On Monday, August 10, Todd Blanche took the oath of office as attorney general, administered by federal appeals court judge Emil Bove, another of Trump’s defense lawyers before moving to the Department of Justice, where he was Blanche’s top deputy.
What ties all of this together is the destruction of accountability. Executive privilege is expanded, court orders are resisted, records are withheld, and now an anti–money laundering system created by law is being dismantled.
And what’s really frustrating is how deliberate this is: weaken the mechanisms that expose corruption, and corruption becomes much easier to hide.
Without accountability, the rule of law becomes whatever those in power are willing to obey.
Professor Richardson coyly observes that there is a question as to whether the Trump administration will refuse to abide by the law. There is obviously no doubt about it.
In addition to all the Constitutional provisions that Trump has freely violated and of course emolument clauses and the Hatch Act and the FinCEN legislation and countless others, we are in the midst of an illegally waged war that was launched at least in part to distract from their ongoing failure to abide by the Epstein Transparency Act. And how many administration officials, including Trump of course, are implicated in the crimes surrounding the Epstein/Trump child sex trafficking ring?
I pray the Rule of Law in the U.S. will one day be exhumed and resurrected, but at the moment it is quite clearly six feet under and face down.
The waging of war illegally, with its assassinations and hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of deaths in Iran and Venezuela, stands at the apex of a pyramid of contempt for the rule of law, wanton cruelty, idiocy, incompetence, and violations of sense and common decency. The evisceration of anything resembling "justice" from the Justice Department, the pointless, idiotic destruction of USAID, the hollowing out of the State Department, the removal of the last shreds of environmental, historical and cultural protection exercised by the National Park Service and the larger Department of the Interior constitute the greatest casualties of Republican power, with many others -- some equally as devastating -- in their wake.
Like all bombings, the carnage left behind continues to ripple outward. The depletion of missiles from our defense arsenal -- a direct result of a flippant, careless, gung-ho, unqualified Secretary of Defense who thinks war is merely a video game about testosterone, the savaging of the NATO alliance, the abandonment of friends like Ukraine, the dizzying up-and-down, on-again-off-again tariff wars carried out by an idiot who understands nothing about an interdependent global economy, the bizarre attacks on doctors, medicine and science as 'new' old epidemics spread, the intimidation of universities, media companies, newspapers...at times the list appears endless, and continues to mount. We are in the very fight of our lives.
Marc Elias of the Democracy Docket has spoken about his record of constantly challenging Trumpian garbage on legal grounds, winning every case (at least 63 so far) he's waged against them. 'Do you sometimes feel the effort is worth it given the overwhelming odds against you?' Nicole Wallace recently asked him. Elias answered by way of describing studying for his Bar Mitzvah as a young teen, where his social circle included Holocaust survivors and others who fought against the Nazis.
He narrated the story of one Jewish GI, held in a prisoner-of-war camp, alone, by himself, deciding that being captive still didn't exempt him from trying to sabotage his enemies. As a slave worker in Nazi kitchens and galleys, this 19-year-old kid decided that poking holes in the produce to make it spoil would be his contribution to the war effort. Potatoes were the most difficult, he said, telling Elias about how his own fingers would bleed after poking so many holes in them. his reasoning was -- the food would spoil faster, the Nazis would be unable to keep their soldiers fed, the Americans would get a crucial advantage, and win the war.
Whether our efforts are large and heroic, or constitute little more than poking holes in Republican potatoes, we simply have no other choice. We have 80+ days to organize, donate, demonstrate, volunteer, help others conduct lawsuits, and ultimately render judgement against these idiotic bastards and those who enable our country's descent into shame and dishonor. It's a debt we owe to future generations who will one day ask us -- did we do everything we possibly could?
This sad on so many dimensions that I have officially run out of words to describe it and to register my distain, anger, disbelief. 30 years of defending The Constitution "against all enemies, foreign & domestic" was all in vain.
So we have conservative constitutional experts like Michael Luttig decrying the illegal actions of the JD, as are moderates and liberals and still nothing is done. The corruption is far worse than the Guilded Age. How many fathers and mothers will want their daughters and sons going to war to defend the grifters?
Not nothing, but somehow I think we need to train a white-hot spotlight on how sick this has all become. The contrast between the episodes of history that demonstrate "the better angels of our nature" in contrast to practitioners of "Dark Arts".
As far as sons and daughters, I have run into young people in more than one scenario deeply discouraged by the prospects of life in the future. Why? It's not like we did not have or do not have any choice in matters that our robbing posterity of a brighter future. And for what? Who gains from this trajectory. Who gets screwed?
Future generations might reasonably wonder how you decided to vote for this clown as your president - twice. It would be preferable if the current generation paid some attention to this question.
Trump is in so much trouble that nobody seems to have noticed how the whole Make America Great Again project seems to have been dropped in favour of saving Western Civilization.
America was a very different place when I was a small child in the 1940s. Some of that was very good and some of that was very bad, but it seemed to me that until "The Reagan Revolution" the overall momentum moved toward egalitarian empowerment. The middle class and social equality openings were on a roll. Commercial contributions to culture were part and parcel of American Life, but it felt like more of those who Leona Helmsley called "the little people" held sway. In this age of the billionaires, who now dominate the arts, the uses of technology, and even outer space are the real "Great Replacement" for a government and culture of the people, by the people, for the people.
I recently asked myself that question: am I doing everything that I could possibly do? The answer was "No." So, I am increasing my financial contributions to Democratic candidates. What's the money worth if we fail to restore democracy here? We are literally at war.
Seriously, what is the question about the Treasury? And why is what they're doing, or not doing, any different from the other ways this administration breaks the law every day? Like withholding and redacting the Epstein files or killing people on boats without any judicial process?
I have a question. Why does Deutsche Bank still have a charter to operate in the US?? Their long record of criminality should have had them shut down years ago.
Not that there are not plenty of other banks worldwide that would be glad to take up the lucrative job left vacant.
There may be as many criminal minded men in banking as there are in this Republican “government”.
I hate to say it, but I am beginning to suspect Dr. Richardson's coyness -- like her irrationally persistent optimism -- is an expression of a genuinely bottomless fear of successful socialist revolution as all-consuming as that which governs all other USian aristocrats. No question she seeks reform -- but she mistakenly rejects the historically confirmed fatal truth that [any] reform that retains [anything whatsoever] of the capitalist ethos is self-doomed to [intentional] failure. Just as has already happened with [every] USian effort at reform since the USians split from the British Empire to preserve the slave economy owned by their aristocratic masters -- Southron slavers and their New England financiers, proto-Trumpsteiners one and all.
Loren Bliss, I keep begging people to use Tony Judt’s name: Social Democracy and think of FDR and Frances Perkins. The ignorance of many Americans of history makes important all the education we can muster to help people understand that Social Security and Medicare come from a tradition begun after the Great Depression. El-Sayed, Rhodes Scholar, would likely have been in Tony Judt’s country, where, as in most of Europe, sane government takes care of people.
Suspect Putin/Trump of propaganda to destroy any Social Democracy tendencies for US.
Making Americans ignorant of history is another goal of the Radical Right-wingers. Our current fascist government has a goal of turning schools into brain-washing sessions. People like Frances Perkins and Tony Jundt must not be acknowledged by US citizens. Now the powerful cultists are demonstrating what a country run by a mafia-style criminal gang looks like. Reading and following HCR is one way to fight back.
"The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to facilitate the means by which all the people under its jurisdiction can access the best possible life." – Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor, 1946
“The happiness and prosperity of our citizens is the only legitimate object of government.”
I admit I didn’t know Tony Judt’s name or his work. (Swallowing hard right now after that shameful confession.) Nevertheless, I agree with everything in your comment, Virginia Witmer. Thank you for it.
Virginia, unfortunately many, mostly the young who have no recollection of the tyranny of socialism could not tell you the difference between FDR's social democracy and socialism. The pursuit of socialism has yet to have a good end, and by it's nature cannot. One cannot defend democracy and socialism at the same time, they are mutually opposed systems.
Gary, social democracy, as taught by Tony Judt, working class Brit, head of the NYU Remarque Institute, is more a continuation of what FDR and Frances Perkins, followed by Truman and LBJ envisioned for US than Soviet style “socialism,” the giant bugaboo which we are busy emulating at this moment with our gulags and oligarchs.
Having spent 10 years in the countryside in France and having friends there still, I can tell you that public transportation and medical care (socialism?) are years ahead of anything we even dream of in a climate change world. Coming from a Virginia farming community as I do, visiting the same large cattle farm in the Nièvre for about 20 years, I learned in 2018 that the reason I was seeing wheat where formerly there was cattle or sheep was because “wheat feeds more people” and it was an EU request.
When people tell me (“socialist) France will fail, I remind them of LePen father and daughter (photographed with Putin, though not with red carpet like our president), who never won an election there.
Thinking I should add that the day after DT was elected in 2016, I got a call from the Nièvre inviting me to come live there. Patriotism developed as a child during WWII kept me here, but there are days….
It seems to me that late-stage capitalism is even MORE mutually opposed to democracy, but I need to remember that defense of capitalism at all costs, no matter how corrupt it has become, is our modern-day political correctness.
And in all probability the extermination of our species and the toxic reduction of our Mother Earth to everlasting lifelessness. Our [utterly subjugated] terminal surrender to capitalism is literally a suicide cult, Jonestown on a global scale.
Gary, don’t know whether you’ll find my reply, but in brief, I had a 20-yr look at France, living there, then extended visits. LePens unelected nationally, while we got DT here.
Thank you, Mr. Pudup, for a picture-perfect lesson in why the United States failed and why its people will [never] rescue the nation from the deliberate fulfillment of Hitler's dream of a Thousand-Year Reich it has become.
I sense no particle of coyness in Heather Cox Richardson and see nothing wrong with persistent optimism. I hadn’t detected that trait in her either but, if you say so...
Agree. She is not coy. She tells us what is happening and often gives historical context. I do not see her as optimistic either. Some of her letters I have found down right depressing.
Whatever one chooses to label Dr. Richardson's reaction, there is no question she refuses to recognize we are as much at war -- and therefore as much in ecogenocidal jeopardy -- as we were on 8 December 1941.
Loren, I’m not so sure. HCR as an historian is not writing us about her opinion. She’s doing what I believe an historian does, gives us the facts about the past and the present rather than her opinion about them. She’s doing has left it up to us to form opinions. DT and gang o the other hand do exactly the opposite. Try to erase facts counter to their pov both from the past & present.
Brava, Anne Marie! I finally figured out why your posts, Loren, are such a test of my mental acuity at the age of 87. It’s the use of using multiple consecutive unalike adjectives! Also, there are no commas!
You are definitely a skilled well versed informative writer!
Love your posts after my first cup of coffee! Please keep on keeping on!
This is all of one piece. The Trump Family has wired all three branches of the federal government for their personal benefit. In the face of chillingly cold and blatant reality, the Press and the Dems continue to buy Donald's gigantic scam. The Big Con.
The Republican Party is dead. It is the Trump Party now. Project 2025 is a distraction, as is the Iran War, concentration camps for brown women and their children, the vandalism of our White House and national monuments, the stolen election lies, mismanagement of our government, the lawsuits against the media, the non stop AI cartoon posts. All a diversion from their stuffing their pockets with tens of billions from all sources. Including from us citizens.
Trump brushes off questions about the ill gotten money. "I don't know anything about it. It's my sons' business." "The stock market is up." "No, I won't give back the airplane." "I don't know anything about crypto."
The Congress and the DOJ says "Ignore the President using his office to take billions." As though a President and his Family making tens of billions from the office is just a normal thing for a Presidential Family to do. Blanche's job is to make sure they can keep stealing and cheating and breaking the laws, and not go to jail.
The REALITY is that Blanche, Bissent, Patel, Vance, the rest of the Cabinet, 272 Trump Party Senators and Representatives and 6 Supreme Court justices all work for the Trump Family now. It's hard to see past the daily Donald Show chaos but understand the truth. The Trump Administration is now wired for a few hundred crooked politicians to ride fast on Trump's coattails for their personal gain. The Trump Family gets their billions and the rest get the crumbs. The all sold their honor to a conman for money.
I keep coming back to this too — the chaos can make everything feel disconnected, but so much of it points back to the use of public office for personal gain. I wrote about that recently because at some point “corruption” almost feels too polite a word for what we’re watching.
Actually Trump and the ChristoNazis are doing to the [failed] United States exactly what capitalism does to everything it touches: looting it to destruction and death, then abandoning it like the rotting corpse the capitalists have hatefully made of it by their sworn allegiance to Absolute Evil.
I don't think it is so much a matter of capitalism as concentration of power, be that financial or political power, and generally speaking, they go hand in hand. It seems to me that one of the key lessons we can draw from history is that power tends to corrupt; and I see evidence of that on every level of life.
But what IS power in this context? I see it as the process that determines whose will prevails. That can be predatory but also cooperative, as we often ritualize in good faith social niceties; planning mutually with effort not to override others input. Then there is coercion which can be in the form of bribery as well as extortion. The marketplace is no love-in, but it can be reasonably mutually beneficial. Wikipedia says: "The Square Deal was Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program aimed at ensuring fair treatment for all Americans, focusing on three main goals: conservation of natural resources, corporate regulation, and consumer protection. It sought to balance the interests of business, labor, and the public, promoting equality of opportunity."
Contrast that with Hobbesian "Reaganomics". People may arrive at differing solutions to civilize the distribution of power in their society, but monopolization (domination) remains tyrannical. whether in governance or the marketplace, as we are seeing now, and have historically seen,, in other nations irrespective of their e conomic style.
Loren has been commenting on HCR's Letters since before I joined.
His comments are unrestrained, but on-topic. His purpose is not to draw attention to himself, nor derail the conversation, which are hallmarks of troll behavior.
If you disagree with his opinions, then post evidence-based rebuttals.
Posting one-word accusations makes you look more like a troll than Loren.
LOREN BLISS is a stalwart good faith contributor to LFAA.
Context: About 10 of us have engaged Substack Inc Inc to REVISE their Terms of Use (TOU) "report" function which now has vastly improved options. DONE.
ALL of us including the Platform are bound by an enforceable CA contract which ALWAYS carries a duty of good. That means you can go to Substack Inc' contractual option: JAMS, my world-famous old neighbor in SF.
Look up the jury instruction for good faith & fair dealing if you want a Sunday Moring Wake Up.
Agree Kelli. For The Grump, the presidency is the ultimate con job that tops all the others in his miserable existence. He steals from US to benefit himself. He has no interest in governing the country because that was never his plan to begin with. He is the Mafioso-in-Chief who opens the doors of power, the treasury, and distorts markets for the benefit of all who show him “loyalty.” We do not have a government right now; we have a crime syndicate where even the law enforcement agencies have been co-opted and are now the syndicate’s “security force.”
But there are chinks in the armor. We the people are not stupid and we know we are being conned (OK most of us do). We are going to rise en masse November 3 and peacefully remove hundreds of co-conspirators from power. That’s only just the beginning, though. The harder work will begin in January 2029 when we begin to dismantle the infrastructure of the crime syndicate piece by piece. A Democratic Congress will not sit on their hands like Garland did. They will dig relentlessly and get to the fetid bottom of all of this. There will be charges. Lots of charges. Each takedown will get us one step closer to him. And when the time comes we will bring him down too in shame. That’s if he hasn’t already kicked the bucket and taken the express train to Satan’s gate by then.
I agree, Chris. That’s the part I keep coming back to as well—the office is being treated not as a responsibility to the country, but more like an opportunity for personal power, loyalty, and profit.
Kelli, looting is the correct word. In the meantime, pointing at anyone they can to accuse them of drinking at the public trough: immigrants, minorities, the poor, etc.
Looting our culture, looting our heritage, looting our legacy to posterity, and of course looting the treasury, which Trump asserts is now his prerogative to spend or not spend as he so chooses. Yet, without his money, Trump would just be another jerk. Maybe he could be an "Influencer", but without the power that comes with money, he would have little to sell. He does have a certain cunning as a self-promoter.
I first heard of him in connection to the Wollman Skating Rink in NYC were he conned someone else into doing the work and hogged all the credit. Then he became an (un)"reality TV star", a perfect mouthpiece for Putin and plutocracy.
Follow the money, in the "Intolerable Acts", in the Civil War, in the shrinking of the middle-class and rise of de facto corruption. I'm not a Bible literalist, but it does call "the live of money" a root of evil; "love" in that sense seeming to indicate a value you place above all others. Everybody needs money, under their control or spent on their behalf, and I think most people, myself included, want as much as they can get, more or less. But while money can move someone to make me a burger, it can also buy murder for hire, buy a political outcome, or enable a light sentence for serious wrongdoing (see Epstein). Money can de facto bribe and extort, and there lies the rub. How to adequately separate fair exchange from corruption? And prohibit the latter.
The top 0.1% all loot your country and they tell you it's only the American Dream, and you've been buying that horseshit for decades. Politicians like Trump only facilitate this to a greater or lesser exent (the former in Trump's case). No other president, however, has used the office of the president quite so brazenly for self-enrichment as Trump.
Even the leadership of the Democratic party are scared shitless of candidates identifying themselves as 'socialists' because they fear that the electorate will not vote for such people. The media recently hailed Francesca Hong's defeat in Wisconsin as both a surprise and also a victory for moderation when it was actually a victory for the status quo in the domination of big money in American elections.
I have felt for a long time that the only way we will rid ourselves of these criminals will be by force. They are proving to me , at least, that normal democratic means will never work against them. The only question I have is will we stop this before it’s too late, or will there be years/decades of living under totalitarianism before enough is enough and the regime is finally taken out. Not an accusation, just an observation; I don’t think in general the American people truly know what we are up against.
I agree. The majority have no clue. And yes it will take atleast a generation to fix this. There will have to be literally more people dying the streets due to poverty for the people to wake up. And then I wonder if they will rise up cuz nothing was done after children were massacred at Sandy Hook. Look at how short lived Reconstruction was ( white folk wanted to just move on already).
It's sad living next to a once great nation that chooses to bully its best and safest trading partner. I doubt I'll ever visit again. It's too sad.
I was in Canada last year and grateful people were so nice. WE do not ‘choose’ to bully-a renegade president whom no one respects does what he wants.
Our system allowed him to be elected (barely) by people who believed his lies. I am befuddled by people who could not see straight through this man; for that matter people who did not know past behavior predicts future behavior, and he TOLD us his goal was retribution.
Nonetheless here we are and must fight our way out, punish those who aided him.
I'm certain they know; but they most assuredly don't care, because they assume they'll escape the ecogenocide, which they as "good Christians" believe will be directed only at humans who've offended their sadistic god -- that is, all humans soon-to-be-exterminated by the ChristoNazi theocracy in retaliation for their sexuality, gender, race or ethnicity.
Loren, yes, they think their money will save them. It won't in the end. I know people who are Christians and are not hateful while doing their best to resist the monsters and help others.
The regime has worked hard to cut off all avenues to dialog or peaceful conflict resolution. It’s almost as if they want a violent conflict as an excuse to unleash a pogrom against all who refuse to bend the knee. Remember Vought’s words which continue to chill me, that it will be non-violent “as long as the left allows it to be.” And yet they continue to provoke and instigate. This is what they want.
Clearly. Knowing that We the People are forcibly disarmed and -- by cancellation of the draft -- denied the training essential to resistance, there is no doubt the ChristoNazis' intent is to provoke us into uprising and then use that as the rational reason for the ultimate pogrom -- the methodical extermination of all opposition. This will no doubt include the use of the neutron bomb against rebellious cities -- this to preserve the material infrastructure, perhaps for later sale to Putin, while radiation sickness kills the entire population. Again, this is why I maintain our only rational hope for Liberation is invasion by progressive nations.
I wish I could believe there is, but everything they’re doing says no. Brick by brick, aided by a completely complicit Congressional majority and a Supreme Court that sees the Constitution as absolutely flexible, they are building a “legal” framework that insulates them forever from prosecution and accountability. Add to that a barely regulated para-military goon squad, a compliant military they have brow-beaten into submission and a firm grip on the mainstream media, and it ain’t looking too good for the short term. Even if they leave the mid-term election alone and even if a Democratic majority is voted into both chambers, they will refuse to comply. Every subpoena, every investigation, every lawsuit will be met with resistance or outright defied. Everything Democrats attempt will wind up in the Supreme Court, while the damage continues, just like it’s happening today. I keep beating this drum, but all we ever needed to know about these fascists was revealed to us before, on and after January 6, 2021. Most of us weren’t then and still aren’t getting the real picture.
It may be true that Project 2025 and all the rest that you mention are distractions as far as Trump sees it, as he selfishly and corruptly steals. But these "distractions" are murderous and an actual felt REALITY. Even if he were to be prosecuted fully, his "distractions" will continue to rule. Unless . . . unless.
And these ChristoNazis and their billionaire-omnipotent masters have indeed murdered the former United States beyond any possibility of resurrection. Which is why-- even were we ever to awaken enough to truly arise (which it's now obvious we will never do) -- I argue our only hope for liberation is invasion by liberation-minded nations.
Loren, I appreciate your perspective, but I refuse to accept your cynicism about the outcome. We The People still have a chance to take back the mangled mess that was a functional democracy, and rebuild it, not the same as before, but better than before. I Believe!
It isn't "cynicism," Signe; it's the bitter truth you can't escape when you've spent -- as I have -- most of my 86 years covering the [chronically] failing U.S. (I appreciate your perspective, indeed would be delighted were it proven true, but my own experience -- and for that matter my knowledge of history and sociology -- forces me to estimates such as the one you refuse to accept.)
The ultimate reason USian self-liberation is impossible is the conquerors are Christian fanatics, which means they believe they are infallible -- and they are thus as impossible to reform as Medieval Crusaders or Nazi gas-chamber technicians.
Both can coexist: facts of reality, and optimism. Without optimism, there is no motivation to ACT, to DO SOMETHING to rescue our democracy. With a nihilistic outlook, there is the couch awaiting the opportunity to widen your gluteus maximus. (not personal to you, Gloria)
The [only] reason I'm "couched," Signe, is I'm a wheel-chaired cripple, which because I'm in the failed and former United States, means I'm already despised by most USians, who in their Ted Bundy capitalism fervently believe that anyone who is no longer exploitable for profit should be killed.
In unspeakable truth, the people who voted to destroy the U.S.A. are the prime representatives of the meanest, most sadistic, most Evil-hearted national population in our species' entire history.
Loren, I wish I could refute your fairly dire prognosis, but I can't.
Some may call me superstitious, but I am convinced that the origins of an enterprise will determine its nature and its future. I have occasionally pointed to Walmart as an example. The retailer's origins have been carefully concealed by the Walton family to protect their business. The company wasn't started by a poor, kindly grandpa who sold goods to his neighbors. Sam Walton was enraged by what he believed was a betrayal and started Walmart out of spite. The sole purpose of his enterprise was putting TG&Y Stores out of business. This foundation of retribution has poisoned the entirety of Walmart's cutthroat business model. Walmart is the most powerful retailer on the planet, but there is still history to be written, and its fortunes are closely tied to those of the U.S.
Contrary to the glowing stories we were told in school, the origins of the U.S. aren't especially noble. White European misfits traveled to North America, arrogantly assumed the land was theirs for the taking and took it, claiming the Indigenous stewards of the land were "savages" who needed to be "civilized" and/or pushed out.
The newly-minted colonial aristocrats took umbrage to The Crown's attempt to finance their defense with taxes and fomented a bloody insurrection that we proudly named "The Revolutionary War." Since then, there has been scarcely a year that the U.S. hasn't been involved in a military conflict somewhere. Not to mention the endless bloodshed that takes place within our own borders.
Compare the U.S. with Canada, which never revolted against The Crown. Our neighbor to the north evolved naturally and peacefully into a virtually autonomous nation without bloodshed. We violent Usonians are bemused by the Canadians' politeness.
I have contended that those affluent "Founding Fathers" constructed a trifurcated government that was designed to protect and promote the assets of the wealthy, allowing only crumbs to fall from the table to the peasants below. Occasionally progress has been made by the "have-nots," only to be quickly clawed back by the "haves."
Today, we are eating the fruit of the poisoned tree.
Historically, every empire has had to be vanquished and humiliated before its people could realize that they were not exceptional. That they must humble themselves and join the global community. I can't see why the U.S. would be any different.
I remember when Hillary Clinton was mercilessly ridiculed for repeating opposition researcher Chris Lehane's phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy," as if no such thing existed.
She also declared that Donald Trump is "temperamentally unfit" for the presidency and could lead the U.S. into dangerous situations, including potential wars and economic crises.
And those of us who've been paying attention are now witness to glaring evidence that she was right about the vast right-wing conspiracy, which is now empowering and protecting the madman she warned us about.
Yesterday, Donald revealed in his social media posts that he has become profoundly detached from reality, posting utter nonsense in praise of himself and his nonexistent achievements.
Perhaps our calls to our legislators should shift from all the other urgent issues of concern to demands that they exert themselves in the powers of the 25th Amendment.
So much of what Hillary warned about was treated as partisan exaggeration at the time, when in fact she was naming patterns that were already there.
And I still think 2016 exposed something deeply ugly in the country — not just political frustration, but how much misogyny, racism, and resentment could be mobilized when someone gave people permission to express it.
What’s painful now is how much of what was dismissed then has become impossible to ignore.
Well, well, well ... it seems the turncoat has turned his coat again. I'd heard that he was seeking a reconciliation with his orange daddy. This article was published at the beginning of Cohen's return to the ... I was going to use "fold," but that's for sheep.
Where do hellions live?
Oh, that's right. I'll finish my sentence.
... beginning of Cohen's return to the gates of hell.
We need full accountability. Trump and all his MAGAt fascist bootlickers must be thrown in prison to save our sacred democracy. Let’s keep protesting and singing the no kings anthem together: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/no-kings-anthem
"If DOJ had publicly produced all documents responsive to DDF’s FOIA requests this case would be in a different posture – but that is not what has happened. DDF’s review of the Defendant’s production of records under the Act reveals that numerous categories of information responsive to our FOIA requests were not publicly produced in the Epstein Library and no information about exemptions applicable to any documents withheld from the public production has been made publicly available or sent to DDF. DOJ has thus not yet fully complied with FOIA as to any of DDF’s FOIA requests."
Indeed. Let us honor our Mother Earth by mobilizing rage and vengefully rising up angry. Else what's the point of reading Dr. Richardson's [superb, infinitely courageous] efforts to keep us informed as to the ever-more-irresistible status of our ecogenocidal subjugation by the all-conquering ChristoNazis.
(Clearly the ChristoNazis assume we are already too completely disarmed -- and thereby sufficiently reduced to compulsory pacifism and its inescapable mandatory victimhood -- to [never again] effectively resist their Evil.)
Indeed. Which I for one do [not] believe is mere coincidence. (Per the Gaia Hypothesis: earth is "alive, conscious and self-regulating"; per Jackson Browne, citing "the magnitude of her fury in the final hour."
Consider this from Dan Rather: "Welcome to our weekly Reason to Smile. Because our current political climate can be more depressing than three straight days of rain, several years ago we decided to impart a weekly moment of joy every Sunday morning. We believe music can be the balm we all need… a song can change your mood in a minute. It’s no more complicated than that."
I respectfully disagree Gloria. I experience tons of rage but it has nowhere to go except the weekly protests and postcard writing I participate in. I'm betting there's more rage than we know about but no outlet to make a real difference. A civil war perhaps is whats needed but we have no leadership.
Also the military has been duped so badly. I want Mark Kelly to reenlist. There just has to be a way forward. I’m 89 years old and like you, have done all I am capable of except sell my first born and my social security.
There is something exhausting about watching corruption stop bothering to look embarrassed.
Trump’s former defense lawyers are now helping run the Justice Department. Executive privilege seems to cover practically anyone the president has ever spoken to. Epstein records remain buried. Treasury is weakening rules meant to reveal who actually owns suspicious companies.
Apparently transparency was the problem.
We used to call these things scandals. Now they are policy decisions.
The operating principle is simple enough. If Congress might investigate it, hide it. If a court wants it, delay it. If a law creates records that might expose somebody important, get rid of the records. Then call all of this executive authority and complain that critics are being political.
Trump once promised to drain the swamp.
Instead, they seem to be covering it with plywood, removing the warning signs, and telling us there was never a swamp there in the first place.
At some point satire becomes difficult because reality refuses to leave any room for exaggeration.
Of course it is, and tragically, Trump has finally realized (or his advisers have confirmed for him that) his Constitutionally-granted pardon power gives him the right (like it or not) to ignore all accountability, as there is no longer any form of accountability that can't be avoided simply by having the President give you a pardon (and apparently there never was as that power has been in the Constitution since its origins, but nobody else ever chose to use it that way).
If the United States is going to continue to function as an effective democracy after the passing of the corrupt Trump regime, it will be critical to change a lot of this that is enshrined in both the Constitution and in the laws.
Ah, Signe...please don't insult our brachiating cousins. This Regime is more like a barrel of parasite-infested fecal matter, toxic in every way imaginable.
JL - 2/3 of conversations is gossip according to many experts. Republicans have based their campaigns on this fact for decades. When we are talking to our Republican voting acquaintances, we need to talk about the anti-values of our local politicians and how rich they've become from being our elected officials. Or even, did you hear about so-and-so? They lost their health insurance coverage or their health insurance doubled in price. The Republicans are all liars working for the oligarchs and they are all cruel and hateful murderous bastards. You know--that kind of thing.
If they try to defend their politicians say, "Everybody knows they only care about money or power or whatever."
Not "ALL" civilization m'lady; merely the last approximately 6,000 years of what patriarchy wants us to accept as civilization. Suggestion: study the thousand-year Minoan civilization, which thanks to modern archaeology and metallurgical analysis, we are discovering was not only the first global trading commonwealth, but was built and sustained by woman-centered governance, [without] the male imperialist compulsion to ecogenocide that defines [all] patriarchal efforts. See https://thenoosphere.substack.com/p/archaeologists-keep-finding-women, also Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo, "The Great Cosmic Mother" (Harper: 1987); also Gavin Menzies, ""The Lost Empire of Atlantis: History's Greatest Mystery Revealed" (William Morrow: 2011.) The overall academic source is the late archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, chiefly "The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe" (Harper: 1991).
Thanks for the list, Loren. All I meant was, doesn't matter WHAT the civilization is, if kids aren't taught that they should recognise when they're wrong, and do something about it, then any civilization will crumble. And where would that come from but the home? And probably initially from the mother.
Well the symbol of the double axe and the great tale of the Minatour and the woman who gave the thread to the hero to use to get out of the maze. It is a fascinating culture and time Phil.
Unfortunately, Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution provides a much broader JAIL FREE PASS via the Pardon Power. And that isn't something that can be overridden by court orders or other techniques.
It seems to me that what's coming after Trumpism, if there is an after, would have to be changes in the Constitution. Can that happen? The Pardon Power will need to be addressed.
It will be difficult, because it takes 3/4 of all states to ratify amendments and we know how many deep "red" states there are (almost half). But we will need to work on it from almost the get-go. The Pardon power needs to be addressed, and I am starting a substack to talk about revising how the Department of Justice works: taking it out of the "executive" branch where it reports to the President, and creating the office of AG as an elective one, with elections every four years alternating with the presidential years. So the country would have TWO "executives" leading parts of the executive branch, the President leading most of it (including the military) and the AG leading the prosecution/judicial branch (but not including the courts, they would remain separate). The AG would have a fair amount of power and would hopefully be independent enough from the President to be able to bring necessary charges against members of the executive branch for crimes they commit.
Interesting suggestion. Something that restores the mission to its founding purpose. To be the Constitution’s lawyer. Not the president’s. The WH has a chief counsel and that is their job, not DOJ’s. I like this reform because it restores that independence.
lauriemcg, he’s not thumbing his nose at us; we are absolutely invisible to him. He only sees himself and his small circle of sycophants, and not always them either. In Trump world, We The People do not exist. Our existence is “fake news."
You are right Signe -- in order to thumb his nose at us he would have to acknowledge that we exist - and only he and his sycophants exist in his world.
You can hope for that, but I don't see how. Trump will provide a raft of pardons to every senior member of his administration, and those people will be able to go home scot-free. We need to fix that going forward so no future regime in the US can ever do what Trump has done, but that won't provide accountability for what was already done under this administration. I wish it weren't so, but it is the plain, obvious truth.
From abroad, the US pardon system looks like a joke. You pardon turkeys and you use it to give immunity to people who have the money to pay.
He laughs as he pardons.
You call law what is not law and you call democracy what is not democracy.
They will all walk off with their pardons, Miller, Patel, his family all... In fact they won't even need to walk, they've got it pretty sown up now.
I like the bit about "they've destroyed all the data collected" from shell companies. Those are the people that don't even need your "monopoly" pardons.
LEST WE FORGET: The (deliberate) bombing of the girls’ school is undoubtedly Trump’s reaffirmation of ChristoNazi misogyny – the same hatred of females and contempt for femaleness that leads to both the victimization of terrorized children by the Trumpstein cult and to capitalism’s apocalyptic assault on our Mother Earth. That hatefulness – also manifest as white male supremacist bigotry – fuels the crimes against humanity that define the entire Trumpstein Regime. Thus the vital, know-our-enemy relevance of the full text of the Jane Doe lawsuit against Trump and Epstein -- later withdrawn by the plaintiff in response to credible death threats: https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Johnson_TrumpEpstein_Lawsuit.pdf
States should retroactively prosecute them to the fullest extent possible, wherever they live. Pardons should not trump state law, make them move to another state! In other words make their lives miserable with what little arsenal we have.
And what's really, really frustrating is how our elected representatives in congress and other oversight institutions are not exercising their sworn duties to stop it. I would like to understand what Democratic and Independent congresspeople are doing; is whatever they are doing simply not being reported, or are they not doing much at all, or are they so hampered by the legitimate rules that they are truly impotent?
And what's really, really, really frustrating is to realize that these Republican lawmakers, appointers, and confirmers were actually elected, many of them more than once, by the American citizenry!
I've watched many of HCR's interviews with Democratic and independent members of congress. Most of them point out how the system basically neuters the minority party from doing much, even in normal times; and the current majority clamps down even more, yet they are doing what they can. Vote Blue!
If you go to Jessica Craven’s newsletter from yesterday, she provides the email address for the veteran-owned company selling those shock gloves to ICE. Write to them with your opinion of providing those to ICE’s. I did. (Sorry I don’t have the link handy.)
The company manufacturing the Shock Gloves that will be sold to ICE: Compliant Technologies in Kentucky by calling (859) 447-0576 or emailing info@complianttechnologies.net. Their mailing address is P.O. Box 24714, Lexington, KY 40524, and their business location is near Lexington and Nicholasville, Kentucky
Trumps corruption totally exposed. Murder in plain sight. No remedy. He makes up reality. Hes a monster sypported by people who feed off of him or are terrified and have zero morality. As half the country now recognizes
NEW YORK, Aug 14 (Reuters) - "JANE STREET took a $15 billion hit in July from its exposure to AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness and other [frezied] tech stocks that were battered by the bloated market selloff, according to two people familiar with the matter and a note seen by Reuters."
Reuters: "The secretive Wall Street trading platform, JANE STREET, however, has generated trading revenue of more than $40 billion year to date, one of the sources said, easily outstripping trading revenue at the largest banks & other market-making rivals. Nevertheless, a $15 Billion Dollar LOSS is Market killing news.
Noted: Hedge funds sold tech at historic pace ahead of Situational Awareness fire sale.
*********************************************
Thus, monitor AI markets today Sunday, 8/16 via a licensed stock broker or CNBC or Charles Schwab and/or other real-time before the Asian Markets open early Monday, 8/17.
They're upfront and egregiously working for criminality.
Remember, this is the same crew covering up the Epstein network -- to which criminal Donald notoriously and for long proudly belonged. It included money laundering -- which Heather details in her Letter today how criminal accomplice Todd Blanche facilitates its anonymity.
But those in that network of easy rape -- girls, girls, girls, so many underage -- also indulged in high level drug running, arms dealing, as well as the money laundering and trafficking.
They're all proud of how they flip off the law. Flip us all off, as that Long Dong Clarence court furthermore cloaks in open immunity from the law.
Stay angry, fellow commenters. It's only going to get worse before November 3.
You got me with “The long dong Clarence criminal court”. For those who don’t know it refers to the Anita Hill trial where she accused him of sexual harassment with “graphic detail”
Ah, the wondrous days of 1991 when men could be men and women could be, well, play things for men. Judging from the Epstein files, things haven't changed all that much, sigh.
I am deeply concerned for the ones on the ship. What if a serious, contagious disease breaks out??? But even more likely, they aren’t being properly fed and the conditions are unsanitary…Cannot believe. Criminal negligence by the regime…
I watched almost all of Anita Hill's testimony and the questions the senators asked and the badgering she got. After what she told them, it was to my shock and the country's shame that Thomas was confirmed.
And guess who gave Long Dong Thomas a pass and allowed him to get on the bench? Give up? Ole Stumbling Joe Biden who wanted to save his political ass and tossed Anita Hill under the bus.
Bill, you are correct that Biden was ONE of the MANY old white men who threw Anita Hill under the bus. But don’t lose the context in your eagerness to trash Biden, an otherwise decent man and good president. In the era of the Thomas hearings, it was almost expected that a woman —especially a woman of color— would not be respected nor heard. But many women (myself included) heard her and were awakened. One might argue that was the true beginning of the Me Too movement, because we were all sick to death of the sexual harrassment and were emboldened by her courage, sickened by Thomas’ and other men’s denials.
Biden’s apology to Ms. Hill was not enough as she felt it should have been taken more seriously and measures taken to protect women from sexual harassment.
What struck me with that day of her testimony was that her parents were sitting behind her. Former President Biden really missed the mark in that clearly. On the other side Ginny Lamb Thomas or soon to be. Mrs Thomas was having a laying on if the hands moment from what’ve have read about how and why he continued to proceed with the nomination process.
The votes were there to prevent Uncle Thom from being nominated. That one brilliant line that I’m sure was not created by Thomas but saved him ; “This is nothing more than a high tech lynch mob.”
Joe Biden -- a [real] Democrat, complete with his oft-repeated but of course plausibly deniable performance as the chief representative of the [true] "Democratic" [sic] Party's primary post-JFK function: serving the "Republican" [sic] ChristoNazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column, thereby ensuring the permanence of USian ChristoNazi theocracy.
Other Democrats and "Democratic" [sic] state regimes are most assuredly following suit. Take Washington state Democrats for example: jihad-fanatical in their infinitely repeated pledge to make Washington "the first truly gun-free state," they continue to escalate their efforts to ensure ChristoNazi conquest by imposing total forcible disarmament on the state's citizenry, thereby dooming us to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. They're also cutting social services, both by slashing bureaucrats' working hours and by staffing telephones with the sort of contemptuously hostile employees who were once encountered only amongst the ill-fare queens, the openly hateful agents of what is credibly damned from both ends of the political spectrum as the largest, most shibboleth-protected welfare bureaucracy on the planet, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.
But my most recent definitively hostile encounter with the state's bureaucracy was [not] with DSHS. It was with SHIBA -- State Health Insurance Benefits Advisory -- a division of the State Insurance Commissioner's Office that, unlike most of the Evergreen State's bureaucracy, had hitherto been [notoriously] zealous in its defense of human rights. Not any more: when I said I called to complain about the lying propaganda that convinced me to switch health insurers to a plan that offers painfully less than it promises, the bureaucrat -- obviously a ChristoNazi sympathizer if not an infiltrated CN operative -- quite antagonistically told me my grievance is no longer acceptable and hung up.
So much for the alleged "Blue State" resistance, which most assuredly does not exist at the bureaucratic level. I know bureaucrats from decades of covering state and local governance. With few rare exceptions, among them my best sources, the vast majority of state and local bureaucrats are the obsessively self-serving quintessence of what the USian majority revealed itself to be by re-electing Trump. They are potential Adolf Eichmanns, every bit as morally imbecilic as the politicians they serve -- yet another reason why (exactly like Nazi Germany) -- the former U.S. will [never] be Liberated save by invasion.
Ken Duberstein (from the Bush administration) advised Thomas and probably had Thomas write that aggressive line about lynching. At the time I thought it was brilliant because it forced all the white men on the committee to shut up and vote for him.
A few years later, as an art dealer of mostly Black art, I was a vendor at the National Bar Association convention in Memphis. I was standing in a yard between the hotel and conference hall and I saw a man walking towards me with a phalanx of people behind him shouting something. As they approached, I heard the repeated refrain, “They lowered the bar for you.” Thomas passed me and the group yelling that as well. I went inside to listen to Thomas speech and a few audience members stood up and turned their backs to him while they spoke. I’ll never forget that day. I wish I had had a movie camera to record it. I’d be famous today, lol.
Hello Phil... DJT would not have gained as much Power as DJT has without a Corrupt GOP Majority in the US Senate, and a Corrupted SCOTUS... Remember DJT has been Impeached Twice in a Democratic Congress, but Acquitted Twice in a GOP Majority Senate... A GOP Corrupted SCOTUS has given DJT Practical Immunity... DJT is Supremely Corrupt, and DJT's Reptilian Brain understands that Anything in the Current Corrupted System can be Bought... Just Ask Emil Bove, and Todd Blanche...
When we've higher standards, Apache, our teachers can rise to more than test preppers.
Prepping, always in thrall to those narrow-range IQ measures, neuters all -- so bottom-line versions of humanity devolve as we see normalized now atop Washington, D.C.
Republicans and the fawners over Donald criminality cannot imagine standards dovetailing not only more humanity -- more humanities in the classroom, and more reading of full books -- but also essaying skills cognizant of life's complications.
Language sunk only to ideology, and values sunk only to money needn't keep their grip on all as they do now to so many.
Can Dem candidates sing more of teachers poised for more?
Hello Phil... Good Values begin at Home, and are Reinforced by the Friends that we pick... To me, the Erosion of Popular Values began under Reagan... Remember 'Greed Is Good'?... That began the Popular Worship of $$$... DJT thrived in the '80s, and now look at where we are...
To pop in Apache and Phil yes the film Wall Street with Michael Douglas and Martin and Charlie’s Sheen based on the economic bikinis of Ivan Bloskey sp? I think . However the web continues down farther to the Wrightsman Estate that Epstein bought I think. If one looks into the history of Charles Wrightman from Dayton Ohio the same city Martin Sheen, Erma Bombeck, Chad and Rob Lowe and the Wright Family including the Wright brothers’ sister Dorothy were from.Oh my oh my. Oil and Kansas and Oklahoma and Tulsa. Talk about dancing on graves!
How can our nation not impeach Trump after reading this and other articles that illustrate how corrupt he is? We grew up being so very proud of being Americans. Trump has destroyed that.
53-47, that's how (referring, of course, to the fact that the Senate consists of 53 MAGAt members and 47 Democrats and Independents, and it takes 67 to vote to convict Trump for an impeachment).
I wonder if there’s a way to prosecute those who accept pardons when a pay-to-play motive is uncovered? That might be the way to get the corrupt players to stop accepting pardons, if there will be (probably state-level) charges and penalties.
It's not coincidental that FinCEN was just gutted. Trump's lawsuit against Capital One for closing his accounts revealed that the accounts were closed because they were flagged for money laundering.
It is REALLY convenient that he now controls virtually all of the crime enforcement and prosecution arms of the federal government. FBI, Secret Service, US Marshall's office, the Bureau of Prisons, all prosecutors in the DoJ, etc.
Congress is controlled by the FOP (f'king old party) and getting LOUD isn't going to change anyone's minds. Spend your energy targeting November 3. That is CRITICAL!
Deaf, dumb, and blind apparently. We see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Sheep being led to slaughter. Be like the bull who escaped from the slaughter house, rescued by Jon Stewart and others. There is a better life. He remembered, so should we…
On vacation, over the last few days, I have spoken with FIVE separate Texas voters ages 20-33 who do not know who James Talarico is. Would you Texans get up and start talking him up?! You have the opportunity to change the trajectory of our national political reality by defeating that mutant offspring of vicious Texas right-wing corruption, Ken Paxton. Do something!
My Congressman is MAGA through and through. I get little satisfaction out of scolding his staff members for supporting authoritarianism. Okay, a little satisfaction.
By confirming as A.G. the chief protector of Epstein’s crowd of pedophiles, Trump’s flunkies in the senate have made themselves complicit in protecting all those pedophiles. Congratulations, senators! What will you tell your granddaughters?
It would just take a handful of House members and Senators who value integrity and the constitution to put an end to this madness -- and yet - crickets. I will never ever understand why even a few did not stand up and say 'this is wrong and we must end it.
“Is Donald Trump being treated by the Department of Justice as a victim of Jeffrey Epstein?
🤨 On August 13, 2019, a small group of lawyers exchanged an email about Jeffrey Epstein.
🤨 Three days earlier, Epstein had been found dead in a federal detention cell. The email circulated a CNN story about the investigation into his associates.
The subject line read: “Re: Rachel continues to kill it.”
🤨The CC line included three names:
1. Todd Wallace Blanche.
2. Sean S. Buckley.
3. John Peter Cronan.
All three were former federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, the same office prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein.
Three identifiable participants in these 2019 conversations about Jeffrey Epstein now occupy remarkably consequential positions within the federal legal system.
And Todd Blanche ended up running the Justice Department responsible for deciding what the American public gets to see in the Epstein files.
🤨 Seven years later, on August 13, 2026, a federal judge threatened contempt while demanding answers from the Justice Department about its handling of records Congress ordered released concerning Jeffrey Epstein.
🤨 These emails are not meaningless.
They provide context.
And after what happened yesterday, context matters quite a fucking bit.
🤨 Because while Todd Blanche’s name was sitting inside the Epstein files, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department spent Thursday explaining to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan why parts of the Epstein files remain hidden.
And Sullivan was not enjoying the experience.
🤨 We’d like to know if Donald Trump’s Justice Department is using protections intended for victims of Jeffrey Epstein to protect Donald Trump from disclosure in the Jeffrey Epstein files while withholding records connected to an allegation in which a woman says she was the victim.”
I have reduced my daily news intake to only HCR’s letters. Now, even that is becoming almost more than I can bear. The level of corruption the Republican congressional majority is enabling, even fostering, is breaking my back.
Will the November midterm elections get here soon enough? Some days I doubt it. Today is one of those days.
that's exactly how they want you to feel. Yes Rest. But these last 2 months before the election is when all oars need to be in the water. Don't let them defeat you.
We've cut way back as well. I watch what my retired cop cohort thinks and I despair; these people who I once counted as friends (and trusted with my life) would see me destroyed in the name of their Christian God.
Know, dear Ally, it is what they see only through the veil of widespread corruption over their eyes. It is NOT what will happen.
I always give a side eye glance whenever anyone willing to don this veil of corruption comes up with some statement of ignorance regarding human beings that, if allowed to come to pass, would destroy that which saves us during thus time. Human beings, since our creation and however one believes how it came to pass, are endowed not only with all physical elements but a good, healthy dose of what holds it all together. Our humanity. Unless it is destined in some timeline somewhere beyond our comprehension to disappear, it is what will save us again. As it has time and time again.
Have faith. The Light in us all shines out through our eyes. When I give a side eye glance, trust that I am zapping an egregious thought by someone with Light and Love. There is no opposite.
And I keep Ogden Nash’s thought always tucked in my pocket….
“The door of a bigoted mind opens outward so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.”
To me the only infinite fact there is in our Universe is Light and Love. That is what is in my quiver. Ever the warriors we are!
Project 2025 has taken all three executive branches and their Administrators who have and are destroying every piece of America. They have also held American soldiers hostage in a war they created to launder taxpayer money. “Who’s going to stop me” is their slogan. What is the answer?
Time and again Trump‘s confederates bend the law beyond recognition or simply refuse to obey it in defiance of direct judicial orders. How can they get away with this? Are laws mere suggestions? Are judges powerless?
That MIGHT be possible as pensions are just governed by laws that can be changed. You could pass a law, for instance, that anyone who obtains a pardon and accepts it loses any pension they get from the government. That would at least put a sting to the pardon power.
Jon, you’re on to something. I commented above on this: ie go after the customer. Historically cops would arrest prostitutes and ignore the johns. Now they (sometimes) arrest the johns for engaging in illegal activity (where it’s illegal). I suggest using legal means to go after those who BRIBE this administration for pardons with their big donations. Any lawyers on here who can comment on this? Is it possible?
As soon as he took office, Blanche issued a memo dramatically expanding executive privilege, which he described as the authority of the president to “withhold certain sensitive information for the public good.”
Seems like every time I have heard the phrase "executive privilege" invoked, the very last thing it is serving is "the public good".
John Feeley, the former US ambassador to Panama, describes the first meeting with Trump that ultimately led him to resign. During that meeting, Trump asked him: “What do we get from Panama?”
“This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant,” Feeley told Kai Wright, “who is surrounded by people who are not ignorant, but who, in their presentation towards a region that I dedicated about 30 years of my life to, have such a fundamentally superficial view.”
Get While The Getting’ Is Good: Fascist Republican Greed
“Never met a greedy fascist Republican I didn’t like,” said Cheeto, the corrupt felon, convicted sex offender, and abuser of presidential powers.
In the environment of politics both Democrats and fascist Republicans are both at the $$$ trough but the fascist Republicans take the prize for greed, prodded by the wealthy donor class that fuels their lust for power. This perversity was well demonstrated in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby set in 1925. Interestingly the novel was a commercial and critical disappointment during Fitzgerald's lifetime, selling poorly, but historically it depicts a parallel of what is happening today with a NeoNazi twist. Is this what WE the People have become?
And not only is the morality of the country being tested, the judicial system is put to the test as well with the fascist highest court debasing the rule of law by giving a felon absolute immunity. Emboldened by such a judicial gift, Cheeto is now working out an IRS immunity deal as well.
But the roarin’ 1920’s didn’t end well and with a spendthrift golden gilded Cheeto at the helm and a soaring national debt of almost $40T, Cheeto will become the 21st century Hoover.
I suspect Trump will be on his way to the 10th circle of somewhere or other before the full consequences of his and his cronies mischief envelops our society.
My only fear about that prediction is that when/if Trump heads out for hell before his term is over, Hell on earth in the United States gets a lot hotter by virtue of his replacement, JD Vance.
Anybody else ever noticed that JD is also commonly used to refer to "juvenile delinquents"?
It's crumbled. We need to still stay the course, get a Democratic government elected in 2026 and 2028, and then fix all of this stuff that Trump is able to take advantage of.
Sigh, you can scream all you want about this, but our Constitution dictates how and when we get to "kick them out" (by voting). Whether or not anyone belongs in prison (and they surely do), I wouldn't hold my breath until that happens, because it will almost certainly result in your own asphyxiation. Nobody in the Trump administration is ever going to see the inside of a federal prison for the crimes they have committed. NOBODY. Pardons to all who want them (and anyone who doesn't is a bigger idiot that Trump).
What ties all of this together is the destruction of accountability. Executive privilege is expanded, court orders are resisted, records are withheld, and now an anti–money laundering system created by law is being dismantled.
And what’s really frustrating is how deliberate this is: weaken the mechanisms that expose corruption, and corruption becomes much easier to hide.
Without accountability, the rule of law becomes whatever those in power are willing to obey.
Professor Richardson coyly observes that there is a question as to whether the Trump administration will refuse to abide by the law. There is obviously no doubt about it.
In addition to all the Constitutional provisions that Trump has freely violated and of course emolument clauses and the Hatch Act and the FinCEN legislation and countless others, we are in the midst of an illegally waged war that was launched at least in part to distract from their ongoing failure to abide by the Epstein Transparency Act. And how many administration officials, including Trump of course, are implicated in the crimes surrounding the Epstein/Trump child sex trafficking ring?
I pray the Rule of Law in the U.S. will one day be exhumed and resurrected, but at the moment it is quite clearly six feet under and face down.
The waging of war illegally, with its assassinations and hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of deaths in Iran and Venezuela, stands at the apex of a pyramid of contempt for the rule of law, wanton cruelty, idiocy, incompetence, and violations of sense and common decency. The evisceration of anything resembling "justice" from the Justice Department, the pointless, idiotic destruction of USAID, the hollowing out of the State Department, the removal of the last shreds of environmental, historical and cultural protection exercised by the National Park Service and the larger Department of the Interior constitute the greatest casualties of Republican power, with many others -- some equally as devastating -- in their wake.
Like all bombings, the carnage left behind continues to ripple outward. The depletion of missiles from our defense arsenal -- a direct result of a flippant, careless, gung-ho, unqualified Secretary of Defense who thinks war is merely a video game about testosterone, the savaging of the NATO alliance, the abandonment of friends like Ukraine, the dizzying up-and-down, on-again-off-again tariff wars carried out by an idiot who understands nothing about an interdependent global economy, the bizarre attacks on doctors, medicine and science as 'new' old epidemics spread, the intimidation of universities, media companies, newspapers...at times the list appears endless, and continues to mount. We are in the very fight of our lives.
Marc Elias of the Democracy Docket has spoken about his record of constantly challenging Trumpian garbage on legal grounds, winning every case (at least 63 so far) he's waged against them. 'Do you sometimes feel the effort is worth it given the overwhelming odds against you?' Nicole Wallace recently asked him. Elias answered by way of describing studying for his Bar Mitzvah as a young teen, where his social circle included Holocaust survivors and others who fought against the Nazis.
He narrated the story of one Jewish GI, held in a prisoner-of-war camp, alone, by himself, deciding that being captive still didn't exempt him from trying to sabotage his enemies. As a slave worker in Nazi kitchens and galleys, this 19-year-old kid decided that poking holes in the produce to make it spoil would be his contribution to the war effort. Potatoes were the most difficult, he said, telling Elias about how his own fingers would bleed after poking so many holes in them. his reasoning was -- the food would spoil faster, the Nazis would be unable to keep their soldiers fed, the Americans would get a crucial advantage, and win the war.
Whether our efforts are large and heroic, or constitute little more than poking holes in Republican potatoes, we simply have no other choice. We have 80+ days to organize, donate, demonstrate, volunteer, help others conduct lawsuits, and ultimately render judgement against these idiotic bastards and those who enable our country's descent into shame and dishonor. It's a debt we owe to future generations who will one day ask us -- did we do everything we possibly could?
This sad on so many dimensions that I have officially run out of words to describe it and to register my distain, anger, disbelief. 30 years of defending The Constitution "against all enemies, foreign & domestic" was all in vain.
Maybe you held off something worse during those 30 years. Nevertheless, time to rearm.
Hi TJB,
I understand, I too have run out of words.
Not yet.
And actually never. Heroes don't always win, but they always strive.
Go on, do it - you know you really want to.
Readers Digest version...we have morons doing moronic things supported by corrupt sycophants.
And less than three months to set things straight?
Yikes!
I think we need to pick up the pace, but humanity has battled, as Lincoln called it "The same old serpent" as long as anyone can remember.
ICTT, once again you’ve replied brilliantly. Thank you for the story of that indefatigable young man poking holes in potatoes.
I’ve continued thinking: ‘Sue’!
There’s plenty of us that can do it. Our States can do it.
Let’s poke holes in to Miller’s plans. Remember the saying, that it’s the cracks where the light gets in?
So well said, ICTT!
Thanks for relating this story of RESISTANCE!
So we have conservative constitutional experts like Michael Luttig decrying the illegal actions of the JD, as are moderates and liberals and still nothing is done. The corruption is far worse than the Guilded Age. How many fathers and mothers will want their daughters and sons going to war to defend the grifters?
PS...it's spelled "Gilded Age".
Thanks yea I saw that and got distracted from corrected - appreciate you comment!
Not nothing, but somehow I think we need to train a white-hot spotlight on how sick this has all become. The contrast between the episodes of history that demonstrate "the better angels of our nature" in contrast to practitioners of "Dark Arts".
As far as sons and daughters, I have run into young people in more than one scenario deeply discouraged by the prospects of life in the future. Why? It's not like we did not have or do not have any choice in matters that our robbing posterity of a brighter future. And for what? Who gains from this trajectory. Who gets screwed?
Everyone should read your comment! It is the best one I have seen—-go poke holes in the Republican potatoes everyone😉😊😉
Elias told the story in his interview with Nicoll Wallace for her podcast, The Best People.
Solidarity.
Resistance has been too mild and too slow to get the job done.
What do you suggest we do to ramp up resistance Gloria?
National mass tax resistance
Since he doesn't pay any...
Future generations might reasonably wonder how you decided to vote for this clown as your president - twice. It would be preferable if the current generation paid some attention to this question.
Trump is in so much trouble that nobody seems to have noticed how the whole Make America Great Again project seems to have been dropped in favour of saving Western Civilization.
America was a very different place when I was a small child in the 1940s. Some of that was very good and some of that was very bad, but it seemed to me that until "The Reagan Revolution" the overall momentum moved toward egalitarian empowerment. The middle class and social equality openings were on a roll. Commercial contributions to culture were part and parcel of American Life, but it felt like more of those who Leona Helmsley called "the little people" held sway. In this age of the billionaires, who now dominate the arts, the uses of technology, and even outer space are the real "Great Replacement" for a government and culture of the people, by the people, for the people.
ICTT, Once again, you condensed the choices all Americans have in tRump's war against democracy and everything we value in life, Thank you!
You're welcome, though I think the person who really needs thanking is Marc Elias, perhaps with a donation to the Democracy Docket legal fund.
I recently asked myself that question: am I doing everything that I could possibly do? The answer was "No." So, I am increasing my financial contributions to Democratic candidates. What's the money worth if we fail to restore democracy here? We are literally at war.
Thanks. I must have missed that episode of Nicole Wallace.
Think it's on her podcast series "The Best People." Sure it can easily be found.
ICTT May I share your comment?
It is so deflating and depressing
Seriously, what is the question about the Treasury? And why is what they're doing, or not doing, any different from the other ways this administration breaks the law every day? Like withholding and redacting the Epstein files or killing people on boats without any judicial process?
I have a question. Why does Deutsche Bank still have a charter to operate in the US?? Their long record of criminality should have had them shut down years ago.
Not that there are not plenty of other banks worldwide that would be glad to take up the lucrative job left vacant.
There may be as many criminal minded men in banking as there are in this Republican “government”.
I have a question. Why does Deuche
Not withholding tax money to the government on a national scale has left no resistance that could make a difference.
I hate to say it, but I am beginning to suspect Dr. Richardson's coyness -- like her irrationally persistent optimism -- is an expression of a genuinely bottomless fear of successful socialist revolution as all-consuming as that which governs all other USian aristocrats. No question she seeks reform -- but she mistakenly rejects the historically confirmed fatal truth that [any] reform that retains [anything whatsoever] of the capitalist ethos is self-doomed to [intentional] failure. Just as has already happened with [every] USian effort at reform since the USians split from the British Empire to preserve the slave economy owned by their aristocratic masters -- Southron slavers and their New England financiers, proto-Trumpsteiners one and all.
Loren Bliss, I keep begging people to use Tony Judt’s name: Social Democracy and think of FDR and Frances Perkins. The ignorance of many Americans of history makes important all the education we can muster to help people understand that Social Security and Medicare come from a tradition begun after the Great Depression. El-Sayed, Rhodes Scholar, would likely have been in Tony Judt’s country, where, as in most of Europe, sane government takes care of people.
Suspect Putin/Trump of propaganda to destroy any Social Democracy tendencies for US.
Making Americans ignorant of history is another goal of the Radical Right-wingers. Our current fascist government has a goal of turning schools into brain-washing sessions. People like Frances Perkins and Tony Jundt must not be acknowledged by US citizens. Now the powerful cultists are demonstrating what a country run by a mafia-style criminal gang looks like. Reading and following HCR is one way to fight back.
"The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to facilitate the means by which all the people under its jurisdiction can access the best possible life." – Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor, 1946
“The happiness and prosperity of our citizens is the only legitimate object of government.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1811
True.
That being said, wokism already tried to brainwash people and then fired them when they resisted.
It's one of the main causes that allowed neofascists to do the same thing...
And spreading the word, L B.
Concur.
I admit I didn’t know Tony Judt’s name or his work. (Swallowing hard right now after that shameful confession.) Nevertheless, I agree with everything in your comment, Virginia Witmer. Thank you for it.
I like the term Pragmatic Capitalism, what we find in the Scandinavian countries.
Virginia, unfortunately many, mostly the young who have no recollection of the tyranny of socialism could not tell you the difference between FDR's social democracy and socialism. The pursuit of socialism has yet to have a good end, and by it's nature cannot. One cannot defend democracy and socialism at the same time, they are mutually opposed systems.
Socialism, Democratic Socialism, and Social Democracy are NOT the same thing.
Why does no one use a dictionary anymore?
Overgeneralizing just enables tyranny to flourish.
Gary, social democracy, as taught by Tony Judt, working class Brit, head of the NYU Remarque Institute, is more a continuation of what FDR and Frances Perkins, followed by Truman and LBJ envisioned for US than Soviet style “socialism,” the giant bugaboo which we are busy emulating at this moment with our gulags and oligarchs.
Having spent 10 years in the countryside in France and having friends there still, I can tell you that public transportation and medical care (socialism?) are years ahead of anything we even dream of in a climate change world. Coming from a Virginia farming community as I do, visiting the same large cattle farm in the Nièvre for about 20 years, I learned in 2018 that the reason I was seeing wheat where formerly there was cattle or sheep was because “wheat feeds more people” and it was an EU request.
When people tell me (“socialist) France will fail, I remind them of LePen father and daughter (photographed with Putin, though not with red carpet like our president), who never won an election there.
Thinking I should add that the day after DT was elected in 2016, I got a call from the Nièvre inviting me to come live there. Patriotism developed as a child during WWII kept me here, but there are days….
(Writing 10 GOTV postcards per day.)
Oh I would have so loved an experience like that!
Thank you for your excellent informative posts, Virginia. I bet those 10 years engraved wonderful memories and your soul sang.
It seems to me that late-stage capitalism is even MORE mutually opposed to democracy, but I need to remember that defense of capitalism at all costs, no matter how corrupt it has become, is our modern-day political correctness.
And in all probability the extermination of our species and the toxic reduction of our Mother Earth to everlasting lifelessness. Our [utterly subjugated] terminal surrender to capitalism is literally a suicide cult, Jonestown on a global scale.
Gary, don’t know whether you’ll find my reply, but in brief, I had a 20-yr look at France, living there, then extended visits. LePens unelected nationally, while we got DT here.
Thank you, Mr. Pudup, for a picture-perfect lesson in why the United States failed and why its people will [never] rescue the nation from the deliberate fulfillment of Hitler's dream of a Thousand-Year Reich it has become.
Oh good grief, Loren. All of us are not throwing in the towel like you have. We can’t capitulate.
I sense no particle of coyness in Heather Cox Richardson and see nothing wrong with persistent optimism. I hadn’t detected that trait in her either but, if you say so...
Agree. She is not coy. She tells us what is happening and often gives historical context. I do not see her as optimistic either. Some of her letters I have found down right depressing.
Whatever one chooses to label Dr. Richardson's reaction, there is no question she refuses to recognize we are as much at war -- and therefore as much in ecogenocidal jeopardy -- as we were on 8 December 1941.
Loren, I’m not so sure. HCR as an historian is not writing us about her opinion. She’s doing what I believe an historian does, gives us the facts about the past and the present rather than her opinion about them. She’s doing has left it up to us to form opinions. DT and gang o the other hand do exactly the opposite. Try to erase facts counter to their pov both from the past & present.
What’s the evidence she “…refuses to recognize, etc.?"
Capitalism has always needed regulatory brakes.
Brava, Anne Marie! I finally figured out why your posts, Loren, are such a test of my mental acuity at the age of 87. It’s the use of using multiple consecutive unalike adjectives! Also, there are no commas!
You are definitely a skilled well versed informative writer!
Love your posts after my first cup of coffee! Please keep on keeping on!
Thank you, Anne Marie.
Are you saying that any progress must be measured by a stark dichotomy rather than incrementalism?
TROLL
He's a convicted fraudster who has pardoned dozens of criminals - do bears shit in the woods?
Every day some new law or guardrail falls, I have to question how much longer I can stand this. Why does everything go trump’s way?
I have trouble not lashing out at the people who elected this man and did his to us. But there is no point.
COYLY??????
This is all of one piece. The Trump Family has wired all three branches of the federal government for their personal benefit. In the face of chillingly cold and blatant reality, the Press and the Dems continue to buy Donald's gigantic scam. The Big Con.
The Republican Party is dead. It is the Trump Party now. Project 2025 is a distraction, as is the Iran War, concentration camps for brown women and their children, the vandalism of our White House and national monuments, the stolen election lies, mismanagement of our government, the lawsuits against the media, the non stop AI cartoon posts. All a diversion from their stuffing their pockets with tens of billions from all sources. Including from us citizens.
Trump brushes off questions about the ill gotten money. "I don't know anything about it. It's my sons' business." "The stock market is up." "No, I won't give back the airplane." "I don't know anything about crypto."
The Congress and the DOJ says "Ignore the President using his office to take billions." As though a President and his Family making tens of billions from the office is just a normal thing for a Presidential Family to do. Blanche's job is to make sure they can keep stealing and cheating and breaking the laws, and not go to jail.
The REALITY is that Blanche, Bissent, Patel, Vance, the rest of the Cabinet, 272 Trump Party Senators and Representatives and 6 Supreme Court justices all work for the Trump Family now. It's hard to see past the daily Donald Show chaos but understand the truth. The Trump Administration is now wired for a few hundred crooked politicians to ride fast on Trump's coattails for their personal gain. The Trump Family gets their billions and the rest get the crumbs. The all sold their honor to a conman for money.
I keep coming back to this too — the chaos can make everything feel disconnected, but so much of it points back to the use of public office for personal gain. I wrote about that recently because at some point “corruption” almost feels too polite a word for what we’re watching.
The President Is Looting the Country:
https://wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com/p/the-president-is-looting-the-country
And he’s acting to erase the evidence before the midterms.
Actually Trump and the ChristoNazis are doing to the [failed] United States exactly what capitalism does to everything it touches: looting it to destruction and death, then abandoning it like the rotting corpse the capitalists have hatefully made of it by their sworn allegiance to Absolute Evil.
Is the only answer a Socialist Revolution? Is there no peaceful resistance solution?
I don't think it is so much a matter of capitalism as concentration of power, be that financial or political power, and generally speaking, they go hand in hand. It seems to me that one of the key lessons we can draw from history is that power tends to corrupt; and I see evidence of that on every level of life.
But what IS power in this context? I see it as the process that determines whose will prevails. That can be predatory but also cooperative, as we often ritualize in good faith social niceties; planning mutually with effort not to override others input. Then there is coercion which can be in the form of bribery as well as extortion. The marketplace is no love-in, but it can be reasonably mutually beneficial. Wikipedia says: "The Square Deal was Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program aimed at ensuring fair treatment for all Americans, focusing on three main goals: conservation of natural resources, corporate regulation, and consumer protection. It sought to balance the interests of business, labor, and the public, promoting equality of opportunity."
Contrast that with Hobbesian "Reaganomics". People may arrive at differing solutions to civilize the distribution of power in their society, but monopolization (domination) remains tyrannical. whether in governance or the marketplace, as we are seeing now, and have historically seen,, in other nations irrespective of their e conomic style.
TROLL
Rachel, stop.
Loren has been commenting on HCR's Letters since before I joined.
His comments are unrestrained, but on-topic. His purpose is not to draw attention to himself, nor derail the conversation, which are hallmarks of troll behavior.
If you disagree with his opinions, then post evidence-based rebuttals.
Posting one-word accusations makes you look more like a troll than Loren.
LOREN BLISS is a stalwart good faith contributor to LFAA.
Context: About 10 of us have engaged Substack Inc Inc to REVISE their Terms of Use (TOU) "report" function which now has vastly improved options. DONE.
ALL of us including the Platform are bound by an enforceable CA contract which ALWAYS carries a duty of good. That means you can go to Substack Inc' contractual option: JAMS, my world-famous old neighbor in SF.
Look up the jury instruction for good faith & fair dealing if you want a Sunday Moring Wake Up.
Then, wake up!
Agree Kelli. For The Grump, the presidency is the ultimate con job that tops all the others in his miserable existence. He steals from US to benefit himself. He has no interest in governing the country because that was never his plan to begin with. He is the Mafioso-in-Chief who opens the doors of power, the treasury, and distorts markets for the benefit of all who show him “loyalty.” We do not have a government right now; we have a crime syndicate where even the law enforcement agencies have been co-opted and are now the syndicate’s “security force.”
But there are chinks in the armor. We the people are not stupid and we know we are being conned (OK most of us do). We are going to rise en masse November 3 and peacefully remove hundreds of co-conspirators from power. That’s only just the beginning, though. The harder work will begin in January 2029 when we begin to dismantle the infrastructure of the crime syndicate piece by piece. A Democratic Congress will not sit on their hands like Garland did. They will dig relentlessly and get to the fetid bottom of all of this. There will be charges. Lots of charges. Each takedown will get us one step closer to him. And when the time comes we will bring him down too in shame. That’s if he hasn’t already kicked the bucket and taken the express train to Satan’s gate by then.
I agree, Chris. That’s the part I keep coming back to as well—the office is being treated not as a responsibility to the country, but more like an opportunity for personal power, loyalty, and profit.
Kelli, looting is the correct word. In the meantime, pointing at anyone they can to accuse them of drinking at the public trough: immigrants, minorities, the poor, etc.
Looting our culture, looting our heritage, looting our legacy to posterity, and of course looting the treasury, which Trump asserts is now his prerogative to spend or not spend as he so chooses. Yet, without his money, Trump would just be another jerk. Maybe he could be an "Influencer", but without the power that comes with money, he would have little to sell. He does have a certain cunning as a self-promoter.
I first heard of him in connection to the Wollman Skating Rink in NYC were he conned someone else into doing the work and hogged all the credit. Then he became an (un)"reality TV star", a perfect mouthpiece for Putin and plutocracy.
Follow the money, in the "Intolerable Acts", in the Civil War, in the shrinking of the middle-class and rise of de facto corruption. I'm not a Bible literalist, but it does call "the live of money" a root of evil; "love" in that sense seeming to indicate a value you place above all others. Everybody needs money, under their control or spent on their behalf, and I think most people, myself included, want as much as they can get, more or less. But while money can move someone to make me a burger, it can also buy murder for hire, buy a political outcome, or enable a light sentence for serious wrongdoing (see Epstein). Money can de facto bribe and extort, and there lies the rub. How to adequately separate fair exchange from corruption? And prohibit the latter.
The top 0.1% all loot your country and they tell you it's only the American Dream, and you've been buying that horseshit for decades. Politicians like Trump only facilitate this to a greater or lesser exent (the former in Trump's case). No other president, however, has used the office of the president quite so brazenly for self-enrichment as Trump.
Even the leadership of the Democratic party are scared shitless of candidates identifying themselves as 'socialists' because they fear that the electorate will not vote for such people. The media recently hailed Francesca Hong's defeat in Wisconsin as both a surprise and also a victory for moderation when it was actually a victory for the status quo in the domination of big money in American elections.
You even laugh about this state of affairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqctWW3jB0
1/10% r 1%, Russell?
Fuck off, slimeball.
I have felt for a long time that the only way we will rid ourselves of these criminals will be by force. They are proving to me , at least, that normal democratic means will never work against them. The only question I have is will we stop this before it’s too late, or will there be years/decades of living under totalitarianism before enough is enough and the regime is finally taken out. Not an accusation, just an observation; I don’t think in general the American people truly know what we are up against.
I agree. The majority have no clue. And yes it will take atleast a generation to fix this. There will have to be literally more people dying the streets due to poverty for the people to wake up. And then I wonder if they will rise up cuz nothing was done after children were massacred at Sandy Hook. Look at how short lived Reconstruction was ( white folk wanted to just move on already).
It's sad living next to a once great nation that chooses to bully its best and safest trading partner. I doubt I'll ever visit again. It's too sad.
I was in Canada last year and grateful people were so nice. WE do not ‘choose’ to bully-a renegade president whom no one respects does what he wants.
Our system allowed him to be elected (barely) by people who believed his lies. I am befuddled by people who could not see straight through this man; for that matter people who did not know past behavior predicts future behavior, and he TOLD us his goal was retribution.
Nonetheless here we are and must fight our way out, punish those who aided him.
I agree Doreen, I became hopeless after Sandy Hook when all those babies and others were murdered in the light of day.
I'm certain they know; but they most assuredly don't care, because they assume they'll escape the ecogenocide, which they as "good Christians" believe will be directed only at humans who've offended their sadistic god -- that is, all humans soon-to-be-exterminated by the ChristoNazi theocracy in retaliation for their sexuality, gender, race or ethnicity.
Loren, yes, they think their money will save them. It won't in the end. I know people who are Christians and are not hateful while doing their best to resist the monsters and help others.
I’ll ask you what I asked Loren, is there no peaceful solution?
The regime has worked hard to cut off all avenues to dialog or peaceful conflict resolution. It’s almost as if they want a violent conflict as an excuse to unleash a pogrom against all who refuse to bend the knee. Remember Vought’s words which continue to chill me, that it will be non-violent “as long as the left allows it to be.” And yet they continue to provoke and instigate. This is what they want.
Clearly. Knowing that We the People are forcibly disarmed and -- by cancellation of the draft -- denied the training essential to resistance, there is no doubt the ChristoNazis' intent is to provoke us into uprising and then use that as the rational reason for the ultimate pogrom -- the methodical extermination of all opposition. This will no doubt include the use of the neutron bomb against rebellious cities -- this to preserve the material infrastructure, perhaps for later sale to Putin, while radiation sickness kills the entire population. Again, this is why I maintain our only rational hope for Liberation is invasion by progressive nations.
I wish I could believe there is, but everything they’re doing says no. Brick by brick, aided by a completely complicit Congressional majority and a Supreme Court that sees the Constitution as absolutely flexible, they are building a “legal” framework that insulates them forever from prosecution and accountability. Add to that a barely regulated para-military goon squad, a compliant military they have brow-beaten into submission and a firm grip on the mainstream media, and it ain’t looking too good for the short term. Even if they leave the mid-term election alone and even if a Democratic majority is voted into both chambers, they will refuse to comply. Every subpoena, every investigation, every lawsuit will be met with resistance or outright defied. Everything Democrats attempt will wind up in the Supreme Court, while the damage continues, just like it’s happening today. I keep beating this drum, but all we ever needed to know about these fascists was revealed to us before, on and after January 6, 2021. Most of us weren’t then and still aren’t getting the real picture.
It may be true that Project 2025 and all the rest that you mention are distractions as far as Trump sees it, as he selfishly and corruptly steals. But these "distractions" are murderous and an actual felt REALITY. Even if he were to be prosecuted fully, his "distractions" will continue to rule. Unless . . . unless.
And these ChristoNazis and their billionaire-omnipotent masters have indeed murdered the former United States beyond any possibility of resurrection. Which is why-- even were we ever to awaken enough to truly arise (which it's now obvious we will never do) -- I argue our only hope for liberation is invasion by liberation-minded nations.
Loren, I appreciate your perspective, but I refuse to accept your cynicism about the outcome. We The People still have a chance to take back the mangled mess that was a functional democracy, and rebuild it, not the same as before, but better than before. I Believe!
It isn't "cynicism," Signe; it's the bitter truth you can't escape when you've spent -- as I have -- most of my 86 years covering the [chronically] failing U.S. (I appreciate your perspective, indeed would be delighted were it proven true, but my own experience -- and for that matter my knowledge of history and sociology -- forces me to estimates such as the one you refuse to accept.)
The ultimate reason USian self-liberation is impossible is the conquerors are Christian fanatics, which means they believe they are infallible -- and they are thus as impossible to reform as Medieval Crusaders or Nazi gas-chamber technicians.
Signe, respecting your optimism but ca n only label it as major denial of the facts of reality.
Both can coexist: facts of reality, and optimism. Without optimism, there is no motivation to ACT, to DO SOMETHING to rescue our democracy. With a nihilistic outlook, there is the couch awaiting the opportunity to widen your gluteus maximus. (not personal to you, Gloria)
The [only] reason I'm "couched," Signe, is I'm a wheel-chaired cripple, which because I'm in the failed and former United States, means I'm already despised by most USians, who in their Ted Bundy capitalism fervently believe that anyone who is no longer exploitable for profit should be killed.
In unspeakable truth, the people who voted to destroy the U.S.A. are the prime representatives of the meanest, most sadistic, most Evil-hearted national population in our species' entire history.
Loren, I wish I could refute your fairly dire prognosis, but I can't.
Some may call me superstitious, but I am convinced that the origins of an enterprise will determine its nature and its future. I have occasionally pointed to Walmart as an example. The retailer's origins have been carefully concealed by the Walton family to protect their business. The company wasn't started by a poor, kindly grandpa who sold goods to his neighbors. Sam Walton was enraged by what he believed was a betrayal and started Walmart out of spite. The sole purpose of his enterprise was putting TG&Y Stores out of business. This foundation of retribution has poisoned the entirety of Walmart's cutthroat business model. Walmart is the most powerful retailer on the planet, but there is still history to be written, and its fortunes are closely tied to those of the U.S.
Contrary to the glowing stories we were told in school, the origins of the U.S. aren't especially noble. White European misfits traveled to North America, arrogantly assumed the land was theirs for the taking and took it, claiming the Indigenous stewards of the land were "savages" who needed to be "civilized" and/or pushed out.
The newly-minted colonial aristocrats took umbrage to The Crown's attempt to finance their defense with taxes and fomented a bloody insurrection that we proudly named "The Revolutionary War." Since then, there has been scarcely a year that the U.S. hasn't been involved in a military conflict somewhere. Not to mention the endless bloodshed that takes place within our own borders.
Compare the U.S. with Canada, which never revolted against The Crown. Our neighbor to the north evolved naturally and peacefully into a virtually autonomous nation without bloodshed. We violent Usonians are bemused by the Canadians' politeness.
I have contended that those affluent "Founding Fathers" constructed a trifurcated government that was designed to protect and promote the assets of the wealthy, allowing only crumbs to fall from the table to the peasants below. Occasionally progress has been made by the "have-nots," only to be quickly clawed back by the "haves."
Today, we are eating the fruit of the poisoned tree.
Historically, every empire has had to be vanquished and humiliated before its people could realize that they were not exceptional. That they must humble themselves and join the global community. I can't see why the U.S. would be any different.
TROLL
I remember when Hillary Clinton was mercilessly ridiculed for repeating opposition researcher Chris Lehane's phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy," as if no such thing existed.
She also declared that Donald Trump is "temperamentally unfit" for the presidency and could lead the U.S. into dangerous situations, including potential wars and economic crises.
And those of us who've been paying attention are now witness to glaring evidence that she was right about the vast right-wing conspiracy, which is now empowering and protecting the madman she warned us about.
Yesterday, Donald revealed in his social media posts that he has become profoundly detached from reality, posting utter nonsense in praise of himself and his nonexistent achievements.
Perhaps our calls to our legislators should shift from all the other urgent issues of concern to demands that they exert themselves in the powers of the 25th Amendment.
So much of what Hillary warned about was treated as partisan exaggeration at the time, when in fact she was naming patterns that were already there.
And I still think 2016 exposed something deeply ugly in the country — not just political frustration, but how much misogyny, racism, and resentment could be mobilized when someone gave people permission to express it.
What’s painful now is how much of what was dismissed then has become impossible to ignore.
Apropos the misogyny and racism, now as a result impossible to overthrow, thus the ultimate definition of both the USian nation and the USian people.
Speaking of which, what happened to Michael Cohen these days? Anyone know?
Well, well, well ... it seems the turncoat has turned his coat again. I'd heard that he was seeking a reconciliation with his orange daddy. This article was published at the beginning of Cohen's return to the ... I was going to use "fold," but that's for sheep.
Where do hellions live?
Oh, that's right. I'll finish my sentence.
... beginning of Cohen's return to the gates of hell.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/01/19/michael-cohen-who-turned-on-trump-with-glee-now-claims-he-was-coerced-to-cooperate/
As of July 7, the two monsters have kissed and made up.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/michael-cohen-trump-attorney-reconcile-b3010488.html
I was wondering the same. Seems he should be speaking out.
See my reply to MLMin ET.
Absolutely right Deburgh
We need full accountability. Trump and all his MAGAt fascist bootlickers must be thrown in prison to save our sacred democracy. Let’s keep protesting and singing the no kings anthem together: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/no-kings-anthem
Democracy Defenders filed a FOIA covering much of the same material requested by Katie Pfang. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71168739/democracy-defenders-fund-v-us-department-of-justice/.
"If DOJ had publicly produced all documents responsive to DDF’s FOIA requests this case would be in a different posture – but that is not what has happened. DDF’s review of the Defendant’s production of records under the Act reveals that numerous categories of information responsive to our FOIA requests were not publicly produced in the Epstein Library and no information about exemptions applicable to any documents withheld from the public production has been made publicly available or sent to DDF. DOJ has thus not yet fully complied with FOIA as to any of DDF’s FOIA requests."
Dated: April 15, 2026
/s/ aryn Wilgus Null (# 985724)
Norman L. Eisen (# 435051)
Tianna Mays (# 90005882)
Pooja Chaudhuri (# 888314523)
Jacob Kovacs-Goodman (# 90032363)
DEMOCRACY DEFENDERS FUND
Is DOJ in default????
with all due respect, it's going to take a lot more than singing this November.
With all due respect, Public Defender is bringing his art to the cause -
something which the professor says is part of our pro-democracy "tent."
Sorry, I meant to say Public Servant!
Morgan Freeman endorses this message.....get out and sing (and vote):
https://substack.com/home/post/p-208204539
That. Is. Fabulous!!!!!
ditto that!!!
Thank you for that very inspirational link!!! So good!!!
As Jeff Tiedrich says…eff yeah!!
Morning, Lynell. Yes, we must use everything in our arsenal to defeat this disgusting administration.
Oops; I think I mean Public Servant...sorry!
Indeed. Let us honor our Mother Earth by mobilizing rage and vengefully rising up angry. Else what's the point of reading Dr. Richardson's [superb, infinitely courageous] efforts to keep us informed as to the ever-more-irresistible status of our ecogenocidal subjugation by the all-conquering ChristoNazis.
(Clearly the ChristoNazis assume we are already too completely disarmed -- and thereby sufficiently reduced to compulsory pacifism and its inescapable mandatory victimhood -- to [never again] effectively resist their Evil.)
In case you haven't noticed, 'Mother Earth' has been looking after herself recently.
Indeed. Which I for one do [not] believe is mere coincidence. (Per the Gaia Hypothesis: earth is "alive, conscious and self-regulating"; per Jackson Browne, citing "the magnitude of her fury in the final hour."
Consider this from Dan Rather: "Welcome to our weekly Reason to Smile. Because our current political climate can be more depressing than three straight days of rain, several years ago we decided to impart a weekly moment of joy every Sunday morning. We believe music can be the balm we all need… a song can change your mood in a minute. It’s no more complicated than that."
Exactly right. There’s been resistance but no RAGE!
I respectfully disagree Gloria. I experience tons of rage but it has nowhere to go except the weekly protests and postcard writing I participate in. I'm betting there's more rage than we know about but no outlet to make a real difference. A civil war perhaps is whats needed but we have no leadership.
Also the military has been duped so badly. I want Mark Kelly to reenlist. There just has to be a way forward. I’m 89 years old and like you, have done all I am capable of except sell my first born and my social security.
I’m recalling the Boston Tea Party
''The Swamp Is Now Classified''
There is something exhausting about watching corruption stop bothering to look embarrassed.
Trump’s former defense lawyers are now helping run the Justice Department. Executive privilege seems to cover practically anyone the president has ever spoken to. Epstein records remain buried. Treasury is weakening rules meant to reveal who actually owns suspicious companies.
Apparently transparency was the problem.
We used to call these things scandals. Now they are policy decisions.
The operating principle is simple enough. If Congress might investigate it, hide it. If a court wants it, delay it. If a law creates records that might expose somebody important, get rid of the records. Then call all of this executive authority and complain that critics are being political.
Trump once promised to drain the swamp.
Instead, they seem to be covering it with plywood, removing the warning signs, and telling us there was never a swamp there in the first place.
At some point satire becomes difficult because reality refuses to leave any room for exaggeration.
He promised to drain the swamp...he just didn't tell us he was replacing it with sewage.
Swamps are actually vibrant ecosystems.
Tramp IS the Swamp.
I totally agree but who will throw them in prison?
I read a similar opinion somewhere else a few months ago and I think you are right Kelli.
No Accountability is a big JAIL FREE PASS as they say in Monopoly.
Let's start there.
Accountability is a fundamental pillar of civilization.
Of course it is, and tragically, Trump has finally realized (or his advisers have confirmed for him that) his Constitutionally-granted pardon power gives him the right (like it or not) to ignore all accountability, as there is no longer any form of accountability that can't be avoided simply by having the President give you a pardon (and apparently there never was as that power has been in the Constitution since its origins, but nobody else ever chose to use it that way).
If the United States is going to continue to function as an effective democracy after the passing of the corrupt Trump regime, it will be critical to change a lot of this that is enshrined in both the Constitution and in the laws.
I am reminded of flaws in computer code that enable a malicious person to seize control of the system.
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."
-- John Adams
And lacking even a single pillar of civilization, ChristoNazism is not just absolute barbarianism, it is the Ted Bundy celebration thereof.
Sociopathic
Along with accountability, J L, I would add: CHARACTER. Both are lacking in the current barrel of monkeys masquerading as leaders.
Ah, Signe...please don't insult our brachiating cousins. This Regime is more like a barrel of parasite-infested fecal matter, toxic in every way imaginable.
Ah Loren — you read my mind! I almost added, “apologies to actual monkeys” and so your point is well taken.
JL - 2/3 of conversations is gossip according to many experts. Republicans have based their campaigns on this fact for decades. When we are talking to our Republican voting acquaintances, we need to talk about the anti-values of our local politicians and how rich they've become from being our elected officials. Or even, did you hear about so-and-so? They lost their health insurance coverage or their health insurance doubled in price. The Republicans are all liars working for the oligarchs and they are all cruel and hateful murderous bastards. You know--that kind of thing.
If they try to defend their politicians say, "Everybody knows they only care about money or power or whatever."
I recall that a character in the film Manhattan concluded " ... gossip is the new pornography."
True, that. ALL civilization - starting in the family.
"I did it.
I'm sorry.
How can I fix it?"
Not "ALL" civilization m'lady; merely the last approximately 6,000 years of what patriarchy wants us to accept as civilization. Suggestion: study the thousand-year Minoan civilization, which thanks to modern archaeology and metallurgical analysis, we are discovering was not only the first global trading commonwealth, but was built and sustained by woman-centered governance, [without] the male imperialist compulsion to ecogenocide that defines [all] patriarchal efforts. See https://thenoosphere.substack.com/p/archaeologists-keep-finding-women, also Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo, "The Great Cosmic Mother" (Harper: 1987); also Gavin Menzies, ""The Lost Empire of Atlantis: History's Greatest Mystery Revealed" (William Morrow: 2011.) The overall academic source is the late archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, chiefly "The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe" (Harper: 1991).
Thanks for the list, Loren. All I meant was, doesn't matter WHAT the civilization is, if kids aren't taught that they should recognise when they're wrong, and do something about it, then any civilization will crumble. And where would that come from but the home? And probably initially from the mother.
Well the symbol of the double axe and the great tale of the Minatour and the woman who gave the thread to the hero to use to get out of the maze. It is a fascinating culture and time Phil.
Agreed, Graham.
Unfortunately, Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution provides a much broader JAIL FREE PASS via the Pardon Power. And that isn't something that can be overridden by court orders or other techniques.
It seems to me that what's coming after Trumpism, if there is an after, would have to be changes in the Constitution. Can that happen? The Pardon Power will need to be addressed.
It will be difficult, because it takes 3/4 of all states to ratify amendments and we know how many deep "red" states there are (almost half). But we will need to work on it from almost the get-go. The Pardon power needs to be addressed, and I am starting a substack to talk about revising how the Department of Justice works: taking it out of the "executive" branch where it reports to the President, and creating the office of AG as an elective one, with elections every four years alternating with the presidential years. So the country would have TWO "executives" leading parts of the executive branch, the President leading most of it (including the military) and the AG leading the prosecution/judicial branch (but not including the courts, they would remain separate). The AG would have a fair amount of power and would hopefully be independent enough from the President to be able to bring necessary charges against members of the executive branch for crimes they commit.
Interesting suggestion. Something that restores the mission to its founding purpose. To be the Constitution’s lawyer. Not the president’s. The WH has a chief counsel and that is their job, not DOJ’s. I like this reform because it restores that independence.
Husband of Ruth writing:
“ corruption becomes much easier to hide”
Hide? I see no evidence that this administration is trying to hide corruption. It’s right out in the open.
He's thumbing his nose at all of us as he gleefully loots the country.
lauriemcg, he’s not thumbing his nose at us; we are absolutely invisible to him. He only sees himself and his small circle of sycophants, and not always them either. In Trump world, We The People do not exist. Our existence is “fake news."
You are right Signe -- in order to thumb his nose at us he would have to acknowledge that we exist - and only he and his sycophants exist in his world.
Flaunting it.
There will be accountability.
You can hope for that, but I don't see how. Trump will provide a raft of pardons to every senior member of his administration, and those people will be able to go home scot-free. We need to fix that going forward so no future regime in the US can ever do what Trump has done, but that won't provide accountability for what was already done under this administration. I wish it weren't so, but it is the plain, obvious truth.
From abroad, the US pardon system looks like a joke. You pardon turkeys and you use it to give immunity to people who have the money to pay.
He laughs as he pardons.
You call law what is not law and you call democracy what is not democracy.
They will all walk off with their pardons, Miller, Patel, his family all... In fact they won't even need to walk, they've got it pretty sown up now.
I like the bit about "they've destroyed all the data collected" from shell companies. Those are the people that don't even need your "monopoly" pardons.
LEST WE FORGET: The (deliberate) bombing of the girls’ school is undoubtedly Trump’s reaffirmation of ChristoNazi misogyny – the same hatred of females and contempt for femaleness that leads to both the victimization of terrorized children by the Trumpstein cult and to capitalism’s apocalyptic assault on our Mother Earth. That hatefulness – also manifest as white male supremacist bigotry – fuels the crimes against humanity that define the entire Trumpstein Regime. Thus the vital, know-our-enemy relevance of the full text of the Jane Doe lawsuit against Trump and Epstein -- later withdrawn by the plaintiff in response to credible death threats: https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Johnson_TrumpEpstein_Lawsuit.pdf
There’s more than one way to get accountability.
Please expound on this. I would love to hear what you think accountability would look like.
So what we need right now is for states to begin compiling potential charges against senior officials, for use in coming years?
States should retroactively prosecute them to the fullest extent possible, wherever they live. Pardons should not trump state law, make them move to another state! In other words make their lives miserable with what little arsenal we have.
I like this idea Daniel.
Hope so. When do you suppose that will be starting?
And what's really, really frustrating is how our elected representatives in congress and other oversight institutions are not exercising their sworn duties to stop it. I would like to understand what Democratic and Independent congresspeople are doing; is whatever they are doing simply not being reported, or are they not doing much at all, or are they so hampered by the legitimate rules that they are truly impotent?
And what's really, really, really frustrating is to realize that these Republican lawmakers, appointers, and confirmers were actually elected, many of them more than once, by the American citizenry!
I've watched many of HCR's interviews with Democratic and independent members of congress. Most of them point out how the system basically neuters the minority party from doing much, even in normal times; and the current majority clamps down even more, yet they are doing what they can. Vote Blue!
How can it be stopped? The gestapo has gloves causing punishing shocks.
If you go to Jessica Craven’s newsletter from yesterday, she provides the email address for the veteran-owned company selling those shock gloves to ICE. Write to them with your opinion of providing those to ICE’s. I did. (Sorry I don’t have the link handy.)
The company manufacturing the Shock Gloves that will be sold to ICE: Compliant Technologies in Kentucky by calling (859) 447-0576 or emailing info@complianttechnologies.net. Their mailing address is P.O. Box 24714, Lexington, KY 40524, and their business location is near Lexington and Nicholasville, Kentucky
Trumps corruption totally exposed. Murder in plain sight. No remedy. He makes up reality. Hes a monster sypported by people who feed off of him or are terrified and have zero morality. As half the country now recognizes
Basically corruption like you’ve never seen before. And all enabled by the Pedophile Protection Republicans.
NEW YORK, Aug 14 (Reuters) - "JANE STREET took a $15 billion hit in July from its exposure to AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness and other [frezied] tech stocks that were battered by the bloated market selloff, according to two people familiar with the matter and a note seen by Reuters."
Reuters: "The secretive Wall Street trading platform, JANE STREET, however, has generated trading revenue of more than $40 billion year to date, one of the sources said, easily outstripping trading revenue at the largest banks & other market-making rivals. Nevertheless, a $15 Billion Dollar LOSS is Market killing news.
Noted: Hedge funds sold tech at historic pace ahead of Situational Awareness fire sale.
*********************************************
Thus, monitor AI markets today Sunday, 8/16 via a licensed stock broker or CNBC or Charles Schwab and/or other real-time before the Asian Markets open early Monday, 8/17.
Why would you weaken oversight unless you have something to hide?
It's called NEOFASCISM.
Time to use the word!!
And...of course...Cui Bono?
Who benefits?
A devastating blow to our country’s foundation of laws and history of democracy.
I agree with you except I would say that the corruption is not hidden. It is blatant.
They're upfront and egregiously working for criminality.
Remember, this is the same crew covering up the Epstein network -- to which criminal Donald notoriously and for long proudly belonged. It included money laundering -- which Heather details in her Letter today how criminal accomplice Todd Blanche facilitates its anonymity.
But those in that network of easy rape -- girls, girls, girls, so many underage -- also indulged in high level drug running, arms dealing, as well as the money laundering and trafficking.
They're all proud of how they flip off the law. Flip us all off, as that Long Dong Clarence court furthermore cloaks in open immunity from the law.
Stay angry, fellow commenters. It's only going to get worse before November 3.
You got me with “The long dong Clarence criminal court”. For those who don’t know it refers to the Anita Hill trial where she accused him of sexual harassment with “graphic detail”
It's his own term, Mike.
Anita Hill testified to how he used to brandish that language to his female subordinates in the U.S. federal office where he lorded over them.
He considered it uproarious, great fun, and just about his maximum as far as any personal decency might be concerned.
Ah, the wondrous days of 1991 when men could be men and women could be, well, play things for men. Judging from the Epstein files, things haven't changed all that much, sigh.
I would advise every soldier in all branches of the military to quit and go awol. The sooner the better. They are commanded by an absolute JACKASS.
I am deeply concerned for the ones on the ship. What if a serious, contagious disease breaks out??? But even more likely, they aren’t being properly fed and the conditions are unsanitary…Cannot believe. Criminal negligence by the regime…
Or jump ship?
Yikes! Also: EWWWW!
I watched almost all of Anita Hill's testimony and the questions the senators asked and the badgering she got. After what she told them, it was to my shock and the country's shame that Thomas was confirmed.
And guess who gave Long Dong Thomas a pass and allowed him to get on the bench? Give up? Ole Stumbling Joe Biden who wanted to save his political ass and tossed Anita Hill under the bus.
Bill, you are correct that Biden was ONE of the MANY old white men who threw Anita Hill under the bus. But don’t lose the context in your eagerness to trash Biden, an otherwise decent man and good president. In the era of the Thomas hearings, it was almost expected that a woman —especially a woman of color— would not be respected nor heard. But many women (myself included) heard her and were awakened. One might argue that was the true beginning of the Me Too movement, because we were all sick to death of the sexual harrassment and were emboldened by her courage, sickened by Thomas’ and other men’s denials.
Biden’s apology to Ms. Hill was not enough as she felt it should have been taken more seriously and measures taken to protect women from sexual harassment.
The apology was late and we all learned that the women had to take a leadership role in rejecting and preventing harassment. And we did.
What struck me with that day of her testimony was that her parents were sitting behind her. Former President Biden really missed the mark in that clearly. On the other side Ginny Lamb Thomas or soon to be. Mrs Thomas was having a laying on if the hands moment from what’ve have read about how and why he continued to proceed with the nomination process.
The votes were there to prevent Uncle Thom from being nominated. That one brilliant line that I’m sure was not created by Thomas but saved him ; “This is nothing more than a high tech lynch mob.”
Sad but true, Bill.
Joe Biden -- a [real] Democrat, complete with his oft-repeated but of course plausibly deniable performance as the chief representative of the [true] "Democratic" [sic] Party's primary post-JFK function: serving the "Republican" [sic] ChristoNazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column, thereby ensuring the permanence of USian ChristoNazi theocracy.
Other Democrats and "Democratic" [sic] state regimes are most assuredly following suit. Take Washington state Democrats for example: jihad-fanatical in their infinitely repeated pledge to make Washington "the first truly gun-free state," they continue to escalate their efforts to ensure ChristoNazi conquest by imposing total forcible disarmament on the state's citizenry, thereby dooming us to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. They're also cutting social services, both by slashing bureaucrats' working hours and by staffing telephones with the sort of contemptuously hostile employees who were once encountered only amongst the ill-fare queens, the openly hateful agents of what is credibly damned from both ends of the political spectrum as the largest, most shibboleth-protected welfare bureaucracy on the planet, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.
But my most recent definitively hostile encounter with the state's bureaucracy was [not] with DSHS. It was with SHIBA -- State Health Insurance Benefits Advisory -- a division of the State Insurance Commissioner's Office that, unlike most of the Evergreen State's bureaucracy, had hitherto been [notoriously] zealous in its defense of human rights. Not any more: when I said I called to complain about the lying propaganda that convinced me to switch health insurers to a plan that offers painfully less than it promises, the bureaucrat -- obviously a ChristoNazi sympathizer if not an infiltrated CN operative -- quite antagonistically told me my grievance is no longer acceptable and hung up.
So much for the alleged "Blue State" resistance, which most assuredly does not exist at the bureaucratic level. I know bureaucrats from decades of covering state and local governance. With few rare exceptions, among them my best sources, the vast majority of state and local bureaucrats are the obsessively self-serving quintessence of what the USian majority revealed itself to be by re-electing Trump. They are potential Adolf Eichmanns, every bit as morally imbecilic as the politicians they serve -- yet another reason why (exactly like Nazi Germany) -- the former U.S. will [never] be Liberated save by invasion.
Ken Duberstein (from the Bush administration) advised Thomas and probably had Thomas write that aggressive line about lynching. At the time I thought it was brilliant because it forced all the white men on the committee to shut up and vote for him.
A few years later, as an art dealer of mostly Black art, I was a vendor at the National Bar Association convention in Memphis. I was standing in a yard between the hotel and conference hall and I saw a man walking towards me with a phalanx of people behind him shouting something. As they approached, I heard the repeated refrain, “They lowered the bar for you.” Thomas passed me and the group yelling that as well. I went inside to listen to Thomas speech and a few audience members stood up and turned their backs to him while they spoke. I’ll never forget that day. I wish I had had a movie camera to record it. I’d be famous today, lol.
Hello Phil... DJT would not have gained as much Power as DJT has without a Corrupt GOP Majority in the US Senate, and a Corrupted SCOTUS... Remember DJT has been Impeached Twice in a Democratic Congress, but Acquitted Twice in a GOP Majority Senate... A GOP Corrupted SCOTUS has given DJT Practical Immunity... DJT is Supremely Corrupt, and DJT's Reptilian Brain understands that Anything in the Current Corrupted System can be Bought... Just Ask Emil Bove, and Todd Blanche...
When we've higher standards, Apache, our teachers can rise to more than test preppers.
Prepping, always in thrall to those narrow-range IQ measures, neuters all -- so bottom-line versions of humanity devolve as we see normalized now atop Washington, D.C.
Republicans and the fawners over Donald criminality cannot imagine standards dovetailing not only more humanity -- more humanities in the classroom, and more reading of full books -- but also essaying skills cognizant of life's complications.
Language sunk only to ideology, and values sunk only to money needn't keep their grip on all as they do now to so many.
Can Dem candidates sing more of teachers poised for more?
Hello Phil... Good Values begin at Home, and are Reinforced by the Friends that we pick... To me, the Erosion of Popular Values began under Reagan... Remember 'Greed Is Good'?... That began the Popular Worship of $$$... DJT thrived in the '80s, and now look at where we are...
Of course good parenting, Apache.
Schools as an issue differs from that of parenting because schooling gets -- what? -- how much money as a public activity for public values?
To pop in Apache and Phil yes the film Wall Street with Michael Douglas and Martin and Charlie’s Sheen based on the economic bikinis of Ivan Bloskey sp? I think . However the web continues down farther to the Wrightsman Estate that Epstein bought I think. If one looks into the history of Charles Wrightman from Dayton Ohio the same city Martin Sheen, Erma Bombeck, Chad and Rob Lowe and the Wright Family including the Wright brothers’ sister Dorothy were from.Oh my oh my. Oil and Kansas and Oklahoma and Tulsa. Talk about dancing on graves!
How can our nation not impeach Trump after reading this and other articles that illustrate how corrupt he is? We grew up being so very proud of being Americans. Trump has destroyed that.
53-47, that's how (referring, of course, to the fact that the Senate consists of 53 MAGAt members and 47 Democrats and Independents, and it takes 67 to vote to convict Trump for an impeachment).
Been there, done that. Gave him more support
JDinTX, we will be lucky to see the Senate flip with a count of 52-48. If more than 52 Democrats (and Independents) are elected, I will be stunned!
I’m cautiously optimistic of your stunned future, Jon!
Impeachment doesn't work, pardons work, that's where you are - https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-15-2026/comment/315770650?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=za9v0
I wonder if there’s a way to prosecute those who accept pardons when a pay-to-play motive is uncovered? That might be the way to get the corrupt players to stop accepting pardons, if there will be (probably state-level) charges and penalties.
Great question, Signe!
And even "worser" before Jan 20, 2029.
Truth Phil, expect worse
It's not coincidental that FinCEN was just gutted. Trump's lawsuit against Capital One for closing his accounts revealed that the accounts were closed because they were flagged for money laundering.
If is gets in the way of any high level grift and fraud, Trump's a'gin it. That said, yeah, cover-up of his own crimes is Trump's Job One.
It is REALLY convenient that he now controls virtually all of the crime enforcement and prosecution arms of the federal government. FBI, Secret Service, US Marshall's office, the Bureau of Prisons, all prosecutors in the DoJ, etc.
Deliberate and with malice
Call your Congress people every damn day and tell them to get LOUD about this. Everyone is too quiet.
Congress is controlled by the FOP (f'king old party) and getting LOUD isn't going to change anyone's minds. Spend your energy targeting November 3. That is CRITICAL!
read and act upon chris armitage's great ideas....
Which ones do you think are great? I am not impressed.
you can do both! And don't forget...public shaming of these corrupt GOP
If you think you can't do both, then you're lazy patriotically and deserve what's coming.
Way too general a statement M.A.Porter.
Deaf, dumb, and blind apparently. We see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Sheep being led to slaughter. Be like the bull who escaped from the slaughter house, rescued by Jon Stewart and others. There is a better life. He remembered, so should we…
On vacation, over the last few days, I have spoken with FIVE separate Texas voters ages 20-33 who do not know who James Talarico is. Would you Texans get up and start talking him up?! You have the opportunity to change the trajectory of our national political reality by defeating that mutant offspring of vicious Texas right-wing corruption, Ken Paxton. Do something!
🤯
My Congressman is MAGA through and through. I get little satisfaction out of scolding his staff members for supporting authoritarianism. Okay, a little satisfaction.
By confirming as A.G. the chief protector of Epstein’s crowd of pedophiles, Trump’s flunkies in the senate have made themselves complicit in protecting all those pedophiles. Congratulations, senators! What will you tell your granddaughters?
It would just take a handful of House members and Senators who value integrity and the constitution to put an end to this madness -- and yet - crickets. I will never ever understand why even a few did not stand up and say 'this is wrong and we must end it.
power and $$"
Threats. They killed the Hortmans and their dog. They are a mafia and they have an army — ICE.
Threats. They killed the Hortmans and their dog. They are a mafia and they have an army — ICE.
“Is Donald Trump being treated by the Department of Justice as a victim of Jeffrey Epstein?
🤨 On August 13, 2019, a small group of lawyers exchanged an email about Jeffrey Epstein.
🤨 Three days earlier, Epstein had been found dead in a federal detention cell. The email circulated a CNN story about the investigation into his associates.
The subject line read: “Re: Rachel continues to kill it.”
🤨The CC line included three names:
1. Todd Wallace Blanche.
2. Sean S. Buckley.
3. John Peter Cronan.
All three were former federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, the same office prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein.
Three identifiable participants in these 2019 conversations about Jeffrey Epstein now occupy remarkably consequential positions within the federal legal system.
And Todd Blanche ended up running the Justice Department responsible for deciding what the American public gets to see in the Epstein files.
🤨 Seven years later, on August 13, 2026, a federal judge threatened contempt while demanding answers from the Justice Department about its handling of records Congress ordered released concerning Jeffrey Epstein.
🤨 These emails are not meaningless.
They provide context.
And after what happened yesterday, context matters quite a fucking bit.
🤨 Because while Todd Blanche’s name was sitting inside the Epstein files, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department spent Thursday explaining to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan why parts of the Epstein files remain hidden.
And Sullivan was not enjoying the experience.
🤨 We’d like to know if Donald Trump’s Justice Department is using protections intended for victims of Jeffrey Epstein to protect Donald Trump from disclosure in the Jeffrey Epstein files while withholding records connected to an allegation in which a woman says she was the victim.”
‘Special Treatment’
CLOSER TO THE EDGE & ROOK T WINCHESTER
AUG 14 2026 | Substack
https://closertotheedge.substack.com/p/special-treatment?r=kxzps&utm_medium=ios
.
They know, and use, every trick of the trade. Lacking conscience and shame, Kathy bar the door. They see no “NO.”
I was taught it was Katy 🤷♂️
Thank you for the link. Yikes!
I have reduced my daily news intake to only HCR’s letters. Now, even that is becoming almost more than I can bear. The level of corruption the Republican congressional majority is enabling, even fostering, is breaking my back.
Will the November midterm elections get here soon enough? Some days I doubt it. Today is one of those days.
I know exactly how you feel Ralph. It's all just so very demoralizing.
that's exactly how they want you to feel. Yes Rest. But these last 2 months before the election is when all oars need to be in the water. Don't let them defeat you.
We've cut way back as well. I watch what my retired cop cohort thinks and I despair; these people who I once counted as friends (and trusted with my life) would see me destroyed in the name of their Christian God.
Know, dear Ally, it is what they see only through the veil of widespread corruption over their eyes. It is NOT what will happen.
I always give a side eye glance whenever anyone willing to don this veil of corruption comes up with some statement of ignorance regarding human beings that, if allowed to come to pass, would destroy that which saves us during thus time. Human beings, since our creation and however one believes how it came to pass, are endowed not only with all physical elements but a good, healthy dose of what holds it all together. Our humanity. Unless it is destined in some timeline somewhere beyond our comprehension to disappear, it is what will save us again. As it has time and time again.
Have faith. The Light in us all shines out through our eyes. When I give a side eye glance, trust that I am zapping an egregious thought by someone with Light and Love. There is no opposite.
And I keep Ogden Nash’s thought always tucked in my pocket….
“The door of a bigoted mind opens outward so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.”
To me the only infinite fact there is in our Universe is Light and Love. That is what is in my quiver. Ever the warriors we are!
Salud, Ally and Ralph!
🗽💜
Salud! 🗽💜💙🌊
Morning, Ally!
This must be so hard for you. If I could, I would "wish" it away on your behalf.
It is a hard pill to swallow, indeed. Thank you.
Project 2025 has taken all three executive branches and their Administrators who have and are destroying every piece of America. They have also held American soldiers hostage in a war they created to launder taxpayer money. “Who’s going to stop me” is their slogan. What is the answer?
Hey, that was a quote from Ayn Rand. Republicans heard and charged full steam ahead. Indeed, who will. Ike is gone, who will stand up with us..
Ike had his own demons. Their names were Dulles.
Every rose has it’s thorns, but Ike had few and some are just a briar patch, ensnaring all
How poetic. His thorns weren't few (Iran, Vietnam, Guatemala, Cuba, etc.) and still have terribly negative ramifications today.
Another big difference between now and Europe in the 1930s-1940s. Nobody is coming to save us.
Time and again Trump‘s confederates bend the law beyond recognition or simply refuse to obey it in defiance of direct judicial orders. How can they get away with this? Are laws mere suggestions? Are judges powerless?
Who is going to enforce what judges order?
Good point: who will bell the cat! Judge‘s bailiffs are not enough, but local & state police have roles to play.
The local police department is busy with other things. No one is there to enforce judges orders, that’s the problem!
trump WILL stick around as long as he can STILL squeeze another nickel out of the American Treasury and the American taxpayers..
Because that's what GRIFTERS do!!
SAVE AMERICA and DEMOCRACY!!
WE ARE STRONGER TOGETHER!!
VOTE 'EM ALL OUT!!
THEN LOCK 'EM ALL UP!!
Absolutely VOTE 'EM ALL OUT!
Unfortunately we won't be able to LOCK ANY OF 'EM UP because they will all walk out of office with unconditional Presidential pardons.
How about they lose their pensions?
That MIGHT be possible as pensions are just governed by laws that can be changed. You could pass a law, for instance, that anyone who obtains a pardon and accepts it loses any pension they get from the government. That would at least put a sting to the pardon power.
Jon, you’re on to something. I commented above on this: ie go after the customer. Historically cops would arrest prostitutes and ignore the johns. Now they (sometimes) arrest the johns for engaging in illegal activity (where it’s illegal). I suggest using legal means to go after those who BRIBE this administration for pardons with their big donations. Any lawyers on here who can comment on this? Is it possible?
Seems like Trump's "art of the deal" is that price is no object so long as someone else is picking up the bill.
you have to take back the Senate too!
As soon as he took office, Blanche issued a memo dramatically expanding executive privilege, which he described as the authority of the president to “withhold certain sensitive information for the public good.”
Seems like every time I have heard the phrase "executive privilege" invoked, the very last thing it is serving is "the public good".
Every day I wonder how Merrick Garland reviews his own priorities as AG.
One hopes that he is troubled by his failure to act.
#shorts - Former US ambassador on the meeting with Trump that showed Trump was uneducated. (8/10/26)@theGuardian
https://youtube.com/shorts/yj1qbAE_fdw?is=4e6Bft-Aem_3ySqB
John Feeley, the former US ambassador to Panama, describes the first meeting with Trump that ultimately led him to resign. During that meeting, Trump asked him: “What do we get from Panama?”
“This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant,” Feeley told Kai Wright, “who is surrounded by people who are not ignorant, but who, in their presentation towards a region that I dedicated about 30 years of my life to, have such a fundamentally superficial view.”
Get While The Getting’ Is Good: Fascist Republican Greed
“Never met a greedy fascist Republican I didn’t like,” said Cheeto, the corrupt felon, convicted sex offender, and abuser of presidential powers.
In the environment of politics both Democrats and fascist Republicans are both at the $$$ trough but the fascist Republicans take the prize for greed, prodded by the wealthy donor class that fuels their lust for power. This perversity was well demonstrated in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby set in 1925. Interestingly the novel was a commercial and critical disappointment during Fitzgerald's lifetime, selling poorly, but historically it depicts a parallel of what is happening today with a NeoNazi twist. Is this what WE the People have become?
And not only is the morality of the country being tested, the judicial system is put to the test as well with the fascist highest court debasing the rule of law by giving a felon absolute immunity. Emboldened by such a judicial gift, Cheeto is now working out an IRS immunity deal as well.
But the roarin’ 1920’s didn’t end well and with a spendthrift golden gilded Cheeto at the helm and a soaring national debt of almost $40T, Cheeto will become the 21st century Hoover.
No, Trump’s corruption is in a class of its own.
I suspect Trump will be on his way to the 10th circle of somewhere or other before the full consequences of his and his cronies mischief envelops our society.
My only fear about that prediction is that when/if Trump heads out for hell before his term is over, Hell on earth in the United States gets a lot hotter by virtue of his replacement, JD Vance.
Anybody else ever noticed that JD is also commonly used to refer to "juvenile delinquents"?
The thought had occurred to me.
Better hurry, it’s about a done deal. Will they pull a Mitch or a Schrodinger’s cat and keep us in an extended state of suspended animation.
Thank you, Heather. Hope you get some rest and restoration on Sunday. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
The rule of law is crumbling more and more..... I'm at a loss for words.....
It's crumbled. We need to still stay the course, get a Democratic government elected in 2026 and 2028, and then fix all of this stuff that Trump is able to take advantage of.
When will these blatantly corrupt people get their just desserts? It’s high time we revolted and kicked them out. It is absolutely disgusting!
There is no longer any rule of law in this country. This administration belongs in prison - ADX Florence would be appropriate!
Sigh, you can scream all you want about this, but our Constitution dictates how and when we get to "kick them out" (by voting). Whether or not anyone belongs in prison (and they surely do), I wouldn't hold my breath until that happens, because it will almost certainly result in your own asphyxiation. Nobody in the Trump administration is ever going to see the inside of a federal prison for the crimes they have committed. NOBODY. Pardons to all who want them (and anyone who doesn't is a bigger idiot that Trump).