Bipartisan negotiators announced Wednesday they have struck a deal to avert a partial government shutdown this week, securing agreement on half of the dozen must-pass spending bills and extending a pair of fast-approaching funding deadlines deeper into March to buy Congress more time.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a joint statement with appropriators, members charged with crafting spending bills, that they have a deal on six bills that fund several federal agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Interior, Justice, Transportation and Veterans Affairs. And they've agreed to vote on a short-term bill to avoid a partial government shutdown this weekend, buying more time to pass the funding deal...
Still, the House and the Senate need to pass the stopgap measure by the end of Friday to avert a partial shutdown. In the Senate, a speedy vote will require consent from all 100 members, which means it's not yet guaranteed they will pass it in time...
So there's the likelihood a Republican Senator - or either Manchin or Sinema, just for shits and giggles to appease their conservative allies - could hold up the votes and send us into shutdown. As long as enough Democrats and Republicans in the House agree to the measure - something the Not-Really-Freedom Caucus can't delay - it ought to get through that half of Congress.
It then becomes a question if the UnFreedom Caucus retaliates by holding another Motion to Vacate to punish Johnson for making this deal, which just repeats the cycle of shutdown mania all over again chasing after yet another Speaker replacement.
I am tired of this staged drama. I am tired of the wingnut hostage-taking that happens every time.
Just stop fucking voting for Republicans, America. Please. For just common decent sanity. Just stop this needless drama. Just stop it.
When I heard this (I saw it on Twitter but I'll provide an official report from NPR via Carrie Johnson and Nina Totenberg) my first thought was
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments the week of April 22 in a high-stakes dispute over whether former President Donald Trump enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution.
The order from the court on Wednesday keeps Trump's prosecution in the Jan. 6 case on hold for at least a few more months.
The justices said, in an unsigned order, that their review would be limited to a single question: "Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office."
The good news: I was getting in my car at the workplace parking lot when I checked Twitter so I wasn't upsetting the kids at the library when I dropped that F-Bomb.
The bad news: JFC WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED
The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals was supposed to be airtight. That panel of jurists came back with a unanimous ruling that they "cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter... Doing so would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three branches."
Apparently there were at least five Supreme Court Justices who decided "nah" and want to jump into this mudpit to make their own ruling.
I considered three possible reasons why this is now happening:
1) This is just the Far Right Conservatives on the Supreme Court - three of them appointed by trump himself, expecting favors in return - doing what they can to stretch out the calendar on trump's DC felony insurrection trial (and maybe the South Florida classified documents trial) to keep it from even starting before the November general election happens, with Early Voting starting in some states by mid-September. Even if the Supreme Court ultimately affirms the lower court's ruling, it won't be until mid-August when they're expected to make such a ruling and the trial itself is expected to last at least two months (the South Florida trial is expected to last four to six months, it was never expected to wrap up before November).
This is the most likely reason, as it's the one defense trump truly has: DELAY EVERYTHING. Even then it's such an extreme partisan move that no honest American should ever trust a SCOTUS ruling under the Roberts regime ever again.
2) The Justices saw something in the Appellate ruling that required either clarification, or they believed that a decision on Presidential Absolute Immunity required a final say from the highest court in the land. This is the least likely reason, because most legal scholars agreed with the Court of Appeals and there was no reason for SCOTUS to rule on this other than ego.
This is the nightmare scenario. This possibility would do exactly what the Court of Appeals warned against: Immediately break the Checks and Balances of the Constitution and basically be a suicide note ending any judicial power of the Supreme Court itself.
You might think even the Far Right Justices would recoil from the reality that granting trump that Absolute Immunity would be the end of their own power of Judicial Review. But remember, those Justices believe it is not only possible under Unitary Executive rules, but necessary. They agree with the idea of a dictator in the Oval Office just as long as it's a conservative standard bearer seizing all that power. It may destroy the Constitutional order we've all lived with for 230-plus years, but it'll give them the excuse to rebuild their conservative utopia on those ashes.
We now are facing the real and serious reality that at least five Justices - Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (with Roberts being the only conservative who might balk at the destruction of his own jurist legacy) - will try to find a way to give trump the "Get Out of Jail Free" card that Absolute Immunity could give him.
The logical argument that would deter such a ruling - that by agreeing Presidential Absolute Immunity exists, the Supreme Court may be giving current President Joe Biden a literal license to overthrow government himself - ignores the fact that the Republican-backed Justices have twisted rulings and precedent in previous decisions in order to carve out narrow rulings to benefit only a select few. Don't put it past the Far Right Justices to come up with a legal argument that grants that immunity to trump alone. Even though our entire legal system is supposed to be based on "equality before the law" as a rule.
The Far Right may also be gambling on the possibility that even granted this weapon, Biden's own personal nature would prevent him from wielding it as he sits in the White House right now. But don't count on that. Biden may have no choice but to use such absolute power if it comes to it. He's got solid evidence right now that trump and the Republicans are colluding with a hostile foreign power - Russia - to subvert the 2024 elections, and his own intelligence agencies could be telling him by October the only way to save the United States is to declare emergency powers and arrest everybody in the GOP from trump on down. Granted, that move will trigger an open and bloody civil war, but the alternative would be to risk the likelihood that trump and his wingnut allies will sabotage the Electoral College count one way or another. And then trump gets to be dictator on Day One, and the Constitution dies for good.
Sanity and common sense tells us no one person should hold such absolute power: Not in politics, not in religion, not in law, not in life. But we're not living in sane times, are we. Not since 2015 when trump upturned everything this nation was supposed to stand for.
Even exhorting every American out there to get the vote out this election cycle - which we need to do, anything we can to make it clear the majority of us DO NOT WANT trump BACK IN POWER - doesn't feel like it'll be enough.
Fuck it. We're going to fight.
Stop trump. That's the mission now. Just fucking STOP trump.
It's unsettling enough that the Special Counsel overseeing the investigation in Hunter Biden's potential criminal behavior had to pull a 180 on relying on this "witness" Alexander Smirnov and issue felony charges against him instead. And then, worrying that the Nevada magistrate who handled the bail release on Smirnov was giving Smirnov a chance to flee the country, they recharged Smirnov in a California court with more specific evidence - and that he was a flight risk - to ensure the guy stayed in custody.
Smirnov’s claims have been central to the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family and helped spark what is now a House impeachment inquiry into Biden.
They became a flashpoint in Congress in July as Republicans demanded the FBI release the unredacted form, a so-called FD-1023, documenting the unverified allegations. Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky had subpoenaed the form as Republicans deepened their probe ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Republicans acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if the allegations were true but said they were significant in their investigation of Hunter Biden.
The allegations of Russian contact with the source of those allegations should be a death knell for the impeachment inquiry, said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “It appears like the whole thing is not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda,” he said.
Of course, the Republican leaders on this - Comer, Jim Jordan, the other clowns in that car - are running away from having Smirnov as their keystone to their entire impeachment effort, except for the fact they've been running away from every other tainted source they tried to rely on over the past year of sham hearings and "rumored" revelations.
What this twist exposes is not only their failure to find legitimate scandal against their true target Joe Biden (they honestly don't care if Hunter goes to jail or not), but exposes how corrupted and compromised the modern Republican Party leadership is towards a foreign power like Putin's Russia. The nominally conservative pundit at Washington Post Jennifer Rubin spells out the problem (this was via a gift link, don't know if it will paywall):
Are Republicans easy marks or willing participants in Russian anti-Biden operations? That’s a troubling question raised by the Feb. 14 grand jury indictment of a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, on charges of concocting a tale about President Biden’s supposed involvement in his family members’ business dealings.
Allegations by Smirnov — who appears to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to the federal indictment — have formed the backbone of the House Republicans’ laughable attempt to build an impeachment case against the president. They championed him as their star witness. Now the Republicans’ fact-deficient storyline has been shredded...
Now Republicans are pretending that Smirnov wasn’t so important after all. They’re vowing to plow ahead on this cock-and-bull mission that never got off the ground. Not only did multiple witnesses testify that Biden had no involvement with his son’s business dealings, but previous allegations that Biden acted on his son’s behalf had also already been thoroughly repudiated...
The current House debacle overlaps with a Russian disinformation project described by the national security specialists Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa on the website Just Security in 2020. That scheme enticed Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) to buy into the now-discredited scenario that as vice president Biden sought on behalf of his son to stop an investigation of Burisma. (It also added in another phony Ukraine election interference claim.)
And let’s not forget that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf.
The current revelations concerning Smirnov should not merely spell the end of the comically inept impeachment proceedings; they should provoke questions about Republicans’ recklessness in peddling claims they apparently knew were unreliable.
At the very least, it is clear that House Republicans had reason to be skeptical of Smirnov’s allegations instead of embracing them. FBI briefers “warned lawmakers that the document, known as a 1023, containing Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens also included raw, uncorroborated intelligence that should not be made public,” CNN reported on Wednesday. Even if the Republicans did not know Smirnov might have ties to Russian intelligence, they certainly knew the basis for making wild allegations about Biden was extremely shaky...
Republicans’ affinity over multiple elections for Russian-backed plots should warrant wall-to-wall coverage. (Let us not forget Russian efforts detailed in the Mueller report to enlist the Trump campaign and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) Responsible news outlets should press House Republicans to justify their refusal to vote for aid for Ukraine and habit of spreading Russian conspiracy theories.
In short, Trump (enabled by House Republicans) wants Ukraine aid blocked and invites Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries with military budgets Trump deems insufficient. He already has served as an indispensable helpmate in Putin’s assault on democracy and the international order. No wonder Russia appears yet again ready to pull out all the stops to boost Trump.
Rubin refers back to a particular matter that obsessed me during the trump years: The Mueller Report. It annoys me to no end that when then-Attorney General Barr - appointed by trump to shut down the Mueller investigation before it closed in on trump himself - ended that grand jury probe, he promoted - and the mainstream media bought into - the lie that the Report "exonerated trump" and that was the end of that. What everyone seemed to ignore were the factual elements Mueller's team found - the first half of his legal objectives - rampant and provable evidence that Russian Intelligence and their oligarch allies actively engaged in election interference in 2016. What Mueller couldn't prove was trump's direct involvement with those efforts (instead Mueller found at least five instances of Obstruction, which he couldn't criminally charge due to Presidential Immunity but tried to get House Democrats to attempt impeachment, which they failed to pursue).
I remain shocked and angered to this day that Congress both Democrats and Republicans failed to heed Mueller's - and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence agencies - warnings that Russia - above all the other foreign powers looking to interfere like China and Iran - will continue to attack America's electoral systems to force the results - like stealing the presidency AGAIN for trump - that benefits Russia instead of the U.S. and our long-standing European / Middle Eastern / Asian allies. There's been almost no legislation - no priority put to making our elections more secure nor passing legal sanctions and punishments on Russia for their crimes. We're talking about acts of war getting committed on us - our rights as Americans - and nothing, no response.
Worse: We have had solid evidence for almost a decade that Russia was, is, and will do anything they can to disrupt and divide the United States. And it's getting clearer that the Republican Party as a group are happy to help them.
I mentioned before how the Republican mindset - drawing from their deep conservative ideology - their One Truth is that they view only themselves as True Americans. To do so, everyone else - aka Democrats and those who do not fit in the Republican Culture War like women, Blacks, Latinos, gays and trans, and more - dare not and cannot be considered "American" even though geographically, demographically, philosophically, we are as American as they.
Their problem is that those conservative Republicans are not in the actual majority of Americans... and they know it. They've been sliding out of contention with the majority of voters since 2008, they'd been warned after the 2012 election cycle, and yet instead of moderating themselves to retain broad appeal the conservatives doubled down on Culture War extremism and RINO purging to keep party unity, tied into aggressive state-level and federal-level gerrymandering and voter suppression to skew elections to their favor.
Thing is, that Game of Demographics can only work for so long, as the Republican extremism on issues like abortion (and related issues like birth control and IVF) and tax cuts for the rich peel away the edges of their GOP voting base to where they can't "win" even with all the gerrymandering and suppression.
So the Republicans are desperate to get any help from anywhere they can. Even if that help is coming from a foreign power like Russia where their leader Putin and his cronies are openly threatening our allies and our own nation's safety/stability. Even when that help falls under open acts of sedition that rely on corrupted persons like Smirnov.
Similar to how trump's 2016 campaign met with and tried to coordinate with Russian nationals over getting dirt on Hillary Clinton - in possible violation of 52 US Code sect. 30121 - the current House Republican leadership and their allies from trump's Justice Department (looking at you Bill Barr) have come dangerously close to breaking that law getting tampered/manufactured Russian intel just to pursue false claims against Biden. Not to mention more obviously legal problems like suborning perjury and presenting false evidence.
The GOP leaders did all this because they truly believe 1) they're above the law, 2) they're the Real Americans fighting against un-American Democratic "criminals," 3) the Russians are not the bad guys. That last part is important because the modern Republicans driven by their Culture War bullshit truly see Putin - with his open homophobia, his disdain for "librul" Western norms, and "traditionalist" worldview (not to mention his sadism towards his lessers) - as a serious ally in that Culture War.
I wasn't there to see it, but I read the history books about the Red Scare, the McCarthyism of the 1950s where conservative Republicans openly hunted liberals and left-leaning Americans as Communist threats buddying up to Stalinist Soviet Russia. "Pinko down to their underwear" was the accusations, and anybody who ever expressed solidarity with Soviet Russia were hounded until they were broken or dead. Today, we now see those inheritors of the conservative Republicans happily and publicly embracing a Russian regime that may no longer be Communist but is just as corrupt and tyrannical as anything Stalin ever led.
The irony of such betrayal is lost on these modern Republicans, too greedy and too desperate to stay in power to see how they've sold their own ideals and their own nation out to a Russian dictator.
This scandal ought to convince every American voter who truly wants what is best for our nation - for our families, for our communities, for our future - to stop voting for a Republican Party corrupted and compromised beyond redemption.
Elections matter, people. There's a reason why Putin wants to corrupt ours this 2024 just like he tried in 2020 and succeeded in back in 2016. Get the vote out, America. For the LOVE OF COUNTRY everybody, do NOT vote (R)epublican (R)ussia.
Okay, just to help voters keep track of which Presidential candidate has certain issues and concerns as we head into the thick of the 2024 Primary Season:
Joe
Biden
Donald
Trump
Is Old
a
a
Is Showing Signs of Memory Issues
a
a
Is Still Screaming about "Stolen Votes" from 2020
a
Is Threatening to quit NATO
a
Is Demanding Republicans in Congress Block Any Aid to Ukraine
In Its War Against Russia
a
Is Gloating about ending Roe V Wade
a
Found Liable of Sexual Assault in a Court of Law To the Tune of
$88 Million and Counting
a
Found Liable of Acts of Business Fraud To the Tune of $450
Million Plus Interest
a
Refuses to Let Congress Pass a Border Reform Bill to
Keep His Opponent From Benefiting Politically
Is Facing Criminal Trial in New York on 34 Counts for
"Election Interference" and Filing False Documents
this March 2024
a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in DC on Four Felony Counts Concerning
January 6th 2021 Riots as Soon as The Supreme Court Considers an
Appeal Over Absolute Presidential Immunity
a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in South Florida on Multiple
Counts of Classified Documents Mishandling, Probably by May
2024
a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in Georgia on Multiple Counts of
Election Interference and Racketeering Related to a Fake Electors
Scheme, TBD
a
Is Winning the 2024 Party Primaries with 90 Percent of
the Vote
a
Is Getting Told By National Media Pundits to "Step Aside"
or Quit Campaigning to Make Room for the Pundit's
Preferred Candidate (TBD) for the "Good of the Party"
and the United States
You would think the so-called "pro-life" movement would be thrilled to support something like in vitro fertilization (IVF). After all, IVF should be a good thing: It's the active choice to get pregnant and have a baby in spite of various health or physiological factors that were preventing couples (or women) from natural reproduction. It's expensive, and painful, and not always successful: but thousands of people choose it because they want to be good parents. In the opposition to abortion - that it's "baby-killing" or "ending God's gift" - the choice of IVF would reflect that positivity of life.
It has to do - mostly - with how it's done: Harvesting multiple ova and fertilizing each one, freezing the embryos until one is needed, implanting it, and hoping it works. All those extra harvested eggs become troubling to the "pro-fetus" believers because in their world-view those embryos are now persons, and any potential destruction of those embryos would be an act of abortion. There's also the problem that an implanted ova may not take, which becomes in their minds an abortion as well.
I'd also argue the "pro-fetus" people are annoyed - jealous, really - by how instead of relying on God for the miracle of childbirth, people can rely instead on Science and fertility doctors to get it done.
There's also the rage against feminism, the fear that single women would choose IVF with a random sperm donor and avoid the emotional - and oft-times physical - complications dealing with men. God forbid the Patriarchy - "OBEY your husbands, ladies" - be denied or disturbed in any way.
But it all boils down to what these wingnuts REALLY want. They want control.
I mentioned before how I've seen them in-person protesting at clinics, driven by rage and shilling fearmongering images of bloodied fetuses. Eager to pass "moral" judgment on women and families they didn't know, just so they could have some insane level of control over how the world around them truly works.
In the Religious Right's obsessive need to end abortion as a choice, they will tear down everything else to impose their religious views - their control - on everyone else. They will deny rape and incest as a problem to ensure women can't get abortions from unwanted pregnancies. They will obscure the reality that pregnancies are not 100 percent safe, and deny how miscarriages, stillbirths, and ectopic pregnancies can happen in "God's perfect world." They will demonize women who suffer miscarriages and seek to jail any doctors foolish enough to provide any kind of prenatal care in these Red States under theocratic misrule.
The Religious Right are going after IVF because it's still a choice, one they can't control and one that dares question their foundational belief in personhood for embryos.
The Religious Right are going after birth control - something that actually stops fertilization, so it shouldn't affect "personhood" - because these wingnuts want their control over the reproductive act for every woman, even the ones - liberal Christians, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim - who don't subscribe to their religion.
The Religious Right will bust down the doors of every house in America to check on your uteri, women, never mind your personal rights. These same enforcers won't lift a finger to go after men who commit onanism and waste all that sacred sperm.
These same Religious Right will deny you any chance to get pregnant and have families on your own terms, through IVF or through personal use of contraceptives until you're ready - emotionally and financially - to have children. Because they want to control that part of your lives as well.
As much as they'd love to control your souls, and demand your fealty to their Church (not their God, because they will deny other Christians any say in what God truly is), they know in the end they truly can't. So they want control - political, physical, public - of everything else just so they can make themselves superior to the rest of us.
The Religious Right are doing all of this so they can sit themselves atop a throne to look down on the rest they view as sinners and un-persons.
Doing all this so they can judge us, before God judges them for the damage they've done to their neighbors.
God DAMN them, and for the Love of a true and just God drive every one of these Christianist absolutists out of our elected offices and courtrooms.
It's been two years now, and it's not the best possible way to celebrate this anniversary of when Putin sent the full might of his Russian military into all of Ukraine back in February 2022. Looking back at some of what I wrote, I noticed these observations:
Russia (Putin) doesn't want Ukraine to go running off to another European alliance like NATO or the EU, but they can't offer anything to Ukraine that would honestly entice Ukrainians to take Russia back as a political/economic partner. So instead, Russia (Putin) will try to "encourage" their relationship by force, not caring that such bullying behavior will only drive Ukrainians more towards joining Western Europe against Russia.
Ukraine is never going to give in to Russia's demands here, they will not agree to any deal absolutely barring them from even thinking about joining NATO. They dare not. Even the mere threat of joining NATO is the only leverage Ukraine has against outright invasion and occupation. Paradox: Every move Russia makes to stop Ukraine from joining NATO only pushes Ukraine further towards joining NATO.
It's that fear of NATO - how Putin and his lackeys see that western alliance as a bulwark against Russian dreams of rebirthing their empire - that keeps Russia from just admitting to themselves they screwed up because it's been two years of failure after failure. I noted this five days in:
What Putin got was a bloody nose, figurately speaking.
Literally, five days into his ordering the invasion of Ukraine, what Putin has is an international PR nightmare, near-global condemnation of his war, escalating sanctions and lockdowns of every financial avenue Russia has - including cutting off banks from SWIFT, a transactional process that can arguably block the Russian citizenry and businesses from their own accounts - not to mention a tanking stock market, and nothing resembling a cakewalk into Kyiv to set up his puppet state.
Putin's rival Zelensky failed to flee the capital when the invasion started, instead using his media savvy to go onto social media and make a personal call to arms to every Ukrainian to stop the Russians approaching their major cities. Reported when asked by western powers to evacuate for his own safety, Zelensky answered "I need ammunition, not a ride." Sonofabitch (and I mean this in a cool way) is getting comparisons to freaking Winston Churchill, for God's sake...
Putin has already shot his load, as it were. Making a grand pronouncement that Ukraine wasn't even a real country and that he was going to make them all happy Russians again, only to have nearly every Ukrainian grab a rifle and fight back. Even grandmothers were tossing sunflower seeds at Russian troops cursing that their bodies will be fertilizer for the flowers that will bloom.
Putin has already flexed his nation's military might, only to face the possibility that he's going to have to retreat, never a good look for a bullying autocrat. Or worse, double down on the troops and weaponry (that he may not have) and try to overwhelm Ukrainian resistance by sheer numbers, risking the growing anti-war sentiment of the citizenry at home...
Putin is doubling down on making this conscription (don't call it a mobilization like it's a good thing, this is forced military servitude) because Ukraine's recent success shredded much of the ground forces he had there and he needs as many bodies as possible to hold onto whatever he can claim. As mentioned earlier, Putin is also forcing the occupied regions of southern Ukraine - the Donbas in particular - to "vote" on a rigged "annexation" so that Russia can claim to the world that it's Ukraine invading Russia, even though most other nations would never recognize such a brazenly illegal move.
Putin is relying on the one last resource he can utilize in his war to conquer Ukraine: Manpower. Russia's overall population at 143 million is 100 million more than Ukraine's (43 million), and just on simple numbers in a slogfest Russia should be able to outlast Ukraine to conquer a bloodied landscape.
But in his desperation, Putin is overvaluing quantity over quality of armies. By all reports, Russia's armed forces are poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly supplied... and everything that's happened since this February has proven how poor Russia's performance has been in a straight-up fight with an army that can fight back. While Putin is emphasizing in conscripting men with previous military experience, there's no guarantee those men have good enough experience in the first place, and there's no sign of them having the discipline and motivation to perform any better than the first wave of troops Putin sent in. Most military experts in the West argue that Putin needs to train his conscripts, which would take months... and Putin doesn't have months at this rate. He will send raw untrained victims to the front lines and hope to Zerg Rush Ukrainian forces by sheer attrition...
Without that help, Ukraine will enter its third year of survival at their most vulnerable with Putin willing to prolong the attrition until he can be certain of complete victory, which would be if trump steals the electoral results this November. If that happens, trump's threats to drive the U.S. out of NATO become fact, and NATO is suddenly faced with an emboldened Russian Empire eager to reclaim Eastern Europe and use their influence on internal Far Right political factions to destabilize whatever's left.
A Manhattan jury found three top executives of the National Rifle Association liable Friday in a lengthy civil trial that focused on alleged corruption and the misspending of millions of dollars.
Longtime NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, a key architect in the nonprofit's hardline gun rights agenda who stepped down as CEO last month, was central to New York state's case.
Jurors found that LaPierre "violated his statutory obligation to discharge the duties of his position in good faith."
They concluded that he had caused roughly $5.4 million worth of harm to the nonprofit group's finances — though they also found that LaPierre had already repaid roughly $2 million.
The executives were accused of misappropriating and mismanaging funds donated to the gun rights group's members. According to New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the lawsuit, their actions led to "the loss of more than $64 million in just three years."
During the six-week trial, state lawyers alleged that LaPierre had spent over $11 million for private flights and approved $135 million in NRA contracts in exchange for yacht access and free trips to the Bahamas, Greece and other vacation hotspots, The Associated Press reported.
All those vacations to overseas nations that have gun control laws in place. Probably made it safe for LaPierre to walk around at night spending more blood money.
LaPierre spent three decades growing the NRA's political and lobbying influence. Even as mass shootings became commonplace, LaPierre rejected attempts to change gun policy, branding gun control proponents as enemies of freedom and using the threat of firearms regulation to fundraise.
His resignation was announced just days before the trial began, with the NRA instead citing health as the reason for his departure.
The NRA's grip on politics has weakened in recent years as it's faced declining membership and revenue, and concerns within the group over leadership's direction and misuse of funds...
With any luck, this court ruling breaks all of that. This jury decision will block some of the more corrupt NRA leaders from holding office, hopefully leaving room for reformers to gain meaningful footholds. AG James is looking to install an independent court monitor to oversee the financials, which would go a long way towards clearing out any of the other org leaders unable to bribe or bully their way back into power.
While I am hopeful of all that, whether this will lead to any sanity on the political stage remains unknown. Far too many politicians - cough Far Right Republicans cough - have built their "brands" on being "gun-toting, 2nd Amendment Loving" psychopaths, and they're not going to change their public image any time soon.
It's up to the voters - now without the NRA funneling their blood money into the electoral process - to hear the calls for gun reforms more clearly, and to vote appropriately for the federal and state officials who will do something - banning the assault rifles that make up most of our mass shootings; reinstating gun safety regulations like waiting periods, registration and training; and stopping the intentional market glut of cheap guns; things like that - to stop our streets - and our schools, and our stores, and our churches, and our movie theaters, and our concerts - filling with innocent blood.
Hope you go to Hell broke, Wayne. You earned that.
I can't show the whole strip (copyright), but you can click the link to see it. While Trudeau is usually good on research - when he states a fact in his strips, he can vouch for the sources - he does make a mistake claiming that I-95 is the best escape route to take. Christ, I-95 is a parking lot just like I-4! The teacher will never make it. Take the backroads like Highway 441!
This past Sunday, many readers whose regional newspapers are owned by the multi-billion dollar, conservative-leaning mass media holding company Gannett flipped to the funny pages to find that Doonesbury was conspicuously missing from its usual position in the printing. Former Iowa State Representative and president of the Veterans National Recovery Center Bob Krause noticed that absence and made sure to show Twitter what Gannett hid from them.
Gannett owns almost 400 newspapers in the United States, including the national publication USA Today and local papers in 44 states, among which is Krause's Iowa, where the Des Moines Register followed company protocol and cut out the above strip from circulation. Apparently, Gannett didn't want its readers knowing that seven of the states in the U.S. Confederacy explicitly cited the issue of slavery in their declarations of secession. Gannett also doesn't want comic strip fans learning about how almost 100,000 white southerners chose loyalty to their country over preserving slavery as they fought for the Union during the Civil War.
Many conservative-dominated states have passed legislation designed to prevent education about historical topics such as slavery and civil rights, but the state that Trudeau name-drops in Sunday's censored Doonesbury strip has drawn the most attention for how hilariously absurd its lengthy ban list stretches – a school district in Florida even made national headlines this past summer for banning an Arthur book from the school library...
I'd written before about how Doonesburysits on the edge of controversy and how newspapers try to find a balance to ensure First Amendment rights aren't violated (often by putting the comic on the Op-Ed page). Here, the Gannett media corporation couldn't be bothered with that, and just straight up banned the Sunday comic. Gannett however forgot that Doonesbury is available through other sources - such as the GoComics archive - and that too many people would notice that void in the Sunday funnies.
What we're seeing here in real time is the Far Right Republican effort - led by DeSantis and a dozen-plus Republican governors - to whitewash American history to hide the "shame" of slavery, civil war, and racism from the schoolbooks in order to "protect the sensitivities of privileged Whites." They're getting help by these media empires - mostly owned by conservative rich folk, and owning most of our newspapers, radios, and local television stations - who want to pander to the wingnut Narrative of White Victimhood and the avoidance of literal centuries of racism and sexism that underlines our nation's history. (It ought to horrify everyone to realize how much control over our media that's held by so few corporations)
These history deniers, these panderers, these censors are incapable of even debating what it is they're trying to shove down the throats of our school-age children, and so they will resort to silence because they cannot convince. And this wasn't censored just in Florida: it reached as far as Iowa (a Union state) showing how far the company's - and the wingnut conservatives' - reach was on this.
All these wingnut deniers are doing is highlighting their own fear, their own ignorance, their own racism.
Shame on Gannett corporation for violating the First Amendment. Shame on DeSantis and every Florida Republican who cannot accept the racist history of our state and our nation. Shame on them for failing to recognize their sins and work to improve themselves by, you know, being less racist and less sexist.
I hope to God Trudeau sues Gannett on free speech rights. I hope to God the Republicans lose the next ten election cycles so their inept and racist legislation gets flushed out of our legal codes.
Stop voting Republican, Florida. Stop voting Republican, America. They don't want people to know the facts about our history, about our current economic and social inequalities, they don't want people to think period.
I dunno. It depends a little bit on when the Gannett owners decided to drop Doonesbury. It just seems a little too coincidental that they drop the strip for ALL their papers - even in places where it's still popular - as this particular comic was getting prepped for print.
One of my core arguments remain: Florida Republicans are whitewashing our state's and nation's history, to the detriment of ALL our youth and adults who need the facts from the past to understand what needs repair in our society to improve our future. The corporate media is doing nothing to fight against that censorship, no matter how this looks.
A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. While that may not get Mr. Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Mr. Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.
Indeed, Mr. Biden may owe his place in the top third in part to Mr. Trump. Although he has claims to a historical legacy by managing the end of the Covid pandemic; rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and leading an international coalition against Russian aggression, Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Mr. Trump from the Oval Office.
trump was already having a bad month, so... this just piles it on.
“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” wrote Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the college professors who conducted the survey and announced the results in The Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Trump might not care much what a bunch of academics think...
Trust me, Pete, trump is a raging self-absorbed narcissist. Of course he cares what other people think, it's what drives his fear and his anger.
...but for what it’s worth he fares badly even among the self-identified Republican historians. Finishing 45th overall, Mr. Trump trails even the mid-19th-century failures who blundered the country into a civil war or botched its aftermath like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson.
This poll is a follow-up of sorts to the one that came out in 2021, when trump fled from the Oval Office and the damage of his tenure more tangible. It's telling that in the brief period of reflection of the last three years, few if any historians are willing to give trump some credit or improvement over the terrible mediocrities - the 19th Century disasters that were Buchanan, Pierce, and Johnson (no, the first one) - that are long gone.
There are no signs in the United States of long-term effects remaining from trump's misrule (other than the madness of his rabid MAGA base escalating their Culture War on our schools). Of the things he did that left an impact - such as signing away Afghanistan to the Taliban at the very end of his presidency - none of it was for the better.
That trump is eagerly running again for the Presidency bodes ill for the nation. It's not because trump wants to undo his terrible legacy, he wants to add to it. And he's not running for the benefit of his followers or even the nation as a whole: trump is running this 2024 so he can use the legal immunity of the Executive office to keep his orange ass out of jail.
Gods help us. We dare not let him back into the Oval Office. trump will be worse than he was before. And that term of office was shockingly bad.
For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, America. Vote Biden. Vote Democratic Party in every spot on the ballot.
The Friday decision from Judge Arthur Engoron orders Trump and his flagship organization to pay the bulk of that amount: nearly $355 million. Trump's two sons and co-defendants, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are each liable for $4 million. Allen Weisselberg, a former Trump Organization executive, is liable for $1 million. The total is even higher with interest — more than $450 million overall, according to the attorney general's office.
"Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin," Engoron wrote in the court filing. "Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways..."
If you want popcorn, that should be in Aisle 9 at your local Publix. If you don't have a local Publix I assure you there will soon be one. (evil laughter from Publix HQ in Lakeland FL)
The judge also decided to limit Trump and his co-defendants' ability to do business in the Empire State. Trump and his companies are prohibited from serving as an officer or director of any New York business or applying for loans for three years. His sons are limited from similar leadership roles for two years.
Jeffrey McConney, ex-controller of the Trump Organization and also a defendant, was not ordered to pay any amount, but he and Weisselberg are permanently barred from serving in the financial control function of any New York corporation or similar business entity registered or licensed in New York state.
One of the thing trump - and his sons - can't do is get any loans from banks that do business in New York, which was one of the ways he'd been inflating his personal wealth and perpetuating his ongoing grifts over the decades. Considering New York City is the financial capital of the world - well, it's one of the major centers along with London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and (checks notes) that one nation-state that allows shell companies to money-launder off-shore accounts - this is tossing a wooden shoe into trump's gears real quick. If trump is trying scheme up anything else to make money down the road... he might not be able to. At least not for the next three years.
I mentioned earlier that trump - like most rich folk - doesn't have a lot of real cash on hand to be able to pay these kinds of fines. Most of the wealth is on paper, on the estimated values on properties and businesses owned, and on the amounts floating around in investment portfolios and the stock markets. Either trump is going to be forced to sell a number of properties - at fair market value, NOT the inflated prices trump claimed - or use other people's money. There's a reason why a lot of people - myself included - viewed trump's effort to claim control of the RNC this week was to claim the revenues flowing in to the party organization's campaign coffers.
And he doesn't have that time afforded to him. trump is facing more court trials, specifically the criminal cases. A quick update on those:
The ruling comes at a crucial time for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Engoron's decision comes a day after another judge set the date for what could be Trump's first criminal trial, related to hush money payments issued during the 2016 election.
He is facing a combined 91 state and federal charges, including several related to his role to stay in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden...
Just this week, the judge overseeing that Hush Money trial - the DA is trying to claim it's an "election interference" trial because trump evaded campaign finance rules and lied to voters about the matter, but seriously it's the Hush Money To Stormy Daniels case - ruled against trump's bid to have the case dismissed and set the jury selection to start March 25, 2024 (it's also Bustillo but it's a different NPR article, well that IS her beat):
New York Judge Juan Merchan has rejected an attempt to dismiss the charges in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump, and a jury trial will begin as originally scheduled on March 25.
The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Trump with 34 felony counts last year, alleging he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information before the 2016 presidential election. That included hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who was threatening to go public with charges that she had had an affair with Trump not long after he married Melania Trump. Trump, who was present for Thursday's court hearing before Merchan, has denied the affair.
The next trial was technically the matter in DC federal court regarding trump's involvement in the January 6th insurrection, with four felony counts there. However, Judge Chutkan postponed that trial awaiting the ruling on trump's claim of Absolute Immunity, which an appellate court rebuked and which the Supreme Court received this week to determine if they need to hear the matter.
A number of legal experts are arguing SCOTUS doesn't even need to hear the appeal, and that is a choice the justices can make. They could still take it, and deliberate the matter in order to give trump what he REALLY wants - more delay - but they'd still have to make a ruling on it this term year (by late summer if they pad it out). If they dismiss trump's appeal, this trial could start as early as mid-May (depending on another trial): If SCOTUS takes it, they still have to rule on it by August (and like the 11th District of Appeals, they dare not approve in favor of absolute presidential immunity, it would literally kill the Constitution) and the trial could start by September (cutting it close to Election Day).
If by some miracle the Mar-A-Lago trial does start by May, it's still expected to take two or three months to complete considering the sheer amount of classified documents - and their mishandling - to go through. It would affect whenever the DC trial starts, which I would argue deserves to go first because of its immediacy and its importance in confirming trump's culpability over the nightmare of January 6th. Hopefully this will get straightened out soon.
Thrown into this mix is the fourth criminal matter trump faces in Fulton County, Georgia... which hit a huge delay when one of the co-defendants filed a complaint against DA Fani Willis over possible misconduct with an affair with one of the special investigators hired by the DA's office. The judge overseeing that trial held a hearing the last two days, during which the worst part of trumpian (damn you Roy Cohn) legal tactics - public smearing of opponents - was on full display.
Thursday’s evidentiary hearing on the misconduct claim against Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis yielded a lot of drama but little evidence of wrongdoing, legal experts say.
Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held a hearing after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Mike Roman, alleged an improper relationship between Willis and top prosecutor Nathan Wade and claimed that Wade used his earnings from the case to fund trips for the pair...
“I simply don’t see any new evidence that requires disqualification. It’s a credibility pissing match so far. Ugly. Dramatic. But the needle hasn’t moved,” tweeted Georgia State University Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis.
“As an excavation of a now-defunct relationship, it was Bravo-worthy (and frankly, sad). But as an evidentiary hearing, it wasn’t the win the defense promised, especially under the governing legal standard,” agreed MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin...
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the hearing featured “a lot of spectacle but not very much substance.”
"Ultimately, at the end of the day yesterday, it was just a big nothingburger," she said. "There was nothing to show that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade had the financial conflict of interest that Georgia law recognizes, something akin to a prosecutor who only gets paid if they win a case. That's the classic case in Georgia law where there is a conflict that results in disqualification. That wasn't there yesterday in the courtroom..."
If trump and his co-defendants were hoping to throw the whole prosecution out, that wasn't going to happen. At the least, the judge could have removed Willis from overseeing the matter and handing it off to another prosecutor in the DA's office. Whether it delays this trial any further - which legal experts considered an open-shut case because of so much direct evidence against trump including that audio tape - is unlikely, because it's all the other trials' schedules that's interfering when this one starts.
Again, to all the Republican voters out there, to all the Republican Party leaders out there: You could have avoided all this. trump was dirty and corrupt and vulgar in the years before 2016. You had all the warning signs when he first campaigned - the failed casinos, the civil trial involving trump's university scam, the reports of sexual assault, the open racism and sexism - that trump was going to be a disaster of a human being. AND YOU STILL VOTED FOR THAT.
We've had other corrupt men in high office before, just that none of them reached the criminal lows that trump has. trump's not facing criminal trials because he's a "great conservative American," he's facing criminal trials now because 40 years of bills over his bullshit are finally coming due.
The civil trials are mostly done, and trump has to pay those dues soon. The criminal trials start March, and the countdown to just even ONE felony conviction begins.
Update: Thank you Batocchio for sharing this article at the Crooks & LiarsMike's Blog Round-Up. To the visitors, please take the time to leave comments below, and check out the more recent articles I've posted here!
Trump has been increasingly public about his mounting discontent with the committee and with McDaniel in particular.
But it wasn’t always this way. McDaniel, who is the niece of retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), first captured Trump’s attention when she held the role of chair of the Michigan Republican Party in 2016. Trump rewarded McDaniel after his historic win in the state by installing her as RNC chair...
Most of Priluck's article covers how often McDaniel as RNC chair would rise to trump's defense as various scandals arose. It especially points out how McDaniel teamed up with trump's handlers to throw out the legal results of the 2020 elections:
McDaniel was also one of the many Republicans called to testify before the Jan. 6 select committee.
Her deposition footage revealed that — after the 2020 election — Trump connected her with John Eastman. Eastman is the architect of the fringe legal theory that the vice president had the power to swap official electors with ones who supported Trump during the certification process.
“He turned the call over to John Eastman, who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states,” McDaniel said in the deposition video.
She then confirmed the RNC helped the Trump campaign assemble “contingent” electors...
Yet even with all that legal help to commit a serious act of illegality, trump came to blame the RNC - and thus McDaniel - for failing to help him get the courts into accepting his baseless claims of "stolen" ballots. After all, trump can't blame himself for not having any evidence behind his Big Lie.
It's been clear to a number of observers that the power struggle between the Establishment faction of the Republicans and the invasive trumpian force were coming to a head. This is the most public sign that trump decisively won that battle. It wasn't enough that trump held the power with the GOP voting base: trump wanted control of every possible decision-making role in the party so he can effectively raid it like a vulture capitalist, strip it for parts, keep the good stuff for himself, and abandon the husk when he moves on.
Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump and the daughter-in-law of former president Donald Trump, promised on Tuesday that she would use "every single penny" of Republican National Committee (RNC) funds to see Trump back in the White House if she becomes co-chair of the party.
During a recent appearance on the conservative network Newsmax, Trump claimed that “the RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history..."
"No one tell her the RNC is supposed to be in charge of assisting the entire party at the federal, state and local level. Not just Trump’s personal slush fund," quipped attorney Bradley Moss on X/Twitter.
Republican strategist Bobby Trivett, a self-acknowledged Nikki Haley supporter argued that Lara Trump has "no interest in Republican Victory up and down the ballot, she just wants Trump legal fees paid."
Former Department of Defense official Mike Walker seemed to posit that Lara Trump's claim of financial support for MAGA might not be politically aligned with other conservatives, tweeting that her assertion will likely come as a "surprise GOP candidates for the House and Senate and other offices..."
While individual candidates and state-level organizations of the GOP can make their own fundraising, they need the foundational support of the national party to ensure they keep their budgets in the black. The way Lara's talking about it - and how the other campaign experts are interpreting it - is that trump will ensure the RNC won't pay out, it'll vacuum up.
For all of trump's talk about being a big billionaire, the truth is that on his person he barely has any wealth at all. Most of a billionaire's wealth is on paper: That is, the expected value of various properties, corporations, investments, and financial papers they have on them at any given time. Elon Musk for example may be the richest man on the planet, but most of that wealth is tied up in stock holdings and investments he can't easily liquidate to put more money in his pocket right at this moment.
And in trump's case, a lot of that wealth was a lie (hence the New York civil case). trump doesn't have that much money for real.
For trump to pay off - or place in escrow for the courts while he fights his appeals - that much money would require him to either sell off a number of his properties and financial holdings - which weakens his overall claim to power and cuts into future grifting and emolument schemes - or gain access to on-hand cash, which is where the campaign donations come in. Knowing trump, he'll steal other people's money first before using his own.
Most of the other deep-pocket fundraisers for the Republican Party are the same way. Their wealth is mostly on paper as well, which was one of the reasons why the GOP across the board has been struggling with campaign fundraising the last year or so as those deep pockets are evaluating the Return On Investments their money isn't achieving. While the SuperPACs are still out there, how many of them are going to share their money with an RNC organization that's not going to help with the costs of campaigning - the ads, the office staffing, the signs, the rallies, the snacks - heading into 2024?
This is going to get messy as trump and his lackeys clean out the Republican Party vault to pay off his debts (and whatever indulgences trump still enjoys).
This is what running a business looks like, Republicans, if the aim is to crash and burn everything and move on to the next victim. Congratulations, GOP, you're now Sears.
One person was killed and up to 21 others were injured after shots were fired Wednesday afternoon outside Union Station in Kansas City, Mo., at the conclusion of a celebration for the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl win, officials said.
The number of victims from this shooting is still evolving as law enforcement continues their investigation.
Officers took three individuals into custody, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said during the day's second news conference, updating the previous tally of two suspects brought in.
One suspect was captured after a foot chase with officers, she said...
In preparation for the expected crowd size, 800 law enforcement officers were on scene for the parade, Graves said. The heavy police presence helped in getting fans to safety once the shooting began and in administering life-saving aid to gunshot victims, she said...
Even with all those good guys with guns, gun violence still happened.
But KCUR reported that Children's Mercy Hospital received 12 patients from the rally, 11 of them children and nine of those with gunshot wounds. Fire Chief Ross Grundyson couldn't immediately confirm the ages of the victims.
Children.
The gunmen FIRED AT CHILDREN.
It is too early to speculate what the motive of the gunmen were, but the fact they opened fire with children present spells out that these sons of bitches didn't give a damn who they were hurting.
And there's one more event in public that we can't dare attend without risk of getting shot at.
We as a nation cannot peaceably assemble - we cannot celebrate, we cannot convocate, we cannot be a community - because the ongoing threat by the National Rifle Body Count Association's public demands that their rights to carry murder weapons everywhere at all times shall not be infringed.
It's just that the gun nuts' right to carry assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns stocked with high-capacity magazines requires the rest of us to pay in our blood.
We in the majority are dying so that the paranoid, armed-to-the-teeth minority can fantasize to their Turner Diaries cosplay bullshit.
Goddamn the NRA. Goddamn the politicians who let them rack up these body counts.
We need gun reform NOW, before every street in America drowns in the blood of our children.
Did Trump just encourage Russia to invade U.S. allies in Europe if they don’t spend more on defense? It seems so. At a campaign rally on Saturday, he recounted a story about a NATO summit he attended while he was president:
One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [presumably the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want.”
In one aspect, this remark—widely reported in news media the past few days—has been taken a bit out of context. Trump cited the story as an example of how his tough-guy tactics were effective. He got the allies, he claimed, to “pay up”—to boost their defense spending after years of shirking their obligations...
Yet, more broadly, the remark is just as alarming and dangerous as Trump’s critics and many European officials are interpreting it. It reflects a long-standing attitude of indifference and borderline hostility to allies, of viewing them the same way that a Mafia boss regards his capos or clients in a protection racket.
There is no question: When—not if—Vladimir Putin read that remark, he mused that he might get away with intimidating or invading Poland, the Baltic nations, or some other nearby countries if Trump wins the 2024 election. Ditto for Xi Jinping and Taiwan...
Much like Kaplan, I'm viewing trump's public ire towards NATO not as trump as a landlord upset about rent not getting paid but as a mob boss demanding his payoff for protection by his victims. Try to remember, one of the things trump kept insisting to our NATO allies wasn't to increase their defense spending but to pay the United States - to pay him, hint hint - over what trump saw as "unpaid bills".
Which, of course, is not how diplomacy and military alliances work. But donald trump doesn't care about what works, he only cares about what profits donald trump. And he's perfectly willing to break everything to profit from it. Back to Kaplan:
Trump’s purely transactional view of alliances is nothing new. It was widely reported that, as president, he told his aides several times that he wanted to pull out of NATO. In 2020 he told the European Union’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you,” adding, “By the way, NATO is dead and we will leave.” After he left office, some of his top aides said that if he had been reelected in 2020, Trump would have definitely quit the alliance...
Under other circumstances, it would be hilarious to watch all the hardened foreign policy wizards of the Republican Party - all of them perfectly aware of how the U.S. has benefited in both military and political matters being united with the other Western democracies during the Cold War and Global War on Terror decades - suddenly switch their worldviews from "Europe good, Putin bad" to "OMG Putin is just the best BFF ever!" Under other circumstances, most of those intelligent, well-studied thinkers of realpolitik would argue against any ill-advised ignorant demolition of a stable, valuable alliance. But we no longer live in that world: This is the World of Fox Not-News, and if you can't help shill the Narrative of the hour/month/year which happens to be whatever is in trump's head that very moment, you are persona non grata to the GOP...
We will see a near-immediate end to foreign sharing of intel: What is the likelihood the UK or France is willing to share data with a nation that could easily hand it over to Russia without batting an eye? NATO's efforts to stop Russia from a full-out invasion of Ukraine falls apart. Half of Central Europe - bizarrely under the political sway of right-wing Nationalist governments more friendly to Putin than they should - could well cut out of any NATO or shared alliance with Western Europe and turn most of Eastern Europe back into a Russian playground...
Which - again - is exactly what Putin wants.
We're getting into the second full year of Russia's full-out war on Ukraine, which followed eight years of border clashes after 2014 when Ukraine threw out their corrupt pro-Russian government. For all of Russia's military might on paper, it's been an utter disaster for Putin. While Ukraine hasn't succeeded in a major counteroffensive since autumn of 2022, Russia shows no sign of claiming more territory. All Russia has done well during this campaign has been targeting civilian centers to terrorize the populace and adding to their long list of war crimes. The only advantage Putin has - the manpower to conscript millions more of his people than Ukraine can - is the one resource keeping Russia in this quagmire.
Putin's hope is clear: If trump wins the November election, any potential American support to Ukraine - which has been tied up by trump's Republican allies in Congress - officially ends. Up until then, Putin can throw more Russians into the meat grinder and never care for the bloodshed he's spilling of both Russian and Ukrainian alike.
The underlying message trump is getting out there is that he doesn't care one whit about the United States' obligations to long-standing treaties that have kept the peace with our most powerful allies for more than 60 years. And it's not even trump using Russia as a boogeyman to scare NATO into being more compliant. This is trump signaling to his mob boss Putin that Europe will be easy pickings should trump regain the White House in 2024.
If you genuinely want world peace, you have to realize that Putin is the greatest threat to world peace in our lifetime. You have to realize trump is just one of Putin's pawns to keep war and chaos going so Putin can reclaim his dreams of empire.
You have to, for the love of ALL that's holy, vote against trump and make sure he never gets anywhere near the Oval Office again.
