Tea and Vitriol

Every culture on Earth has their version of the old tale "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," where a student of the mystic arts unleashes the Dark Forces in his master's absence and cannot exorcise them when they get out of control. Disney's "Fantasia" features a delightful retelling of that tale, with Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice. Unfortunately, for both the US and the world, The Donald has taken over that role. While The Donald IS a rodent, he is not nearly so loveable as Mickey Mouse. The effects have been nothing short of disastrous for everyone but The Donald, the Trump Crime Family, their cronies and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, who is The Donald's particular partner in crime. War crimes, that is. The world has seen The Donald unleash the Dark Forces when he sought to annex Canada and Greenland, when he threatened to withdraw from NATO, with his on and off again support for Ukraine, with his erratic imposition of illegal tariffs o...

The right extremist, neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland won 44% of the vote in Sachsen-Anhalt on Sunday. It was both feared AND expected. Sachsen-Anhalt has not fared well since German reunification in 1990. It is, in fact, the poorest of the German Länder. Neither have the other German Länder that comprised the former East Germany, which is where the AfD have made inroads in the past five years. The people there have felt let down by the government of the unified Germany, believing that they had better lives under the Russian puppet state that was Communist East Germany. Several people on German news programs have stated that at least there were jobs then. You might not have liked them, but at least you had them and got paid for them. That is one of the factors behind the AfD's rise in Eastern Germany, and especially on Sunday in Sachsen-Anhalt. Since German reunification, many of Sachsen-Anhalt's outdated factories were closed down. Others were absorbed by bigger companies i...

  Anyone who has ever visited an amusement park, a fun fair or traveling carnival has experienced the thrill of fun house mirrors. These mirrors are so crafted as to distort the images of the viewer into all sorts of weird shapes and sizes. But what happens when the person or object casting their reflections into such a mirror are already pathetic caricatures, like the US government? Does the mirror make their reflections look normal, or even worse? That is the question. Okay! We all know that The Donald is downright crazy! Because he is also the US president, he is downright dangerous. Even worse, as head of the Trump Crime Family, he has enriched them by billions of dollars at the taxpayers' expense, which is a good deal considering how most of his business deals and casinos went bankrupt before he ever even considered running for the presidency. Of course, the Democrats shriek about this, seeming to forget that the Clinton and Biden Crime Families enriched themselves to the tune...