They can’t contain the fury of the people

A break in my schedule allows me to post today. My next post will likely be in another week. I finished the book The Extraordinaries by TJ Klune. This is the story of Nick. He’s 16, gay, has ADHD, lost his mother two years before, and has a cop for a father. He has a great group of friends – Seth, who has been his bestie since first grade, and lesbian couple Gibby and Jazz. He also has a crush on Shadow Star, an Extraordinary, also known as a superhero, battling his archnemesis Pyro Storm. The crush is strong enough that Nick wants to become an extraordinary, to better attract Shadow Star’s attention and to protect his father from bad guys. But his ADHD gets in the way of sense and logic. As the story moves to the ultimate battle (of course, there is one) and goes through a few twists, there are discussions about good and evil and whether the life of an extraordinary is something to be desired. There is also, of course, Nick generally being 16 with ADHD and gaining a bit of maturity. In addition to the fun there are moments that are quite touching. Klune is a very good writer. I enjoyed the book. Now the question is whether I enjoyed it enough to read the two sequels and the answer isn’t obvious. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that in response to the Missouri legislature gerrymandering their US House districts to squeeze out another Republican seat, the group People Not Politicians submitted over 300,000 signatures demanding a voter referendum on the new map. Those 300K signatures are almost three times the number required to force a vote. The new map cannot take effect while the referendum is pending, blocking it from being used in the 2026 election. So, of course, Republicans are looking for ways to nullify the signatures, or at least enough of them to get below the threshold. About 90K signatures were collected before the referendum paperwork was certified and will be the first to be challenged. Republicans are challenging the constitutionality of the referendum in court. They’ll also try to have the Secretary of State make that declaration without the court. They claim signatures were gathered by illegal aliens (no, not the starship kind, the border-crossing kind).

The GOP will do its damnedest to prevent Missouri voters from voting. But the campaigns will keep pushing, the people of Missouri will keep pushing, and while GOP elected officials might eventually kill this particular referendum, they can’t contain the fury people have over this.

A couple days ago Needham reported that while the nasty guy is killing people in boats in the Caribbean because he claims they are transporting drugs to the US he gave a pardon to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández who was convicted of taking bribes to move 400 tons of cocaine.

When confronted with this contradiction—lethal strikes on defenseless boaters versus mercy for well-heeled drug traffickers—White House press secretary Karolilne Leavitt responded with a typical word salad.

I’ll leave it there. Kos of Kos noted a few things about the pardon for Hernández: “That 400 tons amounted to 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.” In addition to attacking boats in the Caribbean the nasty guy has also used drug trafficking to justify tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China. When asked about the pardon the nasty guy said, “Well I don’t know him.” Then blamed Obama and Biden, as in Biden was president when Hernández was convicted so that must have been a setup.

It takes a certain kind of callous incompetence to hand out a pardon and then claim, “I don’t know him” and “I know very little about him.” Someone told him Hernández was “set up” by Obama and Biden? How about maybe you have your staff investigate the matter, talk to prosecutors, read the f’n Wikipedia entry—anything!

Kos included a photo of Honduran farmers protesting the pardon of Hernández. Last week Needham reported the nasty guy had gotten an MRI as part of a medical exam, but couldn’t remember what part of his body was scanned.

This, of course, raises not one, but two, health concerns: Which health condition is the president hiding that required a magnetic resonance imaging test, and which health condition is the president unwittingly revealing when he can’t seem to recall why he even had an MRI?

That hasn’t stopped him from bragging about how smart he is and from insulting female reporters who ask about the MRI. Needham listed other things the nasty guy has done recently that question his mental fitness. One of them is the frequency he falls asleep in meetings. Now that the process of releasing the Epstein files is supposedly underway, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has started a new campaign, “Release the MRI results.” Kos community member xaxnar posted a video of Robert Reich discussing the nasty guy’s health. He is also annoyed at the way the media is not covering it, especially compared to the way the media covered and gloated over Biden’s “every verbal slip, stumble, or momentary lapse.” Wrote xaxnar, emphasizing a point Reich made:

Granted he’s a monster, but he doesn’t have the energy, the focus, and the knowledge to perpetrate the cruelties in the detail now being carried out in his name. The press is willing to credit people around Trump — Miller, Vought, Vance et. al. — for instituting these policies, but they are reluctant to ask if Trump is just rubber stamping what gets put in front of him.

Reich’s six minute video documents some of those mental issues. That includes dementia increasing a person’s paranoia. He adds:

Stephen Miller, Russel Vought, JD Vance, and RFK Jr. seem to be feeding into Trump’s paranoid delusions to increase their own power and advance their own fanatical agendas. ... [People with dementia] can be manipulated and taken advantage of by unscrupulous relatives or caretakers. Is this what’s happening in the White House?

Reich encourages us to spread his video and its content because mainstream media isn’t. I’m doing my part. At the bottom of the post xaxnar includes a link to a more complete discussion of mental health issues created by Dan Rather. I’ll repeat the link here. It’s worth a read. Alex Samuels of Kos reported one of the nasty guy pardons went to Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar. At the end of the article Samuels discussed Cuellar’s crime. Now with pardon in hand Cuellar decided to run for reelection – as the Democrat he has always been. And the nasty guy accused him of a lack of loyalty. He assumed the gift of a pardon would prompt Cuellar to switch parties.

In short, Trump all but acknowledged that he viewed the pardon as a political transaction. And when the transaction failed, he reacted as if he’d been swindled. ... A pardon cannot force gratitude or obedience. And once issued, it cannot be revoked when the beneficiary declines to play along. Trump expected a Republican seat in exchange for his presidential largesse. Instead, he got a Democrat who thanked him politely and then went right back to being who he has always been. And Trump, as ever, took it personally.

Needham reported last Friday that the nasty guy has fired McCrery Architects, the ones to design the huge ballroom for which the White House East Wing was demolished. The new firm is Shalom Baranes. Good luck guys. Shalom Baranes might be better suited than the previous firm, but the nasty guy is very hands-on with is building projects and difficult to please. This leads to speculation (including by me) that the East Wing was torn down way before construction on its replacement was ready to begin. Also possible is that the ballroom never gets built even after a slew of architects, or if it is built it will be such a national disgrace a part of the 2029 inauguration ceremony will be its implosion.