There is an old adage in American politics that Democrats get America into wars and Republicans get the country into economic depressions. The key to any presidency is to avoid doing both.
I spent 12 years as a county politician, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. A hard-nosed realist politically, my take is “You elect officials and then you live with the results.”
Americans re-elected Donald John Trump as president and we should accept the consequences. It’s not like President Trump has made a secret of his opinions. He considers tariffs beautiful, every agreement not signed by him personally is worthless trash, and anything not specifically forbidden by law is negotiable: Actions like putting his name on public buildings, hanging huge banners with his likeness on federal government property, tearing down the East Wing of the White House and paving over the Rose Garden or turning Washington DC into a racetrack. If something is not expressly forbidden in the Constitution and Trump wants to do it, he issues an Executive Order and does his thing, whether it be resurfacing the Reflecting Pool or holding a cage fight on the White House lawn.
There is an Unwritten Law of Unforeseen Consequences, but until they blow up in our faces, the Trump administration seems oblivious to any consequences what-so-ever.
IRAN. When President Obama left office, the U.S. and Iran had concluded a nuclear arms agreement specifying that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon. Once elected president, Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement was the worst deal in history and the U.S. was withdrawing from the agreement. Cut loose from any binding agreement, Iran put the pedal to the metal and accelerated development of a nuclear weapon.
This threat led to a direct military strike against Iran by Israeli and American forces on February 28, 2026. Before that date, few members of the general public had ever heard of the Strait of Hormuz. (It sounds like a brand of hummus, Strait of Hormuz brand hummus!)
I expect the White House to be better informed than the general public (including me). Suddenly the Iranians cut off oil tanker traffic in the bottleneck Strait of Hormuz and a third of the world’s crude oil became unavailable. Duh, who knew?
There is no cleaning up this mess. The world was better off with the Obama-era agreement, left to molder in the dust of history.
The economy. The Republicans had a field day poking the Biden administration in the eye over rising gas prices. I am not an economist, so for me that branch of science seems kind of diffuse. Does it really matter if the U.S. has a trade imbalance with China? It’s all numbers. If both countries wanted, you could officially erase the debt tomorrow and just start over. I realize that is unrealistic, but it is not impossible.
What does it mean when America’s national debt has topped 40 trillion dollars?
One thing seems obvious, tariffs are not a good remedy for what ails the U.S. economy. Even I notice when gas prices hit $4 a gallon and grocery prices rise by a third.
The Kennedy Center. If you don’t live in the Washington DC area, this last discussion may seem uninteresting, but I feel it is symptomatic of the current administration’s willful blindness. Someone should point out for White House spokespeople and Department of Justice lawyers that calling an elephant pink doesn’t give us a herd of pink elephants.
The Kennedy Center is the top fine arts venue in the nation’s capital. It is also a bastion of liberals and Democrats, as the name implies. Not especially welcome there, for years, Trump ignored it. Then he decided to make it his own. He issued an Execulive Order adding his name to the building’s façade and he replaced the entire board of directors with allies and supporters. The sad news is that these actions resulted in artists and patrons abandoning the Trump-Kennedy Center as too partisan and reflective of President Trump personally. Unhappy with the current administration, they stopped participating, leaving the venue with very few patrons, fewer donors, almost no artists and in a hellish position financially.
Wake up, America! How many mistakes are too many mistakes?
Clive singing in the 1980’s punk band Only After Death.
The spotlight never fades on Taylor Swift. But while she remains #1, memoirs and autobiographies from other musicians spring up like clover. The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards has penned an autobiography titled “Life.” Frontman Bono in the rock band U2 wrote a memoir in 2022, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” Bruce Springsteen has come out with “Born to Run” and Rush’s lead vocalist Geddy Lee has written “My Effin’ Life.” The late Marianne Faithfull wrote both an autobiography and a memoir. Since these songwriters are getting published, I figure someone must be reading their stuff. I have in front of me on my desk a 2007 copy of The Heroin Diaries, a drug-addled, red-ink-splattered chronicle of glorious misadventure by songwriter Nikki Sixx of the legendary heavy metal band Mötley Crüe. Even on Broadway, the play “Stereophonic,” a study of a 1970’s rock band and its struggles in the studio, landed rave reviews. Clearly, the glamorous, cantankerous lives of musicians are as hot a topic today as when the Beatles ran into Marylebone Station in London in 1964 to escape screaming fans in the film A Hard Day’s Night.
Managing the Swedish rap duo realPfft, I meet Clive Flatenbad and Mutte Fjutt almost daily online over Microsoft Teams. Sitting at my laptop, seeing them in living color, the only two things separating Oxburg, Maryland from Uppsala, Sweden are a six-hour time difference and the Atlantic Ocean. Since he is eminently available and sure to please, I’m inclined to publish this interview with rap artist and lead singer Clive. I work with the dude, so I knew a lot of his backstory, but nothing like this. It feels like a college tutorial.
Born to a Swedish father and a British mum, Clive was raised in Stockholm. I consider him more than a musician. A performance artist, I think of him as G.O.A.T., the Greatest Of All Time frontman for Swedish garage bands. He sang in several back in the 1980’s, a time when thousands of wannabe rock stars dressed themselves in black leather, holed up in suburban basements and strummed guitars. When they weren’t out practicing ice hockey on frozen tennis courts, the boys were at home jamming.
Unlike John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Clive didn’t start out in music. He became a radio disc jockey while attending college in the United States in the 1970’s. Armed with a Radio Telephone Third Class Operator Permit from the FCC, he frog-marched into a local radio station that smelled like a cigar box and created radio theater. Clowning on a one-hour show, he christened it Audiographics. A clever name, it was graphic audio. Basically, it was a series of humorous podcasts 50 years before there was such a thing as podcasts. Filled with the conflicting personalities of American AM Top 40 radio, it offered mayhem on AM. (“Typing by Radio” was a recurring gag, where Clive supposedly taught touch-typing, clack, clack, clack, over the radio.) Whether intoning a British accent à la Winston Churchill, pr-pr-producing a nasal stutter or delivering the pear-shaped, mellifluous tones of a studio announcer, Clive invented a closetful of voices.
When he got back home to Stockholm, he worked on the railroad and freelanced as a rock journalist. One fine day, his buddy from high school Björn Svensson invited him to join his radio program. Once again, Clive’s many personae fit the bill. “We were pre-recording weekly half-hour radio shows in 100% Swedish that were broadcast at 11:30 on Tuesday nights, ‘Channel U R, Underground Radio,’” Clive explains. “Audio theater that made us into heroes fashioning something fresh in 1979 on the newly-created Stockholm Neighborhood Radio, set up by the government to compete with an off-shore commercial satellite radio station broadcasting in Swedish but based in Great Britain. Accustomed to having complete control of the airwaves, the Social Democrats didn’t like foreign interference one bit.”
It was an easy step from announcing to singing, from drama to drama queen.
What motivated you to become a singer?
“Sex. When it comes to sex, Americans think Sweden is some sort of bunny patch. In questions of intimacy, the law puts all the power in the hands of strong-willed Swedish women. One result is hundreds of thousands of blue-eyed blonde teenage schoolgirls giving you hard, sexually demanding stares. You cannot touch them, the law against pedophilia is super-strict. We’re the adults in the room. That doesn’t stop them from flirting outrageously. They all want to hang out with a singer in a band, just as long as he keeps his hands to himself. If you like to flirt, Sweden is Heaven on Earth.
“I have had to explain this rule of thumb to some genuine international rock stars playing concerts in Sweden during their European tours. ‘If she’s over 18, you can bed her, but remember that she is in charge,’ I instruct them. ‘And when you are done, don’t abandon her to your roadie. Take her downstairs for coffee and buy her something nice in the hotel gift shop. Be a gentleman. That way, hopefully, she will never accuse you of rape.’”
So you became a rock star.
“I only got into the music end of things because of Björn’s radio show. You know, Björn as in Björn Borg, but not. He needed songs tailor-made to fit the dialogue. I can sing. He bought a used, monophonic ARP synthesizer and a programmable electronic drum machine. Zowie! Overnight, we became a synth band.
“Since he wasn’t any good as a musician, Björn made up for a lack of chops by going hog wild on personality. Grimacing, sweating and growling in ecstasy, he pressed a single pale finger against a single white key on the keyboard of the pre-programmed synthesizer.
“Björn collected strays, whose unhappy presence occasionally made difficulties im das home studio. One of them, a starchy German audio engineer named Willy, wanted to know how you harmonized melodies when the monophonic synth only played one chord at a time. The short answer was, you didn’t. When multi-tracking, you could add individual chords one atop another, so-called layering, but an early synth was no Hammond organ or even a piano. It made one tone and only one tone at any given moment.
“One day, a piano player named Stefan sat down at the keyboard of the ARP and let loose a humongous parade of lickety-split chords in quick progression. ‘Aha,’ complained Björn dismissively, ‘one of those keyboardists. A plinky, planky, plonky piano player.’
“It was hard to counter Björn’s hard-edged critique, because if one expressed admiration for the pianist’s virtuoso abilities, it meant Björn was a gutless wonder, the hole in the doughnut. From that day on, Björn declared ‘I’m not a musician,’ making it sound like a vulgar label. ‘I’m a natural talent,’ he claimed. Since that is what he called himself, no criticism could be applied to his musical output because, after all, he wasn’t a musician composing music, he was a natural talent creating art.”
Whoa! That sounds like total bullshit.
“Back then, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, I was all doped up on nicotine. Plus being jacked up on caffeine from umpteen mugs of coffee 24/7, a beverage known for its ergogenic and nootropic properties. Ugh!”
Come again?
“The result: I was a Dizzy Dan who couldn’t think straight. That meant Björn could sell me a load of goods. I had an inferiority complex after years of jeering abuse in grade school for being a British half-breed. Possessing low self-esteem, I accepted everything he dished out.
“While ABBA was raking in millions, Björn excused our lack of commercial success by endlessly chanting ‘One is never a prophet in his own land,’ a Jesus parable from the Bible.”
Sad, bro.
“I was mucho young and naïve.Since he was uninterested in piano lessons, Björn used the envelope function on the synthesizer to create a repetitive, fluctuating tone which he called ‘pulse music.’ Give the man credit, within a year or two, the boys in Düsseldorf, Germany christened the same musical style ‘techno’ and made it big in the dance clubs. We should have had a chunk of that, but a dilettante, Björn always found a reason not to go commercial.”
You’re pissing me off, Clive.
“Let’s remember, it was the 1980’s. Swedes had a social safety net the size of the moon and lots of disposable income. You really had to struggle to fail, but B.S. artist Björn and his cronies managed to so thoroughly blacken their reputations, they had to leave Stockholm with their tails between their legs. Declaring themselves a bohemian Artists’ Collective, they rented a farmhouse and took refuge on the island of Gotland.
“It was only a matter of time before Björn’s other buddy, yellow-haired, slow-eyed Anders, whose father is affiliated with the fish industry, arrived at the farmhouse one Spring morning. Living on the dole, guitar case and clunky red amplifier in hand, he acquired an extension cord, plugged it into an electrical outlet and fed the cord through an open window. Setting up his amplifier out of doors, facing the V in the wall where the chimney met the masonry, he tuned his candy apple red Stratocaster. Presto! Channeling Jimi Hendrix, Anders played improvised, endless guitar solos. Like, forty or fifty minutes at a time. Those musical interludes echoed for miles across the flat terrain of southern Gotland, waxing and waning ghost-like on the wind. Among the locals, no one knew where this strange guitar music was coming from. Like UFO’s, it was a mystery shrouded in uncertainty.
“The day came when southern Gotland held a rock festival. I was the lead singer in our punk band, O.A.D. Only After Death. Hetero-erotic melancholia, I got up on stage in a tattered Swedish Army uniform and growled in English:
Turn me on, turn me on, I’m a television
It’s your choice, make your decision
Turn the knob, hit the switch
Life changes in hue, death changes in pitch.
“Shazam! I knocked ’em dead. Going bonkers, the audience literally stormed the stage.”
So you were on your way?
“Southern Gotland is not exactly the center of the music universe. One good performance does not a career make. But, yeah, as a songwriter, I was a crowd-pleaser.
[Even Mutte Fjutt was involved with the band. He had a television repair shop in Uppsala where he upgraded and repaired the band’s equipment.]
“We rehearsed in the barn. Doing things the hard way, our studio equipment consisted of a used, 4-channel reel-to-reel tape recorder, only one step above a Blattnerphone.”
Never heard of it.
“Google it.
‘I need a guitar solo on every song,’ insisted Stratocaster Anders. ‘Otherwise, what’s the point of playing?’
‘What do you have in mind?’ I asked.
‘Forty-minute solos. Free form guitar improv is my specialty,’ he insisted.
‘We’re a synth band,’ countered Björn, adjusting knobs on the synthesizer before placing a ‘pie’ of dry snuff under his upper lip. ‘Our audience expects a synth solo in every song. One, at a minimum. More if need be. It’s expected.’
‘Actually, we’re a punk band,’ I pointed out.
‘Now you seem aggressive,’ scolded Björn, his fave critique. A Swede from the heartland, he bullied me constantly.
‘The bass guitar drives the rhythm section which is the motor in modern rock music,’ Max on bass mansplained. Mercifully, he didn’t demand a bass solo.
“Like the Beatles, we were a four-piece: Clive, Björn, Anders and Max. Trying to work with these rank amateurs, bathed in frustration, I found that their egomania quickly became a quagmire. It triggered in me almost daily meltdowns. Amid their endless gabbing, I had to beg them to shut up and play some music. Since I was a guest in their house, I was expected to play by their rules.”
Sounds like an ass backwards way to develop a career in pop music.
“Contacts, contacts, contacts, in Sweden it’s all a matter of who you know. A rock journo who doubled as a singer/songwriter, I got offers from record labels and professional musicians to front budding young teenage garage bands who, with the right frontman, could blossom into meaningful commercial vehicles. It happened all the time, singers went from high school choir to heavy metal bands in Swedish Norrland. Did I want to make music a full-time commitment? I was manager of a county railway station on the mainland. Wise, for once, I didn’t throw away my career at a moment’s notice.
“Björn peppered me with bad advice. ‘Musically, we are a dynamic duo. I am your muse. Without me, you are No-wheres-ville. No one has ever created music like ours!’
(Because it stinks, I thought.)
‘Our music will overthrow the music industry! No one will ever catch up with us.’
(I doubt it, I reasoned, keeping my own counsel.)
‘Our music isn’t commercial pap. We are creative geniuses. We refuse to sell out.’
(So the Beatles, Michael Jackson and the Stones have sold out to the man?)
‘This is our time! Why live a life of regret over what could have been? Never in the history of human progress has such a divine opportunity been spilled onto the laps of such worthy practitioners.’
(Maybe, but in that case, why does our music stink?)
‘I create soundscapes. It’s what I do. You should be eternally grateful that I am willing to share them with you.’
(Don’t do me any favors!)
‘I’ll be your manager. We’ll sign a contract. You can pay me by the hour.’
(Aha! Björn the money suck!)
“I discussed it with my dad, who was a personnel director in the government.
‘What’s the question?’ he asked, askance. ‘Give up a lifetime career and a pension for a stint as a singer in a rock band that only stays popular for three years? No way! What kind of lunacy is that? Sure, if you strike it rich and become an ABBA or the Beatles, but even then you are striking a deal with the devil. Money, money, money, get your head together!’
“By then, I owned three tape recorders, a mixing console, a MOSFET sound system, studio and stage speakers, microphones, reams of recording tape, a studio video camera and a U-matic video tape recorder. While I worked overtime on the railroad, my bandmates were on the island of Gotland, playing the hell out of my equipment. Me mum wanted to know who was footing the bill for all this creative tomfoolery. I was!
“Smart for once, I kept my full-time job.”
So that was the end of sex, drugs, rock and roll?
“That wasn’t my vibe. I had already done the whole drug scene in college, smoking Mary Jane and Mexican hashish to the point of confusion. Who wants to muddle through life in a daze? Then, too, I was a recovering alcoholic with visible liver damage on the X-rays. In a land of drunks, I became a teetotaler. Fed up with wild, meaningless sex, I became a monk, ruling out a host of sexually transmittable diseases. Hey, Mutte and I are still around and reasonably healthy. Take care of your bod, it’s the only one you’ve got.”
Fast forward. What’s cooking?
“Let’s be clear, Mutte and I barely make a red pfennig from our music. I don’t intend to travel under the false pretense that we are a commercial money-maker or a cash cow. Living on our pensions, music has become our hobby. It keeps us young. If Billboard ever releases The Top 2,000, you might find one of our tracks at #1,998. Yes, you will find us on TikTok, but since we don’t record TikTok videos, our audience is in the double digits. After eight years and 145 songs, our YouTube channel has eight subscribers. Eight! Tell your friends to subscribe!!!”
Hey! Let’s get realPfft’s YouTube Channel audience out of the single digits ditch, folks! It doesn’t cost anything, so SUBSCRIBE today!
“We belong to a musical rights organization that sends us royalty payments four times a year. It’s barely enough income to file it on our tax returns.
“When I read that Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are billionaires, it feels like we must be doing something muchowrong-o, but Mutte and I are who we are. Our music distributor expects us, not them, to create a following on social media. We discussed it and that ain’t gonna happen. ‘Whatever time and energy we have, let’s concentrate on producing music,’ we decided.
“The paradox of social media is that if no one sends me a text message and my phone doesn’t ring, it often feels like no one knows I exist. I end up sitting alone at home, staring out the window at acres and acres of snow.”
Your listeners are in the single digits, but they come from cities as diverse as Toronto, Bogotá, Prague, Kuala Lumpur and Johannesburg.
“Our listeners are the bright spot in our lives! Alphabetically, they’re from Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA and Vietnam.
“It’s an uphill struggle to chart in the UK, France or Japan since those markets focus on homegrown product, but we are there! Every time a fan downloads a free music file, that confirms for us that we are reaching our audience. We love the fact that our kookiest songs elicit the biggest response: Storming the Capitol, Back in the Pandemic, Speed Hump, My Broken Tooth, the funkadelic Timewarp. We often wonder how we come up with these songs, but as long as people like them, we’ll keep on ‘grinding out the hits.’
“Musical dinosaurs, Mutte and I love almost every kind of music: rock, pop, punk, rap, hip hop, soul, R & B, dance, disco, jazz, funk, fusion, metal, samba, salsa, calypso, steel drum, folk, chanson and classical. We call our genre Dino Pop.
“No klezmer, no polkas and no accordions, thanks.
“We once tried to release a K-Pop track, but our music distributor refused because we are not Korean. Wrong nationality, wrong generation.
LOL!
“Historically, music groups were at the mercy of their record labels. Record companies hired flacks who seldom understood the music or their groups. A & R dudes—Artist & Repertoire— decided what got released and when, what it sounded like, the cover art, how many copies went into the pressing and the size of the PR budget. Often, they made innocuous decisions that drove the recording artists mad.
“This unhappy situation has been passed down to today’s music distributors, who mean well but often seem clueless regarding trends, styles and technological breakthroughs. Online stores have all these irritating rules about track title formatting, capitalization, cover art content, explicit lyrics, metadata, copyrights and release dates. The music distributors ride herd on a stable of unruly, angry artists and have to right the ship according to the demands of the online stores. Now they have forbidden ‘sound alike’ covers of popular tunes, after customers complained that they had been hoodwinked into buying a track created by a tribute band instead of the original recording. Yada, yada, yada. If iTunes doesn’t like some facet of a music release, everyone falls into line, bending over backwards to satisfy iTunes. Nitpicky and hyper-focused, the online stores have all the authority.
“In the 1980’s, cassette tape became the primary format. You were no longer dependent on record companies, you could distribute your band’s music on a mixtape. The trade magazines published articles like ‘Will Home Taping Mean the Demise of the Record Industry?’
“Came the 1990’s, we got music CD’s, compact discs that you could burn on your computer. Hoo boy! Once arrogant record labels became as sweet as lambs. After firing half their staff, deeply solicitous, concerned about the welfare of their musical talent, they asked, ‘Do you need studio time? Do ya wanna cut a track? ‘Cause we can fix you up with an audio engineer and a producer if you have any jangly tunes circulating inside that head of yours.’
“Yesterday, DIY, you could take a computer, a guitar, a microphone, an interface and digital software and join the millions of musicians who were recording tracks in their bedrooms and releasing them online. Record labels were dead. After living through the age of vinyl, cassettes, CD’s and streaming, now we’re into A.I.
“I’m going bananas!”
I hear echoes of that craziness in your music.
“I like to say ‘Everything we do is comedy.’ realPfft means ‘really nothing.’ Lint. Let’s hear it for low self-esteem, dudes!
“Paul the perfectionist drove the other Beatles to distraction. More than one monumental rock band is known for huge fights in the studio. Aware of that, Mutte and I are super-careful not to stamp on each other’s toes. We are both clinical depressives, we can go into a blue funk and not compose a single note for months. Many is the time Mutte has composed instrumentals while waiting for Clive to get his sorry ass in front of a microphone. Besides being a music loops genius, Mutte is a great guy, very low-key. I’m a conspicuously live wire, a manic-depressive, so I try to tone down my assertive personality and let Mutte find his groove. Most often, he composes the music while I write the lyrics. Then we meet at the mixing console.
“We only release music that speaks to us, which means we are always going to inhabit the margins. Making a virtue of necessity, we try to breathe fresh creativity into mainstream pop’s cluttered soundscape. Time will tell whether we accumulate more gray hairs than fans!
“PrezidentOzymandias, we started out by making fun of Donald Trump, only to discover that he didn’t need us, he was pretty good at parodying himself. We stopped making fun of Trump because everyone is talking and no one is listening. ‘He’s crazy!’ or ‘He’s not crazy!’ It got old. Who cares? Alternative fact, me mum used to complain that ‘Trump is a real nothing burger.’ Mercifully, unlike MAGA, we are not fueled by insecurity and grievance. Yes, we are driven, but only by our quest for musical perfection. Our motto is ‘With realPfft in Modern Times,’ a take-off on King Carl Gustaf’s motto ‘For Sweden in Modern Times.’
“Fruity loops, Mutte has purchased some wonderful performances by female vocalists from Ghosthack in Germany. We love the fact that the same female vocal can appear in different tracks by separate bands in different countries. Anyone can buy those vocals. You can build a playlist showing how different musicians have used the identical material. Cool! Unfortunately, it drives music distributors nuts to find identical metadata spread across the globe. ‘Someone has stolen your vocal!’ warns the distributor. Well… no, not really. It’s called sharing. Loops also play havoc with copyright law, but the license to use the material is included in the purchase price.
“Everything changed with the arrival of TTS, Text-To-Speech, and now A.I.
“The music industry has a problem with artificial intelligence. The Internet is flooded with ghost artists and songs created by generative A.I. The tools have taken over the workshop! We’re in the age of push-button songwriting, anyone can dial up a song.
“In the Old Days— two years ago— Mutte used ChatGPT to produce song lyrics which he fed into the Text-To-Speech platform Uberduck and hit ‘rap.’ Uberduck provided a rapper style voice and rhythm, which Mutte fed into Suno AI which combined the vocal with an instrumental accompaniment, producing a finished track. Cut and paste music.
“Today, Mutte might feel inspired to feed a prompt into Google’s Gemini AI, ‘Write me a song about the Stockholm sewer system.’ Gemini delivers song lyrics which Mutte feeds into Riffusion/Producer.ai, a tool which creates the voice, style, rhythm, melody and rock accompaniment. Riffusion has combined these various functions, everything from soup to nuts, on a single platform. Voila! A finished track: trip-hop, IDM, Swedish house music.
“We spend a lot of time at the mixing console. Music created from electronic signals is brittle and a bear to mix. There are hi-fi and mastering issues. Still, a Brave New World, computer programs often provide our next hit song. If we don’t like the first version, we can always ask the software for a remix.
“Kuny, who does our cover artwork, feeds a prompt into Microsoft Copilot and within minutes, he has a png file containing finished cover art that used to take him days to create.
“Riding the crest of this wave, the joke is on us. The music industry talks about ‘A.I. junk’ and ‘A.I. generated noise’ on the Internet muscling out bona fide artists. Fake bands like The Velvet Sundown can attract millions of fans, their creators milking thousands of dollars in royalty payments from the industry. According to Google, current data suggests that over 30,000 A.I. generated tracks are uploaded daily to the streaming platform Deezer. That’s hundreds of thousands of songs every week.
“The figures are mind-boggling. Totally nerts. The generative A.I. website Boomy claims it has generated over 22 million songs or 15% of the world’s recorded music.
Are you afraid of being replaced by A.I.?
“Thank God realPfft released its first track in 2018. We have bona fides, we’re not an imaginary band. I love the idea of Wall-E rolling onstage at a music festival, approaching a microphone and singing its little heart out. That would be interesting music! Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Silicon Valley.
“Using A.I. as a tool, Mutte and I have become adept music producers, but we risk losing our souls. Retired, older and hopefully wiser, our creativity is a race against the clock.
“We’re big in China! And Swedish Pop is now a specific genre on Spotify.”
Are you going to do a Taylor Swift and re-record gems from your back catalog? The song Television was first recorded in 1981.
“You have a typical businessman mentality, Kevin. Let me ask Mutte and get back to you.”
Cool beans, Clive! Cool beans.
Note: Some personal names and references have been fictionalized to protect people’s privacy.
A bitterly cold winter, the people of Minneapolis are battling snow and ICE.
It turns out we libs have been afraid of the wrong bogeyman. We have feared MAGA, when the real blackguard is the Department of Homeland Security being converted into a domestic thugocracy.
There are 3,000 Department of Homeland Security agents deployed across Minnesota at this time, some from CBP, Customs and Border Protection, and others from ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are making daily arrests and sometimes they shoot people.
What surprises me is the lack of discipline among the ICE troops. When I see a video of an ICE agent approaching a vehicle, exclaiming “Open the door! Open the door! Open the fucking door!” I am appalled. This angry profanity is not standard police procedure. I have been yelled at by a police officer for exiting my vehicle at a traffic stop, but I have never been cussed out.
When a fellow ICE officer on that icy street in Minneapolis then unholstered his pistol and shot Ms. Renée Good dead, this strikes me as an unnecessary escalation of a situation which— had cooler heads prevailed— could have been resolved in a very different fashion.
Once upon a time, I was a U.N. peacekeeper. We encountered annoying sniper fire and constant disappointment, which got on our nerves. We were sent to carry out a specific mission and we never seemed to reach our goal. Occasionally in our brigade, one of my fellow soldiers would spit out a hate-filled rant over one or another of the combatants whom we had been sent to pacify. It always caught me off-guard to encounter so much anger, but professional soldiers, we never let our emotions color our actions. That may sound like a categorical denial of human nature, but it’s true: Angry and disgruntled, we still treated our contact with the locals with utmost caution. The last thing we wanted to do was get in a firefight with those people.
In Minneapolis, seventeen days after the Renée Good debacle, there was a second killing. This time it was a dude named Alex Pretti, a male intensive care nurse employed by the Veterans Administration. When he went to help a female demonstrator who had been knocked to the ground, a hodgepodge of agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit piled atop 37-year-old Alex. Disarming him of his legally licensed handgun, two agents of the Border Patrol then fatally shot him, firing ten or more rounds within five seconds.
Gaslighting the voters, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller claimed Pretti was an assassin who tried to murder the federal agents. A half dozen videos taken from various angles show something completely different. A scrum in rugby perhaps.
“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, defending the actions of the government agents. Noem blames Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for using inflammatory rhetoric to fan protest in the state. She also claims that Renée Good committed an “act of domestic terrorism.” The videos show Renée was driving away in her car at 5 mph, her wife Becca next to her in the front seat and her dog in the back, which makes it hard to understand exactly what kind of terrorism Kristi Noem has in mind.
According to mainstream media, Department of Homeland Security officers have fired shots 16 times since July, either while making arrests or at people protesting their operations.
ILHAN OMAR, member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota’s 5th district, has called for Kristi Noem to be impeached and for ICE to be abolished.
Since everybody and his brother is writing reams about ICE in Minnesota, I want to raise two issues that seldom get mentioned. Where are the ICE agents housed? Barracks bitching often leads to gross public behavior. Angry soldiers don’t exit the airplane angry, their frustration and anger is a boots-on-the-ground reaction to daily confrontation with an unruly public. The antisemites of my youth got infected with that attitude every evening at the family dinner table. Hearing their fathers badmouth the Jews, they felt empowered to beat the crap out of us Jewish kids.
The ICE agent jumping in his van in the morning has spent an evening listening to complaints from his fellow ICEmen, stoking his anger and giving him a very negative view of his urban environment. At what motel or National Guard depot are these people staying? Where do these people go to eat? What kind of leadership are they being given around the dinner table and what are they being told regarding the day’s events? Is a total trainwreck being met with a pat on the back and a reminder that DHS agents have total immunity from prosecution while carrying out their duties?
Noem complains that ICE agents are being harassed at their hotels and in local restaurants. She also claims that their families have come under threat. Well d’uh? You run around all day in masks, carrying guns, arresting people, then you find the locals have a negative view of your activities? Gee, I wonder why.
My second question regards the protesters. Who are these people and how do they have so much time on their hands? We had a major snowfall in the Washinton, DC area last Sunday. Even worse, the snow was followed by rain and sleet, forming a crust of ice atop the snow. This makes for great “snowcrete,” blocks of ice perfect for building an igloo. Unfortunately, they weigh a ton. Hacking these ice blocks on my driveway into manageable chunks and piling them in my yard, my back is killing me. Listen, any of you demonstrators in Minneapolis are welcome to grab a snow shovel or an axe, jump a plane and join me here in Maryland! I’ll supply the hot coffee and the overnight stay.
Yes, I understand why the demonstrators are recording the ICE agents’ nefarious activities. I applaud their civic engagement. They are providing an invaluable record of the heinous b.s. being perpetrated by ICE. I am just curious about their domestic situation. How do they manage to free up time in the middle of the day to engage in civil disobedience? They can’t all be nepo babies or night workers.
Without wading into the debate about fascist brown shirts within ICE or whether Kristi Noem is a danger to American democracy, I will simply say that 90% of ICE activity in Minneapolis looks suspiciously unconstitutional. If the video record is any indication, the right to gather in public protest, the right to free speech, constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure as well as the sanctity of the home are all being violated. The Trump administration’s smoke and mirrors pseudo-justifications do not change the facts on the ground: White American protesters are getting shot dead by federal agents in a hail of bullets.
While Elon Musk chainsaws the federal bureaucracy, firing people left and right, “saving” the American taxpayer millions, Trump’s policies are going to raise the national debt by trillions. Penny wise and pound foolish.
A trade war with America’s most prolific trading partners isn’t going to end well for America. “They’re ripping us off,” complains the president, but when he took office, unemployment was at 4% and we had a robust economy. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Trump has experienced multiple bankruptcies, only this time, when he bankrupts America, there won’t be any small claims court to bail us out.
Maybe Trump is just playing with us and isn’t really going to place 25% tariffs on foreign auto parts. He has the playfulness of a child and follows his instincts, so we never know what to expect from one week to the next.
Americans in the heartland love their automobiles. They are not going to be happy when tariffs drive up auto prices, adding $10,000 in sticker shock to new cars. Most dealerships have enough stock on hand to cover sales for 60 to 90 days, but after that, we’ll be living in a world of tariff autos.
As soon as prices fly through the roof, the American people are going to be furious.
I call most Trump supporters “kitchen table Republicans,” people who sit at the kitchen table in the evening and try to get the household budget to add up. Perennially strapped for cash, they cannot afford to have inflation reduce their purchasing power. These are the voters who blamed the Dems for the rising cost of gasoline and groceries.
If they were furious with Biden over higher gas prices, just wait while Trump screws up trade with Canada and Mexico. The pendulum is going to swing. Violently.
This is what happens when you populate the highest echelons of government with billionaires. They couldn’t care less about ordinary people who are struggling to make ends meet.
In recent weeks, the Trump Administration has laid off tens of thousands of federal employees across numerous agencies. Lacking constitutional authority, Elon Musk and his assistants at the Department of GovernmentEfficiency (DOGE) continue their effort to dismantle the federal workforce without any clear analysis of the impact. Federal agencies and the American people will suffer devastating consequences.
Since more than 80% of federal employees live outside of the Washington DC area, the effects of these “large-scale reductions in force” will be felt in communities across the country and reduce the effectiveness of government operations.
These layoffs follow a 77,000-person reduction in the size of the federal workforce via acceptance of Musk’s “deferred resignation” offer: Employees who signed the agreement will receive pay until September, while no longer being required to work.
There are timebombs.
Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service have fired 400 federal workers at the Department of Homeland Security. Two hundred of those cuts are Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees. Good luck when the next hurricane floods the South, the next snowpocalypse snarls the East Coast, California burns to the ground or terrorists blow up our cities.
What will happen to our food and medicine when Trump hollows out the Food and Drug Administration?
Where will we get vaccine to fight the next pandemic when Trump/Musk terminate research funding by Executive Order?
Layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration make flying that much more dangerous.
Awaiting a tax return? With tax season looming, the IRS has cut nearly 6,000 newly hired employees, representing about 7% of its workforce.
DOGE has dismissed dozens of probationary federal employees at the Department of Education. Considering how MAGA supporters attack the curriculum at our schools and libraries, these turbulent times bode ill for our children’s education.
DOGE has reduced the Small Business Administration staff by 720 employees— approximately 20% of its workforce— while inflation rises and bird flu sends egg and chicken prices skyrocketing. Since February 2022, over 150 million chickens have been killed to stop the spread of the H5N1 epidemic. No longer profitable, many restaurants have been forced to close.
While Musk and his minions chainsaw their way through a supposedly bloated bureaucracy, more than 10,000 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) staff have been placed on administrative leave, abandoning aid programs around the world. With USAID funds frozen, $500 million in food has been left rotting in ports and warehouses.
No longer a beacon of democracy, America can expect foreign adversaries to attack. How will America defend itself when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired the career leadership at the Pentagon?
More than 1,000 Department of Veteran Affairs employees have been dismissed, including some working at the Veterans Crisis Hotline, leaving soldiers and military veterans like me who are suffering from PTSD to fend for ourselves, always a ticking timebomb.
The good news is that north of the border, 250,000 Canadians have signed a petition demanding that their government rescind Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship. Shazam!
On its website, DOGE has claimed savings to date of $65 billion, but offered no explanation for why some previous items have been removed or how it had arrived at this total. A “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. Riddled with errors, this “wall” calls into question the veracity of DOGE’s claim. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has said in a written statement that the cost-cutting initiative “has already identified billions of dollars in savings.” Do tell.
Buzzing chainsaw DOGE axed roughly 2,000 Department of Energy employees, including those who worked for the critical National Nuclear Security Administration. The Trump Administration quickly reversed the layoffs, after learning how critical those jobs are to the security of our nuclear arsenal. D’oh?
It’s amateur night at Trump casino. Good luck!
This blog post is based partly on data from NARFE, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association.
This is the THIRD TIME since its creation in November 2019 that my blog showcases the realPfft chestnut “Influence Peddling?”
God help us! The Biden clan strikes again. Whenever anyone during the next four years criticizes the Trump administration for being a cesspool of corruption— blah blah blah— they’ll get a side-eye and the two-word response “Hunter Biden.”
A real piece of work, President Joe Biden— the gift that keeps on giving— has pardoned his son Hunter, a major league screw-up who pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges and was convicted of three felony counts for lying on a federal firearms application.
Ouch!
To quote Google: “In the U.S. criminal tax case against Hunter Biden, prosecutors allege he accepted payments from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu to influence U.S. government agencies regarding a criminal probe in Romania. Hunter Biden has pleaded guilty on September 5, 2024 to tax evasion and related charges.”
Why the president has the power to grant pardons has always been a total mystery to me. Yes, Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution assigns the president the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment,” but it just invites cronyism and corruption.
Even making allowances for the questionable paintings which Hunter created and sold for $1.5 million or the $6.5 million in loans which he received from Joe Biden buddy Kevin Morris, the smell of corruption hangs heavy over Hunter’s actions.
And now his daddy has pardoned him! Well, fuck me! Yes, Joe is a doddering old cuss, but he does have a staff— and his wife Jill— who one assumes are reasonably clear-headed. The optics are so effing terrible, there are no words strong enough to express the public disgust and condemnation.
I know that Joe is vain and wants his place in the history books, but I don’t know if “hopelessly corrupt old geezer” is the label he most desires.
Congrats to the Demoncrats as they hit still another stinkeroo outta the ballpark!
This election wasn’t really about Donald Trump. He was always there, a storm cloud rumbling anger and grievance, but at least everyone knew who he is and what he represents. There were few surprises. Call it the white backlash.
If you are unhappy with Trump’s election, I blame the Democrats’ inability to field a decent candidate.
Loyalty and laziness.
Out of loyalty, the Democrats kept hidden the fact that Biden should be in an Old Folks Home where he can get the care he needs.
Out of laziness, they adopted the old saw that a sitting vice president should get the chance to run for president if the incumbent withdraws from the race.
The Biden-Trump debate took place at the end of June. The Democratic Convention was held in Chicago in the middle of August. Biden insisted he would not withdraw, but I expected the party leadership to investigate alternatives and have an open convention.
The problem was finding a blemish-free candidate. All nice people and dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, each came with baggage. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is terrific, but America is not going to elect a woman president. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is a gem, but America is not going to elect a Jewish president. A dozen others lacked sufficient name recognition for such a short campaign. So everybody fell in line behind Kamala Harris.
A Hail Mary Pass, she had three strikes against her from the outset. A woman. A black. A California lib. We see that clearly because Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by a wide margin. The voters rejected the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Period.
America is not racist, but after eight years of being under Obama’s spell, Americans were still smarting over a black president.
Bad timing, this was the wrong election for the Dems to go into the laboratory and cook up a hybrid candidate.
It’s a fact, I get zero pleasure out of an assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump. As a concept, it sucks. Totally. Ever since the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, political violence has cast a shadow over my view of America. This is a violent country with too many guns. The courts do this, the courts do that, okaying bump stocks and finding gunmen acted in self-defense, but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground: School shootings and festival massacres lurk like a backdrop to our daily lives. Even with my military background, I find that every single one of these shootings makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I don’t wish to fuel conspiracy theories, but I do want to point out that there is a pattern among the perpetrators. Why should this lone-wolf shooting be any different from the others that preceded it? I expect that we will find:
The gunman acted alone.
The neighbors found the gunman to be quiet and withdrawn, hardly making a ripple in the social life of the neighborhood.
The gunman was white.
The gunman’s parents say he had become angry and depressed.
The gunman purchased his weapon at a gun show within the last three weeks.
When the authorities check his abode, they will find notebooks filled with angry rants.
The authorities will find angry rants online which the gunman posted on dark sites, but no one noticed as a tragedy unfolded.
Right now, the gunman’s motive remains unclear. We’ll see what the investigation reveals.
A typical speculation which I am already hearing is that Trump did this to himself to garner sympathy and votes. I disagree. Watching the video, you see how shocked the former president was. Getting shot came as very unwelcome news to him. It’s a hell of a note, but the raw drama of an assassination attempt will kick the Trump campaign into high gear.
Looking at the photos, Trump now has his “Washington Crossing the Delaware” moment. Blood on his face, surrounded by Secret Service agents, an American flag waving in the background, he defiantly shakes his fist at his enemies. It’s a classic photo.
The press will focus on the gunman, while the real story is the reaction of Trump’s supporters. At the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the crowd immediately turned their fury on the reporters and television crews, blaming their coverage for this act of political violence.
When judging the level of an armed conflict, gunfire is an inflection point, leading to clear “before” and “after” scenarios. With the first shot fired, there is no putting the evil genie back in the lamp.
Even during the melee and destruction of the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol, there was no gunfire. No shots were fired outside the Capitol, among the crowd. Police explained that they purposely avoided gunfire, since they knew that the demonstrators were armed and a gunfight would lead to a bloodbath.
This craven act in Pennsylvania could be the first shot in an escalating series of politically violent occurrences, as America struggles with its Wild West heritage.
Naturally, Trump and his supporters are angry. You don’t poke a stick at a tiger. There is the risk of violent reprisals.
“You waved to me from the train, all blond and blue-eyed, your pale skin ruddy from the cold.” This was my grandfather Mordechai as a teenager writing to Trudi, his one great love. His devotion to her overshadowed the love he felt for my grandmother. Indeed, it overshadowed his love of anything else in life. I liken Mordechai to a radio receiver that could only receive one frequency. In his case, the other-worldly signal from Trudi’s brain, an electric motor that generated a signal strong enough to give some people actual headaches. It’s all in the love letters which she and my grandfather wrote to one another.
I emphasize the Russian side of our family, but we are also Feingolds, aus Deutschland. People who came from Germany to Sweden and, eventually, America.
Rosa, my Mutter, passed away a year and a half ago. In liquidating her estate, I have come upon a lot of greeting cards with the kind of heavy, Jewish decorative art that I learned to abhor in my youth. Arthur Szyk is a modern example of the genre. Among other things in the safe deposit box, there was this crumbling stack of letters tied in brown string. Old, from the Second World War, with German stamps and postmarks from her side and Swedish stamps and postmarks from his, the letters are in Berliner Dialekt. Written in Fraktur script, the handwriting is decipherable, but a bear to get used to. Why mom held on to her father-in-law’s youthful indiscretion, I’ll never understand, other than that she liked Mordechai.
In Berlin on business in the middle of April— Spring in the air— I took the letters with me to a philologist named Siegfried who I found online. Dare I say it? You can find anything in Berlin. I emailed Siegfried a few weeks before my trip and was amazed to receive a ready and rapid reply. He would see me. He lives on the second floor of a tan five-story apartment house on Barfusstraße in Wedding, a block from Schillerpark. Spirited, with a glint in his eye, a white beard and a gnarled face, he is in his late 80’s, one of that strange breed born prior to World War Two.
“Your parents named you Siegfried,” I blurted, shaking his hand vigorously, feeling my face go red. That was the effect he had on me. “Your name means victory and peace,” I added.
“It’s of no importance,” he assured me. “If it bothered me, I would have changed it, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“Oh, okay,” I agreed, watching him close and lock the front door before disappearing into the kitchen to make us coffee. In Germany, coffee is a must.
The walls of his study are filled with German expressionist paintings and woodcuts from the 1920’s. They must be worth their weight in gold! Serving the coffee, he read aloud from several of the letters, chuckling with amazement at their childish sentiments.
“They’re love letters by young people,” I explained lamely.
Siegfried gave me a fuller picture of Trudi’s train ride than I could piece together with my limited German. It was March of 1938. Trudi and her parents were leaving Berlin for Rostock, nearer the Baltic coast, where they spent the war.
Together with online searches, we could also deduce that Trudi’s father, Hans Schmitz, a somewhat overwrought Berliner, worked for the Reichsbahn, the state railway. So he never ended up in the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front. From his perch on the Baltic Sea, it was easy for Hans to turn a blind eye to the cattle cars loaded with Jews heading east to the concentration camps. A typical railway man, he looked upon politics as a disease and considered Hitler to be his own worst enemy. Hans turned down a promotion to Gauleiter, district chief, because it would have required him to join the Nazi Party. Trudi went to school, where they knitted socks for the troops, collected clothing for the Winter Relief and sent care packages to the front.
Quaint.
Rostock got bombed mercilessly. After the war, it became East Germany’s major seaport.
When Kristallnacht struck in November of 1938, the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against the Jews, the Feingolds signed over 95% of their possessions to the Nazis and decamped to Malmö in Sweden where my great-grandfather taught at the university. His expertise was ancient civilizations, which immediately put him at loggerheads with National Socialist mythology regarding swastika sun symbols and the qualities of the so-called Aryan race. The Nazis were only too happy to banish der Professor from the Reich. He was exactly the kind of intellectual Jew who made Hitler’s blood boil.
“DenTeufel,” sighed Siegfried.
“The Devil?” I asked.
“You are American.”
“Yes, that’s right, Swedish-American. Growing up, my parents sent me to live—”
“Of course,” he barked, as if broken families were as common as dirt. “What interests me is the current state of America. Do you feel that you are flirting with a devil by allowing Trumpf to run for a second term?”
“Ah… um…” I stammered, caught off guard.
“That’s why I agreed to see you!” he harrumphed, which was okay with me, but unexpected. I took a clunk of cold coffee and gathered my thoughts.
“It’s a case of domestic politics,” I explained carefully. “There are all these politicians pooping…”
“Yes?” he asked, amused.
Thinking in a jumble of German, Swedish and English, I was having trouble expressing myself. “These politicians are screwing around. Chiefly Mitch McConnell, minority leader of the Senate, but yeah, it’s a handful of people who are oblivious to history and afraid of getting shot by Trump’s supporters. Every opportunity they have to put a stop to Trump’s candidacy, like three blind mice, they don’t do it,” I ended with an embarrassed chuckle. Why did I have to bring up mice, for God’s sake?
“What about Biden?” Siegfried asked, making the name sound like two words.
“Megalomania,” I explained. “Egocentricity. Aware of his age, he promised in 2020 to only run for one term. He claimed he was a transitional president, a bridge to the younger generation. But when push comes to shove, his high regard for himself has convinced him that he can win reelection. A nice gramps, but really, really old and doddering,” I concluded. “It’s not that the Republicans are so strong, it’s that the Democrats are so weak.”
“I keep reading that in the German press,” Siegfried replied, taking out a meerschaum pipe and filling it with tobacco from a tin. “Do you identify as Jewish?”
“Very much so.”
“So, what do you think of the war?”
“A tragedy for all concerned, on the ground in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank,” I said, more sure of my opinion. “Hamas is playing the West for fools. First they murder the Israelis and then they stir up pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel sentiment among young people all around the world. They are winning the propaganda war, which sucks.”
“Let’s go outside. I want to smoke,” Siegfried insisted. Standing with me on the front walk, lighting his pipe with a fancy silver lighter and billowing clouds of white smoke, he asked if I had considered moving to Israel.
“I am considering it. I never expected the American public to turn on me, but I am a student of history. I see America reenacting all the same mistakes as Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.”
“I lived through one world war, I don’t want to live through another,” Siegfried declared, shaking his head. “The Russians are breathing down our necks. You Americans need to stop flirting with the Devil and get your act together.”
Da capo. Again. “Influence Peddling” is a tune which the Swedish rap band realPfft released in November, 2019. Hunter Biden’s never-ending soap opera breathes new life into this chestnut.
I have been keeping the Hunter Biden swamp at arm’s length. It’s a cocktail of egomania, self-centered greed, immaturity, careless foolishness, stupidity and lack of a moral compass.
Not good.
Hunter’s apologists explain that he was battling drug addiction, depression and alcoholism. Mental illness and mental anguish are terrible afflictions to behold, but neither constitutes a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Where were the adults in the room? Joe Biden limits his knowledge of the events to a claim that he asked his son Hunter if Hunter knew what he was doing and Hunter said yes, he did.
If you are going to be this irresponsible as a parent, you deserve to reap the consequences. America is not known as a stupid country, but there is a streak of mulish stupidity in the Bidens’ behavior that is miles wide.
The “d’oh” dumbness isn’t limited to the Bidens. Just look at the mess America’s 45th president has created for himself. These people need a dog collar and someone to pull on the leash whenever they venture too close to the nearest cliff. What is wrong with these people? Taylor Swift’s drama queen persona resembles Albert Einstein in comparison to this gluttony of ineptitude.
This is another good reason for the Democratic Party to retire Joe and Kamala after four years of White House service and choose a different pair of candidates for president and vice president in 2024.
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