Tag Archives: Donald Trump

In First 3 Months in Office, Taxpayers Spend 26 Million Dollars to Send Trump to Florida to Play Golf!!!!

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The $26 million dollars taxpayers have spent on sending him to Florida to play golf over the past three months doesn’t seem to have made him very happy, does it? How many people would that have supported on Social Security? According to my Social Security payments, it would have supported 1,300 people’s Social Security for a year!!! Yet we don’t deserve it, I guess.
May be an image of 2 people and people golfing

Len Nelson

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Today, on his 69th day in office, convicted felon Donald Trump played golf at the course he owns in West Palm Beach, Florida. Since his inauguration on January 20th, it’s his 14th day of golf at that particular property and the 18th time he has played at one of his golf courses.
That means he has played golf on more than a fourth of the days since he was sworn in.
Based on a 2019 Government Accountability Office report which detailed the cost to taxpayers for moving his motorcade equipment and security personnel around as well as the immense cost of flying Air Force 1 for each of Trump’s first term golf trips, the total cost to date for Trump’s second-term golf outings is now up to $26,127,531.
I’ll remind you that billionaire authoritarian oligarch Elon Musk, whom Trump appointed to ferret out “waste and fraud” in government, hasn’t said a word about it. He’s apparently too busy firing essential federal workers and veterans and destroying government services which Americans depend on to notice that the president’s devotion to his hobby instead of his nation has cost taxpayers more than $26 million in little more than two months.
Yet Musk, whose companies rake in an estimated $8 million PER DAY from government contracts, keeps complaining about how other Americans with government contracts and those who receive government benefits are the “parasitic class.”
Check yourself, Elon. Check your boss’ grifting, too.

For Sunday Whirl Wordle, Mar 23, 2025

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The King of Chaos. I was on my way to a local hotel/restaurant to read my Trump poem when I saw a woman selling this pinata beside the road. I braked, turned around and went to buy it. A man, seeing me buying it, stopped to buy one as well. “Does it have anything inside?” He asked. “No, you have to cut it open in back and fill it,” I answered. “What should we fill it with?” asked his female companion. “I’d suggest filling it with baloney,” I answered.

The King of Chaos. I was on my way to a local hotel/restaurant to read my Trump poem when I saw a woman selling this pinata beside the road. I braked, turned around and went to buy it. A man, seeing me buying it, stopped to buy one as well. “Does it have anything inside?” He asked. “No, you have to cut it open in back and fill it,” I answered. “What should we fill it with?” asked his female companion. “I’d suggest filling it with baloney.”

Depression

A chain of glimmering wishes gleams silver as I free
my mind from all its worries of what is or what may be,
but moment by sadder moment, my sorrow flames again,
whipped up from fading embers of a sadness that has been
lingering like a trance that I cannot escape.
Faint shadows of those horrors that assume a larger shape.
I dip into my past to restore wild memories
that I naively hope will bring  depression to its knees.
But they do too little to trim away the fears
That hover all around me, holding pleasure in arrears.

The word prompts for today’s Sunday Whirl are: sorrow dip  chain wild silver free trance glimmer faint trim

(If you can think of a better title for this poem, please suggest it. Company arrived just as I was finishing it and gotta get posted.

Heather Cox Richardson. This is downright chilling. Loss of memory, rambling statements. And he’s on his way to play golf!!!

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Perhaps in response to the growing outcry over last weekend’s rendition of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under a legal justification a federal judge has found questionable, President Donald Trump last night told reporters that he didn’t sign the proclamation that set that legal process in motion.

When asked when he signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, by which Trump claimed that Venezuela is invading the United States by sending alleged gang members over the border, Trump answered: “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it.” Trump was on his way to his golf club in New Jersey, and seemed to be handing off responsibility for the declaration to someone else, perhaps Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Other people handled it,” he said. “But Marco Rubio’s done a great job. And he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

But, as Matt Viser said in the Washington Post today, on Friday White House communications director Steven Cheung said Trump personally signed the proclamation, and his signature appears on the document in the Federal Register of official government documents. The gap between the two versions of events raises questions about who is in charge of White House policy.

Trump’s habit of deflection might explain last night’s statement, and his habit of distraction might explain today’s social media post, in which the president returned to an exchange of words between him and Maine governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, more than three weeks ago. At a meeting of the nation’s governors at the White House on February 21, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaig stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.

The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump’s executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity. Trump asked if the governor of Maine was in the room.

“Yeah, I’m here,” replied Governor Mills.

“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked.

“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said.

“We are the federal law,” Trump said. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t….”

“We’re going to follow the law,” she said.

“You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding,” he said.

Mills answered: “See you in court.”

As Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico recounted today, after the exchange between Trump and Governor Mills at the White House the administration opened investigations by the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture into Maine’s policies. The Department of Agriculture temporarily paused funding for the University of Maine, then restored it and cleared the university system of Title IX violations, saying it had “clearly communicated its compliance.” The University of Maine system said it was “relieved” and added that it had never violated Title IX compliance.

On March 11 the Department of Education abolished more than half of the offices in its Civil Rights Division, getting rid of more than half of the division’s employees. Last Wednesday it said it had concluded its investigation into the Maine Department of Education and had determined that the state was violating Title IX by permitting transgender youth to play in the boys’ or girls’ sports that conform to their gender identity. It gave the state ten days to follow the administration’s interpretation of the law.

This morning, the president posted on social media: “While the State of Maine has apologized for the Governor’s strong, but totally incorrect, statement about men playing in women’s sports while at the White House Governor’s Conference, we have not heard from the Governor herself, and she is that one that matters in such cases. Therefore, we need a full throated apology from the Governor herself, and a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again, before this case can be settled. I’m sure she will be able to do that quite easily. Thank you for your attention to this matter and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! DJT.”

Mills was a former state attorney general, and her position is that it is her job as governor to follow state and federal law. But Trump seems to be trying to make his fight with her personal. So long as she is willing to kowtow to him, the “case” can be “settled.” Exactly what she is supposed to be apologizing to him for is unclear, unless it is that she stood up to him, a rare enough event that at the time, Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”

At the White House, Governor Mills was not only reinforcing the rule of law in the face of an authoritarian who is working to shatter that principle; she was standing up to a bully who claims to be protecting women and girls but who has bragged about sexual assault, been found guilty of sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, and barged in on teenaged girls dressing in the Miss Teen USA changing room.

Trump’s political stances have also belied his claim to protect women. He has worked to deny women and girls access to health care, including the right not to die needlessly from a miscarriage. He has undermined women’s right to control their own bodies and defunded or stopped the programs that protect their right to be safe from domestic violence and sexual assault. He has ended programs designed to protect women’s employment and has fired women from positions of authority.

Mills stands in dramatic contrast to Trump. Her career has focused on helping women and girls to overcome domestic violence, the threat of sexual assault, and inequities in the workplace. As a district attorney—the first woman elected as a DA in New England—she grew frustrated with the ways in which the criminal justice system failed victims of domestic violence. She co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby to advocate for battered and abused women, which then led to her election to the Maine legislature and from there to state attorney general and then to the governorship.

While Trump’s demand that Mills make a “full throated apology” to him is in keeping with his habitual attempts to dominate women, Mills follows in a tradition of women from Maine who stood up for the principles of American democracy against bullies who would destroy it.

In a similar moment, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, of Skowhegan, Maine, stood up to Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy and his supporters were hoping to gain votes in the 1950 midterm elections by stoking fear that the communists who had recently taken control of China threatened the U.S. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, McCarthy, a Republican, claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and many of his colleagues cheered him on, while Republicans who disapproved of his tactics kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. On June 1, 1950, with McCarthy sitting two rows behind her, Smith stood up in the Senate to speak. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she said. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves, she said. She condemned those trying to stifle dissent.

“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” she said. “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist. They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Senator Smith ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/22/trump-deportations-autopen/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-see-you-in-court-maines-governor-tells-trump-on-transgender-athlete-ban

https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-concludes-maine-department-of-education-violating-title-ix

https://www.propublica.org/article/education-department-civil-rights-division-eroded-by-massive-layoffs

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans

https://www.ed.gov/media/document/letter-of-finding-maine-doe-109602.pdf

https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-concludes-maine-department-of-education-violating-title-ix

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/trump-maine-governor-transgender-athletes.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/22/donald-trump-trans-athletes-maine-00003871

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf

https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a4b98bb3947d42af9ec83d7db

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-creepiness-while-he-owned-miss-universe-191860/

https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/about

Bluesky:

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lkxtadpkc22f

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Time to Order the Book

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Someone told me they didn’t vote for Trump, they voted for our country. Now time to do more for it. Get rid of this person who is dismantling it, bit by bit. If you are still unconvinced, order and read the book written by his niece!!! Available for free in ebook or audible with a trial membership on Everand. 

Snopes confirms truth of the below. What next?

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According to Task & Purpose, cemetery officials confirmed that they “unpublished” the pages in question in compliance with a Trump administration executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion and a resulting directive from U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.” This was confirmed by Snopes!!!! Read below.

SnopesClaim:

In mid-March 2025,

The Arlington National Cemetery website removed links to webpages about Black, Hispanic and female veterans buried at the site.

Rating:

True

 

 

(archived) circulated online that the Arlington National Cemetery website had removed links to webpages about Black, Hispanic and female veterans buried at the site.The claim originated from a report by Task & Purpose, a military news, culture and analysis outlet. The report found that between December 2024 and March 2025, several links to pages relating to Black, Hispanic and female veterans disappeared from Arlington National Cemetery’s website.

Using archive.org‘s Wayback Machine, a website that archives pages from across the web, we verified the removal of links that Task & Purpose reported. The removed links included three pages from the “Notable Graves” section, six education “themes,” two pages from the “History of Arlington National Cemetery” subsection and one page from the website’s “Explore” tab. Therefore, we rate this claim true.

According to Task & Purpose, cemetery officials confirmed that they “unpublished” the pages in question in compliance with a Trump administration executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion and a resulting directive from U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.”

We reached out to Arlington National Cemetery to confirm the above. We also asked the cemetery to confirm exactly which links officials removed and when. A cemetery spokesperson gave the following reply:

We are proud of our educational content and programming and working diligently to return removed content to ensure alignment with Department of Defense instruction 5400.17 and Executive Orders issued by the President.  We remain committed to sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism, while continuing to engage with our community in a manner that reflects our core values.

In a further March 14, 2025, email, the same spokesperson said, “We are hoping to begin republishing updated education modules next week.”

Missing links led to pages paying tribute to Black, Hispanic and female veterans

The Task & Purpose report included a full list of links the outlet said disappeared from Arlington National Cemetery’s site.

Using Wayback Machine, we replicated Task & Purpose’s findings. The missing links, removed between December 2024 and March 12, 2025, were as follows:

At the time of this writing the pages listed above still existed and could be accessed through their direct URLs, but not through links on the Arlington National Cemetery website.

For example, the Freedman’s Village page was still available through its direct URL, though the History of Arlington National Cemetery section of the website no longer linked directly to it. The page detailed the temporary settlement housing formerly enslaved people that the federal government constructed on Arlington National Cemetery grounds in 1863.

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Section 27 of Arlington National Cemetery saw the cemetery’s first military burial during the Civil War. More than 3,800 African American formerly enslaved people were also buried in Section 27, according to the page, which was still live but also not directly linked on the site on March 14.

Six “Themes” disappeared from the cemetery’s Education portal between February and March 2025. (education.arlingtoncemetery.mil / web.archive.org)

From a page-by-page click-through of the Arlington National Cemetery website we also found a missing list of webinars under the website’s “Explore” section. The Webinars subpage disappeared from the site between Feb. 22, 2025, and March 11, 2025. The page contained recordings of talks on topics including “Freedman’s Village” and “75 years recruiting women” that might have qualified it for removal.

Links removed following DOD ‘digital content refresh’

The U.S. Army, reporting to the Department of Defense, operates Arlington National Cemetery under the Office of Army Cemeteries. Therefore, policies enacted in the DOD also apply to the cemetery, its staff and its website.

A Frightening Possibility!!!

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Here is a post from Forgottenman that I hope you’ll read. It actually deals with a blog my friend Jere sent to me that I wanted to post but wanted him to check it out first.  Here is his reaction and hopefully you’ll give us yours as well.:

Mike Brock’s “Notes From The Circus” Blog

Posted on 

This isn’t my usual type of post¹, and it’s hard to find the “Start” button, so I’ll plunge right in.

A couple of weeks ago, I somehow stumbled onto Mike Brock’s Notes From The Circus blog. I was not familiar with him, and I tried to read some of it, but I got bogged down in some of his philosophy-speak² – those shorthand references to concepts that (I imagine) more easily dwell in late-night sessions of a gaggle of students, scholars, philosophers huddled in the back conference room of the campus library. I bookmarked his blog to check out further another day. Today is that day.

Why today? Because that’s when Judy/Remi/LifeLessons sent me a note asking “What do you make of this??? Should I post it?” The link was to a recent post on Mike Brock’s blog! (I had not mentioned him to her previously! Yeah, even with 1400 miles between us, she and I are somehow still joined.)

(For the rest of his post and a link to Mike Brock’s frightening appraisal of current events, go here: https://okcforgottenman.wordpress.com/2025/03/09/mike-brocks-notes-from-the-circus-blog/

The former head of the Social Security Administration “You’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits within the next 30 to 90 days.”

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Last week, the former head of the Social Security Administration issued a grave warning to the American people:

“You’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”

Why is former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley sounding the alarm?

  • Because of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) being “run” by Donald Trump’s presidential stand-in Elon Musk.
  • DOGE is infiltrating critical information systems, closing dozens of offices all across the country, and forcing through massive staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration.
  • Social Security started sending monthly benefits in January 1940. In the 85 years since, payments have never failed to go out.
  • Today, 73 million Americans depend on Social Security every month.
  • And at the risk of stating the obvious, they have earned those benefits. Social Security is not a government handout. (Unlike the numerous tax breaks and subsidies that billionaires like Elon Musk and giant corporations get courtesy of American taxpayers.)
  • People pay into the system throughout their working lives, then get money back once they reach a certain age.

By the way, Elon Musk recently said this on the mega-popular Joe Rogan podcast: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Why are we letting someone who thinks that way mess with any part of the federal government, much less one of the most important and successful programs in our nation’s entire history?

Tell Congress:

If Social Security misses payments even once, millions upon millions of Americans — who have already paid into the system — will suffer. Not just Democrats. Not just people in supposedly blue states. Not just the “coastal elites” Republicans have convinced themselves are some kind of all-powerful bogeyman. You must work together to prevent the so-called Department of Government Efficiency from interrupting Social Security payments and to undo whatever damage DOGE has already done at the Social Security Administration.

Click to add your name now.

Thanks for taking action.

For progress,

– Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen

Donate | Public Citizen | 1600 20th Street NW | Washington DC 20009 | Unsubscribe

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Please Read this Poem!!

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What is the logic of not believing in abortion but believing it is okay to let babies die of Ebola in Africa because we have cut off aid to fund vaccinations…or to allow children to die of measles because our misguided head of national health does not believe in vaccinations? Nothing in the Bible says charity should be ended at national borders or that the rich should profit by the neglect of the poor. Think, people, think! And please read this poem written by my friend Andrea Huelsenbeck at: https://arhtisticlicense.com/about-artistic-license/:

 

And, in case you don’t read comments, Lisa has included THIS link which also deals with the topic alluded to above. 

“How the Mighty Will One Day Fall” for the One Day Prompt, Feb 22, 2025

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How the Mighty Will One Day Fall

I would pay a pretty tuppence
to see his highness get his comeuppance.
His smug assurance, his galling preening.
He’s like a babe in need of weaning,
sucking at the teat of fame.
What other mortal needs his name
written on towers around the world?
He’s Ozymandius, stone lip curled
in cruel splendor, sure in his power
reasserted on every tower.
But remember, as he counts each coup,
how all the mighty have fallen, too.
False knights wear armor prone to tarnish.
His Midas touch will lose its varnish.
We’ll laud the day when he’ll be dumped—
That day when he’ll be over-trumped!

 

For: https://weeklyprompts.com/2025/02/22/weekly-prompts-the-one-day-prompt-10/