The Era of Trump?

[Chicks]

Best protest sign in Scotland:

I pray that “Big Beautiful Bill” will be the name of Trump’s prison cell mate.

[bobabode]

Welcome to Scotland you cockwobble!

[Rajoo]

By the time the United States was extracting a group of Americans and legal U.S. residents from a prison in Venezuela last month, some State Department officials had come to an uncomfortable realization.

One of the prisoners had been convicted of murdering three people in Spain in 2016. And soon he would be on his way home, having his photo taken alongside those deemed by the United States to have been wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela.

Mr. Hanid Ortiz, 54, a citizen of the United States and Venezuela, is now living as a free man in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of the case.

A 19-year U.S. Army veteran who served for a year in Iraq, Mr. Hanid Ortiz was expelled from the military after pleading guilty to fraud and larceny.

In 2016, according to Venezuelan court documents, he sought to kill a lawyer in Madrid who he believed had a relationship with his wife. When he arrived at the lawyer’s office he killed two women there, as well as a man he mistakenly believed was the lawyer.

All we can do with this case is shake our heads because this makes no sense, a triple murderer set free because he happens to be one of the ten prisoners that the US negotiated for release with Venezuela, no explanation as to how he became one of the ten.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/u...venezuela.html

[Rajoo]

This is an opinion piece but the information is true imo.

China is winning the trade war Trump started

You can see it in the economic numbers: China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. You can see it, too, in Trump’s failure to wring significant concessions from Beijing. Though most countries have acquiesced to U.S. trade bullying, China has not. In April, Trump hiked U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent. China retaliated with 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods. Then President Xi Jinping ramped up the pressure by restricting exports of rare earth metals to the United States, which threatens to halt production of cars, fighter jets and other products.

To me the tariff war has led to increased unemployment in the US, inflation from tariffs which is also an indirect tax on goods which could become permanent just like the previous tariff Trump introduced on China which Biden kept in place. And today I found out that some of our customers have supply shortages (semi conductor devices that are mostly sourced from China).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...s-china-trade/

[Oerets]

New Census WTF Dude!

No time unless the numbers are all ready counted.......




https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/u...mmigrants.html

""President Trump said on Thursday that he had ordered the Commerce Department to begin work on a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants.""

[Chicks]

Trump to blame for high cost of living, Americans say in new poll
Six out of 10 Americans fault president for financial struggles and eight out of 10 worry about tariffs’ impact
https://www.theguardian.com/business...of-living-poll

Well, duh. Why the hell did so many fools vote for him? Those of us who didn't knew exactly what would happen, and here we are...

[Noogies]

What I can't get my head around is the MAGA view of "tariff income". There's only two ways this can go: 1) The importer writes the check at the POE and passes the cost on to the consumer = a sales tax, or, 2) Importer writes the check and eats the tariff = corporate tax.

I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand. I even see talking heads in the liberal media getting it wrong.

[bobabode]

Trump's IRS dude lasted six Scaramuccis before being shipped off to Iceland for the duration. Too damned funny.

"Donald Trump is removing Billy Long as the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, will temporarily serve as acting commissioner for the president, a White House official and a source familiar with the matter said to Reuters on Friday.

The New York Times first reported the news about Long, a former congressman from Missouri. He was expected to be nominated for an Iceland ambassador post, according to NBC News." Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...and-ambassador

[Rajoo]

I was not aware that Long was the sixth IRS head this year and we are just six month into this administration.

Long, a former six-term Republican congressman from Missouri, was confirmed to the position in mid-June. Trump broke tradition by not allowing the former Biden-appointed IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, to serve out his full five-year term.

He was the sixth IRS leader since the start of the year. One early acting commissioner left amid churn at the agency due to the administration’s cost-cutting campaign led by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, while another left after the agency agreed the DHS data-sharing arrangement. A third acting commissioner was pushed out after only two days because of an internal conflict between Musk and Bessent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...-data-dispute/

And on another note, Whiskey Pete seems to be in support of abolishing women's voting rights.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man who oversees the nation's military reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote.

The extraordinary repost on X from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, made Thursday night, illustrates his deep and personal connection to a Christian nationalist pastor with extreme views on the role of religion and women.

In the post, Hegseth commented on an almost seven-minute-long report by CNN examining Doug Wilson, cofounder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC. The report featured a pastor from Wilson's church advocating the repeal of women’s right to vote from the Constitution, and another pastor saying that in his ideal world, people would vote as households. It also featured a female congregant saying that she submits to her husband.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote in his post that accompanied the video.

Dovetails nicely with the Barefoot and Pregnant philosophy of life.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/...221638095.html

[Chicks]

Does Donald Trump Know What a Dictator Looks Like?
He calls Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator,” but not Vladimir Putin.
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/does-d...ce=parsely-api

Very interesting to watch this Libertarian site, which has long supported smaller gummint, finally beginning to wake up to the reality of Donny's fascism. I do hope they will get ever more vocal against his fascism, now that they are finally beginning to see it for what it is.

Their front page headlines are VERY different than they were a few short months ago.