3/12/2025

 Wednesday, March 12, 2025

D+125/52

1947  President Harry Truman introduced the Truman Doctrine to fight communism

2018 British Prime Minister Theresa May said Russia was "highly likely" to have poisoned a Russian spy and his daughter on March 4 with nerve agent

2022: Saudi Arabia executed 81 convicted criminals, the country's largest known mass execution in modern times 

In bed at 10, awake and up at 5:15.   

Prednisone, day 325; 4 mg., day 8/21; Kevzara, day 8/14.  2 mg. of prednisone at 5:30 a.m. and 7:40 p.m.  Other meds at 7:30 p.m.  .

"With you, all roads lead to Putin." 

Is Trump evil, nuts, AND stupid?  I started thinking yesterday that maybe Trump is truly delusional about tariffs and about Canada becoming America's 51st state.  Maybe he really is living in his own delusional world.  I wonder the same about Tracy Flick, I mean Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary.  I understand his psychological, Roy Cohn-driven inability to admit he is ever wrong.  I have some sense of how his wicked personality is driven by his upbringing by his nasty father.  I can even understand, though I don't agree with his ham-handed approach, his extortion of Volodymir Zelenshyy for mineral rights in Ukraine as 'payback' for past American support in the war with Russia and his desire to regain control of the Panama Canal and to acquire Greenland.  But how to understand his bellicosity against Canada?  What is so unacceptable about our economic relationship with Canada, a relationship governed by the USMCA trade treaty that his prior administration negotiated and that he signed as president during his first term?  How is it conceivable that he is truly waging an economic and psychological war with our closest and heretofore. friendliest neighbor, literally threatening on his social media site to destroy their automobile industry with which we've been profitably doing business for years?  How can all this be happening in real life?  Is this guy off his rocker?  Is he so deranged and deluded, so megalomaniacal, that we may have a 25th Amendment situation down the road?  Is that how we'll get President Vance?  We have long known that this guy is immoral and amoral, wicked, narcissistic, deceitful, perfidious, sociopathic, et cetera.  Is he also nuts or, in the words of the 25th Amendment, "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office"?    

From today's The Hill:  

CNBC reporter Steve Liesman blasted President Trump over his trade policies and broader economic strategy in the wake of a struggling stock market this week.

“I’m going to say this at the risk of my job, but what President Trump is doing is insane,” Liesman, CNBC’s senior economics reporter, said during a segment on the cable channel Tuesday. “And now he’s saying he’s putting 50 percent tariffs on Canada unless they agree to become the 51st state. That is insane. There’s just no other way of describing it.”

Telling headlines: Trump’s Economic Messaging Is Spooking Some of His Advisers; Europe Retaliates Against Trump’s Tariffs as Trade Fight Widens; Stocks Pare Losses but Investors Remain Wary of Trade Tensions; U.S. Inflation Expected to Have Stayed Stubbornly High in February; Investors Thought They Had Trump Figured Out. They Were Wrong; Greenlanders Elect Party That Pushed Hard Against Trump Takeover; E.U. retaliates against Trump’s tariffs as trade war escalates; and, Republicans to Trump: Maybe rethink the tariff thing, please.  

I'm at 6s and 7s all day today, can't get going, half-dead brain.