Rich Explains

Average Worker Output  $150,000

Average Worker Income  $ 64,000

           Margin  $ 86,000

On the income part, I'm being a little more generous than Rich is being - but still

Who do you suppose is putting those margin dollars in their pockets?

Oops

When you mistake cruelty for strength, knee jerk reaction for critical thinking, and hyperbolic grandstanding for smart policy.

Texas built a floating wall of blade-studded, one-ton buoys to maim people trying to cross the Rio Grande, and this week that same cruelty came roaring back to bite the state that built it, when over a hundred of them broke loose in flooding and slammed straight into Laredo, shutting down the nation's number one trade port. Governor Abbott championed this as a signature piece of Operation Lone Star, brushing off warnings that the design was reckless.

This was entirely foreseeable. The Rio Grande International Study Center warned Laredo officials back in March, about four months ago, that flooding could snap the barriers free, and advocates say they had been sounding the alarm even longer. City leaders reportedly waved it off to stay in the federal government's good graces.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost. The Laredo customs district normally processes around $3.5 billion in goods each week, and any shutdown of its busiest crossing bleeds real money real fast, on top of the safety risk to residents downstream.

Update: The bridges were opened again after a brief closure.

But seriously - this is what we do now. It's the same old story from decades ago: Going to such great lengths trying to keep people out, will always eventually result in the realization that you're just putting yourself in a prison of your own making.

So oftentimes it happens

That we live our lives in chains

And we never even know

We have the key

What's the fuckin' point here? These people are risking everything to come here. All they want is their fair shot at a better life for themselves and their families.

Yes - control the borders. Try to make it all work better. And don't forget that in 2024, there was legislation that had full bipartisan support ready for markup and passage in both houses. But Trump took a dump on it because - and several members reported he said this straight out - he wanted the issue for his campaign.

And stupid MAGA people, in their stupid red hats, jumped up and down cheering for him.

Notes From The Fair

Been wondering how Trump manages to hang on to a 35% approval?

Wonder no more.

Wanna know how Trump got elected besides the help of Musk and Putin?

Look no further than here: ⤵️

This is how the average Trump voter actually thinks! 🚫 🧠 pic.twitter.com/bt4C5Nokhi

— Damaan, AKA 'Philly's Finest!' (@Damaan4u33) July 20, 2026

Schrödinger's Senator

I'm wondering if Beshear could go ahead and schedule the special election, and let the Republicans show cause why it shouldn't happen.

Mitch McConnell’s Aides Launch New Health Cover-Up

Mitch McConnell’s staff have declined to answer basic questions about what work he is doing—37 days after he was loaded into the back of an ambulance and vanished from public view.

His staff, led by $226,000-a-year longtime aide Terry Camack, refused to even say if the senator had spoken to any of them in recent days.

Their refusal comes two weeks after CNN’s MAGA contributor, Scott Jennings, claimed he had spoken to McConnell for close to 20 minutes about Iran, Ukraine, and the Senate race in Maine. Jennings claimed that McConnell was “at some point preparing to go back to work.”

But when confronted by the Daily Beast on what had happened to those claims, his staff offered no comment on when he would return to work.

Despite the silence, the Daily Beast has established that taxpayer funds are being spent on a semi-permanent guard on the Washington D.C. hospital where he was taken on June 14 after a 911 call which said he had apparently had a heart attack, was unconscious, and had received CPR.

The row of black Capitol Police unmarked SUVs sitting outside the George Washington University Hospital is now the nearest thing that exists to proof of life.

But they have done nothing to end a drip-drip of whispers that McConnell is in a vegetative state, brain-dead, or even secretly deceased while his staff cover it up. The staff also refused to comment on his cognitive state.

The Daily Beast has visited the hospital over the past few days and observed security vehicles sitting on the street near a driveway.

The McConnell team’s cover-up has also hit Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who has demanded answers about McConnell’s health status.

Beshear said that regardless of whether McConnell’s health is a personal matter, his prolonged inability to work raises legitimate questions about representation given the senator has now missed dozens of votes during his absence.

The Democratic governor is also facing a growing backlash within his own party to be more aggressive against McConnell.

“It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell. In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies—not state agencies—suggesting he’s passed,” Beshear said on Saturday.

The nearest thing to proof he is alive came on July 12, when his office released a photo and statement purporting to be of him and his wife, with a lengthy statement which the aides said was from him.

In the photo, the Kentucky Republican is sitting on what appears to be a hospital bed, dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt, beaming alongside his 73-year-old wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

But the image immediately sparked widespread skepticism, and then a flood of memes and AI-generated videos mocking it, including from high-profile MAGA figures who questioned its authenticity.

One image posted by a MAGA supporter swapped the faces of McConnell and his wife—“see how easy that is?” it read.

A separate video featured McConnell getting up from his hospital bed and doing an energetic dance in the hospital room.

The mockery was emblematic of the skepticism surrounding the Senator's health.

Another meme featured the senator being visited by Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and John Wayne—all of whom are dead.

“New photo just released of other friends visiting Mitch McConnell today,” it read. “He really looks great! Hang in there!”

In the accompanying statement, McConnell was quoted as saying that was “briefly unconscious” around the time he was first taken to the hospital and had undergone various tests to try to determine what led to his fall.

It said he was also treated for mild pneumonia and has been moved to a rehabilitation facility.

“My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages,” the statement read, adding that the senator was now “regaining my strength.”

But his ongoing silence has left observers speculating about whether he is genuinely alive, while his disappearance has also reignited a broader debate over the gerontocracy in Washington.

Before he was admitted to hospital in June, McConnell was regularly seen being wheeled around Capitol Hill in a wheelchair, having suffered various falls and spells of freezing in the middle of press conferences.

But at 84, he is far from the oldest member of Congress, which is often jokingly referred to as America’s most prestigious retirement home.

In the Senate, Republican elder Chuck Grassley is 92 and still voting. In the House, McConnell’s fellow Kentuckian Hal Rogers is 88, Democrat Maxine Waters is 87, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is serving her final term, is 86.

Amanda's Tuesday

Part Of The Plan

Tell me how it's not what the Plutocrats have had in mind all along.

Rich

Manly Men

Sarah nails it starting at about 12:15

Shades Of Vietnam

Treat the services like expendable toys, and you'll lose their votes for a generation or more.

These fuckin' idiots are tearing the US military apart.

Pentagon Withheld Dozens of U.S. Military Injuries in Iran War

Central Command is not required to release information about injured troops, especially when they quickly return to duty, a military official said.

In the week leading up to the Iranian attack on Friday that killed two U.S. soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes against U.S. forces in the country.

Those attacks injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters, according to several U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.

The episode is the latest example during the Iran conflict of the tension between what the Pentagon says is the need for operational security and the government’s obligation to inform the public about the conduct of the war.

In statements after airstrikes against Iranian military sites last week, U.S. Central Command said it was retaliating for Iran’s attacks against commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, never mentioning Iran’s strikes on bases in the region, including in Jordan.

Central Command is not required to release information about injured service members, especially when they quickly return to duty, a U.S. military official said.

Moreover, another U.S. military official added, why would the Pentagon divulge information that could help Iran zero in on its deadly ballistic missiles and drone attacks in Jordan and other bases in the Middle East where thousands of American troops are stationed?

Central Command has also stopped announcing how many sites in Iran it hits each day for the same reason, U.S. officials say.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that the military had not withheld or misrepresented U.S. casualties in the war. “Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action,” he said in a statement.

He pointed to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which he said was “regularly updated” with the latest information regarding dead and wounded U.S. troops. The publicly available site offers aggregate figures, but does not include information on specific mass-casualty attacks of the sort that have occurred in Jordan over the last week.

“Cherry-picking raw numbers without context paints a deliberately misleading and incomplete picture,” Mr. Parnell added.

In the days since the collapse of a fragile truce, the Pentagon has provided little information about the American military strategy after nearly five months of war. The last major Pentagon briefing on the war was in early May.

In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.

The subject of American casualties in the war is similarly sensitive. The deaths of two Army soldiers in Jordan on Friday and another service member in northern Iraq bring to 17 the total number of American military personnel killed since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Feb. 28.

The Pentagon’s casualty reporting protocols call for publicly identifying deceased service members only after 24 hours have passed since next of kin were notified. The names of troops wounded in action are not typically released.

In a statement on Saturday, Central Command said four American service members wounded in Friday’s attack were taken to Jordanian hospitals and had been discharged. More American troops received minor injuries and had returned to duty, the statement said, but it did not specify how many.

And the statement did not mention service members injured in the three previous attacks in Jordan last week.

In a brief phone call with NewsNation, President Trump said the troops died “in service of our country” and reiterated the war’s primary goal of “never allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media on Saturday that the loss of the two U.S. soldiers would stiffen American resolve.

According to the Pentagon’s casualty reporting site, 427 U.S. service members have been injured in the Iran conflict. The site counts 14 troops killed in hostile and nonhostile incidents. The online death figures have not been updated to include the deaths the Pentagon announced over the weekend.

Mr. Parnell said that the figures for wounded troops include “everything from minor sprained ankles during routine training to incidents entirely unrelated to combat operations.”

In previous administrations, the Pentagon has usually delayed providing any details on injured service members until family notifications were completed. During the Biden administration, the Pentagon typically reported the number of service members injured in attacks by Iran-backed militias on U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq.

More than 1,700 Iranian civilians have died in the war, according to estimates.

Embarrassing

Trump is a Proximity Freak. He has no discernible talent or distinguishing accomplishments of his own, so he has to suck the vibes off of people who are talented and accomplished, or he just manufactures accolades as a tribute to himself.

• My uncle taught at MIT, so that makes me smart too
• I rubbed elbows with rich and famous people, so that makes me as great as they are 
• I think I'll give myself a Medal Of Honor
• I'll invite that lady from Venezuela and cop her Nobel Peace Prize
• I got the people in Palm beach to rename their airport after me
• I've ordered the Treasury Dept to mint a new dollar coin with my face on it
• My signature will be on all the money - because I'm great
• Wait'll you see the Arch of Trump - it'll prove my greatness to all the world for all time

Cup crazy: Trump hijacks World Cup glory in a spectacle historians won’t forget

Donald Trump refused to leave the World Cup stage. He clung to the trophy as though it belonged to him. The players celebrated around him while the cameras searched in vain for an adult willing — or able — to explain to the president of the United States that the ceremony wasn’t about him.

It happened in plain sight. It was real — yet it remains almost impossible to believe.

The psychological fragility on display was breathtaking. It was narcissism stripped of disguise, vanity without inhibition, neediness elevated to statecraft. Historians will study the footage because it captures, in a handful of seconds, something speeches and books can’t: a man so consumed by the hunger for adulation that he can’t surrender the spotlight, even when the world’s greatest athletes have earned it.

There are images that explain an era better than any speech. This was one of them.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico and Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, looked less like honored guests than reluctant hostages, unwilling participants in a spectacle they neither chose nor could escape. They trailed as far behind Donald Trump as protocol and dignity would allow, instinctively placing distance between themselves and the strange gravity of the moment, as though proximity itself carried risk.

Trump shuffled ahead, slightly stooped, moving with the slow, inexorable certainty of a lava flow — impossible to hurry, impossible to redirect, consuming every ounce of attention in its path. It was a procession of malice wrapped in vanity, instability wrapped in power, all bundled into a slovenly suit and Florsheim shoes straining around the swollen ankles of the American Nero.

There was something almost Shakespearean in the grotesquery of it. The leader of the world’s most powerful democracy behaved not as a statesman, but as an aging monarch who no longer distinguishes between the state and himself. Every trophy is his trophy. Every triumph is his triumph. Every stage is his stage.

Roald Dahl gave the world Veruca Salt, the spoiled child who believed every prize belonged in her hands. Lewis Carroll imagined the Mad Hatter, imprisoned inside his own absurdity. Donald Trump has accomplished something neither author attempted. He has fused both characters into a single living performance while occupying the presidency of the United States.

Then came the boos.

The stadium rejected him. It mocked him. It reviled him.

It no longer mattered.

There was a time when applause and condemnation occupied different chambers of the human heart. There was a time when shame retained the power to restrain conduct and public humiliation could provoke reflection. Donald Trump crossed that frontier years ago. He no longer distinguishes between admiration and contempt because each satisfies the same craving. To be cheered or jeered is irrelevant so long as the lights remain fixed upon him. The crowd’s hatred has become merely another form of attention, and attention is the only currency he has ever truly valued.

President Norma Desmond has reached his final cruising altitude.

There’s no longer a Donald Trump who performs for an audience. There’s only Trump performing for Trump. The man has been consumed by the character. The character has been devoured by the caricature.

The cartoon has swallowed the man.

He now exists as self-parody made flesh — a photographic joke requiring no caption, a punchline that no longer needs a setup because his mere appearance completes it. Satire has become obsolete. Exaggeration has become impossible. Reality has outrun parody.

This is the final destination of narcissism. It isn’t merely vanity. It’s the obliteration of the self beneath an invented persona until nothing authentic remains. The individual disappears inside the performance. The mask fuses to the face. Every moment becomes an audition. Every stage becomes compulsory. Every camera becomes indispensable.

The tragedy isn’t simply personal. It’s national.

The presidency was created to embody constitutional restraint, republican virtue, and public service. Donald Trump has transformed it into an instrument of perpetual self-validation. He mistakes visibility for leadership, celebrity for greatness, dominance for strength, and spectacle for achievement. The office no longer elevates the man. The man diminishes the office.

History has a merciless eye for such moments.

Long after today’s arguments have dissolved into the fog of forgotten headlines, this image will remain. A lonely, grasping figure refusing to release a trophy he didn’t win. World champions celebrating around him while he inserts himself into their triumph. Foreign leaders hanging back as though they had wandered unwillingly into someone else’s fever dream. A president incapable of understanding that the greatest office in the world confers responsibility, not ownership.

The footage will endure because it distilled an entire political age into a handful of unforgettable minutes. It required no commentary. It needed no narration. The picture explained itself.

The ceremony belonged to the champions.

Only one man believed it belonged to him.