How Embarrassing!

Yesterday Nikki Haley, our ambassador to the United Nations addressed the body with, essentially, a threat!  128 nations of the world expressed their displeasure and condemnation of the ‘decree’ by Donald Trump that as far as the US is concerned, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.  It is their sovereign right to express criticism and opinion.  After all, that is what the UN is all about, right? 

So what do Trump and Haley do?

The two of them, in the name of the United States of America, tell the world that we will remember their vote and it will help determine whether we continue to fund the UN and continue to send aid worldwide to Earth’s most vulnerable humans.  Haley said, “We’ll be taking names!”

This is not my United States.

Trump, in the name of the USA, is acting like the imperious ‘bully’ he is in real life, threatening to do nasty things if the world doesn’t show loyalty to him and his decrees.  This is not our country any more, my friends.  How crass and egotistical to present himself and our country as an autocratic ‘my way or the highway’ member of the world community.

Is there no end to this nightmare?

Roger Cohen of the New York Times perhaps says it best in his editorial today:  https://nyti.ms/2p8OMyU

If this is America, we must resist and work hard to change who is in power so we can be proud of who we are.

The Handwriting is on the Wall......

We have turned an ominous corner in our journey through the “Valley of Trump” as we try to ‘fear no evil’.  If you take a step back from the daily indignities to our democracy and survey the entire landscape there are some signs that we are headed for a very unsettling time.

1.          There seems to be a coordinated assault by Republicans on the Mueller investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, and the Senate Judiciary Committee investigation.  They are painting Mueller’s efforts as biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, etc.  Republicans are being loudly vocal, led by their propaganda arm (Fox News) they are impugning, in increasingly vitriolic terms, the effort to get to the baseline facts of what happened during the election.  The President is repeating everyday that it’s a witch-hunt and ‘there is no collusion’.  He’s right.  There was no collusion….it was an outright conspiracy!  Trump’s campaign operatives met with the Russians repeatedly all during 2015 and 2016; they took calls, emails, met with Russian intelligence operatives, Russian oligarchs and their minions, Russian bankers, Russian lawyers and Putin cronies.  They assisted with the transfer of information to Wikileaks; they knew about upcoming releases of damaging information; they solicited Russia’s help in ‘finding the elusive Clinton emails’; they travelled to Russia for conferences, meetings, introductions.  They took money from the Russians.  Can you even imagine the uproar if any of those things would have occurred during the Obama administration?

2.    All of this is in preparation for the dismissal of Robert Mueller and his staff.  We are going to be told, and in fact are being told now, that the investigation is bogus, biased, false, etc. by the President and his obsequious toadies on a daily basis.  This is a coordinated attack to repeat these assertions over and over because as we know, if you repeat lies enough times, there are those that will come to believe it as the truth.

3.    There is an ongoing corruption of the rule                    of law. The administration is attacking the courts, the FBI, the Justice Department on a daily basis.  Trump describes the FBI as ‘tattered’.  35000 employees who toil on a daily basis to protect us from all manner of evil are being generalized and categorized as a biased mass of incompetent agents.  How do you think that will affect the moments when an agent presents his credentials in pursuit of bad actors?  Will the public see them as enforcers of the law or a Gestapo like force?   Trump has nominated a huge number of questionable candidates for lifetime appointments to the courts….and the Republican Senate has confirmed them!

 4.   The administration attacks the first amendment and the Free Press daily.  We have heard threats to ‘change the libel laws’, to threaten FCC licenses of organizations that purportedly vomit forth ‘Fake News’ 24/7.  We have daily Presidential press briefings that are filled with lies, obfuscations, misstatements and are basically worthless when it comes to trying to understand and report what this administration is doing.  We learned of Trump’s meeting with Kislyak and Lefrov after the Comey firing--through the Russian press!  Our press was not  allowed in the Oval Office when they met.  We learned that Trump had a 45 minute call with Putin the other day from a Russian press release, not from our own Executive Branch information sources.

       And today we learn that the administration has banned the use by the CDC of 7 words in any report or document it releases.  Freedom of the Press  anyone?  The words are: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, science-based, and evidence-based…….are they kidding??

       Hey CDC!!!  Here are some alternatives you can use:           

            Vulnerable-- Powerless, defenseless

            Entitlement—claim, need, prerogative

                           Recompence, priviledge

            Diversity—diversification, multiplicity,

                           Variance

            Transgender—cross-gender, gender identi-

                           Fication, gender differentiation

            Fetus—embryo, developing egg, fertilized

                     Egg, blastosphere

            Science-based—empirical

            Evidence-based—factual, proven by facts

        

5.         Appointed and confirmed nominees to head the major departments of our government are selected because they are committed to dissembling the agencies they are appointed to:  Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of State, Attorney General’s office, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of the Treasury, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of the Interior.  If the nominees are not hell bent on destroying the agencies, they are completely incompetent and ignorant of what they should be doing (Think Ben Carson, Steve Mnuchin, Rick Perry)

   Last night there was a startling tweet from an unexpected source:  Mr. Walter Shaub, late of the US Office of Government Ethics.  You will recall that he resigned several months ago after the administration marginalized his ongoing efforts to point out ethics violations and infringements by the new regime.

“This weekend I’m stocking up on portable phone chargers, warm clothes, & gear needed for when we take the streets. I’m concerned the assault on the rule of law is coming over the holidays when we’re distracted. It‘ll be a defining moment for the Republic.”

There are many who are now scared about what is happening to our government.  If Trump and the Republicans shut down the Mueller probe, the Senate Intelligence probe, etc. what happens then?

Will Walter Shaub’s prediction be realized? 

How will each of you citizens interpret the oath of office that all our leaders take: “I swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America”

Should we be scared or empowered?

An Uneasy Development....

We are witnessing a change in the direction of the administration’s defense of the probes taking place into the Russia scandal.  It is not a reassuring change at all.  In fact it is a rather nefarious effort to discredit the Mueller investigation being undertaken by not only the administration, but by Republican congressmen in US Senate and House.  All you had to do was listen to Trump in Pensacola on Saturday at a rally for Roy Moore.  He repeated over and over that "the system is rigged, the system is rigged, but we are going to fix it!"  Get ready--It is Trump's new mantra!

As more and more details emerge that confirm suspicions of collusion by the Trump Campaign, and lies told to just about everyone about multiple and frequent connections and communications with Russian Intelligence as agents of Putin’s Russia, the only defense possible is to discredit the system, the investigators and the FBI.  This is a truly scurrilous development!

Frankly, from all outward appearances, the FBI and Mueller’s team have been carrying out a careful, thorough detailed investigation that seems well organized and planned.  Despite accusations from Republicans, who apparently will do anything to deny the actual truth about what is being revealed, the investigative team seems to be unbiased and scrupulously prosecutorial.

So what else can those who have drunk the Trump cool-aid do?  They are searching for a strategy that will result in the President’s ability to fire the Special Prosecutor and end the threat to Trump’s autocratic regime.  Hence the effort to discredit the thousands of loyal, patriotic employees of the FBI as ‘supporters of Hillary Clinton’ who are out to ‘get’ the President.  How absolutely ridiculous!  And of course, they claim that Mueller has hired Clinton supporters to conduct the investigation.  In fact in a rather McCarthy-esque tableau last week, Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, was questioned by Trey Gowdy, Jim Jordan and others trying to insinuate that all the members of Mueller’s team and major staff at the FBI were anti-Trump.  Rep. Louie Gohmert read aloud from a list of FBI officials, asking Wray after each name whether that person had shown political bias in their work.  Maybe he should have asked Wray if any of them ‘were or had ever been members of the communist party!’

If Trump fires the Special Prosecutor based on fact-less accusations of bias, there is no telling where we go from there.  There is real jeopardy for our republic if we turn around that bend.  It is doubtful now that there are any Republicans who will ever put country ahead of party.  Our democracy will have fallen over the edge of a precipice I could never have imagined for America.  It will be the end of the America I was born into.

Why is this Man Smiling?

Mitch McConnell is the slimiest, most slippery character ever to walk the halls of the United States Senate.  This is a man who has spent his career learning how to ‘game’ the Congressional mechanism to accumulate power and serve the greed of those who want to buy influence.  The cardinal rule of McConnell is he will do anything to acquire more power, or to achieve an outcome he thinks achieves his political interest.

This is the man who told us in 2010 that his only reason for coming to work every day was to make Barak Obama a one-term president.  Then he led the Republican minority in the Senate to obstruct literally every lawful action that the President attempted.  He broke the traditional filibuster, using it to attempt to block confirmation of nearly 170 judicial appointments being made by the Obama administration. His use of the filibuster in the Senate to obstruct nearly every Democratic initiative was the reason Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2013 invoked the so called  ‘nuclear option’ to ram through a Senate rules change to remove the Filibuster as a device for obstruction, except for Supreme Court nominees.

In 2014 McConnell vowed to restore the Senate rules and reinstate the ‘traditional committee process’.  He never got a chance to do that because as soon as he became Majority Leader in 2014, he was faced with the crisis of Antonin Scalia’s death and the prospect of the Supreme Court having the first liberal majority in decades.  So what did he do?  His audacious response was to prevent the Senate from even holding hearings on Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and then ramming through a rules change to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch.  How hypocritical!  He declined to even show even a minimum of respect for the sitting President's right to make a Supreme Court appointment.

And then look what he tried to do recently in his effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.  All the analyses showed that millions would lose health care, but did that matter to him and the rest of the Republicans? No.

So now we are listening to him tell us all the wonderful things that are going to result from this newest tax ‘reform’ legislation that he has engineered.  Never mind that all economists and analysts are unanimous in their criticism that this is an economic disaster and an historic re-distribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest 1% of the country.  There are no experts that say there will not be an increase to the nation’s deficit by at least half a trillion dollars and most predict it to be bigger.  There were no hearings on this bill.  A measure that will change the way the entire economy will operate was created in a few weeks by 50 odd people in a locked room with no opportunity for either the opposition party, much less the American people to understand what is in this bill.

So my question to all you fellow citizens is:  Is this the way our democracy is supposed to work?  Is a small coterie of elitist white men and a few women supposed to be able to effect such a ‘sea change’ in our economy and societal structure without the opportunity for all of us to understand what they are doing before they do it? 

And who is the architect of all this? 

It’s our ‘friend’ Mitch McConnell….leading the charge to cash in on his party’s deal with the devil in supporting Donald Trump for President because Trump will sign anything they put in front of him.  This tax ‘reform’ makes all the ‘donor class’ ecstatic.(yeah that’s all the rich people who only want to feed their greed by taking more money from the less fortunate, and who keep financing the campaigns of all those Republicans who are self serving their own avarice for power and that of their ‘donors’).  Our founders are turning in their graves!

I am again reminded that the only real way we root out this ‘rot’ is to vote.  Vote.  It is the only power we really have.  And believe me, there will be endless efforts to minimize that remaining right over the next year.