Love ya, Rick. I appreciate the way you put things together with a fine degree of clarity and compassion. Not pity, compassion. We go beyond dichotomies. We meet within our complexities and grind them into authenticity. BTW - -Congratulations! You have the best of all worlds. Don’t frig it up.
Rick, I haven’t been able to watchthis excellent commentary til New Year’s Eve Day. It is the best “sermon” I have heard in decades. You are my favorite therapist and God Knows I needed this. Happiest New Year to Rene and You - Bless You Both.🫶🏻
Rick, thank you for working so hard to inspire us to keep up the fight! You so eloquently validate and justify our deepest values. May YOU be of good cheer this holiday season and receive blessings upon blessings in the year ahead!
The real question is when Trump doesn’t destroy America are you gonna be mad that you weren’t right? I mean he gave you cheap gas prices and no wars.. and he didn’t put you in jail. I didn’t kill you and you got to keep your property!
OK, I’m the bad guy for telling you the truth then? Just because you don’t like my comments, doesn’t mean I’m wrong.. The truth is the liberals are too gullible
The truth is revealed to you when you asked for it, do you have to use discernment and keep your eyes open and know that you don’t know everything that’s the first thing you know! Be humble and keep your wits about it, fear is a primitive emotion.
Rick, somehow you have once again said just what I needed to hear. Thanks for doing what you do!!! Merry Christmas to you and your family, including the dogs. 😁
All holiday joys to this beautiful community. Personally, I worship odd time signatures and my high holy day is May 29, the day in 1913 of the Rite of Spring's Paris premiere. Which means that my high holy day celebrates ritualistic child murder, but hey, all in the service of those spastically thrashing meter changes :D (Seriously, I kind of loathe the tableaux. I'm just in it for the music.) I'm whatcha call one o' them old-school modernist dinosaurs ;) But I'll be having a wonderful time with my sis's religiously blended family (my bro-in-law is Jewish) celebrating what the season is really all about which as Rick so appropriately noted, is the winter solstice. Days will get longer ;)
I cannot fully express how much Rick means to me -- how much he means to all of us -- as a political sensei in these most troubled of times. For all the Orwellian froth scumming up the meme-o-sphere, Rick and the Never Trump pod community have helped to form a genuine under-the-radar ideological synthesis, taking the best parts of conservatism, a grounded understanding of humanity's limits, a reverence for the rule of law and a sense of duty, and forged it with his for the most part liberal audience and taken our pleas for a greater humanity seriously.
Rick's not going to be glibly quoting Joseph Schumpeter on "creative destruction" any time soon, LOL (neoliberal inside joke ;).
So I couldn't watch Trump's latest live action shitpost, but I caught the clips. Wish I had the stomach to make it to Trump's riff about Melania's "perfect panties." This was of course in the middle of his long Borscht Belt routine about the supposed obscene invasiveness of the Mango Lardo raid, but it only makes him come off as a crotch sniffing pervert, ROTFL Like, WTF does he know so much about his wife's underwear drawer? It's not like he sleeps with her or anything, LOL
But the thing that really gobsmacked me is the _massive_ healthcare scam he's cooking up, which has roots in Karl Rove's reformicon nonsense he tried to get Dubya to do to Social Security, sodomized sans lubrication with Nick Fuentes-grade idiot populism demonizing insurance.
I consider myself a virtual innumerate but at least I can get my head around elementary algebra. Trump hasn't the slightest understanding of statistics or actuarial tables or why, in fact, insurance companies exist at all. Of course, risk management was never his strong suit in business ;). So his "solution" is to give all the money everybody pays for health insurance back to them! See, because insurance companies are EVIL! And who do the insurance companies support? Democrats!
And then ... see ... they can buy their own _much cheaper_ health insurance!
Don't tell them, though, that they'd have to buy it from an evil insurance company :O This shit would embarrass the ShamWow guy :P
We Warren Democrats who fought for a public option need no lectures on the financial incentives of insurance companies. We also understand why insurance companies exist, even though a far more efficient system would be single-payer like Medicare. We compromised to get ACA done.
But worse ... much worse than this, which merely collapses into absurdity ... is the egregious, doubtless illegal crap he's about to pull with prescription drugs and his TrumpRX card.
Good gods, wake up and smell the kickbacks. The TrumpRX scandal will consume most of next year.
Thank you Rick for the much needed pep talk. Like you I’ve become less interested in Twitter due to the accelerated presence of the bots. I still go on but I’m quicker now to use the block function. I’ve also seen some cracks in Trump’s MAGA. My sister is a MAGA due to watching Fox all day and night. She recently told me she gets embarrassed by Trump always selling his merch on Fox. Little by little maybe she’ll see that he’s not the person she thought he was all these years. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.
Thank you for this lovely and heartfelt message and for always, always striving to strengthen our hearts. May we all receive and give grace. I wish you and your loved ones a sweet Christmas and every good thing in 2026.
And yes this country deserves another chance and I believe we will have it.
Beautifully said and inspiring as always, Rick – thank you. And thank you for pointing out the resilience of the American spirit -- the imperative of freedom and independence is in our DNA.
Dear Rick, Thank you for your words that are pure poetry and reminding us that “This is the dark part of the year. The days are short and the nights are long. Ice holds the earth in its grip. And then quietly without asking anyone’s permission, the light starts creeping back. Spring is coming. And Spring always comes again”.
I wrote a letter to Trump. I’m pretty proud of it. I hope it finds him. Would love for you to check it out.
https://open.substack.com/pub/ravenambrose/p/dear-president-donald-trump?r=7ad73t&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Love ya, Rick. I appreciate the way you put things together with a fine degree of clarity and compassion. Not pity, compassion. We go beyond dichotomies. We meet within our complexities and grind them into authenticity. BTW - -Congratulations! You have the best of all worlds. Don’t frig it up.
Rick, I haven’t been able to watchthis excellent commentary til New Year’s Eve Day. It is the best “sermon” I have heard in decades. You are my favorite therapist and God Knows I needed this. Happiest New Year to Rene and You - Bless You Both.🫶🏻
Merry Christmas.
That’s all that man does is spiel lies out of his garbage mouth. I can’t stand liars, manipulators, and con-men.
Rick, thank you for working so hard to inspire us to keep up the fight! You so eloquently validate and justify our deepest values. May YOU be of good cheer this holiday season and receive blessings upon blessings in the year ahead!
How mature and if you liberals wanna talk, let me know. Otherwise you can Keep on crying I don’t even care 😘
Your profile says that the media is trying to divide us with labels and here you are snarking at "you liberals."
I'm a liberal, Dawgg. You have anything further to say about that? ;)
Sorry if I hurt your feelings.. The truth does hurt
Which "truth" hurts, exactly?
That Trump sucks and America completely rejects him? That doesn't hurt at all ;)
The real question is when Trump doesn’t destroy America are you gonna be mad that you weren’t right? I mean he gave you cheap gas prices and no wars.. and he didn’t put you in jail. I didn’t kill you and you got to keep your property!
That's so beyond sardonic it's nihilistic.
I mean, it’s the truth
OK, I’m the bad guy for telling you the truth then? Just because you don’t like my comments, doesn’t mean I’m wrong.. The truth is the liberals are too gullible
There's "truth" around here somewhere?
Where?
Oh right, that Trump universally sucks ;)
The truth is revealed to you when you asked for it, do you have to use discernment and keep your eyes open and know that you don’t know everything that’s the first thing you know! Be humble and keep your wits about it, fear is a primitive emotion.
Yeah, but the problem is that one man's "discernment" is another man's psychotic delusion.
Merry Christmas to you and your family Rick!
Rick, somehow you have once again said just what I needed to hear. Thanks for doing what you do!!! Merry Christmas to you and your family, including the dogs. 😁
All holiday joys to this beautiful community. Personally, I worship odd time signatures and my high holy day is May 29, the day in 1913 of the Rite of Spring's Paris premiere. Which means that my high holy day celebrates ritualistic child murder, but hey, all in the service of those spastically thrashing meter changes :D (Seriously, I kind of loathe the tableaux. I'm just in it for the music.) I'm whatcha call one o' them old-school modernist dinosaurs ;) But I'll be having a wonderful time with my sis's religiously blended family (my bro-in-law is Jewish) celebrating what the season is really all about which as Rick so appropriately noted, is the winter solstice. Days will get longer ;)
I cannot fully express how much Rick means to me -- how much he means to all of us -- as a political sensei in these most troubled of times. For all the Orwellian froth scumming up the meme-o-sphere, Rick and the Never Trump pod community have helped to form a genuine under-the-radar ideological synthesis, taking the best parts of conservatism, a grounded understanding of humanity's limits, a reverence for the rule of law and a sense of duty, and forged it with his for the most part liberal audience and taken our pleas for a greater humanity seriously.
Rick's not going to be glibly quoting Joseph Schumpeter on "creative destruction" any time soon, LOL (neoliberal inside joke ;).
So I couldn't watch Trump's latest live action shitpost, but I caught the clips. Wish I had the stomach to make it to Trump's riff about Melania's "perfect panties." This was of course in the middle of his long Borscht Belt routine about the supposed obscene invasiveness of the Mango Lardo raid, but it only makes him come off as a crotch sniffing pervert, ROTFL Like, WTF does he know so much about his wife's underwear drawer? It's not like he sleeps with her or anything, LOL
But the thing that really gobsmacked me is the _massive_ healthcare scam he's cooking up, which has roots in Karl Rove's reformicon nonsense he tried to get Dubya to do to Social Security, sodomized sans lubrication with Nick Fuentes-grade idiot populism demonizing insurance.
I consider myself a virtual innumerate but at least I can get my head around elementary algebra. Trump hasn't the slightest understanding of statistics or actuarial tables or why, in fact, insurance companies exist at all. Of course, risk management was never his strong suit in business ;). So his "solution" is to give all the money everybody pays for health insurance back to them! See, because insurance companies are EVIL! And who do the insurance companies support? Democrats!
And then ... see ... they can buy their own _much cheaper_ health insurance!
Don't tell them, though, that they'd have to buy it from an evil insurance company :O This shit would embarrass the ShamWow guy :P
We Warren Democrats who fought for a public option need no lectures on the financial incentives of insurance companies. We also understand why insurance companies exist, even though a far more efficient system would be single-payer like Medicare. We compromised to get ACA done.
But worse ... much worse than this, which merely collapses into absurdity ... is the egregious, doubtless illegal crap he's about to pull with prescription drugs and his TrumpRX card.
Good gods, wake up and smell the kickbacks. The TrumpRX scandal will consume most of next year.
Book it.
Thank you Rick for the much needed pep talk. Like you I’ve become less interested in Twitter due to the accelerated presence of the bots. I still go on but I’m quicker now to use the block function. I’ve also seen some cracks in Trump’s MAGA. My sister is a MAGA due to watching Fox all day and night. She recently told me she gets embarrassed by Trump always selling his merch on Fox. Little by little maybe she’ll see that he’s not the person she thought he was all these years. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.
Thank you for this lovely and heartfelt message and for always, always striving to strengthen our hearts. May we all receive and give grace. I wish you and your loved ones a sweet Christmas and every good thing in 2026.
And yes this country deserves another chance and I believe we will have it.
I like the formulation that this will be America's second chance.
Beautifully said and inspiring as always, Rick – thank you. And thank you for pointing out the resilience of the American spirit -- the imperative of freedom and independence is in our DNA.
I mean, I had to shower for two hours last night, after reading through all this crap.
https://thistleandmoss.com/p/trump-is-in-the-epstein-files-we-just-cant-see-it
It makes you feel dirty inside.
Dear Rick, Thank you for your words that are pure poetry and reminding us that “This is the dark part of the year. The days are short and the nights are long. Ice holds the earth in its grip. And then quietly without asking anyone’s permission, the light starts creeping back. Spring is coming. And Spring always comes again”.
Be of good cheer!