Dispatches from Vilnius

One of the reasons we find ourselves in the current situation where Trump has demanded an FBI probe into who stopped the escalator on his way to give a speech to the UN General Assembly is because people who knew better voted for him anyway.  If " Escalatorgate " wasn't bad enough, Trump gave one of the most meandering, fact-challenged speeches in UN history.  Not even Hugo Chavez sounded more bonkers when he called George Bush " the devil " in his infamous 2006 speech to the UN. Although former Venezuelan Pres. Chavez wasn't far off. Why voters in "America" keep making the same mistake over and over again is a real mystery? Bush was bad enough. He drug the US into two wars over 9/11 and left the country in economic shambles with the worst recession since the mid 1970s.  You'd think Americans would never vote Republican again after that but they gave Obama all of two years before voting in a Republican House of Representatives in 2010.  They ...

Kamala's new book is getting a lot of attention even before it hits the shelves.  It seems to have befuddled Dems with many saying it has ruined her political career.  Judging by the tone she has set, it seems she has no plans to run for office of any kind, passing on the California governor's race in 2026, where she was considered the front runner, although many Dems were expressing their reservations .   After the election, many pundits and politicians were foisting the blame on her for the loss, especially given she was able to amass such a huge war chest in 107 days.  However, there was plenty of blame to go around, mostly on the media for focusing so heavily on Trump in the waning days of the campaign that Harris got almost no air time. The enthusiasm that had propelled her campaign to that point was gone and she had a very had time getting her message out.   The conservative media treated her as an imposter, claiming she was a DEI vice-president...

I only really knew Charlie Kirk through South Park.  When I heard he got shot in Utah, I thought it was a joke or at worst he staged it to try to give himself some cred like Trump got for that shooting in Pennsylvania last year.  Next day I heard Young Charlie was dead and that it wasn't a joke but rather a day of national mourning, at least for the MAGA faithful.  The Chief Magster even ordered flags flown at half mast to honor the "the truly great American patriot," although it oddly coincided with the commemoration of 9/11. I suppose in Magaland Charlie is a patriot, but everywhere else he was just seen as a loudmouth bigot with a podcast. The episode has since been pulled from Comedy Channel so as not to show any offense to the fallen conservative ideologue.  My biggest worry is the fallout from the incident as Magsters worldwide have sworn vengeance , although the assassin will probably turn out to be one of their own.  I was shocked to learn how far Char...