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Trump grovels for Putin; Trump’s dementia on full display

When I first saw this I suspected it was an AI fake, but of course not. The fun really starts 45 seconds in:

Trump looks about 90 years old and sounds worse. He appears to be deeply unwell, as if he’s shot up with steroids and who knows what else to keep him upright (barely).

Everything about this is just unhinged. The tacky decor, the stupid hat, the groveling courtiers and courtesans, but most of the humiliating spectacle for any non-delusional American of the sight of this pathetic shambles of a man being manipulated so easily by a Russian autocrat, who must be in disbelief that his interventions into the American electoral process have paid off so spectacularly.

 

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Thoughts on last night’s Arlington (VA) School Board meeting

This will be of interest mainly to Virginians.  In November Virginia votes for Gov, LtGov, Atty Gen, all 100 delegates in the General Assembly as well as local offices.

COMMENTS ON EVENTS AT LAST NIGHT’S ARLINGTON SCHOOL BOARD MEETING

See below for some reactions and thoughts from last night’s Arlington County School Board meeting, at which Winsome Earle-Sears (and many others) spoke, and the rally prior to the meeting, at which one activist held up an offensive, ill-conceived, racist (even if the person’s intent, as she said to Fox “News,” was “satire mean to provoke conversation about the absurdity of prejudice”). It’s obviously blown up into a huge, viral story in right-wing media and on Twitter, although we’ll see if really breaks out into the “mainstream media” or not, and whether it lasts more than a few days. With that, here are a few thoughts and reactions.

  • Last night, Abigail Spanberger almost immediately said she “condemns this repulsive display” as “racist, abhorrent and unacceptable.” She followed up this morning with another statement, elaborating that “no matter the intended purpose or tone and no matter how much one might find someone else’s beliefs objectionable, to threaten a return of Jim Crow and segregation to a Black woman is unacceptable.”

 

  • Arlington County Board member Maureen Coffey also responded almost immediately: “Arlington was the 1st school district in Virginia to desegregate in 1959 This is entirely unacceptable &flies in the face of the work we have done to be an inclusive & welcoming community for all. We do not fight for progress by putting others down, we fight for equality for ALL.”

 

  • Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA08) commented this morning: “There is no place for racism in Arlington or anywhere else. This sign is wrong, does not represent the values of our community and I join those condemning it.”

 

  • Equality Virginia issued a statement a bit earlier this afternoon: “Equality Virginia condemns the anti-Black sign displayed at a rally for trans youth ahead of the Arlington School Board meeting on Thursday, August 21st. The sign invoked segregation-era policy and tactics that are dehumanizing and deeply harmful. Anti-Blackness has no place in our movement, the for LGBTQ+ liberation is intertwined with the fight for Black liberation. We must condemn anti-Blackness in all its forms with the same dedication that we fight against transphobia.”

 

  • Of course, all of this overshadowed the content of the Arlington School Board meeting, at which the vast majority of speakers expressed their support for transgender students and their opposition to the Trump administration’s threats to slash funding to Arlington public schools if they don’t change their transgender student policies. 

 

  • For her part, Winsome Earle-Sears consciously chose to come to Arlington to speak out, because she feels like raising the “salience” of this issue – which bathrooms and locker rooms transgender students should be using – will help her politically. She also, presumably, believes strongly in what she’s saying, namely that  – in her view: “What is happening in our schools right now is just wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s insane. And it has to stop. There are two sexes, boys and girls. And for generations, we’ve understood this that they deserve their own sports teams, their own locker rooms, their own bathrooms. That’s not discrimination. It is common sense…When girls lose their privacy, when boys are punished for speaking plain truth, when parents are silenced for simply asking questions, that’s not education. That’s indoctrination.”

 

  • With a couple exceptions, the other speakers at the School Board meeting all spoke out strongly in support of transgender students, argued that Arlington County schools are following the law, “reflect the core values that we hold as Arlingtonians – respect, inclusion, kindness,” etc. They also pushed back hard against the “political cudgel” being used by the Trump administration against Arlington County public schools. Check out the video, below.

 

  • As for the politics of this, clearly Virginia Republicans are looking for an issue on which they can gain some traction, after a rough summer of disunity – and also getting outraised financially and trailing in the polls. So they look at 2021 – when Youngkin used “wedge issues” like “CRT,” transgender kids’ use of school bathrooms, etc. as part of his winning gubernatorial campaign – as a model for 2025. The big difference, of course, is that in 2021, a Democrat (Joe Biden) was in the White House, while this time around a Republican (Donald Trump) is president. And historically, Virginia almost always goes OPPOSITE for governor of whichever party is in the White House. So how much did all the so-called “culture war” stuff help Youngkin in 2021? Hard to say, but in the end, he only won by two points, even with an increasingly unpopular Biden in the White House, and even with almost no record, a huge amount of money, and a pathetically incompetent media – allowing Youngkin to be all things to all people. This time around, Earle-Sears doesn’t (at least not so far) have nearly the money that Youngkin had; plus she’s got much more of a political track record (as a right winger all the way) than Youngkin had; but yes, the media still sucks, as badly or even worse than in 2021, so far mostly normalizing and “sane washing” the far-right-Republican 2025 ticket.

 

  • The Spanberger campaign, of course, would like to keep the focus of this election on the economy, inflation, jobs, healthcare, DOGE cuts, federal workers, tariffs, etc. – the things voters care about and which make a big difference to Virginia’s future. And at the moment, it looks like the Spanberger folks will have a LOT more resources to communicate with voters on those things in the fall than Earle-Sears will.

 

  • But…and it’s a big BUT, Earle-Sears has the *enormous* advantage of Republicans having built, over the past few decades, a *massive* right-wing media/messaging machine, while Democrats almost completely dropped the ball on that front (despite being warned repeatedly not to do so). Which means, of course, that Republicans have the ability to turn just about ANYTHING into a huge “issue” – for instance, “CRT” in 2021, despite the fact that it wasn’t even taught in Virginia public K-12 schools, nor did the vast majority of voters even know about it – while Democrats have minimal capacity to do the same to Republicans. Or, in this case, Republicans/right wingers can take a sign by a random activist, not even sure who the person is (but there’s no indication she’s any sort of Democratic Party or Spanberger campaign official, politician, etc.) and turn it into the messaging, “SEE, THIS IS WHAT ALL DEMOCRATS THINK! THEY ARE ALL HORRIBLE!” And in this environment, no matter how many times or how strongly Democrats like Spanberger denounce the offensive sign or whatever, it kinda doesn’t matter, because the right-wing echo chamber will amplify it regardless, claim (dishonestly, but that doesn’t matter to them) that it represents Spanberger and Democrats in general, etc. Yes, that’s the absurd world we live in…and that Democrats SHOULD HAVE adapted to many years ago, but that most Democrats *still to this day* don’t understand.

 

  • One more point along these same lines: yes, some random activist had an offensive sign, and Democrats have been condemning it – as they should. Meanwhile, though, Donald Trump – a virulent racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc., who has said a GAZILLION offensive, vicious, horrible things over the years – is president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party. And yet almost nothing seems to “stick” to him. As for the 2025 VA GOP ticket, they’re tied to Trump, plus if you look at their past rhetoric and actions, there are tons of outrageous, extreme, bigoted, etc. things…and yet does anybody care about any of that? Would any of that stuff, if tweeted, get even a small fraction of the “eyeballs”/”clicks” as this story of a random, unnamed activist holding up a moronic, offensive, etc. sign at a rally? Of course not. And that’s just a massive failure on the part of Democrats, plus the media of course, which SHOULD – but doesn’t – differentiate for its readers what’s from an official source, a candidate, etc, and what’s from somebody you never heard about.  
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Trump has no shame. That is his secret power. He has no morals.

But Trump has no shame. That is his secret power. He is, literally, shameless. So he can parade his vivid inadequacies—his ignorance, his vanity, his physical grossness, his overall gaucheness—before the world, shielded by this power of shamelessness. But there are times he needs more, and so he protects himself from the mortal threat that someone might stand up to him and compel him to recognize his own absurdity with an armor of cruelty. He is cruel. He must be cruel, must lash out, must smash, must humiliate and dominate any person who dares to notice how ridiculous he is, how wrong, how unlawful, how ignorant. That has probably happened a lot in Donald Trump’s life, and it has made him a master of cruelty.

This sick, disturbed, evil personality has captivated tens of millions of Americans WHO ARE JUST LIKE TRUMP. They have raised him up higher than almost any other American in our history. Why? How? There are structural economic reasons, yes; America was ripe for a populist revolt, as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders showed. But Sanders is an eminently decent man. He lacked the elixir of hatreds, the cup of cruelty that Trump offers to all who follow him.

This is the key to Trump’s EVIL:  He gives people permission to say and do out loud, in public, the things they used to do and say in secret.  Trump’s followers are as mean, nasty, evil, and twisted as he is.

The contagion of cruelty has now swept our land, and swept Trump back into power. The culture of cruelty is now the center of power in our country. The ideal of American solidarity, that way of life that recognizes we are all bound together in this nation, all brothers and sisters living in one shared national community, working out our differences under law through democratic debates—that’s a joke in Trump’s America. MAGA doesn’t even pay lip service to it.

Oh, they prattle on about America all the time, but they don’t mean what Lincoln meant. Or Reagan. They sing “God Bless America,” when they ought to fear the judgment of a just and loving God. The only community that truly matters is MAGA. MAGA is America and America is MAGA. You’re in or you’re out. And once you are in, you are complicit, because MAGA is built and bound together by the endorsement of, and the participation in, this culture of cruelty. There can be no dissent. Dissent of any kind is dangerous, because it exposes the truth: The truth that is being cruel is a sickness, not a triumph. Their grandchildren will be ashamed of them for this.

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James Dobson is dead. Sad to say, there are more like him out there.

James Dobson, Burn in Hell

By Erik Loomis,  From:  https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/08/james-dobson-burn-in-hell

James Dobson is dead. Finally. This awful homophobe made the world a significantly worse place by his living in it. His brand of hate was tremendously influential in the modern Republican Party. Future Americans should look at Dobson with contempt and disgust, much like the racist scum of our collective past and of the Trump administration today.

Born in 1936 in Shreveport, Louisiana, that town that has provided nothing but wonderful gifts to American life, Dobson grew up in the Nazarene church. The Nazarenes are pretty far out fundamentalist. Dancing and movies were pure sin and any good Nazarene could not be involved in such horrors. And Dobson was fully immersed in that. His father was an uneducated iterant minister traveling through the Southwest, where this stuff had its strongest pull.

Dobson became interested in psychology, which was also seen as sinful by a lot of his fellow religionists. Nonetheless, he thought he could serve the Lord by attaching that to Christianity. He developed a combination that was the worst of both evangelicalism and psychology, creating a special category of evil in the world. He went to what is today Point Loma Nazarene University and then finished a doctoral degree in psychology at the University of Southern California in 1967. Unfortunately, the sins of the secular hells of higher education did not rub off on Dobson and he came out of that as determined to spew his fundamentalism as ever. In fact, he stayed on at USC as a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine. And he was there for 14 years, so he still had steady work while he pushed his grift, which was mostly at first about hitting the kid so the little brat behaves.

From the very beginning of his public career, Dobson was horrible. He came to public light in 1970 with his child raising manual, Dare to Discipline. This book made him the anti-Benjamin Spock. It was openly pro-corporal punishment.  He claimed to oppose child abuse, but his guidelines on this was much more vague than it was on beating the crying kids. It was supposed to be about self-control and if anyone ever moved beyond that to the point that they enjoyed whacking the little brat then they shouldn’t be hitting their kids. But how can one even know this at the time?

In a follow-up book The Strong-Willed Child, which also advocated beating the hell out of the brats, Dobson stated about how long the beating should go on, “Yes, I believe there should be a limit. As long as the tears represent a genuine release of emotion, they should be permitted to fall. But crying quickly changes from inner sobbing to an expression of protest … Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining, and the change can be recognized in the tone and intensity of his voice. I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” Ah yes, keep hitting the child until their will gives up. What can go wrong?

And it wasn’t just kids that he urged hitting. It was also the family dog! What is it with right wingers and abusing dogs? He described his dachshund—named Sigmund Freud—not wanting to go into its enclosure. So he got the belt. Here’s the relevant passage in The Strong-Willed Child. “I had seen this defiant mood before and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud….. “I hit him again and he tried to bite me . . . That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt.”[1] This was an object lesson on how to raise both animals and children for James Dobson! No wonder he was so popular among evangelicals. His love of patriarchal violence fit their world vision seen as under threat by people who don’t…..beat dogs and children, not to mention think people should love who they want and have control over their own reproductive system.

Dobson had his strong grift going. It was always connected to evangelicalism. But in the 1970s, it wasn’t explicitly political. That would change with the 1980s. Dobson moved into the national political realm in 1981, with the founding of the Family Research Council. Building on the rising putrescence of right-wing evangelicalism in American politics as the Reagan era began, the Family Research Council became a leading organization in the fight to repeal the second half of the twentieth century. This was the nakedly political arm of Dobson’s organization, attempting to influence politics, and especially Republican politics, to a hard-right stance on social questions, especially against feminism and homosexuality. He founded it with other right-wing authoritarian psychiatrists. From the beginning, it worked closely with the Reagan administration and was led by a former Health and Human Services official from the Reagan years. Its official website stated that its mission was that “Believing that God is the author of life, liberty, and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.”[2]

Thus it was not only homophobic, but Islamophobic and anti-Semitic. It made claims that the Democratic Party is controlled by Jews. Dobson headed this until the early 1990s, when its obvious political aims threatened the tax-exempt status of the entire operation. So the FRC was spun off to be run by the equally odious Gary Bauer and today Tony Perkins. Now this is a rogue’s gallery of right-wing authoritarian crypto-fascists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has long called out the FRC as a hate group, noting its claims that gays are actually pedophiles and exposing that its so called “policy experts” are just right-wing hacks pretending to know anything.

And then there is Focus on the Family. Founded in 1977 by Dobson, this organization, based first in California, has been the cornerstone of hard-right evangelicalism ever since. Along with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Focus on the Family was the most important institution in terms of building up right-wing support for the culture wars that dominated our national politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and still do to a great extent today. At its core was its daily radio show carried on over 200 stations around the country starting in 1980. In 1988, Focus on the Family went even more overtly political, starting a policy arm intended to directly influence politicians to push for evangelical political priorities, especially repressing women and gays.

In 1991, Focus on the Family moved to Colorado Springs. This put it on the front lines of Colorado’s infamous Amendment 2, in 1992, restricting rights for gay people in the state. Dobson was a huge supporter of this, rallying the evangelical community to protect our nice white children from such horrors as books like Heather Has Two Mommies and other literature that in the thirty years since has clearly destroyed American civilization. Amendment 2 passed and Dobson’s power seemed to grow enormously because of it, even as the nation as a whole moved toward accepting gay marriage, though I would not be confident that continues.

Dobson became the most notorious figure on the evangelical right in these years and as such, there were some awesome protestors against he and his band of hatemongers. In 1993, Focus on the Family opened a new campus. The Lesbian Avengers disrupted the event. In fact, the Focus on the Family campus has long been a center of protest for gay rights activists. In 2005, Mel White, a gay pastor, held a big protest in front of the Focus headquarters, where he wanted to meet with Dobson. White said, “Dobson has become the primary source of misinformation about gay and lesbian people in the world. He is single-handedly doing more damage to the truth than anyone else, in our opinion.”[3] Hard to argue. This is the kind of horrible person that Dobson was. He did not meet with White. And yet, amazingly, even more evil right wing pastors also protested at the Focus headquarters, saying that Dobson did not hate abortion enough![4] The level of sheer vile evil at the core of American evangelicalism simply has no bottom.

For some reason, Dobson interviewed Ted Bundy on live TV the day before the latter was executed. It was done to serve Dobson’s interests. Bundy claimed that the reason he killed 50 women is that he looked at pornography. Given that fighting the smut industry was central to Dobson’s mission, he was able to raise a ton of money of these tapes and then donate a portion of the proceeds to anti-porn groups he was associated with. But it was the kind of publicity hound shallow exploitation to promote himself that was at the core of Dobson’s actual ideology, whatever he may have stated about politics.

What really obsessed Dobson was THE GAYS. The idea of non-heterosexual sex was horrifying to this man. If anything should define Dobson’s awful life, it’s the homophobia. When the Sandy Hook massacre happened, Dobson blamed it on God punishing America for allowing gay sex, stating “I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God almighty, and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”[5] He wrote books on the topic of gay sex, such as 2004’s Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle.

I don’t know about you all, but I can tell you my marriage really went downhill after gay people were able to get married. I mean, we both started getting into animals and everything else that Dobson predicted would happen. What’s even the point of marriage anymore now that I know some dudes are doing it next door to me. When will it stop? WHEN WILL IT STOP! Dobson was all about gay conversion therapy too, constantly promoting this horrible self-denial and self-hatred in the guise of medicine.

And how to stop boys from becoming gay? Dobson believed that fathers should whip out their dick and show it to the boy so that they become real pussy-loving men! No, seriously, he specifically promoted this passage in a friend’s manuscript:

Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.[6]

Dobson continued to push his grotesque culture war at every moment possible. The We Are Family Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting diversity in all ways, sent out a DVD to schools using cartoon characters such as Sponge Bob Square Pants to promote their message. For Dobson, this was the GAY AGENDA in action to convert our good American kids to be the queers. He stated, “childhood symbols are apparently being hijacked to promote an agenda that involves teaching homosexual propaganda to children.” And because Dobson and his people were so loud and had so many allies, those videos were pretty much not used in the classroom. A potentially high-quality educational tool was squashed by someone opposed to the entire last century of progress and the educational world caved to him.

Dobson left Focus on the Family in an official capacity in 2003, with the organization first taken over by former Reagan Cabinet official Don Hodel and then by Jim Daly, who attempted to give a slightly softer touch to the same hate. But that by no means instituted that Dobson was going to disappear from the scene. Quite the contrary. By 2004, Dobson was targeted fellow Republicans. He led a campaign to deny Arlen Specter the position of the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee because the Pennsylvanian was pro-choice. This didn’t work, but it did help foment the unrest against Specter that forced him to switch to the Democrats in order to vainly try to help save his career since he had no chance for reelection as a Republican. Dobson specifically rejected the idea of the Republicans as a big-tent party, stating, “I don’t want to be in the big tent … I think the party ought to stand for something.” Well, he’s pretty much won that battle as the Republican Party primarily today stands for a fascism Dobson was always comfortable with.

That same year, many credited Dobson with getting evangelicals out to vote for George W. Bush, suggesting that he was the critical factor in helping Bush win Ohio and Florida. It’s certainly more complicated than this, but there’s little question he had become the leading evangelical voice in politics by this time. He thought of himself this way too. When a top Bush staffer called Dobson to thank him for the help in the election, he started lecturing the staffer about how if Bush didn’t take stronger stands against gay rights, there would be hell to pay in 2008. Well, Republicans did have hell to pay that year but it most certainly wasn’t because Dobson was angry about Bush’s relative indifference to homophobia.

Dobson was also on the “judges are activists and this is bad by which I mean judges should be conservative activists” kick. In 2005, he co-wrote (or “co-wrote” more likely) a book titled Judicial Tyranny: The New Kings of America with such brilliant lights of American conservatism as Roy Moore, Ed Meese, Alan Keyes, and Phyllis Schlafly. He spent time on all the other idiocies of the right-wing movement as well. He talked about how the universe was created by “intelligent design” and that evolution was a hoax. Of course, once conservative activists started rewriting the Constitution to create a revanchist America dedicated to false visions of the past, Dobson never said a word because he loved those kinds of activist judges.

In 2008, Dobson couldn’t stand the idea of John McCain winning the nomination. So he threw his support behind the lovely figure of Mike Huckabee. He hated McCain. But then he also hated Barack Obama. Before the election, Dobson went ballistic over Obama’s 2006 “Call to Renewal” speech because Obama had called Dobson out specifically. Obama had stated: “Would we go with James Dobson’s [interpretation] or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture would guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which says that slavery is OK but eating shell fish is an abomination… Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount — a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?”

Dobson responded in 2008 that Obama knew nothing of the Bible and that “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology.” Shortly before the election, Dobson released something called “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America.” In it, he listed all the horrible things that were going to happen in the next four years. To quote this article on it at HuffPost,

It apocalyptically depicts terrorist attacks in American cities, churches losing their tax exempt status for not allowing gay marriages, pornography pushed in front of our children, doctors and nurses forced to perform abortions, euthanasia as commonplace, inner-city crime gone wild because of lack of gun ownership, home schooling banned, restricted religious speech, liberal censorship shutting down conservative talk shows, Christian publishers forced out of business, Israel nuked, power blackouts because of environmental restrictions, brave Christian resisters jailed by a liberal Supreme court, and finally, good Christian families emigrating to Australia and New Zealand.[7]

Sweet. I especially love the idea of New Zealand as Christian paradise.

Dobson left Focus on the Family entirely in 2009, in a somewhat acrimonious divorce that ended his radio show sponsored by the organization. It seems that the reason for this was Focus on the Family trying to provide a softer image. Now, I found the infamous Focus Super Bowl anti-abortion ad featuring Tim Tebow in 2010 utterly offensive. But for Dobson and other hardcore right-wingers, the ad was so soft as to say nothing about abortion at all.[8] What a bunch of sellouts!

Dobson continued to hate Barack Obama. In 2014, he called him “the abortion president” in public speeches. He even said this at the National Day of Prayer event at the Capitol, which is supposedly to be a nonpartisan event, saying, “President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president. He didn’t make any bones about it. This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense he is the abortion president.” Democrats were outraged. On the other hand, the entire National Day of Prayer is a Cold War relic created by Congress in 1952 to show those godless communists who was right. So Dobson acting in this capacity was somewhat fitting with the legacy of McCarthyism that the nation has never truly dealt with to the present.

Through the rest of his life, Dobson’s bread and butter remained his atrocious childrearing advice books. To say the least, I am not going down this mango expedition to actually read them, but they include such great sounding titles as The New Dare to Discipline (1996), The New Strong-Willed Child (2007), and Bringing Up Girls: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Women (2010). I love that most of these seem to be basically rewrites of the older books. After all, have to keep that cash flowing in from the suckers. In 2010, he made sure to have that consistent outlet to cash and attention by starting his daily radio show, Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson. After all, those evangelicals need to hear repeated messages about how you should beat your children and vote for noted Christian Donald Trump.

Dobson continued being a grotesque cancer on America until the end of his life. Like a lot of right-wingers, he wasn’t immediately on the Trump Train, preferring Ted Cruz. But that was only because he didn’t think he could trust Trump to be the fascist Dobson always hoped would transform America. Once Trump proved to indeed be that fascist, Dobson got on board.  He was a huge supporter of Roy Moore’s Senate run in Alabama. After all, at least Roy trying to pick up young girls at the mall meant he wasn’t gay. I guess Moore’s father showed him his penis. After the 2020 elections, he lamented the defeat of God’s right-hand man, Donald Trump. Let us quote some of this heartfelt letter:

Dear Friends,
There is a heaviness within my spirit today on behalf of our beloved nation. I’m sure I share that sentiment with many of you. In a sense, Shirley and I are also grieving over the potential passing of an era, during which I believe God gave America a spiritual reprieve. President Donald Trump was partially responsible for this crucial change of trajectory.

He isn’t a perfect man, and his relationship with the Lord is a very private matter. But he attempted during the first four years of his presidency to get acquainted with, to honor, and to learn from Christian leaders. He is very close to Rev. Franklin Graham, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Rev. Paula White, Dr. Jack Graham, former Governor Mike Huckabee, and at least 30 others, including myself. He once said while greeting us at a formal dinner, “This is your house. Welcome to it.” He then led us on a tour upstairs in the private residence.

People who know the President best tell us he is one of the most hard-working and dedicated men ever to serve in the Oval Office. We saw that indefatigable nature during his final campaign, when he once held nine rallies in two days. He is also remarkably resilient. The media and his political opponents hammered him every day for four years. There was never a respite. President Trump arose every morning knowing he would be unfairly ridiculed and attacked from morning to night. This criticism began before he was elected and continued throughout his presidency. Nevertheless, he stood like a rock and his list of accomplishments could fill a book.

Joe Biden and the Democrats also support open borders. So much for the wall! That means that people around the world will be invited to enter this country legally and take up permanent residence within it. From the day of their arrival, they will be entitled to free welfare, free legal services, free medical care, free education, and who knows what else. Millions of people must be out there thinking, “How can I get to that promised land?”

We have also been told to expect trillions of dollars to be spent for the foolishness of the Green New Deal, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the helm. That could bankrupt the nation. And can you imagine how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will deal with hostile governments, including those in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea? That is an international nightmare in the making.

The institution of the family will find no friends in the White House or in the halls of Congress. Taxes are likely to skyrocket for middle-class parents and others. We can also expect unprecedented assaults on religious liberty and churches could be stripped of Constitutional protection. Also at risk are our Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment, and other provisions within the U.S. Constitution. Democrats are talking about defunding the police and even the military. Radical change is about to descend on the nation. America is about to be over-run by the most leftist regime in history.

If that sounds discouraging and hopeless, we have to remember Who is in charge here. I believe the Almighty has had His hand of protection on this land since the days of its founding fathers. Our ancestors cried out to Him at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Midway, and Normandy. I don’t believe He has forsaken us now. So how do we explain the predicament that confronts us? I don’t know. Millions of people have been praying about the outcome of this election because we knew it would have such profound moral and spiritual implications. But who can discern the mind of God?[9]

Who indeed can discern the mind of God? Only James Dobson evidently.

Dobson’s son, presumably after a childhood of beatings, has now continued dad’s grift. He has his own spin on it—the punk Christian right-winger, which is something that we’ve seen a lot in the last 25 years or so, or really going back to hippies for Jesus in 1967 or so. He now offers seminars in child rearing, sex, and all sorts of things that I really don’t want to hear from anyone named Dobson.[10] Evil can never truly be eliminated from the world. It just gets passed down from generation to generation, usually through atrocious parents such as James Dobson passing down their pathologies to their children.

The impact of James Dobson on this nation will be felt for a very long time. Few Americas in the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries did more to make the nation a less tolerant, more homophobic, more misogynist, more child abusing nation than James Dobson. His life is a horror show and the America of Trump is very much James Dobson’s vision. Good riddance to bad rubbish. At least these people do die eventually.

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Are we great again yet?

Trump’s Economic Promises Timeline

WHAT TRUMP PROMISED

8/9/24: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”

NBC Montana, Trump Rally in Bozeman, MT,  YouTube (August 9, 2024).
8/14/24 “Under my administration, we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months”

“Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”

PBS NewsHour, Trump Rally in North Carolina, YouTube (August 14, 2024).
8/17/24 “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again. We’re going to make it affordable again.”

“We’re going to get your energy prices down. We’re going to get your energy prices down by 50%.”

PBS NewsHour, Trump speaks at campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, YouTube (August 17, 2024).
9/5/24 @ 10:56 “We will bring our auto-making industry to the record levels of 37 years ago, and we’ll be able to do it very quickly through tariffs and other smart use of certain things that we have that other countries don’t.”

@ 18:05 “Energy is going to bring us back. That means we’re going down and getting gasoline below $2 a gallon, bring down the price of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares, and housing costs.”

@ 48:04 “We will eliminate regulations that drive up housing costs with the goal of cutting the cost of a new home in half. We think we can do that.”

NBC News, Trump Addresses Economic Club Of New York, YouTube (September 5, 2024).
9/18/24 “While working Americans catch up, we’re going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates. We can’t let them make 25 and 30%.”

Former President Trump Campaigns in Uniondale, New York, C-SPAN (September 18, 2024).
9/29/24 “We’re going to get the prices down. We have to get them down. It’s too much. Groceries, cars, everything. We’re going to get the prices down. While working Americans catch up, we are going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates at 10%. People are being made to pay 25%. Temporary ban.”

Speech: Donald Trump Holds a Campaign Rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Roll Call (September 29, 2024).
10/1/24: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We’ll do that. We’ve got to bring it down.”

PBS NewsHour, Trump delivers campaign remarks in Waunakee as vice presidential debate set to begin, YouTube (October 1, 2024).
11/04/24 “A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper”

Former President Trump Campaigns in Pittsburgh, C-SPAN (November 4, 2024).

WHAT WE GOT

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The Trump economy is now crushing working people

Trump’s economy crushing the working poor

https://www.woodtv.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/wage-growth-is-sinking-for-poorest-workers/

That’s a sharp reversal from the post pandemic recovery era, when the lowest paid workers were seeing the fastest wage growth, something economists termed “wage compression.”

The trend of wage compression has inverted almost entirely. The poorest workers are now seeing the slowest levels of wage growth while the highest earners are seeing the fastest.

People were too busy covering inflation to notice that Biden’s economy delivered the biggest wage growth for the bottom 20% and bottom 50% in generations. The working poor actually saw bigger gains in wage growth than the top 10% under Biden.

Well that’s over now. Buckle up working people, they’re coming for all of it and all of it at once. Your wages, your health care, your retirements, and you savings, the rich want it all. Trump thinks working people got too fat and happy and he’s going to ensure they’re terrified to the point they’ll work for food.

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SECDEF Hegseth is a national security risk

Learned something new about Kegseth. “Pound them down Pete” has a tattoo I didn’t know about.

There is the Jerusalem cross tattoo on his chest. Everyone has seen that one and hopefully heard it’s connection to militant religious extremism.
There is a much more troubling tattoo that he should really be asked about more.

On his inner bicep there is tattoo that reads “Deus Vult” which is Latin for “God wills it”. This specific tattoo is frequently associated with white nationalist movements.

In fact, while he was a member of the DC national guard, it was the specific “Deus Vult” tattoo that got him removed from the detail in support of the Biden inauguration as an insider threat risk.

Those two tattoos, together, they are a clear sign of a Christian nationalist. In fact many consider him, based on the tattoos and his own writings and people he associates with, to be tied to the Christian Reconstructionist movement, an extreme and very militant, Christian nationalist movement.

So, to be clear, the guy that was bumped from an inauguration detail as a significant insider threat risk, is now in charge of the military itself.

These senior civilian Pentagon officials and military flag officers retiring or being fired, is not random but a reshaping of our military leadership by a Christian nationalist deemed to be a serious insider threat risk.

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This is what it looks like . . .

This is what it looks like when the loser knows he lost.

This is what it looks like when a whipped dog grovels at the feet of the person who whipped him.

This is what it looks like when a simpleton with the mind of a 5-yr-old is chastised by a parent.

This is the alleged President of the US bowing down to a brutal, evil dictator who knows he just won.

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August 18, 2023: Trump descends into madness and dictatorship and drags the rest of us with him

This morning, J.D. Wolf of Meidas News pulled together all of Trump’s self-congratulatory posts from Sunday morning, when the president evidently was boosting his ego after Friday’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump shared an AI-generated meme of himself with a large male lion standing next to him and the words “Peace through Strength. Anyone can make war, but only most courageous [sic] can make peace.” He posted memes claiming he is the “best president…in American history” and the “G[reatest] O[f] A[ll] T[ime], a “legend.”

Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Trump has faced a rebellion among his QAnon supporters as he and administration officials have refused to release information from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and have moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking children, to a minimum-security prison camp and given her work-release privileges. It appears he’s working to make QAnon supporters forget that he was named in those files and to lure them back to his support.

For their part, Russia Today trolled Trump’s “peace through strength” boast this morning by posting a video of an armored vehicle first going slowly on a road and then dramatically speeding up. The vehicle was flying both Russian and U.S. flags.

Trump’s social media account this morning posted a long screed saying the president is “going to lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines, and lying that the U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting because it is rife with fraud. As usual, the post claimed that Democrats “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE” and claimed they “are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” The post said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Then the post claimed that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

This is bonkers across the board. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting, and there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. Just today, news broke that right-wing channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been rigged to give the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Combining that sum with the $787 million Fox News paid for spreading the same lies means, as Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote today, that media entities have paid out nearly $900 million “for publishing lies about the 2020 presidential election. Yet Donald Trump, who lost by more than seven million votes, keeps repeating the Big Lie and makes it compulsory dogma for his employees.”

Certainly, if Democratic leaders were so unelectable, the Republicans would not go to such lengths to rig district voting maps and keep Democratic voters from the polls. Indeed, while voter fraud is vanishingly rare, the Republicans are using the specter of it to engage in election fraud: manipulating the mechanics of an election to favor one side over another.

This manipulation is happening dramatically right now in Texas, where Trump pressured Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict the state in a highly unusual mid-decade map change in order to set Republicans up to gain five more seats in Congress in the next election. Abbott dutifully called a special session of the legislature to change the maps. Texas Democrats tried to stop the redistricting by leaving the state to deprive the Republicans of a quorum, that is, the minimum number of lawmakers necessary to conduct business. They stayed away until the special session expired. Abbott immediately called another one.

Today, with it clear Abbott would simply call special sessions until they returned, the Democratic legislators went back to Texas fifteen days after they left. “We killed the corrupt special session, withstood unprecedented surveillance and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this existential fight for fair representation—reshaping the entire 2026 landscape,” said the leader of the Texas House Democrats Gene Wu, acknowledging the protests across Texas at the legislative steal. “We’re returning to Texas more dangerous to Republicans’ plans than when we left. Our return allows us to build the legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country, and inspire legislators across the country how to fight these undemocratic redistricting schemes in their own statehouses.”

Finally, the U.S. Constitution is very clear that no president has the power to dictate election rules. The framers were determined to prevent that power from falling into the hands of a potential dictator and so gave it to the states and Congress, establishing that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

These obvious lies make it seem crystal clear that Trump and his loyalists are preparing to reject any election results that they don’t like.

Trump’s panic about facing voters is increasingly evident. His job approval ratings are already abysmal, and the fallout from his tariffs and deportations is only now beginning to show. Last Thursday, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index—wholesale costs that will likely show up later in consumer costs—jumped 0.9% in July, the largest jump since June 2022, when the U.S. was mired in post-pandemic inflation. The wholesale price of vegetables jumped 38.9% in July.

On Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the budget reconciliation bill (called by Republicans the OBBBA, for “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”) that adds $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade will trigger cuts of up to $491 billion in Medicare (not a typo) from 2027 to 2034 in addition to its cuts of almost a trillion dollars to Medicaid over the next ten years. The 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act (S-PAYGO) automatically triggers cuts to government programs if the budget deficit increases as it is expected to under the new law, and Medicare spending would be on the chopping block.

Although Democrats called attention to this threat to Medicare during debates over the measure, Republicans promised their cuts to Medicaid would target only “waste, fraud, and abuse” and promised they would not touch Medicare.

Today Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal showed what those cuts actually look like in one state. Schladen reported that the cuts to Medicaid will take insurance from 310,000 people. Schladen also noted that the law ended the “enhanced premium tax credit” that made health insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s insurance markets more affordable for those who make between 100% and 400% of federal poverty guidelines. More than 530,000 people in Ohio have benefited from the program. Their premiums will go up dramatically when it expires at the end of this year, and experts warn that more than 100,000 healthier people will drop their coverage. That loss, in turn, will drive up costs for those remaining in the market.

Scott Horsley of NPR reported on Saturday that electricity prices in the country have “jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.” Prices are going up as producers export liquid natural gas and as data centers swallow energy to fuel the AI boom.

Elected on his promises to lower prices, Trump is in trouble with those who believed those promises. Today, former Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, formally announced his candidacy for the Senate seat vacated when J.D. Vance became vice president. Brown noted that in Ohio, which has a population of about 12 million people, “half a million are going to lose their [health] insurance. These are mostly working families that are working for an employer that doesn’t provide insurance, or they’re kids, or they’re seniors, or they’re disabled people. Those are the people who are losing their health insurance. People didn’t vote for that. They didn’t vote for drug prices to go up. They didn’t vote for higher grocery bills. They didn’t vote for veterans’ benefits being slashed. They didn’t vote for any of this.”

On Thursday, the Pew Research Center reported that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, with 61% disapproving of it.

And then there is the increasing evidence that Trump is unable to manage the presidency. Today Trump met with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb. That so many foreign leaders dropped everything to rush to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s meeting with Putin on Friday indicated their alarm. The leaders reiterated that Putin started the war and could stop it at any time, and pressed Trump to back a ceasefire.

At today’s meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”

This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long.