Part 1 – Trump Crime News Ramps Up Again
Supreme Court Rulings…This year might be the busiest news cycle in American history with everything that’s going on, which is why our posts in all 3 parts are so overloaded with articles from major news outlets. In becoming thoroughly informed about all the major political stories currently happening, perusing these long lists below of many many many links are a good place to start. The way to best utilize this blog is not skipping over these lengthy lists of links, but to browse through the titles & click on any that most strike your interests. The news stories during this Trump era are just too important & consequential to just glaze over. So more than at any other period in our lifetimes, it’s incumbent upon us to follow the news closely & share important updates with others. This blog more than any outlet you can find, does collect all the most pertinent articles from major news sources conveniently here in one place.
All of our Part 1’s primarily focus on recent reports of Trump crimes, from which there were a couple big stories from this past week. Overall it’s been awhile since we’ve posted this many articles in Part 1. The first headline we’ll start with came from Supreme Court rulings, where the proper decisions were made that a U.S. president is not above the law & can’t operate like a rogue dictator. Trump had his typical autocratic response, as he denies doing anything wrong with his finances or anything else, while trying to pin the blame on his opponents & the nebulous deep state supposedly operating in the shadows to undermine society. Of course, those trumped up lies are ridiculous, but Trump & his echo keep perpetrating this stuff & their fans believe it, so we’re forced to deal with a large chunk of the population who don’t deal in facts or reality. Fortunately the high court ruled on the side of transparency, even if justice is probably being delayed until Trump is out of office.
The court specifically ordered Trump to turn over eight years of tax returns to the Manhattan D.A. who’s investigating credible evidence of various Trump crimes, while the congressional House committees still have to jump through hoops to get his taxes. The downsides of the court’s rulings are that it’s likely to be quite awhile before those House committees & the public get to see Trump’s tax returns, as it’s not likely to happen prior to Nov. 3rd. That’s been Trump’s legal strategy all along, looking to drag out the release of his taxes until after the election while delaying or stripping Congress of their important oversight authority. It serves to stifle voters from evaluating the president’s financial misdeeds before they cast their ballots: https://www.msn.com/en-us/
For years I’ve speculated how following the money will lead to the crimes. Whether that time comes before or after the November election, Trump may at some point be made to face the music. These are not some phony accusations like the lock her up chants during the 2016 campaign, or the claims by the prez & his echo for political purposes of saying his opponents should be thrown in jail for a whole litany of phony conspiracy theories they keep throwing out there. No, what the prez has done appears very real. And yes, the evidence really does suggest numerous crimes were committed by our president, which even if 8 years of tax returns are kept hidden from the public, the NY prosecutor & grand jury are now allowed to see them from which we the people will eventually get the cliff-notes version. Bottom line is a president cannot be permitted to commit crimes & subsequently get away with them: https://www.rawstory.com/2020/
So the Supreme Court rulings were a mixed bag. A president does need to be held accountable & the various probes will continue, but Congress & the public won’t have access to Trump’s tax returns as soon as we should. Those decisions ultimately can help the legal system get to the bottom of various potential financial crimes, where fraud may have been committed in areas like taxes, charities, banking, insurance, inauguration funds, money laundering & campaign finance (which is one of the crimes his ex-attorney Cohen is now serving time for). Upon his likely (hopefully) lopsided defeat coming up in November, it’s conceivable our current president really could be on the hook for serving prison time (& don’t pooh-pooh that thought, the evidence of multiple crimes is irrefutably solid no matter what the far-right echo-world says): https://www.alternet.org/2020/
These financial crimes being investigated in NY were apart from the president’s betrayal of his country, those other cases that exposed his conspiracy plots with Russia & Ukraine to defraud our elections along with the subsequent pattern of obstruction of justice, but the penalties were not adequately carried out due to Mueller being prohibited from following the international money trail plus AG Barr’s conflated-spin whitewash, along with a rigged Senate jury serving as Trump’s protective cult. So while Trump won’t be indicted for all his crimes, the variety of illegal activities appear to be so numerous, at some point he’ll likely pay the price for the crimes that can soon be proven by investigators. In cahoots with Cohen, he’s already an unindicted co-conspirator to campaign finance crimes, which we may someday come to find out was only the tip of the iceberg. For a president running his reelection campaign on a platform of law & order, he sure does get involved & surrounds himself with plenty of criminals/criminal activity. The good & the bad of the court decisions are detailed here (& hear the crime song at the very bottom of Part 3):
Nixon Tattoo Avoids Prison
Trump Might Be Stoned…Trump once again is running roughshod over the American legal system. The prez just betrayed his country by letting off the hook his friend & convicted criminal who also betrayed his country: https://www.lawfareblog.com/
Even Mueller who never spoke out during his 2-year investigation & avoids the public eye with a passion, he was astonished at the audacity of this brazen move, to the point he penned this alarming opinion piece: https://www.washingtonpost.
This presidential act was truly a travesty of justice! Romney is correct in saying the president in commuting the sentence of a convicted criminal to ostensibly cover up his own crimes, amounts to corruption at an historic level. We’re seeing things from this White House in stunning rapid-fire fashion that is way beyond anything we’ve ever seen from any other presidency, which all of these very bad moves represent both an imminent & long-term risk to our representative democracy. It’s true, the worst president ever keeps getting worse: https://www.washingtonpost.
https://www.motherjones.com/
https://www.axios.com/lindsey-
Part 2 – This President & His Echo Offer Up a Unique Threat of Tyrannical Fascism
Book on Family Dysfunction…There are reasons a person turns out to be a egomaniacal narcissist, pathological liar, vengeful bully, sexual abuser, con-man fraudster, control freak & potential unhinged psychopath, as it can almost always be traced back to an abusive childhood: https://www.independent.co.uk/
Reliable Sources lays out a possible horrific mental diagnosis: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/
Our Dishonest, Divisive, Dysfunctional, Demagogue Despot
On the president’s recent report card, he’s lately managed to increasingly divide us as a political campaign strategy, actually making items like masks, confederate statues/flags & BLM protests an us-vs-them wedge issue. It’s the exact opposite of what a responsible president would be doing. Well, at least we can take comfort in the prez bragging about passing a cognitive test, with difficult questions like identifying the picture of a camel from the other pictures of a rhino & a lion: https://www.mediaite.com/news/
Let’s examine the greater dangers. The more our prez stacks the courts & security/intelligence communities with corrupt loyalists, the more he can override the rule of law & usurp unabridged power that may well grease the skids into tyranny! The damage has been significant in these first 4 years, but given another 4 years we can expect the destruction to become permanent & catastrophic! We cannot overstate how important it is that Biden win this election. I’ve warned about 100 times during the Trump presidency that America is not uniquely immune from fascism, so here are some valid reasons: https://www.washingtonpost.
Has there ever been a worse president in our nation’s history? Seriously, look at the overall situation objectively. Let’s see, we have a crashed economy, virus deaths into the hundreds of thousands, 20,000 lies while in office, divisive racial strife, bullying & insulting any hint of opposition, coddling to foreign enemies while dissing allies, corruption beyond measure, compelling evidence of presidential criminality, has his sights set on being a tyrannical dictator….for an American president, that’s tough to top! As a master distractor, his leadership has been such a constant wave of chaos, so the unprecedented stream of reckless/disastrous actions & major scandals tend to get lost in the shuffle: https://www.msn.com/en-us/
Look here, breaking news, Trump just hit the 20,000 mark for verifiable lies while in office!: https://www.washingtonpost.
Beware & Avoid the Deadly Fox
Along with white supremacist terrorists, Fox fake news should rightly be ranked at the very top as a threat to America by spewing dangerous hate speech. In feeding their viewers all manner of falsehoods, propaganda & conspiracies, they’ve managed to distort the views of conservatives across the land, enhancing the bitter divides in our nation which make it very difficult to have constructive dialogue for getting important things done. Fox has also created a culture of death. In downplaying the virus pandemic all along that gave their viewers a false sense of security, spurring risky behavior when many haven’t taken Coronavirus seriously enough, the resulting lack of taking proper precautions has unnecessarily contributed to the growing number of infections & fatalities. Plus in being critical of Black Lives Matter & the racial protests, Fox has been stoking the ongoing racial animus that’s helping spark the ugly white supremacist backlash, sometimes breaking out in pockets of violence.
Those Fox primetime shows in particular are a total disgrace, which along with other extremist talking heads from the rest of the right-wing echo spewing their nonsensical disinformation, have become highly destructive to the functioning & safety of our society. Fox shows largely train people to deny facts. Among the pertinent news this week includes an update on the bigoted/racist Tucker Carlson show which steers millions wrong every weeknight, as we’ve come to discover his bigoted & racists bombasts on the air are not his viewpoints alone, but a sick deranged lead writer was feeding him this outrageous hate-talk: https://www.mediamatters.org/
Other Knuckleheads Inspired by Trumpian Echo-Garbage
I always assumed the radical fringe only existed in foreign countries, being found with extremist members of the state-party found in communist &/or dictatorial regimes, jihad Islamic radicals behind theocratic nation-states or terrorist organizations, or the white nationalist mentality that exists among Nazi groups in pockets throughout the world. But they’ve got nothing on us! With the inspiration & wink-wink approvals coming from our White House, it’s unleashed a racist/bigoted tribal hatred right here in America on par with the worst from around the world.
The attitude presented in the list of links below can only be described as conspiratorial & faulty thinking, self-centered vitriol towards others, lack of awareness or sense of reality, & in the most extreme cases even crosses over into evil personified. In this ghastly state with so many far-right wackos on the loose out there spouting their fact-free rubbish, we’re now facing a true truth emergency!: https://www.cnn.com/videos/
https://www.businessinsider.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/ted-cruz-must-be-banned-for-life/30514/
Crony Capitalism on Display
It’s remarkable how the president’s friendly sycophants are dipping into PPP funding meant for struggling small/medium-sized businesses. As we’ve repeatedly seen, everything the prez is ever involved with gets immersed in corruption & political favors:
The Huge Price Evangelicals have Paid for “But Gorsuch”
Peter Wehner has issued another dire warning to the evangelical flock, that their undying subservience to the immoral earthly king mostly serves to smear their Christian witness, effectively driving people away from the heavenly king & his church by damaging the reputation of the faith. Insightful paragraphs that should prompt earnest introspection are posted here from https://www.msn.com/en-us/
Elsewhere, Trump has engaged in a bromance with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the worst persecutor of Christians in the world, and established more intimate and admiring relationships with many of the world’s despots than with leaders of America’s traditional allies. And on issues that have traditionally concerned conservative evangelicals, such as fiscal responsibility and limited government, Trump has been awful: The deficit and the debt exploded under his watch, even pre-pandemic.
Now think about what the cost has been of the uncritical support given to Trump by evangelical Christians. For now, focus just on this: Christians who are supporters of the president have braided themselves to a man who in just the past few days and weeks tweeted a video of a supporter shouting “white power” (he later deleted it but has yet to denounce it); attacked NASCAR’s only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, while also criticizing the decision by NASCAR to ban Confederate flags from its races; threatened to veto this year’s annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases honoring Confederate military leaders; referred to COVID-19 as “kung flu” during a speech at a church in Phoenix; and blasted two sports teams, the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, for considering name changes because of concerns by supporters of those franchises that those team names give undue offense.
For his whole life, before and since becoming president, Trump has exploited racial divisions and appealed to racial resentments. The president is now doing so more, not less, than in the past, despite the fact—and probably because of the fact—that America is in the grips of a pandemic that he and his administration have badly bungled and that has claimed more than 130,000 American lives. As The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out on July 6, “Almost every day in the last two weeks, Mr. Trump has sought to stoke white fear and resentment.” White evangelicals are the core of Trump’s political support, and while the overwhelming number of the president’s evangelical supporters may not be racist, they are willing to back a man who openly attempts to divide people by race. That would be enough of an indictment, but the situation is actually a good deal worse than that, since Trump’s eagerness to inflame ugly passions is only one thread in his depraved moral tapestry. My hunch is that at the beginning of this Faustian bargain, most evangelicals didn’t imagine it would come to this, with them defending the indefensible, tarnishing their reputations, and doing incalculable damage to their causes.
This is the worst year for America in more than a half century; a stunning 87 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going and only 17 percent feel proud when thinking about the state of the nation, while 71 percent feel angry and 66 percent are fearful. Donald Trump’s presidency is so polarizing and such a catastrophe that a plurality or outright majority of Americans now oppose much of whatever he supports. The mood of the public is the most progressive it’s been in nearly 70 years. During the Trump era, the nation has moved to the left on a whole series of issues, including those that matter most to evangelical Trump supporters.
The Trump presidency, which has produced few significant legislative or governing achievements, has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement. The greatest cost of the Trump years to evangelical Christianity isn’t in the political sphere, but rather in what Christians refer to as bearing witness—showing how their lives have been transformed by their faith. Much of the evangelical movement, in aligning itself with Donald Trump, has shown itself to be graceless and joyless, seized by fear, hypocritical, censorious, and filled with grievances. That is not true of all evangelicals, of course, and it’s not true of all evangelicals who are Trump supporters. But it’s true of enough of them, and certainly of the political leadership of the white evangelical movement, to have done deep injury to their public witness.
I know this firsthand, from pastors around the country who have talked about the catastrophic effects of the unholy alliance between evangelicals and Donald Trump. One pastor of a large church on the Pacific Coast told me: “There are many reasons why young people are turning away from the Church, but my observation is, Trump has vastly accelerated that trend. He’s put it into hyperdrive.” This pastor, a lifelong Republican who declined to be quoted by name because of the position he occupies, wrote that “for decades Hollywood has portrayed conservative Christians as cruel, ignorant, greedy, and hypocritical. For 20 years I have worked, led, and sacrificed to put the lie to that stereotype, and have done so successfully here … Because of how we have served the least of the least, city officials, school officials, and many atheists have formed a respect for Jesus and his church. And I’m watching all that get washed away.”
He added, “Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.” In the midst of the wreckage, Trump’s evangelical supporters will undoubtedly comfort themselves with this thought: They got Gorsuch.
This unfortunate allegiance to Trump, regardless of any short-term gains, has the potential to forever tarnish the evangelical church. Other links to recent evangelical news is here following this reply I just sent out to a Christian brother:
Hello Joe…Trump is a big phony, always pandering to his base in order to get reelected & glorify himself. The bigger question is how many might be relegated to hell because the obvious hypocrisy & moral duplicity they see from the faithful are driving them away from the church. There’s no denying evangelical Christians are the primary group empowering Trump. And if he gets reelected, they will be to blame. Evangelicals need to switch gears & vote Biden, breaking this unholy allegiance to an evil king in order to start restoring the good name of the evangelical church. We have to ask, would Jesus display this same kind of blind fervent devotion to an immoral character as evangelicals do?
https://www.christianpost.com/
From the man credibly accused by around 20 women of sexual abuse, assault or rape, plus the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about abusing women. Let’s also recall other ways Trump himself admitted to being a sexual pervert, like barging into the dressing rooms of naked teenage girls:
Part 3 – The Economy, Virus & Election
Starting with the Economy…I’ve always considered myself a GOP-supporting moderate conservative, which I still might be a conservative based on a traditional definition from a couple decades ago. But a couple circumstances have changed dramatically. In recent decades we’ve had ever-growing class divides that’s recently come into clearer focus, plus a Republican Party growing ever more extreme & out-of-touch with the needs of the American people. So whereas in my former years there were valid reasons for a moderate like me to favor GOP candidates, that is no longer the case. The pendulum needs to swing back in favor of workers instead of big corporate interests raking in all the benefits, creating a win-win economy where the oligarch class stops exploiting the working middle class: https://www.salon.com/2020/07/
Despite the prez’s bluster in his campaign ads, his economy prior to 2020 was far from the greatest ever. The declining unemployment rates followed the same basic trajectory as Obama’s, while the number of jobs created lagged behind the pace set by the Obama administration. What Trump had managed to do which separated his economy from Obama’s, largely due to his tax cuts going mostly to the top, was in spiking the deficits higher while widening the gaping wage/wealth inequalities. We’ll never see the greatest economy again until we find a way to restore the prosperous middle class. As for this year, the collapsed economy can be pinned on Trump, since as other countries effectively fought & contained the virus pandemic, our president dismissed, downplayed, denied & ignored the virus emergency. His approach is a proven disaster as the unrelenting virus spread was the reason our economy tanked. So under Trump’s absent leadership, we now have tens of millions of Americans thrown out of work along with hundreds of thousands dead.
Biden could be the right guy to help us rebuild our economy, since as VP he was involved in our recovery from the Great Recession. We should give the Dems the reins & give them a shot, since at least they’re trying to uplift the working middle class, whereas Trump’s GOP seeks to perpetuate this current lopsided gilded age by mostly favoring the top 1%. But to set the stage for the economy to even begin bouncing back towards normalcy, it can only happen once the virus is contained, which Trump is still adamantly refusing to do. Ignoring a huge problem almost never resolves that problem. These updates explain the negative ramifications of an economy when presidential leadership goes AWOL in a time of crisis:
COVID-19 Pandemic Rages On
I guess it’s poetic justice this would happen to one of the world’s biggest virus deniers:
Our Own Presidential Buffoonery Presiding Over an Emergency
The prez refuses to accept or acknowledge any bad news from his aides, so he puts himself in no position to actually solve dire predicaments like this virus pandemic when he doesn’t receive factual updates. The situation is so surreal in that we’re facing the most dire crisis an American president has had to manage for saving lives in many generations, yet our current president is practically ignoring the whole thing! In treating a pandemic emergency like an oblivious moron, his actions are complicit in many thousands of Americans deaths which is in effect like committing negligent homicide: https://www.mediaite.com/news/
If this virus is still raging a month from now, expect parents, teacher unions, state governors & local officials to have a whole different attitude towards the administration about having their kids cram back into the classrooms: https://thehill.com/homenews/
There’s no question our presidential leadership fumbled the ball on this pandemic in every way & every step along the way. Let us count the ways. We needed a guiding light at the top for prompting universal acceptance on mask wearing & social distancing. Competent management would also ensure no shortage of testing in proportion to the outbreak, or being slow on the trigger in those early days when ramped up testing had a chance of isolating/containing the spread. A worthy administration would also call on the people to sacrifice in a war-like footing for the greater good, promoting the temporary inconvenience of a shutdown until we had bent the curve, while resisting the urge to reopen too soon before recommended guidelines on arresting the spread was met. The prez has hardly rallied the people at all with the commitment needed to effectively battle this curse.
Whenever the Trump administration fails miserably, as what happens in most cases, Trump always looks to pass the buck. Now the administration has unleashed a series of falsehoods & unjustified smears against Dr. Fauci, trying to pin the blame on him in distracting from Trump’s dismal failures: https://slate.com/news-and-
Just some more random thoughts. Despite the ongoing bungling when we saw Trump making one misstep after another, his party could have intervened to right the ship & save lives, but they instead enabled him all along the way: https://www.rawstory.com/2020/
Most other countries did a far better job of stemming the spread & minimizing deaths (with some nations having even reduced the death counts down to practically zero), since their leaders took decisive early actions & their citizens followed important safety guidelines/protocol. In the United States, our president did not. And we the people were confused by contradictory messages & conflicting instructions, with the conservative base especially guilty in defying safety measures. But Trumpeters are influenced by their leader. How can a leader ever begin to guide us through a deadly emergency crisis when he constantly ignores the problem even exists? The American people have noticed the incompetence, the inattention, the denials & the dereliction of duty: https://www.msn.com/en-us/
https://www.businessinsider.
https://thehill.com/homenews/
https://thehill.com/opinion/
https://www.axios.com/reality-
https://www.newsweek.com/
https://www.newsweek.com/
https://www.independent.co.uk/
The Latest on Campaign & Election News
A cult mentality can’t be reasoned with. They can only be annihilated in November and relegated to the dustbin of history. That’s what we the voters must do to the wayward Trumpian party, since it’s the only path we possibly have in making America great again. The GOP has gone way beyond redemption, so every remnant of the Trump-inspired gaslighting demagogic corruption we should seek to destroy. No good can ever come out of such a cult, so whether that party gets vanquished & never returns, or can rise out of the ashes as a transformed party, either way it doesn’t really matter at this point. Having our sights set on November, the first step is in knowing a functioning democratic society just can’t exist when this current version of the GOP holds any type of governing power.
So let me make myself clear by again reiterating, the party of Trump has gone off the rails & is beyond hope: https://www.huffpost.com/
I don’t want to get giddy over recent polling, since we all remember & were stunned by the 2016 election returns. But the more Americans see of his chronic mishandling of the job & unfitness for office, the more his approval ratings drop: https://thebulwark.com/trump-
First & foremost, we need to encourage all rational non-Trumpeters to register to vote if they’re not already: https://www.politico.com/news/
Trump’s base strategy might be designed to further ingratiate his fans to love him, realizing he can’t broaden his base & is likely to lose in November, after which he can use his cult following for setting up his own delusional echo-media empire. That would create a whole new problem we’d need to fight, but it still beats having him continue to screw things up from inside the White House. Or it could be his refusal to try broadening the base stems from his aides & campaign advisors being fearful to deliver the bad news, so they feed him only sugarcoated polling & the prez is unaware just how bad he’s doing: https://www.washingtonpost.
https://thebulwark.com/
https://www.rollcall.com/2020/
Time After Time
Time after time Trump makes a mess of his role as leader. We’ve seen Trump’s true colors shine through & it’s not something we want in a president: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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