Pearl River      If it weren’t so terrible for all of us, some of the crazy ineptness of our current government would be hilarious, as they offer a new definition of gallows humor.  I don’t want to pick a scab, but I can’t help but share some of the madness, as I look for some company to join me in this misery.

Take the recent White House, Trump, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. rollout of their MAHA report, standing for Make America Healthy Again.  These guys didn’t count on anyone actually reading the report or looking at the hundreds of footnotes, pretending to be science, for some their outrageous claims.  When real scientists did so, they quickly found that some footnotes were repetitious and some scientific reports were invented and imaginary.  Like a bad term paper, they had used artificial intelligence in writing the darned thing, rather than using real science handled by real scientists.  In fact, it was so obvious that some “references included “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of ‘oaicite’ is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.”  The White House claimed it was “bad formatting.”  Yeah, right!  They are going to have to rebrand this report as HAHA, not MAHA.

In 1984-style doublespeak and the Trump administration’s “alternative facts” view of truth, the administration has tried to argue that reducing tons of regulations involving bank fees, energy conservation requirements, and more are saving families money.  Part of this continues the Musk and DOGE tendency to splash-dash claims to justify their sloppy work and attacks on the government. The Trumpers have made these claims unabashedly despite the fact that changing or fomenting regulations requires cost benefit analysis to protect the public, and the same agency’s own scientists and economists have already released previous reports that factually document the real savings for Americans.  When forced to explain, the answer was a concession sort of:

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the record about DOGE’s claims of deregulatory savings, but he emailed a statement from an unnamed senior administration official, who said that they “represent cost savings for regulated parties” — in other words, banks and other corporations. That position lines up with that of the American Bankers Association, which sued to overturn the credit card rule, contending that lower penalties cut into the costs lenders incur in recouping late payments.

You with me?  We’re transferring our savings back to banks and companies that were ripping us off in the first place.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Then there’s the whining.  It’s unbelievable how these folks can hurt millions, wreck lives, and organizations, and are so thin skinned that they give themselves pity parties.

Trump complained that on Wall Street, stock brokers have labeled some of their back-and-forth purchases and sales as “TACO trades,” referring to Trump’s yo-yoing on tariffs.  Trump was offended when he was informed this wasn’t about Taco Bell, but that TACO stood for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”  Not the look he was going for in building the imperial presidency.

I don’t want to leave out our old nemesis, the rightwing video scammer, James O’Keefe.  A couple of years ago his excesses, self-dealing, and narcissism led to his ouster from Project Veritas, the vehicle he had created for this madness.  With Trump back, he hasn’t gone away of course, but that doesn’t stop him from whining.  A recent report has him selling videos where he spends inordinate time complaining about mean things the employees he had abused had to say about him as they booted him out.

It’s wrong for us to expect that impunity should be coupled to a sense of irony, but that can’t stop the rest of us from noting the ridiculousness of all this and calling a spade a spade.