse:
- At The Moderate Voice retired U.S. Air Force Major Dorian de Wind has vivid childhood memories of an earthquake tragedy in and around Ambato, Ecuador.
On that day in August 1949, our parents picked us up from the river very soon after the earthquake hit.
As we drove through the few streets that were passable, the extent of the disaster quickly became apparent.
We drove to our house that was still standing, but not safe to stay in. Our family spent the next few days in temporary shelter but soon moved to more permanent quarters…others were not as fortunate.Rebuilding with international aid:
With significant help from other nations, including from the U.S., from international aid organizations and from the Ecuadorean government, Ambato was largely rebuilt relatively fast. It would take surrounding devastated towns much longer to rebuild. One of these towns, Pelileo, was totally rebuilt at a new site, a little more than a mile from its previous location.
A Festival of Fruit and Flowers (Fiesta de la Fruta y de las Flores) was held in Ambato on June 29, 1950, to help morale and the revival of Ambato.The festival is still conducted every year.
- Infidel753 provides a list of worthy information sources.
With the legacy mainstream media now owned and controlled by billionaires, and largely pushing their agenda, alternate sources of information are a necessity.As might be expected, some of his recommendations are especially good.
- Legal expert Imani Gandy interviews co-creator of The Daily Show Lizz Winstead on the purpose of satire.
In addition to Imani’s goal of making a ridiculous opposing argument too frivolous to take seriously, her guest adds what she considers essential.
Is the point of political comedy to build an audience, or to build a movement? And what happens to all that comedy-fueled outrage when it has nowhere left to go?
Winstead has a name for that: anger fluffing. And she finds it pointless. - Dave Barry finds an article about the problem society has with us boomers and assumes it to contain what have become the traditional complaints about old farts with loud, very loud, longing for the good old days. Turns out he is a bit mistaken.
But I was wrong. The article says that the problem with us Boomers is… We’re partying too hard. Seriously.
Quoting The Economist:
The generations now ageing disgracefully were disgraceful in youth, and in middle age. If they’re behaving badly now, there is really not much to be done about it. If they choose to frolic at toga parties, no one will stop them. Except, ultimately, time.Yup.
We boomers are a wild and crazy sort. - @whiskeywhistle98 learns how hard it can be to tell someone bad news:
- SilverAppleQueen has sleepy cats.
- Awww…
Health improvement remains discouragingly slow but steady.
Therapy continues.
I have neckties older than my physical therapist but, since she is more mature, I pretty much have to listen.
And she is reassuring about my progress, so there is that.
Exercises at home and medical appointments take time and attention.
Sleep continues to be erratic, with unscheduled naps frequently taking over. Blogging has become hit-or-miss.
More to report as life goes on.
We begin this week with a reminder that we all have an occasional friend who is easier to like retrospectively:
We continue with our valued and dependable sources of internet wisdom:
3 responses to “Week of Trump Slump
Iran War, Munitions, Liver Economy, Polls Diving, DOJ Law, Fauci Blamed, Biden Blamed, Muslims Blamed”
As to your recovery, slow but steady wins the race, I guess? One day it will be me, and you can remind me then. 🙂 Thanks for all you do here!
Howdy Burr!
I’m glad to hear that you are on the mend. It just takes longer for us retired old fogies.
One of the things that strikes me so clearly after reading you excellent round up is just how impotent and incompetent Trump is proving himself to be and really MAGA is in general.
Times to try our souls.
Blog On, Sibling!
Jack
I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that a particular fellow blogger would wildly equate Abdul El-Sayed with David Duke.
It shows whether they are Democrats or Christian nationalist Republicans, Zionists will put the interests of Netanyahu and his apartheid Israel over America (Yes, even Jimmy Carter knew it’s apartheid.) Our loyal Zionists cheer Trump for joining Netanyahu’s war on Iran.
(Never mind the rising costs for struggling Americans. Just for this war, the average household has paid over $600 in higher gas and food costs. It is certain to cost much more. But hey, we don’t mind having less money for healthcare, just to help Israelis have their universal care while they slaughter tens of thousands and deprive millions of people of their homes.)
If we don’t like it, we’re Islamic terrorist lovers to Zionists, I’m sure.
American Zionists are quite tolerant of illegal settlers murdering West Bank Palestinians and taking their homes. And so what if IDF forces shoot kids in the head and bomb food lines? Ethnic cleansing and genocide are cool when Israel does it.
A UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. (Zionists HATE the UN.)
International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS): The world’s largest professional organization of genocide scholars passed a formal resolution stating that Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the legal threshold for genocide.
Human rights groups: Prominent organizations such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, alongside international groups like Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders have published reports concluding that Israeli policies in Gaza constitute genocide
Radical American Zionists believe they understand what’s going on better than this person:
Israeli-born genocide scholar and IDF veteran Omer Bartov explains why incitement, displacement and the destruction of civilian life can meet the legal bar for genocide, even without gas chambers or shooting pits.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/20/world/video/gps0720-israel-gaza-genocide
Fetterman?? He may have guts, but his brain isn’t operating at full capacity. Naturally he gravitates to FOX(R) for attention.
He gets it. He knows everyone critical of Israel is a raging Jihadist, salivating to impose Sharia law in the US.
Now Democratic Zionists all but prefer the Senate to remain in Trump’s hands.
Republican senators sent a letter to the ICC Chief Prosecutor: “Oppose Israel and we will go after your family — You have been warned”.
THAT should teach us a lesson. Serve Israel and support Trump, or else…