November 2025 Grab Bag o’ Humour

Kudos to Demi Moore for correcting the pronunciation of her name. It’s not Deh-MEE like we thought many years ago. It’s Duh-MEE as she corrected us. And it does take courage to correct the public.

Especially if you know that 10% of people are going to say DUH!-mee. As well, a further 25% of people are going to say Dummy or DUM-Ee.

Not to mention at least 1% will know her name is mispronounced but think its the second name. They will say Deh-MEE MOR or Deh-MEE MOR-Ay.

Correcting this pronunciation may be hard, but Duh-MEE can handle it.

*

24 Sussex Drive is supposed to be the First address in Canada. But first one prime minister discovered that repairs could be delayed to curry favour with the public. Then the next prime minister did the exact same. So eventually we are left with a rotting structure that no prime minister has lived in, in recent memory.

Not to be outdone, Donald Trump tore down the whole east wing of the White House in the United States. He says he is going to build a grand ballroom where the east wing once stood. But we all know Trump’s taste is toward the more garish.

Now Trump has set a new precedent for the next president. Perhaps the next president will tear it down to build something they think is better. Or maybe they like garish and will live in the ballroom while tearing down the west wing of the White House. Symmetry might demand two garish sides to the White House.

*

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan show and blamed immigrants for many things wrong with America.

“Musk and Rogan blamed immigrants for everything from budget shortfalls to democracy itself” said the article I linked to.

Elon Musk should know, himself being probably the most high profile immigrant in the United States. Tax his immigrant billions and I bet there will be no budget shortfall.

I wish all the problems of the world would be this easy to solve.

#24SussexDrive #budgetShortfall #demiMoore #donaldTrump #eastWingDestroyed #elonMusk #grandBallroom #immigrants #joeRogan #ottawa #pronunciation #thePublic #theWhiteHouse

Opinion: Demolishing the East Wing is yet another broken norm in the Trump administration – The Occidental

• Opinions

Opinion: Demolishing the East Wing is yet another broken norm in the Trump administration

By Whittaker Perrin, November 12, 2025

The East Wing of the White House was a historic building. Constructed in 1902 during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, it stood for 123 years until it was demolished last month under the Trump administration. It is now being replaced with a massive, gaudy ballroom.

Spending $300 million on a ballroom is an idiotic response to solve a “lack of event space” problem that was never really there in the first place. This is money that the administration could spend on various initiatives that directly benefit the American people as a whole. From a political point of view, the intelligence of the movedoes not improve. In a Yahoo/YouGov poll of U.S.adults conducted in October 2025, only 25 percent of respondents approved of the project, while 61 percent disapproved. It’s easy to see these numbers as encouraging news, especially coupled with widespread election losses for Republicans this past week and the ongoing government shutdown. However, they hint at an unsettling reality of this administration: that it is willing to act on its policies in favor of selfish grandeur while disregarding norms and popular opinion. While it may seem harmless in this case, this mindset has drastic effects on the everyday lives of people living in the U.S.

Perhaps the issue where this is most apparent is immigration, where the Trump administration has repeatedly deported U.S.citizens. This is blatantly illegal, but by acting quickly before the judicial system can protect these people, or by outright ignoring the rulings of the judicial branch, the Trump administration has deported these people anyway.

The right to due process comes from the Constitution, and it should protect not just U.S. citizens but also illegal immigrants from being deported without at least having the opportunity to go through the judicial system. Ignoring a constitutional right is not only concerning for the implications it has now, something we’ve experienced firsthand here in LA,but also for what it could mean in the future.

Trump has repeatedly claimedthat he would be active in going after his enemies in this administration, going as far as to say,“I am your retribution” while campaigning in 2023. Last month, he went ahead with designating Antifa as a terrorist organization —a designation that has not fallen on groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

The only thing stopping the Trump administration from outright deporting its political enemies is public approval, rather than morality. Of course, I imagine any moral voice in the leaders of the administration is long dead, as evidenced by cases such as the detaining and then deporting of a 10-year-old American citizen with Stage 4 cancer and her family, without medical care, as they rushed to the hospital. I grew concerned while fact-checking the statement, as I found a similar story with conflicting facts. It turns out that entirely separately, a 4-year-old with Stage 4 kidney cancer, also a U.S. citizen, was deported without medical care.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion: Demolishing the East Wing is yet another broken norm in the Trump administration – The Occidental

#300Million #ballroomForTrump #demolishing #eastWing #eastWingDestroyed #gaudyBallroom #theOccidental #whiteHouse

Demolition at the White House – The New York Times

Demolition at the White House

President Trump has torn down a 123-year-old annex to make way for a ballroom.

2025-10-24, T06:00:14-04:00 – See Transcript in online version.

Oct. 24, 2025, 6:00 a.m. ET

Hosted by Rachel Abrams, Featuring Luke Broadwater, Produced by Alex Stern, Anna Foley, and Eric Krupke, Edited by Chris Haxel, With Paige Cowett and Devon Taylor

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano,Engineered by Chris Wood

The Trump administration completed its demolition of the East Wing of the White House on Thursday to make way for a new presidential ballroom.

Luke Broadwater, who covers the White House, explains who is paying for President Trump’s latest construction project and why the demolition is striking a nerve.

On Today’s Episode

Luke Broadwater, who covers the White House for The New York Times.

Background Reading

• After 123 years, the East Wing is gone.
• See the White House as it stood and what Mr. Trump envisions.

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Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. For corrections, email: [email protected]. Follow our hosts on X: Michael Barbaro @mikiebarb, Rachel Abrams @RachelAbramsNY and Natalie Kitroeff @Nataliekitro

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Demolition at the White House – The New York Times

#2025 #America #Demolition #DonaldTrump #EastWing #EastWingDestroyed #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Podcast #Politics #Resistance #Technology #TheDaily #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

A demolition – The Washington Post

A demolition

The East Wing, the entrance to the White House for millions of Americans on official tours, the site of offices for every first lady for nearly half a century and the home of calligraphers who prepared thousands of invitations for White House state dinners, disappeared into a pile of rubble yesterday. It had stood for 123 years.

Built during the Theodore Roosevelt administration as an entryway for guests arriving in carriages, and rebuilt during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the East Wing met its end under orders from Trump. He dismissed it this week as “a very small building” that was in the way of his planned 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom. With it went the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and the East Colonnade, which connected the East Wing to the White House and included the president’s theater. “It’s not just a building,” said Laura Schwartz, the White House director of events in the Clinton administration. “It’s the living history.”

Meeting a need

Tearing down the East Wing to make space for the ballroom was an unfortunate necessity, said Gahl Hodges Burt, who was social secretary for three years under President Ronald Reagan. Since the largest spaces in the building have room for 200 seated guests at most, recent administrations have erected enormous tents on the South Lawn for ever larger state dinners.

“Putting up a tent does nothing but make people upset that they’ve come to a state dinner but they never get inside the White House,” Burt said. “The only bathroom facilities for a tent are porta-potties. Setting up a kitchen out there is hugely expensive. When the tent is up, the helicopter can’t land. And the grass dies.” (Ms. Burt was referring to the presidential helicopter, Marine One.)

Michael LaRosa, the press secretary to Jill Biden, lamented the loss but agreed that a ballroom was needed: “The French have the Élysée Palace, and here we are having a lawn party.”

A rich history

During its 123 years, two modern East Wing incidents stand out.

In 2009, in what passed as a scandal at the time, two uninvited guests and aspiring television reality stars, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, slipped into the first state dinner of the Obama administration. They rubbed shoulders with Vice President Joe Biden.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his West Wing office and rushed him into a bunker below the East Wing, which had been built as a shelter for Roosevelt during World War II. Cheney headed underground the moment that American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

The East Wing never had the political importance or cachet of the West Wing, which houses the Oval Office. But it became prominent, and controversial, when Republicans denounced the expensive new construction, built partly to cover Roosevelt’s new underground shelter, as wasteful.

The first lady’s spot

The personality of the East Wing was always calmer and less intense than that of the testosterone-filled West Wing. Until Thursday, the ground floor housed the White House visitors’ office and the Office of Legislative Affairs, while the second floor was home to the White House Military Office and the offices of the first lady.

Presidents watched the Super Bowl and showed movies before their release in the theater in the colonnade, which was used as a coat check for big events. During holiday parties, a band would often play Christmas carols just outside the East Wing entrance as guests arrived.

Melania Trump visited the East Wing so infrequently during her husband’s first term that her empty office there was converted into a gift-wrapping room. It is unclear how many times she has been there in the second term, or if she had offered any feedback on her husband’s plans.

For more…

• The White House released a list of donors who are helping Trump pay for the $300 million ballroom he wants to build at the White House.
• “The Daily” podcast today is about the demolition.
• On late night, Stephen Colbert talked about the demolition.

Editor’s Note: This post was edited and posted from the email from The Washington Post.

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Donors #EastWing #EastWingDestroyed #Education #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSBallroom #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse #WhiteHouseHistory

Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor – US news – The Guardian

Editor’s Note: Featured image by WP AI.

Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor

The start of construction on the president’s $250m ballroom marks a regression to his property wheeler-dealer days

• This story was originally published in our This Week in Trumpland newsletter; sign up to get it in your inbox every Wednesday

David Smith in Washington, Wed 22 Oct 2025 15.42 EDT

The press corps crowded into the East Room – crystal chandeliers, moulded ceilings, portraits of past presidents – on Monday for an event celebrating student baseball champions from Louisiana. But first Donald Trump had something else on his mind.

“Right behind us we are building a ballroom,” he said, gesturing towards a gold curtain. “I didn’t know I’d be standing here right now ’cos right on the other side you have a lot of construction going on, which you might hear periodically.”

Beyond the Oz-like curtain demolition crews were tearing down part of the White House’s East Wing so they could start building Trump’s ballroom, a $250m project he says will be paid for by himself and unnamed donors. The spectacle of a mechanical excavator ripping through the facade, leaving a tangle of broken masonry, rubble and steel wires, was hard for some to take.

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was quoted by WTOP News as saying: “Maybe it’s just the dislike of change on my part, but it seemed painful, almost like slashing a Rembrandt painting. Or defacing a Michelangelo sculpture.”

The US president has never been one to shy away from glaringly obvious metaphors. For the past decade, as one norm and institution after another has collapsed, critics have called him a human wrecking ball. So what better than literally wrecking a wing of the 225-year-old White House?

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, tweeted: “Something profoundly symbolic about Trump taking a wrecking ball to the White House … paying for the demolition with money from cronies and insiders seeking government favors … and the Republicans in Congress acquiescing as Trump treats public assets as private property.”

Apparently stung by the criticism and feeling defensive, the White House blasted out a press release on Tuesday. It complained: “In the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House – a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and renovations from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”

The release listed past examples that included Teddy Roosevelt building the West Wing, Harry Truman overseeing a “total reconstruction” of the White House’s interior, Richard Nixon converting the swimming pool into the press briefing room and Barack Obama resurfacing the south grounds tennis court into a basketball court, complete with construction photos.

The administration does have a point: the White House has constantly evolved and, before First Lady Jackie Kennedy intervened, it was a dingy, unglamorous place. Its appeal is that it is grand but not too grand: bigger and plusher than Britain’s 10 Downing Street, to be sure, yet modest compared with some of the baroque palaces of despots around the world.

But there are a few things going on here. First, Trump seems bored by domestic policy. He would rather not talk about an economy that is stalling. The government shutdown, which would have consumed any of his predecessors, seems to induce only a yawn and AI videos depicting Democrats in sombreros.

He is following in the tradition of past presidents who in their second terms pivoted to foreign policy, where it can seem easier to build a legacy (and maybe even win a Nobel peace prize). Last week his in-tray included Gaza, Argentina, Venezuela, Russia and Ukraine; on Monday he met the prime minister of Australia; on Friday he heads to Asia.

Trump’s ennui has also turned him into an unlikely Benjamin Button: he is regressing from commander-in-chief to his youthful career as a builder and property wheeler-dealer. Like everything else about his second term, his makeover of the White House is far more ambitious than first time around.

He planted two giant flagpoles that fly the Stars and Stripes, drowned the Oval Office in gold decor (the New York Times called it a “gilded rococo nightmare”) and installed a “presidential walk of fame” with gold-framed portraits of every president except Joe Biden, who is supplanted by an autopen.

It’s all beginning to feel like Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida, an opulent orgy of gold-plated fixtures and gold leafing. I heard Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? floating over the West Wing on Monday and imagined Trump playing DJ on his new Rose Garden patio.

At a Rose Garden lunch on Tuesday, the president told Republican senators: “You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back here. You hear that sound? That’s music to my ears. I love that sound. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. In this case, it reminds me of lack of money because I’m paying for it.”

Trump has plans for Washington too. Last week he unveiled plans for a triumphal arch across from the Lincoln Memorial that was quickly dubbed the “Arc de Trump” topped by a state of Lady Liberty – in gold, naturally. He showed off three 3D models – small, medium and large – and quipped: “I happen to like the large one. Why are you shocked?”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor | US news | The Guardian

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EastWingDestroyed #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalTrustForHistoricPreservation #Opinion #Preservation #Resistance #Science #TheGuardian #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSBallroom #UnitedStates