More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

The State of the Union Carnival Show

I will admit that I did not watch all of the State of The Union address for several reasons: it was laced with lies and distortions which is the norm for the Felon - a piece at the Associated Press lists the untruths - and went on for ever, and I simply was not in the mood to watch a spectacle of narcissistic preening that would have made it difficult to keep from vomiting.  Members of the military and the men's U.S. hockey team were used as political props to an utterly insincere performance bu the liar in chief.  The one thing the speech, if one can call it that, was missing was any accurate description of how the Felon's  policies will bring down prices and benefit everyday Americans. Indeed, while many are struggling financially, some in the GOP want more tax cuts for the super wealthy and large corporations. In short, the event painted an utterly false picture of where the nation finds itself under the regime of a narcissistic psychopath suffering from increasing dementia. With luck, the event will prove to be little help for the Felon's plummeting approval numbers that with luck will prove to be a heavy anchor on Republican candidates in November.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the carnival barker's show: 

The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy, because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, MC, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.

Trump did his usual rote lying about the economy—pity the fact-checkers who tried to keep up even in the first 10 minutes or so of the speech—along with some of his other greatest hits, including the many wars he stopped and the magic of tariffs.

Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, once managed to do the entire State of the Union address in 31 minutes; that’s because he could say important things efficiently and well. Tonight, however, was not about communication, it was about showmanship. Almost every line was a cue for applause from obedient Republicans; they even gave Jared Kushner a standing ovation. Every few minutes, Trump told a story, and reached out into the audience like the host of The Price Is Right, telling people to come on down.

He started, of course, with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Just basking along with Team USA wasn’t enough. Trump soon announced that the goalie Connor Hellebuyck would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Normally, this honor is bestowed for a lifetime of achievement . . . .

And so it went, all night. Sometimes, the guests were meant to tug at the heart, such as when Trump recognized Erica Kirk, the wife of the murdered activist Charlie Kirk. Others were presented as ornaments meant to illustrate Trump’s successes: Enrique Marquez, a Venezuelan political prisoner freed after U.S. forces deposed the strongman Nicolas Maduro, was given a round of well-deserved applause. Trump also gave a shoutout to a woman whose IVF medications were now, he claimed, cheaper.

But no group received more attention than the U.S. military. Trump handed out two Purple Hearts (one posthumously), a Legion of Merit, and not one, but two Congressional Medals of Honor. Military awards that should have been treated with dignity and respect were placed on men like prizes, including a moment when Trump’s co-host, the First Lady, put one of the Medals of Honor around the neck of a 100-year-old fighter pilot.

Trump even had designated heels in the audience: the Democrats. He called them crazy, and accused them of impoverishing the nation. He dared them to stand up if they agreed with him that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” This stunt was obviously meant to force Democrats either to stand or boo or otherwise do something that Trump could exploit; instead, it merely resulted in several awkward seconds of a staring contest between the president and the Democrats in the chamber. Trump managed to bait Representative Ilhan Omar into shouting at him, but for the most part, he seemed genuinely irritated that the Democrats sat through his show in stony silence.

The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.

The largest American armada assembled since the second Gulf War is now encircling Iran. Trump never mentioned the buildup; instead he claimed that his one overriding interest was that Iran would forswear nuclear weapons forever. But the brief case he laid out was not for nonproliferation, but for regime change.

But if some of the address was a game show, much of it was a bloody Grand Guignol theater of horror stories, almost all about immigrants preying on the helpless and the innocent. Trump led into these anecdotes by starting with an accusation that the Somali community of Minnesota was scamming the state. He followed up with stories of murder and mayhem, . . . .

Trump tonight went far beyond what even the most self-indulgent presidents would have envisioned. Beset by scandal, facing multiple defeats in America’s courts, and hitting levels of unpopularity that would make Richard Nixon nod with empathy, he turned the State of the Union into a vulgar, populist carnival.

Trump made a great show of honoring a handful of U.S. military heroes. Meanwhile, thousands of young men and women are a world away, waiting for his orders to go to war. The president of the United States might have taken a moment tonight to tell their families why they’re out there, and what they’re supposed to do. But why bother? The show must go on.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem

With the Felon openly longing to be a dictator and the Republican Party welcoming even the ugliest elements of the far right into the party, the GOP's drift towards open fascism has intensified,  Indeed, within today's GOP even open admiration of Hitler is not a disqualification for not only party membership but leadership as well. Meanwhile too many old school Republicans cling to the fantasy that the GOP is the same party as in the 1980's or 1990's.  Nothing could be further from the truth and, as a lengthy piece at The Atlantic lays out, the Republican Party has a Nazi problem and, by extension, so does the nation as a whole.  The piece traces the rise of open anti-Semites in the GOP and the growing use of slightly revised Nazi memes in GOP talking points and propaganda (aided and abetted by Fox News and its imitators). In its quest to win at any cost and disregard of whom that goal has made political bedfellows, the GOP has both lost its moral compass and any sense of shame as to whom one is empowering. Throw the openly racist and totally immoral Felon into the mix and the descent to moral bankruptcy and acceptance of Nazi  devotees into the GOP became all too assured.  Here are column highlights and a description of what moral Americans must do:

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party.

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. . . . But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. . . . Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?  When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. . . . I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants . . .  .

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

[R]acism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States. . . . years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. . . . . Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods.

Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 A very distant cousin of mine.

The Supreme Court Delivers the Felon a Humiliating Defeat

The economy under the Felon continues to deteriorate with few new jobs created during 2025, consumer prices continuing to rise, and the USA had a record trade deficit - something the Felon's tariffs were supposed to end - and economic malaise being felt by a majority of Americans. Indeed, new polling indicates that 60% of Americans disapprove of the Felon and his policies. Even on immigration enforcement, a majority of Americans oppose the Felon's brutal and illegal actions which have violated literally thousands of judicial rulings. Then, of course, there is the Epstein scandal that shows no signs of going away despite the Felon's bald faced lie that he has been "completely exonerated."  Now, the heretofore complaint U.S. Supreme court has handed the Felon another humiliating defeat by ruling that his tariffs are illegal and cannot be imposed without action by Congress.  In typical lying and contemptuous form, the Felon has lashed out at the six justices ruling against him like a spoiled child and has spewed lies - what else is new? The ruling by SCOTUS is a victory for Americans and constitutional government and, with luck may be a turning point for the Court that seemingly belatedly realizes that its former rulings favorable to the Felon (which I strongly disagree with) have created a monster. Two pieces in The Atlantic look at the Courts rejection of the Felon's illegal tariffs. Here is a summation from one piece:

The ruling is a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, rule of law, and millions of American consumers and businesses harmed by these tariffs. . . . This decision spared America from a dangerous, unconstitutional path. Under [the Felon's] President Trump’s interpretation of the law, the president would have had nearly unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch. That undermines basic constitutional principles. The Framers of the Constitution had sought to ensure that the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization.

Here are longer excerpts for the second piece:

In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head. In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.

A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress. It does so for reasons that date back to English constitutional history: An executive who can tax without permission from elected representatives is on his way to becoming a tyrant.

[The Felon] President Trump has had lots of ideas for how to spend the money he collected without Congress. He has offered it to farmers. He has mused about direct cash payments to taxpayers. He has speculated about creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies. He has disregarded the fundamental principle that spending, like taxing, is a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president.

Now we may be on the verge of a regime-changing war against Iran. War-making is also supposed to be a congressional power—but there’s no sign that Trump will allow Congress to vote on his war. In the past, the ultimate check on the president’s war-making powers was Congress’s power over the purse. . . . . if Trump were allowed to tax without Congress, then he might reasonably conclude that he could fight wars without Congress.

Trump’s tariffs were advertised as a revenue source liberated from the restraints imposed by Article I of the Constitution. Had the Supreme Court upheld the tariffs, it would have wrought a constitutional revolution. Instead, the court quashed Trump’s scheme. Like every president before him, if he wants money—for an Iran war or any other purpose—he will have to ask Congress for it.

Trump’s theory was that an emergency-powers law passed in the 1970s allowed him to impose permanent revenue-raising tariffs on anyone for any reason. This argument was always far-fetched. The law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was part of the post-Watergate reform to reduce presidential emergency powers. The IEEPA reformed the Trading With the Enemy Act passed during World War I. President Franklin Roosevelt had used that law to ban most private ownership of gold bullion in 1933, which even supporters had to concede was a fantastic legal reach. After Watergate, Congress sought to restrain the president by limiting the IEEPA to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The law’s powers can be invoked only after a formal declaration of national emergency, and the word tariff appears nowhere among the powers conferred upon the president by the law.

Trump gets very impatient when he’s asked about “affordability.” You can understand why he squirms. The price increases Americans have felt in 2025 and 2026 can be blamed in no small part on Trump’s tariffs. Power bill up? Trump imposed a tariff on the equipment used to generate and transmit electricity. Six-pack of beer more expensive? Trump taxed the beer cans. Kids need new shoes? Trump’s tariffs raised the cost.

The ironic political question for 2026 is whether the U.S. Supreme Court acted in time to save Trump from himself. Whether or not it was the justices’ intention to help Trump, a generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout? Acceptance would be smart, but humiliating. Trump holds other legal means to disrupt international trade, some of which he used in his first term. But those powers have tighter legal limits than Trump wants. . . . Until and unless a future Congress acts to protect Americans from Trump protectionism, the outlook for U.S. prosperity and security will remain clouded.

While shadows dim the future, the sun shone today. U.S. stocks surged after Trump’s Supreme Court defeat. American consumers may soon feel the benefit. Liberated from this approach to economic warfare, relations with allies may recover some of their former cordiality. And unlike the case of Charles I, all of this was accomplished while allowing America’s president to lay his unsevered head on his pillow tonight.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty