Let's Fix This Country | Articles on national issues, politics, foreign policy, and the culture

the presidency

Gabbard’s Dramatics Entice Trump to “Go After” Obama for “Treason”

Out to please her boss, DNI Tulsi Gabbard serves up incendiary allegations

Still, nine years later, Donald Trump is so in the grip of his malignant narcissism that he must somehow disprove – however falsely – that he won the 2016 election without any assist from Russian meddling. He simply cannot stand any implication that Russia might have helped.

So he has charged his intelligence appointees to show that the “Russia collusion hoax” was rooted in the conspiracy of a cabal at the top of government that election year.

He has had CIA Director John Ratcliffe order up a “CIA Note”, a short and redundant document that finds multiple faults with the CIA’s prior review in early 2017 of Russia involvement. Ratcliffe followed this up by delivering criminal referrals to the Justice Department on July 8 that the former directors of the CIA and FBI, John Brennan and James Comey, be investigated for illegal conduct such as lying to Congress.

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Tulsi Gabbard and her treasonous Obama.

And second, just a couple of weeks later, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard did her part to win Trump’s praise with her study of intelligence communications in late 2016 which, she alleges, show the corrupt intent of bringing down the newly-elected president, Donald Trump.

Gabbard upped the ante. It’s not just Brennan and Comey. She is going after Obama. She claims documents show Obama rejected the intelligence community view that Russia was not trying to “hack the election in favor of either candidate” and called a December 6th National Security Council meeting on “a sensitive matter” in which he charged DNI James Clapper to produce “an intelligence assessment that detailed not if but how Moscow affected the outcome of the election”, Gabbard writes. She is saying Obama ordered intel to slant its… Read More »

the president's military

Court Gives Trump License to Militarize U.S. Cities Against Protests

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court's order that California's National Guard be returned to Governor Gavin Newsom's control, ruling that President Trump was justified in federalizing the state's Guard without Newsom's concurrence.

The three-judge panel, two of them Trump appointees, ruled unanimously that the protests over ICE agents seizing brown-skinned people off the streets of Los Angeles had become overheated enough that "affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination" is warranted, "that he likely acted within his authority (italics ours)".

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President Trump exulted in the decision, insulting the governor in the process, tweeting:

"The judges obviously realized that Gavin Newsom is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done. This is a great decision for our Country..." (capitalization his).

This has been his dream, not to govern, but to rule. The doctrine of states' rights is not for him. Trump has long desired to use the United States military against the American people. Restrained by advisers who told him he needed to wait for governors to ask for federal help, he has regretted not taking direct action against the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. "The next time, I am not waiting” to send in… Read More »

governance

Trump’s Answer to Weather Disasters: Shut FEMA down.

He has a much cheaper plan.

President Trump has said that he intends to put an end to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after the current hurricane season ends. With 119 dead and 173 missing as this is written, and catastrophic damage inflicted on the hill country area of Texas, one would think he’d have second thoughts.

He had come to that conviction in January when he visited Asheville in North Carolina where in late September of last year Hurricane Helene had wrought devastation never experienced by the mountain region of the state:

“I’d like to see the states take care of disasters, let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen. And I think you’re going to find it a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half and you’re going to get a lot quicker response."

It was a stunning notion with no basis whatever in facts, and yet at end-April he appointed 13 people to review FEMA and gave them 180 days to come up with a recommendation.

In the meanwhile, the managerial brilliance of Musk and DOGE cut the permanent staff by 20%. No surprise that The New York Times is reporting that FEMA did not answer nearly… Read More »

taxes

The Great Budget Baseline Con

What debt? Creative accounting makes it go away.

Republicans now face the dicey task of persuading their voters that the "One Big Beautiful Bill" they've just passed is anything of the sort. Deeply unpopular, Fox News and Quinnipiac polls show an average of 57% of voters are opposed to the OBBB, with only 34% in favor. And when told that it could add $3.5 to $4.0 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years while cutting $800 billion from Medicaid at a cost of 8-10 million people losing medical coverage, all to preserve the 2017 tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, support of even MAGA Republicans plunges 10% or so in polling. And wait until they discover that no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, both have limits, and together with the quadrupled state and local tax deductible, all expire in just three-and-a-half years at the end of Trump's term.

So what are Republicans to do? Step one, attack their own Congressional Budget Office which has always been the go-to source for non-partisan analysis. Several op-eds dug into historical examples of when the CBO got it wrong. "The CBO has a terrible track record of predicting health insurance losses", says the arch-conservative Washington Examiner's editorial board. "Most… Read More »

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the presidency

Trump Says Give Him Numbers He Likes or You’re Out

A reporter asked President Trump, “Why did you fire the head of the bureau of labor statistics?” He answered, “Because I think her numbers were wrong”.

If you didn’t know already, now you know that the America you once knew is gone. It is now a dictatorship where the man we still call “president” must be served only with data that conforms to his vision that we are living in his “Golden Age”.

Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Dr. Erika McEntarfer was Senate-confirmed and is under a four-year contract. That is no impediment for a dictator.

expected job decline arrives

Friday’s jobs report dropped from preceding months to only 73,000 net new jobs created in July. Daniel Koh, who was chief of staff at the Labor Department during President Biden’s tenure, knows how labor statistics come to be:

”There are thousands of people who put together this report every month from hundreds of thousands of input data."

But Trump, utterly ignorant of the ebb and flow of millions of jobs across the nation, thinks the data are wrong because they don’t fit his imaginary reality. He tweeted:

”In my opinion, today's job numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.“

Business and government need reliable data to make decisions. The monthly job number, eagerly awaited by the financial markets on the first Friday of every month, is one of the key economic indicators tracked by government agencies. Because the job numbers from… Read More »

deportation

ICE Told It Can Detain Millions and Deny Them Access to Due Process

Their new policy defies April's Supreme Court ruling

Investigative reporters at The Washington Post have learned that immigration agencies have been cleared to detain people without allowing them any right to apply to a court for a bond hearing that could free them to continue their lives while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated. With the administration's accelerated sweeps all over the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crowding the detention facilities, and far too few immigration courts and judges to process them, ICE will simply bypass these steps and ship detainees to one of its 200 detention centers where they could wait many months extending to years waiting to be heard.

The head of ICE, Todd Lyons, wrote in a July 8 memo that the departments of Homeland Security and Justice had “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities” and determined that immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody" where they will wait “for the duration of their removal proceedings." The American Immigration Lawyers Association has heard from it members that denial of bond hearings has already begun in several states.

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To meet the 3,000 arrests a day demanded by the administration's most extreme immigrant xenophobe, deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller, the hordes of people ICE and other federal agents are grabbing at random will inevitably include American citizens.

This week, perhaps seeming to comport with a Supreme Court mandate in April, a second ICE memo says it will give notice to certain individuals facing deportation that they have just six hours to try to reach a lawyer.

This adheres to the Court's April ruling not at all. It said individuals in deportation proceedings are entitled to due process and… Read More »

the presidency

Trump Physical Ailment Reminds Us to Check Mental Acuity, Too

Updated Aug. 1: A month ago, the President's circulatory system was diagnosed as having difficulty overcoming gravity to return blood to his heart, resulting in swelling at the extremities. The President's doctor deems it non-serious and treatable with medication that stimulates circulation.

We've been through four years of President Biden's diminishing mental status only to learn of the accusation that the White House kept the seriousness of his condition from the public. In a time of mounting precarity, we need to be wary of that being the case again by keeping tabs on not just Donald Trump's physical fitness but on his mental acuity as well.

Donald Trump is the oldest president ever to be sworn in, older by a few months than when Joe Biden began his presidency, yet you can bet that the loyalty-chosen crew at the current White House will do its utmost to keep any slippage in Trump's mental acuity from our learning of it.

Trump took a cognitive test in April as part of an overall medical exam and was eager to report from Air Force One right afterward...

"I got every answer right. I've taken it, I've taken the cognitive test I think four times, the number, and I've got nothing wrong."

Days later in the Oval Office he was like a child awarded a gold star:

"I took my cognitive exam as part of my physical exam, and I got the highest mark, and one of the doctors said, 'Sir, I've never seen anybody get that kind of -- that was the highest mark.'"

Coming from Trump and not the examiners, who knows? But assuming that, for baseline continuity, it was the same cognitive test as… Read More »

civil rights

Freedom of Speech, Trump Variant

Contradict him at your peril.

In his March 5th address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump said, “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” He backed that up with an executive order. What he did not say was that his free speech edict does not permit others to say or write what he doesn’t like.

Just before July 4th, Paramount announced it would pay Mr. Trump – his library fund supposedly — $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by him about the editing of a snip of what Kamala Harris had to say in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes”. The suit, filed just before the election for a preposterous $10 billion, would have gone nowhere in court, but Paramount is up for sale to a Hollywood studio run by the son of the world’s third richest person, Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle Corporation, and the transaction needs the approval of the federal government.

To the extent that the broadcast journalists and their research and production staffs don't quit in protest, the sellout tarnishes the reputation and future credibility of “60 Minutes”, an institution that has been on air since 1968.

the official verdict

It doesn’t stop with CBS. Mr. Trump has now threatened to sue The New York Times and CNN for… Read More »

the presidency

Immunity Wasn’t Enough. Supremes Void Checks and Balances for Trump.

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Last July, in the final decision of its term, the Supreme Court conferred immunity from prosecution on the U.S. president for any official act he might take, no matter if illegal. We wrote, "This Court has bestowed immunity on the one potential president most likely to commit illegal acts."

How true. As soon as Trump took office, he set about issuing a tsunami of executive orders, many of which broke laws. In response to lawsuits, a host of district court judges issued nationwide injunctions to block Trump's actions until the suits play out at trial.

So now what's happened? On Friday, the Court took a major step to doubly empower the president, winding up the current term by stripping the judges' presumptive power to issue universal injunctions.

off leash

The 6-to-3 decision thereby frees all of the president's decrees to go forward, legal or not. Gone are the checks and balances of the Constitution's grand design to forever prevent the newly formed United States from ever becoming a monarchy. There's nothing left to control the king. Certainly not Congress. The Republicans control both… Read More »