@dpbsmith.bsky.social
On 8/5/2026, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg told munitions contractors to speed up production, saying "Years-long development cycles are not acceptable." I hope the contractors said "You won't give us a year, when YOU took six months to get around to asking us?" Why the heck didn't
"Asked later what is different this time around, Trump replied, “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation.” Trump already decapitated Iran once. It didn't work. Why does he think it would work this time?
Why eleven icebreakers? Ten for actual service in the Arctic. One to be named Navy One and made into a floating White House. Gilded hull. Gold figurehead of Donald J. Trump, himself. Eighteen-hole golf course (real turf) on the top deck. Carrara marble columns somewhere. Poop deck.
"Look, we have totally destroyed their military. They have some missiles left. They have some drones left."--Donald Trump, 6/9/2026. "On July 17, two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action as CENTCOM and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks."
I don't know what made these marks on the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. But I know what didn't make them. They were not made by a "sharp knife," a "razor," or a "box cutter." You don't need to be a forensics expert to tell that.
Trump, 1/21/2026 he said that the Greenland agreement brokered by NATO is a deal "everyone is happy with.... It's a deal that people jumped at, really fantastic for the USA, gets everything we wanted, including especially real national security and international security."
A bit of a downer, but three of our most familiar patriotic songs--"America, the Beautiful," by Katherine Lee Bates; "God Bless America," by Irving Berlin; and "This Land is Your Land," by Woody Guthrie--ALL celebrate the our bicoastal "manifest destiny." "From sea to shining sea;" "From the
Donald Trump, 2020, on the risk of fireworks starting wildfires at Mt. Rushmore: "I said, what can burn? It's stone. You know, it's stone."
Trump recently claimed that "They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade" of the reflecting pool. As the WSJ commented, "It wasn't immediately clear what the president meant by this." (What is the "façade" of pool?) But I had a feeling of déjà vu.
Donald Trump said an agreement would be signed today. I didn't believe him. I was wrong about that. That's all.
"Iran’s promise is in the first paragraph of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.... Asked for clarification about the matter, including what commitment Iran might have made to Mr. Trump, a White House spokesperson had nothing to add to the president’s remarks." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/u...
Every darn time Blue Bell changes its flavor lineup, Yahoo! treats it as "news" and Google News picks it up. That seems very wrong.
Data centers should be required to generate their own electricity on site, and to discharge all their waste energy by radiation from the site. This would not solve all the environmental problems long-term, but it would at least solve the social inequity problems.
Funny, when a news story wants a quick visual identification of "the White House," they only use file photos, never actual pictures of the White House today. I guess there's no angle from which the UFC arena arches don't show.
Donald Trump is proposing to cancel the America250 concert series after six of the nine acts books have withdrawn. He calls the entertainers selected by the Donald Trump Organization "overpriced" and "boring". The three that still want to perform are learning how Trump rewards loyalty.
Apart from the stupidity of bragging that the length of a pool is more than the height of a building, apart from bragging about the size of a pool he had nothing to do with building...it is not "bigger" than any but smaller skyscrapers.
This is so unspeakably stupid it's hard to know where to begin. But let's begin here. The length of the reflecting pool is nothing special, and is less than the height of the Burj Khalifa.
Donald Trump, May 24th: "The Enriched Uranium (Nuclear Dust!) will be ... destroyed ... with the Atomic Energy Commission, or its equivalent, being witness..." The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)? Abolished so long ago most Americans have probably never heard of it. Does he think it still exists,
Cue Bob Newhart voice: "US strikes cloud peace deal? Well, I guess they might at that."
Byron Allen is described as a "former standup comedian," but his last standup performance seems to have been at age 18 in 1979, over forty years ago. Here it is, and I've set the link to start at a particularly risible knee-slapper: youtu.be/FGnui6uUpI4?...
Byron Allen Makes History As The Youngest Stand-Up Comedian to Appear on The Tonight Show
YouTube video by Johnny Carson
youtu.be
Donald Trump on the Strait of Hormuz, 5/21/2026: “We want it free. We don’t want tolls. It’s international. It’s an international waterway." Also Donald Trump: 4/6/2026 “What about us charging tolls? I’d rather do that than let [Iran] have them. Why shouldn’t we? We’re the winner. We won.”
OMG Matt Levine, in his Bloomberg column, nailed it: "Lots of very smart people have had high-minded ideas about intergalactic travel for centuries, but perhaps it will turn out that a critical step in getting there is building an app to generate short-form pornographic video on demand."
I don't want to single out any particular post or photos, but daily BlueSky convinces me of one great fundamental truth: It is very hard to take a good picture of food.
I would like to see ONE comment made by ANYBODY before 2016 who said that they found the Reflecting Pool disappointing because it wasn't blue enough.
Welcome to Massachusetts! (Actually, to spoil the joke, Lynde Street is one way, and only allows you to leave the intersection, so it has no stop sign. Only the other four do).
Donald Trump called the press "the enemy of the American People." (If built) will he make the White House ballroom available to the White House Correspondents' Association for their dinner? Will he make all his big public appearances in the ballroom instead of places like the Butler Show Grounds?
I'm perfectly fine with beefing up the security of the underground bunker in the White House. But that was never mentioned in the original arguments for a ballroom, the rhetoric was that "for 150 years" every President has wanted a better event space etc. etc. But I don't understand the security
