So here’s an angle that I haven’t seen posted anywhere (you read it here first). One of Trump’s favorite talking points these days as he seeks to deflect blame for is ill-preparedness in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic (when he’s not blaming President Obama or the WHO) is that no one could have seen the coronavirus pandemic coming. The Washington Post, among others, has examined this claim and found it to be lacking.

We know, for instance, that in 2018 Trump and his team dismantled the Global Pandemic Office of the National Security Council. We also know that in early 2017, before Trump was sworn into office, Obama administration officials briefed a group of restive, incoming Trump cabinet members on how to respond to a global pandemic. Read more »

Today is a day ending in “y” which means that Donald Trump has once again done something outrageous that shows his utter contempt for the idea that the United States is a nation of laws and not of men. What’s got most people of good conscience raising eyebrows is a tweet in which the President seems to indicate that if need be he will not refrain from leveraging the Presidential pardon authority to write himself and his family members a “get out of jail free” card should Robert Muller decide to bring charges as a result of his investigation of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice.

While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.FAKE NEWS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

As usual Donald Trump is trying to be too cute by half here, at once asserting that he is innocent of any real crime (it’s all just “fake news”) but at the same time insisting that “everyone” agrees that his pardon authority is unlimited and thus, one must surmise, applicable to himself. Read more »

An interesting thing happened in America on November 9th, 2016. The day after the votes cast in our presidential election were tallied and it was determined that Donald Trump had carried the electoral college, 100,000 people rushed Healthcare.gov to buy insurance for themselves and for their families. The website, whose rocky grand-opening just a couple of years earlier was ridiculed as an example of government incompetence, is now looking more like a precarious lifeline for thousands of people who see it as their last chance to buy into a health insurance plan before the new Republican administration of Donald Trump rides into town on a promise to blow the whole system up. Read more »

Looks like Ted Cruz is targeting the “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare” crowd with his latest mailer which tries to entice recipients with promises of free money from the government. The Huffinton Post reports:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is out with a deceptive new mailer that masquerades as official government business and promises people there’s a “check enclosed” when it’s actually asking for money instead.

A New Jersey resident sent The Huffington Post the latest piece of mail he received from Cruz’s campaign. The envelope appears to have come from Cruz’s Senate office and has his name printed the same way it often is for Senate business. In small type the mailer clarifies that it is for “personal” matters and was not sent at taxpayers’ expense. It also promises a check.

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It was really only a matter of time before Ted Cruz, presidential candidate and most hated man in the U.S. senate, would fall victim to his own party’s anti-immigrant fervor. Climbing in the polls and threatening the Trump campaign in Iowa, Cruz has become the target of accusations and insinuations that the conservative firebrand, born of a Cuban father and American mother on Canadian soil (Calgary), does not meet the Constitutional requirement that a president be a “natural born citizen.”

From the left, it’s deliciously ironic to see this sort of comeuppance for man who sought to reassure GOP voters of his anti-immigrant bonafides by paraphrasing George Wallace’s “segregation forever speech” for The New York Times. And of course, there’s more than just a little satisfaction to be gained by watching the party that spawned an industry of nutty conspiracy theorists dedicated to casting doubt on Barack Obama’s eligibility now setting its sights on destroying one of its own. Read more »

Early the morning of March 24, 1944 a German patrol pulled up to a home on the outskirts of in the Polish town of Markowa.  The Germans had been alerted by a local police constable to the fact that eight Jews, comprising members of two different families, had secretly been given shelter by Josef Ulma, a prominent citizen and the town librarian. The Germans surrounded the home, and after extracting the Jews shot all eight of them in the head on the spot. Not satisfied with this bloody deed, the Germans turned to the Ulma family themselves. For hiding Jews in defiance of German martial law, Joseph was shot.  The fact that Jospeh’s wife Wiktoria was his eight months pregnant, failed to soften the Soldier’s hearts and she was shot as well. Finally, the Nazis turned their attention to the UIma’s six children, now weeping loudly and profusely at the sight of their dead parents.  Methodically, mercilessly and in cold blood they were shot as well. The eldest of the Ulma children was eight years old. The youngest was but two. Read more »

In pondering the significance of the Umpqua Community college tragedy, one of a seemingly unbroken string of mass killings to shake the nation since the shocking Columbine massacre 16 years ago, the first and perhaps most distasteful truth we have to acknowledge is that this shooting will not change anything. I’m sorry to be so blunt. I’m sorry if this sounds defeatist. But any honest assessment of the politics and the culture of firearms in America must come to the simple and inescapable conclusion that thanks to our nation’s out-sized love of firearms, at this very moment somewhere in the Midwest a mother is preparing dinner for a daughter who won’t live to see her 21st birthday, somewhere down South a father and son are restoring an old car that will be completed by just one of them under a somber cloud of loss, somewhere in New England a young couple are planning for a future life together in a world that has a place set aside for only one of them, and this is a scene that is being replayed hundreds, if not thousands of times this very moment all across our country.

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