Tag archives: Donald Trump

President Trump, casting himself as the nation’s top investment guru and seeing opportunity in Intel, announced the government’s $8.9 billion investment in Intel for a ten percent stake in the company. The money comes from Biden’s Chips Act, the purpose of which was to create more onshore chip manufacturing. Intel had already received $2.2 billion […]

Donald Trump is everywhere in the news lately. He dominates the daily headlines. Thus the title to this article (yes, I stole it from the movie). He’s hard to avoid. The fact that Trump is in the news constantly is an important issue. He is the news. That is because of powers relinquished by Congress […]

“Shock and Awe” was the G. W. Bush term for his attack on Iraq in 2003. Trump’s Big Ugly Billionaire Bailout Bill (BUBBB) is a shock and awe attack against our own people. Perhaps this should be called “Shock and Awful.” The bill adds $3 trillion to the U.S. debt – almost all from tax […]

We are back from a road trip from Kentucky to Boston, immersing us in American history. The idea of a “Deep State” goes back to the 1950s in what Eisenhower called the “Military Industrial Complex.” But the actual term “Deep State” didn’t gain much traction until Trump’s first term. Trump uses it to refer to […]

A sea of demonstrators filled Cabrillo Boulevard on Saturday as part of the nationwide “No Kings” protest, joining millions across more than 2,100 U.S. cities in opposition to what organizers describe as presidential authoritarian overreach. Estimates for the Santa Barbara turnout ranged from 5,000 to as high as 18,000, making it potentially one of the […]

I like Elon Musk. He’s one of the greatest innovators of our time. He revolutionized the automobile industry with Tesla, outpaced NASA with SpaceX, created a global wireless network with Starlink, and is on the cusp of a brain-computer interface with Neuralink. Think Thomas Edison. Musk – supposedly the world’s richest man – is a […]

It pains me to use my precious column space to provide basic civics lessons, but it seems that most Americans need them. Since my February article “Three Unequal Branches of Government?” I have asked everybody I meet if they know that there is just one primary branch of government. Not one knew that. When asked […]

Recent media coverage has focused on the battle of conservative philosophies within the Trump Administration and in conservative circles. In the darker corners of the Internet, radical commentators, so-called “influencers,” are gaining the attention of the rich and powerful and Administration insiders. It’s actually rather fascinating.  The Wall Street Journal recently published an important article […]

DEI is under stress from within and without. President Trump issued on January 20, 2025, an executive order terminating “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI in the Federal Government.” DEI’s roots are found in President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order 11246, which required federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that employees are treated during […]

Who do you think of when you hear the word “elites”? The term has come to mean “educated.” But 100 years ago, it was about economic power. And most people understood which party stood for the economic elites. Franklin Roosevelt made this point very clearly in his 1936 acceptance speech for the Democratic Party nomination: […]

I used to call myself a sort of minor-league celebrity. Different people, I have found, have different standards for what they consider fame or notoriety. To some, in the old days of print media, it was a matter of how widely you or your photographed image  appeared – nationally or internationally – in newspapers, magazines, […]

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sentenced to jail without due process of law. You cannot look at it any other way. It is one thing to deport an illegal immigrant, it is another thing to put him in jail without a trial. It does not matter that the government outsourced the jail.  The issue is one […]

On March 14th, the Senate passed a continuing resolution for fiscal year 2025, providing funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through September 2025. On the evening of March 14th, President Trump then ordered that the IMLS – the singular federal agency dedicated to funding library services – “be eliminated to the […]