< the presidency|313||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.
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 view to say – well, she doesn’t quite say what she thinks Obama ordered if he ordered anything. She has not identified specific criminal activity. Which doesn’t keep her from saying:
”There must be indictments, those responsible, no matter how powerful they are and were at that time, no matter who was involved in creating this treasonous conspiracy against the American people. They all must be held accountable.”
No sooner said than done. Attorney General Pam Bondi said her department “would be proud” to work with Gabbard and the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday the creation of a so-called strike force to investigate her allegations.
conspiracies of her own
Gabbard seems to treat as a treasonous conspiracy the mere production of the “intelligence community assessment” (ICA) that was completed in January 2017. What Gabbard has discovered does not seem all that conspiratorial. It was no secret that Obama wanted a report on all that was known about any Russian interference in the election, and for it to be completed before Trump – a paranoiac on the subject and with unmistakable Russia leanings – took office when he would surely deep six any and all such intelligence. For Obama, knowing what Russia was up to was decidedly a national security matter.
It has long been universally concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election. But even arch-conservative National Review says:
”All of the above has been well known for eight years; even though Gabbard presents it as a shocking revelation… But Trump and Gabbard go further, treating the accurate portion of the Democratic narrative as though it too were a fiction. Russia did indeed try, however ineffectively, to interfere in the election. Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe has attested to it.”
over the moon
Donald Trump would have none of that. Sitting in the White House, he exulted:
“They caught president Obama absolutely cold. After what they did to me and, whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly, so people say, oh, you know, a group. It’s not a group. It’s Obama. His orders are on the paper. Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, the man says. It’s time to go after people. Retribution against everyone who has ever said anything critical of him. Obama, of course, is a special case. The Black president, whose candidacy he hd hoped to derail by claiming, solely out of the bigotry we see all through his life against Blacks, that he was born in Kenya and thus constitutionally ineligible to be president.
Without benefit of any evidence in Gabbard’s claims that comes close, he would claim “treason”, and with such confusion that it adds to our piece last week about his lapses of acuity:
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question. I like to say ‘Let’s give it time’. It’s there. He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.”
Steal the election? Not what Gabbard claims, and what she does claim took place in December 2016, after the election.
Trump would go on to foul the presidency of the United States beyond anything imaginable of any other president in our history. He sent out an AI-created video that shows Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office when FBI agents enter, drag Obama out of his chair, force him to his knees before the White president, and remove him. The fake video then shows Obama in an orange jumpsuit in jail. The gay theme “YMCA” plays in the background.
This dangerously inspires assassination among the mentally deranged of his followers and he knows it. He has been called out before, as when he sent a tweet with him wielding a baseball bat over New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s head. But the Supreme Court would call this an “official act”, so he has immunity.
a republican take
Apart from Ms. Gabbard’s deep-state conspiratorial theatrics, the issue boils down only to whether Russia favored Trump or was just trying to disrupt our democratic system.
Announcement of the “strike force” came hours after Gabbard released a previously classified report from 2017 and edited further since that questioned the intelligence community’s ICA. The report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee acknowledges that…
“Putin ordered conventional and cyber influence operations, notably by leaking politically sensitive emails obtained from computer intrusions”
… but argues that Putin’s putative interest in aiding Trump was flawed, based on reports characterized as “substandard”. One, the House panel said, was based on a single human source who was “biased” against both Trump and Putin, and who claimed that Putin was “counting” on Trump’s victory. “One scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the report states.
The House committee that produced the report was led by California Representative Devin Nunes whose slavish devotion to Trump makes the report itself biased and suspect in Democrats’ eyes, witness that Nunes is now paid a colossal sum as the CEO of money-losing Trump Media & Technology Group, which is little more than Truth Social.
Democrats accused Gabbard of jeopardizing intelligence community sources and methods by releasing the Republican report.
In keeping with Trump’s animosity toward the intelligence services, Gabbard seems out to sow doubt with inflammatory remarks that she will have a difficult time substantiating in court, should it come to that. She says, presumably about the 2017 ICA and her alleged perfidy of the plotters:
“The most egregious weaponization of intelligence in American history…The manufactured findings from shoddy sources, they suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims. They disobeyed tradecraft, intelligence community standards, and withheld the truth from the America people.“
Gabbard recently tried to argue that there was no Russia influence because there was no Russian meddling in the actual vote totals, which has never been the intelligence community assessment.
Back to Ratcliffe
The “CIA Note” run up for Ratcliffe that reviews the 2017 ICA shows no awareness of the plot that Gabbard claims to have uncovered. It largely critiques the…
“highly compressed production timeline…which led to departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA.”>The most disputed point of the original review was its conclusion that Putin “aspired” to help Trump, a conclusion that “struggled to stand 
James Comey and John Brennan.
on its own” and was given only a “moderate confidence level”. Also suspect was the “excessive involvement of agency heads” and mentions of John Brennan’s heavy hand. He pushed for assessing that Putin favored Trump in its U.S. election intrusions. He “risked stifling analytic debate” by “signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated.” This was enough for Ratcliffe to make a criminal referral against Brennan. Why Comey as well isn’t apparent. The Note makes no mention of him.
obama rejoinder
Former President Barack Obama unusually felt the need to speak out:
”Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.
Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee said about the January 2017 ICA, “The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.”Special Counsel John Durham spent four years investigating the Russia connection and dwelled only on the Steele dossier, finding nothing to undermine the ICA.
The Department of Defense Inspector General saw no political bias or improper motivation in that specific ICA.
The Mueller team spent two years unearthing “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign”, reported in its 200 pages. The “investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
media split as ever
On the right, Fox News is all in for Gabbard. Primetime Laura Ingraham devoted a full segment with comments of this quality:
“When you think about the time, the man hours, the tens of millions of dollars, probably over a hundred million dollars when you add it all up, of the Mueller investigation. That entire thing was built on a lie…that entire thing was a fraud.”
Media on the left call Trump’s threats to “go after” Obama just another distraction by him to divert attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Trump has concocted the only story big enough to dislodge Epstein. Still, best not to discount Trump’s insatiable appetite for revenge (in his confused mind he more than once in his campaign rally ramblings thought he was running against Obama).
the outlaw president
Which brings us to Chief Justice John Roberts who wrote in his opinion that granted President Trump immunity from prosecution:
“Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law…An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine. The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid.”
And here we have the president to whom he granted immunity doing just that. Had he not granted immunity to Trump, his slandering Obama as treasonous and putting his life at risk could have brought civil and/or criminal prosecution.
The Court has been so deferential to Trump that if Trump does pursue a criminal charge against Obama and it winds up in the Supreme Court, might the biased six say that immunity only applies to Trump and future presidents and cannot be applied ex post facto to Obama?
Jul 25 2025 | Posted in
National |
Read More »
< deportation|290||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.
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 an opportunity to challenge their deportation through a habeas corpus petition:
“[N]otice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
The ICE memo offering six hours is cynically impudent. The Court should step in to remind ICE of what it said 80 years ago, that “notice which is a mere feint is not due process.” But will it? More on that later.
Immigration law says those here illegally “shall be detained” but the law’s application has always pertained only to those who had just crossed the border and would be immediately deported. But in its announced policy of denying an individual any access to a judge and a bond hearing, 
Narciso Barranco, a landscaper trimming bushes outside
an IHOP when he was here wrestled to the ground.
Agents say he attacked them with a weapon, but video
shows he was only carrying his weedwhacker.
He has lived in this country for a long time. He has
three sons who served in the United States Marine Corps.
ICE now intends to apply the statute to immigrants already here — families with schoolchildren who have been in country for years, working productive jobs, integrated into American communities, paying taxes.
Lawyers referred to in the Post article say that the totalitarian powers the administration has given ICE to deny bond appeal have no stated limit and could apply to the millions of people Trump contemplates. The “Big Beautiful Bill” allots a whopping $45 billion to expand immigrant detention capacity. We are building concentration camps.
During World War II, President Roosevelt ordered that persons in the United States of Japanese descent, out of fear that some could be spies for Japan, be rounded up and herded into internment camps for the duration of the war. It has been regarded a shameful forsaking of civil rights ever since. About 120,000 people were incarcerated. The Trump plan for millions will exceed the Japanese transgression many times over to the extent that immigrants are held here and not released to other countries.
For years the United States and scores of other countries have decried the inhuman practices of the Chinese Communist Party for holding an estimated million Muslim Uyghurs in internment camps. Is the United States about to do much the same?
Trump’s America
The Trump budget provides a gargantuan $31 billion for hiring and training 10,000 additional ICE agents, enough to make it the highest funded federal law enforcement agency compared to the budgets for the FBI and DEA.
Originally, ICE agents were to go after only known immigrant criminals. “We’re starting with the criminals”, Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press”. That quickly became a lie. It is obviously not possible to identify, find, and apprehend 3,000 criminals a day. Even if it were, how could there be so many criminals on the loose?
Instead, to meet Donald Trump’s goal of deporting a million immigrants in his first year, ICE is sweeping up whomever they encounter with brown skin — day laborers who congregate mornings at Home Depot 
parking lots hoping to find work, customers at 7-Eleven stores, workers at carwashes and nail salons, dishwashers and gardeners, and most cynically snatching people at courthouses who had come to fulfill their legal obligation to attend immigration proceedings.
These are people who, with random exceptions, have committed no crimes. The Miami Herald got a list of the first 700 to be incarcerated at Alligator Alcatraz and found that 250 of them have no criminal convictions or pending charges at all. Just immigration violation. Moreover, ICE’s indiscriminate and indifferent seizure of people off the street guarantees that thousands among the intended millions will be United States citizens.
“Let me See Your Papers”
Americans need to reflect not only on the police state their country has become, but what it could mean for all of us. ICE agents will scour every community to purge the millions Trump wants ejected from his United States.
What if they grab you? Maybe you are white, but your anti-fascist remark or protest sign irks them and they are pressured to meet quota. So when they slam you against a wall and zip-tie your wrists behind your back, your mind races to think of what you are carrying that proves you are a citizen. Probably nothing. We are not required to carry “papers” in this country. So you are loaded into a van and put in a cage somewhere awaiting transfer to one of the nation’s 200 immigrant detention facilities. There you will wait for your hearing which, under the new policy that denies bond hearings, you are not going to get.
SCOTUS Accommodatus
The policy of disallowing abducted immigrants from seeking a bond hearing will undoubtedly be contested in lower courts and should, on an emergency basis, be elevated to the Supreme Court. That gives rise to forebodings, however, given the justices’ decisions of late.
Take the example of the birthright citizenship case. A district federal court had issued a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive order fulfilling his long-held mania to deny citizenship to anyone born in the United States of undocumented immigrant parents, citizenship accorded by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. But the Court used the case, voting 6-to-3 in the usual partisan divide, to put an end to lower court assumptions that they can issue edicts that control the entire country. Lower court decisions go no further than bringing relief to the plaintiffs in such cases, says the Court.
What was stunning was the Court ignoring the birthright citizenship case itself. Rather than rule then and there that denial of citizenship was clearly in violation of the black letter text of the Constitution, the Court set that aside for another day and in the interim is allowing Trump to do as he pleases, the Constitution be damned. For as long as the Court’s dereliction persists, Trump could be stripping citizenship from an average of 255,000 children per year, according to the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute.
That’s not an isolated case. Ten days ago, the Court handed Trump another victory, reversing a lower court’s ruling and allowing his administration to fire thousands of federal workers. Typical of such emergency applications, the Court neither signed the order nor revealed their vote count. Most significantly, it is only a temporary ruling, but that allows Trump to go forward, firing at will, harming thousands of lives, until the Court gets around to possibly deciding too late that the firing exceeded the president’s power.
Last Monday, the Court repeated the same failure to deal with legality of the president’s action at hand, allowing him to eviscerate the Department of Education, cutting its staffing in half, possibly declaring his action illegal someday too late for the government workers who have been kicked to the curb.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson could have been speaking for all three cases when in her dissent in the birthright case she wrote that the six justices in the majority endangered the rule of law by creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”
These example set the stage, we fear, that the Court will treat ICE’s denial of bond hearings the same way – allowing hundreds of thousands to disappear into the carceral system only to eventually ruling that the administration had engaged in a colossal abuse of power, long after the imprisonment of people for months and years without any due process or access to legal help, or disappeared out of the country, deprived of any chance to make their case that they belong here.
can this really go on?
Trump voters may finally be beginning to realize the immorality of ICE’s indiscriminate tactics as they see people they know in their hometowns kidnapped and vanished. These are the people who hand you your 
A woman tied to a tree in the process of her arrest..
takeout dinner, who perform the dangerous work of re-shingling the roof of friends down the block, who tend to the elderly living next door, who drives the bus that takes your kids to school. Removal of these industrious people leaves a disruptive void in communities. And it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear, where parents are afraid to let their kids go to school, and the kids are afraid to go home for fear that their parents may be gone.
A June Gallup poll showed that 79% of surveyed adults see immigration as a good thing for the country and a record-low 17% see it as bad, reversing what polls showed just a few years ago. Support for offering undocumented immigrants pathways to citizenship has risen to 78% from 70% last year, with Republicans registering a 13% gain. Disapproval of how Trump is handling the arrest and deportation of immigrants has reached 62%.
We may see a growing backlash from Americans repelled by the cruelty of Trump’s and Miller’s ugly treatment of people, the vast majority of whom are just trying to find a better life here. The right-wing propaganda channels keep immigration a distant abstraction to keep viewers in line, but as it comes closer and people hear the stories of dreadful mistreatment in our supposed land of the free, compassion for fellow humans may rise along with the realization that this is in total violation of Christian teaching.
Jul 18 2025 | Posted in
Policy |
Read More »
< the presidency|278|30|>
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 the one administered in 2018, its 30 questions are very simple, testing for marked dementia as in the inability to draw a picture of a clock. NBC News took a swipe at his bragging, writing,
“Trump somehow convinced himself, however, that it was akin to a Mensa exam and that his ability to get a perfect score was proof of his genius.”
So it’s up to us to be vigilant, and a few incidents lately give cause for worry.
ted talk
In Pittsburgh, speaking at an “Energy and Innovation” event, Mr. Trump said,
“I want to introduce Dan Meuser. Dan Meuser is here. Where’s Dan?”
He had to be told that Meuser had not been on the plane, had stayed behind in Washington.
He then launched into a story about his uncle, John Trump, a professor at MIT, having taught Ted Kaczynski, who would become the Unabomber who sent explosive packages through the postal system that murdered three people and injured 23 others. “Kaczynski was one of his students”, Trump said. He told the audience that he had asked his uncle what kind of a student Kaczynski was, and that the professor had said, “Seriously good..he’d go around correcting everybody”.
Except, Kaczynski’s undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in mathematics were from the University of Michigan. He never attended MIT.
More serious, Trump’s uncle died in 1985. Not until eleven years later was Kaczynski found to be the perpetrator of the bomb attacks. So Trump could not have known of a Ted Kaczynski to ask his uncle about while his uncle was alive.
It’s a strange and hallucinatory story that leads to wondering what is amiss with the president.
fed up
Trump has been railing against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for months. At the same time that he intends to raise tariffs against countries the world wide, he wants the Fed to lower interest rates, which are the agency’s go-to weapon against the inflation steep tariffs will inevitably bring. Just days ago he said,
“He’s a terrible Fed chief. I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in.”
Biden didn’t “put him in”. Trump did. Trump appointed Powell — in 2017.
not all there
To counter right-wing media’s constant ridiculing of Joe Biden for his mental lapses, the left-wing finally began picking away at Trump’s slip-ups around mid-2024. This page ran “America in Trouble: Trump Showing Heightened Levels of Incoherence” last September. It is over ten months later, so it is reasonable to bring this subject up again.
In Trump’s case, it was not so much slurring words and mixing up country names as in Biden’s case, but Trump’s on-and-on incoherent ramblings. That hasn’t been in daily evidence as he sits in the Oval Office saying a sentence or two that we get to hear on news programs. What we don’t know is whether there is more we should hear that the media blocks in fear that Trump will take action against them, as he already has against several news outlets.
Anyway, here’s one example we tediously transcribed when we fund all that he said. A couple of commentators picked up on it but, as usual, they quoted just a sentence or so of what Trump said, which serves to smother any persuasive point that his mind has become disordered.
Trump went down for the opening of Alligator Alcatraz, a celebratory move that itself says a lot, but here’s how he responded to a Fox reporter’s question even after the question was repeated, worth taking notice of both for his not grasping the very clearly enunciated question, but for his then wandering off incomprehensibly. Only if you spend a little time to read to the end will you appreciate that Mr. Trump is not all there:
Reporter Danamarie McNicholl from Fox News Channel: “Mr. President, is there an expected time-frame that detainees will spend here — days, weeks, months — and does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?”
The President asked for the first part of the question to be repeated.
McNicholl: “Is there a specific time-frame you expect the detainees to spend here — days, weeks, months.”
Trump: “In Florida?”
McNicholl: “Yes”
Trump: “I’m going to spend, I’m going to spend a lot — okay, this is my home state. I love it. I love your government, I love all the people around, these are all friends of mine, they know ’em very well. I mean I’m not surprised that they do so well. They’re great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in this state. I’ll spend a lot of time here. I want to, you know, for four years I’ve gotta be in Washington. I’m OK with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. I made it, it’s like a diamond, it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful. It wasn’t maintained properly, I will tell you that, but even when it wasn’t, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot, but I’ll spend as much time as I can here, you know. My vacation is generally here because it’s convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It’s my home, and I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun and I’m a big contributor to Florida, you know, I pay a lotta tax*, and a lot of people moved from New York and I don’t know what New York is gonna do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they’re leaving. I don’t know what New York is gonna do about that because some of the biggest, wealthiest people, and some of the people who pay the most taxes than anyone in the world, for that matter, they’re moving to Florida and other places so we’re going to have to help some of these states out, I think, but thank you very much. I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”
Jul 18 2025 | Posted in
Governance |
Read More »
< civil rights|100||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 reporting on an assessment of the Iran nuclear site bombings that differed from his proclamation that they were “totally obliterated”. The Times and CNN must pay for mention of any other conclusion. On social media he said journalists at both organizations should be fired.
One of the 18 government intelligence agencies had quickly issued a “preliminary” report expressing its surmise that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program had been set back by only a few months. Not just any of the agencies, but it was by the Defense Department itself – the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had immediately fallen in line: “Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated”. So did Steve Witkoff, billionaire real estate investor and now Trump’s special Middle East envoy and negotiator, who concluded:
“[T]here’s no doubt that it was obliterated. So the reporting out here that in some ways suggests that we did not achieve the objective is just completely preposterous.”
Explosives expert and Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was irate:
”The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter [sic] pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen [sic] 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Fox News wanted to disseminate the official line quickly, so in the prime nine-o’clock slot, Jesse Watters skated quickly past the briefest mention of a Defense Department report so as to make it a CNN reporter’s article. “CNN says the bunker busters we dropped didn’t work.”
Trump outside the White House made no mention that it was a DIA report:
“That place is demolished. The B2 pilots did their job but when I see CNN all night long they’re trying to say, well, maybe it wasn’t really as demolished as we thought. It was demolished…and I will say I think CNN ought to apologize to the pilots of the B2s. I think that MSDNC ought to apologize. I think these guys, really, these networks, cable networks, are real losers…They’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN cause I watch it. I have no choice. I’ve gotta watch this garbage. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news. But I think CNN is a gutless group of people.”
(MSDNC — i.e., Democratic National Committee — is the president’s moniker for the MSNBC network).
The letter from Trump’s attorney to the Times and CNN said that their reporting had damaged Mr. Trump’s reputation by making the DIA report known and they must “retract and apologize” for reporting that the lawyer called “false”, “defamatory”, and “unpatriotic”. The newpaper’s lawyers responded with “No retraction is needed” and “No apology will be forthcoming”.
In the days since, there has been a mix of assessments in the media and from government figures ranging from an Iran capable of fashioning a dirty bomb in days if the uranium had been moved before the attack, to needing years to recover. Certainly the “obliterated” claim has been obliterated and yet the president exhibited his questionable faculties still saying just last Sunday:
”The attack turned out, according to every single atomic energy commission that was a complete and total obliteration.”
Jul 11 2025 | Posted in
National |
Read More »
< taxes|155|20|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 importantly, the CBO report ignores the macroeconomic damage that would result from rejecting the OBBB.” Well, of course. The CBO Is not evaluating what didn’t happen.
accounting skullduggery
But surely the most desperate dodge Republicans have come up with to enshroud the huge addition to U.S. debt they have enacted is to argue that they haven’t cut taxes at all. The tax rates and standard deduction are the same as in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Nothing changes. We just continue as before. So that’s declared the new “baseline”. So if they haven’t cut taxes other than a few extra giveaways (no taxes on tips, overtime, etc.), the OBBB doesn’t add to the debt at all!
But wait a minute. President Trump says “Senate Republicans are voting for the largest tax for middle-class Americans in history.” At a dinner with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu July 7th he called them, “the biggest tax cuts ever”. How can they be the biggest tax cuts ever if taxes aren’t changing? (Also, they’re an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, which he at the time called the biggest tax cuts in history, so he’s double-counting.) Trump says, “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.” But what’s changed to suddenly spur the economy?
The 2017 TCJA was passed by Republicans under “reconciliation” rules that require only a 51% majority in the Senate for bills that deal only with financing the government. But they are temporary; they expire after ten years. Some sooner. Expiration would restore the higher pre-2017 tax rates. The $4.5 trillion in revenue to the government that would add in the coming decade would wipe out the $3.5 to $4.0 trillion increase in the nation’s debt caused by extending the TCJA.
But now Republicans speak of the reversion, required by the rule they agreed to in 2017, as the biggest tax increase in history. Trump hallucinated about the bill that “if it’s not approved, your taxes will go up by 68%”. That’s either a preposterous lie or something’s amiss with his mental acuity. Comparison of tax tables then and now say more like 7%. He also continues to say “no tax on Social Security”. Seniors just get a reduction.
town halls not recommended
Accordingly, Republicans back in their home districts will have to argue simultaneously that the Act is a monumental, historic tax cut that benefits everyone but doesn’t add to the deficit at all because the new baseline says there is no tax cut. Golly, in fact, when you wipe clean any notion of pesky debt increase, the OBBB magically becomes a $508 billion deficit decrease.
Even the usually sober Wall Street Journal is party to the hoax. An editorial sloughs off the CBO $3.5-$4.0 trillion debt increase because “it’s only true if you assume that Congress was going to tolerate a $4.5 trillion tax increase.” They are saying that because allowing expiration of the 2017 Act and reversion to the status quo ante was off the table — “Congress was never going to allow that” — there is no debt increase because there is no revenue increase to measure it against. So the editors adopt the new baseline that makes tax extensions “free”. The CBO “scores” legislative proposals against “current law” and current law before passage of the OBBB was that the reconciliation bill of 2017 would expire and revenue would increase. But the Journal says, “In any rational world, changes in the law would be scored against current policy” (emphasis ours). Policy trumps law.
The Journal‘s news pages disagree. One day earlier an article began,
“Republicans waved a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget.”
The reporter quotes Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY):
“Republicans are doing something the Senate has never, never done before — deploying fake math and accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of their bill.”
Jul 11 2025 | Posted in
Taxes |
Read More »
< governance|147|20|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 two-thirds of thousands of calls to its disaster assistance line because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers.
The agency’s acting director who Trump appointed in May has no background in disaster response and told employees last month he didn’t know the country has a hurricane season.
One of the reviewing panel is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who can be counted on to turn thumbs down on FEMA’s survivor because that’s what Trump is looking for. She has already disrupted FEMA’s preparedness grants to states and localities, insisting on personally approving all outlays of more than $100,000, slowing issuance to a crawl.
But another committee member is Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who after the July 4th disaster in his state would be vilified by his constituents should he vote for FEMA’s extinction.
Asked days ago by a reporter about “planning to phase out FEMA”, Trump’s equivocation suggests he hasn’t changed his minded:
”Well, FEMA is something we can talk about later, but right now they’re busy working so we’ll leave it at that.”
brain fog
Turning over emergency management to the states is an asinine idea evident from just a moment’s thought, and leaves one wondering whether the president has cognitive dysfunction rivaling Biden’s.
It would require every state to create an agency of its own – FEMA cloned 50 times over. Each would need to develop emergency management professionals, inventory costly supplies of water and foodstuffs, stock tents and bedding, on and on, a long list, poised to deal with calamity. And staffing wouldn’t be just a few people; it would have to be a full-size team poised to handle an extreme weather event — an event that might not happen this year, perhaps not next year either, nor possibly for an indefinite, unpredictable number of years beyond. All the while, 50 agencies with personnel sitting about with nothing to do in most states, each state bearing the redundant cost burden.
That, says businessman Trump, would be “a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half”.
fix it
The solution is the opposite. To be sure, FEMA draws a lot of complaints. In the wake of a disaster people expect it to be everywhere at once. It was Trump himself in the days immediately following the hurricane who said about FEMA in North Carolina, “They’re not getting water, they’re not getting anything”, which was of course a lie from someone far removed. “They’re giving your FEMA dollars to illegals. They’re housing them with your FEMA dollars”, he claimed, misinformation amplified by chief propagandist at Fox, Jesse Watters. FEMA has a separate program, Shelter and Services, mandated and funded by Congress, to manage the migrant overflow, just as now it is charged with running “Alligator Alcatraz”. No money was diverted from North Carolina rescue operations.
Trump said residents were being offered only $750 in relief. The Biden administration had the foresight to add a few months prior a $750 handout as an on-the-spot stopgap for people to buy food, baby formula, diapers, whatever – a supplement to the regular and substantial relief to follow. He did great harm. It caused people to believe there was only the $750 and not reach out for the further assistance that awaited them, and replacing the institutional faith people had in their government with misguided resentment.
Trump’s reviewers should come up with reforms, not just another irresponsible DOGE-style shutdown. Above all, the review committee should recognize that FEMA is faced with an ever-increasing number of weather events – 27 with at least $1 billion in damage in 2024, and before judging that as being probably a fluke, note that there were 28 in 2023 – yet it is always chronically unfunded and understaffed. By dismantling FEMA, Trump would show he simply wants to wash his hands of responsibility.
Jul 11 2025 | Posted in
Governance |
Read More »
