For Barack Obama, this summer’s been one long slog.
Between Congress, woes and scandals, he should’ve moved to Prague.
But there’s nothing like a terrier
To make the White House merrier,
And there’s nothing Americans love more than a presidential dog.
Left: Sutter coaches Gov. Brown, 74, doing push-ups; right, Reagan used as a prop intended to humanize Gov. Scott
You can tell a lot about a person’s character by the way they treat animals. For millions of dog lovers, for example, learning that Mitt Romney had once decided to force his Irish setter Seamus to ride in a kennel strapped to the roof of his car on a 12-hour family vacation, even after Seamus got sick in the kennel, exposed a man whose life of privilege had left him with a deficit of compassion and common decency.
The revelations this week that Gov. Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, got rid of a dog that appears to have been acquired in 2010 as a prop for his campaign for governor is similarly a window into Scott’s character. And it stands in stark contrast with the the story of another big-state governor elected in 2010, Jerry Brown, and his dog, Sutter, who has become an unofficial mascot in California since the governor took office.
Why does Elon Musk get to decide fed workers’ fates?
We didn’t elect him to be the United States’ Potentate!
Let men of good will firmly resolve
That Musk is the problem he aims to solve,
Because the fact is, DOGE is indeed the Deep State.
“We are witnessing an extraordinarily broad chilling effect in American society. It is not just what you want to say, but what you are allowed to ask. It is about both formal government actions and informal threats, with threats of professional ruin or even violence from the President’s supporters. It is about both censorship and self-censorship. It is about a sense of collective fear.”
“Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms.”
“If they want to try to annihilate Ontario, I will do everything — including cut off their energy with a smile on my face. …They rely on our energy, they need to feel the pain. They want to come at us hard, we’re going to come back twice as hard.”
— “Speaking Monday at a mining convention in downtown Toronto, Ontario Premier Doug Ford doubled down on threats to cut electricity exports to U.S. border states if the tariffs go through,” the Toronto Sun reports.
“The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin. Every single day you hear from the National Security Advisor, from the President of the United States, from his entire national security team, Kremlin talking points.”
“America’s abrupt turn from moral beacon and defender of the free world is unsurprising, given the fundamental immorality of the Trump administration. If you have the morality of a gangster, you will behave like a gangster.”
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Wednesday announced nearly three dozen deregulatory moves that he said would spur the U.S. economy by rolling back rules that have unfairly burdened industry, reported the Associated Press. Many of the moves would affect landmark regulations aimed at protecting clean air and water.2>
“The U.S. debt and deficit problem worsened during President Donald Trump’s first month in office, as the budget shortfall for February passed the $1 trillion mark even though the fiscal year is not yet at the halfway point,” CNBC reports.
The U.S. had ~172,000 layoffs in February, up 245% from January and the most in a single month since the Covid pandemic in 2020, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s also the most job cuts in the month of February since 2009, during the financial crisis. More than a third of those layoffs (~62,000) came from the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal headcount reduction. But it wasn’t just federal workers who were laid off: Retail was also hit hard, losing nearly 40,000 roles. Per CNBC, the sector has lost six times more jobs so far this year than it did in the same period last year.
“President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation,” Reuters reports. “The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration.”