Men's Lifestyle July 31, 2026 0 Comments

Why Trump’s Relentless Hunt for Hillary Could Be the Biggest Political Showdown You’ve Never Seen—Get Ready to Witness the Clash!

Ever notice how some folks just have a knack for turning the mundane into a masterclass in persistence and hustle? Take President Trump’s nightly ritual, for instance—calling his fundraiser like clockwork, not just for updates, but to crank up the pressure on donors to cough up more cash. It’s almost like watching a real estate shark circling his prey, but now the arena is the White House. And just when you think the asks can’t get any more audacious—bam!—they do. But here’s the kicker: does this relentless grind reveal an iron will to succeed, or just a playbook tinged with the relentless grind of high-stakes real estate wheeling and dealing? Either way, it’s a spectacle that makes you wonder—how much stamina does it take to stay in the game when the stakes keep getting higher? Buckle up, because the weekend’s roundup dives deep into politics, history, and even ancient hominids wielding wooden tools like pros. Ready to flex those mental muscles? Let’s roll. LEARN MORE

7 min read

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

My God, the president learned well from the various Persons of Interest he encountered during his real estate days in New York. From The Wall Street Journal:

Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.

Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.

“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments.

Mr. Trump wants to hear bad news immediately.

When some donors have been put on the phone with Trump after giving millions, they expected to receive thank yous, but instead were asked for more money, people familiar with the calls said. In one case, O’Rourke asked an executive to cut a $1 million check to a Trump entity just days after he’d attended a thank you dinner for a separate multimillion-dollar donation he’d made to the president’s ballroom, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Apparently, Ms. O’Rourke may have grown a bit uneasy playing the piano in the downstairs lobby. I am unmoved. This is the business she has chosen.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Love You Madly” (Ella Fitzgerald/Duke Ellington): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archive: Here, from 1926, is the funeral of Rudolph Valentino, including a nifty coffin shot. Things seem to have gotten a bit chippy out front of the funeral home. Not long before he kicked, Valentino finally got fed up with the gay-baiting to which he’d been subjected in the nation’s newspapers ever since he exploded into stardom. Responding to an unsigned column in the Chicago Tribune in which he was called “Homo Americanus,” Valentino challenged the author to step forward and fight him. (He’d been taking boxing lessons from Jack Dempsey.) Finally, a sportswriter named Fred O’Neil volunteered to take him on, and the two met on the roof of the Ambassador Hotel in New York. O’Neil landed one punch, but Valentino decked him in reply. Two weeks later, Valentino’s appendix ruptured and he died. History is so cool.

Jesus H. Christ doing the time warp (again), how far back does this vengeful old tyrant want to go to settle old scores? From Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump said he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to revive his failed lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and others of conspiring to tarnish his 2016 campaign with bogus claims of collusion with Russia.

In a Supreme Court filing made public Tuesday, the president requested an additional month, until September 9, to seek review of a November appeals court decision that upheld dismissal of the case and affirmed almost $1 million in sanctions against Trump and one of his lawyers.

The odds are that the carefully manufactured conservative majority, as well as the court generally, will decline to join the president in the pursuit of the snipes, even though the snipe in question is old and arthritic and already may be as near death as a Kentucky senator is by now.

The cobwebby suit under discussion was the subject of one of the more amazingly contemptuous dismissals ever dropped on anyone by a federal court.

In the Clinton case, the 3–0 ruling by 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals faulted Trump and lawyer Alina Habba for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against his 2016 rival. Two of the judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents, including one by Trump. The suit, filed in March 2022, accuses the group of promoting false claims of improper ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia, including those outlined in the so-called Steele dossier. Trump claims the alleged conspiracy violated a federal racketeering law. The suit also named an array of political operatives, lawyers and others.

U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks, who dismissed the case, imposed the penalty in January 2023 after concluding Trump was “using the courts as a stage set for political theater and grievance” by bringing the suit.

Good Lord, how big is this man’s craw anyway, and how much does it hold?

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Popular Mechanics:

Since stone endures while other building materials erode away, it’s long been assumed that our most ancient ancestors worked exclusively with stone tools and created only stone structures.

But Homo sapiens weren’t the first hominids to build with something other than stone. At Kalambo Falls, a site perched on the Kalambo River in the tropical woodlands of northern Zambia, a team led by University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham pulled something extraordinary from the river sediments. It appeared to be the remains of a wooden structure, cut and shaped with stone tools, and buried beside it were several more tools made of wood. It’s one of the few wooden artifacts to survive from half a million years ago—and it’s also the earliest known wooden structure built by human hands.

Those hominids, clever folks, by God.

However, the logs were too ancient for radiocarbon dating. Instead, researchers turned to luminescence dating, which gauges radioactivity in the minerals of the surrounding sediment to establish when those grains were last exposed to sunlight. The results showed that the wood was at least 476,000 years old, pushing the age of the discovery well past the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils, a 300,000-year-old find from Morocco.

Uh-oh, so who were these folks?

So who notched the Kalambo logs? No one knows. H. erectus, who lived from 2 million to 100,000 years ago, is the obvious suspect. Homo heidelbergensis is another, since a skull from that species has been found elsewhere in Zambia. And at Florisbad in South Africa, modified wooden objects turned up in spring deposits alongside the remains of a later species, Homo helmei.

So some other family of hominids invented Lincoln Logs 467,000 years ago. Accumulated royalties must be staggering then.

Hey, Natural History Museum in London, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Musango matusadonaensis is the fifth dinosaur ever named from Zimbabwe, and it’s likely there are even more just waiting to be discovered. An early relative of Diplodocus that walked on two legs has been found near one of the world’s largest artificial lakes. Discovered on the shore of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, Musango matusadonaensis is a rare find in a country with a relatively unknown palaeontological past. Only four other dinosaur species have been named from the region, leaving key questions about Zimbabwe’s past unanswered.

Wait a minute. A diplodocus walking upright? Is it possible it learned to build wooden houses before the big rock fell? If they lived that way then, I’m even happier now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for Representative Max Miller’s wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people, and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware, and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of The Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornadoes in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.