Trump Makes Memorial Day All about Himself

5/28/18:  The president gets Memorial Day off to a decent start at 6:01 a.m., tweeting a link to a story about a little boy he met last year at the grave of his father, a Marine killed in the line of duty.

With that formality out of the way, Trump makes the rest of the day about himself. His second tweet at 7:58 reads:

Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!

No, Mr. Trump, “those who died for our great country” would not be “happy and proud” were they able to rise from honorable graves and see what you have done. Those who died at Lexington and Concord so that our people could be free would consider your attacks on the free press a disgrace. The black soldiers from Massachusetts, cut down by the hundreds while trying to capture Ft. Fisher in 1864, would not be happy to hear you call black NFL players who protest police brutality “sons of bitches.” They would not be proud to know you now say those who protest—and to be honest, protest against you—should maybe not be in this country at all. Every Jewish soldier who ever died under the Stars and Stripes would remember your comments after the riots in Charlottesville, when you said there were “good people” on both sides, including the side made up of neo-Nazis and K.K.K. types.

The immigrants who came here, fleeing repression in Russia, starvation in Ireland and religious hatred in Poland, who came looking for a chance to make a better life than they could in Italy or India, who learned to love their adopted country, who fought and died under our flag, they would not see you as you see yourself, as the greatest president ever. They would see you as a man who tramples on the values that make this nation great. Pfc. Diego Rincon, whose family fled Columbia as refugees, and who died at 19 in Iraq, winning U.S. citizenship posthumously, would see where you stand on cutting the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. And Rincon would cringe. Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, born in Guatemala, killed in Iraq in 2003, would know that fifteen years after he paid the greatest price a man can pay for their country, you want to build a wall and keep people exactly like him out.

The 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam while trying to stop the spread of communism —while you piled up five draft deferments—would not be proud of what you’ve done so far.

Felix Longoria Jr., a Mexican-American killed fighting the Japanese in 1944 and denied a memorial service because of prejudice in his own home town, would listen to you talk about Mexicans as “murderers” and “rapists.” He would recognize the same kind of prejudice he and his family faced seven decades ago, a prejudice that blinded people even when his body came home in a coffin draped under the flag. Those who spent years in a North Vietnamese prison and died from torture and abuse—comrades of John McCain—would rise from their graves to denounce you for the hypocrite you are. Those who served with Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq (whose family you attacked), and who were later killed themselves would not be happy to see how you behave. Lt. Ashley White, killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2011, posthumously awarded a Bronze Star, would consider your mistreatment of women, your lying to even your three wives, and she would justly stand aghast.

Those who believed in honor would know you to be a man without honor.

Those who served because they believed they had a duty to country and went to war in 1812 and 1917 and 1950 and 2001 would consider your family’s entire history, of never serving at all, and shake their heads.

Those who thought freedom was always worth fighting for, and by that meant freedom for all, they would not be proud of you today.

They would be appalled.

Having had his say about heroes, and doing his best to include himself, Trump spends the rest of the day tweet-bitching about the Russian investigation.

*

For a daily dose of Trump, read more at “The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump.”

If you’d like to know way more about the Russian investigation, try “A Year of Robert Mueller.”

Anything New? The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump (Part II)

AS A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN, I HAVEN’T been this worried since 1972, during the early months of the Watergate investigation. At that point it looked as if Nixon might get away with political murder. Almost half a century later we have a lawyer for President Trump insisting that his boss could commit murder and still not be indicted. Trump, his lawyer says, could just pardon himself.

If a majority of Americans is ever ready to fall for that sort of reasoning, the U.S. Constitution will be worthless scrap paper.

(If you’d like to jump into the cesspool that is the Trump administration, and swim a few more laps, we last covered him in this post: Anything New? The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump (1/20/18 to 4/19/18) Link.

THE TRUMP ARCHIVE

4/20/18: Besides bingeing on Fox News and wondering if Melania will dump his fat ass for lying about porn stars and Playboy Bunnies, what is the President of the United States up to today? He’s fuming every time he hears the name “James Comey.” He rages every time he thinks about Comey’s memos, which Comey says outline conversations he and Trump had about the Russia investigation.

Trump hints he has tapes. Comey hopes so.

For months, Trump insisted those memos didn’t exist. He insists Comey never took notes while they were together!

Comey just made them up later to cover his F.B.I. butt.

In fact, at one point, Trump went for a kind of lying-sack-of-presidential-poop bluff. He could prove Comey was lying: 

Several weeks passed. Trump laid low. Apparently, he was laying in wait to catch Comey in a “perjury trap” of his own. (See: 1/26/18.)

Okay. No.

Trump finally admitted he was stuffed with moose dung. If there were tapes….um, he didn’t have any.

Now the Comey memos have been released. They don’t directly implicate the president in any collusion with Russians.

You know what that proves! According to the White House, the Comey memos are suddenly real and prove Trump is innocent. 

You can’t make this up.

4/21/18: Speaker Paul Ryan decides to do his part in draining the swamp by firing House chaplain Father Patrick Conroy. This is the first time in history a chaplain has been fired before completing his term.

You are probably thinking: Another sex abuse scandal! Or: Conroy must have been flying all over Kingdom Come, like Scott Pruitt! (See: 4/15/18.) Nope. Ryan took umbrage when Father Conroy offered up this prayer during House debate on the huge Republican tax cut bill:

As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.

Big bonanza for big campaign donors.

At this point you realize Ryan doesn’t care enough to even pretend he cares about the typical American. He passed a giant tax cut with hundreds of billions going to the wealthy few. He’s going to retire before he can slash Social Security, which was always his blue-eyed dream. But you wonder if he wouldn’t have fired Jesus, had he been House chaplain, for saying: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that under the Ryan/Trump tax plan each of the Koch brothers, Charles and David, will see their income taxes slashed—annually—by at least $1 billion. This explains why they donated $500,000 to “Team Ryan” in January. The Koch brothers don’t buy the message of Jesus.

They buy lawmakers.

4/22/18: Armed with—what else—an AR-15, a deranged gunman walks into a Nashville, Tennessee Waffle House and opens fire. Travis Reinking manages to kill four and wound four before a brave patron can catch him in the act of reloading and wrestle away his weapon.

The N.R.A. issues a bold statement: Guns don’t kill people, eating bacon and eggs kills people.

4/23/18: Public sector workers are on strike or wrapping up strikes in several Republican-dominated states.

A giant GOP sucker’s bet.

Teachers in Oklahoma have walked off the job, after going without a pay raise for a decade.

Arizona teachers, among the lowest-paid in the nation, have staged a massive walkout.

Kentucky teachers participated in a walkout over pension cuts and Colorado teachers have taken similar action.

Funding problems in Oklahoma worsened when a Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature slashed income taxes and cut the tax rate on oil and gas extraction from 7% to 2% in 2014. Already strapped for cash, the state dived into a lake of red ink. That’s how it goes in Republican states. You cut taxes. You promise cuts will lead to booming business. The cuts will pay for themselves. Honest! When fiscal miracles fail to materialize you freeze or cut pay for teachers, firemen and sanitation workers.

Teachers in West Virginia also walked off the job, even though state law makes it illegal for public sector workers to strike. For some reason, they were mad because they made less than teachers in 46 states.

At least they’ve got Oklahoma beat.

Yes, I know: You can make an argument that states may not be able to fund public employee pensions in the future. (Full disclosure: this blogger is collecting a teacher’s pension from the State of Ohio.)

But it might be nice, if Republicans would stop giving fat tax cuts to Big Oil and billionaires at the same time they’re crying red ink wolf. It might be nice if Republicans closed a few loopholes which allow multinational corporations to hide profits in offshore tax havens. And it might be nice if the average American worker realized what the GOP means when the party talks about making America great again. Republicans have worked hard to cripple private sector unions and worker pay has stagnated. Now they hope to gut public sector unions, too.

It’s a giant GOP sucker’s bet. Republicans promises to “bring jobs back” to America.  But it was their corporate allies—who donate consistently to Republican candidates and who have recently been rewarded with massive tax cuts—who shipped those jobs overseas. The GOP might warn your average gun-owning, working stiff that big bad liberals are coming to take his or her firepower away. It was the GOP that stood by and applauded when corporations started slashing workers’ pensions, moving jobs from “high-wage” states to “low-wage” states (always Republican-controlled) and screwing the average employee.

(Well: at least he or she still has his or her guns.)

What the GOP really seems to want is to make America great, c. 1918. In those days, if workers tried to join a union they were fired and “black-listed” to insure they never caused trouble again. Government regulations were limited, pretty much what Republicans would love to see today. If a coal mine was unsafe there were no pesky federal mine safety inspectors snooping about. In 1918, for example, 2,696 coal miners were blown to bits and crushed while at work. 

Let’s make America “great” again. Let’s return to an era when workers had few rights and fewer benefits and pay was low and the Robber Barons ruled. In 1918 companies could pay workers in scrip, good only for purchases at the company store, and then jack up prices. There were no paid sick days, no paid vacations, no overtime rules. The typical worker put in six days a week, if not seven. The twelve-hour shift was common. If a worker smashed a hand in a machine or fell into a vat of molten steel at a foundry the injured worker was fired and the cost of burying what was left of the employee who fell in the vat (if anything) rested entirely on the family’s shoulders.

That’s the way it used to be, before workers began to fight for improvements and that’s where we seem headed again. (For further discussion, see: 5/26/18; 5/27/18; 6/21/18 and 8/24/19.)

4/24/18:  In a talk to hundreds of Wall Street bankers, Mick Mulvaney, Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) tells his audience how they can help the Big Orange Buffoon drain the swamp. The bankers can throw him bags of money and he will fill the swamp up. (See: 4/23/18.)

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” the former congressman explains. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Money talks loud.

Mulvaney listens. The payday lending industry donated $60,000 to his campaigns while he was in Congress.

Now, as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), he is to protecting consumers, as E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt is to protecting the environment. Pruitt wouldn’t care if a chemical company mixed pesticide into a child’s pudding. Not if he could cut regulations on pudding! Mulvaney wouldn’t protect a consumer if two bank executives started beating him or her over the head with bags of quarters in the lobby.

Mulvaney, for example, recently dropped sanctions against one online payday lender, NDF Financial Corporation. NDF operates out of Canada and makes illegal loans now and then—in all 50 states. NDF has a slick system to milk customers of every penny. It’s part of an 11-company operation, all playing different roles in bringing in desperate consumers and shaking them down.

Annual interest rates as high as 950 percent.

Suppose you need $500 to pay off unexpected medical bills. (Not that anyone in the GOP would care.) NDF and associated companies will lend you the money for fourteen days and charge you a fee of $134.90. You’re a poor guy, and after fourteen days you can’t pay off the loan. You take out a new 14-day loan and get charged another fat fee. If you get stuck in this cycle the annual percentage rate you pay can reach 700%.

Under Mulvaney’s leadership-in-reverse, CFPB dropped a lawsuit aimed at a group of Kansas payday lenders accused of stealing millions from accounts of consumers who failed to pay debts that…well, to be honest…they didn’t owe. You can tell these lenders were legit because they operated out of a call center and made cold calls to people, to suck them into their web.

Kansas officials couldn’t stop them because they incorporated on an Indian reservation in California.

The Kansas City Star explained the beauty of this predatory scheme:

The business model used by the four companies mirrors what’s referred to as the “rent-a-tribe” structure, where a payday lender nominally establishes its business on American Indian reservations, where state regulations generally do not apply.

Some payday lenders favor the model because they can charge interest rates higher than what states allow.

How high? According to a complaint originally filed by CFPB—before Mulvaney took over—interest rates could range from 440 to 950 percent annually.

In the good old days, when President Obama was in office, the feds brought a successful case against one Kansas operation—like NDF, incorporated on an Indian reservation. Scott Tucker, head of the company, received a 17-year prison sentence for rampant fraud. His lawyer got seven years. His brother, Joel, got nailed for a $4 million fine.

Fellow Kansan Tim Coppinger also took a hit when CFPB was run by a Democratic appointee. He was forced to pay $54 million in restitution in a class-action case.

4/25/18: Let’s check in on the Stormy Daniels case. This is the case for damages filed by the porn star. Today, Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, told the judge that in all matters related to the lawsuit on behalf of Daniels, he would be pleading the Fifth “due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

You know who once said, “The mob takes the Fifth Amendment. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

President Trump.

Know who took the Fifth in court on 97 separate occasions, when asked during divorce proceedings about marital infidelity?

Citizen Trump.

4/26/18: In a rip-snorting, 29-minute call to Fox & Friends, Trump decides to vent about… everything. Part of the time he spends yelling. The rest of the time he’s sticking his foot so far down his throat, even the Three Stooges who host appear worried he’s choking.

“We’ll see you next Thursday, Mr. President.”

At one point, Trump catches a denizen of the Washington swamp in a bold-faced lie. Namely: himself.

He says Michael Cohen did represent him in the Stormy Daniels case. He tacitly admits he must have known about the $130,000 hush money payment—because he tells the Fox crew, “And from what I’ve seen, he did absolutely nothing wrong. There were no campaign funds going into this.” (See: 3/8/18.)

His performance is so unhinged even the Stooges seem alarmed. Finally, Brian Kilmeade realizes it might be time to cut Trump off. “We’ll see you next Thursday, Mr. President,” he says. “We know you have a lot to do.”

As for Trump—who also graded his work in office as A+ during the call—he thought the interview went well:

Trump felt this call went great.

*

APPARENTLY, THE THREE STOOGES aren’t the only ones who think Trump might be coming unglued. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes 14-7, to move forward with a bill to protect the Mueller investigation.

Milksop Mitch says he sees no need to bring the bill to the Senate floor; but the fact four Republicans, including committee chairman Chuck Grassley, sense danger tells us much about the fear Republicans secretly harbor regarding the nut job in the Oval Office.

Grassley is clear about the need for protection for Mueller and any special counsels to come:

Because special counsel investigations only occur where there is a conflict of interest within the executive branch, special counsel investigations are usually matters of great national concern. And Congress, by exercising its oversight powers, can help the American people to have confidence that these investigations are conducted efficiently and independently.

*

E.P.A. CHIEF SCOTT PRUITT, facing multiple investigations, spends the afternoon testifying in front of Congress. Did he ever think, lawmakers ask, that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to create a twenty-person security detail to protect him, at a cost to taxpayers of $3 million? Nope. His staff told him he could do it. Did he really need to spend taxpayer dollars to be guarded by security when he took his family on vacation to Disneyland? Pruitt never thought it was a problem. Was he aware that trickery had been employed to raise the salaries of two top aides? Pruitt says he knew nothing. Did he realize the secure phone booth he ordered for his office was going to cost $43,000? Gosh! He had no idea. Had he possibly noticed that one top political appointee, paid a princely salary by taxpayers, didn’t bother to come to the office?

How could Pruitt have known? If she didn’t come to work, he couldn’t see her and didn’t know she wasn’t in the office.

Besides, it wasn’t his fault. The aides did it.

Meanwhile, Pruitt is preparing to submit a budget that reduces E.P.A funding by $2.58 billion, or 23 percent.

4/27/18: President Twitter Thumbs is so excited he can’t wait to tap out the news! The Russian investigation is over. He’s cleared!

According to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump never saw a Russian walk into the Oval Office, never talked to Vladimir Putin about anything except the Cubs winning the World Series, and never had an inkling Russians were offering his son and son-in-law dirt to damage Hillary Clinton.

The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has released its final report, which, to be honest, they could have written on an Etch-a-Sketch without doing any investigating at all.

Trump tweets:

Just Out: House Intelligence Committee Report released. “No evidence” that the Trump Campaign “colluded, coordinated or conspired with Russia.” Clinton Campaign paid for Opposition Research obtained from Russia- Wow! A total Witch Hunt! MUST END NOW!”

Sadly, for Trump, the free press continues to do what the free press does. Reporters keep digging.

New emails show that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump’s son, Trump’s son-in-law and Trump’s campaign manager, promising to supply dirt to damage Hillary Clinton, was not just at the June 2016 meeting to talk about adoption. In an interview with Richard Engel of NBC News, she admits she has not been entirely truthful when she says that she “wasn’t an agent for anyone” when she showed up at Trump Tower two years ago.

“I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” she says. “Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general.” That makes her an informant for the Russian equivalent of our Attorney General.

Trump immediately explains to a crowd at a rally in Michigan—as he preps to run again in 2020 by ignoring the job in 2018—that this proves he’s innocent of colluding with Russia!

Here’s an actual sample of the presidential logic. “I guarantee you, I’m tougher on Russia,” he tells cheering fans.

In fact, have you heard about the lawyer? For a year, a woman lawyer, she was like, ‘Oh, I know nothing.’ ...Now all of a sudden she supposedly is involved with government. You know why? If she did that, because Putin and the groups said, ‘you know this Trump is killing us. Why don’t you say that you’re involved with government so that we could go and make their life in the United States even more chaotic.’ Look at what’s happened. Look at how these politicians have fallen for this junk. Russian collusion. Give me a break.”

It was always clear who the Russian lawyer worked for.

This is interesting, because Trump helped draft a misleading statement in July 2017 about that meeting—after the “Fake News” folks revealed the meeting had been held. In that statement he claimed participants “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” Now the Russian lawyer involved admits direct ties to Russia’s top law enforcement officer—meaning Russia’s government may have had a keen interest in doing damage to the Clinton campaign.

This may come as a shock to many who still love Donald J. Trump with a love beyond reason. But it was always clear the “woman lawyer” in question was working for the Russian government. It’s just that for two years everybody in the Trump administration refused to admit it.

(See: 7/10/17, for email exchange between Rob Goldstone and Don Jr, regarding Russian willingness to help Trump campaign.)

4/28/18: Edward Levi, appointed by President Gerald Ford to lead the Department of Justice in the wake of the Watergate scandals, once made clear his understanding of his role. “Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.” It cannot become “anyone’s weapon.”

Trump has made it clear, instead, that the rule of law is an impediment in his path. If he had his way, he said during his campaign, he’d lock Hillary up as soon as he finished the oath of office. Earlier this month he warned that former F.B.I. Director James Comey should be thrown in jail.

Trial first, anyone?

Nah. Not in Trumpistan.

“And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”

To put it plainly, in an interview with The New York Times, last December Trump made it clear what he believed the main job of the Department of Justice was. First, he whined about his Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Sessions’ failure to protect him from investigation. If only Sessions would do for him what he imagined—in an obvious case of projection—Attorney General Eric Holder did for President Obama. “I don’t want to get into loyalty,” Trump responded to a question about whether or not he had ever asked law enforcement officials for loyalty, “but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him. When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”

In other words: forget the rule of law.

Trump would have great respect for anyone in the Department of Justice if they “totally protected him.”

*

PERIODICALLY, USA TODAY checks in with a group of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016. Most still love him even though most believe the president is lying about Stormy Daniels. “I’m not in the man’s pants. I don’t know what he did when he pulled them down,” says Monty Chandler, a disabled veteran from Church Point, Louisiana. “The only evidence is her, the hush money. We’re human. We all sin. And he tried to cover it up.”

Oddly enough, Chandler believes Trump when he says the Russian investigation is a witch hunt.

No getting in Trump’s pants—or his head.

4/29/18: In “The End of Intelligence,” an editorial written by former C.I.A. head Michael V. Hayden, The New York Times allows Hayden space to focus on the boldest lies of Candidate Trump and his evil twin, President Trump.

“Ground truth doesn’t really matter.”

Hayden notes:

A)    Candidate Trump claimed he had watched a video of thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

B)     He said the father of Ted Cruz had a hand in the assassination of President Kennedy.

C)    Trump hinted that Justice Scalia had been murdered—that a pillow had been found on his face.

D)   After a disastrous speech to the Boys Scouts in July 2017, Trump claimed that a Scout official called to say it was “the greatest speech ever made to them.”

David Press, an intelligence officer who once gave daily presidential intelligence briefings, had asked Hayden one day if he thought Trump could even “distinguish between truth and untruth.”

“We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years,” Hayden told him. “But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.”

“I wondered if he had attained that high perfection when a man believes his own lies.”  

Owen Wister, The Virginian

Hayden went on to write that White House aides reportedly call Trump the “two-minute man.”

No, we’re not talking sex.

We mean “briefings.” Previous presidents often received 60-page intelligence briefings every day. Trump wants his five pages or shorter. Trump would be happy if his briefing papers simply read: “Donald Trump is the best president ever and the United States is doing great!”

The hero of Owen Wister’s cowboy novel, The Virginian, once outlined his concerns about another ranch hand. “I wondered,” the hero says, “if he had attained that high perfection when a man believes his own lies.”  

With Trump, that “high perfection” has been reached.

*

THE PRESIDENT calls on Senator John Tester of Montana to resign, after Tester helps block his nominee, Dr. Ronny Jackson, to become head of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Part of the problem stems from Trump’s snap decision to nominate Jackson, in all likelihood because Trump fell in love with Jackson the moment that he insisted during a press conference that Donald weighed only 239 pounds. That was exactly one pound less than necessary to be labeled “obese.” From the looks of Trump in golf pants, it was at least twenty pounds shy of reality. This nomination came despite Jackson’s lack of administrative experience.

Many veterans’ groups wondered if the nominee, accustomed to running a White House unit of roughly 40 doctors and nurses, could transition smoothly to leadership of the VA. Veterans Affairs has an annual budget of $186 billion and employs 360,000 people to provide healthcare for nearly ten million veterans at 145 hospitals and 1,200 outpatient clinics.

Still, Trump was mad at Tester—and seemed to question why we have a confirmation process at all. Why not let him put anyone he wants in any position! Trump has already suggested John Dunkin, the pilot of his personal jet, to head the Federal Aviation Administration, an agency with a $16 billion annual budget. He has nominated Wendy Vitter for a seat on the federal bench. Vitter then refused during her confirmation hearing to say if she believed the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was “correctly decided.”

(This was the decision of a unanimous court which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools.)

4/30/18: Today might be a good day to give Trump credit for movement in relations with North Korea. President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Kim Jong-un have met to discuss ending a state of war that has existed since 1950. Kim is talking about denuclearizing the peninsula.

“Nobel, Nobel.”

Naturally, Trump and his supporters believe this proves the president is the greatest leader ever. At a rally over the weekend the audience chanted, “Nobel, Nobel.” Still, it’s hard to imagine Trump—who often talks cavalierly about nuclear war—every receiving the Peace Prize.

Naturally, the president had to be a dick in discussing matters. At one point he insisted he shouldn’t have been left to deal with North Korea, as if he wanted to be elected president, but didn’t want to have to handle complicated world problems. Mostly, he wanted to talk about his greatness, a greatness that rested on the many impressive skills of his great self. He would fix the problem all by himself. He would solve the North Korean nuclear puzzle when no one else could. “The United States has been played beautifully, like a fiddle, because you had a different kind of a leader,” Trump said. “We’re not going to be played, okay? We’re going to hopefully make a deal. If we don’t, that’s fine. The United States in the past was played like a fiddle.” (See: 12/25/18; 12/8/19.)

Trump couldn’t just say that previous administrations dealt with difficulties too. North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon when George W. Bush was in office. Pressure to force the North to halt testing failed because neither China nor Russia would help. North Korean missile tests while Obama was in charge increased the danger. Tough economic sanctions were imposed. China remained unhelpful. So long as China traded with the North, sanctions failed.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration managed to put in place crippling sanctions on Iran. By 2015, Iran had enough enriched uranium to build an estimated 8-10 atomic bombs and the skill and capacity to build its first bomb in 2-3 months. In the face of growing danger, China, Russia, Great Britain, France and Germany signed on along with the United States for a deal to end sanctions in return for Iranian agreement not to pursue a nuclear weapons program for ten years. Iran shipped 98% of its enriched uranium to Russia. Iran agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor facilities to insure they complied. The IAEA has consistently reported since—fiddles aside—that the Iranians are abiding by the agreement.

Iran has no nuclear weapons.

So, what does the Trump administration plan to do? Trump would like to tear up the deal—which he recently called a “disaster” and “insane.” The French, Germans and British say the deal is working as intended.

In fact, two of Trump’s favorite people—and we do not mean Playboy Bunnies—agreed in a phone call today that the Iranian agreement should be preserved and fully implemented. Those buddies: Vladimir Putin, Trump’s Secret Santa pal, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

*

TRUMP loves Macron—as we saw recently during the first state visit of Trump’s tenure in office. With reporters looking on, the President of the United States appeared to have a foreign policy boner. “We have a very special relationship,” Trump continued, referring to Macron, who stood by his side.

“In fact,” Trump said, glancing at his best French friend, “I’ll get that little piece of dandruff off.”

With that, he flicked some speck on the French president’s shoulder and grinned at TV cameras like some lovable dope. “We have to make him perfect—he is perfect,” the Big Orange Buffoon explained.

“I believe that against ignorance we have education…Against the threats on the planet, science.”

President Emmanuel Macron

The next day, in a speech to Congress, Macron went out of his way to point out the critical foreign policy mistakes of the Trump administration. Vox highlighted five times Mr. Perfect rebuked the Buffoon. When it came to climate change, Macron explained the different paths one might take. “I believe that against ignorance we have education,” he began, implying that Trump was the champion of ignorance. He listed other dualities, finishing with this: “Against the threats on the planet, science.”

Climate change wasn’t a “hoax, or a communist ploy dreamed up to hurt the United States. Macron explained:

Some people think that securing current industries and their jobs is more urgent than transforming our economies to meet the global challenge of climate change. I hear these concerns. But we must find a smooth transition to a low-carbon economy. Because what is the meaning of our life, really, if we work and live destroying the planet…What is the meaning of our life if our decision, our conscious decision, is to reduce the opportunities for our children and grandchildren?

By polluting the oceans, not mitigating CO₂ emissions, and destroying our biodiversity—we are killing our planet. Let us face it. There is no planet B.

Macron also mentioned the dangers of “Fake News.” But with the greatest liar in U.S. history occupying the Oval Office, you knew he was thinking of Trump when he warned, “Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy, because democracy is about true choices and rational decisions. The corruption of information is an attempt to corrode the very spirit of our democracies.”

How about scrapping the Iran deal? Good idea or bad?

We must ensure stability and respect sovereignty of the nations, including that one of Iran, which represents a great civilization. Let us not replicate past mistakes in the region. Let us not be naive on one side. Let us not create new walls ourselves on the other side. There is an existing framework called the JCPOA to control the nuclear activity of Iran. We signed it at the initiative of the United States. We signed it, both the United States and France. That is why we cannot say we should get rid of it like that.

Or to put it more succinctly, in terms of foreign affairs, the Trump administration really sucks!

The sun sets over Washington.

May 1, 2018: The sun rises over Washington. Trump wakes. Trump learns The New York Times has published an article about forty-nine questions the Mueller team would like him to answer. Trump tweets angrily.

It’s what Trump does:

So disgraceful that the questions concerning the Russian Witch Hunt were “leaked” to the media. No questions on Collusion. Oh, I see...you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!

The president tunes in to Fox News. This riles him further. He tweets again, “It would seem very hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened! Witch Hunt!”

He lies with stunning abandon.

In reality, the president should be happy to see any questions in advance because every man, woman and child on his legal team lives in fear he will have to testify under oath. The fear is that—no matter how carefully they might prepare him to meet with Mueller’s team—he won’t be able to avoid stepping into what his handlers call a “perjury trap.”

A “perjury trap,” as far as this liberal blogger can tell, is where you ask the Big Orange Buffoon questions about allegedly illegal activities and he does what he always does. He lies with stunning abandon.

Here we provide a list of some of the questions Mueller would like the President of the United States to answer—with helpful notes of explanation:

What did you know about phone calls that Mr. Flynn made with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, in late December 2016?

When Flynn lied about what was discussed during the phone call—and lied to Vice President Jesus—not investigators—that was the cause of his removal as National Security Adviser.

What did you know about Sally Yates’s meetings about Mr. Flynn?

Eighteen days passed between the time Yates informed the White House that Flynn had lied and the time Flynn was fired.

After the resignations, what efforts were made to reach out to Mr. Flynn about seeking immunity or possible pardons?

As a former F.B.I. counsel recently explained, prosecutors like Mueller often ask the subject of investigation questions for which they know the answers. This is where Trump may trigger a “perjury trap.”

Mueller has asked the courts to delay Flynn’s sentencing for at least sixty days. This would indicate a cooperating witness is currently yielding up information helpful to the prosecution.

What was the purpose of your Jan. 27, 2017, dinner with Mr. Comey, and what was said?

This was the dinner—Trump alone with Comey, at Trump’s request—during which the F.B.I. director says the president wanted to know more about the Steele Dossier and said he needed “loyalty” from Comey.

What was the purpose of your Feb. 14, 2017 meeting with Mr. Comey, and what was said?

Flynn had resigned the day before. According to Comey, the president first cleared the Oval Office of others, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Then he asked him to go easy on the investigation.

What did you know about the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Flynn and Russia in the days leading up to Mr. Comey’s testimony on March 20, 2017?

Director Comey revealed publicly in testimony before Congress that members of the Trump campaign were being investigated.

What did you do in reaction to the March 20 testimony? Describe your contacts with intelligence officials?

According to the Times, Trump asked the nation’s top intelligence official, Dan Coats, “to pressure Mr. Comey to back off his investigation.”

What was the purpose of your April 11, 2017, statement to Maria Bartiromo?

In that interview, Trump complained that Comey had been “very, very good to Hillary Clinton…If he weren’t, she would be, right now, going to trial.” Keep those comments in view. As Trump sees it, the law should be used to bludgeon opponents.

Regarding the decision to fire Mr. Comey: When was it made? Why? Who played a role?

There’s a better than fair chance investigators have already talked to witness about what Trump said and what his intent was in days leading up to the firing of Director Comey. Here again: a perjury trap waits if Trump lies.

What did you mean in your interview with Lester Holt about Mr. Comey and Russia?

It was during that famous interview that Trump said he was really going to fire Comey for one reason: the Russian investigation.

What was the purpose of your May 12, 2017, tweet?

This was the tweet in which the president warned that Comey had better hope there were no tapes of their previous conversations. For context: Comey responded, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” Trump admitted later there were no tapes.

What did you think and do regarding the recusal of Mr. Sessions?

Sessions has already met with Mueller’s investigators. Trump has never forgiven him for his recusal, which allowed Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General to appoint a Special Counsel.

When did you become aware of the Trump Tower meeting?

Here may be the biggest “perjury trap” of all, one large enough to grab a grizzly bear and hold him fast. No one involved in this meeting (in June 2016) originally remembered it had been held. Then no one remembered what the true purpose of the meeting was. By the time the free press revealed that purpose, the president, his son Don Jr. and close advisers had crafted a phony cover story. They insisted the meeting was primarily about adoption—a claim, if made under oath today, which would clearly merit a finding of perjury.

It would be perjury Armageddon.

What involvement did you have in the communication strategy, including the release of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails [related to this meeting]?

Basically, why did you knowingly craft a cover story, regarding the June 2016 meeting, that you should have known—or did know—was a lie?

What communication did you have with Michael Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign?

What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding Russian sanctions?

Those two questions—--and several others—about a potentially massive deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow—hint at investigators’ interest in a quid pro quo, involving Trump campaign officials, and perhaps Trump himself, with agents of a hostile foreign power.

What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?

This is a new line of inquiry. It may indicate that Rick Gates, Manafort’s right-hand man, also known to be cooperating with the Mueller probe, could have spilled dirt on the dirty tricks of Team Trump 2016.

What did you know about communication between Roger Stone, his associates, Julian Assange or WikiLeaks?

(For more on Stone, jump to: 1/25/19.)

5/2/18: Another day in Trumpistan! E.P.A. Administrator Pruitt is facing eleven investigations. That’s probably a record for any cabinet member.

Pruitt testified recently in front of Congress. He insisted he didn’t know about any of the ridiculous spending or pretty much anything else that was happening at his agency. At times, you had to wonder if Pruitt realized he ran the E.P.A. or if he thought he was a circus clown or bronco buster.

Former E.P.A. deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski was blunt. He called his old boss a “bald-faced liar.” Chmielewski, a Trump appointee, not some “libtard” hater, assured a reporter, “100 percent,” he was forced out after questioning Pruitt’s lavish spending. In addition, he was threatened by the head of Pruitt’s abnormally large security detail, Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta. With investigative storm clouds gathering and lightning striking inches from his feet, Perrotta suddenly decided to resign his post.

Also leaving on the spur of the moment was Albert Kelly, Pruitt’s choice to head the E.P.A. Superfund cleanup program.

Kelly had had zero experience working on environmental issues and had never dealt with matters related to toxic waste. He did have banking experience in Oklahoma, from whence he and Pruitt came. Alas, Kelly had earned a lifetime ban from the financial industry as a result of shady dealings and had once helped Pruitt get a sweet deal on a home purchase. The seller was a former lobbyist, who took $100,000 less for the property than had previously been paid, and the “buyer” was a shell company. This obscured the fact Pruitt was going to be the person who lived in the house and the person who got a sweet deal from a lobbyist.

Meanwhile, a Moroccan news agency revealed that a second lobbyist helped arrange an expensive trip to Morocco, by Pruitt and a few of his best buds, including that lobbyist, Richard Smotkin. And why did the head of the E.P.A. even need to fly—first class, of course—to Morocco? No one really knows. According to Moroccan news reports, however, Pruitt stayed at the luxurious Hotel Sofitel Marrakech while he was visiting the country.

*

A SECOND TRUMP DOCTOR is in the news. Harold Bornstein, Trump’s personal physician for 36 years, recently told NBC that in February 2017, after he revealed that Trump was taking a prescription medicine for hair growth, his office was raided by Trump goons. Leading the raid was Keith Schiller, longtime Trump bodyguard, and at that time Director of Oval Office Operations. That made him a paid employee of the federal government.

Schiller was joined by a top lawyer from the Trump Organization and another “large man” Bornstein didn’t recognize.

Trump wrote his own medical report.

Not only did Schiller demand Bornstein hand over medical records, without providing documents required before such a transfer could take place, he seized the originals—which by New York State law would be the property of the doctor. Bornstein says he felt, “raped, frightened and sad.” Schiller demanded that a framed photo of Bornstein and Trump be removed from the wall.

According to NBC News: “Bornstein said the original and only copy of Trump’s charts, including lab reports under Trump’s name as well as under the pseudonyms his office used for Trump, were taken.”

Well, be honest now, are you the least bit surprised Trump used pseudonyms at his doctor’s office?

Finally, Bornstein told a reporter that a letter he supposedly wrote in December 2015, certifying Trump’s health and fitness to be president, was in fact written by…Donald J. Trump.

“He wrote it himself,” Dr. Bornstein said.

At the time, news reports quoted Bornstein as saying, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”  Not just healthy! He’d be the healthiest ever!

Trump had been mocking “low energy” Jeb Bush, and warning that Crooked Hillary lacked the “stamina” to do the job.

So “Bornstein” gushed:

Over the past 39 years, I am pleased to report that Mr Trump has had no significant medical problems. Mr Trump has had a recent complete medical examination that showed only positive results. Actually, his blood pressure, 110/65, and laboratory test results were astonishingly excellent.

Trump didn’t drink. Trump didn’t smoke. He’d never had cancer or required a knee or hip replacement. He had lost “at least fifteen pounds” in the last year. In other words, Trump was a stud. “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” the letter writer added for fun.

(Wait, does this mean Trump probably wrote the famous “bone spurs” letter, as well?)

*

YOU MAY remember that Dr. Ronny Jackson also discussed Trump’s health in a televised meeting in January. Like Bornstein before him, Jackson seemed to lay it on thick. Trump was in “excellent” health, both mentally and physically. “It is called genetics...” Jackson smiled broadly before a gathering of reporters. “Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.” Trump wasn’t just a stud currently. Jackson insisted he’d be a stud for a second term.

Or a second century!!!

Even the fact the president was sleeping only four or five hours a night didn’t trouble Dr. Jackson. Not a problem! That’s because Trump had “a very unique ability to just get up in the morning and reset” or “push the reset button,” which “has helped him with his stress level.”

(I wondered at the time if Jackson had ever read any of the B.O.B.’s early morning rage-tweets.)

Finally, Jackson noted that the president was 6' 3", which apparently meant he was still growing at age 71. As Politico quickly noted, Trump’s New York driver’s license lists his height at 6' 2," and at that height, and what Jackson said was Trump’s weight (239 pounds), the president would officially be obese.

*

A RUMOR HAS LEAKED that the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard-right Republicans, may be working on impeachment articles to get rid of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

“The Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

If you watch a lot of Fox News, you’d be cheering this development. If you had a grip on reality, you’d be worried. These lackeys want to get rid of the one man who protects Mueller—so they can get rid of Mueller—so they can end an investigation into the misdeeds of their boy, the Big Orange Buffoon.

Rosenstein was not dainty in response. “I can tell you there have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite some time,” he told reporters. “And I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

Let that sink in.

Trump’s bootlickers in the House of Representatives would love to shut an investigation down—not because it’s taking too long—but before it’s too late to protect all the assorted crooks.

5/3/18: It appears the Trump legal team is giving up. Ty Cobb resigns. Don McGahn is looking for an exit. Rudy Giuliani says, “fuck it,” and admits the president has been lying all along. Trump knew about the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, even though he told reporters he didn’t.

An existential threat to our system of government.

Rudy’s comments only get weirder. He mentions that any move by investigators to go after Ivanka would probably be too much for either he or the president to tolerate. “Ivanka Trump? I think I would get on my charger and go right into…their offices with a lance if they go after Ivanka.” If Mueller went after the president’s daughter, “the whole country will turn on” him.

Well, then, what about her husband, Jared Kushner? “Jared is a fine man, you know that,” Rudi told his interviewer, but, “Men are disposable. But a fine woman like Ivanka? Come on!” he added.

As for me, your hard-working blogger, I haven’t been this worried since the early months of the Watergate investigation, when it looked like Nixon & Company might get away with political homicide.

For fifteen months, as Trump has run amok, trampling American values, vilifying the free press, threatening to jail political foes, and tweeting madly in an effort to cast a pall over the Department of Justice and F.B.I., I have had one consolation. The American people seemed not to be falling for his tricks. When he called critics “slimeballs,” “lowlifes” and “liars,” I believed no sensible person could be duped by his deceits. Again, and again, he complained about “Fake News.” With stunning regularity, the “Fake” stories proved true. He called the U.S. legal system a “disgrace” and a “disaster” and wanted long-standing Senate rules altered so he could have his way.

Opinion polls gave me hope. (I’m not like Trump. I don’t believe in polls only when they reflect what I want to believe.) They showed, generally, that the American people were not buying his line.

Now the polls are starting to narrow. Taken in aggregate, opinion polls are very accurate. Till recently the president was down in most job approval ratings by 10-15 points. Now almost every poll shows his ratings moving in a positive direction—assuming you love Trump. Reuters/IPSOS had him down 39 percent to 58 percent, approval/disapproval, on April 10. Yesterday, the same poll put him at 49% to 49%. The Rasmussen poll, which tends to be an outlier, has had him fluctuating, up a little, down a little, in recent weeks. Monmouth had the president down 14 points on March 5. On April 30 he had closed the gap to 3.

I see these numbers and gag. As a former history teacher, I realize full well opinions vary. I understand what Sophocles meant, two millennia ago, when he said, “The wise are doubtful.”

I know I could be wrong.

I also know history. From everything I can tell, Trump represents an existential threat to our system of government. I believe the U.S. Constitution will be imperiled if Republican toadies (I don’t mean all Republicans) dominate Congress after 2018. I believe the rule of law might be doomed, if not permanently, at least till 2024, if Trump wins a second term. The list of bootlickers, grovelers and sycophants that bring ruin upon our democracy will be long, assuming we have a system twenty years from now, where the possibility of publishing such a list still exists.

A study of history shows that societies routinely fail to see disaster coming. Or they do see it but have no idea how to respond. The Mayans failed to deal with environmental degradation. First their food supply collapsed. Then their society degenerated amid city vs. city warfare. The German people elected Adolf Hitler and he broke loose to unleash hell. Brazil’s government today is controlled by oligarchs and Brazilian politicians are their tools. The Chinese have an untenable imbalance between male and female births and a society top-heavy with an aging population that a youthful cohort will find impossible to support. A sixth of the U.S. economy revolves around healthcare. Whether you like Obamacare or loathe it, over time the costs will be unsustainable.

My biggest worry, however, is Donald J. Trump. I do not doubt one bit that he’d close The New York Times and jail political opponents without trial if he believed he could only save himself. 

How can you tell Sarah Sanders is lying? She's standing at the podium.

5/4-5/5/18: Various members of the Liars’ Club start the weekend off by trying to explain which lies currently are official lies. Did the President of the United States know about the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels or did he not? In February, Trump’s personal attorney told the American people his client did not. Michael Cohen claimed he paid the settlement out of the goodness of his nearly bottomless lawyer’s heart.

Pressed by the free press to explain, Cohen next claimed he used a home equity loan to raise the cash.

Don’t worry, though, he was not reimbursed. You had to be a little bit dense to swallow that.

Eventually, reporters forced Press Secretary Pinocchio to answer questions regarding the hush money payment (see: 3/8/18). Oh, no, Sanders said, the president never knew about the payment. The president would never have sex with a porn lady! Trump always kept his weenie in his pants.

Now, two months later, Pinocchio looked like she was swallowing castor oil while dealing with fresh questions. And you knew: Sanders had to go home, and sit up late at night, hating her job, knowing every day she was standing in front of reporters and trying to convince them a pile of steaming hippo crap was a beautiful sculpture.

Reporters kept poking around for truth, which has everything to do with what true journalists do. Eventually, representatives of the free press cornered the head of the Liars’ Club on Air Force One. Did Trump know anything about the payment to Daniels? No, Donald J. Trump said.

Then why did Cohen make the payment, a reporter inquired?

“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” the president said. “Michael Cohen is my attorney and you’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.”

At this point, you had to imagine only fools could be falling for such shit. Still, ardent Trump fans believed what he said. He could have stood and drooled for five minutes. They wouldn’t have noticed.

Unfortunately, for the Liars’ Club, the story continued to unravel. Had Cohen worked in any capacity for the Trump Organization during the 2016 campaign? This could lead to questions about campaign finance violations if the answer was yes. “No!” all the members of the Club cried in unison. No one at the Trump Organization could believe anyone would ask such a question! Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, pointed out that at least one email sent by Cohen, related to the hush money payment, came from his address at the Trump Organization.

Another legal filing related to the Daniels case was signed by Jill A. Martin, a different lawyer for the Trump Organization. Hey, no big deal, all the liars who worked at Fox News said.

Martin was merely filling out legal papers on her free time.

For fun.

It was soon reported by The New York Times that a bunch of lawyers working for Trump were about to quit. In a pair of tweets in March the president howled about more “Fake News.” God damn! He and his supporters hated “Fake News.” Eleven days later John Dowd, his top defender, resigned. Ty Cobb lasted longer, stepping down at the end of April. As for the “Failing New York Times” and it’s “purposely…false story,” the reporter on the story was soon shown to be approximately 103% right. Maggie Haberman had predicted that Emmet T. Flood would be added to Trump’s team.

On May 2 he was.

Meanwhile, the Liars’ Club added another big name to the ever-changing list of paid legal liars. Trump would go with Rudy Giuliani. Rudy immediately began assuring everyone that no, the President of the United States would not sit down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In his first real day on the job Rudy let slip on Sean Hannity’s show that Trump did know about the payment to Daniels. But don’t worry! Trump paid Cohen back.

Even Hannity (a founding member of the Liars’ Club) seemed stunned. This was going to require a creative new round of lying, to replace all the lies Giuliani had just blown to bits. True, Hannity was happy to lie for Trump, so long as cable ratings remained high. But even his most obtuse viewers might start to notice that the president was lying—at the very least, to his third wife.

Rudy added helpfully that Trump paid Cohen back by putting him on a $35,000 monthly retainer, “with a little profit and a little extra margin for paying taxes.” So, what? Four months? Five? That would come out to a pretty good payday of $175,000, or $130,000 for Stormy and $45,000 for Cohen.

The president “didn’t know about the specifics of [the payment], as far as I know,” Rudy continued, “but he did know about the general arrangement that Michael would take care of things like this. Like I take care of things like this for my clients. I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along.”

In another interview later the same day, Rudy stuck his other foot in his mouth. Okay. Cohen had been paid a total of $460,000 for his pains. Or was it $470,000? Giuliani wasn’t sure.

But Rudy was out of feet.

If empty heads in red MAGA hats were spinning, the next morning Rudy showed up on Fox & Friends and gave them another spin. Giuliani tried to stick a third foot in his mouth. But he was out of feet. This time he offered up the nugget that Cohen might have gotten a great deal in the hush money settlement with Daniels. “My God, this is cheap,” Rudy said Cohen must have thought to himself. “Let me get this signed up and signed off.” Why this was almost “pocket change” for a man like Trump. As Rudy saw it, $130,000 was nothing to worry about when it came to keeping a porn lady from spilling the beans. Just imagine, he asked the horrified hosts, “if that [story] came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.”

Yes, imagine. The Big Orange Buffoon might not be president!

But that wasn’t Trump’s real motivation. Oh, no. According to Rudy, he only wanted to spare his wife’s feelings.

Such a thoughtful spouse.

Could the story get any more bizarre? It could. Thursday morning the Buffoon had to do some tweet-lying. First, Trump claimed that any hush money paid “had nothing to do with the campaign.” Then he admitted his personal attorney had received a monthly retainer, as Rudy said:

…from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA. These agreements are.....

...very common among celebrities and people of wealth. In this case it is in full force and effect and will be used in Arbitration for damages against Ms. Clifford (Daniels). The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,.....

...despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair. Prior to its violation by Ms. Clifford and her attorney, this was a private agreement. Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction.”

But the questions only multiplied.

The First Lady had to be asking how much Cohen was paid—when the payments began—apparently twelve months ago—and how many women he hushed up by stuffing their mouths with bundles of cash. We already know two Playboy Bunnies have accused Trump of conducting affairs. One of those affairs was before he married Melania, but at the time he was engaged to Marla Maples, who was soon to give birth to their child. The second affair took place during the same period Trump was boinking Stormy, and when he was definitely married to Melania, his third wife.

The next day, Press Secretary Pinocchio tried to clean up Rudy’s first mess. According to The Hill, she was telling colleagues behind the scenes Giuliani’s comments left her in an “untenable position.” 

Now she had to go out in front of the press and admit this was the first time she had heard that her boss had reimbursed Cohen. It probably made her choke on her words to know she was standing at the podium, a pillar of Christian righteousness, and prevaricating about payoffs to porn stars.

Still, the pay is pretty good.

She soldiered on, saying six times during one press briefing that she was not misleading the public. Not at all! Not at all! She was providing “the best information I had at the time.”

By Saturday morning a fresh layer of possible lies had been added to the pile of hippo poo. According to The New York Times, Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization had:

…known since last year the details of how Mr. Cohen was being reimbursed, which was mainly through payments of $35,000 per month from the trust that contains the president’s personal fortune, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement.

For those who care about the U.S. Constitution and believe absolutely in the rule of law, if even half of this was true, the questions were far more important than who did what, when and where, in matters of sleazy sex. If Trump would lie about this and lie without restraint why would anyone, no matter what size red MAGA hat they screwed to their cranium, not be coming to the realization that they had been sold a bill of goods in voting for the Big Lying Orange Buffoon.

5/6/18: Random notes on the Trump economy: The April jobs report is out. It’s solid, with 164,000 jobs added (preliminary report). This keeps alive a streak of 91 months of jobs growth.

Trump fans tend to ignore the fact that the first 76 months of good numbers were piled up under Obama.

True, under Trump, unemployment declined to 3.9% which is good; but workers’ wages have not increased as much as hoped.

.

Nearly half cannot afford emergency medical expenses.

Here we should note that many Trump supporters have ample reason to feel left behind. Adjusting for inflation, in 1970, 92% of Americans, age 30, were making more than their parents at that same age. By 2010 that figure had fallen, for those born in 1980, to 50%. A study by the Federal Reserve finds that 46% of workers would not have cash to pay emergency medical expenses of $400 or higher. (The median out-of-pocket cost of emergency medical care is now $1,000.) One in four persons surveyed said they went without dental care to save money. As for those without health insurance, 41% said they skipped doctor’s visits.

5/7/18: The Rudy Giuliani Traveling Circus makes the TV talk show rounds. Now we hear him claim the president wants to testify in the Mueller probe. Rudy insists that Trump shouldn’t have to. If he did, the president would probably invoke the Fifth Amendment.

No one, least of all Rudy, could say exactly what Trump knew about the payoff to Stormy Daniels, or when he knew what he knew, or answer inquiries about other possible payments. In yet another disastrous interview, Rudy responded to a question by George Stephanopoulos on the show This Week. Could Lawyer Cohen have made more payments to more women?

“I have no knowledge of that,” Giuliani winced and blinked. “But I would think if it was necessary, yes.” 

Even Kellyanne Conway, glibbest of liars—her salary paid by taxpayers—told Jake Tapper on CNN she had no idea if similar payoffs were made to anyone else. For once she dared not risk a definitive “no.”

“They didn’t cross my desk as campaign manager,” she dodged. “And I would also tell you that I’m happy to answer these questions, but I have limited visibility into what Mayor Giuliani is talking about, because, politely, he is the president’s counsel. I am the president's counselor,” she said.

Different liars, different jobs.

Finally, she insisted that Trump had not been lying when he told reporters that he did not know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels.

“No,” he had said. He did not elaborate.

Pressed again on why Cohen would have made the payment, Trump responded: “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.” Only Cohen knew what was going on. Now Conway insisted the Big Orange Buffoon still wasn’t lying.

So, she still wasn’t lying.

Conway was in the unenviable position of lying to help a liar.

Conway tap-danced round the problem and told Tapper that you had to look at the president’s three recent tweets to understand the point he had been trying to make. “I’m going to relay to you what the president has told me, which is the best I can do. He didn’t know it at the time the payment occurred.”

Tapper refused to let Conway off the hook. 

He noted that reporters on Air Force One had asked the president, “Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?”

He responded, “No. No. What else?”

The immediate follow up question was, “Do you know where he [Cohen] got the money to make that payment?”

“No. I don’t know,” Trump replied.

“That’s present tense,” Tapper pointed out to Conway. “But he did know.”

Conway was in the unenviable position of lying to help a liar. But Giuliani had made her lie for Sunday morning obsolete. He had admitted that Trump paid Cohen back over several months—and that he paid him back before he denied knowing about the matter on Air Force One.

Even Fox News was forced to report this story, because Giuliani had been speaking on Fox News. They just didn’t choose to put 1 + 1 together and tax the brains of their loyal viewers.

Postscript: We learn that U.S. Senate investigators want to know if Jill Stein’s Green Party got money from the Russians during the 2016 campaign.

Stein’s name has been linked to Don Jr. and the Senate’s interest is probably not good news for Don Jr. or the Trump team.

5/8/18: Trump withdraws from the Iran nuclear arms deal, which means he kept his campaign promise, albeit a stupid one. Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain and Japan, all U.S. allies, oppose the move. Turkey calls it “an unfortunate step. The European Union faults the move, citing the fact that almost everyone except Trump believes the deal was working. Iran has zero nukes today—the perfect number. “We fully trust the work, competence and autonomy of the International Atomic Energy Agency that has published 10 reports certifying that Iran has fully complied with its commitments,” an EU spokesman offers. China and Russia, which had agreed to the deal, make it clear they’re not interested in renegotiating.

Iran threatens to resume uranium enrichment. This they had ceased, according to IAEA inspectors.

Our allies are not pleased.

5/9/18: The Man Who Would Be Mussolini is reported to have erupted in a rage on hearing illegal border crossings are on the rise again. Trump is said to be fuming because crossings in April and May have risen to 50,000, triple the number during the same period in 2017.

Trump is playing the Hater’s Game.

America, Trump grumbled, has the “dumbest immigration laws anywhere on earth,”  “the worst immigration laws in history.” These were “laws that were written by people that truly could not love our country.”

That’s the Hater’s Game: Frame the case in terms of Trump vs. evil, loyal vs. traitor. It worked for Mussolini. In its most toxic form, it worked for Hitler. And in that toxic form it works for Kim Jong-un today. You paint your opponents as irredeemable enemies of the nation—of the State.

Good vs. evil—and the State represents good.

George Orwell already explained.

5/10/18: Wages for the average American worker are up, but despite the decline in unemployment, little more than in recent years. The average wage increase hit three percent annually in January 2015, once recovery from the recession took hold. It has fluctuated since, from a high of 3.9 percent, annualized, in November and December 2016, when Obama was in office, to a low of 2.9 percent in December 2017 and again in February 2018. For March the average median gain was 3.3 percent, year-over-year.

For the 12-month period from April 2017 to April 2018 the inflation rate nationally was 2.5 percent.

In other words, the average worker wasn’t gaining all that much ground; and the average worker had way less chance of having affordable healthcare since President Trump took office.

5/11/18: At 9:02 a.m. I check the president’s Twitter feed. Not a tweet for the day is to be found (or if he has tweeted it hasn’t been posted yet on the site I check). Even better, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly hasn’t said anything insulting about immigrants all weekend.

As a former Marine, I believe General Kelly is proving that the skills which make you a good combat leader don’t necessarily mean you’re going to have a firm grip on complex social issues. If you want stuff blown up, Kelly is your man. If you want someone to comment with insight on immigration, probably you’d do better with almost anyone else (except Trump).

The Washington Post ran an interesting article recently, comparing Kelly’s “keep-the-riff-raff-out” comments regarding today’s immigrants with the Kelly family tree. It turns out seven of his eight great-grand parents were immigrants, three from Ireland, four from Italy.

Since I taught American history for decades, I might note that Irish immigrants were almost entirely low-skilled (and starving) individuals when they fled their country in the face of the Great Famine. Nor were they welcome here. They were usually uneducated, spoke limited English, and, worst of all in the minds of many natives (not those Natives), they were Catholic. It was said repeatedly that the Irish would never be loyal to anyone but the Pope.

Italian immigrants, arriving generally after 1900, were considered equally undesirable. They were “swarthy,” not of the “best racial stock,” according to some of the leading thinkers of the era. It was also said they brought crime with them—and, of course, some did. But every Italian male, according to the nativist thinking of that time, was a mafia member in the making.

For that reason, Kelly’s recent comments seem ignorant at best. We already know the president never reads a book. That means his ignorance is profound. Kelly seems little better. Asked about illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border, he told reporters: “Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS13.”

So far, so good. Kelly sounded like he grasped the nuances that escaped his clueless Hater Boss.

Alas, Kelly kept rambling: “But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society.”

These immigrants did not speak English well, he warned, as if he imagined his Italian great-grandparents did. Today’s immigrants, Kelly added, were “overwhelmingly rural people” from countries where “fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm…They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws.”

That “the laws are the laws” is a tautology.

That immigrants in the first generation have difficulty assimilating has always been true. Yet the first-generation Irish helped build our railroads and canals. The first-generation Italians went to work in coal mines and steel mills, working long hours for low pay. Today, first-generation Mexicans and Hondurans roof homes, groom golf courses and nanny our kids. The second-generation Irish became policemen in Boston. The second-generation Italians, like the DiMaggio brothers, starred on the diamond. Today, second-generation Mexicans and Hondurans in the DACA program join the United States military (you’d think Kelly would notice), care for the sick in hospitals and teach in our schools.

5/12/18: When it comes to draining the swamp the Trump administration may not be any worse than previous administrations—but it’s definitely no better. And there seems to be a predisposition to help Russian individuals and entities whenever it can.

CNN reports:

A former senior campaign and transition aide to President Donald Trump recently inked a deal to help a Russian oligarch’s conglomerate shed sanctions the Trump administration slapped on them last month.

Bryan Lanza, who is in regular contact with White House officials, is lobbying on behalf of the chairman of EN+ Group, an energy and aluminum firm presently controlled by Oleg Deripaska…a billionaire who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and was the target of US sanctions imposed last month.

New alligators swimming in the swamp include Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager, who started his own Washington consulting business after the election. “Trump doesn’t make a decision without checking with me,” he has told clients who want access. Brian Ballard, Trump’s longtime Florida fundraiser has also come to town, as has Susie Wiles, who led his campaign in that state.

Lots of Russians.

And how about more Russians! CNN continues:

Former New York Republican Rep. John Sweeney has made more than $200,000 lobbying on behalf of a European pipeline venture owned by Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian natural gas company, according to federal lobbying disclosures. The New York Republican previously worked on Trump’s campaign and assisted with administration hires during the presidential transition.

The swampiest creature of all would be Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. New documents show he began selling his services to the highest bidders almost as soon as Trump finished swearing to uphold the Constitution. Within 24 hours, AT & T had agreed to pay him at least $200,000, in hopes he could smooth a path to an $85 billion merger with Time-Warner. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Novartis, did Cohen better, forking out $1.2 million in return for his aid. Other companies chipped in various sums, bringing the haul to $4.4 million.

By now, of course, you know no story about the Trump administration seems complete unless you sprinkle in Russians. Cohen took $500,000 from a company called Columbus Nova and other entities controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, a close friend of Vladimir Putin.

Drain that swamp.

5/13/18: A terrorist in Paris uses a knife to kill one French citizen and wound four others. Trump tweets:

So sad to see the Terror Attack in Paris. At some point countries will have to open their eyes & see what is really going on. This kind of sickness & hatred is not compatible with a loving, peaceful, & successful country! Changes to our thought process on terror must be made. 

Two months after the high school slaughter in Parkland, Florida no rethinking by the Trump administration is in evidence.

5/14/18: The president formally announces movement of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Jared Kushner speaks at the opening ceremony. Ivanka is all smiles. Pastor Robert Jeffress offers up a heartfelt prayer.

An Israeli newspaper quickly takes issue with the choice of Jeffress to speak. “If the Trump administration’s intention was to offend Jewish sensibilities with its pick of an evangelical minister to give a prayer at the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, it succeeded.”

Hating Jews, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics and Muslims.

Jeffress, an Evangelical firebrand, has made it clear he believes all Jews will someday burn in Perdition. Mormons, he believes, are part of a cult. Hindus and Buddhists are just as bad. He has labeled the Catholic Church “the genius of Satan.” As for Islam, you know Jeffress is going to make Muslims in lands surrounding Israel feel better when he claims their religion is “evil,” “violent” and “false.”

As a bonus we learn that Reverend John C. Hagee gave the benediction. Hagee is the person you would pick if you wanted to stir anger among Muslims and convince them the U.S. would never be a fair broker in any Middle East peace discussion. “Islam in general,” Hagee has said, “those who live by the Quran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.” In the Reverend’s warped dreams 200 million Muslims want to “come to America or invade Israel to crush it.”

As a Hater’s Bonus, Hagee once claimed God punished New Orleans and nearly drowned the city because a Gay Pride parade was scheduled. The day before the gays were set to march, Hurricane Katrina hit.

God works in mysterious ways, drowning a thousand people, because gays wanted to hold a parade with floats.

If you’re a fan of nutty shit, it gets better. Hagee has insisted that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan. “How did it happen?” Hagee once asked. “Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.” First, God thought it might be cool to have six million Jews tortured, gassed and shot.

Hagee and Jeffress put their faith in Bible prophecy, which is fine. It might not be the kind of belief on which you want to base your nation’s foreign policy though.

First, they believe, you’ve got to get the Jews back to the Promised Land. Then they retake Jerusalem. Next, you have a lot of hocus pocus. At least one theory involves Russians and Muslims attacking Israel but being defeated with the help of God and the Antichrist, an unexpected partnership. The Jews realize the error of their ways. They accept Jesus and the Son of God returns, ushering in a thousand years of earthly bliss, followed by the less-than-blissful End Times.

And it’s all good—if you’re a Christian, that is.

Has Trump given any of this a moment of thought? The tone-deaf President of the United States tweets: “U.S. Embassy opening in Jerusalem will be covered live on @FoxNews & @FoxBusiness. Lead up to 9:00 A.M. (eastern) event has already begun. A great day for Israel!”

Then: “Big day for Israel. Congratulations!” 

Palestinians erupt in fury. Israeli defense forces respond with tear gas, rubber bullets and live fire. The BBC reports that at least 52 Palestinians are killed and hundreds wounded.

Good times. End times.

No peace.

5/15/18: What have we learned about the Trump administration lately? We have learned that foreign policy can be hard. You move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and Palestinians blow up. It doesn’t help when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes it clear Israel always has and always will want to keep all of Jerusalem.

Also, Israel would like to keep the West Bank for—who knows—maybe another thousand years.

Or until the Rapture.

*

IN OTHER NEWS, Trump & Co. continue to holler about the “witch hunt.” According to Vice President Jesus, the Russian investigation has gone on long enough! Special Counsel Mueller has been at it a year.

An entire year! Tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo loooooooong!!!!

Since this humble blogger has a brain and can conjure up actual memories, let’s turn back in time to when conservatives loved the Benghazi investigation. That one lasted two years, four months.

We can go back farther for perspective. Remember when the Whitewater investigation morphed into an examination of Bill Clinton’s sexual misdeeds? How long did that last? Seven years. Or: four years, one month and six days, if you count only the part after Ken Starr took over. 

Remember how Fox News stood up for the right of President Clinton not to testify under oath—how it was a “perjury trap!”

No, you do not.

Fox loved that investigation.

Surprising number of Russians attended Trump Inauguration.

You can fairly argue about politics. You can’t fairly argue about the calendar. June 6 is always followed by June 7. The Mueller team continues to go about its work quietly and deliberately. Viktor Vekselberg, yet another Russian oligarch, was recently stopped at a New York-area airport and questioned about payments to Trump’s personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen.

We now know that a surprising number of Russians attended Trump’s Inauguration. Vekselberg was one. Federal campaign filings indicate two of his American partners donated $1.2 million to festivities. Russian pharmaceutical executive Alexey Repik and his wife were there. So were Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, two of the Russians who participated in the secret June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. Last, but not least, Russian banker, Alexander Torshin showed up.

Torshin is famous for:

A)    Joining the National Rifle Association.

B)     Attending five N.R.A. national conventions, including the one in 2016, where he met Don Jr.

C)    Possibly funneling money to the N.R.A. to be used in the campaign.

D)   Reportedly holding the dual posts of banker and “godfather” of a Russian crime syndicate, and specializing in both roles as a money launderer.

The Mueller team has also interviewed Thomas Barrack, a close friend of the president. Barrack was chairman of the Trump Inauguration Committee. Anything interesting about Barrack? Yes. He was investigated by the Italian government—which wanted to know about a complex scheme to funnel money through Luxembourg (motto: “We may be a pipsqueak nation, but we are a BIG tax haven.”). In the process, Italian authorities believe Barrack and his pals may have evaded $190 million in taxes. It might also be worth noting that Rick Gates (now cooperating with the Mueller probe) worked for Barrack up until the day he was indicted. (See: 6/29/18.)

5/16/18: This is a really bad day for the Big Orange Buffoon. First, he’s required to file paperwork and admit he paid back Michael Cohen in 2017, after his personal lawyer gave $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.

This means, that regarding the Stormy Daniels story:

A)    Cohen has been lying for months.

B)     Trump has also been lying.

C)    Team Trump is replete with liars.

D)   The president knew members of his team were liars and didn’t correct them because…

E)     Birds of a feather.

The American people might not care about a consensual sexual relationship between Citizen Trump and a porn star in 2006. When the President of the United States lies about it, aboard Air Force One, that’s a serious matter.

“I understand you have some information for us...What have you got on Hillary?”

Donald Trump Jr.

First, the good news on that topic—if you’re the president. Rudy tells reporters that Robert Mueller has agreed that under Department of Justice guidelines a sitting president cannot be indicted. A president might bludgeon his wife. He might traffic in child porn. He might conspire with Russian agents. He could not be indicted. He might be guilty; but he’d have to be impeached.

Then the bad news—for the president. F.B.I. Director Wray speaks before Congress. He says the Russian investigation is not a witch hunt.

You may remember he said the same last July, when Trump appointed him to head the Bureau.

In testimony today, Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Wray if he stood by his past statement, that the investigation was not a witch hunt.

“Yes,” Wray responded. He did not hedge or elaborate. It’s not a witch hunt, according to Trump’s own pick to head the F.B.I.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee releases thousands of pages of testimony related to the secret June 2016 meeting, with Don Jr. and Trump campaign officials and agents of the Russian government. In transcripts revealed today, Don Jr., who was not under oath, is shown to have spun a tenuous tale. First, a participant in the meeting remembers the president’s son starting off by saying, “I understand you have some information for us.”

When conversation veered off topic, Don Jr. was quick to refocus everyone. “What have you got on Hillary,” he wanted to know.

“Just goes to show you their exact moral compass.”

Members of the Senate Judicial Committee wanted to know why Don Jr. took a meeting with the Russians and never contacted U.S. intelligence agencies to warn them about a foreign power’s attempt to interfere in our election. Well, Trump Jr. explained, the campaign had not received the hoped-for dirt on Hillary. So why contact anyone? No harm in meeting with a few Russians—hoping to get dirt on an opponent—not if it didn’t lead to real dirt.

In fact, asked in July 2016, if there was any truth to the claim, coming from the Clinton team that Russians were trying to help his father, Don Jr. replied with indignation. “Well, just goes to show you their exact moral compass,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “They’ll say anything to be able to win this. This is time and time again, lie after lie…It’s disgusting; it’s so phony.”

Yeah…so many lies.

In other highlights from his testimony, Don Jr. said he couldn’t remember who he called and spoke with for eleven minutes, just before the secret meeting. The call was to a blocked number. It might have been his father. It might have been his mistress. No, scratch that last. Don Jr. lied about that, too.

It might have been Pope Francis. Don Jr. responded repeatedly to such questions, “I don’t recall.”

After the meeting ended, Don Jr. made a second call to a blocked number. Who did he call? He couldn’t remember.

What about a purposely misleading statement issued in July 2017, a year later, after the free press got wind of the initial meeting? That was the statement which said the meeting was primarily about adoption. Did Don Jr. talk to his father about the statement? He could not recall. Did his father help craft it—which would indicate a desire to cover up the truth about working with Russians?

Don Jr. could not recall.

Is that it, finally? No. Not yet. The Senate Intelligence Committee announces its bipartisan conclusions. The Russians clearly interfered in the 2016 election—with the intention of harming Clinton and advancing the prospects of Donald J. Trump. Vice Chairman Mark Warner puts it succinctly: “The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.”

And there’s more! Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells a Senate panel that Cambridge Analytica targeted certain groups of voters through social media. Sophisticated voter suppression tactics were employed to convince voters not to show up at the polls or undercut support for candidates. Wylie suggested that the professor at the center of the Facebook data breach scandal might have allowed the Russians to get hold of the personal information he had gathered on millions of Americans. That professor, Aleksandr Kogan, made numerous trips to—Russia—possibly for legitimate reasons, since he sometimes worked at St. Petersburg University.

Still, you begin to wonder how many connections to Russia, tangential and essential, there are in this tale.

Former C.I.A. Director John Brennan makes his feelings in this regard clear. He calls the Trump team’s efforts to denigrate law enforcement agencies and investigators “despicable.” On Nicolle Wallace’s program he says the president suffers from “a disease of dishonesty that afflicts him and metastasizes in so many ways. It’s a cancer that he’s spread…hurting this country.”

*

IN OTHER NEWS, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks to graduating students at Virginia Military Academy. See if you can guess who he’s talking about.

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth,” he tells graduates, “or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”

He continues:

It is also that foundational commitment to truth and facts that binds us to other democratic, like-minded nations, that we Americans will always deal with them from the same set of truths and facts, and it is truth that says to our adversaries, “we say what we mean and we mean what we say.” 

When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may see the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America.

5/17/18: Donald Trump rises early and sets out to do what he does best. First, he turns on TV and watches Fox & Friends. Then he tweets and whines. At 6:28 a.m. he offers this nugget: “Congratulations America, we are now into the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History.”

Sadly, we learn later in the day that another witch has pled guilty. This time the pointy hat ends up on the head of Jeffrey Yohai, Paul Manafort’s former business partner and ex-husband of Manafort’s daughter. Yohai now joins five other witches who have pled guilty and agreed to cooperate. A seventh witch is cooperating but has not yet been charged.

*

TRUMP’S PICK to head up NASA admits what pretty much every scientist at NASA already knows.

Former Oklahoma congressman and man-with-no-science background, Jim Bridenstine, tells staff in his first meeting: “I don’t deny the consensus that the climate is changing, in fact I fully believe and know that the climate is changing. I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way.”

That’s right, he said: “major way.”

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas,” Bridenstine informs gathered scientists, who have known this for decades. “We are putting it into the atmosphere in volumes that we haven’t seen and that greenhouse gas is warming the planet. That is absolutely happening and we are responsible for it.”

If you watch too much right-wing news, you’ve never heard of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) and don’t know the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) exists. Still, all are sounding dire warning. The WMO announced that records for 2016 show CO₂ in the atmosphere at its highest levels in 800,000 years. AMAP has been equally clear. If current trends continue Arctic sea ice may disappear within 20 years. NSIDC is blunt. An ominous trend involves loss of “old ice,” defined as ice five-years-old or older. In 1984 old ice covered 61% of the Arctic Ocean.

Recent measurements say this cover has declined to 34%. Such ice ranges from 9.8 to 13.1 feet thick.

Melting Greenland ice would pose a huge problem.

Melting sea ice does not raise sea levels. Melting ice in Greenland would. Here again, trend lines are bleak. At Cape Morris Jessup, far to the north, hourly temperatures rarely surpass 32° Fahrenheit. It happened once in 1997. It happened five times in 2011, seven in 2017 and 59 times in 2018.

Melting Greenland ice would pose a huge problem around the world; and it is starting to melt. According to another assortment of experts, ice in Greenland is melting at a rate not seen in centuries. You can read all about it in everyone’s favorite magazine, Geophysical Research Letters.

Or you can watch Fox News and get dumber by the hour.

In summary, we must again label President Trump a “science moron.” This is a man, after all, who doesn’t believe in exercise because he thinks the body has a finite amount of energy. If you use some up there’s only so much left for golfing, tweeting, and signing hush money checks. Explaining basic science to Trump is like trying to explain the Virgin Birth to a Golden Retriever.

In fact, let’s try a simple test to illustrate the point. Is the following Trump tweet about weather or climate:

December 2013: “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!

Um…that would be weather.

January 2014: “NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”

Again: weather.

January 2014: “Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!”

Still weather.

February 2014: “Massive record setting snowstorm and freezing temperatures in U.S. Smart that GLOBAL WARMING hoaxsters changed name to CLIMATE CHANGE! $$$$”

Stupid focus on terminology; still…weather.

July 2014: “Record cold temperatures in July - 20 to 30 degrees colder than normal. What the hell happened to GLOBAL WARMING?”

That would be weather.

July 2015: “It’s late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It’s now CLIMATE CHANGE.”

Still stupid!

October 2015: “It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming.”

Can someone get this man a jacket? It’s still weather, you dolt.

And most recently:

December 28, 2017: “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

Yes, weather.

Here’s climate change—or global warming—either one. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) agree that 2017 was the second or third hottest year, globally, on record. Using NOAA rankings for simplicity, the hottest years on record are:

See any trend???

5/18/18: Another school shooting, this one in Santé Fe, Texas, leaves ten dead and ten wounded.

Paige Curry, a teen survivor at Santé Fe High School, perfectly captures the world we inhabit. “Was there part of you that was like, ‘This isn’t real, this is—this would not happen in my school?” a reporter asked.

“No, there wasn’t,” Curry responded.

“Why so?” the reporter asked.

“It’s been happening everywhere,” Curry explained. “I felt—I’ve always felt like eventually it was going to happen here too.”

Naturally, President Trump promised swift action to keep America’s children safe—after making an identical promise in February after the slaughter in Parkland, Florida. This was before he backed away from a promise to raise the age at which an individual could purchase a rifle.

This was before he gave a craven performance at the N.R.A. convention two weeks ago, where he essentially mocked the idea that guns were a problem. For some inscrutable reason, Trump decided to fall back on the argument, in front of the N.R.A., that…well… what about knives?

The president decided to focus on London, England, where knife attacks have been rising. “They don’t have guns,” he said of the British. “They have knives and instead there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital,” Trump said, without naming the place. “They say it’s as bad as a military war zone hospital...knives, knives, knives.” Trump added a stabbing motion to illustrate his point.

“London hasn’t been used to that. They’re getting used to that. It’s pretty tough,” he continued.

In other words, guns weren’t the problem and gun control laws would be futile in America, because bad guys could kill you with knives. And then the only way to stop a bad guy with a knife would be a good guy with a knife, or maybe a bazooka! So, there you were! We should keep buying more knives.

Or: bazookas.

This made perfect sense to the audience at an N.R.A. convention and they cheered in lusty fashion.

Now ten more teens lay dead in an art classroom at their school—and ten more had been bloodied but would survive. The shooter was a teen. He used two guns purchased legally by his father, and ready to hand. He entered school with a shotgun and a revolver hidden under a trench coat. A “good guy” with a chair to the back of his skull might have stopped his rampage if the killer had been armed only with knives. But the teen had guns. Two or three brave teens might have jumped the killer and subdued him—if only he had knives. A girl with a book bag could have swung it in self-defense to parry a knife-wielding teen’s thrusts. A table tipped over by the teacher might have shielded her and a couple of students had the murderer not had a shotgun.

But he did.

Indeed, we live in a country where almost any fool can get his or her hands on almost any kind of gun.

And then some other fool will focus on knives.

Cutlery kills.

This is not the argument we need. Knives are beside the point. Briefly this year, London suffered more murders than New York City, a metropolis of similar size. Trump and his crew seized on that to make a false point. London has consistently suffered far fewer murders than New York City, and this even after New York City has had success, in part because of tough gun laws, in cutting the toll. In 2005 London had 181 murders. The number fell steadily, to 93 in 2014, before rising again to 116 last year.

That would include murders involving guns, knives, spoons, cars (a current terrorist trick), shovels, bricks and frozen loaves of Pumpernickel. Meanwhile, New York City would see 2,245 murders in 1990. The toll declined to 352 in 2015, 334 in 2016 and 290 in 2017. That means New York City is still more than twice as dangerous as London.

The wider the perspective, the clearer our blood-soaked dilemma becomes. The British don’t track murder rates by calendar year, but total by 12-month periods. For Wales and England combined, you have the following death tolls:

We’d have 13,246 fewer murders per year.

England and Wales had a combined population of 58.4 million in 2016. I think we can also assume almost every man, woman and child had access to a knife. Still, the murder rate in England and Wales was 1 in every 80,775 people.

The United States, with a population of 323.4 million, saw 17,250 murders in 2016. That would make our rate 1 in 18,748.

Those numbers may not do justice to the difference. If we had the same murder rate as England and Wales, where knives are a problem, but guns are rare, the United States would have suffered 4,004 murders in 2016. That’s a difference of 13,246 in one year; and you can carry a similar difference back over many years.

Knives aren’t the issue and it is glaring stupidity to argue they are. We in America live in a gun-drenched society and if more guns made us safer, we’d already be the safest people on earth.

In 2015, after a deranged white man in South Carolina walked into a black church and gunned down nine parishioners, President Obama brought up the question of gun violence in America.

He had brought it up in 2012, after the slaughter at Sandy Hook. But every time he called for sensible steps to address gun violence in our schools and theaters and streets, the N.R.A. screamed that the Second Amendment was doomed. Obama was coming for all our guns, all 300 million. The only way to stop Obama from taking away every gun—not to mention every sharp knife—was to rush out and buy all the assault rifles the gun makers could produce.

The death toll in nearly every other advanced nation in the world remained starkly lower. These were nations like our own, where people had access to knives and, if not baseball bats, other wooden clubbing options, axes and garden tools and, in Japan, samurai swords. Somehow, the gory calculus was never the same. Japan led the way in safety with only .029 murders for every 100,000 people. Fifteen other advanced nations had murder rates less than 1 per 100,000. Germany suffered murders at the rate of .70, South Korea, .84, Sweden, .92. Eleven countries, including Australia, 1.07, Canada, 1.44, and Israel, 1.75, had murder rates under 2 per 100,000. Hungary’s rate was 2.86. Chile’s was 3.14. Only Estonia, Turkey and Mexico suffered greater slaughter than the United States, with our rate of 3.82.

Bringing up knives is intellectually lazy at best, dishonest at worst, which is to say, typical Trump.

Imagine the roar of outrage from the right-wing crowd if Islamic terrorists managed to kill 13,246 Americans on our nation’s streets in one year. They’d be demanding we load every Muslim American in the country on boats and send them back to the countries from which they came (including all those Muslim Americans born in this country). They’d insist we had to ban every Muslim from entering the United States for the next thousand years.

Imagine Trump’s take on the need for a border wall if one Mexican who snuck across the border had murdered 10 more Americans yesterday.

Or 17 on February 14.

The problem in the U.S. is guns. Not all guns, not all guns in all hands, not the Second Amendment.

The problem is too many guns accessible to too many hands.

You could pass sensible laws to curtail that ready access to too many people with too many potentially murderous hands. Or you could stand in front of yet another N.R.A. convention and talk like a clown.

5/19/18: Trump makes me nauseous. That’s all I can stand for today.

5/20/18: It’s a quiet Sunday in Trumpistan. Not a single person in the administration gets indicted.

Still, a Trump Twitter Tantrum ensues. At 8:11 a.m., we get this:

....At what point does this soon to be $20,000,000 Witch Hunt, composed of 13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years, STOP! They have found no Collussion with Russia, No Obstruction, but they aren’t looking at the corruption...

Thirteen angry Democratic lawyers? Trump is foaming at the mouth. His next tweet comes at 8:19:

...in the Hillary Clinton Campaign where she deleted 33,000 Emails, got $145,000,000 while Secretary of State, paid McCabes wife $700,000 (and got off the FBI hook along with Terry M) and so much more. Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this Scam. 

So: You’re only a “real American” if you like Trump?

Ten minutes later:

Now that the Witch Hunt has given up on Russia and is looking at the rest of the World, they should easily be able to take it into the Mid-Term Elections where they can put some hurt on the Republican Party. Don’t worry about Dems FISA Abuse, missing Emails or Fraudulent Dossier!

This last tweet is absurd. The New York Times has reported that Don Jr. took a second secret meeting at Trump Tower, where it is alleged representatives of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates offered help during the 2016 election. This is the “failed and crooked” Times, which correctly called Don Jr. out on a June 2016 meeting with Russians, which Don Jr. originally denied he had.

Nor has Mueller “given up on Russia.” One participant in this newly revealed meeting was George Nader. Nader is cooperating with Mueller. Nader was also involved in another secret meeting with a Russian in the Seychelles. No one remembered any of these meetings until the free press dug up the facts.

Faced with a tightening noose, the “very angry and clearly delusional” (my characterization) Chief Executive does what no president has ever done. He says he will interfere with an investigation into his own administration.

At 12:37 he makes this clear:

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

5/21/18: In the wake of his Sunday tweet tantrum, Donald J. Trump in part gets his way. The Department of Justice agrees to look into whether or not the F.B.I. “infiltrated” his campaign or put a “spy” in strategy meetings or set up a hidden camera to watch Melania undress.

The Steele dossier was correct.

Even the nit-wittiest nitwit could figure this out if they devoted five minutes to cogitation. A source, now revealed as a result of right-wing yapping, “inside” the Trump 2016 campaign talked to three people. One was George Papadopoulos who has since pled guilty to lying to the F.B.I.

A second was Carter Page, who shows up in the infamous Steele dossier, allegedly for traveling to Russia and talking to individuals with direct links to Vladimir Putin. Page now admits he did go to Moscow during the 2016 campaign. At first, Page denied telling anyone on the Trump team about his trip. Later he admitted he did. Then he said he didn’t meet with any high Russian officials.

Then he said, okay, I did.

The third individual contacted was Sam Clovis. Clovis described the extent of his contacts with the “spy” during the campaign. “The meeting was very high level; it was like two faculty members sitting down in the faculty lounge talking about research. There was no indication or no inclination that this was anything other than just wanting to offer up his help to the campaign if I needed it.” No cloaks were involved. No daggers. The pair talked in a hotel lobby. Clovis didn’t have a hidden gun or a pencil that could spray chemicals. He had a cup of coffee and a notebook in his hands.

According to Clovis he never even bothered with notes. Isn’t that convenient—if you might be investigated!

Clovis then blew a giant hole in the idea that this source was spying on everyone for the run amok F.B.I. “I’m not going to name the individual, I know exactly who it is...but I will say this: That person had nothing to do with the campaign. They were not part of the campaign.”

So, it would seem the “spy” did not spy on Trump Sr., or Trump Jr. or Ivanka or even Tiffany Trump.

*

ANOTHER RABID DEMOCRAT comes to the defense of Robert Mueller and…Oh wait, he’s a Republican. It’s the man who briefly led the Trump transition team, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

In a speech at the University of Chicago, he tells the audience, “Bob Mueller himself is not a partisan, he’s an honest guy, he is a hard working guy, he’s smart and you can’t argue that the investigation hasn’t been effective so far.”

Trump’s biggest problem, says Christie, not counting the fact he’s a pathological liar, is Trump.

“There’s no way to make an investigation like this shorter,” Christie says he warned the president, “but there’s lots of ways to make it longer. He’s executed on a number of those ways to make it longer.”

“I don’t question Bob Mueller’s honesty or his integrity,” Christie says finally, “never have, and having worked with him for years, I still wouldn’t.” 

*

SPEAKING AT a conference in New York, former Russian chess champion Gary Kasparov warns that Vladimir Putin will attack our elections again. Putin is not a democratically elected leader, Kasparov says. “He’s a dictator.” For seventeen years, Kasparov notes, the Russians have been trafficking in lies and false stories on the internet and they’re good at what they’re doing. “The sad news is propaganda works,” he told his audience. “Fake news works.”

“I also believe in the KGB.”

Did he believe our president was in the pocket of Putin? “Donald Trump had more Russian connections than Aeroflot,” he replied. “While I believe in coincidences, I also believe in the KGB.”

5/22/18: It’s another bad day for Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. A longtime business partner pleads guilty and agrees to cooperate with investigators. That partner is Evegeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant (of course), known as the New York City “Taxi King.” Freidman avoids a lengthy jail sentence and is required to hand over $1 million to settle his unpaid tax bills.

*

IN A RELATED STORY, Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado, floats a theory about Cohen. Campos notes that Trump’s lawyer was involved in three hush money settlements in 2016. Two involved Trump. One was a payment to Stormy Daniels. A second payment went to Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal. The third involved Elliot Broidy, a heavy-hitting GOP fundraiser, who impregnated another Playboy Bunny, Shera Bechard. (See: 4/14/18 and 4/16/18.)

Campos’s theory: Broidy took a fall for…Donald J. Trump!

Campos notes several intriguing details. In all three settlements the women were initially “represented” by a lawyer named Keith Davidson. Davidson has since been accused of conspiring with Cohen to insure all three clients remained quiet. In the Daniels case and the Broidy case, Cohen used nearly identical non-disclosure language. He used the same pseudonyms. For the women: Peggy Petersen. For the men: David Dennison. And the two Petersen/Dennison payoffs were routed through the same L.L.C., Essential Consultants, set up by Cohen during the 2016 campaign.

Broidy took the hit for his sins and paid $1.6 million to hush up the pregnant Bunny. Soon after, he gained direct access to President Trump. This led to a private meeting at the White House where a business deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was discussed. The United Arab Emirates agreed to give Broidy a contract to provide security services worth perhaps $600 million.

Leaked emails between Broidy and George Nader show another interesting connection. Here the Associated Press picks up the story:

Just two days before that meeting, on November 30, Broidy wired $200,000 from his Bank of America account to Real Estate Attorneys’ Group, a California firm. On December 5, REAG transferred that money to attorney Keith Davidson. Davidson was at the time supposedly representing the legal interests of Shera Bechard, a Playboy model with whom Broidy now claims to have had an affair. (Bechard fired Davidson shortly afterward, when she became convinced that Davidson was actually working in concert with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, to protect Cohen’s client’s interests rather than hers.) That $200,000 was supposed to be the first of eight quarterly payments that “David Dennison” agreed to make to Bechard, in order to buy her silence about an affair and a subsequent abortion. All this was laid out in an NDA recovered from Michael Cohen’s office when it was raided last month.

Now, being a fact-based blogger, let me say we cannot know where this tale will end. We do know this. Nader is cooperating with Mueller. Nader has been in several meetings with Broidy.

Did the Bunny abort Donald’s love child?

If Broidy was covering for Trump—if Trump was the actual semen donor in the Bechard affair—all kinds of campaign finance laws would have been broken. Broidy’s deal with the UAE might be viewed as a quid pro quo. Trump gets silence from the pregnant Bunny. Broidy gets a contract worth hundreds of millions. Saudi Arabia and the UAE get the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want: pressure on Qatar, a neighboring rival.

And as an added “bonus,” the Playboy Bunny would have aborted…Donald J. Trump’s love child!

There may be nothing to this theory; but we already know a Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, was paid $30,000 to keep quiet about Trump and a housekeeper’s child.

We know Broidy was previously convicted of bribing New York State officials.

We know that the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, has warned that two other women whose stories appear credible may have received large hush money settlements in 2016.

So, we can assume Cohen is worried. And if Cohen is worried the President of the United States is worried.

(Author’s Note; 8/25/19: Nothing has come of this Broidy-Bunny-Trump Bunny Baby-story. It could be, for once on this blog, that we were totally wrong. Generally, save for typos and misspellings of names, and too many examples of poor sentence-structure, your humble blogger has been right on target in what he says.)

5/23/18: This may be the day Donald J. Trump proves conclusively that he has no shame, and possibly proves he’s nuts. He wakes from his slumber and launches another Twitter rampage. The gist of his message is this: Everyone else is lying. The only person you can trust is me.

Up with the birds, Trump’s first tweet comes at 5:54 a.m.:

Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!

Clearly, we’re off to a bad start—with an unhinged president categorizing critics and federal investigators as “criminals.”

This is when you realize that if Trump had the power to lock up his enemies without trial he would. Hillary would already be behind bars, no trial required. Trump made that clear during the campaign. John Kasich and Ted Cruz, Trump once complained, were teaming up against him during the campaign. “It’s collusion,” he told Sean Hannity. “In business you go to jail for that, but it’s collusion where they’re coming together because they are getting beaten badly.”

America has plenty of cells. Trump would fill them. Snoop Dog would end up behind bars as punishment for an insulting video.

Trump insisted that those who burn the American flag, a form of protected free speech according to the Supreme Court, should be jailed.

And we know Trump would be happy to fill entire prisons with journalists who write about him in unflattering terms.

Comey would already be in jail. Trump said that too.

In any case, Trump was steaming to start his day. Next, he tweet-quoted a Fox News story: “‘It’s clear that they had eyes and ears all over the Trump Campaign’ Judge Andrew Napolitano”

(See: 5/30/18 for a reversal in the judge’s thinking.)

At 6:12, the president tweets again: “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!”

The Trump Tower of Lies is imploding.

At 6:33 he bends the words of James Clapper, who had blistered him on television the day before. Trump tweets: “‘Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign’ No, James Clapper, I am not happy. Spying on a campaign would be illegal, and a scandal to boot!”

At this point, anyone who bothers to check what Clapper said begins to realize the Trump Tower of Lies is imploding.

As the day progresses, what do we learn? First, let’s revisit what Clapper said in an earlier appearance on The View. Joy Behar, one of the hosts, put the following questions to him:

BEHAR: So I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?

CLAPPER: No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence which is what they do.

BEHAR: Well, why doesn’t [Trump] like that? He should be happy.

CLAPPER: He should be.

The concept is simple. If Russians were infiltrating Trump’s campaign, the good guys (U.S. intelligence agents) would want to stop the bad guys (agents of a hostile foreign power; Russia).

If Manafort and others were working in the interest of foreign powers, Candidate Trump would surely want to know. And Manafort had neck-deep ties to Russian interests going back years.

The best possible explanation would be that Trump knew nothing about Manafort’s shady past. But Manafort is dirty beyond question—a money launderer in the pay of Russians—if not worse. We know he was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch when he took on a job in the Trump campaign for free.

A new report, issued by Bloomberg on the same day Trump is tweet-moaning about the “Criminal Deep State,” indicates Manafort made 17 trips to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, just before joining Trump’s team. The purpose of all those trips was to perform lobbying work for the Opposition Bloc, a pro-Russia political group.

Clearly, the magnetic pull of crook to crook was at work. Manafort had been advising a corrupt Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who, when toppled in a popular uprising, fled to…Russia.

Bloomberg, noting that Rick Gates, Manafort’s right-hand man, has pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with the Mueller team, explained:

Gates worked with Manafort for a decade in Ukraine, serving as a loyal wingman. In his guilty plea, Gates admitted that he helped Manafort set up dozens of undisclosed offshore bank accounts, hide their work as unregistered agents for Ukraine and launder millions of dollars into the U.S. Manafort convinced Gates to help him create false documents for banks, urged his son-in-law to lie to a bank appraiser and misled lenders about the use of loans, prosecutors charged.

“Greatly benefit the Putin government.”

In an in-depth story last November, the Business Insider reported that in 2006 Manafort signed a $10 million annual contract with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and allegedly murderous crime boss. Manafort agreed to perform lobbying work in the U.S. which he promised “would greatly benefit the Putin government.”

Nevertheless, money woes soon beset him. Deripaska filed suit in 2014 in the Cayman Islands (where all good money launderers go to shield bank accounts from pesky tax laws and legal oversight), claiming Manafort had disappeared after he gave him $19 million to invest.

We can therefore assume Manafort was interested in placating a dangerous Russian crime boss. Once Manafort joined the Trump campaign he found time to email one of his many Russian friends. Had Deripaska been made aware of Manafort’s expanding role in Trump’s political operation? If so, maybe a deal could be worked out—access to Trump for the Russian crime boss, knowledge about Trump’s plans—forgiveness for Manafort for that $19 million gone south?

His Russian friend responded. Deripaska was indeed paying close attention. Manafort emailed again: “How do we use to get whole. Has OVD [Deripaska’s initials] operation seen?”

Trump's pal: Vlad.

Being an evidence-based kind of guy, I admit there’s no known evidence to tie the president directly to illegal contacts with Russians. Still, the smell of dead rats assaults the nostrils. And you can see why U.S. intelligence might have wanted to keep tabs on several shady members of the Trump campaign team.

The critical question then comes into view. Has the President of the United States been trying to derail an investigation into Russian interference in 2016, simply to cover the Trump rump?

Later in the day the president pushes for a meeting to get to the bottom of this “spy” business during his campaign. He tells reporters in a quick gathering on the White House South Lawn that he’s all about “total transparency.” He’s not blocking an investigation. “What I’m doing is a service to this great country and I did a great service to this country by firing James Comey.”

He did a great service to himself, that’s for sure.

The plan for the meeting is soon set. It will include White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, representatives of the F.B.I., the Department of Justice and U.S. intelligence, and two members of Congress.

Great! Two branches of government working together in the name of transparency...

Wait. Two members of Congress?

Representative Devin Nunes is one. This is the same man whose hometown newspaper labeled him “Trump’s stooge.”

The second would be Rep. Trey Gowdy, another Republican. No Democrats! That is the president’s idea of “transparency.”

Trump’s “first instincts are to twist and distort the truth.”

On her 4:00 p.m. MSNBC show host Nicolle Wallace, a former member of the George W. Bush administration, puts up the following quote from former CIA head Michael Hayden’s new book, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in the Age of Lies. Hayden had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and retired from the U.S. Air Force as a decorated four-star general.

We have elected someone as president of the United States whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family. And in so doing, to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality. He has caused damage to our societal and political fabric that will be difficult and will require time to repair. And close to my heart, he has besmirched the intelligence community and the FBI, pillars of our country, and deliberately incited Americans to lose faith and confidence in them.

Hayden’s comments on camera are equally harsh. Trump, he warns, ignores “objective reality.” The president has attacked what Hayden calls the “truth-tellers.” He has created friction points, and here Hayden ticks them off on his fingers, listing “intelligence, law enforcement, courts, science, scholarship and journalism.” Hayden admits the truth-tellers are imperfect in the stories they tell.

Yet, he adds, “Their only safe haven is to preserve and pursue truth as they best know it to be.”

Referring to the “scene” on the South Lawn earlier in the day, where the president attacked reporters for what they had said, Hayden warns that the President of the United States is completely untethered from the truth. His comments represent “a created reality to meet the needs of the moment.” The president “never argues the facts of the case.” He simply attacks those who threaten him—plying truth as their swords.

Trump’s shield?

Lies.

*

THE CLOUDS around the Trump administration darken. The BBC reports on another secret meeting involving Michael Cohen. Cohen took a payment of $400,000 from representatives of the president of the Ukraine. In return he set up a meeting with Trump at the White House in June 2017. At the time Cohen was not listed as a representative of the Ukraine as would be required under U.S. law. After the meeting, the government of the Ukraine suddenly stopped helping Mueller pursue links between pro-Russian Ukrainian interests and Paul Manafort.

The BBC reports: “One source in Kiev said [Ukrainian President] Mr Poroshenko had given Trump ‘a gift’—making sure that Ukraine would find no more evidence to give the US inquiry into whether the Trump campaign ‘colluded’ with Russia.”

According to the reporter for the BBC, “Last week in Kiev, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Serhiy Horbatyuk, told me: ‘There was never a direct order to stop the Manafort inquiry but from the way our investigation has progressed, it’s clear that our superiors are trying to create obstacles.”

5/24/18: Let’s get another day in America off to a rousing start. Fox & Friends is running a taped interview with the president. He’s stoked to hear the NFL will fine players who kneel during the National Anthem!

After all, nothing says, “I love the land of the free, and the home of the brave” more than squelching the right to protest.

The NFL does say players can remain in their locker rooms if they prefer.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

Trump can’t talk long before making it clear how he feels about the rights of those with whom he disagrees. “Well, I think that’s good,” he tells the three hosts, Larry, Curly and Ainsley, referencing the fines. “I don’t think people should be staying in locker rooms. But still, I think it’s good.”

Then Trump takes it ten steps too far. “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem, or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

Trump doesn’t have much chance to celebrate the news because he has a spy problem on his hands or in his head. In Trump’s muddled thinking, the F.B.I. and other federal agencies were spying on his campaign. He tweets out “evidence, which often means making it up. At 7:21 we get: “Clapper has now admitted that there was Spying in my campaign. Large dollars were paid to the Spy, far beyond normal. Starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. SPYGATE - a terrible thing!” The meeting between members of Congress and representatives of the U.S. intelligence community, to get to the bottom of this Spygate mess, is on for later in the day. (See: 5/23/18. Trump has already told the same lie about what Clapper said.)

*

BEFORE THAT MEETING can take place, Trump learns another lesson. Diplomacy is hard.

The much-ballyhooed June 12 summit with North Korea is canceled.

Here, your favorite blogger should be clear. He would not fault Trump on most foreign policy matters, were Trump not so gleeful in bashing predecessors for their “failures.” Trump will take credit for every step forward the United States makes on any front. He will blame everyone else for any step back.

This much is true in 2018 and has been true for years: None of the options to contain Kim Jong-un’s rogue regime are good. Trump is simply the latest U.S. president to discover that fact.

Diplomacy, like love, is hard.

The rest of the day you could watch “experts” on cable television debate. On Fox News everything Trump had done or would ever do was brilliant. On MSNBC a radically different case was presented. Politicians put forward arguments based not on reason but on whether they had an “R” or “D” after their names.

This blogger would point out that history shows diplomacy is always messy and complex. The Spartans and Athenians could not resolve their differences 2,500 years ago. The Peloponnesian War dragged on for twenty-seven years. The Israelis and Palestinians can’t settle their differences today. And, despite Jared Kushner’s best efforts, they won’t anytime soon. North Korea has been a nettle for the U.S. to grasp since attacking South Korea on June 1, 1950.

This is the way the world works, always has worked, and always will work. Diplomacy is hard.

China has been both an active and silent actor in what is a long-running play. In the winter of 1950, the Chinese sent hundreds of thousands of troops crashing across the Yalu River and smashed into American and U.N. forces. Harry Truman was the first president to learn that North Korea, backed by China, would present a challenge to the interests of the United States.

It may still prove that Trump and his team have a good backup plan despite the cancelation of talks—that perhaps back channel movements are likely in days to come. But it’s hard not to laugh at a fool like Trump, who wants nothing so much as to be constantly praised. Gone for now is his chance at a Nobel Prize, which, if you believe the Big Orange Buffoon, everybody was saying he deserved.

In order to cancel the summit, Trump sends the following letter to the Chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea:

The missive reads like a weird breakup letter. “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me,” Trump writes. “I look very much forward to meeting you” someday, the lovesick U.S. leader moans. He can’t forget Kim’s “beautiful gesture” when the romance seemed strong. He can’t believe the “tremendous anger” now directed his way.

Diplomacy, like love, is hard.

Like a jilted lover, Trump makes his deepest feelings clear. If he can’t have Kim, no one can! He’ll blow him to bits. “You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”

Of course, there’s a reason no nation has exploded an atomic bomb on an enemy in 73 years. At best, if we use our “massive” nuclear arsenal, we’re going to roast millions of men, women and children. Most would be innocent human beings who don’t like Kim any more than good Americans do.

Kim has the capacity to hit targets in the continental United States, which is new, and not Trump’s fault. Yet we must admit, assuming we have some modicum of intellectual honesty, that previous presidents had to consider a similar dilemma. They knew Kim had the ability to turn Seoul (and possibly Tokyo) into a smoking hole in the ground. The only difference between 2006, when North Korea got its first nuclear bomb, and 2018, is that Los Angeles is now in range.

But at least we’ve got a few cool medallions—coined before the meeting was canceled—we can toss and flip.

Naturally, they show Trump’s face. (See: 6/1/18.)

*

WITH HOPES for a Nobel Prize dashed, Trump can console himself knowing there’s a meeting scheduled to consider spying on his campaign.

According to the propaganda people at Fox News, this meeting will allow Congress to get to the bottom of the Spygate mess. But for some odd reason, Democrats in Congress think they should attend.

One meeting becomes two.

Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy attend the first. Speaker Paul Ryan tags along. He has a scheduling issue and can’t go to a second meeting planned after the first. Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats arrive. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has secured a seat—after Democrats point out that Trump’s interest in “total transparency” (see: 5/23/18) might be more believable if members of both parties were allowed.

But then the tale takes an odd twist. Remember, this is a meeting called because Congress has a duty to exercise oversight over the Executive Branch. To the surprise of nearly everyone, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Trump defense lawyer Emmet Flood appear.

Flood is indubitably not a member of Congress. He has no reason to be sitting in a meeting such as this, unless to get the scoop on what investigators might know about his boss.

And if Congress is trying to ensure proper oversight over the Executive Branch, why is Kelly there?

Kelly and Flood—at least according to White House Press Secretary Pinocchio—speak briefly and leave.

A Republican congressional staffer, hearing they appeared, says, “That’s the craziest shit I ever heard.”

A second meeting is required because top congressional leadership, not just Nunes sucking up to Trump, and Gowdy trotting after to watch, is held soon after the first gathering concludes. Present are Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer for the Democrats, Nunes again, Sen. Mark Warren, a Democrat, and Sen. Richard Burr and Sen. Milksop Mitch for the Republicans. The same three intelligence heads give a similar briefing to the group.

On Fox News, soon after, Brett Baier asks Milksop Mitch to describe the meeting just ended. 

“Were you surprised by what you learned?” Baier wants to know. Were there, like, dozens of spies!!!!

“Nothing particularly surprising,” Milksop replies. “But again, it was classified, so there’s no real, no real report I can give to you.”

*

MEANWHILE, DETAILS about both the idiocy and mendacity of President Trump continue to spill out.

Two days ago, after watching too much cable news, Trump claimed the F.B.I. informant who talked to three members of his campaign had been paid “a massive amount of money…many times higher than normal” to spy on his campaign. That informant, now revealed to be Stefan Halper, looks a lot less suspicious if one turns off the television and searches for truth. As Politifact notes, his biography impresses. Halper is “professor emeritus at Cambridge University in England where he lectures on international security issues. He served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Political-Military Affairs in the Reagan administration.”

At the time he was being paid to talk to three members of the Trump team (see: 5/21/18), he was also working on a study of Russian-Chinese relationships, and Halper was paid by the Pentagon, not the F.B.I.

The tab for all his work, both “spying” on Trump and doing Pentagon research, came to $244,960.

Guess how much Halper earned working for the Pentagon from 9/29/2017 to 3/29/2018, while Trump had his fanny planted on his Oval Office throne? Halper earned $411,575 on Trump’s watch.

*

IN RELATED NEWS, the president told allies earlier in the week that he wanted “to brand” Halper a “spy,” not an informant. According to the Associated Press, he told confidants he thought that sounded more ominous, and would stir up his base. Typically, whether he had the facts straight or not never entered into the calculations of the President of the United States.

At this point, I think we can safely say if Trump thought supporters would believe talking Oreo cookies told him Barack Obama was leader of a “Criminal Deep State,” then Trump would be tweeting about talking Oreos.

Postscript: A federal judge rules that Trump and his Twitter police can’t ban critics from his feed. In using Twitter extensively and in making it a forum for discussion of government policy, banning critics denies them access to a public forum and violates First Amendment rights.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am seriously thinking about signing up for Twitter today.

5/25/18: Trump can’t let the “Spygate” story go. On late night television Stephen Colbert labels the matter “Stupidgate.” A former federal prosecutor labels Trump’s disingenuous campaign “Liegate.”

As expected, the president lays out his “case” in a series of idiot tweets. He could stand up at a press conference and explain his concern in detail to the American people. But he’d have to answer probing questions and he’d get mad. Trump hasn’t held a press conference for 461 days.

Instead, we’re served tweets:

The Democrats are now alluding to the the concept that having an Informant placed in an opposing party’s campaign is different than having a Spy, as illegal as that may be. But what about an “Informant” who is paid a fortune and who “sets up” way earlier than the Russian Hoax? 

Tweet #2: “Can anyone even imagine having Spies placed in a competing campaign, by the people and party in absolute power, for the sole purpose of political advantage and gain? And to think that the party in question, even with the expenditure of far more money, LOST!”

Tweet #3:

“Everyone knows there was a Spy, and in fact the people who were involved in the Spying are admitting that there was a Spy...Widespread Spying involving multiple people.” Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist Senior Editor But the corrupt Mainstream Media hates this monster story! 

“This vandalism of democracy.”

The New Jersey Star-Ledger captures the sentiment of that part of the American people still capable of grasping the basic issues in this sordid Trump tale. The Star-Ledger editorial reads in part: 

Confident that he can use the U.S. Department of Justice as his personal chew toy, Donald Trump has again decided that he can trample the thickest red line in American rule of law and that nobody is going to lift a finger to stop him.

The president demanded that Justice launch an investigation designed to torpedo another criminal investigation—the one in which Trump is the principle subject, which is probably his most audacious act of obstruction since he fired the FBI director who led another investigation against him. 

…this is the same president who said, “I have absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department,” despite the prevailing consensus that DOJ has operational independence from the executive branch...

It’s all very predictable, given the jaw-dropping scorecard of an investigation which Trump has tried to disturb, derail, and delegitimize. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has extracted guilty pleas from Trump’s national security adviser, deputy campaign manager, and foreign policy adviser, and indicted his campaign manager, 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies.

Mueller has bagged all that in just 12 months. And he hasn’t even frog-walked Michael Cohen and Roger Stone out of their caves yet, or shown whether Donald Trump Jr. tried to solicit anything of value in all those visits with foreign agents during the 2016 campaign. 

…Yet as the special counsel shoves it into fifth gear, the possibilities still seem endless. The last thing America needs is for its Justice Department to be complicit in this vandalism of democracy.

*

MEANWHILE, The New York Times breaks another story. On January 9, 2017, just eleven days before Trump is sworn into office, Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer and fixer (and at the time an employee of the Trump Organization), has another secret meeting at Trump Tower.

His guests are Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch, and Vekselberg’s American cousin, businessman Andrew Intrater. No one knows about this tea party until reporters poring through C-SPAN footage notice the two boarding the elevator in the Trump Tower lobby and exiting again half-an-hour later.

It turns out to be a productive meeting. Cohen gets a $1 million contract to advise his visitors on business opportunities in Trumpistan. Vekselberg and Intrater donate $1.2 million to support Trump inaugural festivities. Vekselberg and Cohen later attend an inaugural ball together.

You can certainly understand why a Russian oligarch might want to curry favor with a new president, especially one happy to be curried. With direct ties to Putin, Vekselberg would like nothing better than to see U.S. sanctions lifted. We know Vekselberg attended the same dinner in Moscow where General Flynn spoke and we know Flynn was paid handsomely for his eloquence. We know Flynn forgot to reveal payments from Russian entities as required by U.S. Army regulations. We know Flynn lied to Vice President Pence about another meeting with Russians. We know Vekselberg was stopped at a U.S. airport recently by agents from the Mueller probe. So, if you smell something fishy, your olfactory senses are working.

This past April, Vekselberg and his companies were specifically sanctioned as a result of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. (For months President Trump insisted no meddling occurred.)

These sanctions led to somewhere between $1.5 billion-$2 billion in Vekselberg’s assets being frozen.

CNN sent a reporter to catch up to Vekselberg in Moscow; but when confronted with questions about payments to Cohen and donations to the Trump inauguration, he refused to answer.

*

MEANWHILE, TRUMP STRAIGHT MAN, Congressman Louie Gohmert, insists that the president is purer than the Virgin Mary. Robert Mueller, however, “has protected radical Islamists his whole career.”

Aliens have taken over the minds of our pets.

Gohmert offers the theory that the “anthrax scare” which filled the news a few days after the 9/11 attacks was a diversion, that Mueller (the director of the F.B.I.) was “looking for something to take the attention away….”

Oh, fuck it. If you can believe this crap, you might as well start arguing that aliens have taken over the minds of our pets and are spying on us every time we ruffle our dogs’ ears or feed our fish.

In the wake of the terrible 9/11 attacks, media coverage was continuous and profound. No one was “diverted” by the anthrax scare. Most Americans probably don’t remember it even occurred. We all remember that on that terrible day 19 individuals, adhering to a twisted strain of Islam, carried out their murderous attacks. No one “diverted” us from that horrible truth.

The only people stupid enough to believe Gohmert’s comments are conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, on the right-wing fringe. These are the nuts who think the 9/11 attacks were a government “inside job.”

In fact, we know Gohmert spoke at length to Jones on his May 18, 2015 show. At the time, Louie was shouting warning about the Jade Helm plot, wherein the Obama administration was going to send federal troops to invade Texas. How would this invasion proceed? There were tunnels. These tunnels were under Walmart stores that had suddenly closed without reason. When it comes to diversionary tactics Gohmert earned a black belt in bullshit years ago.

*

CONGRESSMAN Adam Kinzinger, like Gohmert a Republican, unlike Gohmert, a war hero and not nuts, appears on CNN. Wolf Blitzer describes him as “a key member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.” A transcript of their talk includes these relevant details, as always emphasis added, unless otherwise noted.

BLITZER: We got a lot to discuss.

I want to talk about North Korea in just a moment, but first are you concerned at all by this pattern of connections between people in President Trump’s orbit and these Russians, including oligarchs directly linked to Vladimir Putin?

KINZINGER: No.

I mean, I don’t really know what to make of any of this stuff, partially because, as I have said from the very beginning, I—Mueller knows what he’s doing….I want him to complete his report. And then I will make a determination based on what he says.

…But the day to day, I mean, to be honest with you, I just really don’t even pay attention to every story on this. I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m sure we will find out when the Mueller investigation is completed.

BLITZER: So, just to be precise, Congressman, none of these developments bother you at all?

KINZINGER: Well, I mean, I’m not saying they do or don’t bother me. What I’m saying is, we hear something new every day, some of which are debunked, some, they say may be accurate.

BLITZER: The president is also arguing that the confidential FBI source who was investigating Russian ties of the Trump campaign is actually a spy and he was actually directed by the Obama administration to undermine President Trump.

Does that make sense to you?

KINZINGER: I don’t know. Again, I mean, all I have seen is what I have seen on TV about that.

And then I have seen my colleagues who have been briefed on this. They came out and said they weren’t overly concerned about it, as you played a sound bite from Mitch McConnell. I have not been briefed on it, so I just don’t know.

BLITZER: The president’s allies, at least some of them, are clearly ramping up their attacks on the special counsel, Robert Mueller, was for a long time the FBI director.

I want you to listen to what your Republican congressman—your Republican colleague Congressman Louie Gohmert told Judicial Watch. Watch this. 

(They watch Gohmert spin his yarn.)

BLITZER: When you hear that, what’s your reaction?

KINZINGER: I know Louie, obviously. I like Louie. He’s a good guy.

But I disagree with him in this case. I don’t know what case he’s referring to, but I can tell you with pretty good confidence that Mr. Mueller’s not sympathetic to radical Islam. So I think, if there’s any connection that was made, it’s not because of any kind of sympathy by Mr. Mueller. I trust his investigations. I trust his techniques.

Indeed, it is possible Mueller’s final report will exonerate President Trump. If Trump is innocent, that should be clear enough.

5/26/18: We start the Memorial Day weekend the way Republicans like it. First, there’s excitement because…well…giant tax cuts for fat cats!

In related news, did you realize top prices for Rolex watches can surpass $400,000? This is exactly the way to insure a healthy economy. Cut taxes and the superrich will create more jobs for Rolex factory workers. 

I should point out the website offering the watch above includes “free shipping and handling” if that might be a factor in your decision.

Speaking of the typical American worker, this has been a great month for them. No, I’m joking! First, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, that companies which require individual workers to sign arbitration agreements can ban collective action by workers to recover overtime pay they were wrongly denied. Now, if Mega Corporation-R-Us bends the rules and 980 workers are cheated out of $1,900 overtime pay each, those 980 workers can go to arbitration individually and complain.

I think we can say with total “confidence” that Mega Corporation-R-Us will not fire Worker #1, who steps forward first and complains.

Or worker #2, who doesn’t get the message when they do.

In similar fashion, if a female employee has been sexually harassed by her superior, she must go to arbitration to complain. She may not join forces with other female workers similarly harassed.

The act was passed to improve the rights of workers.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the Supreme Court majority in Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis, rules that the Federal Arbitration Law of 1925 has precedence over the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The latter act was passed to improve the rights of workers eight decades ago.

Now that conservatives have a grip on the highest court in the land, the corporations can do what they want. This kind of decision is a “payoff” for donations corporations have heaped on the GOP. Abercrombie and Fitch won’t need to change a policy that requires thousands of workers not scheduled for shifts to come in immediately, at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, if notified two hours before. Company leaders at Mega Corporation-R-Us can sexually harass a nightshift cleaning woman, two receptionists, three interns and five secretaries over the course of several years.

The nightshift cleaning woman will have every right to pay for a lawyer and go to arbitration herself.

True, the law in this case is complex. Gorsuch may be technically right. But law and justice do not always match. (See, for example: The Fugitive Slave Law.) At the end of his lengthy opinion, even Gorsuch all but admits that point: 

The policy may be debatable but the law is clear: Congress has instructed that arbitration agreements like those before us must be enforced as written. While Congress is of course always free to amend this judgment, we see nothing suggesting it did so in the NLRA—much less that it manifested a clear intention to displace the Arbitration Act. Because we can easily read Congress’s statutes to work in harmony, that is where our duty lies. The judgments in Epic, No. 16–285, and Ernst & Young, No. 16–300, are reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. The judgment in Murphy Oil, No. 16–307, is affirmed.

The five judges who signed on for this ruling include: Gorsuch, appointed to his seat after Milksop Mitch ignored two hundred years of precedent and refused to give a hearing to Merrick Garland; Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.; Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.; Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Wax Figure Clarence Thomas. All were appointed by Republican presidents.

*

AS SUMMER APPROACHES, teachers can relax after bruising strikes in several deep red states. These strikes in West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky were sparked by a variety of issues. In Oklahoma teachers had gone a decade without raises. Now, you may be asking why states can’t raise pay for teachers. The answer is simple. GOP lawmakers are inordinately proud of having signed the Grover Norquist “taxpayer protection pledge.”

If you go to the webpage for Americans for Tax Reform you can see that 46 members of the U.S. Senate and 208 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all members of the GOP (I think), have agreed never to raise taxes again, not in a million years, assuming they live so long.

Meanwhile, President Trump has issued a series of executive orders stripping protections from federal civil service employees. Now it will be easier to fire them if they ask for more money or improved benefits and—hopefully, as Republicans would put it—to bust their unions.

Republicans will cast all these moves as noble efforts to save taxpayer dollars. Actually, these are bricks in a wall—no, not that wall—to break the power of ordinary American workers.

How the Great Scam worked.

There was a time when many workers in private industry had excellent pensions. Then Mega Corporation-R-Us began to complain about greedy workers. Leaders of the GOP agreed. Unionized workers with pensions were the worst! Executives at Mega Corporation-R-Us, however, earning seven-figure salaries were not. Mega executives only wanted to create jobs.

Conservatives argued that government was the problem, never the solution. The only way to make America great again would be to starve the beast and slash taxes, so your average auto assembler could afford a Rolex.

Mega Corporation-R-Us, Behemoth Retailing, and Leviathan Cable TV, and especially multinational corporations, managed to pull off several slick moves. First, corporations insisted they had no choice but to move factories from “high-wage” states to states where “business-friendly” rules prevailed. These states, almost exclusively Republican-controlled, had laws that made it difficult for unions to organize. They promised lower taxes on businesses and reduced services like healthcare for ordinary citizens. But hey! Job creation! Texas “created” 10,000 jobs by syphoning off 10,000 jobs from Michigan and Ohio. Those jobs just happened to pay $25 per hour in Ohio. In Texas non-union workers would accept $13 instead.

Government was not the enemy of workers.

Democrats were not the enemies of workers.

Unions, imperfect as they are, were not the enemy. The corporations and their political allies were perpetrating a Great Scam.

Soon the corporations realized that immigrant labor was even cheaper than non-union labor. You could pay an undocumented Mexican $6 per hour to install drywall in new homes. An American—if unionized—might demand $23. A non-union, native-born worker might expect $13.75. Americans would expect overtime if workdays stretched to nine or twelve hours. The undocumented workers wouldn’t complain if overtime wages went unpaid. They wouldn’t dare. In Texas, one of the reddest states in the land, hundreds of thousands of construction jobs were lost by native-born workers—and filled by the undocumented instead.

Let me stop a moment and make clear. This is not a diatribe against immigrants. My Irish ancestors came to America in the 1800s for much the same reason millions of Mexicans have come in recent years. I do not fear Haitian immigrants for their race. I do not fear Syrian immigrants for their religion. I do not fear Nigerian immigrants for their cultural beliefs. I do not fear immigrants at all. As a liberal, I would argue that immigrants enrich this country in many, many ways.

I am simply listing the steps required to pull off the Great Scam. The Mega Corporation-R-Us crowd, overwhelmingly Republican in sentiment, took a series of steps that inevitably held wages down.

Now, we have a president who promises to build a magic wall to keep the undocumented out—and keep the jobs in—and the GOP continues to sell the same worthless “male enhancement” fiscal pills.

Yes. Unemployment is down. Plenty of $10 per hour jobs and even $13 and $15 per hour jobs are opening up.

For most Americans, the $29 per hour-jobs at Ford Motors, General Electric and Stanley Tools are gone.

They were loyal only to their bank accounts.

Still, the corporations weren’t finished. The next step was inevitable. The rise of multi-nationals meant Ford Motors looked to Mexico to build engines. General Electric turned to China to manufacture lightbulbs. Stanley Tools started producing wrenches in Taiwan. The people who ran our corporations showed less and less loyalty to workers and to America itself. They were loyal only to their bank accounts. Why pay a worker in North Carolina $14 per hour to make underwear, for instance, if a worker in Sri Lanka could make the same garments and do it for $14 per day? Why build iPhones in the U.S. and deal with overtime rules when you could do business in China and workers would put in 90 hours per week and never complain?

True. China was (and is) a communist nation. True. Communism is founded on the premise of destroying capitalism. Truer still: China is a growing threat to the United States on the international stage. The multinationals didn’t care if decisions they made helped China gain power. Great piles of money were to be made.

The average American worker could see his or her economic position weakening but couldn’t tell why. Meanwhile, the multinationals sent Joe’s shipyard job to Vietnam. Calvin’s steel-making job ended up in Bangladesh. GOP politicians and shills at Fox News convinced Joe that Democrats wanted to take away his guns and convinced Calvin there was a “War on Christmas” to worry about.

Understandably, the average worker felt the pain. The coal miners who voted for Trump in 2016 were desperate and saw a vote for him as a worthwhile gamble. The men and women at the Carrier plant in Indiana, scheduled for closing, should, almost unanimously, have voted Republican, if Republicans could really save their plant from closing. If a Republican candidate was promising to bring jobs back from China, voting Republican, not Democratic, made sense.

The problem, again, was that the Democrats had never been the ones to ship the jobs to China to begin.

You could listen to the truth, buried at the end of Mitt Romney’s famous 47% speech if you paid attention in 2012. It wasn’t the obvious part—about how 47% of Americans were “takers,” and Romney and the superrich were “makers”—that should have alerted workers to the fact the Great Scam was on.

It was the second part that revealed a fundamental truth about the Republican Party. Romney was talking to a room full of the fattest possible cats about the joys of investing in China.

In that role, Romney had reveled in opportunities to make money by shipping jobs to China—failing to take note of the near-slave wages and terrible working conditions Chinese workers had to accept. Here’s how he described the “possibilities” of making piles of dough in China:

And I remember going to—sorry just to bore you with stories—but I was, when I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen them.

American workers would never accept similar conditions. Romney continued in truly tone-deaf fashion:

And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, “Gosh, I can’t believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in.” They said, “No, no, no—this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they’ll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we—this is to keep people out.”

And they said, “Actually, Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they’ve saved enough money and they don’t come back to the factory.” And he said, “And so on the weekend after Chinese New Year, there’ll be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven’t come back and they can come to the factory. And so, as we were experiencing this for the first time, for me to see a factory like this in China some years ago, the Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, “You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you’re born in America.” This is an amazing land. And what we have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we’re sharing it with the world. I’m concerned about the future, but also optimistic as I said, and I look forward to getting America back on track…

If wages and benefits declined, it didn’t bother the fattest cats.

If wages and benefits declined at home, it didn’t bother Romney and the fattest cats. It didn’t bother the Koch brothers or the Walton clan. The Koch’s could afford to donate hundreds of millions to Republican candidates and causes. They would eventually be repaid for their “investment” with policies that granted them tax cuts worth billions. The Walton family continued to donate to the GOP and continued to pay workers subpar wages. Walmart managed to curtail hours so fewer employees would qualify for healthcare under the Obama plan. Big Pharma donated hundreds of millions to the GOP and kept jacking up drug prices. Republicans kept arguing that it would be a horrible idea if Medicare started negotiating to lower drug costs. The price of insulin shot up by 700% in twenty years and champions of capitalism pronounced it good.

The average worker got a few extra dollars in his or her paycheck when Trump and Congress cut taxes.

Unfortunately, Calvin could no longer afford the insulin his daughter, who suffered from type-1 diabetes, needed to live. Still, if he watched enough right-wing TV, he found solace in thinking Republicans were fighting for him—fighting to keep transgender individuals from using the same bathrooms as his girl.

The Great Scam was in.

The Great Scam still is.

5/27/18: Back in 2015 a conservative friend got mad when I said Congress should raise the minimum wage. I argued (as proven by math) that the minimum wage had failed to keep up with inflation.

He argued, in hallucinatory fashion, that if the minimum wage was raised a McDonald’s cheeseburger would cost $5.

What America really needs is a “Whopper Tax.”

Considering how fat most Americans are, including me, my argumentative friend, and Orange Teletubby Trump, you might argue that if a Big Mac cost $5, we’d all be better off in the end. (The rear end.)

At that price we might eat more fruits and vegetables at home.

Here, let me be the first to suggest a “Whopper Tax.” It’s a kind of conservative, “take responsibility for your actions” approach to healthcare. Why should any in-shape citizen pay higher taxes for healthcare for others if those others are big tubs of goo? We need to place scales at the entrances of fast food emporiums and in grocery stores. If you buy a bag of Reese Pieces at the grocery or a Whopper at Burger King, but step on the scale and you’re obese, then you are the whopper. Let the federal government impose a “Whopper Tax,” say $1.50 on the candy or $2 on the burger. These tax dollars can be used to offset the costs of healthcare in years to come.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, wages!

When it comes to wages, minimum or not, we know the average worker is faring worse than he or she might have three or four decades ago. How bad have the pay disparities become? An Obama-era rule helps us get a picture. Under new rules (which the GOP would of course like to revoke) publicly traded companies must reveal the pay of top executives, compared to the median pay of workers.

Before we continue, this is not some diatribe about capitalism. This is not a call to bring communism to our shores. If you’ve been paying attention, China, almost the last supposed practitioner of communism, has been thoroughly corrupted by money. Party leaders and their relatives wallow in cash.

Capitalism, to repurpose a quote from Winston Churchill, is the least bad economic system. (Churchill had said democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the rest.) That doesn’t mean the current version is in balance.

Consider Stephen Wynn—until recently chief executive of Wynn Resorts—as a poster boy for current trends. Wynn’s compensation in 2017 came to $34,522,695, as much as 909 of his workers. Massive economic clout allowed him to donate heavily to Republican candidates and causes ($729,217 to Trump alone) while simultaneously forcing female employees who wanted to keep their jobs to have sex with his weird, plastic-surgery self. It was what you call a Wynn-win-win for the boss.

Life was good until too many female employees banded together and the pervert got bounced.

Wynn, left, was really good at getting away with abusing women.

More generally, life is a stupendous pleasure for the men and women on top. Margaret Georgiadis, former chief executive at Mattel, never had to worry about paying her family’s next doctor bill. She took home $31,275,289 in 2017. This was equal to the pay of 4,987 regular Mattel workers. A company spokesperson offered an apology of sorts, explaining the disparity this way: “More than half of Mattel’s worldwide employee base consists of manufacturing-plant workers in Asia and elsewhere, which of course, significantly impacts our median employee pay rate.”

In other words, you shipped jobs overseas and stopped making toys in the U.S. You screwed American workers.

Now you’re screwing workers overseas.

A guy who probably put in some serious overtime to earn his pay would be Frank Bisignano, chief executive at First Data. First Data processes credit-card transactions and Frank is frankly doing fine. In 2015 he did suffer a little, earning a paltry $51.6 million. This year, however, he finally collected a living wage. His take for an average week would be just under $2 million; for the year: $102,210,396. That means Bisignano made as much as 2,028 employees.

How are others at the top of the pyramid faring? Michael Rapino earned $70.6 million, compared to the median pay of Live Nation Entertainment employees ($24,406). That meant a chief executive-to-worker pay ratio of 1 to 2,893. Jeffrey Bewkes at Time-Warner made just under $49 million, as much as 651 cable installers. Steve Easterbrook of McDonald’s took home $21,761,052, as much as 3,101 men and women behind the counters.

But at least Republicans blocked every effort to raise the minimum wage and a hamburger didn’t cost five bucks.

5/28/18:  The president gets Memorial Day off to a decent start at 6:01 a.m., tweeting a link to a story about a little boy he met last year at the Arlington Cemetery grave of his father.

With that formality out of the way, Trump makes the rest of the day about himself. His second tweet at 7:58 a.m. reads:

Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!

No, Mr. Trump, “those who died for our great country” would not be “happy and proud” were they able to rise from honorable graves and see what you’ve been up to. Those who died at Lexington and Concord would consider your attacks on the First Amendment a disgrace.

Black soldiers, cut down by the hundreds while trying to capture Ft. Fisher in 1864, would not be proud to hear you call black NFL players who protest “sons of bitches.” They would not be happy to hear you say those who protest—who protest against you—should maybe not be in this country. (See: 6/5/18.)

Every Jewish soldier who died under the Stars and Stripes would cringe at your comments in the wake of the Charlottesville riots, when you said there were “good people” on both sides.

The immigrants who came here, fleeing starvation in Ireland, religious hatred in Poland and repression in Russia, who learned to love their adopted country, who fought under its flag, would not see you as you see yourself. They would see you as a man who tramples on the values that make this nation great. Pfc. Diego Rincon, whose family fled Columbia as refugees, and who died at 19 in Iraq, winning posthumous U.S. citizenship, would see where you stand on cutting the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. Rincon would not be proud of you.

Those who spent time in a North Vietnamese prison and died from torture and abuse—comrades of Sen. John McCain—would rise from their graves to denounce you for the hypocrite you are.

Lt. Ashley White, killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2011, posthumously awarded a Bronze Star, would consider your treatment of women, your lying to even your wife, and would stand aghast.

Those who believed in honor would know you to be a man without honor.

Those who served because they believed they had a duty to serve and went to war in 1812 and 1846 and 1898 would consider your family’s history, of never serving at all, and shake their heads in disbelief.

Those who thought freedom was always worth fighting for, and by that meant freedom for all, they would not be proud of you today.

They would be appalled.

5/29/18: It’s a sad day for the president. His favorite TV show has been canceled after Roseanne Barr goes on a Twitter rampage every bit as unhinged as one of his own.

Barr’s meltdown begins when she responds to a comment about Valerie Jarrett, who worked for President Obama. Barr describes Jarrett’s looks: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj.” That’s the first nail in Barr’s coffin, a racist twofer, combining a spritz of anti-Muslim hate with 1870s-style denigration of African Americans.

Suddenly aware that her “joke” might have been poorly received Barr apologizes.

Still, apologizing can be hard if you have sawdust for brains. Barr decides the best way to fight fire is to pour gasoline on it and hold her Twitter fingers in the flames. The second nail in her career coffin is an anti-Semitic tweet. First, Barr labels Chelsea Clinton as “Chelsea Soros Clinton” and claims she is married to a nephew of George Soros, a liberal Jewish financier.

Ms. Clinton gets wind and politely points out, via Twitter, that while the nephews of Mr. Soros may be fine individuals she cannot say. She is not married to any of them or all of them.

Barr picks up a third nail and tries to hammer it home.

We all make mistakes—but not anti-Semitic mistakes.

Before she can stop herself Barr’s nimble fingers are tapping away again. “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me!” she faux apologizes. “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?”

That is true. We all make mistakes. We just don’t all make anti-Semitic mistakes. I once ran into the back of a car driven by one of my former students. It was the only wreck I’ve caused in fifty years. It was a mistake.

It was not an anti-Semitic mistake.

A large part of Barr’s problem boils down to the same kind of profound ignorance we see in the president. A bare minimum of fact-checking shows Soros was born in Hungary on August 12, 1930. This would make him eight years old when World War II began, fourteen by the time Germany surrendered.

In other words, Ms. Barr was falling for the kind of stupid crap that circulates frequently on the internet. In November 2016, for example, Snopes, the fact-checking site, debunked a rumor that Soros had once been an officer in the dreaded SS, the military arm of the Nazi regime.

That would have been quite a trick for a boy of fourteen.

Oskar Groening worked at Auschwitz but was not found out for seventy years.
The picture at left was supposedly Soros.

Suppose Barr wanted to look under a few rocks and find some actual Nazis to tweet-worry about? She need look no further than Richard B. Spencer, a really big fan of President Trump. (See also: 5/31/18.)

Or she might consider the stirring words of Rocky Suhayda, leader of the American Nazi Party. That would be an obvious place to start.

Back in 2016, he had this to say:

Now, if Trump does win, OK, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that. You know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, OK.

It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate.

What Suhayda was saying was this: “We are bigots. We all know that. We’re members of the American Nazi Party, for god’s sakes. But if we’re smart about how we act we can make it hard for people who aren’t bigots to prove that we are. Are we? Sure. And Trump is our kind of guy.”

For some reason people who like Nazis like Trump.

  

5/30/18: Today’s topic is Nuts on Twitter. First up, we have Roseanne Barr, the suddenly unemployed television star. 

A golden foot in a golden mouth.

Yesterday she stormed into contention, for “Twitter Nut of the Year,” with a racist tweet comparing an African American woman to a baby born from the union of a Muslim terrorist and an ape.

Until that moment, President Trump had “Twitter Nut of the Year” locked up. But a look at the body of Barr’s work marks her as a dark horse candidate to take home this year’s prize. (It’s a trophy of a golden head jammed up a golden ass.) Barr has been all over the place in the past, insulting all manner of individuals and groups. She once told an interviewer that the Pope “owns almost every dollar in the world.” She called Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, “a filthy Nazi whore.” As Vox noted, racist tweets have long been a staple of her Twitter feed. Barr referred to Susan Rice, an adviser to President Obama, as “a man with big swinging ape balls.”

In the same way, there was no conspiracy theory Barr couldn’t swallow. In March she tweeted about a survivor of the Parkland school shooting. She insisted he performed a Nazi salute during the “March for Our Lives.” Later she had to admit the image she had seen and tweeted about was doctored. Barr offered up Twitter support for Pizzagate conspiracy sites. This was cool, if you were a right-wing nut. It was sad if you were the dumb schmuck who believed Hillary Clinton was holding children in a pizza parlor basement as part of a child sex ring. Then you, the poor dumb schmuck, would march into said parlor, fire your assault rifle several times at a locked basement door, get arrested and be sentenced to four years in jail.

Total children found and saved: 0.

If you tweet your belief in imaginary child sex rings, that’s how you win “Twitter Nut of the Year.”

Trump, of course, is a tough Nut to beat but Barr has serious chops. She said Obama organized the Boston Marathon bombing so he could trample gun rights. At one point she called Israel “a Nazi state,” and insisted Zionism was a creation of the Third Reich. That’s like saying General Custer was plotting with the Sioux to get the Seventh Cavalry wiped out.

*

OF COURSE, to become the champion you must beat the champion, and the “Twitter Nut of the Year,” three years running, 2015, 2016 and 2017, is the President of the United States.

Trump gets in another great shot of his own today. With iPhone in hand, he could have tweeted something like: “Roseanne Barr’s comments are totally unacceptable in a diverse country based on the ideal that ‘all men and women are created equal.’” He could have posted: “All good people, of all races, religions and ethnic backgrounds deserve to be treated with….”

Nope.

Trump tweets instead:

Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that “ABC does not tolerate comments like those” made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?

That’s how you win the Nut Award: ignore racism and whine about how mean the media is to you.

*

SPEAKING OF WHICH, President It’s-All-About-Me has been tweeting madly about the Mueller investigation all week.

Last Saturday, he unleashed a flurry of Twitter yelps:

With Spies, or “Informants” as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?”

Okay. Let’s follow the president’s logic. There were “spies.” They were “all over” his campaign.

No one warned you about the “phony Russian problem?” That would be true—unless you counted James Comey and James Clapper who spoke to you about the investigation on January 6, 2017. And you probably should count Sally Yates, who came to the White House on January 26, six days after you took the oath of office, to warn that General Michael Flynn, the man you chose as your National Security Adviser, had been lying about contacts with Russians.

The tweet barking continued:

Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt. They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation...They went back home in tatters! 

Such young lives ruined! Michael Flynn, pled guilty, age 59; Paul Manafort, indicted, but still starry-eyed at 69.

Trump grabbed his phone again early Wednesday and started tweet-babbling once more. This time he quoted Fox News, which he was watching. It took three tweets to vent. Congressman Trey Gowdy, a Republican, could be seen on TV answering a question about whether Trump was wrong to be upset with Attorney General Jeff Sessions or not, after Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.

The tweets read:

Rep. Trey Gowdy “I don’t think so, I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the country’s... 

....chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, ‘oh by the way I’m not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too...and that’s how I read that - Senator Sessions, why didn’t you tell me before I picked you....

....There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!”

Trump then tacked on four words at the end of the third tweet: “And I wish I did!”

Unfortunately, not even some of the regulars at Fox News, and not Gowdy either, could support Trump’s absurd comments about spies and infiltrators swarming his campaign.

Judge Napolitano blows a big hole in the “Spygate” boat.

Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal expert who appears regularly on Fox, blew a big hole in Trump’s “Spygate” boat.

Speaking to Martha MacCallum, he said:

The allegations from Mayor Giuliani over the weekend, which would lead us to believe that the Trump people think the FBI had an undercover agent who finagled his way into Trump's campaign and was there as a spy on the campaign seem to be baseless—there is no evidence for that whatsoever.

But this other allegation with this professor (whose name we’re not supposed to mention), that is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and criminal investigations.

(The professor Napolitano refers to is the single informant known to have talked to three members of the Trump campaign.)

Gowdy then all but sank the Spygate boat. He is one of a handful of members of Congress who sat in on meetings with the heads of the F.B.I., Department of Justice and U.S. intelligence agencies earlier in the week. This was after Trump demanded investigators provide information about all the “spies” investigating his campaign. Now Gowdy had this to say in another interview on Fox News. First, the F.B.I. routinely used informants, he pointed out:

I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump…It looks to me like the FBI was doing what President Trump said: “I want you to do, find it out.” President Trump himself in the Comey memos said, “If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it.”

Sounds to me like that was exactly what the FBI did.

What about the idea that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani had been floating lately—that the president should never sit down with the Mueller team and talk? Gowdy responded, “If he were my client, I’d say if you’ve done nothing wrong, you need to sit down and tell Mueller what you know.”

5/31/18: Let’s hear a round of applause for Republicans running for Congress. First, out of Arizona, we have Joe Arapiao, a former sheriff found guilty of contempt of court. Arapiao promises if elected to the U.S. Senate to focus on important matters like President Obama’s birth certificate.

(Even Trump himself and Fox News have long since admitted Obama was born in these United States.)

One GOP primary opponent is Craig Brittian, mastermind of a money-making revenge porn website.

And it gets even “better.” In Illinois, Bill Falwell is up for election in the Seventeenth Congressional District.

Falwell has claimed:

A)    The 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

B)     Beyoncé has ties to the Illuminati.

C)    So does Madonna.

D)   And he knows because he has watched their music videos.

“The Illuminati,” CNN explains, “is a secret society that serves as the basis for a popular conspiracy theory that alleges that many of the world’s leaders and celebrities are masterminding world events.”

FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT MY OTHER POSTS

  

So Much Winning: A Hundred Days of Trump (1/20/17 to 4/29/17)

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So Much Winning: Days 101-200 of Trump (4/30/17 to 8/7/17)

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The Awful, Abysmal, Atrocious Days of Donald J. Trump (8/8/17 to 11/15/17)

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The Horror Show Continues: Days 301-365 of Trump (11/16/17 to 1/19/18)

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Anything New? The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump (1/20/18 to 4/19/18) Link

Anything New? The Daily, Hourly Craziness of Donald J. Trump Part II (4/20/18 to 5/31/18)

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