2023 Archives

If we continue to allow violence (like January 6th) and violent rhetoric to spread through the American body politic, we stand a very real chance of losing our republic. Sunday morning we all woke up to the news that an explosion and fire beneath I-95 in Philadelphia had snarled traffic for miles, disrupting both travel and commerce. My first thought went to Congressman Clay Higgins' (R-Putin) tweet days earlier calling for armed America-haters to: "1/50K know your bridges."

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Donald Trump has been indicted for stealing top-secret national security documents from you and me — our government — and endangering the security of America and the world by leaving them around where random spies and bad guys could access them. — Trump's jealousy for the way Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley was heroically portrayed in the media caused him to share secrets with others merely to impress them. — "Scary as hell." That's how an expert in the modern white supremacist militia movement described the tweet from Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins that seems to tell armed militia members to prepare for civil war if Trump is convicted and sent to jail. — Geeky Science! They knew the earth would burn, but they wanted the money. — Picture of the Week! Trump's Snidely Whiplash moment — and does that look like the white power sign that Snidely's flashing for the camera?

As Trump faces the music for a small slice of his crimes against our nation & our democracy, let’s not forget that he’s not the first. He was carrying on a GOP tradition stretching back to 1968… Every day that goes by appears to bring us closer to a Trump indictment on serious felony charges, most likely including violations of the Espionage Act; there’s considerable speculation that it may come as early as today. Most Americans view Donald Trump as an aberration, a one-off, the exception. He’s our first “criminal president” they think, the first to have committed crimes to get into office, while in office, or both. Most Americans, in this regard, are wrong, and it’s a tragic statement about both the way we teach American history in our schools and the way our corporate media deals with past presidential crimes. If previous Republican presidents had been held to account for their crimes the way it appears Trump is about to be, Trump may well have not been as brazen in everything from his violations of the Hatch Act to the Espionage Act to his explicitly asking Vladimir Putin to intervene in the 2016 election.

Turn on a light, the old saying goes, and the cockroaches will scatter. It’s time to bring honest and unflinching light to the Republican Party’s use of the word “woke”… Ron DeSantis says he’s going to save America from “wokeness,” proclaiming to a Los Angeles fundraiser: “So in Florida, we say very clearly, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.” Nikki Haley declares: “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”