Opinion

If I don’t get a full night’s sleep, I can’t function. I’m a wreck for the next two days. Yet Cory Booker, of New Jersey, stood on the floor of the United States Senate to give a speech that lasted 25 hours. He broke Strom Thurmond’s record, a feat made sweeter by the fact that Thurmond was a Dixiecrat who was trying to stop Black people like Booker from having a say in democracy, much less being a US senator.

It was a heroic achievement that, according to MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown, is lighting up the Democratic base. There has been “a maddening thirst for leadership from Democratic political figures,” Brown said today, with one poll showing a huge majority of Democrats – almost two-thirds – is tired of the party's compromises with Donald Trump. The question now, Brown said, is whether the congressional Democrats “can keep this energy going beyond this specific moment.”

I have learned something important about the United States since Donald Trump took office for the second time. I have learned that most people most of the time will choose to believe in the existence of certain eternal rules that powerful figures must obey, even as those same powerful figures break those same rules over and over again.

Consider the rule about Social Security. It used to be seen as the “third rail” of American politics. If anyone touched it, they got zapped. The last time was in 2005, after George W. Bush’s victory. The backlash against attempts by the Republicans to privatize it contributed to the blue wave of 2006. It might have affected the 2008 election, as well.

“In my work with the defendants [at Nuremberg], I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.” — Captain Gustave Gilbert, the US army psychologist assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

You don’t expect moral leadership from mice. And yet, in a recent study, rodents showed more empathy, urgency, and compassion for strangers than the men currently shaping our nation’s future. While lab mice display empathy by resuscitating unconscious cage-mates, Trump and Musk gleefully slash food aid, housing support, and global relief efforts — all cheered on by a right-wing movement that now sees empathy as a fatal weakness.

— DOGE plans to re-program Social Security. Social Security runs on an older COBAL programming language and, while it’s a bit creaky, it works just fine. But the DOGE wrecking crew — we learned the day after Musk went on Fox “News” and lied repeatedly to America’s seniors — now plans to replace the entire system with something newer.

This is the kind of project, messing with 70 million people’s earned benefits, that should take a year or two with multiple layers of redundancy and safety; instead they say they’ll do it in a few months. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, as WIRED reports a senior Social Security technologist told them: “Of course one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se but [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions.” The big concern is that they might end up crashing the entire system.

Despite all my moaning since a slim majority of Americans decided it was safer to carry on with their lives walking a tightrope without any safety nets, than it was to stay grounded, and together against the billionaires who have proved over and over again they want to eat us all, I have been mighty proud of the good and righteous people on the Left.

Too many Americans don’t deserve us, but the idea of America does, dammit. Despite being knocked down and staying down on that gray November day, we picked ourselves up and braved the fascist winds that are blowing at a gale off the Potomac right now.

In the past month, Trump has threatened to imprison peaceful protest organizers, falsely declared a national invasion, invoked war powers in time of peace, serially ignored court orders, and sent people to an El Salvador prison without due process or review, all while making outrageous comments meant to distract the public from his administration’s illegal conduct.

This week served up the capper when we learned that Trump officials are coordinating their actions on Signal, an app with an auto delete feature, in violation of multiple federal laws requiring communications to be preserved and protected.

I grew up with a raving alcoholic.To call his behavior erratic is to engage in understatement for dramatic effect.

My dad was in the Navy, assigned to one of the submarines of the Pacific Fleet in Oahu Hawaii, which meant long periods of welcomed absence. But whenever the submarine was docked, he was home, where he vacillated between two states of drunk: wet drunk and dry.

Dear Republicans,

Here we go again. A large chunk of Trump‘s cabinet and our national security leaders just endangered our country and our pilots who were flying over Yemen with their arrogance and frank stupidity.