Archive → September, 2026
Calling President Trump! Calling President Trump!
Americans elected Donald John Trump to represent them in 2024, because he ran on a platform of reform and reconfiguration of a tremendously bloated and corrupt federal government. Without question, President Trump hit the ground running in 2025 and began implementing huge changes.
Eliminating USAID was an important step, because it was 100% captured by one political party and was serving as a fire hose of taxpayer money going directly to Democrat Party activist groups.
Ditto for the unneeded Depart of Education. If education is a state and local thing, then what the hell does America need a federal agency for, to what end? To further enrich the greedy and destructive teacher’s unions? No thanks. Not a good use of limited taxpayer funds.
Ditto for US EPA, a place I worked for seven years and for whose complete and utter corruption and ideological capture I can personally attest. Burn that place to the ground and start over with a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. Administrator Lee Zeldin is making slow but steady progress towards taming that freakshow.
But one of the problems the Trump Administration faces is the unbelievable lawlessness of the judiciary, where so many ideologically activist judges openly flout the law and Constitution to block Trump Administration policies. Policies that are solely the purview of the Executive Branch, and about which the Judicial Branch should have zero jurisdiction or oversight.
Latest in this judicial over-reach is the White House expulsion of far left ideological activist groups falsely representing themselves as “news reporters.” Included are CNN, MS NOW, and some other openly partisan group that is hardly an arbiter of fact or news, but rather an actor trying to create news and political narrative.
President Trump is within his right as Chief Executive to expel these frauds, and anyone else he wants, from access to the White House, which is the home and office of the Chief Executive. Absolutely no one else has anything to say about White House operations. Not the Congress, not the Judiciary.
And yet, another lawless activist judge has “ordered” that the White House allow these leftist activsts inside its doors…and instead of just saying no to this lawlessness, President Trump appears to be deferential to it.
Recall that American government is set up with three co-equal branches of government, and a natural tension exists between them. That natural balance is upset not only when one branch over-reaches its established jurisdiction, but when it is allowed to do so by the other co-equal branches.
Which is what is happening right now with this aggressive over-reaching judge and the over-weaning White House.
Yes, America has a Constitutional crisis over press access to the White House only because President trump is waaaaaayyyy too deferential to lawless judges, who themselves have zero standing in saying how the president runs his White House. There is no other Constitutional issue here, certainly no First Amendment right to access a government building exists, and certainly not the heart of the Executive Branch.
Freedom of the press means that fake news misinformation groups like CNN and MS NOW are free to say to the American public anything they want to say. It does not mean that these disinformation activists at CNN get to go say it wherever they desire to go.
I am not going to elaborate over the double standard here, compared to when the Joe Biden White House yanked the credentials of 400-some news reporters who refused to regurgitate Biden talking points and narrative. Or when the same Biden White House ordered Twitter and Facebook to shut down political voices and information sources that the Biden Narrative opposed. Or when the Biden FBI kicked in the doors of journalists who were lawfully reporting on the salacious and disgusting contents of Ashley Biden’s diary.
No, what is really at the heart of this issue is Donald John Trump’s softness, his dislike of confrontation or of prolonged difficulties. I know, his enemies describe him as the opposite, but the proof is right here in front of us.
He very much wants to make everything into a New York real estate deal, a natural and healthy give-and-take negotiation that results in an even handed resolution. He is also doing it with Hamas in Gaza, Iran’s IRGC, Turkey’s modern day Caleph Erdogan, and with America’s grossly over-reaching judiciary. All with huge problems resulting from his lack of a firm hand, a firm stance. Big mistake, President Trump!
American government involves an on-going, nonstop power struggle among the three branches of government. This natural tension is built into the framework of America’s bones. When it fails, the entire premise of American democratic rule is placed at risk. And it is failing now, because one political party is devoted to grabbing as much power as it can “by any means necessary,” while the other political party is deliberately in avoidance and refuses to fight back, regardless of the cost. One party is crazy, the other is lazy.
And the one man America pinned a badge on to bring order to the chaos is throwing gasoline on the fire, instead of putting it out.
This failure is made worse by President Trump’s outright refusal to stand up for his office, for the Chief Executive, for his basic Constitutional rights as the only person elected by the whole country. Bizarrely, he keeps deferring to his enemies, including this rogue judge, as if they will give him a fair deal, a fair shake, fair treatment. He seems to keep on hoping that his sworn political enemies will somehow come around and see the wisdom of mutual benefit conflict resolution, when the result of his deference and kindness is just more intransigence and confrontation and undermining of his executive role and policies.
It is long past time that President Trump puts his foot down and tells these rogue judges to go ahead and enforce their illegal, unconstitutional decisions, if they can. Without his compliance, their power-grabbing decisions are meaningless. And there is no reason why a self-respecting Chief Executive like President Trump should be outsourcing management of the White House to the Judiciary, which has zero jurisdiction there, especially on White House day to day operations.
Calling President Trump! Calling President Trump! The Bat Light is flashing over Gotham, the bad guys are rampaging through society, and we need you more than ever now! Where are you, President Trump? Where did you go?
Party or Principle: To which are you loyal?
Just curious because of the curious elections going on around America right now. Appears that a lot of Americans are loyal to one political party, and not necessarily to a set of immutable principles.
Which are you loyal to, a political party or to certain principles?
Maybe you remember a certain political party back when it stood for certain principles, and I also remember that political party. From my seat now, it is hard to see how either of America’s two main parties have stayed true to a set of immutable principles, though one party has stayed much closer to its original founding ideas (anti-slavery, keeping the American union of states together, ensuring that new states admitted to the Union were not slave states) than the other.
Used to be that adherence to a political party resulted from agreeing with the policies it sought to implement. That kind of loyalty makes sense. It is a linear, logical relationship. And now that we see one of the American political parties so. freakin. far. from its historic beginnings, and yet still commanding loyalty of half of America, it is hard to square up.
In fact, this one political party is openly devoted to the interests of illegal border jumpers over those of existing American citizens, more supportive of Iran’s IRGC jihadi terror forces than of the American military forces seeking to stop them from nuking America, more supportive of pedophiles and murderers and rapists than of their victims, etc. The list of contrary policy positions is very long for this political party, to which tens of millions of Americans nonetheless pledge their allegiance, their money, and their vote. Imagine that your political party is supported by the IRGC, Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea….the worst, most oppressive, most cruel, least-free nations all support…the Democrat Party.
Only one explanation for this makes sense to me: Self-destruction is the ultimate virtue signal.
In our modern digital world of personal signals and attempts to stand out, be unique, get noticed, break loneliness, gain influence or fame, nothing says I am superior to others than hating yourself and voting for policies that destroy yourself, your nation, your core necessities.
A stated willingness to sacrifice your own interests is the ultimate statement of purity, of goodness, or moral superiority, these leftists believe.
Problems with this are two:
One, leftists’ self-destructive (“suicidal empathy”) behavior is not limited to just leftists. They seek to impose this same destruction upon everyone else in America. So much for showing anyone the way and how socialism is supposed to be done right by living it successfully for the rest of us skeptics; nope, it has to be forced on us at gunpoint. And in their minds, the socialists are the ones with the guns…
Two, this behavior is based on the super rich irony that you have to be super rich and live in a super rich and super organized nation, like America, to indulge fantasies of self destruction. It requires living among such great wealth that one feels invulnerable, immune to accountability, to be able to entertain these moronic statements and beliefs.
Only spoiled rotten people can dye their hair blue, self-identify as a dog, change their pronouns daily, hate America, hate tax-paying white people, and also demand and expect expensive lattes and gourmet food. Starving people cannot indulge themselves in self-destructive fantasies, just like those humans who already lived under socialism, and got out alive, assiduously reject it.
We saw this mentality most vividly at the nationwide anti-Israel-anti-America-anti-police student + activist university encampments from 2023-2025. Students there made a big deal about going on hunger strikes to make their political point, and then just hours later they whined about the lack of “Door Dash” food deliveries to their violent environment.
Spoiled rotten pampered children of privilege acting out all brave and fierce, only to then complain about not getting exactly the kind of expensive, fancy food to which they are accustomed, or that the police they decried were also nowhere to be seen when needed to protect these overgrown children from each other.
What complete rubbish and childish nonsense.
Leftists and Democrats view America as an eternal safety net that is too big to fail, to which they must never donate but from which they can always take, that America is too successful to collapse under the weight of this sustained assault. At their deepest, leftists appear to believe that self-destruction is some sort of atonement, and that their lives will be better afterwards. And people like me say, in response, are you outta your freakin mind!
There is no food period in your leftist gulags. Forget Door Dash, or expensive lattes; food itself of any sort is in short supply at the education camps these fools envision for others but which will inevitably house them.
A great deal of this discussion is encapsulated in a powerful speech given by a Democrat at the Republican National Convention last week. Yes, he is a Democrat whose own family vilifies him for having broken ranks. But you know what? The people who care the absolute most about political party allegiance, like the Kennedy family, are not interested in ideas, or principles, or in being consistent, or in supporting the US Constitution. Rather, their political party affiliation is either their business, their family, or their religion.
For the Kennedy clan, being a Democrat is strictly business. It is access to power and wealth.
For many unaffiliated Catholics and Jews, the Democrat Party has become both family and the embodiment of their “religious values.” Not that abortion until after birth or defenseless citizens under the jack boot of all-powerful government are values of Judaism or Catholicism, as founded, but to the fallen members of these groups who are far far distant from actual religious teachings, these kinds of vacuous policies have supplanted tradition.
When coupled with the heroin-like dopamine rush these people get for always “voting correctly,” America ends up with tens of millions of uncritical Americans who are not anchored in principle, but who are rather loyal to a political party that changes with the winds, and which openly runs on self-destruction.
Even if that political party is destroying the America that protects and feeds them and caters to their every desire and dream. Their silly fantasy about showing how much they care by killing themselves and their interests takes precedence.
People like me inhabit the other end of the many spectrums (emotional, cognitive, religious) involved here. I am loyal to America’s first principles, its founding ideas, like the superiority of meritocracy, not to any political party, and especially not to any political party that deviates so far from America’s first principles.
And I have a tough time understanding anyone who acts otherwise, except to pity them as the in-effect lost-in-space drug addicts they are.
I am loyal to the ideas the old party used to stand for, not for the crazy, self-destructive policies it promotes today. I did not leave the Democrat Party, it left me.
Remember 9-11
Never forget, never forgive until America gets a full apology.

MIssing Charlie, Missing America
Today is the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, on a college campus supposedly devoted to learning, education, ideas, free speech, debate, and so on. Because you were a kind person with a big heart, I miss you, Charlie, and so do a lot of other people. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 Islamic jihadi attacks on America.
Since the day Charlie was shot by a political leftist incapable of free thought or debate or learning or free speech, America has been subjected to an increasing onslaught of anti-free thought, anti free speech, anti debate, anti ideas by the political Left, especially on college campuses.
Incapable of standing and debating, the political Left and its Islamic jihadi allies always use violence, coercion, suppression, and censorship. Claiming victim status until they have sufficient power to firmly control their political opposition, political Leftists, and their political and cultural allies, demand equal footing in every venue, in every institution. Then, when they have enough votes, they take away everyone else’s vote.
And now, at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where 25 years ago the Twin Towers were hit by two jet airplanes hijacked by Islamic jihadis, and where over 3,000 Americans subsequently lost their lives in horrible deaths, the political Left is once again demanding shared space. Yes indeed, there are demands for a mosque (!) at the Twin Towers site. Because the murderous Islamic hijackers deserve to be remembered as victims, too. As though the murderers are the same as their victims.
Charlie Kirk stood for reasonable debate, but he also stood up firmly for Western culture, Western ideals, Western values. We must carry on this legacy, most importantly through voting for strong pro America, pro freedom candidates.
Charlie’s vision for America (and Europe) challenged people especially on college campuses, because his message was incompatible with the Left’s destructive moral relativism that has taken hold everywhere.
The same moral relativism that demands the 9-11 Islamic hijackers be treated the same as their victims has also infected the minds of the Lindsay Clancy jurors, who are now openly saying in front of cameras in public interviews that Lindsay Clancy was the real victim, not her three little children that she strangled with her bare hands, in her home, in their bedrooms, surrounded by all their teddy bears, toys, and other symbols of safe, happy, hearth and home. These women jurors are talking about “compassion” for the murderer, to the point where they would have her be found not guilty of brutally murdering three innocent children.
In other words, a year after Charlie was shot in the neck by a Leftist, America is still suffering from the Left’s attack on basic human morality and essential civilizational values held the world over, except in materially successful capitalist countries, like America, where citizens have so much stuff that they can afford to invent their own problems. Like so-called “compassion” for brutal child murderers.
Charlie, we miss you, we need you now more than ever, and I know I speak for many when I say that your legacy of freedom, core Western values, and open debate as fundamental to our American culture is not forgotten. Today we remember your martyrdom, and tomorrow we remember the martyrdom of the 3,000 innocent Americans burned alive, crushed alive, thrown into a fifty story fall to pavement alive, by Islamic jihadi murderers.
Hopefully, the lesson we Americans take from all this remembering is that we do not allow yet more Leftists to take elected office and perpetuate, nay, increase, all of this mayhem.
Dear Labor Day: Make Appliances Great Again, please
How sad that our national holidays have become more about appliance and mattress sales than about the original purpose of, say, President’s Day, or Labor Day. But if I were to set out to write an essay about labor, and what working and worker’s rights mean to me, I would die of boredom trying to write it long before I finish it, and long before anyone might stumble onto it while cruising the internet at 3AM, and stay on it til the end. No one would read it, and even if someone might, I would never write it.
So appliances it is on this Labor Day’s essay, and we begin by asking Dear Labor Day, please make appliances great again.
If America is going to have this huge orgy of heavily advertised consumerism around this national holiday, can we at least have appliances worthy of their hallowed, legendary names and high advertising costs?
One must ask, because planned obsolescence is no longer a sideways joke among a handful of Americans who got burned once; today, everyone I know hates modern appliances. Because modern appliances are craaaaaap. All of ’em.
Got yourself a fancy, expensive WOLF stovetop, do ya? Guess what? It has the same exact cheap crap under the hood that the BOSCH has, that all the other ranges have. A little blue cartridge, some same wiring, some aluminum tubes to carry the natural gas, and four or five little piezo starters that are interchangeable among all of the gas stovetop ranges for sale today. And when the WOLF components go bad is about the same time as the BOSCH components will go bad, because they are all the same components. Just the names and a little bit of visible construction is different among the various makers.
How do I know this? Because I have been the ubiquitous frustrated husband who vows “Oh no ya don’t!” when the expensive appliance stops working, because some small electronic gadget way in the back in it goes bad, and I am faced with the bad choices of either bringing in the technician to fix it at nearly the price of a new appliance, tossing it and buying a new one, or trying to fix it myself, while our entire home just about shuts down until the problem is solved.
And I have now fixed enough of these various types of appliances to know the deal, the score, the trap that we are all presently in.
Recently, I bought a new clothes washer that has zero bells and whistles, does not connect to an application on a phone, has no lid lock, no digital display, no buttons. Quite the opposite: It has some old fashioned dials, an aggressive agitator that will rip your arm off, and is made in America. Smaller than most, by any measure, it cost much more than the fanciest washers for sale.
But it also has a waiting list, because Americans are sick and tired of crappy washing machines that put more emphasis on “efficiency” than they do on just washing clothes. Real market demand is bringing back ye olde fashioned washer.
I don’t care about efficiency when it comes to washing my clothes. I just want my clothes to be real clean, and not take all afternoon to appear clean. No low-energy impeller, a high-energy-suck powerful motor spins the agitator, and creates real water turbulence. The new Speed Queen starts and finishes in about twenty minutes total, and if the clothes survive the ride, they are real clean. You may also end up with very clean rags. This Speed Queen model is marketed to farmers and loggers. Think about that.
We Americans used to buy appliances by name brand, because name brand once meant something real, something substantive. Different brands offered different quality levels, different warranties, different life expectancies. Not anymore. Those days are long gone, far over, and I believe Americans all know it. Everything is now made by cheap whores for cheap whores, and tarted up with fancy shiny things and bold name plaques that are not worth the oxygen molecules you will breathe heavily around them as they are being initially installed in your home.
All are made somewhere far away from where legendary American brands started, out of the same crap internals. All of it, every name brand, all is cheap junk whose cheap junkiness will become revealed to you moments after the warranty runs out.
The places that once employed labor forces of American men and women to make the original name brand models, back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, the 1970s, they are today deserted ghost towns. Elmira, New York, Utica, New York, half of Ohio, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, these places are overloaded with empty, crumbling brick buildings that once housed the original manufacturers of the famous name brands we so treasure today.
But today, most appliances are made in Won Hung Low, Long Duk Dong, and Chee Ho, China, and they are all crap.
I know that a lot of American husbands think like I do, are probably battle scarred like I am, and they would also happily spend double the price on whatever the appliance is, if they know it was made in America, by American workers, out of sturdy, reliable, long-lived American-made components, and will not require us to make an impossible choice of fix, toss, or replace while our whole home life stalls out in mid-air, waiting.
Can we please make appliances great again?
(Side note: Author-poet-farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry died the other day; he changed a lot of lives for the better. Gil Freedman, whose father built my home address in 1939, and whose bedroom was long inhabited by one of my daughters, died earlier this summer, from Parkinson’s Disease. Gil was an engineer, and also a conservationist and clean streams volunteer; a gentle person. Nicest guy you will ever meet pharmacist and SCUBA SAR volunteer Steve Markowitz died real young last week, of a cancer he only found out about in July. Folks, do not waste your limited days on anything but moving the ball down the field. Because the older I get, that you get, the shorter and shorter the field appears to get, and we are all running out of field to run down, I don’t care how young you think you are. Spread love, be kind, be good, make our shared planet a little bit better. Editor over and out)
























