June 15—Ancient Roman emperors relied on the Praetorian Guard, a cadre of loyal troops, standing always at the ready to serve the interests of the emperor's august person. When the Diktraitor staged a rally at Fort Bragg this past week, with army soldiers arrayed behind him like the chorus at a Broadway show, egging him on while he vilfied his political opponents, all that was lacking was a raised arm salute, á la Elon Musk, and a shouting in unison of "Hail, Caesar!" The United States is suffering the unfortunate consequences of having elected, to its chief executive office, a megalomaniac with little understanding, much less appreciation, for those fundamental concepts and protocols that have made America among the greatest nations that have ever existed. One of the most fundamental of those concepts is that the military stays out of politics, and last week's display at Fort Bragg was one of the most disturbing spectacles TSD has yet witnessed in this regime's sordid maraud over American history and traditions. As stated in the NBC article, "such overt political activity on a base is . . . inconsistent with military good order and discipline and," according to one expert, "a violation of military regulations." Retired judge advocate general (the Army's senior-most lawyer) Geoffrey DeWeese is quoted in the article as saying, "I would be cringing if I was a senior officer and it happend under my watch." A non-political military is an absolute bedrock principle of democracy, and should not be allowed to be compromised even in the smallest degree. The entire American public must know that our armed forces are here to protect and serve all of us, and never to give the impression that they are armed and trained so that they might protect and serve only some of us. A Fort Bragg spokesperson has said they are looking into the tacky and also unconstitutional sale of Trump political paraphernalia on the base, but none of the implicated brass have taken responsibility for this egregious breach of Army tradition and "good order.'

June 15—The kind of political violence heretofore associated with undeveloped democracies and South American oligarchies has come to the United States, in the sickening murder of a Minnesota House member and her husband, and the serious wounding of a Minnesota senator and his wife. Though the Diktraitor has issued the pro forma assertions of horror and regret, it is not to be wondered at that, after the demagogue-in-chief has portrayed Democrats as "scum" and "communist radicals" determined to destroy America, some unbalanced individual in a gun-happy nation would take the next logical step and eliminate the perceived danger. Reports indicate that the shooter left behind a list of dozens of politicians marked for assassination, all of them Democrats. At the risk of stating the obvious, this nation is heading for a very dark place if we cannot, all of us, begin to treat one another as valued fellow citizens rather than as enemies to be vanquished, silenced and demeaned (I exempt the Diktraitor and his co-conspirators from this injuntion, as they are proven traitors to American democracy). TSD's heart goes out to the orphaned young children of Minnesota Representive Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, their family and friends, and to the gravely wounded Senator John Hoffman and his, also gravely wounded, wife Yvette.

June 15—Those with a passing awareness of America's essential workforce have been speculating about the day when the hard-line immigration policies of Trump-whisperer Stephen Miller run up against stone, cold reality: the American agricultural sector, its housing sector, its hospitality sector, its food services sector and many others rely heavily on immigrant labor, much of it undocumented. In the face of heavy lobbying from agriculture interests, the Diktraitor has paused recently stepped-up raids against agricultural worksites, restaurants, hotels and packing plants. Can it be long before constuction interests, healthcare and building maintenance services get their dibs in, and the Diktraitor, who once again is facing the results of policy-making by an ignoramus with the impulse control of a 7-year-old, does a TACO and backs off? It is probably too much to hope for, but the TSD believes it just faintly possible that this brush with reality might induce the Diktraitor to spur his Republican lapdogs in Congress to finally pass meaningful immigration reform, providing legality and a path to citizenship to workers who play an integral part in our nation's prosperity.

June 15—Amid the weekly chaos of deportation raids and protests, the outbreak of war in the Middle East and despicable political murder in the United States, the big underlying story in U.S. politics is the fate of the Diktraitor's so-called "big, beautiful" budget bill, cleared by the House and now under deliberation in the Senate. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the bill will add $2.4 trillion to U.S.'s already staggering debt over the next 10 years, while increasing by 10.9 million the number of our fellow citizens with no health insurance. The CBO also concluded that the Diktraitor's tariffs, in the highly unlikely scenario that they remain in their current form, could bring in $2.5 trillion over that same 10-year period, thereby making up for the budget shortfall. If the tariffs do remain in their most extreme, currently envisioned form (a 50 percent levy on all nations with whom the U.S. has a trade deficit), the import duties will constitute a huge tax imposed upon American working people in order to finance the budget bill's massive tax cut for the wealthy. Indeed, an analysis by the New York Times concludes that the bill, if passed as proposed, will be the most regressive legislation passed in decades, skewing wealth and income away from working Americans and toward the rich.

June 15—Defenders of constitutional order have, since the beginning of the Diktraitor's assault on the separation of powers, insisted that if the regime wishes to defund agencies or programs established and funded by Congress, Congress must do the defunding through the procedure known as "rescission." In a win for democracy, if not for either good sense or social democracy, the House of Representatives has taken an initial step towards playing by the rules, voting on June 12 to retract $9.4 billion in funding for foreign aid, public broadcasting and anti-AIDS programs. The measure is now in the hands of the Senate. 

June 15—Following the standard Diktraitor's playbook of lie, lie and lie, the regime's EPA ("Environment Polluting Agency") has proposed a new rule stating that "emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution." And pigs can fly, the moon is made of green cheese, and Santa Claus will be arriving at your chiminey on December 24. AP News spoke to thirty actual scientists to clarify the enormity of this latest administration whopper.

June 15—If your head is spinning with the barrage of lawsuits and counter-suits, court rulings and stays arising out of the Diktraitor's attempts to turn the United States into an elective dictatorship, you're not alone. Fortunately, a couple of great news organizations have created tools to keep track of the federal court system's confrontation with an unprecedented and near-constant adventure in executive overreach. TSD has been posting links to the New York Times' lawsuit tracker for some time. This week we add a tool on the AP News site, which has the advantage of providing a handy one-glance graphic showing the status of all lawsuits on any given topic: immigration, workforce and budget cuts, attacks on law firms, and etc.

June 15—The Social Democrat has long argued that the Democratic Party's knee-jerk attachment to extremist culture-war stances has scuttled any chances of the Party's capturing the kind of super-majority required to effectuate real change. Since the Party's devastating losses in November, more and more Party operatives are coming around to the same view. As long-time Democratic operative Adam Jentleson launches a new think tank to liberate Democrat messaging from niche causes that alienate the broad middle swath of American voters, Politico writers Adam Wren and Elena Schneider note signs of a great "un-awokening" among Democrat pols seeking a path out of the wilderness and toward the average American voter.

June 15—A key moment in the British political cycle is the government's annual "spending review." The 2025 review, the first by the UK Labour government installed a year ago, establishes major social democratic milestones after 14 years of conservative control, most especially in affordable housing, improvements in the National Health Service and education, and public transportation. With an eye on Ukraine, and the wider threat the Putin regime poses to Europe, significant increases in UK defense spending are also in the works.

June 15—Polish voters on June 8 awarded a narrow victory to nationalist presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki over social democrat Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski. Though social democrat prime minister Donald Tusk will maintain day-to-day command of Poland's government, presidential veto power, and substantial authority over Poland's foreign policy, will give Trzaskowski substantial leverage to thwart Tusk's social-democratic and pro-Europe agenda.

May 28—The Social Democrat will continue to remind readers that something extraordinary—and extraordinarily bad—is happening in the United States of America: a confirmed traitor to American democracy has lied his way into the Oval Office. After traducing our democracy by pardoning the perpetrators of an attempted coup d'etat aimed at preventing the orderly transfer of the presidential office to a duly elected successor, Donald Trump has attempted with every resource at his disposal, aided and abetted by a coterie of co-conspirators in the executive branch and Congress, to turn the United States into an elective dictatorship. We must not fall into the trap of treating, or speaking about, Donald Trump as if he is an ordinary president of the United States. Nor will TSD give the scoundrel the honor of the presidential title, preferring to refer to this traitor and incipient dictator in our midst as the "Diktraitor." For a fuller treatment of the Diktraitor's attack on our democracy, see TDS's latest "Social Democracy Outlook."

May 28—The biggist normal political news from Washington has been passage by House Republicans of the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." Following the standard Republican playbook, the bill extends large tax cuts, mainly to the wealthy, while calling for massive reductions to two social democratic programs critical to maintaining our most vulnerable fellow citizens: Medicaid and SNAP, or "food stamps." Independent analysts conclude that the bill, if enacted in its current form, will add $5 trillion to the nation's already staggering debt over the next 10 years. Articles from AP News and Politico take apart Republican assertions that the bill's tax reductions will spur enough economic growth, consequently increasing tax collections, to prevent any budget shortfall, an argument once described by Republicans' own George H.W. Bush as "voodoo economics." The bill is now under consideration by the Senate.

May 28—The Diktraitor's corrupt conception of policital power, and congressional Republicans' fealty to their supreme leader, have been on full display of late. On May 14 the Senate ratified the Diktraitor's pick for U.S. ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, father-in-law to the Diktraitor's daughter, Ivanka Trump. With no diplomatic experience to recommend him, Kushner's criminal record for tax evasion, and a connected attempt to intimidate witnesses, was apparently not considered a disqualification to lead America's diplomatic mission to one of the nation's most important allies. Meanwhile Trump when into full emoluments mode, promoting his new meme coin by promising personal visits at the White House to top investors in the crypto currency venture. Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, quoted by Huff Post, called Trump's open use of the presidency to promote his business interests unprecedented in American history. “The real financial corruption in an administration," she said, "is around the president, not usually the president himself."

May 28—A new study by an international group of leading climate scientists warns of the probability of sea level rises of several meters or more before the end of this century, leading to "massive land migration on scales that we've never witnessed in modern civilization."

May 28—The Diktraitor's man-child sidekick and play-date buddy, Elon Musk, is thankfully leaving Washington to resume playing with his other toys. After boasting of his ability to decrease the federal budget by $2 trillion per year, his DOGE team has achieved somewhere between $165 billion and zero in cost-cutting and has possibly actually cost the government money. His failure to achieve his adolescent boast, however, does not mean that DOGE has had no effect. Almost a dozen agencies have been hollowed out, and the federal workforce has been reduced by 250,000, to levels not seen since the 1960s.