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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the lower 70s. North winds 10 to 15 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the lower 40s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 9 a.m. at City Hall. The meeting is expected to be preceded by a rally called by Mayor Mike Norris in his own support, after fellow-council members called for an investigation of his behavior at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
Notebook: I’ve never been the most loyal reader of the Washington Post, but I’ve cherished it over the years, whenever I could get my hands on it, even in the last few years, as it was part of my PressReader subscription, if fitfully so (you never knew whether you’d get your day’s issue, and the Sunday issue has always been blacked out). Good reporting, fairly OK writing, the occasional surprise on the OpEd page, and a respectable opinion section handled by David Shipler, the solid former New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem and the author of The Working Poor, a 2004, denser addition to Ehrenreich’s incomparable Nickle and Dimed The Rights of the People (2011), Rights at Risk (2012), and what I think remains his best book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, from 1986. It is less outdated than you’d think: adjust with a few massacres and you’re current. Shipler couldn’t stay on after Bezos ordered that about-face at the Post’s opinion page, telling Shipler (literally, apparently) that if Shipler wasn’t a “hell yes” for it. he’d better leave. So Bezos, priming himself to find new ways to toady to Trump, wants the Post to be a third-rate copy of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages. McKay Coppins in the November 2021 Atlantic had a piece on the killing of America’s newspapers by Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund. Bezos wasn’t among the culprits back then, what with his “Democracy dies in darkness” adorning the Post after Trump’s first election and before he transitioned to a fascist in sheep’s clothing. But there was this paragraph: “But beneath all the recriminations and infighting was a cruel reality: When faced with the likely decimation of the country’s largest local newspapers, most Americans didn’t seem to care very much. “It was like watching a slow-motion disaster,” says Gregory Pratt, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune.” So it is. Newspapers are dying because democracy is dying, and enough Americans don’t seem to care very much.
—P.T.
XXX
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
April 2025
Contractor Review Board Meeting
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
In Court: Michael Jennelle Sentencing
In Court: Jayden Jackson Sentencing
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Brian London
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
‘Sense and Sensibility’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
The 21st century has seen many of these generational owners flee the industry, to devastating effect. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. Today, half of all daily newspapers in the U.S. are controlled by financial firms, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, and the number is almost certain to grow. […] The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self. […] This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.
–From “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms: Inside Alden Global Capital,” by By McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, November 2021.
Pogo says
@Or
The vast majority of serfdom is actually too damn broke to afford to “care”; illiterate, innumerate, and incurious; the causes of the aforementioned maladies being many, and varied: the young, rising up in a world detached from most previous experience, many, of every age, fully occupied by “just surviving” in an unaffordable, unlivable place and time.
Add this: all the seven deadly sins.
https://www.google.com/search?q=7+deadly+sins
Cheap bread and circuses… followed by death from boredom.
Ray W, says
A number of FlaglerLive commenters have used the issue of the pollution resulting from the recycling of depleted liquid-state lithium-ion batteries to support their opposition to EVs, despite the fact that lead-acid batteries, in their many hundreds of millions, become depleted far quicker than do LiBs, and despite the fact that recycling lead-acid batteries carries its own environmental toll.
TopSpeed, drawing from an Interesting Engineering article, reports that researchers affiliated with two Chinese university labs and the country’s National Engineering Research Center of Advanced Energy Storage Materials have found a method using an amino acid to separate critical metals out of depleted LiBs.
Here are a few bullet points from the articles:
– One method of depleted LiB recycling, knows as “pyrometallurgy”, uses significant amounts of energy to melt the entire battery to separate out the different metals, such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel.
– Another, and dangerous, process uses ammonia or other harsh acids to separate the various metals.
– Another process, using a hydrometallurgical method, selectively removes constituent components from a solution via “electroplating.”
– The newly discovered process uses an amino acid known as “glycine”, which binds itself to the battery’s valuables metals allowing recovery of them from depleted LiBs. The glycine solution is pH-neutral, making it a “natural buffer” that is far safer than the other methods of metal extraction.
– The solution left over after the valuable metals have been extracted “is non-toxic and can be used as an agricultural fertilizer.” In a twist, if one doesn’t use the leftover solution as agricultural fertilizer, the solution can be turned into a different type of battery by adding iron, salt, sodium oxylate, and more glycine.
– The glycine process captures 99.9% of the lithium, 96.8% of the nickel, 92.4% of the cobalt, and 90.6% of the manganese, which the reporter describes as “staggering percentages for these critical materials.”
– The reporter closes the article on this note:
“Lithium-ion batteries power the modern world, everything from smartphones and computers to electric vehicles. If we don’t already, we may soon have a mountain of old batteries and no practical way of recycling them. If researchers can commercialize this amino acid-based technology, we may soon be able to address this critical issue in an environmentally safe and economically viable manner.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Battery innovations are occurring at a breakneck pace. Ford’s CEO is on record as saying that for years the American automakers blindly looked the wrong way and developed EVs that are costly and wasteful. They ignored what was going on in the rest of the world. He told a European podcaster that when Ford decided to enter the EV marketplace, it wasted four precious years and billions of dollars looking into obsolete battery technologies and wasteful vehicle designs. In 2022, Ford came to its senses. It created a “skunkworks” to try to catch up.
Some of the gullible FlaglerLive commenters use this American auto industry myopia to argue that EVs are a mistake. They are wrong in their assumptions, as they so often are.
The reality is that too many of the gullibly stupid among us listened too often to the professional lying class of one of our two political parties and together they suppressed American innovation and natural enginuity. We ceded the development of new battery technologies to the Chinese. Now, American car companies are paying Chinese battery companies to build new generation car batteries in an effort to catch up, when American scientists developed and patented the original technologies and then let the technologies slip away from us.
I am going to type this over and over again.
Ford’s CEO traveled to China over a year ago. While there, he drove a product released by a start-up Chinese EV maker. The car is its initial and only offering to the public. Ford’s CEO liked it so much that he had one shipped to America. He drove it for six months. During the podcast, he said he didn’t want to give it up and that it had made driving fun again.
These are the sentiments of Ford’s CEO. The gullibly stupid among us will ignore his words, as they prefer the lies promulgated by the lying professional class of one of our two political parties.
Ford’s CEO also said that the American auto industry is 10 years behind the Chinese auto industry. He says that were America to allow Chinese EV products to enter the U.S. marketplace without tariffs, it would be an “extinction-level event” for the American car industry.
Ford’s CEO compared today’s EV products to the introduction of the Model T into early 20th century America. The Model T destroyed the old way of making ICE vehicles. So, too, according to Ford’s CEO, will the modern EV. ICE vehicles are the past. EVs, in all their forms, are the future.
The professional lying class of one of our two parties may have thrown away our vehicle manufacturing future, at great cost to us all, with the help of their gullibly stupid followers who laundered their lies. Biden imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs in order to protect American automakers. This is how far behind we are.
Endless dark money says
amerikkka govt we only hire boot licking yes men now.
Ray W, says
I understand from reporting that Itamar Ben-Givr, leader of an ultra-right wing settler movement, resigned his Cabinet seat in the Netanyahu government in January, after criticizing the government for entering into a cease-fire agreement.
Now that Israel has resumed indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, which Ben-Giver praised, he and his party faithful intend to rejoin the government.
Make of this what you will.
Sherry says
Vancouver-based John Restakis is a specialist in co-operative economics and writes on transformative political economy. His latest book is “Civilizing the State: Reclaiming Politics for the Common Good.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s flagrant violations of the constitution and the rule of law are the unmistakable early signs of an administration that is only warming up to abuses yet to come.
Pundits are scrambling to make sense of the chaos he has unleashed. But to understand what is really happening, we need to move beyond politics into the uncharted territory of pathology.
Trump’s demagoguery is in the service of something far darker than the mere lust for power that is the hallmark of all demagogues. We are speaking of the politics of pathology and the emergence of what the Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski termed a pathocracy.
Not merely a dictatorship or an oligarchy, a pathocracy is “a system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people.” That is the danger that is now stalking the flailing democracy of America.
We were warned
From the moment Trump entered the political arena, psychologists warned us of the dangers that he posed. Some have pegged Trump as a psychopath. Others have labelled him a sociopath. Still, others have identified him as a malignant narcissist. In fact, Trump is all three. He has the calculating predatory drives of a psychopath, the craving for adulation and approval of a sociopath and the preening self-regard of a narcissist.
Devoid of all empathy and conscience, he is pathology personified. And, like moths to a flame, he has drawn to himself the personalities that reflect the same lust for power that eclipses all sense of moral responsibility or shame. People like Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Elon Musk and the entire stable of miscreants that compose his cabinet are extensions and reflections of his own persona.
Depressing as it is, one can understand the attraction Trump holds for the opportunists and grifters that populate his circle of enablers. They ride his coattails for personal gain. What is truly disheartening is the continuing allegiance of a large segment of the American public. Fifty-eight days into his reign, with chaos enveloping the nation and stock markets plunging, 46 per cent of Americans still applaud him.
Trump and his followers constitute an assault against normalcy. There is in America today a deep desire for the very disorder that he both fuels and feeds upon. We are witnessing a form of social contagion, emanating from Trump himself, that left unchecked leads in one direction — unspeakable human suffering and tragedy.
That is one lesson we may draw from similar processes we have witnessed in the past. But pathology expresses itself in myriad ways. For psychos like Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, the impulse to do harm was channelled through a fervently held ideology — murderous race theory in one, apocalyptic class war in the other. Trump has no ideology. His impulses are wholly personal and bound only by the evolving whims of his disordered ego.
Spellbinders
The term Lobaczewski uses to describe personalities like Trump is “spellbinders.”
“Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake charming or suicide.”
Sadly, for us, Trump has chosen snake charming. How does this work? The first object of this deceiving process is Trump himself. The deceptions and delusions that cover up the sense of personal weakness and unworthiness that lay untreated in the subconscious of such individuals morph into a belief system that both rationalizes the behaviour and beguiles the unwary. In Trump’s case, it is MAGA and the bubble of his own narcissism.
This repression of self-critical thought is accompanied by what Lobeczewski calls paramoralism — the bad faith appeal to morality to cover ulterior, self-interested aims. The spellbinder’s lies “stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic.”
That Trump has succeeded so spectacularly is terrifying. We must look at the world in a different light. It is an achievement of such mind-boggling audacity that only a man possessed could attempt it — and succeed. But then again, his role models laid out the method: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” So said Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist of the Nazi party.
In our day, the task seems to have become so much simpler. The tsunami of misinformation that floods social media, the deliberate blurring of fact with fiction — all this undermines the very basis of objective truth. And beyond the pathological need to dominate, the aim is to undermine the critical faculty itself.
As the philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt once wrote, “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”
This is the point at which a growing number of Americans have arrived. How did they get here? Are there lessons here for Canadians?
Regression and retribution
There is a tendency in democracies to absolve the citizenry of responsibility for its follies. The choices people make when they vote are always considered legitimate, even when those choices lead to the pain and suffering of the citizenry. This is the moral dilemma of democratic systems. What then, can one say when the democratic process destroys democracy itself? This is the standard procedure of regressive populism — the conscious abrogation of rights and the surrender of political agency by a people to a leader. Sociologist Dylan John Riley calls this authoritarian democracy.
Trump, with his offhand confession that he would be a dictator “on the first day of his presidency,” is showcasing this phenomenon. His promise to exact revenge on his perceived enemies, to weaponize the justice system, to persecute immigrants, to be an avenging angel of retribution for his followers, was the driving logic of his claim to a second term. Such a claim from a presidential candidate would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Now, everything is thinkable.
Ray W, says
According to Reuters, Bank of America Global Research surveyed 171 investors over which the sum total of their investment assets was $426 billion.
They were asked about their allocation of assets.
Collectively, the investors ended a “sell signal” that had been triggered in December 2024.
Collectively, since then they had “raised their allocation to cash to 4.1% from 3.5%.”
Collectively, they had allocated more funds to Euro stocks at the highest rate since 2021, with banks becoming the world’s favored sector.
Collectively, their “global growth expectations” had seen the biggest drop on record. The speed of the downturn was “consistent with end of equity correction.”
The “allocation” of assets to U.S. stocks saw the biggest drop ever in March, over concerns with “stagflation, trade wars and the end of U.S. exceptionalism.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I agree with Ed P. We have yet to gather over the past eight weeks enough reliable economic information to draw much in the way of conclusions. Yes, stocks in some indexes reached “correction” territory, but that has happened before, and many times so. Yes, there seems to be a significant measure of volatility in economic reports, but that, too, has often happened.
I am trending toward the idea that since no one has seen disruption at this level, there may be some credence to the idea that a correction can presage growth, but I am cautious about this argument.
I have repeatedly stated that I am not an economist; rather I am only a curious student.
Five years ago, Congress repeatedly voted to inject huge sums of unfunded stimulus money into the economy at a rate never before tried. An economist recently wrote that the total was $9 trillion. The Fed lowered its lending rate to zero percent and approved the expansion of the credit market by $3 trillion. These combinations of actions were unprecedented, and many economists projected fear of a hard crash into recession. That never happened, and the recovery from the pandemic was broad and rapid, though still not complete.
Who knows where this new American economic experiment will end? But a significant number of surveyed investors report that they have taken money out of U.S. equities and either raised their cash holdings or invested in EU stocks and financial institutions. Follow the money, they often say. Perhaps, that maxim is apropos.
Ray W, says
Today, CNN published an article headlined: “Scott Bessent: ‘I can’t guarantee’ America will avoid a recession.”
Here are some bullet points from the article:
– Recent business surveys show businesses seeing revenue declines, which are explained as due to customers “putting off purchases.” In part, this is claimed to be because of tariff concerns. In turn, these businesses are delaying investments back into the businesses.
– Retail sales (consumer spending) declined in January and declined again in February, this time more than projected.
– JPMorgan economists, in a note to clients, recently raised their projection of risk of recession from 30% to 40%, purportedly due to “ramped up” tariffs that could put a “substantial drag on business activity.”
– Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said last Friday that the risk of recession is now at 50%, and “rising every day.” This morning, he said that “[t]he huge sense of policy uncertainty, the chilled spending, is still with us.”
– Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Bessent said “[t]heir’s going to be a detox period.”
– Last week, Secretary Bessent said that a “detox period” does not imply a coming recession. adding that “it will depend on how quickly the baton gets handed off. Our goal is to have a smooth transition.”
– On Meet the Press this weekend, Bessent said: “there are no guarantees” there will not be a recession.
– This morning on Fox Business, he said, “I can’t guarantee anything. … But what I can guarantee you is that there is no reason we need to have a recession.”
– Also on Meet the Press this weekend, Commerce Secretary Lutnick said: “Donald Trump is bringing growth to America. I would never bet on recession. No chance.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Some three or more years ago, I began commenting on the state of the American economy after the worldwide pandemic-induced upheaval. At that time, nearly every economist in America saw a hard crash into recession on the horizon.
Now, I am commenting to establish another baseline. Where are the economists of today on the issue of recession?
I accept that I am neither educated well enough nor experienced enough to offer my own assessment. But I can offer other people’s views. I will continue to make the opinions of better educated and more experienced people available to FlaglerLive readers.
For the record, most of the economists back in 2021 who foresaw a hard crash into recession were proven wrong. Who knows who is right this time?
Ray W, says
As of 4:00 pm today, the CDC reports that 51 states have been affected by outbreaks of the avian influenza virus. I didn’t realize that Canada had already become a state. Of course, for statistical purposes, it is possible that the District of Columbia is called a state.
671 counties have seen outbreaks. Flagler County is not one of them.
There have been 1654 reports of outbreak since January 2022.
Yesterday, 400,000 “Commercial Table Egg Pullets” were deemed infected in Buena Vista, Iowa.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The virus is still out there and active. Millions of layer hens, among other domesticated birds, have been slaughtered this year. There is yet to be reliable signs that the wild bird virus is coming under control. It takes six to nine months to slaughter a flock, clean out and disinfect the barn, incinerate the birds, disinfect the premises, introduce new chicks to the grounds and allow time for them to grow to maturity and return to normal egg production. There is no quick fix to this issue.
Anyone who claims that we have rounded the corner when the spread continues is likely lying to you.
So long as the virus is in wild birds, it can spread anywhere. The great bird migrations of every spring are about upon us. Flocks of wild birds that migrate from South America to the Arctic in the spring will soon be flying over all parts of the U.S. If infected, they will be shedding viral particles in their droppings.
Ray W, says
Yesterday, a United Nations health agency known as the Food and Agriculture Organization, citing hundreds of millions of poultry lost all over the world, deemed the spread of the H5N1 bird flu “unprecedented.”
Since its origin in 2021, 300 new wild bird species have been infected, which poses “a serious threat to biodiversity.”
The Trump administration is attempting to rehire the “bird flu response” employees it recently fired.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
This is directed toward the gullibly stupid among us who blamed the Biden administration for the rise in egg prices:
The virus appeared in wild birds in 2021.
It was not seen in the U.S. in “layer” hens until January 2022.
It has infected 300 species of wild birds. It is highly pathogenic, which means it spreads easily and widely.
It is a growing phenomenon all over the world. It is not going away anytime soon.
So long as wild birds drop fecal matter wherever they migrate, the disease can reappear anywhere at any time. It flared up in 2022, was partially eradicated in 2023, then it flared up again in 2024 and continued into 2025.
I don’t care how many lies are uttered by the professional lying class of one of our two parties, the virus does not seem likely to completely disappear in a few weeks. Egg prices may be temporarily down, but that seems more likely due to the DOJ preservation letters sent to egg producers, distributors and grocers, who were ordered to preserve all pricing documents. Maybe instances of corporate gouging will lessen, and prices will drop a little bit.
Sherry says
DOGE/MUSK/TRUMP with Pro-Kremlin Ties
This published 3/18/2025 by a British Newspaper- The Byline Times
New evidence has emerged tying Elon Musk and the Trump administration to a network of pro-Kremlin operatives in the US with a history of ties to Musk’s own family.
Byline Times can exclusively reveal that a former US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and longtime Musk employee – working at PayPal, SpaceX and now X – is connected to a movement for the revival of the Russian monarchy with close ties to the Russian Government including its Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs – and which believes Russia is engaged in a mortal civilisational war with the West.
The same network has links via Musk’s family to a 1930s technofascist movement. Known as ‘Technocracy’, the movement wanted to redraw the map of the United States to encompass vast swathes of territory from Canada to Greenland to Panama and Columbia and dreamed of replacing democracy with an “efficient” authoritarian regime run by engineers – paralleling what the Trump-Musk administration is doing today.
The DOGE Operative – Kremlin Ties
In an investigation published early March, former Washington Post cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs revealed that one of Elon Musk’s most loyal acolytes and longest-serving employees for 28 years, Branden Spikes, worked at DOGE for the first two months of Trump’s second term – before returning to his previous role as the Director of Information Technology at X, the Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Although it is not clear what role Branden Spikes played at DOGE, according to Krebs citing sources familiar with the role, he operated at a high-level “within Musk’s inner circle of trust”.
Before working at X, Branden Spikes held senior roles at SpaceX, where he was the fourth person hired into the company, PayPal (where he was IT director), and Zip2, Musk’s first major software venture.
Krebs’ report confirmed that Spikes’s ex-wife, whom he divorced in 2011, is a native Russian woman named Natalia Haldeman with ties both to Musk’s family and to Kremlin-aligned civil society groups in the US.
Natalia Haldeman operated within a network of pro-Kremlin Russian American nonprofits. She registered a wide range of internet domains including for an organisation called the Russian Heritage Foundation.
Photographs obtained by Krebs show Natalia with Branden Spikes at a fundraising dinner alongside Ivan Y. Podvalov, a board director of the Congress of Russian Americans (CRA). Feodor Yakimoff, chairman of Russian Imperial Charity Balls. Both organisations have pro-Kremlin ties. The latter in particular, Byline Times can reveal, has extensive ties to Russian monarchists connected with the Russian ministries of defence and foreign affairs.
The CRA is ostensibly a networking organisation for the Russian diaspora in the US founded in 1973. But it has demonstrated a consistent alignment with Kremlin goals. Today, it is a pro-Trump organisation which has lobbied the US government to drop sanctions against Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry has reportedly promoted the CRA’s president, Natalia Sabelnil, who also has a track record of lobbying in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Yakimoff’s Russian Imperial Charity Balls is sponsored by two Moscow-based groups which advocate a revival of the Russian monarchy and imperial state. One sponsor is the ‘Western USA’ chapter of the Assembly of Russian Nobility headquartered in Moscow. The Russian Heritage Foundation, which has rebranded to Constellation of Humanity, also works with the Russian Imperial Charity Balls.
This journalistic investigation is on-going. . .
As Ray W. says. . . make of it what you will.
Barry says
The most important thing is that the very select few make insane amounts of money while everyone else suffers . This is the plan well underway(3 rich guys in amerikkka have more wealth than 4 billion people combined but let’s cut food stamps). Ignore science and pesky facts , misinformation is what gets people elected apparently. then profiteer off the poor even more! May they burn in hell for their useless evil inflicted upon people! That’s for you republicans and the treasonous cucks you elect.