Tag: President Trump

…meanwhile…

Queen Elizabeth II: 1926-2022

(FRI 9/9/22)

Justice Department appeals… Amid widespread criticism from the legal community of Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order to appoint a special master in the case of classified documents the FBI uncovered at Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound August 8, the Justice Department Thursday asked the judge to allow prosecutors to further review and use the materials seized, reports CQ Roll Call. The DOJ was expected to appeal Cannon’s ruling in favor of ex-President Trump for a special master. 

The judge ordered the DOJ and Trump attorneys lists of acceptable special master candidates by Friday.

In its filing, the Justice Department argues that the injunction on reviewing the seized materials “could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that were not being properly stored …” potentially posing an ongoing risk to national security.

Note: The likelihood of a successful appeal to the controversial ruling by a judge President Trump appointed to the Southern District of Florida after he lost the election to Joe Biden seems positive, though as usual, Trump is successful at creating delays.

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Queen Elizabeth II … has overseen 15 British prime ministers in her 70 years on the throne. The Queen had met Prime Minister Winston Churchill, born in 1874, and on Tuesday appointed Prime Minister Liz Truss, born in 1974, according to Jane Hartley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition Friday. Queen Elizabeth died two days after meeting with Truss at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. The longest-reigning British monarch (her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria, served for 63 years and seven months) is succeeded by her son, King Charles III, who was scheduled to address his nation later Friday.

--Todd Lassa

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...meanwhile... (THU 9/8/22)

Bannon charged … Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was charged in a Manhattan court Thursday on money laundering and conspiracy charges in connection with the WeBuildTheWall Inc. fundraiser, the Associated Press reports. New York State prosecutors allege Bannon funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to two others with money collected from supporters of then-President Trump who wanted to help fund a wall on the southern border with Mexico. 

Prosecutors did not name the two others in the alleged fraud, though Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato pleaded guilty to federal charges last April, AP says. Bannon also faced federal charges, though Trump pardoned him on the last day of his administration, before Bannon’s court date. 

That last fact is likely to negate any defense of double jeopardy. State charges are not covered by presidential pardons.

Federal agents arrested Bannon on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut in 2020 and charged him with pocketing more than $1 million in WeBuildTheWall donations. 

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Kyiv, Ukraine … Secretary of State Antony Blinken became the highest-ranking official to visit Ukraine Thursday with an unannounced visit to the National Specialized Children’s Hospital Ohmatdyt, where he met with children from the eastern part of the country and with the famous bomb-sniffing dog, Patron, NPR reports. He was scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba later Thursday. Blinken announced $2 billion in long-term investments in security for Ukraine and neighbors potentially threatened by Russia. 

Military aid: Meanwhile, from a meeting with counterparts in Germany, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced an additional $675 million in military aid to Ukraine. The State Department said this is set to include more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), as well as additional munitions and armed vehicles, NPR reports. 

--Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Does Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Have a Chance?

By Todd Lassa

Rebuilding infrastructure -- addressing the dangerous bridges and crumbling interstate highways -- was perhaps the only major issue with which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, and her caucus agreed with former President Trump. After nine Infrastructure Weeks (plus Trump’s August 2016 campaign pledge) the last possibility under a Republican president of fixing the broken itself crumbled under the weight of the more-immediate coronavirus pandemic – even if the former president’s critics said COVID-19 didn’t seem to be of much concern to him. 

It’s easy to forget that President Trump unveiled a $1.5-trillion proposal in February 2018, as The New York Times reminds us, but were overshadowed by a couple of White House scandals. In April 2019, with Pelosi re-installed as speaker after Democratic victories in the mid-terms, the White House and Capitol Hill Democrats announced they had reached agreement on a $2-trillion infrastructure package to upgrade highways, railroads, bridges and broadband. But Trump “stormed out” of a meeting to discuss how to pay for it, saying he would not return to negotiations until House Democrats stopped investigating him.

President Biden’s $2.3-trillion plan unveiled earlier this month isn’t much costlier. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said “there would be no Senate Republican votes for the infrastructure bill,” columnist Juan Williams wrote in The Hill.“Full stop.” Capitol Hill Republicans say the bill is full of Democratic social engineering dream programs, and they’re opposed to Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate tax rate from the 21% historic low set by President Trump, on up to 28%.

To the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party, $2.3-trillion isn’t nearly enough. But the Biden administration has signaled it is willing to negotiate with Republicans in order to get at least some support. The White House met with congress members from both parties on Monday, April 12. Biden will need to convince 10 Republican senators to vote for the package to avoid using the arduous reconciliation procedure (the Senate parliamentarian has ruled it is allowed a second time this fiscal year). 

And even without the support of 10 Republicans to vote for cloture on a filibuster, Biden will have to convince fellow Democrat Joe Manchin III, senator from West Virginia, just to get to 51 votes, including Vice President Harris. 

Key infrastructure provisions up for negotiation, according to the AP:

•$115 billion to modernize bridges, highways and roads.

•$85 billion for public transit to shorten the repair backlog and expand services.

•$89 billion to modernize Amtrak’s popular Northeast Corridor line and address its repair.

•$174 billion to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging systems, electrify 20% of school buses and electrify the federal fleet, including U.S. Postal Service vehicles.

•$100 billion to build high-speed broadband in order to provide 100% coverage across the country – a sort of 21st Century Tennessee Valley Authority project.

•$100 billion to upgrade the nation’s power grid resilience, and move toward clean electricity, and related projects.

•$20 billion to redress communities whose neighborhoods were divided by those Eisenhower-spawned highway projects. This affects mostly non-white neighborhoods.

•$111 billion to replace lead water pipes and upgrade sewer systems.

•$50 billion to improve infrastructure resilience to counter natural disasters.

•$180 billion in research & development projects.

•$300 billion for manufacturing, including funds for the computer chip sector (it would be nice during a pandemic not to have to wait for ships full of them to arrive from China), improved access to capital, and clean energy investment. 

That’s $1.324 trillion, leaving nearly $976 billion for such programs as money to build, preserve and retrofit more than 2 million affordable houses and buildings and expansion of long-term services under Medicaid (at $400-billion, the single costliest line item). 

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CPAC is Bargain Basement Wholesale Politics

By Andrew Boyd

The only thing more stomach-churning, to me, than retail politics is wholesale politics, and CPAC is bargain basement in every respect, with a double dose of bombast and the gross absence of humility or measured speech that infects every corner of the body politic today. Giving it as much ink as I’m about to do here is a thoroughly detestable exercise, but that’s the assignment.

First off, CPAC polls are not terribly predictive of real outcomes, so proceed with caution. Yes, Trump pulled 55% of voters in the straw polling, twice that of second-place finisher Ron DeSantis and 13 times that of third-place Kristi Noem. Trump made it clear that a third-party candidacy is not the offing, for him at least. Blessed be he who refuses to commit political suicide. Trump, being transactional by nature, knows better. 

It’s still Trump’s party, as I’ve previously argued, though one might wonder in what kind of shape Trump will be, physically and psychologically, four years hence, when his likely opponent would be Kamala Harris, who never saw a lie she didn’t consider first in terms of its political utility, which makes her just another D.C. bed bug. 

More likely, to my mind, is a Ron DeSantis-Kristi Neom ticket. Other front runners might include Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. Challenges from the anti-Trump pseudo-conservative wing of the party would include Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney. As of today, however, I’d say, there is no path to nomination that doesn’t run through Trump. Even swampy swamperton, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has tacitly acknowledged as much.

More interesting to my mind is the ranking of issues in said polling, with election integrity (62%) running well ahead of more traditional kitchen-table conservative pain points like border security (35%), the economy (32%), gun rights (26%), taxes (22%), national security (20%) and abortion policy (16%). 

For my left-leaning friends, this probably reads as the triumph of misinformation and QAnon-style conspiracy theories. I’m not of the belief that Trump was necessarily denied a landslide victory, but I am not afraid to assert that our election process is a shit show, systemically not up to the standards set forth by the likes of post-war Iraq. Maybe that purple dot thing isn’t a bad way to go, kind of the club stamp of democracy.

Four years may seem a long way off, but it’s really not, and I fear that we’re marching toward a political abyss; that the failure of our politicians to address well-founded concerns surrounding mass mail-in voting, error-riddled voter rolls, the death of voter ID, and the plainly extra-legal actions of state election officials and absence of legal remedy for same (thanks for nothing, SCOTUS) represents an existential threat to democracy and our peaceful co-existence; for if a plurality of the voting population does not believe in the essential propriety of national electoral outcomes, in a country so politically and cultural polarized, the cancer of political violence and mass social unrest will metastasize.

It’s high time that the adults in the room, if they exist, take a step back from the uber-cynical, morally bereft trench warfare of institutional party politics and mainstream media shout fests (yes, I’m including Newsmax and Fox News) and consider how we work together to keep this thing from going altogether off the rails. And don’t look to CPAC or its leftist equivalent for answers. You won’t find any.

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Read the full list of CPAC’s presidential candidate straw poll — click on Forum.

Kill the Legislative Filibuster?

By Todd Lassa

Before last November’s election, Joseph R. Biden punted on the question of whether he supports killing the Senate legislative filibuster. It’s a move Senate Democrats have been considering at least since it won a majority by the slimmest of margins, with Vice President Harris the tie-breaker for when legislation is split down party lines 

The issue is not the first priority with Senate Democrats, who are moving President Biden’s $1.9-trillion coronavirus relief package via the arcane reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority vote rather than the 60 votes – including 10 Republican senators – necessary when the potential of a filibuster is involved. 

The question is, how much legislation can Biden’s Democratic allies in the Senate pass in the next two years without eliminating the legislative filibuster, which means most bills will require those 10 Republican votes? After January 2023, Democrats either will lose their wafer-thin Senate majority, or will build on it, though it is unlikely either party will gain at least 10 senators in the November 8, 2022 mid-terms. 

Filibuster reformation seems to come up every four years with the presidential election, if not every two years. 

In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, rallied Democrats to end the filibuster for federal judicial nominees and executive office appointments. Spiking the filibuster, called “the nuclear option,” requires only a simple majority vote. 

Republicans warned that triggering the nuclear option on appointing federal judges would come back to bite Democrats whenever they inevitably lost the Senate majority. 

And they were right. In 2017, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, led a majority of his party to end the judicial filibuster for U.S. Supreme Court nominees, paving the way for President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch as replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Adding hard-core partisanship to injury, Gorsuch’s Senate approval came the year after McConnell prevented a vote on Obama’s nominee late in his term to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, who now is Biden’s nominee for attorney general.

In the end, Trump saw his three Supreme Court associate justice nominees get Senate approval in his four years in office, compared with Obama’s two associate justices in eight years. 

The question for Democratic senators now is, how much more of Biden’s agenda could the Senate pass in the next 23 months if just 51 votes were needed? And would it be worth weathering the inevitable Senate and White House flip somewhere off in the future?

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Click on Forum for a new commentary by Stephen Macaulay
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Same as the Old Boss — Obama

By Andrew Boyd

President Biden’s slew of executive orders and proclamations are less practical and effective than they are an apparent attempt to enhance the Democratic Party’s image. Biden is particularly bent on reversing former President Trump’s immigration policy without proposing the sort of permanent policy that has evaded both parties for decades. 

Counting non-citizens in U.S. Census is a nakedly political effort to disenfranchise American citizens through reapportionment leveraged against illegals (sorry, non-citizens) by executive fiat. DACA part deux. Halftime show brought to you by SCOTUS and their denial of Trump’s authority to overturn part one. Farcical. 

There is one executive order I can support, to stop building The Wall. I’ve always been dubious on the efficacy of The Wall. On that basis, I’m good. As to walls being immoral, which was the rallying cry like 20 minutes ago, I’d call that complete trash thinking. Look no further than Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony. I await some reasoned argument from anyone on how to effectively manage and monitor inflows and outflows of peeps as do all other sovereign nations. See beloved progressive Canada.

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My take on the other major executive orders …

•Masking challenge and creation of a directorate for global health security and biodefense. What the hell is a directorate? Sound like something we can neither afford nor effectively contain. Watch to see the swell of SJW agenda items that get smuggled in through this baby. A ministry of funny walks would be more to my liking. It’s at least good for a laugh. [Note: SWJ is “social justice warrior” –Ed.]

•Rejoin the World Health Organization. The WHO proved itself utterly unreliable as an honest broker of information in this pandemic, which is putting it kindly. Lapdogs of the Chinese communist party is more on the nose. You can pretend this is a nod to the primacy of science and the critical importance of global coordination, but I suspect it’s more about the Dems unrelenting desire to be loved by their EU counterparts, which is most easily achieved by kneeling to a global bureaucratic hegemony that has anything but the best interests of the American people in mind.

•Extend eviction and foreclosure moratoriums. It’s easy to be humane when you’re doing it with other people’s money. It’s also, inconveniently, immoral. In principle, no different than “stimulus” via the accumulation of public debt, a.k.a. stealing from the future, only this one is on a shorter time frame and more directly tied to a specific group of people in the present, a.k.a. property holders. It’s all theft.

•Pause student loan payments through Sept 30. Why are we so focused on the particular slice of consumer debt that applies to college? It’s regressive in many respects, and again, stealing. Then, of course, there’s the moral hazard behind the notion that the government should have the power to step in and abrogate a legally constructed agreement between two private parties. But that’s just a matter of principle, so whatever.

•Rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. An agreement without teeth, and mostly another means of smuggling in global economic wealth transfers. Among first world nations, who reduced their total CO2 emissions the most, on an absolute basis, in 2019?. That would be the U.S., courtesy of technological innovation driven by the big, bad free market. Meanwhile, 80% of increases in global CO2 emissions in the same time period came from China, Asia and India, and future forecasts see the U.S. remaining relative stable while China, India and other developing economies will fuel their growth with ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions.  

•End Keystone XL Pipeline. The environmental impacts of a pipeline are minimal and, to my mind, substantially outweighed by the economic and national security benefits of America’s energy independence. I know, I hate polar bears and seals and life in general. Shame on me. Oh, and Canada is not so pleased either.

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Biden to the Rescue?

By Todd Lassa

President-elect Biden is ready to test the mettle of his party’s wafer-thin majorities in the House and Senate with his $1.9-trillion coronavirus American Rescue Plan. Key feature of the plan is $1,400 in stimulus payments to complement the $600 mailed out late last year, thus matching the $2,000 President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought. 

In campaigning for Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in their successful January 6 Georgia runoff races for U.S. Senate, Biden suggested that it would take their victories, which give the party a 50-50 count plus Vice President-elect Harris’ tiebreaker, to pass the additional $1,400 stimulus checks. The Trump administration 2017 tax cuts and last March’s $2.2-trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the largest stimulus package in U.S. history, pushed the federal deficit to record levels. Now Republicans on Capitol Hill are starting to move back to their more traditional model fiscal responsibility and opposing such large deficits. 

After details of The American Rescue Plan (or TARP, which recalls the Targeted Asset Relief Program of the Bush 43 and Obama administrations in response to the 2008 credit crisis) were released, The Wall Street Journal suggested in a Friday morning story that Biden’s proposal, along with a 0.7% drop in December retail sales, were to blame for a decrease in stock market averages. But the story quoted one analyst as suggesting that the market was expecting a larger dollar amount that would better stimulate the economy as vaccinations continued across the country and the economy started opening up. 

Conversely, critics of the CARES Act and the short-term extension passed by Congress just before the New Year say the stimulus funds, when distributed to Americans who need it most, were being saved rather than spent (the objective of the payments is to help generate commerce) as they feared for their future employment. 

In addition to direct payments for individuals, Biden’s TARP proposes an additional $400 per week in unemployment insurance supplement through September, expanded paid leave and increases in the child tax credit. About half the package would be claimed by household costs. 

There is $20-billion for national vaccination centers across the U.S., open to anyone living here regardless of immigration status, with the goal of reopening public shools by May 1, within Biden’s first 100 days. Most of the rest of the remaining $950-billion or so would pay for relief to state and local governments, which have suffered severe tax revenue declines due to small business failures and higher unemployment, and to vaccine distribution, including the national centers. 

“If we invest now boldly, smartly and with unwavering focus on American workers and families, we will strengthen our economy, reduce inequity and put our nation’s long-term finances on the most sustainable course,” Biden said Thursday evening (AP). 

Deaths globally from the coronavirus pandemic topped 2 million on Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. death toll accounts for nearly one-fifth of that, now close to 400,000.

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Follow the Money

By Stephen Macaulay

Jesse—Big Daddy—Unruh, California politician during the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and, yes, ‘80s, famously said: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

He also said regarding lobbyists, “"If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them you've got no business being up here.”

So the question is whether Unruh was a cynic or a realist. I’ll go for the second choice.

Even in cases where there is what is generally accepted “normal” behavior by the men and women who hold higher office, in point of fact their insatiable need for money to keep the wheels of their careers well oiled often puts them in positions wherein temptation is at an intensity that most of us will never experience.

And when you have the Trump Family, things are really off the rails.

What is surprising is the number of individuals and corporations Team Trump have, to put it indelicately, screwed. Whether it was contractors who didn’t get paid or hotels that had to send invoices to a collection agency, the Trumps, led by the paterfamilias, have had a thing for other people’s money. Getting into the Oval Office was hitting the jackpot. Presidents don’t need to carry wallets.

One reason why we have heard ad nauseum about how the election was stolen, rigged, etc., about how he “won in a landslide,” probably has more than a little something to do with dead presidents—and I don’t mean Bush 41, Reagan, Johnson, etc.—than any concern with the well-being of the polity.

Remember those tax returns we’ve only seen by fits and starts? Or the return that showed Trump paid $750 in taxes in 2017?

Odds are good that Trump is going to realize that he’s going to make more money being out of office than would back in office (remember that he is 74 and although his parents lived long lives — his father to 93 and his mother to 88 — according to the Social Security actuarial table he has an average 11.76 years left, so he might as well optimize his earnings, such as they may be). What about the kids? Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka? Might they try a run? Anything is possible, but fealty seems to be to Senior, and there is less likelihood that they could pull it off with the bold bluster of the Old Man. And if there is a — and I use this term technically — a shit-storm of lawsuits that come raining down on Trump, the brand is going to be largely besmirched for all but the most dedicated, so the money won’t come raining with it.

So if not Trump, then who? Marco Rubio — a.k.a., “Lil’ Marco” — will probably give it another run. And Mike Pence hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory during his tenure in the White House, nor endeared himself to the Base, so there doesn’t seem to be a path for him to take, so odds aren’t good there. (And that second Unruh quote would undoubtedly be too upsetting to him to contemplate.)

It could be that the Republicans try to do a bit of a reset and go for a more “normal” Ben Sasse — although it should be noted that while Nebraska has been a reliably Republican state, in the last presidential, for only the second time in its history, it awarded one of its five electoral votes to someone else, in this case, Joe Biden.

It should not be forgotten that before the chairman and CEO — then, as now — of The Trump Organization won the Republican nomination, there were Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Jim Gilmore, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry all in the game at one point.

Politics is a nasty game and corporations play hard ball. Make no mistake: they’re not going to put their efforts behind people supported by grown-ups who wear Viking garb — and I don’t mean the Minnesota team — when it isn’t Halloween.

Follow the money.

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GOP faces Faustian bargain with Trump supporters

By Todd Lassa

Before the presidential inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, the party structure and big business supporters of the Republican candidate who earned the most votes in U.S. election history are rather suddenly fleeing their erstwhile party leader, President Donald J. Trump. The answer to the question of whether Trump and his family maintain at least some control over the GOP through 2024, when the president has indicated he may run for a second term, appears to have shifted quickly in the days following the pro-Trump insurrection on Capitol Hill. 

It has affected the future of the Trump family’s businesses. On Tuesday, The Trump Organization’s biggest lender, Deutsche Bank, announced it was cutting ties with both the outgoing president and his business interests, Politico reports, quoting “a person familiar with the matter.” Trump owes the bank more than $300 million, Politico says.

In addition, the political news website reports that New York Signature Bank is closing Trump’s personal accounts and has called for his resignation ahead of January 20. The bank plans to “no longer do business” with members who voted against Congress’ certification of President-elect Biden’s Electoral College victory of 306 to 232.

Meanwhile, at least 10 big businesses say they will withhold contributions to those same Republican senators and members of the House of Representatives, including health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield, which has contributed more to Republicans than Democrats in every election since 1996, according to reports. Others withholding GOP contributions include American Express, MasterCard, Dow Chemical Company and Hallmark. 

BlackHawk, Goldman Sachs, Facebook and Google all will pause political contributions to both parties. 

On Monday, John R. Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur called on the GOP to “purge the taint of Trumpism.” 

Also Monday, Trump’s approval rating fell to a record low for presidential approval ratings, of 33% in the Quinnipiac poll, with 56% of respondents holding him responsible for the Capitol insurrection. This raises the question of what portion of the 74.3 million Americans who voted for Trump last November 3 still support the president after the Capitol Hill riots – and what portion are the type of supporters who would participate in such riots. 

Before the House’s vote on Trump's second impeachment Wednesday, a report in The New York Times and from other outlets said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, would leave it up to his fellow Senate Republicans whether or not to vote for Trump’s conviction. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, resigned her cabinet post as Trump’s Transportation secretary early in the month.

This slippage in support counters conventional wisdom that Trump-style populism will continue to dominate the Republican Party, which, after Mitt Romney’s loss to incumbent President Obama in 2012, conducted an election “autopsy” to figure out how to adapt a big-tent constituency as the white majority continued to shrink below 50% of the nation’s voting population. 

Even if Trump and his family, especially son Donald Jr. and daughter Ivanka, fade from GOP favor between now and the 2022 midterm elections, several pro-Trump Republicans are poised to make a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri face potential discipline for their votes against the Electoral College certification, but Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is still in the running. Moderate Republicans considered 2024 candidates include Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. 

No matter what happens, the traditional Republican issues of tax cuts, small government and minimal regulation will thrive, just as they did under President Trump.

So … what’s next for the GOP? Can it, and should it, purge the Trump family and undermine the power of Trump’s acolytes on Capitol Hill, or should the Republican Party embrace his hard-boiled populism to build on his loyal base?

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Trump Still Leads the Movement, if Not the Party

By Andrew Boyd

Efforts at predicting the future, particular in things as non-mechanistic as politics, is a fool’s errand, but here we go!

First, we must ask ourselves what is Trumpism?  Your guess is probably as good as mine.  Well, no, I necessarily believe my guess is better, and my guess is that Trump gives voice to a deeply seated distrust of our political institutions on the part of something approaching half or more of the voting public, and the belief of same that the whole game, top to bottom, is rigged.

These same people witnessed the hollowing out of our manufacturing economy in service to free and fair trade that was neither.  They watched as same elites, under the pretext of environmental conservation, sought to enable both the destruction and transfer of wealth on a global scale.  Same game, different rationale.  And most critically, they saw in their own party leaders a cowardice and cynicism that left them feeling altogether betrayed. 

Onto that fertile ground stepped an extraordinarily charismatic man. I won’t pretend to know his motives. Such things are very hard to discern.  Given Trump’s history, one might be forgiven for thinking he is, first and foremost, an opportunist and a narcissist in the same league with most of the men who’ve held our nation’s highest office.  Politics on a national scale is the domain of such people, which is among the main reasons I appreciate the checks on power provided by our constitutional system.

The momentum of Trumpism is Trump himself, and I suspect he will find ways to take the movement with him, and the harder the left pushes back by censorship or other bullish, un-American means, the stronger he will become, like Obi Wan Kenobi. That is not a comparison of character, but of the dynamics of ideological movements, and it carries a warning to those who would seek to make Trump a martyr for the cause.  Bad move.  Really, really bad move. 

I despise the cult of personality that surrounds Trump, as I do all charismatic movements, theological, political or social.  Bad things grow in that ground, such as all reasonable people witnessed with horror in the halls of the Capitol last week.  

I hope, naively, that whomever next reaches for the brass ring is more principled in character and measured in tone, for all our sakes. But the gravitational pull of Trump is not soon to be diminished, I’m afraid, and I don’t see anyone on the national political stage today with the power to achieve escape velocity.

For now, the movement, if not the party, is the fiefdom of Donald. God help us all. 

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The Teachable Moment About Lying

By Michelle Naranjo

Last week, I overheard an 8-year old say to her parent, "Maybe I would vote for Trump because if I robbed a bank, I could probably lie and get away with it." The parent laughed, and exhaustedly sighed through another teachable moment.

We have persevered four years of this presidency, so it seems as if we should all be able to trudge through the final 12 days.

But we can't, and we shouldn't. 

This human-made disaster isn't about the personal indiscretions, the golf, the taxes, the children, or the fascination with dictators. 

It is about the lies. They added up until there was a tipping point that has caused a historic amount of damage. 

Inciting an insurrection with repeated and documented lies should have consequences. 

If the 25th Amendment is not brought forward immediately, then there should absolutely be an impeachment as soon as possible. 

But impeachment is just the start of the means to make the wrongdoer be held accountable. There should also be prosecution to return public trust and send a strong message to the treasonous supporters alike. 

Too many have turned a blind eye too often to Trump's treasonous acts during his presidency. It is almost as if some forgot their inalienable roles as inhabitants and allowed themselves to become viewers to be bought and sold. Too many found the manipulations and bungles...funny. 

The supporters of the inciter should also be held accountable, in whatever shape that might take. Historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote, "Politicians who do not tell the simple truth perpetuate the big lie, further an alternative reality, support conspiracy theories, weaken democracy, and foment violence far worse than that of January 6, 2021."

From the eight senators and 139 representatives who consciously chose to support the lies against democracy to those who claimed that believing was more important than their fellow citizens, violence and destruction is not an acceptable tactic to change the minds of non-believers.

 The chasm in the culture of this country is repairable but is so very fragile right now. 

Democracy is showing us a teachable moment. It is exhausting; it is not amusing. 

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Natasha Romanoff Is My Girlfriend. Everybody Says So.

By Stephen Macaulay

Amendment XXV, Section 4.  “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

As rioters attacked the Capitol, Donald Trump put up a video on Twitter—a tweet that carries a label “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence” — read that again and let it sink in and realize that this is a message from the President of the United States.

He claimed he’d won the election by a landslide. That the election has been stolen from him. That “There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us—from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election. …”

Oh, and he said that the people that he loved should go home.

In the weeks following the election, neither he nor his supporters have presented any certifiable proof of any fraud. Any landslide. Any malfeasance that would lead to a change of the election results.

Yet he repeats it. Over and over. Nothing tangible. Nothing real.

There is what is generally accepted to be reality. Then there is something that is pure fantasy. Most people can discern the difference.

Not even the most rabid Marvel fanboy believes that he’s ever going to date the Black Widow. But if someone kept repeating that he was going to be dating Natasha Romanoff, would someone take him aside and suggest that that isn’t ever going to happen? That he should move on?

And if that fanboy kept repeating it, perhaps saying things like “They are keeping her from me,” wouldn’t it seem that that person is more than a bit off?

Would you allow that person to have the nuclear codes?

There is reality. Things break. Things can’t readily be put back together.

Have we not gotten to the point where people who are allegedly responsible step up and do their sworn duty to preserve and protect the United States?

—–

Trump Must Resign

By Bryan Williams

Since the release of the smart phone upon the world in the latter half of the first decade of the 21st Century, our collective societal will to have patience has been nearly eliminated. These Internet connected devices have allowed for instantaneous communication, instantaneous transfer of money across the world, and food delivered to our door within an hour. Our political and governmental machinations have not caught up. They are still painstakingly slow. That it takes two and half months between a presidential election and the inauguration of the next president is enough to make us tear our hair out (and have enough time to order a wig on Amazon to be delivered within two days).

Let me be clear: Any admiration I had for President Trump is now gone. He must go. But how? It is agonizing to think he has (as of my writing this) 291 hours left in his presidency before Joe Biden is sworn in. How do we wait that long?

Many have said Vice President Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment. Cabinet secretaries are dropping like flies with resignations over Wednesday's chaos, so soon there may not even be enough of a Cabinet left to invoke the 25th. But even if there were, in my opinion, this would be the wrong course of action. The 25th Amendment is to be used when the president is physically or mentally incapacitated. Working in the mental health field as I do, I can tell you it would be a stretch to declare Trump mentally incapacitated. Trump is mentally capable of doing many things. He is of sound mind. The problem is, he just won't do what is right. We should not degrade the 25th Amendment even though it would be tempting to do so, and I believe, could be up to legal challenge in this case.

How about impeachment by Congress? This is most attractive and should be undertaken even if there is not enough time considering how slow this process is. At the very least Congress should censure Trump.

What should happen is for Trump to resign and let Pence be our President for the balance of the remaining 291 hours. But we all know he won't. Trump is going to ride this horse until its time is up on January 20th at 11:59AM EST.

So the rest of us here in America have to be adults and have a little patience - 291 hours isn't so bad, is it?

—–

Words Do Not Equal Violence

By Andrew Boyd

When my now wife and I were early in our dating relationship, some 25 years ago, she took a position as a “scab” at the Detroit News in the midst of a writers’ strike. I recall listening to a local NPR affiliate interview with the union’s leading spokesperson, who justified physical violence as a response to verbal violence, and I thought “no.”

The next morning, I was dropping my wife off at the curb and as she sought to navigate the picket lines, same said person put a megaphone to her ear and yelled a series of pejoratives. A minute or so later, people were pulling the two of us apart. Wait, did I just expose my hypocrisy? Yes, although one might argue the proximity of the megaphone threatened real physical damage. I’m not perfect, and I failed to live to my own standards, not for the first or last time. 

Silence isn’t violence. Words aren’t violence. Violence is violence, and those who commit it are due their punishment. Left, right, center.

British psychologist Havelock Ellis observed that all civilization has, from time to time, become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution. We’ve been taking a pickax to that crust for the better part of two decades, and there are more fingerprints on that tool than we can reasonably name in this column. 

Politics is blood sport, and it has a way of bringing out the worst in people on the margins socially, emotionally and ideologically. We saw that in full measure this past summer, and again, to a much lesser degree, yesterday. In neither case would I lay the responsibility legally at the feet of anyone whose rhetoric may have played a role. We can’t equate speech with physical violence. It’s not right on principle, and on the basis of that argument, I cannot support the notion of impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment.

Here we are talking about the difference between legal and moral obligations, a critical important distinction. Are Trump’s fingerprints on that pickax? Yes. So, too, Hillary with her “deplorables” invective, and Maxine Waters, and media who run cover for BLM and Antifa activist rioters, and popular voices on both sides of the aisle.

I’m not happy with Trump. Indeed, I’m deeply, deeply disappointed. His narcissism would seem to know no bounds. He shirks all responsibility for the power and purpose of his words. Managerially and ideologically, I’ll still take him six days a week and twice on Sunday over the likes of Joe Biden, but it’s fair to wonder about the net gains or losses for the Republican Party over time.  

Trump bears no small moral stain, but none that rises to the level of legal or constitutional action, IMHO. I feel bad for Pence, though. That guy has probably endured assaults to his character that would lay low a lesser man, like me. He didn’t deserve the opprobrium leveled at him by DJT in this refusal to take extra-constitutional action. Perhaps he’ll arise as the new voice of a more principled conservative movement that stands stalwart in the face of the morally bankrupt swamp.   

In the meantime, please, everyone, talk and act with care, and imagine that the person with whom you disagree, even vehemently, may not in fact be your enemy.  

—–

Democrats Take the Senate and Manchin Becomes Big Man on Capitol Hill

By Todd Lassa

Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia was trending on Twitter late Tuesday night as the most important Senator, even before urban precinct ballot counts in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections had begun to flip the fortunes of Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff as cable news networks eagerly awaited results after polls closed. Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Ossoff decisively beat two Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. 

Manchin is a Democrat who has served deep red West Virginia in the Senate for 10 years and now has the potential to become to his party what Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has been to the GOP, although more so. Sitting in the late centrist-Democrat Robert C. Byrd’s seat, Manchin becomes a true swing vote, likely to defeat along with 50 Republican Senate bills that come from the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Senate as well as those that come up from “The Squad” wing of the House. 

The Democrats’ victories push their party to a 50-50 Senate count, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker on votes to give the party an effective majority over Republicans. Lame duck President Trump and GOP leaders tried to paint Democratic control of the House, Senate, and White House as the road to socialist damnation. But Georgia Democrats, led by likely 2022 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams and aided by such groups as Black Votes Matter, turned out about 4.5 million voters total by Tuesday, many of them using mail-in ballots. Meanwhile, President Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud in each of the swing states he lost apparently stifled Republican turnout, and his attack specifically on Georgia’s preference for Biden almost certainly prompted many supporters to stay at home.

The Reverend Raphael Warnock says he will remain leader of the Atlanta church once pastored by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and becomes the first Black senator from Georgia, the 11th Black senator in the history of the nation and one of three in the 117th Congress, with Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina, as Kamala Harris moves from the Senate to the vice presidency. 

Manchin’s power on Capitol Hill ultimately depends on where the GOP goes from here, what with Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about to be demoted to minority leader and already distancing himself from the Trump administration while attempting to warn fellow Republican senators against challenging Electoral College votes for President-elect Biden Wednesday. So far, 12 Republican senators have indicated they plan to defy McConnell and challenge the results from their respective states, including lame-duck Senator Loeffler of Georgia.

By Todd Lassa Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia was trending on Twitter late Tuesday night as […]

Twitter Trump Handed the Senate to the Democrats

By Bryan Williams

In thinking about this column, I tried to find a theme. The one that kept coming to my mind was “Let the chips fall where they may.” Ever since it became clear in early November 2020 that President Trump had lost the election, he and many Republicans have gone on a journey of lawsuits and arm-twisting with a goal of making those chips fall where they wanted them to.

Trump and the loyal Republicans in Washington spent the last two months losing the Georgia Senate runoff. What did they expect when they blurted out, “Don’t vote because the system is rigged, but please vote to defeat these socialist Democrats?” Huh?

I voted for Trump in November and I didn’t hold my nose. He won me over because I was able to separate Twitter Trump from the Trump who presides. I generally agreed with his policies. He cut taxes. He was prudent with the use of the military. He confronted China and engaged North Korea’s Kim Jong-un (with mixed results, but hey, he did more than most other presidents). Trump’s administration got us out of the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Nuclear Deal, which I think were both stinkers. He also had much success in advancing peace in the Middle East.

Then he lost in November and Twitter Trump took over and the wheels really fell off. Georgia voters noticed, and to their credit, organizers there were able to turn out the Democratic vote in volume not seen in decades.

It wasn’t all Trump’s fault. Incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were weak candidates in my opinion. Loeffler is a rich white woman who was appointed and never chosen by Georgia voters, to begin with. Perdue refused to debate Ossoff, which was a huge mistake. Also, my theory that the younger or more vigorous candidate usually wins held true in the case of Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff.

So now we have government run by the Democrats. It wasn’t inevitable, but Trump and his loyal Republicans made it inevitable with their odd behavior of the past two months. Will the Dems muck it up with their newfound power? As the outgoing President said so often, “We’ll see.”

By Bryan Williams In thinking about this column, I tried to find a theme. The one that kept […]