Ike gave a very important speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, just a few months after taking office. Where should we spend our money… or not spend our money? Eisenhower, supreme commander of allied forces during WWII understood priorities: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.” I rest his case.

Uber’s Super-Secret Customer Service Number 1-800-314-2308
https://psacot.com/ubersecret/

Tom Rush Quotes
The folk singer Tom Rush regularly posts snappy quotes. Here is a recent example:

“Do you know what I love most about baseball? The pine tar, the resin, the grass, the dirt. And that’s just in the hot dogs.” 
—David Letterman

“I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.”
—Steve Martin

 “Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
…
The Goal Of Life
“The goal of life is to take everything that made you weird as a kid and get people to pay you money for it when you’re older.”
— David Freeman
…
An AI Summary
All my AI pages, and a list of all the AI cartoons I have run.

Kindness is The Way
“We are Here to Help, Not to Harm;
We are Here to Love, Not to Hate;
We are Here to Nurture, Not to Destroy”.
MindfulLivingClub.org
“Wherever I am, whatever work I do, I will find a way 
to make the world a better place” 
— Dick Powell

I don’t think Carl Sagan imagined a time when this quotation would apply both to a money-losing nascent technology and current American politics.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Egregious no longer suffices to describe the behavior of the American Gestapo…Black-masked-thugs…ICE. This week: deport soldiers, kill demonstrators (again, with a new weapon).

ICE is grabbing and deporting members of the U.S. Military and their families.

On the upside, a statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched an effort to end the widespread fertilizer crisis.

Thanks to the President’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz (open before his war), there is a worldwide fertilizer shortage and inflated costs of the available fertilizer.

In a statement, DHS defended ICE kidnapping U.S. active-duty soldiers. The first phrase, “While DHS acknowledges the contributions of military personnel, it emphasizes that…” is the purest bovine effluvia in the context of the rest of the statement.

It is an established fact that bovine effluvia is an effective fertilizer. If the DHS shreds its disingenuous statement and sends the ground up bull byproduct around the country, the fertilizer crisis will be over. Once again our active-duty soldiers have served the nation. Their sacrifice (being deported)  has saved the American farmer.

Defensive Weapon, If Used Competently ICE is buying electric shock gloves. Used improperly (for more than 15 seconds for example) highly trained ICE enforcers can kill people, and probably already have. Normal people have raised concerns about another deadly tool in ICE hands.

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…” Republican U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower [1]spoke these words during his commencement address at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire on June 14th, 1953. This quote has been authenticated.

Were he alive today, Ike might well have suggested we not be afraid to read:

•  •   every document in the Epstein files (no matter who is mentioned)
  
• •  every factual plaque in a national park

• •  every now-censored Department of DEFENSE webpage that mentions anyone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian male (except Jackie Robinson, because even Pete “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” Hegseth apparently has, at long last, some sense of shame.)
  
  

[1] Since his name was too long for headlines, he was DDE or Ike. John Kennedy (JFK) and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) almost fit and got 3LA any. Nixon and Ford were short enough (in stature and name length). No more 3LAs after that, since newspaper headline size can now be cheated to make bad heds fit. Poor Lyndon: his three letter acronym was perfect for the chant “Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Because Ass-Kissing News Was Too On The Nose.

For the first time since February, my First Amendment Doomsday Clock is moving backwards: from 30 seconds to one minute. And this time it is the Supreme Court! The court declined to hear an appeal that would let Alan Dershowitz sue CNN for defamation. Before reacting to the NY Times subpoenas, I want to wait for more information.

I am also requesting a welfare check on the Gang  of 6: apparently Trump-lovers John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were not in the building when the court declined to hear the Dershowitz appeal.

Are the members of the Gang of 6 OK? Not one of them filed a public dissent to the decision to avoid the issue. What, public figures (essentially) cannot be defamed? What’s next, Presidents can’t use the federal government to punish perceived enemies? Don’t bet on that one.

Donald Trump’s love child, SAVE really means Steal All Votes Everywhere. Or, you can unpack its intent, and call it by its real name STOMP: Start Threatening Our Minorities and Poor.

I throw up a little in my mouth when I see LinkedIn flooded with cutesy memes and ludicrous statements about how “only cheaters oppose SAVE.”

The SAVErs claim the only people who object to SAVE are cheaters. Not True. That’s to distract readers from their real intention. 

There are about as many fraudulent voters as there are office-holding Republicans with spines: that is to say, almost none. The SAVERs don’t actually give a damn about non-existent voter fraud. That’s just a head fake.

SAVE Supporters Keep Real Agenda Secret: The Part They Don’t Say Out Loud

To be fair, when the founding Fathers (no founding mothers, alas, except the ones whose husbands were sock puppets) wrote “All men are created equal,” the authors of the Declaration of Independence meant white men who owned property. I do not think their narrow view of humanity erases the revolution they wrought. And, in fact, if not for them, we probably wouldn’t have painfully, gradually expanded that promise to include women and people of color.

For example, while clearly a military and political genius, Washington was also a slave master whose wealth came from the labor of the people he enslaved.  It’s complex and nuanced, and Americans do not, as a whole, do complexity and nuance well.

Of course, the Supreme Court has now relieved women of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but maybe that will change again some day.

Less Death Than You’d Expect

Five signers of the Declaration of Independence were captured by the British. However, none of them died while a prisoner, and only one was arrested for his signature

Details here.