Breaking Fake News Update (v18)

 Fake News Broke on September 7,2025

So, what's going on here? Do we really need to tariff chalk at the same level as drug prices are allegedly coming down?  You bet we do!

Florida cities are busy trying to remove all of their 'street art,' in an effort to satisfy both Department of Transportation Secretary Sean 'Lumberjack' Duffy and their Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

Sidewalk art, such as that in Orlando remembering those lost at the Pulse nightclub anti-LBGTQ mass shooting, a memorial to a high school student, and even one supporting police, were scrubbed out last month, some of them several times, as passionate citizens kept recoloring them.

At least for a while, and maybe still, law enforcement officers were 'guarding' the sidewalks, keeping their communities safe from the dastardly threat of rainbow colors, which have been deemed more distracting than, say, 

• touch screens in cars that are larger than my television, or
• this Florida Man's car, or 
• any of the rolling rallies that have been held for 45/FOTUS over the years, and even
• seeing our National Guard troops fighting landscaping crime in DC.

Somehow, the smaller, leaner, more efficient federal government that everyone likes to say they voted for seems to enjoy being knee-deep in the weeds, and, of course, threatening everyone that they'll lose their taxpayer funding if they don't toe the FOTUS line.

That last part? Not fake news, as we've seen. But rest assured, if there's fake news to report, we'll be on it!

Breaking Fake News Update (v16)

 Fake News Broke on August 28, 2025!

Is there any surprise that we're using the National Guard not only for law enforcement, but also for mundane tasks that would normally be performed by municipal or federal employees? 

• There certainly shouldn't be, given that the National Parks Service, which used to take care of some of these tasks, now has a three or four hands full of employees in DC, compared to a couple of hundred pre-DOGE and pre-One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 
• There certainly shouldn't be, given that DC has seen federal funding slashed by Congress and the administration. 
• There certainly shouldn't be - after all, even FOTUS declared that crime was down 25% in DC this year alone, so no one should be shocked that there isn't a lot for the Guard members from DC and the red states of Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and South Carolina that gleefully ignore high crime in their own states to stand with FOTUS and start Making Restaurants Safe Again for lobbyists, lawyers and politicians. (Are those distinctions without differences?)

I would think, though, that seeing camo-wearing folks with weapons mulching flowers, picking up trash, and loitering in Union Station would be quite the thing in the US capital, wouldn't you agree?

As always, when fake news breaks, we'll be sure to keep you informed. 

Wondering on Wednesday 6/30/21

Ready... Set... Wonder!

Let's dive in to today's wondering, shall we?

A Republican strategist on NPR suggested that because the Dems have only a five-vote majority in the House of Representatives as a whole, it would be grossly unfair to have a Select Committee on the 1/6 Insurrection with eight Democrats and five Republicans. And I wonder, if that consequence of the election is so unpalatable, why on earth didn't the R's jump at the chance to have an independent, 9/11-style commission? I mean, did they all get their Melania jackets from the dry cleaners at the same time?

Sticking with the House and the Select Committee, I wonder if any of the Rs that don't want an investigation have considered what Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) reportedly said - here's the meme that's making the rounds. 

I wonder, what's the argument against what he says? Either you want to know, because you think it was something other than what it appears to be, or you believe The Big Lie, and you don't want any more proof that it was supporters of Former Guy, just like it's been shown all along. Or, I guess, you're chicken and afraid of losing your job. 

Kinzinger, in a recent appearance on CNN, told Anderson Cooper, 

If people are willing, at a young age, to put their life on the line for this country, and we can't put our career on the line for the same thing, what's it worth? Why are you doing it, right? But if everybody just comes out and tells the truth, has differences of opinion or perspective, of course, we can fix this country. Short of that, we've got some trouble.

I wonder how many of his colleagues are willing to admit publicly they agree with him on that?

Speaking of 'we've got some trouble," we learned that South Dakota Gov. Kristy Noem, who might want to be Nikki Haley when she grows up, has promised to deploy her state's National Guard troops in Texas to help with border security. And, according to her spokesman, she's going to use private funds to "help alleviate the cost to South Dakota taxpayers."  The private funds are coming from a Trump-supporting used care billionaire from Tennessee, if that makes any sense at all.

And now, I'm wondering what would happen if say, Michigan's Gov. Gretchen Whitmer decided to send her state's National Guard to Texas to support asylum seekers crossing the border, and say it was Michael Bloomberg who was footing the bill. How'd that sit with everyone?

And are we going to see National Guard deployments up for bid on eBay and other auction sites, I wonder? Or Go Fund Me campaigns to send them to other states on a governor's whim? Think of all the money that could be separated from billionaires and used for defense. Or for The Wall. Anyone still have Steve Bannon on speed dial?

Speaking of Former Guy, he held a rally in Ohio the other day. and Amanda Uhle, a WaPo reporter, attended the rally out of her self-proclaimed inability to "stop probing Trump supporters, trying to understand exactly how they see the world and why they're not seeing it the way" she does. Speaking of his Ohio appearance, she wrote

This time, he was to be accompanied by all you might expect from an 88-degree evening at the Lorain County Fairgrounds — a dusty parking area, livestock stalls and creaky grandstands under the rich, dank odor of manure and surrounded by verdant fields. Air Force One would not be deployed. His lectern wouldn’t be adorned by the presidential seal. He’s not officially running for anything, even if all signs point to a bid in 2024. So, who would want to attend a Trump rally in 2021?

I almost stopped at "the rich, dank odor of manure" line - what could be more evocative of a Trump rally than that, I wondered? But I kept reading, and learned that the people who are attending now are the same people who attended his rallies before - he doesn't seem to have a new crowd, any more than he has a new message. I guess that's a good thing.

Finally, like most people, I've been following the story of the condo collapse in Florida. My heart aches for the families that have been forever changed by the tragedy, and for the community similarly forever changed

One thing I can't shake? Whether this, like so many other infrastructure collapses, was preventable, if only we had been paying attention. And paying attention from the very beginning, not just two or three years ago, or forty years later, or five or six months from now. 

Our appetite for building in coastal areas, on cliffs, in fire-prone forests, on fault lines, seems boundless, as does our appetite for ignoring potential signs of danger along the way, and for kicking the can down the road. 

We cringe, and duck, when we get an estimate on repairs, whether it's a condo or a bridge or a highway, and we don't act until the very last argument is made, literally dozens of times, and even then, half the time we make a temporary fix, as if the arguments will change when it comes time to pay the pipe. And pay we will, after a horrendous collapse, after people die, after families are forever changed by the tragedy, or even after a change in who holds the purse strings. 

And that's always the driver, right? Money up front to make growth happen; money in the middle to buy the view or the solitude or the speed to get from point A to point B; money on the back end to keep things standing (hopefully in time); and of course, money to distribute when our worst nightmares come to fruition.

I wonder about all of that, I do.

What are you wondering about?

Wondering on Wednesday 3/10/21

Ready... Set... Wonder!

Well, well, well. The House passed the American Rescue Plan (the Biden Stimulus) with zero Republican support, just like the Senate did. And while the Rs continue to complain that "the bill wasn't targeted enough" I haven't seen anything specific that's supposed to get me all up in arms about this bill. Why is that, I wonder? And who has that information - Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? 

I worked pretty hard today to get myself a COVID vaccine appointment, something I was able to do because I'm retired and not picky about where I go for the darn thing. As I was going through the process - two times, on different websites, trying to find the best timeslot -  I was shut out of three available time slots that were available when I started entering my info, but gone by the time I was done. And that makes me wonder why they didn't talk to the Ticketmaster/Live Nation people to see how they coded their "your transaction must be completed within 10 minutes to hold your seats" stuff - boy, what a game-changer that would be with the vaccine appointments!

The Pentagon approved having the National Guard protecting the Capitol until May 23rd, at the request of the acting leadership of the Capitol police. I'm on the side of legislators who work there in wondering why the need continues and how the date was chosen. I also have to wonder why they're not getting any intelligence briefings on why the need remains. Unless, of course, there are senators and representatives who have some bad stuff that got swept up in the cell phone data, and they can't be trusted with the intelligence?  Could that be it, I wonder?

I wonder what the roll call vote would be to have Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene disallowed from requesting roll call votes on stuff for the sole reason of trying to maintain her relevancy?

There's more, but there's also tomorrow.

The Update Desk: General Milley's Apology

In our Sunday School Extra Credit earlier this week, we learned from the conversation Martha Raddatz had with Gen. Martin Dempsey (Ret.), former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and current Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley tried to talk the president out of calling for active duty military personnel to help out with controlling the protests in DC.

AP PHOTO/PATRICK SEMANSKY

Esper, as we know, went on to send mixed signals about his participation in the Bible photo op, in which Milley also participated, in uniform. And now, we learn that Milley has also decided to speak out about his actions that day. 

In this CNN article, which is where I got the pic of Trump and his minions, we learn that 

America's top general has apologized for appearing in a photo-op with President Donald Trump following the forceful dispersal of peaceful protesters outside the White House last week, calling the move a "mistake" and saying his presence "created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics."

Gen. Milley's comments came from a taped speech for graduates of the National Defense University, and per the article, he "regrets accompanying Trump" on the walk to St. John's Church.

As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched. And I am not immune. As many of you saw, the result of the photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week. That sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society.  "I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.

He also spoke to the killing of George Floyd, which sparked the continuing protests around the country and around the world as well, where protesters have leveraged what happened here to raise (again) issues of systemic racism in their own countries.

I am outraged by the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd. His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in, day out. The protests that have ensued not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice toward African-Americans ... we should all be proud that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful. 

He also said that the military has done a good job with inclusiveness, "we too have not come far enough. We all need to do better, pointing to the high proportion of African-Americans in the service compared to the overall population, but a low percentage of high-ranking officers. 

... although the United States military has a higher proportion of African Americans serving in our ranks than in society at large, only 7% of our flag and general officers are African American...we must, we can, and we will do better. 

But wait - it's not all lovey-dovey for Milley, it seems.  In this article in The New Republic, he's not getting a lot of sympathy.  Citing the same speech, the article suggests that "Mark Milley is sorry. For the photo op, not the invasion of American streets with soldiers." And there's more.

The article says that Milley has, "as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has made a franchise of slumping in a chair beside the commander-in-chief with a look of shame," but notes that he's better than some others in Trump's inner circle.

...he is a sight better than Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the West Point grad whose honor code led him to explain away his presence in Trump’s photo op as a misunderstanding: He was just expecting to go “observe” a damaged public bathroom. Esper, in turn, is slightly less greasy than Attorney General Bill Barr, who falsely claimed pepper spray wasn’t a chemical weapon and denied responsibility for the order to violently clear protesters from the square. (“My attitude was get it done, but I didn’t say, ‘Go do it,’” he said.)

 It's "easy to applaud" the general for "moral courage of some sort," something that I've found lacking with all of the folks in the Administration, Republicans in the House and Senate, and at the state level, too. But his apology only goes so far. It

covered only his appearance beside Trump, not his own troubling role in the violence and terror carried out in Washington by uniformed, oath-swearing American citizen-soldiers during a dark week that three Times defense reporters—among them an Afghanistan War veteran—called “a debacle for the National Guard.” 

And what was that debacle? Pitting "undertrained, mostly-minority Washington-area National Guard soldiers against their peacefully protesting neighbors and relations." Milley's plan was to convince Trump that the part-time Guard troops could handle things and that the active-duty troops weren't needed. And, it's been reported that Milley and others put quite a bit of pressure, mostly on the DC Guard, to get it done or Trump would send in the 82nd airborne to clean things up. And, throughout all of the stuff the military has been required to do during Trump's three-and-a-half years in office, none of it

can remotely touch the spectacle of the U.S. military’s top general and the Army secretary pleading with National Guard leaders to kick ass in what the Times called “a last-ditch attempt to keep active-duty troops outside the city.”  

Again, from the article,

"...what I saw was more or less really f---ed up,” one told Politico. “The crowd was loud but peaceful, and at no point did I feel in danger, and I was standing right there in the front of the line. A lot of us are still struggling to process this, but in a lot of ways, I believe I saw civil rights being violated in order for a photo op.” 

A photo op for which Milley has apologized, but the apology is not going to soften

his ultimate legacy, one that should persist long after his green-suited, Trump-adjacent photo appearances are forgotten: He will forever be known as the American general who decided that the main difference between a functional democracy and an unconstitutional junta lies in which uniformed troops you use to beat protesters.

Clearly, the second article is addressing much more than just the apology - it's going to the larger issue of how the adults in the room are failing us - if they're even in the room, which is often in doubt.