What a weird, strange week it was

There’s a famous photograph of Calvin Coolidge on the White House lawn wearing an Indian chief’s headdress. Coolidge was a popular fella; he got away with it. Elon Musk, appearing last week in Wisconsin on the eve of that state’s Supreme Court election, donned a cheese hat.

He must have thought it was smart, identifying himself with Wisconsin voters by wearing the headgear of fans of the Green Bay Packers. It backfired. A Wisconsinite was quoted as saying that the DOGE impresario hadn’t earned the right to cheese hat status.



While there may or may not have been a direct connection, Musk’s candidate, a conservative MAGA guy, lost by a lopsided vote. Still, Musk’s antics didn’t help. Neither did the $25 million the Tesla chief poured into the election, helping to make it the most expensive judicial race ever.

Bottom line, Musk sure looked odd with those yellow polyurethane foam wedges propped precariously on his head. Fortunately, he didn’t plop the University of Wisconsin mascot on his noggin – the badger. Ouch, that hurts.

Musk’s cheese hat foray was just one of several odd occurrences that took place last week. In Washington, Sen. Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, spoke on the Senate floor for 25-hours, 4-minutes, a record.

Just as impressive, Booker never strayed off topic. When Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas held the floor for 21 hours in 2013 in opposition to Obamacare, part of his time was devoted to quoting country music lyrics and the characters on the television show “Duck Dynasty.

” Booker hammered on Donald Trump throughout, with excursions into the feckless nature of the Democratic party. He even bashed himself. “I confess I have not been perfect,” he said at one point.

“I confess the Democratic party has made terrible mistakes that gave lane to this demagogue,” he said in reference to Trump. Booker’s “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” moment (or minutes or hours) elicited accolades.

Axios called the marathon address “epic.” Columnist E.J.

Dionne Jr. said the speech “electrified” Democrats across the country and showcased a party resurgence. Over the course of the 25 hours-plus, Booker garnered 350 million “likes” on TikTok.

Booker stated that “in just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm,” adding, “These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such.” Almost to prove the point, President Trump astonished pretty much everyone last week by imposing tariffs on pretty much everyone. Friend or foe, small nation or large, it didn’t matter.

Talk about one size fits all! Well, that’s not exactly the case. Trump’s imposed an across-the-board 10% tariff, with higher supplemental tariffs on the 60 nations he deems especially notorious traders. The result: the highest U.

S. tariffs in nearly 100 years, reportedly higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1929, around the time of the Great Depression. The president’s harum-scarum actions crashed 80 years of global trade policy.

Of course, it’s not the only things he’s crashed, or tried to crash, since taking office for a second term. Let’s see, there’s worry-free Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, university-based medical research, birthright citizenship, foreign aid, the U.S.

Department of Education, vaccination-encouragement, the National Institutes of Health, due process of the law, confidential war-planning, the Voice of America, and local control of elections, among other items. And on it goes, to an even bigger thing, if that’s possible. Last week, the president fessed up that he really wasn’t kidding about possibly seeking a third term in office, despite what the Constitution says.

As for really, really weird, there is this: baseball’s new “torpedo” bat, with a thickened “sweet spot” in the middle. Rather than the likes of a Ted Williams or a Tony Gwynn, it took a MIT-trained scientist to come up the bat, revolutionary in both design and execution. Due in part to the “torpedo” bat, the Yankees hit a franchise record nine home runs in one game last week.

In the first four games of the season, the Bronx Bombers swatted an astounding 18 round-trippers. Why if the Pirates ever get hold of the misshapen pieces of lumber and start belting homers ..

. well, now, that would be strange. Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown.

He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.

com..