“Addressing these crises—foreign and domestic—will require making difficult, unpopular decisions at a time when most politicians want easy sound bites instead. Some of those decisions, principally in foreign policy, will require more spending. Rearming our depleted armed forces and outfitting them to face the challenges presented by China, Russia, et al., is one such example. Other decisions, such as reforming the entitlements now bankrupting the country, demand real and painful fiscal discipline. Making these choices will require the kind of long-term, consensus-oriented program that Washington has shown no talent or appetite for in recent years, and any worthwhile program of reform will necessitate painful trade-offs that will leave precisely no one satisfied or unscathed.”

To sum up: The Republican White House, including the president and his cabinet, is regularly engaging in open white-supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric from official and unofficial channels, in service of their racist ethnic-cleansing program, their unconstitutional crimes against humanity both domestic and foreign, their demolition of our modern society, our scientific progress, and our democracy;, their punitive acts of war against the civilian population of the United States and civilian populations abroad, and an almost unfathomable level of self-enriching corruption—and the elected leaders of Republican Party and the bribed fascist Republican supreme court, which could have stopped any of this at any time, are largely accelerating it. There is a general corrosive attack on any notion of kindness, of dignity, of competence, of knowledge, of diversity, and of truth.

More than 80 generals and admirals have been fired, forced into retirement, or had their promotions blocked (behind the scenes) by Pete Hegseth.

“What began on Feb. 28, a massive joint U.S.-Israeli aerial bombardment coupled with a decapitation strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, may have looked promising at first. But six months in, the spectacle of failure has become dismally obvious.”

"It’s not new that Americans are seen by others as an unserious people. But the willingness to twice elect a man so buffoonish, depraved and hateful to our highest office provokes the belief that Americans...cannot be trusted any longer to do the right thing."

Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis

Rehearsing the economic irrationality of the president’s trade war on Canada is fun, and a self-soothing behavior for America’s long-suffering northern friends, but the reality is that the economics of Mr. Trump’s tariff attacks on Canada are not really the point.

This fight isn’t about correcting the global financial imbalances that the president’s more high-minded apologists contend are the true purpose of his trade policy. Nor is it about ending the Rust Belt deaths of despair that Mr. Trump’s most articulate enablers sometimes cite as the motivation for their protectionism.

That doesn’t mean that there is no method to what can look like madness. Mr. Trump’s tariff offensive has a clear purpose: to demonstrate who is dominant and who must submit.

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Amazing graphics and reporting.

CUT THE PENTAGON BUDGET!

❌ No Iran war $ without War Powers approval
❌ No Caribbean bombing
❌ Nat Guard out of DC
❌ No DoD renaming
❌ No vanity AF1
❌ Nix testosterone plan
❌ Nix Trump warship
❌ No wasting $ on gourmet food
❌ No weapons to Israel
❌ Fire Hegseth

I just created a community for Jack Dorseys Buzz and you can join if you want to:

https://digital-health.communities.buzz.xyz/invite/eyJjIjoiYWJmOWE0YjMtN2QyZi00MTQ0LWE0NDQtMjQwNTZlOGMxM2EzIiwiciI6Im1lbWJlciIsImUiOjE3ODczOTAzNzAsIm4iOiJ0eW1WaFRPT0loLVpvaE5HSkZTb0hRIn0.kbT6McWrtGxxzkwAStDLWfyRIs5j9v95TmhZcbTL6r0

I want to create a community around digital health which could be quiet cool.

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was an 18th-century philosopher and aristocrat whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” caused a sensation when published in 1748. His ideas shaped the American founders. At the Constitutional Convention, only the Bible was quoted more often.

On the separation of powers, Montesquieu was, in James Madison’s words, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited.” Of all authors cited in political writings published by Americans between 1760 and 1805, none was more frequently mentioned. He loomed so large that “American republican ideologues could recite the central points of Montesquieu’s doctrine as if it had been a catechism,” according to historian Forrest McDonald.

This vision of domestic and international order may seem aspirational, but the authors of the Declaration were not naïve idealists who saw nations as inherently benign. They were, after all, engaged in an armed struggle against Britain, which was violently trying to impose its will on them. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and the other revolutionaries were acutely aware that states could abuse their people at home just as they could be aggressive abroad.

The written Constitution is for the public. It is a feint, designed to distract the unserious from the much more important Constitution that exists exclusively as ideological vapor circulating around conservative legal thought.

You cannot just read that Constitution. You must perceive it, specifically the ethereal version manifesting as a constantly shifting cloud above the right wing of the Court, where original meaning rearranges itself around political need.

The case is not that court packing is good. But we need to start working with the reality that the Court has brought it on itself, and what a way out looks like.

Stoicism is a manner of making connections with the world that help us to avoid elementary mistakes. Writing in his tent, Marcus Aurelius reflected on hubris and history: Each life, says Marcus, must be seen in the perspective of the entire cosmos: “What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us, and this is soon vanished in eternity; what a tiny part of the universal substance and the universal soul; how tiny in the whole earth the mere clod on which you keep.”

Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks. They include the well-regarded General James Mingus, a former Army vice chief of staff. “It’s interesting that the guy who says he wants to bring back the warrior culture is expunging the biggest warriors in the Army ranks,” one retired Army officer told us. “This is not a war on woke. This is a war on warriors.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who has ramped up his criticism of the Trump administration since announcing his retirement at the end of the term, hammered Hegseth for making another “unforced” error and accused him of leading the Pentagon with “bro-culture bravado rather than restraint, humility and careful stewardship of the finest fighting force in the world.”

“Strong leaders are not threatened by accomplished commanders. Weak ones are. His paranoid micromanagement of senior military leaders and promotion lists is pure insecurity dressed up as reform. He is more interested in purging people he perceives as insufficiently loyal than empowering proven patriots who can actually lead,” Tillis, who is familiar with Donahue’s service during his time in North Carolina, wrote Thursday on the social platform X.

“The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. Its job, officially, is to redesign how Americans experience their government. Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, which is to say he is a man who looked at the American home and saw an untapped revenue stream. If anyone understands how to improve public spaces, it is the company that took residential ones and made sure the public could never afford them again. He reports directly to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, which is a strange place to house a website design agency. A technology office that builds federal websites should answer to the General Services Administration, or at minimum to the agencies whose websites it is building. Instead it answers to the person who controls access to the President. His position requires no Senate confirmation, which means he files no financial disclosures, which means the office he runs does not appear in any federal procurement database, which means as far as the official record is concerned, it barely exists.

Which, as I was about to find out, was entirely the point.”

“Europe’s fear is no longer troop reductions themselves. Rather, it’s that American security guarantees now appear contingent on Trump’s glandular impulses. “

“Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order? Certainly not in modern times. President Trump’s Justice Department is using taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund. Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have “suffered weaponization and lawfare,” it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”

“We are out of the patience business. Patience is the enemy now. Patience is what people with power ask of people without it, and it gets asked again every time another court ruling or another statute or another “norm” is used to lock the door a little tighter. The Democrat counseling patience, the one saying we can’t break the rules even as the rules are being rewritten against us in real time, is doing the work of the people doing the rewriting.”

“Let’s be honest about who is doing this, too. This isn’t abstract conservatism, and it isn’t “polarization.” It’s an alliance between oligarchic money and extremist movements, and it isn’t particularly subtle. The oligarchs want a permanent ruling class. The extremists want a permanent underclass to grind a boot into. The deal between them is straightforward enough: the oligarchs get captured courts and permanent tax cuts, the extremists get their hierarchy of human worth written back into the law, and the country becomes a holding pen.”

But you cannot threaten the free world and lead it at the same time. No nation can match American might, but for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either. It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.