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Happy 100th Day… Give yourself a pat on the back. You survived the head-spinning chaos, dysfunction, corruption, lies, abandonment, betrayal and destruction with your sanity intact. Well, mostly intact.
Donald Trump’s first 100 days in the White House feels more like 1,000 days. The bad news: he has 1,361 days left.
That provides more than ample time to lock up Americans without due process, wage war on the media, woo Vladimir Putin, sell out Ukraine, withdraw from NATO, grab Greenland, hike tensions with China, accelerate climate change, squeeze universities, eviscerate the country’s scientific community, drive the economy into recession, and retreat into an America First bunker mentality.
Who is going to stop him?
Illinois Democratic governor JB Pritzker kicked off the 2028 presidential campaign with a fiery speech in New Hampshire on April 27 that called for mass protests and to fight Trump’s excesses “everywhere and all at once.”
He blasted the “simpering timidity” of members of his own party who try to accommodate the president and work within a system that no longer exists.
Kudos to JB but the Republican Party—in the words of Trump—“holds the cards” in any effort to counter the danger posed to our democracy by the president.
The GOP under Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson have abandoned their Constitutional duties and buckled under Trump.
Article One of the Constitution establishes Congress as the First Branch of the US government. It’s time for Thune and Johnson to own up to their responsibility before it is too late.
Putting nation’s head into the sand…. Trump, who believes climate change is a hoax, has dismissed the researchers working on the Congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment.
Established by George W. Bush in 1980, NCA shapes policies regarding global warming.
Ticora Jones, chief science officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, accused Team Trump of “putting the nation’s head in the sand” about the climate emergency.
She said the assessment is important because it “lets every American know how climate change affects their community—or even their own backyard.”
Cutting federal climate research isn’t going to eliminate the threats from intense heat waves, unprecedented hurricanes or devastating flooding—it will just make our nation far less able to prepare for them, according to Jones.
What’s next? Will there be a mercy killing of the EPA? There might as well be.
Under the leadership of Trump zealot Lee Zeldin, the EPA cast aside its role as environmental watchdog, and is now an organization committed to unleashing American energy and reviving the US auto industry.
It will take a Democratic administration to make the EPA right again.
Cool cats… Good luck to Ty Bentsen, who launched Los Angeles-based P-22 Agency in April. The hospitality, luxury travel and spirits shop is named after the famous mountain lion that lived in LA’s Griffith Park and became a national celebrity.
P-22 was first identified in 2012 and was euthanized in Dec. 2022 after an examination found that he suffered from injuries consistent with hitting a car.
The shop’s website carries a quote from Los Angeles Magazine’s Jason McGahan that says “P-22 needed to find his own turf AND was willing to risk everything to get it. That’s why his story is legendary.”
The shop pitches itself as a “woman-owned agency of untamed spirits who love what they do and work tirelessly to find success by blazing new trails.”
Good luck to Ty and her team. Success will come if they can earn even half of the media chalked up by the firm’s famous namesake.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gets it wrong... New York governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to take a one-year pause in permitting data centers is a winning issue for her... JD Vance fails to bail out Trump from the mess that he created.
JPMorganChase chief Jamie Dimon warns of lurking risks that could upend Wall Street's gravy train... Iran foreign minister praises Trump's looney "guardian of the Strait" idea... State Dept. scolds NYC's international affairs unit for overplaying its hand... Historian Timothy Snyder graciously puts his '"Hitler and Stalin" lecture series online to alert people that "it" could happen here.
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel, is more popular among American Jews than prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu... Donald Trump is the first leader since Benito Mussolini in 1934 to intervene publicly in his national team’s favor... It's surprising that JD Vance hardly uses the word "Catholic" in his memoir about his conversion to Catholicism.
President Trump killed much of the positive PR that the US has enjoyed as one of the co-hosts of the World Cup... Pride in the US sinks to 25-year low, Gallup finds... White House trashes Smithsonian's US History Museum as the MAGA version of un-American.
Donald Trump claims we are all profiting from Wall Street's rising prices, but the billion-dollar president sure did a lot better than the rest of us... Venezuela hopes the $300M in US reconstructiion aid will follow the same growth trajectory as the White House's East Wing ballroom project.
