Saturday, May 31, 2025

the 40 days of trumpmas - a surreal serial poem

 

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Remember, remember! The fifth of trumpvember

 the 40 days of trumpmas - a serial poem

 

for 40 days the trumpeter reigns,

his lies and hate on whom he disdains,

but election day will come so soon,

we'll no longer hear the orange baboon;

 

in 39 days full of world wide problems.

we could elect him to get rid of the muslims,

but as he'll rant on trivialities of his presidential life,

what could be worse? - you could be his wife;

 

in 38 days just what will you do?

the donald has said he likes lgbtq,

but as he bullies his women and all his men too,

if youre questioning, what stops him from bullying you?

 

in just 37 days, some people are saying,

(or pleading or hoping or some even praying)

the duke of prunes will dye his forelock purple my friend,

and thus make america grape again,

 

our days are down to just 36,

before our problems the don will fix,

he will on day one do what hes said - true,

he'll wall out our enemies - and fat women too!

 

on the 35th day of trumpmas

yes just seven weeks remain!

will the polls and tallies deliver us

donald with his golden mane?

 

34 days and the vice-pipers have piped,

though pence didnt say why donalds suit shouldnt be striped,

he wouldnt defend his master's string pulling,

to make america great? - who do they think they're fooling?

 

just 33 days till the macho tornado,

unless its blown away by hurricane machado,

with women and voters he has so much to loose.

keep your mouth shut donald (unless youre changing your shoes)

 

32 days and we’ve been hit by the big blowhard,

donald spoke here in fla (oh, we had a hurricane too)

this administration gives us playing the race card, a weak economy, and unemployment

but if you want a job you could be donald’s campaign manager (unless youre a jew)

 

31 days, just a month, remains;

will the donald say hes sorry, and his baser impulses restrain?

or keep blaming bill clinton for our moral demise;

when trump speaks to us, our NO votes must be our replies!

 

election comes this time (in 30 days) each 4 years,

time for praise and tears and fears;

as polls will open in many states,

vote early, please dont vote late!

 

down to 29, just a leap february,

and theres still the donald quite

contrary;

donald donald, how does your garden grow?

quoth the master debater, "with pretty maids groped in a row"

 

just 28 days - later or soon,

and the zombies will rise, led by the big goon;

unless everyone gets a reality inoculation,

i might have to move to canada for a well deserved vacation; 

 

now just 27, less than 4 weeks,

no time for you to say 'yikes!' or 'eeeks!'

obama wants to go to mars and colonize it for man,

lets send trump tomorrow! and colonize it for orangutan!

 

26 days are all that remain,

will our democracy and economy go down the drain?

if we all keep listening to the blustering oaf,

will he give jobs and prosperity? - or just half a loaf

 

25 days - will more women speak?,

of the antics of donald who the presidency seeks,

dating 14 year old girls or groping their mothers,

how did the gop pick him over the others?,

 

24 days - were down to two dozen,

the next woman who speaks just might be your cousin,

or mother or sister, aunt, niece, even daughter,

describing the circumstance in which donald caught her,

 

23 days left and trump doesnt yet have as many accusers,

as cosby, but he assures us that they are all really losers,

sent by bankers or hillary with secret agendas,

to disrupt our election of him - our defender!,

 

22 days and we know charity begins at home,

but donalds attention is so prone to roam,

his gift that disappeared to 911 survivors from his foundation?,

oops! maybe donald spent it on a vacation,

 

21 days and trump says the election may be rig-ly,

if hes not the winner and his total's not big-ly,

tremendously higher than hillary gets,

he warns his supporters may all lose their wits,

 

20 days left and while george zimmerman still walks free,

the man who shot at HIM got 20 years - while trayvon got eternity,

trump wants us to support our cops and maintain law and order,

he'll put all the inner city dwellers in jail, and send the immigrant criminals far across the border,

 

19 days left till we all go to pretend,

to elect someone to lead us, as if on it our lives depend,

but wise man, donald trump, already really knows,

who we really voted for - a wolf in president's clothes?,

 

18 days and we bad hombres demand a rebate,

on the ill feelings left since the comments of one candidate,

the debaters have met in their final grudge match,

but only donald can say from whose hands victory will be snatched,

 

17 days and our government is corrupt with quid pro quo,

did you take latin at wharton? is that how you know?,

donald wants us to fire at them all - the bureaucrats lined up in rows,

and believe me, corruption is a subject. that donald really knows,

 

16 days - lets set term limits on all our office holders,

and put all our women in binders - or maybe in folders,

donalds endless complaints are becoming a sour whine,

have a little cheese with that, from wisconsin, where 

hillary's doing fine,

 

15 days and on stocking covered thighs did linger,

two miniature hands with two thumbs and eight tiny fingers,

they belonged to the donald who believed that he owned,

any thing that he wanted - or anyone he got alone,

 

14 days yes only two weeks,

till the duke of orange assends to the throne he seeks?,

to rule all americans, the strong and the weak?,

and dominate the globe with power that's peak?,

 

the 13th day to go - does that seem unlucky?,

not for donald whos lately been appearing quite plucky,

claiming media, polls, and parties are against him,

and rallying his multitudes with wit waxing dim,

 

on the 12th day of trumpmas donald awoke with a jerk,

promptly fired his latest campaign manager (who considered that a perk),

if youre "AAAfroAAAmurikan" and unemployed i can put you to work,

barked donald the businessman from behind his sly smirk,

 

it's the 11th and engineer casey trump is in the caboose,

i hear some of you saying oh no! what's the use,

our campaign will probably just go off the tracks,

but donald says its ok - cause he's got "the blacks",

 

just ten days left yes only one-zero,

til donald is hoping that he'll be your hero,

as new hillary emails come under investigation,

donald hopes to rename camp david to camp donald for

his vacations,

 

like a cat has nine lives we're left with only 9 days,

till we're subject to donald? and his old wicked ways,

on foreign affairs he says he'll save us from isis,

but his domestic affairs are misogyny and crisis,

 

our days are numbered - yes only eight,

till once again we make america great,

by getting rid of candidates who have nothing to add,

goodbye donald you wont make america sad,

 

just one week to go - its day minus seven,

till america's lifted above - to trumpty dump heaven?,

where for rich folks like donald opportunity abounds,

and we keep the working poor with a wall that surrounds,

 

how the time it does fly its already day 6,

till americans problems the donald will fix,

his solutions begin on trumpday number one,

dont you like them? they'll come at the barrel of a gun,

 

Five days to go, baby, One in five,

No one here gets out alive, now,

david dukes not opposed to all jews,

he backs trump - who are you going to choose?,

 

only 4 days left till the armaged-don,

he'll seize power by the horns once he has won,

and donnie will be what he longs for - a winner,

using the FBI to wreak havoc on hillary the sinner,

 

only three left, just a triad of days,

and the donald his supporters continues to amaze,

with hoopla and folderoll made up in his head,

his winning temperament will leave us all dead,

 

just a pair of days - 2 - till trump paradise,

since these words you're reading please heed my advice,

the creatures that surround us are beginning to bite,

'blacks for trump' fear the Illuminati so lets turn out their light,

 

just a single day left till our thanksgiving,

deliver us from donald and preserve the living,

forget sanity and disgard your misgivings,

but pray hard to your gods that they'll be forgiving,

since we've got the nukes why can't we use'em?,

on the road to 2016 why couldn't we lose HIM?,

 

and trumpmas now has finally come,

the tallies will count up to a winning sum,

unless the earth is struck soon by a cataclysmic comet,

to elect a candidate who just makes you want to vomit?,

we wish you a merry trumpmas at this time each 4 years,

if you have'nt voted you've lost the chance to mitigate your fears,

cause donald duck is ready to lead, forget your crocodile tears,

so you'd better get the vaseline and lubricate your rears!

a little bird told me

 a little bird told me 

 

Twitter Logo, Twitter Symbol, Meaning, History and Evolution 

Elon Musk responds to Twitter’s threat to sue him over reneging on deal with a meme

Elon Musk's DOGE savings dwarfed by deficit-ballooning Trump bill

 https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/doge-elon-musk-savings-big-beautiful-blill

Updated May 30, 2025 - Politics & Policy

Elon Musk's DOGE savings dwarfed by deficit-ballooning Trump bill



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Musk "disappointed" in Trump's "big, beautiful bill"

 Elon Musk looks on during a cabinet meeting hosted by US President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 24, 2025, in Washington, DC.

Elon Musk at the White House in March. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Updated May 29, 2025 - Politics & Policy

Musk's real DOGE legacy will be decided by courts long after his departure

Elon Musk's eyes are covered in a shadow by his black "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" hat as he stands in front of a Trump rally crowd.

Elon Musk wears a black "Make America Great Again" ball cap while attending a campaign rally with Donald Trump on Oct. 5, 2024. in Butler, Pa.(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

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    Corruption Watch: Trump’s SEC Drops Major Case Against Crypto Giant Binance After Its Former CEO Partnered With Trump Family On Lucrative Crypto Venture

    https://accountable.us/corruption-watch-trumps-sec-drops-major-case-against-crypto-giant-binance-after-its-former-ceo-partnered-with-trump-family-on-lucrative-crypto-venture/

    Corruption Watch: Trump’s SEC Drops Major Case Against Crypto Giant Binance After Its Former CEO Partnered With Trump Family On Lucrative Crypto Venture

    Trump Administration
    May 30, 2025

    Is a Trump Pardon for Convicted Binance Founder “CZ” Next?

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the latest egregious case of President Trump’s family business dealings apparently influencing Trump administration actions, last night, Trump’s SEC announced it had voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, for allegedly misleading investors about trading controls, among other accusations. 

    The dropped case comes as the Trump Family’s World Liberty Financial Inc. – a crypto venture that has alarmed ethics experts – has grown increasingly close with Binance Founder CZ, going so far as to post photos arm-in-arm with the man who just finished his prison sentence late last year. CZ was convicted of felony money laundering and who allegedly wants to trade a stake in Binance with the Trump family for an administration pardon in order to facilitate Binance’s return to the U.S. market, which Zhao has denied.

    Then on May 1, 2025, Zach Witkoff, a WLFI co-founder and son of Trump Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, announced that Emirati state-backed investment fund MGX would make a $2 billion business deal with Binance using WLFI’s cryptocurrency coins, potentially generating “tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for the Trump family and its partners at World Liberty.”

    Then on May 22, Trump’s WLFl “announced that its USD1 stablecoin, a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, started trading on Binance.” – and which “would be used to facilitate [the] $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi-backed MGX into Binance.”

    The SEC’s decision also comes a week after President Trump held an openly corrupt gala at his golf club for winners of a dubious competition for top holders of Trump’s cryptocurrency meme coin $TRUMP, in which 80% of the Top 25 winners appeared to be either foreign or regulation dodgers. Accountable.US found that the #1 holder was in fact Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun, whose SEC fraud case was paused in February 2025 after Sun bought $75 million in tokens offered by Trump crypto venture WLFI. 

    The Trump SEC’s dropping a case against a new Trump family crypto business partner reeks of pay-to-play shenanigans and abuse of power. No one should be surprised if President Trump’s next move is to grant the pardon that the former Binance CEO and convicted money laundering law violator has allegedly been begging for – which would fast track the crypto exchange’s return to the U.S. and open even more avenues for the Trump family to profit off its ballooning crypto grift operations."

    Accountable.US Executive Director Tony Carrk.


    A New Working-Class GOP? If “Working-Class” Means $4.3 Million a Year!

     https://newrepublic.com/article/195867/working-class-gop-trump-plutocrats

    The New Republic
     
     

    OLD “WHINE”

    A New Working-Class GOP? If “Working-Class” Means $4.3 Million a Year!

    Last year, Trump won praise for building a new GOP. But the Big, Beautiful Bill utterly shatters the illusion that he is some sort of brilliant policy innovator.

    Trump sits, leaning on the arm of an upholstered sofa.
    Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images 

    So much for a new, “populist” Republican Party. So much for the GOP as a brave band of fiscally prudent, anti-deficit hawks. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, policy incoherence, and political vacuousness. That’s its formal name, by the way, and you’ve already admitted a problem when you have to sell something that hard.

    It’s no wonder that the only way the BBB passed the House was for one opponent to vote “present” and for two others to miss the vote. One of the absent members fell asleep and missed the vote, an entirely appropriate response to an exercise in philosophical exhaustion. Defending the bill requires twisting facts into the “alternative” variety and turning the plain meaning of words upside down.

    For example: The right wingers who demanded more cuts in programs for low-income people are regularly described as “deficit hawks.” But even if they had gotten all the changes they sought, the bill would have massively increased the deficit. And most of them voted for a final product that will add close to $4 trillion to the nation’s indebtedness.

    If these guys are hawks, I don’t know what a dove looks like.  

    Trump and his backers continue to insist that they are building a new working-class Republican coalition. But the astonishing thing about this bill is not only that it lavishes tax cuts on the very well-off; it also takes money away from Americans earning less than $51,000 a year once its cuts in Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, SNAP, and student loans are counted for. Republicans who rail against “income redistribution” are doing an awful lot of redistribution themselves—to those who already have lots of money.

    The Penn Wharton budget model of the near-final version of the bill found that Americans earning less than $17,000 would lose $1,035 under its terms. Those earning between $17,000 and $50,999 would lose $705. But the small number of our fellow citizens who earn more than $4.3 million a year have a lot to cheer about: They pick up $389,280 annually.

    Please explain to me again why this is a “populist” Republican Party.

    It’s imperative not to miss what’s obvious about this billthat it ravages lower-income people to benefit the very privilegedand for progressives and Democrats to act on this.

    But it’s also essential to notice what doesn’t get enough attention: that so much of the commentary about how Trump has reinvented the GOP with a fresh set of ideas and commitments is poppycock. Trumpism is certainly dangerous and authoritarian in new ways. It is, well, innovative when it comes to a vast and unconstitutional expansion of presidential power.

    But it’s also an ideological mess riddled with contradictions. When you look below the hood, it’s primarily about the interests of people who can buy their way into Trump’s golf clubs and private pay-for-play dinnersand, especially, about the enrichment of Trump and his family.

    On the phony populism side, Democrats in the House did a generally good job of highlighting the costs of provisions in the bill that hurt so many of Trump’s voters, particularly the cuts in Medicaid and nutrition assistance, or SNAP. Senate Democrats have already ramped up similar efforts as that body’s Republican leaders prepare to grapple with the steaming pile of incongruities the House has sent their way.

    You can tell that Republicans know how unpopular the Medicaid cuts in the bill are because they delayed their effectiveness date to minimize their electoral effect, repeatedly denied they are cutting Medicaid—and don’t want to talk at all about how slashing subsidies within the Affordable Care Act would take health coverage away from millions more Americans.

    They are hiding the Medicaid cuts behind “work requirements” that are really bureaucratic paperwork requirements that would make it much harder for people with every right to coverage to access it. They would make it more difficult for others to maintain continuous coverage. And if these rules were not about “cutting” Medicaid, the GOP couldn’t claim to be “cutting” roughly $700 billion in Medicaid spending.

    But the GOP thinks it has a winner in its work argument. It’s a tired but tested replay of a very old (and, yes, offensive) trope about alleged grifters among supposedly “lazy” poor people. House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a remarkable version of this defense of the “work” provisions: He said they were aimed at “the young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.” If ever there was a quote that should go viral, this is it. Young men, after all, shifted toward the Republicans in 2024. They should know what the party many of them voted for thinks of them.

    More important, progressives need to take the work argument on directly, not only by showing that the work provisions aren’t really about work but also by offering amendments replacing the Medicaid cuts with provisions that actually would expand the availability of well-paying opportunities for greater self-sufficiency. Restoring the clean energy tax credits are important not only to battling climate change; they’re also about preserving and creating well-paying jobs. A package of proposals on affordable housing, job training, and access to community colleges, particularly in economically depressed areas, would make a nice contrast to those who deny that government has the capacity to improve lives.

    What the Financial Times’ economics columnist Martin Wolf nicely termed “pluto-populism” when the GOP passed the 2017 tax cuts that this bill extends is alive and well. That populist rhetoric is being married to plutocratic policies is still not recognized widely enough. This is certainly a commentary on the rightward tilt of the media system the editor of this magazine has called out. But it also reflects a failure of Democrats to take the argument to the heart of Trump’s base.

    It’s political common sense that parties focus most of their energy on swing states and swing districts. Yet there will be no breaking the 50-50 deadlock in our politics without a concerted effort to change the minds of voters who have drifted to Trump out of frustration with their own economic circumstances and the condition of their regions. The fight over Medicaid and SNAP cuts directly implicates these voters and these places.

    And these voters pay more attention to these issues than either the Republicans who take them for granted or Democrats who have given up on them believe.

    When Andy Beshear won his first race for governor of Kentucky in 2019, he not only mobilized Democrats in urban areas; he also flipped many rural counties and cut the Republicans’ margins in others. Typical was Carter County in eastern Kentucky. The county went for Beshear even though it had backed his GOP opponent and then-incumbent Republican Governor Matt Bevin four years earlier and gave Trump 73.8 percent of its ballots in 2016. Breathitt County in Appalachia also flipped, having gone for Bevin and voted 69.6 percent for Trump.

    Fred Cowan, a former Kentucky attorney general and a shrewd student of his state’s politics, told me then that these voters understood where their interests lay. “In a lot of these counties, the school systems or the hospitals—or bothare the biggest employers,” he said “The Medicaid expansion helped a lot of people over there.”

    Sure, it’s easier for Democrats like Beshear with strong local profiles to make their case. But the national party needs to learn from these politicians that giving up on whole swaths of voters is both an electoral and moral mistake.

    The emptiness of Republican populism speaks to the larger problem of mistaking Trump’s ability to create a somewhat new electoral coalition with intellectual and policy  innovation. Some conservative commentators are honest enough to admit how the BBB demonstrates that the “old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas are still dominant,” as Ross Douthat observed in The New York Times.

    But even Douthat wants to cast the bill as an exception to a bolder transformation the president has engineered, particularly around immigration and a “Trumpian culture war.” The problem here is that none of this is new, either.

    The GOP was moving right on immigration well before Trumpwhen, for example, it killed George W. Bush’s immigration bill in 2007 as right-wing media cheered it on. The culture war and the battle against universities are old hat too. The real innovator here was the late Irving Kristol, whose columns in the 1970s introduced Wall Street Journal readers to the dangers posed to business interests by “the new class” of Hollywood, media, and university types, along with activist lawyers. True, Trump is taking this fight to extreme places Kristol would never have gone. But, again, there’s no new thinking here.

    And the attack on trans rights is just the latest front in the LGBTQ+ debates, now that the right has had to abandon its opposition to same-sex marriage because Americans have come to support it overwhelmingly.

    Even the contradictions aren’t new. Since the Reagan years, Republicans have always talked about the dangers of deficits when Democrats were in power but cast those worries aside when they had the power to cut taxes. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” is the canonical Dick Cheney quote from 2002 when he was pushing for more tax cuts in W.’s administration. The exception proves the rule: George H.W. Bush made a deal with Democrats in 1991 that included tax increases because he really did care about deficits—and conservatives never forgave him for it.

    In an odd way, you have to admire Cheney’s candor: At least he admitted what he was doing. The Freedom Caucus members have the gall to yell at the top of their lungs about how they care so very much about the debtand then vote in overwhelming numbers to pile on billions more.

    As the debate over the BBB moves to the Senate, the immediate imperative is to expose the damage the bill does to millions of Trump’s voters to benefit his Mar-a-Lago and crypto-wealthy friends. But it’s also an occasion to shatter the illusion that Trump is some sort of brilliant policy innovator. Extremism and authoritarianism are not new ideas, and his legislative program would be familiar to Calvin Coolidge. 

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