Trump's first Grand Prix DC race draws instant ridicule: 'Clowns need attention'

Bennito L. Kelty
August 22, 2026 

RAW STORY

The site of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix IndyCar series race in Washington D.C., U.,S., August 22, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz

President Donald Trump's IndyCar race in Washington, D.C., drew early criticism and mockery as cars were still making their first laps.

On Saturday, drivers started doing practice, qualifying, and other preliminary races for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, which Trump touted as D.C.'s first-ever IndyCar race. The marquee race, which Trump is expected to attend, will start on Sunday, but the negative reviews started coming in as the drivers raced on bumpy roads, and critics called out the administration for organizing the unsolicited event.

"Turning the National Mall into a race track for the Freedom 250 is a reckless spectacle that puts public spaces at risk because clowns need attention," blasted speaker and advocate Khary Penebaker.

Progressive political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen lamented, "They'll give us literally anything other than healthcare."

"Anyone who has ridden a bicycle in Washington, DC, could tell you this is a terrible idea," activist Alex Palombo wrote in response to a post by NASCAR racer and GOP congressional candidate Jerrod Sessler that noted the "VERY bumpy" track.


"No one in DC is happy about this," journalist Aaron Parnas added.


"August 2026. The streets are now a racetrack," lamented veteran and political commentator Mike Nelson.

Reacting to a post touting the event, Topher Spiro, a senior fellow at American Progress, asked, "Why do you think DC residents want anything to do with this? How much did this promotion cost?"

Reacting to a video from the track, author Erin Page joked, "I have genuinely driven faster through DC, come on now."


"This is any driver from the DMV area," writer Ashley Reese agreed.

"Now just add some MD drivers for the full DC experience," added writer Joe Flood.

Pollster Jake Rubenstein noted that the event is "not packed. But all the people seeing the actual track are blocked by the trees."

 

Potentially dangerous problem flagged ahead of Trump’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix

Alexander Willis
August 22, 2026 
RAW STORY


Aug 22, 2026; Washington, D.C., USA; A.J. Foyt Enterprises driver Caio Collet (4) races past the U.S. Capitol during practice for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix on the street circuit of National Mall. Mandatory Credit: Amber Searls-Imagn Images

Just hours ahead of President Donald Trump’s IndyCar race in Washington, D.C., NBC News’ Sahil Kapur flagged a potentially dangerous problem that could pose a risk to drivers.

Dubbed the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the race has been touted by Trump as D.C.’s first-ever IndyCar race, with the president expected to attend. Drivers hit the course Saturday for practice and qualifying races, but as flagged by Fox Sports, already ran into trouble. A bump in the course sent a number of racers into a runoff area after briefly losing control of their vehicles, as seen in a video compilation shared by “IndyCar on Fox.”

“It’s not an authentic DC street track without bumps!” wrote Kapur, NBC News’ senior national political reporter, in a social media post on X Saturday night. “That said, this is a big one in a flat-out section that caused a bunch of IndyCar drivers problems today – and will be a thing in tomorrow’s race.”

Trump’s big race has already received scrutiny from countless critics, some of whom called the event a “terrible idea” given D.C.’s “very bumpy” roads.

Even former NASCAR driver Jerrod Sessler, a Trump-aligned ex-congressional candidate who lost his primary race earlier this month, warned that the race could pose serious issues for drivers.

“The BUMPS are most certainly going to be the talk of the Freedom 250 in DC,” Sessler wrote in a social media post on X. “The track is VERY bumpy! Not just bumps but cars jumping off the ground sort of bumps!”

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix marks the first-ever IndyCar street race held in the nation's capital, run on a 1.66-mile, seven-turn temporary circuit weaving past the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument. Trump formally established the race through a Jan. 30, 2026, executive order directing the Departments of Transportation and Interior to designate a race route through the National Mall and surrounding city streets, in honor of the United States Semiquincentennial.

‘Appalling and Fundamentally Dishonest’: Ruffalo Rejects Antisemitism Charges by Paramount Amid Merger Warning

“Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues,” said the Avengers actor and social justice activist, “not step back or concede.”


LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: Mark Ruffalo attends the "Crime 101" UK gala screening at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on January 28, 2026 in London, England.
Photo by Simon Ackerman/Getty Images

Jon Queally
Aug 23, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Mark Ruffalo, the actor known worldwide for both his role as the Incredible Hulk in the Avengers movie franchise as well as his work as a dedicated humanitarian and voice for social justice, did not back down Saturday after his criticism of the pending merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. was cast as antisemitic by executives at Paramount, largely owned by billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son, David.

While Ruffalo has been outspoken in his opposition to the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal for months—warning like many other critics that further consolidation by such media behemoths will hurt consumers, squeeze workers in the entertainment industry, minimize the range of viewpoints and creativity available, and further entrench right-wing control of the nation’s media system—what apparently sparked the accusation against him was the recent sharing of a years-old video clip of Paramount board member Safra Catz discussing “really profoundly scary technologies” that Oracle, which offers software and database services and the company upon which Larry Ellison built his vast wealth, provided to the Israeli military over recent years.

While the Instagram post Ruffalo shared has expired, the clip of Catz has been circulating on time for quite some time, seen as evidence of the close and well-documented ties that Oracle has had with the Israeli military:



In Ruffalo’s post, in which he reportedly warned that the Ellisons were “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world,” he also made reference to the genocide in Gaza being carried out by the Israeli military as well as the apartheid under which Palestinians live in the Occupied West Bank.

“This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary.”

Noting Catz’s comments in the video about Oracle, Ruffalo said, “This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition.” And the “really profoundly scary technologies” that Catz mention, he continued “will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”

In apparent reaction to Ruffalo’s post, which Variety characterized as the actor going “scorched earth on Paramount-Warner Bros. merger,” a spokesperson for Paramount issued a statement on Saturday saying that the company is “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind—and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”

But in a response to these accusation of antisemitism on Saturday, Ruffalo issued a new post on social media. It reads in full:
The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.

This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.

Commentators on social media also came to Ruffalo’s defense, calling Paramount’s accusations nothing more than a smear against well-founded criticisms of Oracle’s business model, the crimes of the Israeli government, and warnings about what powerful, right-wing billionaires like the Ellison’s could do with what could become one of the largest media corporations on the planet.

“Despicable to call Ruffalo antisemitic,” said John Abrams, an entertainment editor. “Hi, I’m Jewish. I will be the one to tell you when something is antisemitic, you dishonest clowns. It is not antisemitic to decry Israel’s crimes. In fact, it is our moral obligation—as Jews, and as human beings.”

Journalist Mehdi Hassan called the accusations “truly cynical, shameless, and dangerous.”



“The Israel crybully lobby will try, as they always do,” wrote author and media critic Adam Johnson, “to make an example out of Ruffalo because he had the temerity and integrity to note the Ellisons’ open advocacy and financial support for a military every major human rights group on earth had determined committed genocide.”

“My unsolicited advice,” Johnson continued. “Don’t give these cynical assholes an inch. Don’t accept their ‘antisemitism’ shrieking as good faith.”

Noting that “Ellison put out a press release EXPLICITLY BOASTING about how his Paramount purchase would be good for Israel and his financial support for the IDF,” Johnson argued that somebody “cannot do this THEN CRY ANTISEMITISM when they are held responsible for the actions of the state and military they support.”

OPINION

'Start doing your damn jobs': Editor issues furious letter to the press

D. Earl Stephens 

August 15, 2026 

ALTERNET

Dear Mainstream Media,

Please sit down and shut up, while I have a word with you.

Today in America, tired, desperate sailors are jumping off aircraft carriers, masked government agents armed with guns and cattle prods are murdering and caging innocent people, proverbial and real wrecking balls are battering our government offices and landmarks; our national parks are being mauled by bulldozers, our air and water is intentionally being poisoned, and our endangered wildlife is being slaughtered; life-saving vaccines are being shelved, while measles are making a comeback, science is under mass attack, wars and more wars are cropping up with no end in sight, OUR so-called Justice Department, aided and abetted by a bought-and-paid-for Radical Right Supreme Court is torching the rule of law, while protecting the very worst among us; voting rights are being assaulted right out in the open, a money-laundering operation is underway in OUR White House, bigotry and more bigotry is being heaped upon our children, and the torrent of lies coming from that White House is drowning out what is left of the truth.


Oh, and everything costs too much in America these days. EVERYTHING.

So let me stop there, while my keyboard cools, my readers wipe the sweat from their worried brows, and I ask you this:


WHY can’t you take a day off — JUST ONE STINKING DAY — from your sheer incompetence and report these things, and JUST THESE THINGS? It is absolutely staggering what the good people of America are being forced to endure on an hourly basis right now.

Are you even living in the same country we are???

We are a nation under siege by an authoritarian regime with the most powerful — albeit abused — military in the world, and it is almost impossible to see how we survive it unless everybody is clear-eyed about what we are up against.


That is your job.

How is it the most serious homegrown attack on America since the Civil War STILL isn’t grabbing every headline, every day???

Because here’s the thing, you self-important clowns, if this attack continues apace, we are done. Those are the stakes right now.


If your job is to report on the stories that most affect your readership, listeners and viewers (it is), how is it that this attack isn’t getting every bit of your attention?

What in God’s name are you talking about in your editorial meetings each day?

And I don’t need to hear breathless reporting about what Democrats are doing or aren’t doing right now (that is merely a sidebar), only what has been done by the most lawless administration (regime) in American history by far.

Go ahead, point to one administration that is even remotely comparable to this one. They are battering America into dust. And they aren’t apologizing for it, they are doubling down on it.


WHEN will you, our free press, provide the necessary situational awareness and information our citizenry so desperately needs, so that they can properly arm themselves against an authoritarian monster, who doesn't give a damn about them?

And if you are already trying to dismiss this as nothing but a scalding rant from an old, cranky newspaperman who needs more sleep, go right ahead, but I am right about all of this, and you would do well to listen to it, because millions of people out there are scared to death, and have been waiting years for these things to be said.

So what the hell is wrong with you?

Are you really being paid off by the regime to ignore this story?


Is it greed?

Do they own you?

Are you scared? Is that it, you’re scared …?

Are you simply incompetent, and don’t know how to prosecute journalism, and how to order and play stories based on importance?


My God, it has gotten so bad, just weeks ago you were actually wining and dining the guy who wants to end you.

Do you see how terrible that looks?

You are coming off right now as pathetic failures, and slobbering all over a profession many of us gave our lives to.

You need to get it together right now — RIGHT NOW, because we are out of time.

Donald Trump is a rotting, sick old man who can’t even stay awake anymore. He’s exhausted to the point where he isn’t even pretending to care about the country and people he is openly raping each day.

His only remaining goal in what remains of his miserable, destructive life is to make as much money as he can, and destroy everything and everybody around him, who won’t help him do it.

I want you to read that again, too, because it is indisputable that this is what is happening right now.

Are you going to report this at all — much less with the urgency it demands? Because if Joe Biden or Barack Obama, our ANY president in America’s history, had pulled this, you’d be reporting it as a national emergency, and you’d be right to do so.

You’d be calling for their immediate removal.

It would be 24/7 news, because there isn’t a bigger story than this man’s attack on America.

Trump is a sick, rabid dog who when not spending his waking hours counting his money, playing golf and hiding in food trucks, is marking his territory all over Washington. What is happening at the Kennedy Center right now is just obscenely demented.

Who does this?

Dictators, that’s who.

Are you going to start calling him one, or are you hellbent on tucking the word “president” in front of the name of this ignorant, stupid man, who I guarantee you has never read the Bill of the Rights, and couldn’t name more than a handful of Amendments in our Constitution.

He is literally attacking museums, and rewriting our history right out in the open.

Hell, it’s gotten so bad that this sickly old man has even given up on caring what he looks like. I mean he used to shove his ugly face in the oven each morning, so it got that certain orange sheen he likes, and made sure the dead ferret on his head was puffed up just so.

Now he just looks like his mother shortly before her death. Are you seeing this? He looks absolutely ridiculous.

His health is abysmal. You know that, right?

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His ankles are grotesquely swollen, his little, chubby black and blue hands look like they are going to fall off his wrists, and he spends more time at the hospital than an emergency room nurse.

If you think I am being petty right now, go back and read what you were saying about Joe Biden, particularly in the wake of his debate performance. Trump gives these types of performances DAILY.

And at the end of each day of his pontificating, lying, attacking, and taking whatever he can, he heads off to his empty bedroom in the White House where guys like Marco Rubio, JD Vance and Stephen Miller towel him off, so he can be alone with his happy meal and nuclear-powered cell phone, and type absolutely insane things to the world that barely even get a mention by you guys anymore, because you’ve made the editorial decision to normalize it.

And speaking of normalizing … why aren’t you spending time holding the feckless, abhorrent, mouth-breathing Republicans to account for their cover of all this treason, because at the end of the day, that is what it is.

It’s that bad in America right now, and we won’t survive two more years of this. I assure you that many of the people reading this often wonder if we will survive two more hours of it.

The traitor, Trump, has only been in power for 19 months, has 29 to go, and for anybody who truly loves their country, it is almost impossible to process. The damage he has done has already been catastrophic.

This means the opposition better have one humdinger of an election in November that Trump will most assuredly continue to attack, or the next 29 months might as well be the next 290 months, because America as we used to know it — a decent but flawed place — will be long gone, and replaced by something you’d see in Moscow, which was probably the plan all along.

And still I read things that insinuate that both parties are basically the same, while you do your stupid horse race thing. Here’s where I really want to grab you, and shake you until your eyeballs rattle.

I’ll be the first to tell you, and have, that the Democratic Party is flawed, and hasn’t done enough in their own right, to fight off this attack. But they have never openly attacked our country and done this kind of damage. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every good thing that has come along in my long lifetime is thanks to those hapless Democrats, who actually fix economies and don’t break them.

Go ahead, look that up. Then do something crazy like report it.

Democrats fight for people’s rights, instead of attacking them.

You need to start doing your damn jobs, MSM. If you need more suggestions, call me. I’d be glad to talk, and if necessary slap some sense into you, because right now I’d fire 80 percent of you if I could.

To those of you who are doing the good work, thank you. To the rest of you who are quietly working away for chump change in our local communities and keeping an eye on the town hall, the schools and the ball fields, you rock. I’ve been there, and you are doing vitally important work.

To the rest of you so-called journalists suffocating the news inside our Beltway, stop being so pathetic, and start doing your damn jobs.

Because if you don’t, when this teetering country falls, there will only be one word left to describe you: COMPLICIT.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Impeachment or Prison?

Joseph Natoli

 July 17, 2026

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Photograph Source: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States – CC BY 2.0

“This was about staying out of prison.”

– Haberman and Swan (Regime Change) as to why Trump ran in 2024

Whether we impeach or imprison (or both) Donald J. Trump would be a first step if we are to return to a struggling path of an electoral, Constitutional, democratic order we recognized on this 250^th July 4^th.

Trump’s presidencies have taken us to a place where trust in our elections, a bedrock necessity, a peaceful transfer of power, respect for a Constitutional due process and judicial verdicts rendered, respect for First Amendment freedom of the press rights, and observance of the co-equal powers of executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are mockingly ignored and violated at will.

Trump’s struggle is to get those who would get him before they get him.  And meanwhile line his own pockets. The boldness in him that some admire goes no deeper than this.  He has been on trial and been found guilty by unanimous jury of 34 felony counts. This had all led to a second go at turning the country and the world upside down.

He’s taken us down the rabbit hole where half of us can’t distinguish bullshit and lies from verifiable assertions and the other half remain stunned or apoplectic. The man’s presence is absolutely confounding in a Mephistophelian way.

Also confounding is the historical path to where we are now.  I mean the struggle to American Exceptionalism. Were we struggling close to coming apart before Trump or after? Trump sold a story of American carnage that only he could remedy. There was carnage. By 2016, the top 1% had as much wealth as the bottom 90%. That Trump would readjust that carnage to the greater immiseration of the 90% not enough voters foresaw. Stunned or already at the Kool-Aid.

In Gore Vidal’s view, the United States of Amnesia has been more of a militarized republic than a 5^thCentury BCE Athenian “rule by the people.” The country has been protectively amnesiac regarding the extermination of an indigenous population, 89 years of Black African slavery up until the 1865 13^thAmendment, the annihilation of Japanese civilian populations with atomic bombs in August 1945, and 144 years after the declaration “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” the 19^th Amendment extended the right to vote to women. 144 years.

It seems that such total amnesia has given way to what you would call a “So What?” response. It’s as if a callus has been formed on the American Mass Psyche. Perhaps this is what  happens when an individual or a country is bombarded constantly with words and images that punish an image, like Exceptional, we try to hold on to. Nevertheless, this “So What?” defense is tragic because unless we are able to fully feel and recognize what is true, though terrifying and humiliating, we cannot repair and improve. An overwhelming number of Americans need to conclude that Trump deserves – impeachment followed by imprisonment —  if this government and its citizens are to escape absolute farce post-Trump.

We’re all very soon going to get on the “Get Trump” bandwagon/funeral procession, or, off his sinking ship, and at the same time hopefully recognize that unless all his violations face justice and not allowed to slide into Amnesia or “So What? or “More Than I Can Deal With,” our very much on-going 250 year old struggle is going to be troubled as it never has before with challenges and damages to basic principles left unanswered.

That events can be sent to the oblivion of the River Lethe in our American Mass psyche is a real thing. But whether the Trump assault can be so evaporated without the country still feeling, like an amputated limb, the aftermath of this assault is, to my mind, not possible. His devastation is of an order different than this country has struggled with before.  He’s attacked with reckless impunity the grounds upon which we can decisively squash the flood of troglodyte “posts” that fill the mosh pit of social media.

Gore Vidal called the U.S. “a militarized Republic” which, if reliable to some extent, and I think it is, then Trump is the first leader who has played the country as just that. Positioned at the top of a military/economic powerhouse, Trump dealt as such both domestically and internationally. Manipulating investment returns manipulates the flow of that money into political campaigns. Internationally, the wealth supporting winning military ventures replaces protocols of diplomacy with Mafia-like offers that can’t be refused. Don Corleone extorted competitors because Luca Brasi was his enforcer. Trump sees U.S. military might as his enforcer and the Justice Department at home as the same.

While we could feel that previous presidencies have not negotiated as a militarized Republic, when you look closely through that lens, or listen to international views, Neo-Con regime of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle/Bremer/Feith et al seized  the 9/11 moment to get away with being a militarized Republic. Military/Economic power could position in an advantageous way then and in a future relation to China’s own rising power.  This was the window quickly closing of fixing a new American order. It was LBJ who also knew how to act on behalf of a militarized Republic: “America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea… If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they just might get whacked good.” Not Cyprus but Viet-nam got “whacked good” based on the Gulf of Tonkin lies, equal in devastating outcome to the WMD lies.

In short, Vidal had history to prove his point but Trump’s push internationally is being played on a different board. Listen: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Message to us: Try to stop me. Trump has been successful in taking all he can get away with; a con man/grifter/extortionist, he will cut and run, as he is now doing with a war in Iran he began for no profit to himself — revealed thus far — but completely out of a demented hubris. Jared Kushner, who picks up slaughtered parts like a jackal in Trump’s wake may be too busy evicting Palestinians to make a Spa of a war torn Iran. The real estate investor’s eye is on Cuba but the country has to be war torn first.

And so, it’s not just the crippling of the U.S.’s always shaky Constitutional order compliments of Trump but a full scale exposure through Trump of the U.S’s strong arm international affairs that need to be answered.  The erratic tactics of Trump do not keep China at bay nor they reassure the EU that such tactics will support them and not Russia or China or North Korea. It is only because American focus on anything is always on the individual that we underestimate the macro level of damage that we face and the consequences of not insisting that a price must be paid.

I believe since Reagan planned a multi-layer missile defense system, the international community realized the U.S. would use its economic power in the service of its military power and international peace pacts be damned. All that was wanted was an American president who would without shame or hesitation slap aside honorable peaceful diplomacy, making it clear that filling the craw of this beast was the healthy thing to do.

 Perhaps everyone but Americans were surprised that someone like Trump hadn’t come along before, although everyone has been surprised at the sheer impossibility of such an existence. I would argue that in a country that values getting rich as a personal and societal  summum bonum and has only laughable deterrents to this predation of the weak and poor, the unscrupulous would be every other face in a crowd.

 If this is true, it would give us an answer to the hot question: Why do Republicans and Cabinet members not say no to Trump, challenge his lies, and stand up against his mania? Answer: They are so very like him, only differing in that he is the president and they are not. He lets them stick their beak in the money pot to be had in return for their loyalty. As Putin’s moguls keep him safe, Trump’s moguls keep him from impeachment and imprisonment. Only when his grift and extortion threaten returns on investment will his moguls run from him. But like the crow who won’t leave the carrion feast in the middle of the road until the last second, this Trump gang will do the same.  Tsar Paul I of Russia’s fate may be what awaits Trump.

“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 ft. of the Oval Office,” Trump has told this accessories to crime lot who are nervous about a real retribution conducted by an unchained Congress and Department of Justice, nervous about a time when reason will regain its hold on the country.

No need for armchair diagnosis of these criminal accessories as sociopathic or innately predatory. They are home grown American soil products. Trump’s uniqueness lies in extended public exposure. As president his corrupted soul is on a 24/7 display, which he enjoys because fame, or notoriety, simply goes along with being rich. Securities and insider trader fraudsters avoid such exposure for obvious reasons. Trump doesn’t forego parading his crimes in the limelight because his own megalomania and now the Supreme Court has made him invulnerable. Never before has the American Confidence Man, whom Melville saw as endemic, been in such full display or has so much latent mental illness been given so much time to blossom before our eyes on a presidential stage.

It may not be possible to bring to a hard core 35% Trump loyalists an acceptance of empirical and rational methods of establishing objective, verifiable facts and evidence, but all the mindboggling stupidities laid on us require that an effort be made. Amnesia will not set in here. Crimes alleged and pursued without evidence must be brought into the court of reason and answered.

Every department and agency Trump has contaminated must, like the Augean tables, be mucked out and his appointed clowns judged. The destruction to all the agencies listed in the U.S. Government Manual made by Musk and his Nerd Army need to be re-established.  An un-elected trillionaire batshit crazy should never again be allowed to take a chain saw to our government. The ways in which mind boggling stupidities swarm on social media cannot be primary in how we know, anything, including politics. That recuperation begins in the 3^rd grade, not with STEM, but reading comprehension.

Redemption here  is hard to imagine but it surely begins with Trump in jail, preceded by impeachment.

Joseph Phillip Natoli’s The New Utrecht Avenue novel trilogy is on sale at Amazon. Time is the Fire ended what began with Get Ready to Run and Between Dog & Wolf. Humour noire with counterpunches. .

Republicans got outplayed by Sesame Street's Elmo — and critics won't let them forget it

"Sesame Street" characters in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, on May 7, 2017 (Ritu Manoj Jethani/Shutterstock.com)

Matthew Rozsa

June 21, 2026

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to claim the “Sesame Street” puppet Elmo as one of their own — but online commenters are not allowing them to get away with it.

“The GOP has been faced with their anti-Elmo history after trying to welcome him into the MAGA fold,” reported The Daily Beast's Katie Francis on Sunday. The story began with Elmo declaring, regarding the ongoing World Cup soccer event, that “Elmo loves you, and Elmo loves you, and Elmo loves you, and Team USA, and everybody who’s playing." Yet Elmo then concluded, “Elmo just wants to set the record straight... GO TEAM USA!”

He also clarified, “Just to be clear, Elmo wants Team USA to win, okay? But Elmo loves everybody!”

Notably, the Muppet predicted that his preference for Team USA might be exploited when he asked viewers to not “make this a thing.” Yet despite this warning, House Republicans quickly posted the video with the comment that "Elmo is a certified PATRIOT!”

They then added, “Meanwhile, Democrats are rooting for foreigners...”

What the House Republicans neglected to acknowledge was that Trump and his supporters have fiercely criticized “Sesame Street” and the TV station PBS for its supposedly “woke” culture. Social media users on X quickly reminded them of these facts.

“You clowns literally defunded elmo,” one person posted.

“You a-----es voted to defund PBS and called Sesame Street woke,” another wrote. “You couldn’t be more hypocritical, loud, wrong, or clueless.”

Trump’s vendetta against “Sesame Street” may be personal as well as ideological. Last year The Daily Beast reported that after the president signed an executive order to immediately halt all federal funding to PBS, “almost immediately, people began to suspect that Trump’s vendetta against the network wasn’t because of its 'woke programming.' Instead, it’s all to do with a certain puppet show that has been trolling the man since the ’80s.”

Ronald Grump was a periodic but long-running spoof of the then-hotel magnate that began in the 1980s, as The Daily Beast reported. With song lyrics like “he’s got so much trash it spills out of his can,” locations like “Grump Tower” and occupations like “famous Grouch builder,” Ronald Grump was an undisputed antagonist who tried to do nefarious things like force Oscar the Grouch to give up his garbage can (where he lives) and pave over all of “Sesame Street” so he can turn it into “Grump World.”

After Trump became a reality TV star, the spoofing continued. In a later episode, “Sesame Street” mocked Trump’s NBC reality show “The Apprentice.”

 Is Chinese AI the Remedy to Inequality?

Dean Baker

 May 8, 2026

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Photo by Bo Peng

The world is leaning on China a lot these days as a counterweight to the lunacy of Donald Trump. No one has illusions that China and its leader, Xi Jinping, are champions of democracy, but at a time when the US president is gleefully bombing boats and countries, and debating which regime to change next, China is an island of sanity.

I’ve made the analogy to Stalin in World War II, which continues to be appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill had no illusions about Stalin’s USSR as a beacon of democracy, but they understood the essential role it played in defeating Hitler. China can play a similar role in protecting the world from the craziness emanating from the White House.

AI is one area where its role may prove to be extremely important. There have been many hugely overblown stories about how AI is going to take all the jobs and leave the rest of us unemployed and destitute.

This is an old theme about technology. Those of us who lived through the tech boom in the 1990s recall similar stories back then. There was even a boom in stories of technology-driven mass unemployment in the 1950s and 1960s. A famous novel of the time envisioned such a world in the not distant future. The fear that a new technology, in this case AI, will take all the jobs is not a new one.

Even if the prospect of mass unemployment is unlikely, there is a real concern that it will lead to even greater levels of inequality. Just to be clear, it is not the technology that creates inequality; it is the laws that govern its use. It’s unlikely that people would be making big fortunes on AI if the government didn’t grant patent and copyright monopolies to its developers.

But let’s leave that issue aside for a moment. The story of mass inequality is one where the AI makers are selling a product of enormous value that displaces millions of workers, including relatively highly paid workers. As a result, they can command huge profits from their AI.

Clearly, there is some validity to this story in that AI can displace labor in many areas, some of it highly paid. For example, AI can do much of the work in preparing legal briefs that is now done by lawyers. It’s not clear that AI will, on net, reduce the demand for lawyers, but it can substantially increase the productivity of lawyers.

But the fact that AI can lead to large gains in productivity doesn’t necessarily make the AI companies rich. That depends on the extent to which competition brings the price down.

To take an earlier technology, Dell is the largest manufacturer of computers in the United States. It is a successful and profitable company. Its market capitalization is less than $140 billion. That’s a good chunk of money, but less than 1/30th of Nvidia’s $4.8 trillion market capitalization.

The fact that the PC is an incredibly useful product that has hugely increased productivity has not meant that PC makers would get immensely rich and dominate the economy. The reason is that competition, even with weak antitrust enforcement, has forced down the price so that most of the benefits have largely gone to consumers.

This is where the Chinese AI makers come in. While the leading US makers may still be somewhat ahead by many measures, the Chinese companies are able to make AI products available to users, which likely meet most of their needs, at prices that are a fifth, a tenth, or even less than the price charged by the leading US companies.

For this reason, Chinese AI is beating out US in adoption through much of the world. Apparently, Chinese AI is even gaining many customers in Silicon Valley, both because of its lower price, but also because it is open source, which mean companies can alter it to fit their needs. This also means that a company can run the Chinese AI on their own systems and they don’t have to turn over control of sensitive company data.

This Chinese competition is a huge deal not only for bringing AI prices down, but also for preventing fascist clowns like Elon Musk from getting endless money. While Musk may always be insanely rich, if investors ever learn arithmetic and value his companies based on their profits, he will have far less money. (Tesla has a price-to-earnings ratio of 360. If it had a more normal, but still high PE of 20, Musk’s stake would be worth a bit more than 1/20th its current value.)

We should have that conversation about intellectual property rules that make the Musks of the world ridiculously rich. We should also be changing rules on things like bankruptcy that private equity barons to get rich by buying companies and putting them into bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, we have not yet advanced to the point where we can have a serious discussion on the ways we structure capitalism to generate inequality. Perhaps one day we will, but until then, we should be thankful for Chinese competition.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.