April 30, 2025

He still has time to recoup and return to the forefront of presidential respectability, But Donald Trump is sinking in the polls, rapidly and steeply, which ought not surprise many people. When you are yourself not all that informed about Democracy and surround yourself with others who are perhaps even less informed, ineffectiveness and, thus, popularity declines are to be expected.

The U.S. government, according to the NY Times, has targeted thousands of international students with the aim of cancelling out their legal status.

PB asks: Why don't we target everyone with a foreign sounding name, like Ramirez, Dong or Wong, with the aim of deporting them all. That way, we who remain should find great contentment in the very sound of our names?

Thus, PB was not surprised to learn that yesterday a Texas deputy killed an unarmed man and declared, "I just smoked a dude." (See today's AustinStatesman)

Good thing he didn't smoke a Lucky Strike or Pall Mall; the deputy would have made himself vulnerable to lung cancer and unable to kill anyone with a gun.

Sad News from California: Hearst paper executives report that they may soon be closing The San Francsico Chronicle, once their stellar paper in California. (When Putt was a student in Berkeley in the 1960s, he says his first read every morning was from the Chronicle.

Big news in 1974 was the presumed kidnapping of Patty Hearst (photo) by the Simbionese Liberation Army.

The 1970s were full of news, not all of it good, of course. In fact, it's hard for some of us to believe that it has been half a century since the embarrassing retreat of the US from Vietnam

The Fall of Saigon, 1975