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Give 'em hell, Joe!

You have to hand it to the artless dodger.  Trump managed to get an insurance company to put up a bond for the 83 million he owes E. Jean Carroll in a defamation settlement so that he can appeal the decision.  Now for someone to come up with the 435 million he owes New York in the fraud settlement.  He already has been trying to move assets out of the state so that New York officials can't seize them but Trump Tower is pretty hard to move.   Meanwhile, the list of infamous persons who feel that Trump has been wronged grew this week to include conspiracy theory emeritus Oliver Stone .  It's rather ironic as just four short years ago, Stone described Trump as a " mad King Lear ," noting that there is something "vastly wrong with his ego."  Sounds like a movie is starting to swirl around in Stone's addled mind. The list of distractions doesn't stop there.  RFK Jr. announced to the world that he will be presenting his Vice-Presidential nominee on March
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Middle Out

I nearly spit my coffee on my laptop when I read Musk was suing OpenAI for abandoning its original mission of using artificial intelligence to benefit humanity and now churning out ChatGPT in the name of profit.  At the same time, he jumped all over MacKenzie Bezos for "virtue signaling" in that she has given so much of her divorce settlement to charity.  He thinks independent rich women will destroy Western civilization as we know it.  What's with this guy? Kara Swisher is supposed to elucidate us on the inner workings of Elon's addled mind and those of other Silicon Valley tech barons in her new Burn Book .  She apparently admired most of these guys at one time but has since become repulsed by them in their search for virtual Valhalla.  Seems like every week you learn about some new drug Musk has dipped into on Joe Rogan or some other chat show.  There's a story that he got all the Tesla board members high before getting them to agree on a $55 billion pay pac

D'ohvember!

So Trump stays on the ballot in Colorado.  Not that it really matters as the only primary he has lost so far is DC, which in his addled mind he lost on purpose .  More interesting is that Nikki Haley withdrew her pledge to support the Republican nominee, leaving pundits to speculate what that means.  Will she run as an independent if she loses the nomination and try to pull of the "Murkowski maneuver?"  If you aren't familiar with this rare fete, I will elucidate you.   In 2010, Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent Republican senator from Alaska, found herself "teabagged" in the primaries.  She had run afoul of the movement that sprung up in the wake of John McCain's 2008 loss.  Sarah Palin became the de-facto leader of the Tea Party after that failed bid, or "Mama Grizzly" as she liked to be called.  She and Lisa hated each other.  The animosity stemmed from Sarah's rather limited understanding of what it meant to be governor of Alaska. Sarah pushed

Trumped Out

There's been a lot of consternation in the polling and rightly so.  It is hard to imagine Trump consistently polling ahead of Biden given the performances he has given on the campaign trail, let alone the pending trials which keep getting deferred as his legal eagles argue for "presidential immunity."  The Supreme Court voted to hear the case despite a unanimous 57-page opinion from a federal appeals court that made it explicitly clear he had no such immunity after leaving the Oval Office.  With so many red flags Trump should be lagging far behind in the polls, but as Sarah Jones and Jason Easley point out , the media (in this case the New York Times) is determined to make this election a "horse race." It reminds me a lot of the past midterm elections when most news outlets and prognosticators were predicting a red wave.  538, which bills itself as an objective analysis of the polls, projected that the Republicans would not only take the House by an overwhelmin

A Razor's Edge

Either LP has a very bad sense of geography or her timing is way off.  She was scheduled to perform in Kaunas next week but her concert was abruptly cancelled when she proudly showed off a hoodie  she received from adoring Russian fans on the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.   To be fair the American singer, who is more famous for the songs she has written for Lady Gaga and Beyonce, has shown her support of Ukraine, but the hoodie literally raised a red flag in a country where any symbol of the former Soviet Union and Russian aggression is banned.  I suppose the hoodie falls outside of the ban but has not been well received in the media.    There is a lot of consternation right now as Ukraine is suffering losses along the front line and worry has grown that Russia will mobilize forces along the Baltic borders.  Putin has been more aggressive lately with faux elections coming up.  He's had his "justice department" put numerous Baltic political leaders on th

Report from the Front Line

There were actually Super Bowl watch parties at some of the local pubs in Vilnius but the game came on well past my bedtime.  I checked in on my cellphone when my dog first woke me up at 5:30 this morning and saw that the Chiefs had pulled off another nail-biter.  I imagine that had the alpha males all in a rage.  No doubt the conspiracy theories are swirling on X. X has become pretty much like Parler and Truth Social, littered with alt-right conspiracies and now TCN on X.  Tucker Carlson gained almost as much attention as Taylor Swift with his interview of Putin last week.  Excerpts have been shown everywhere including Lithuanian news.  Daina told me to hush when the clips appear as she wants to hear what Putin is saying in Russian.  It's usually quite different from what is translated into English and other languages.   Calling Tucker a " useful idiot " is actually a compliment.  Chris Wallace was closer to the mark by calling him an " eager puppy ."  The guy

I'll be back

Not surprisingly the Republican House refuses to bring the Bipartisan Senate bill on border security to the floor, given it is the only card they have to play in November.  "Gym" Jordan said as much in this feisty interview .  Trump has become the de-facto House speaker, controlling the ultra-slim majority with bellicose threats from the campaign trail.  Republican US Representatives know their political fate lies in the little hands of the Donald, who controls the electorate in most of their conservative districts, including the figurehead speaker Mike Johnson from Shreveport, Louisiana.  Republicans firmly believe they can still play this issue in the general election even if their stonewalling is on full display. The border security bill was being done to free up aid packages to Ukraine and Israel, which have been on hold for several months now.  This has frustrated lobbying groups, which included a recent delegation of Eastern European parliamentarians pleading Congress

The kiss seen around the world

I have no stake in the Super Bowl but I would kind of like to see San Francisco win.  Not because I'm against Swifties, but I like the Brock Purdy story and how Kyle Shanahan has put the 49ers together.  Reminds me a lot of the Seahawks team Pete Carroll built in the early teens.  Yet, I wouldn't bet against Kansas City after pulling off two big road wins to return to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years. The Chiefs were good before Taylor Swift became the defining feature of the team.  All year long we saw the effect she not only had on the team but the NFL as a whole.  Everyone was talking about Taylor and her relationship with Travis Kelce.  We've literally watched that relationship reach full bloom with Taylor mouthing " I love you " after the Chiefs won the AFC Championship, and Travis giving her a great big kiss.   For the most part the NFL has loved it, as she has brought a spike in viewership and introduced a legion of her fans to the game.  St

White Racism 101

Nice to see a professor and a university standing up to DeSantis.  The Florida governor has gone out of his way to pitch a "colorblind society," eliminating courses from the AP curriculum that present race and gender identification.  At Florida Gulf Coast University, Ted Thornhill is being quite blunt about it, teaching a course called " White Racism ," in which he lays out the cold, hard facts as to how white Americans have created a system of racism that continues to this day.  He only has to point at his governor to prove it. His central argument is that many Whites believe they live in a post-racial society thanks to Civil Rights legislation and the election of Barack Obama as president.  Yet, there is still so much discrimination in society, much of it institutionalized, making it even more difficult for persons of color to get a fair shake.  Everyday we see examples of this, yet this notion of a "colorblind society" has permeated the cultural narrat

I'm Just Ken

The Oscar controversies trumped the New Hampshire primary this week.  People were more upset that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie got snubbed for Oscars than they were Trump winning another primary.  It wasn't like Barbie got shut out.  Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera both received supporting actor nominations, but the snubs were slaps in the face for a movie that pulled in nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion Trump would win the Granite State.  He was polling more than 20 percent ahead of his nearest challenger.  Yet, Nikki scored almost 45% of the vote. Of course this didn't stop him from  celebrating his "yuge" victory , urging his former UN ambassador to accept defeat before he trounces her in her home state of South Carolina.  He even had SC Senator Tim Scott behind him chanting USA! USA! USA!  As if he had won a gold medal in the Olympics. Meanwhile,  Biden won  without his name even being on the ballot, or even campaigning in

Say it isn't so, Nikki

I always thought the Civil War was a pretty easy subject to tackle, especially if you regard yourself as an American citizen.  Apparently, it is more difficult for those who live in the South.  It seems they still haven't gotten over losing the war.  But, Nimarata"Nikki" Haley is different.  Her parents are both immigrant Sikhs from India.  You would think she would have no Southern identification, yet she grew up in South Carolina and seems to have absorbed the "Lost Cause" hook, line and sinker.  She got a big F at a rally when asked, What was the cause of the Civil War?   I grew up in the South too but I learned pretty quickly that the root cause of the war was slavery.  You'd hear these constant arguments about states' rights but the right they were talking about was to continue to have slaves while the rest of the country moved toward a free market economy.  The industrial revolution was in full bloom when the Civil War broke out in 1861.  Unfortuna