Author: Admin

Years ago, a woman in her 60s whom I had just met pulled out a stack of photos to show me how she had celebrated her dog’s birthday: in a neighborhood bar, with balloons and beer for the humans and a little cake made of Milk-Bones and chicken liver for the dog. Everyone, including the dog, looked like they were having a nice time. “Is this your only child?” I asked jokingly. She looked at me with a combination of scorn and pity. “He’s my dog, honey. I raised all my kids already.”

I thought of that moment recently when I saw the unexpectedly hilarious People magazine headline: “Kristin Chenoweth slams non–pet owners who say her dog isn’t her ‘baby’: ‘She came out of my vagina.’” The gist was this: Chenoweth, the showbiz dynamo who broke out as Glinda in the original run of “Wicked” and will play the title role in the much-anticipated musical “The Queen of Versailles,” is currently partnering with a dog-food subscription service called Nom Nom. This involves doing a lot of interviews about her relationship with her dogs, past and present. And that, in turn, has led to headlines taking Chenoweth’s joke both literally and very personally. 

There’s no question that Americans love pets: Statistics from the trade organization American Pet Products Association released in 2023 showed that 66% of Americans have pets, and that they spend significant amounts of money to ensure they’re living their best lives. But the question of whether “pet parent” is a legitimate identity (something that’s debated repeatedly and often angrily online) points to a discomfort with a world in which pets are no longer part of the family, but the family itself, full stop. The result is a sustained collision between unfettered consumerism, gender-role anxiety and entrenched beliefs about what kinds of love are valid and meaningful. 

There was a time when the phrase “pet parenting” was an acronym for a decidedly human enterprise called Parent Effectiveness Training. These days, it’s likely buried in search results under pages of goods and services marketed to enthusiastic pet owners that go well beyond contemporary expectations like doggy day cares, cat hotels and raw-food delivery services. Self-optimizing humans can now optimize their pets as well, with color-changing kitty litter that detects urine abnormalities, FitBark activity monitors and a range of button-training programs to hone interspecies communication; physical-therapy centers for aging and injured dogs offer healing modalities including acupuncture, massage and aquatherapy.

(L-R) Michelle Vicary, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristin Chenoweth and Shannen Doherty in the Getty Images & People Magazine Portrait Studio at Hallmark Channel and American Humane Society’s 2019 Hero Dog Awards at the Beverly Hilton on October 05, 2019. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Hallmark Channel)

Pets and humans have ever-broader options for entwining their daily lives, routines and milestone moments. There are 23 states in America where your dog, cat — any pet who is willing to ink a paw, really — can be an official witness to your wedding, and a smaller number in which your pet can actually serve as a wedding officiant. A growing number of restaurants and cafés offer dog menus, and at a few, like San Francisco’s upscale Dogue, good boys and girls are the target customers for a menu of braised-beef short ribs and antelope-heart pastries. Human-sized pet beds, memory-foam mattresses and co-sleeping attachments all exist to make sure everyone’s on the same level and getting a good night’s sleep.

Reactions to this new normal have been very telling. In November 2023, the New York Times published a feature titled “When your significant other has four legs,” profiling several women who were quite happy to put down the dating apps and focus on their own lives, which include rewarding relationships with their pets. Comments on the piece brimmed with hostility for the very idea that a life prioritizing pets might be more joyous and meaningful than one spent searching for a suitable human. “This is gross. Sad. Abnormal,” read one. “Great story about taking the easy way out,” snarked another. 

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Because birth rates around the globe have been on the decline for more than a decade, trends in pet primacy are regularly framed as usurping the rightful role of human children. It’s not a spurious conclusion: Census data shows that the percentage of women aged 30–44 with no children is higher than it’s been since 1960. Millennial women, ushered into adulthood by the 2008 financial crisis with untenable student-loan debt and a front-row seat to a sh*tshow of school shootings, environmental destruction and educational defunding feel both less equipped to have children and less interested in navigating the economic challenges of doing so. Add in the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that’s turned planned-for and much-wanted pregnancies needlessly tragic, and it’s not difficult to see why starting traditional families isn’t a priority. 

But there seems to be some difficulty in understanding that choosing pets in the absence of either romantic partners or biological children isn’t the same as replacing either of those relationships. When women are the ones doing the choosing, though, there’s a thread of real anger at the idea that they are not only reneging on a social contract but rubbing it in the faces of those who haven’t. Friction between pet parents and so-called real parents abounds online, from TikToks that mock people who insist on bringing their dogs everywhere they go to Reddit threads that insist people who refer to their cats as “the kids” are stealing valor to longform stories of bad pet-parent behavior engineered to make everyone who reads them as angry as possible at everyone involved. 

Pitting groups of people against one another based on differences in lifestyles and beliefs (like, say, whether the term “fur baby” is ever acceptable to use) has always been a successful way to take the heat off of the political and institutional entities that exert the most control over how well both people and their pets live. There’s been a longstanding reluctance to connect, in plain language, diminished material choices with the global slump in birthrates; it’s much easier to point to overindulged pets than to reckon with social and economic factors that keep everyone from thriving. 

The chief complaint about pet parenting seems to be that it wastes valuable love that could go to a human child on a fuzzy facsimile of one, as though companionship is a zero-sum proposition. Even the late Pope Francis — who took his name from the patron saint of animals — had some harsh words in 2022 for adults who have pets but not children, suggesting that opting out of childrearing is “selfish” and “takes away our humanity.” (Spoken like a man who has never had to pay preschool tuition and failed to understand that wiping a butt is no different from scraping poop out of the grass with a hand covered in a purple, lavender-scented poop bag purchased at Whole Foods. Poop is poop, Francis.) 

It’s worth keeping in mind who benefits from ginned-up wars about what makes a legitimate parent — because it’s not the people who could, perhaps, once afford to have both children, pets and even a mortgage, but these days are lucky to be able to afford just one. The people who cast pet parenthood as sad or unnatural are people who aren’t actually interested in human quality of life. Instead, they are the techno-pronatalists scrambling to maintain a white-supremacist bulwark against immigration, and the conservative reactionaries like the authors of Project 2025, whose stated aim of “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life” works by taking choice, autonomy and dignity away from citizens. 

Which is why more of us might want to take Kristin Chenoweth’s path and lead with absurdity. Go ahead and Photoshop your cat into ultrasound photos; send your nosy in-laws a holiday card of you and your dog frolicking in the snow; celebrate the relationships you have instead of waiting around for the ones you don’t. Caring for living things, regardless of species, is always an act of hope. But trolling those who complain that you’re doing it wrong can be very satisfying.

Donald Trump pulled out of another mainstream interview Thursday–this time nixing a sit-down with NBC News.

The interview, CNN reported, would be in Philadelphia with NBC News’ senior business correspondent, Christine Romans. CNN’s Brian Stelter said one source suggested that it had only been “postponed.”

It was the second time in a week that he had canceled a scheduled appearance outside the conservative news sphere, CNN’s Reliable Sources reported Thursday. He had canceled an in-studio appearance on the CNBC flagship show, Squawk Box, which was due on Friday.

His team claimed to Politico that he was unable to do the CNBC interview on Friday because he would be in Michigan. But in fact he will be just a few blocks away from the CNBC studio on Friday morning: appearing live on Fox & Friends.

The MAGA-friendly network teased Trump’s upcoming appearance on its chyron Thursday morning.

The Trump campaign did not specifically address the reasons for the cancellations in response to a request for comment.

“Unlike Kamala Harris, President Trump has long maintained an aggressive campaign schedule that changes day-to-day, and he has sat for local, state, and national interviews almost daily,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s press secretary, told the Daily Beast, adding that Trump will continue meeting Americans where they are— from rallies to the airwaves.”

But another cancellation occurred on Thursday. The NRA announced that Trump had backed out of its planned event next week in Savannah, citing a “campaign scheduling conflict.”

The media shyness follows a rash of odd behavior exhibited by Trump at his rallies, beyond just his meandering and sometimes nonsensical soliloquies.

He danced on stage and played music—ranging from “Ava Maria” to the Village People’s “YMCA”—on stage at a rally in Pennsylvania last week. The incident was widely viewed as bizarre at best, with the Twittersphere lighting up with questions about the 78-year-old former president’s mental acuity.

Even Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted: “I hope he’s OK.”

On Saturday morning tens of thousands of protesters gathered in downtown Los Angeles as part of the nationwide “No Kings” demonstrations. Organizers estimated there were over 40,000 people in the crowd. Protesters carrying signs denouncing Trump as well as Mexican, Palestinian, and U.S. flags (sometimes upside down) marched through the streets. They demanded “ICE Out of LA” and denounced Trump’s authoritarian maneuvers, including sending the National Guard to the city. The marches were at once political and festive, and National Guard soldiers could even be seen posing for pictures with protesters.

In the afternoon, as the marches came to an end, thousands spread out across downtown to continue the protests — some to the immigration detention center, others to the federal building, and others surrounded City Hall. Around 4pm, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) issued a dispersal order, but kettled people in so they could not leave. Then, the sheriffs and cops fired tear gas and pushed the protesters, unprovoked. They trampled an elderly man with their horse and then clobbered him with their batons and fired round after round of less than lethal projectiles at the crowd. The police chased people down, hitting protesters indiscriminately. They beat people bloody.

Karen Bass, the city’s first Black female mayor, and Governor Gavin Newsom — both Democrats — invited the charge. While they denounced the intrusion of the National Guard, they made sure to call out the “violent” protesters but made no mention of the LAPD and the LASD’s violence.

This is because Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, is beholden to private property and those who have the most of it: the capitalists. They defend the raids of immigrant communities, just not in the aggressive style of Trump. The uprisings in Los Angeles of Black and Brown youth, including the street takeovers and confrontations with police, are a reason people were in the streets yesterday. They are what Democrats and Republicans fear the most: unity between a combative, precarious working class youth and immigrants; and a rank-and-file labor movement.

The labor movement, along with the youth, are the reason why Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president David Huerta is free and they inspired the entire country to come out to the “No Kings” protests. The labor movement must defend the youth in the streets and organize the rank and file using its own weapons, especially the strike. Unions in LA have gone on strike in the last year including SEIU 721; the United Auto Workers (UAW 4811), who went on strike for Palestine, and many others. A general strike in Los Angeles or across the region would be a powerful show of our strength that would give direction to the movement and could force ICE out for good.

Breaking with the capitalist parties is a political necessity. Both Democrats and Republicans have attacked worker’s living standards. They keep rent prices high and wages low; they are united in deportations and repression of precarious and unemployed youth; and they sicced the cops on the protesters last night. Both parties are the enemies of the working class.

As the protests in Los Angeles continue, we need to organize and strategize. Socialism is the political ideology that seeks for workers to organize their workplace under direct control and communities without bosses, landlords, cops, or ICE. To make this a reality, we need a working class party that fights for socialism — a combat party to organize ourselves politically and in the streets.

As Donald Trump championed “drill, baby, drill” on the 2024 campaign trail, Republicans quietly coalesced around an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy—embracing fossil fuels, nuclear, geothermal, and, at least rhetorically, renewable sources such as wind and solar. As the growing share of renewable energy in deep red states showed, even anti-climate Republicans couldn’t forswear cheap renewable energy. Business was willing to ditch Trumpian rhetoric about the dangers of windmills for bottom-line logic: The economics of renewables—solar is the cheapest energy source in human history—spoke for itself. But Trump’s war on renewable energy since returning to office demonstrates the triumph of MAGA dogma over free-market principles. As the irrationality of the “Liberation Day” tariffs reveals, Trump won’t let what’s good for business get in his way this time.

Anything-but-renewables

The Trump administration has launched a full-throated war on renewable energy. From killing the residential solar industry to freezing billions earmarked for clean energy projects in low-income communities to crippling the Department of Energy’s ability to connect renewables to the grid, Trump 2.0 does not compromise.

This isn’t “all of the above,” it’s anything but renewables. Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency, under the National Emergencies Act, explicitly defines ‘energy’ to exclude wind and solar. The Interior Department is fast-tracking permitting for all energy projects except wind and solar. The Republican-controlled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allows natural gas plants to leapfrog clean energy projects stuck in the permitting queue.

House Republicans recently passed a budget that would effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) with its myriad clean-energy programs and incentives. They’re not just gutting the technology-neutral production and investment tax credits that formed the core of the IRA—credits that helped create over 330,000 jobs and catalyzed nearly half a trillion in private investment—Republicans are also axing grid modernization loans, energy efficiency programs, and electric vehicle (EV) rebates. If successful, repealing the IRA would decimate America’s nascent manufacturing renaissance, solidify China’s global green-tech dominance, and raise utility bills for American families.

As electricity demand rises, Republicans insist that only “reliable” energy—fossil fuel-powered plants that run 24/7 instead of “intermittent” renewable sources—can keep the lights on and the utility bills low. But solar, wind, and battery storage can and do meet demand affordably and reliably. It also ignores that Republican budget cuts will hamstring even non-intermittent clean energy technologies like nuclear and geothermal, the same tech Republicans have publicly endorsed. Unfortunately for Americans, this war on renewable energy comes with a higher cost.

Trump’s ‘clean coal’ policies purport to reinvigorate America’s coal industry but will only prolong the life of aging coal plants—99 percent of which are more costly to keep running than to replace with wind and solar. Trump recently issued executive orders promoting nuclear power. But many of the administration’s policies make building nuclear power more difficult, including cutting the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s budgets and limiting the latter’s traditional independence. Indeed, the budget that cleared the House last month requalified nuclear projects for tax credits but moved the start date to 2028, a timeline many nuclear projects cannot meet. Even natural gas, the only fossil fuel price competitive with renewable energy, can’t make up the slack. More investment in gas-fired power plants is unlikely to lower energy prices in the near term: Gas projects will take until at least 2030 to come online, and a massive backlog for new gas turbines stretches beyond 2029.

Of course, affordability was never really the point. The point is the MAGA worldview, where the wind never blows and the oil always flows.

MAGA Has Taken the Oil Pill

If Trump’s gutting of cutting-edge scientific research and persecuting corporations perceived as ideologically suspect didn’t alarm Washington, Trump’s on-and-off tariff policy seems to have broken through as ill-planned and doomed to fail.

Naïve as it was to claim to ‘reshore’ American manufacturing without an industrial policy (while gutting its predecessor’s), the administration has yet to lift tariffs on coffee, mangoes, and bananas—tropical crops that cannot be grown in the U.S. (Hawaii and Puerto Rico produce less than 1 percent of U.S. coffee demand.) Trump insists that tariff revenues are enough to obviate income taxes, and he simultaneously celebrates that tariffs will make imports unnecessary altogether. Both can’t be true.

Those with the most financial, ideological, and personal influence can, maybe, capture the president’s ear. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s 90-day tariff delay announced earlier this spring only happened because his Treasury and Commerce Secretaries ambushed the president while Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor and the administration’s most prominent booster of massive tariffs on every nation, had stepped out. They didn’t leave until Trump made the pause official on Truth Social.

The health of American industry now hinges on one’s informal and personal ties to the president, which doesn’t bode well for clean energy, especially since the president’s falling out with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The GOP is still, and has always been, the party of Big Oil. Trump’s tariffs may still harm long-term profits, but, notably, oil interests were one of the rare exceptions in Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Unfortunately, the logic behind Trump’s Fossil Fuels First strategy is the same as his tariff policy: there is none.

Fossil fuels are such a fundamental part of conservative identity that realism no longer applies.

As Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it: Climate change is “a side effect of building the modern world.” Trump recently posted a clip from the television show Landman, in which Billy Bob Thornton’s oilman character claims that pumping crude is too fundamental to the American way of life to stop: “We don’t do it ’cause we like it. We do it ’cause we run out of options.” But that’s precisely the lie. Trump and his movement drill because they like the war on renewable energy. despite having better options.

The MAGA agenda is irrational. Trump wants energy abundance but kneecaps the fastest-growing energy sector; he wants economic prosperity but imposes the greatest regressive tax in U.S. history. It’s a reflection of the modern conservative movement that has succumbed to far-right conspiracism, becoming so divorced from reality that not even a self-inflicted recession might check it.

Sabotage and Strategy

That’s precisely where Democrats can play their hand. There is an energy crisis: natural gas price volatility, climate-induced extreme weather, and the high cost of aging coal plants have created a perfect storm of rising energy prices. And Trump, Republicans, and their big oil donors are willfully exacerbating it by kneecapping clean energy. Democrats need a unified message that defends climate action as the response to the right’s economic sabotage.

While cheap solar and wind energy projects languish on the sidelines, Republicans are forcing Americans to pay more for dirty fuel. Keep it simple: Fossil fuels = higher prices; clean energy = lower prices.

But Democrats also need to counter the Republican agenda with a bold vision of the nation’s energy future, one of abundant clean supplies and good-paying union jobs.

If Democrats fail to act, they won’t just lose a net-zero-carbon future—they’ll lose the country to a movement that values ideology over prosperity and fantasy over fact.

Related

NATO is facing the greatest crisis in its history. What appears to be its strength is increasingly accelerating its internal decline. Like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, the alliance often achieves the opposite of what it intends. Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in the lead-up to the NATO summit in The Hague, with its sweeping militarization agenda. President Donald Trump has proposed nearly doubling NATO’s military spending—to three trillion dollars, or 5 percent of GDP. European allies seem willing to follow his lead. For Germany, the implications are stark: nearly half of its federal budget—around 225 billion euros—would be directed toward military expenditures. The result would likely be a self-inflicted economic and social crisis.

If enacted, such plans would fundamentally transform European societies—turning them into nations where social justice and economic stability are subordinated to military buildup. The rationale in Europe is also increasingly at odds with American intelligence assessments. While German intelligence agencies, the Bundeswehr and mainstream media and think tanks warn of a possible Russian attack in 2029, the combined threat assessments from all 17 US intelligence agencies of the last two years suggest otherwise: Russia is neither planning nor preparing a conventional attack on NATO territory. Given NATO’s overwhelming military superiority, any such move by Moscow would be suicidal.

Meanwhile, transatlantic tensions over NATO’s strategic purpose are mounting. The Trump administration has pushed for an even stronger pivot toward China and, as outlined at the Washington summit in 2024, seeks to “Asianize” NATO through a web of bilateral military agreements. Trump appears interested in freezing the war in Ukraine, leaving European states to deplete their resources in a long-term standoff with Russia. While Trump favors negotiation and rejects a full-scale trade war with Moscow, European strategies increasingly aim to economically and militarily exhaust Russia. Recent EU sanctions targeting the Russian merchant fleet—aimed at halting oil exports via the Baltic Sea—risk triggering a dangerous escalation.

NATO was never a neutral alliance; it was founded to project US geopolitical power. In exchange for security, European nations surrendered considerable sovereignty. Today, the alliance is buckling under the weight of its internal contradictions. In the area of trade, the USA and its European allies are on the brink of a trade conflict. Joint rearmament efforts may attempt to cover these cracks but largely benefit the military-industrial complex, which—like an addict—demands ever-greater profits. Ultimately, the costs are borne by taxpayers, with the middle class at risk of being endangered. German arms manufacturers like Rheinmetall, now in shared ownership by US investment funds such as BlackRock, Goldmann Sachs, and Stanley Morgan are poised to profit enormously.

Germany’s increasingly assertive role in this dynamic is often underestimated. The government now positions itself as the military guarantor of Eastern Europe. For the first time since World War II, a German tank brigade has been stationed abroad—in Lithuania, near the Russian border. Given Germany’s historical legacy, this move signals an alarming degree of historical amnesia. The occupation policies of World War I—and the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union accompanied by genocide against Slavic peoples—remain insufficiently confronted. Today, a renewed drive for “eastern expansion” animates German policy, as seen in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s pledge to make the Bundeswehr “Europe’s strongest army.”

Historians warn that major wars often begin not with sudden acts of aggression but with prolonged rearmament and the erosion of trust. In the face of these developments, it is time to revive the call for détente and disarmament—even if, as during the Cold War, such voices are dismissed as naïve or denounced as traitorous.