More to be pitied than feared?

 It is starting to dawn on me that Trump, his slavish enablers, and his cult followers are more to be pitied than feared.  Watching the hapless Republican Party in the House of Representatives unable to pass a budget, and desperately trying to come up with some reason to impeach President Biden, they just seem not very smart.  Some of them are definitely not very smart, but even the smart ones have to do and say really stupid things to please their orange faced, rage and revenge filled master fulminating in Mar a Lago. 

Trump lost the election, but because he told the Big Lie that his MAGA Cult wanted to hear almost all elected Republicans have to swallow their shame and go along with it to codependently appease their master for fear of losing the next election in the primary to a Trump Cultist.

And now they have to go along with an even Bigger Lie - that all all all all of the many many many many criminal charges and indictments against the King of Corruption and Greed are politically motivated. 

They are not politically motivated.  Of course.  The lifelong criminal just does criminal things, daily, over and over, and has no way of being able to stop.  Because, frankly, he is mentally ill and compulsive.  He needs everyone to submit to him, in small and large ways.  He forces all of them to kiss his ring, to abase themselves at his feet.

What a sad, unbalanced little man.  It is hard to imagine what it must be like for smart Republicans who know what nonsense he is spouting, who know how damaging his endless calls to violence are, who know he is a danger to democracy in America and around the world, who know that he is a danger to the Republican Party, who know he is a danger to their own careers.  Yet, they cower in fear.  They either curl up and hope it all goes away, or they become cheer leaders in hopes of becoming a favorite of the blinded by the propaganda, blinded by the celebrity show, blinded by their own grievances MAGA hard core Trump supporters that they just hold it all inside themselves and go along with it all.  What is it like to swallow and swallow and swallow the truth and the outrage and the opposition every day, time and time again?  How does a personality cope with such endless suppression and humiliation?

I would like to think I would be brave and show the integrity and courage of 26-year-old Cassidy Hutchinson and just speak the truth - what do you know?  What have you seen?  What do you say privately and are afraid to say in public?

But who knows.  Everyone is brave when they don't have to be.  Being brave when it costs you dearly is maybe not so easy to do.  Maybe, There But For The Grace of God Go I.

I feel sorry for these frightened and cowering Republicans who aren't free.  

But I really do hope and pray that they wake up and realize they are paying a price of their own self respect, their own integrity, their own character to continue to play along with dangerous, violent madness of the Orange Emperor who Has No Clothes. 

I make no mistake.  The Former Guy and his cult are dangerous and violent. But maybe it is more a propaganda strut and show than I sometimes fear it is.  Maybe it is a bubble that will just go poof. 

Let the trials begin.  And ---- poof. 

Bank and insurance fraud. Goodbye Trump business?

Bank and insurance fraud.  This overgrown brat of a child has been nothing but a laughable fraud his entire make believe real estate career.  And it has finally caught up with him.  I think this means his New York real estate business is over?  Financial ruin for a con man and thief.  

He is not a successful businessman. He is a fraud.  Always has been. 

“Former President Donald Trump, his top executives, and heirs were declared completely liable of “persistent and repeated fraud”—and the real estate empire was unceremoniously stripped of its business licenses in New York.”

Finally.

Murdoch resigns

 Rupert Murdoch announced that he is resigning from Fox Corp and News Corp.  So what?  I suppose I can feel some hope and joy that such a toxic influence on the world is resigning but I am not so sure.  

As long as the right-wing extremist audience demands to be lied to and given fascist incendiaries, others will fill the void.  Witness the deaths of the execrable Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes.  Others filled the void.  Witness Fox News trying to say that the Orange One lost the election - they immediately course corrected and knowingly and deliberately lied saying that the big pumpkin won - in a landslide - in order to stop a sudden drop in ratings.

The fact that they lied deliberately was proven in court by Dominion Voting to the tune of $787.5 Million.  It was a business decision to lie. They still lie.  

Good for ratings doncha know?  And ratings ratings ratings and $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ is all that counts doncha know?

So, even if the extremist son Lachlan Murdoch fails to save Fox News, the lies will be picked up by other odiferous propaganda machines, and the country will continue to be bombarded with shit.

One down.  A few million to go.....

The 15% reason that Biden is president

 On Super Tuesday in March of 2016 I voted for Joe Biden to be the Democratic Party nominee for president. He wasn’t my first choice. I was deciding between Buttigieg and Bloomberg - two moderates I liked the best. 

But I found out that the rule for the primary was that any candidate that did not get 15% would get no primary delegates. And my biggest concern, by far, was that it was absolutely mandatory that the Democrat beat the idiotic, authoritarian, deranged Donald Trump.  And that meant that we could not nominate someone at the left extreme like Sanders or Warren. 

The moderate most likely to get the needed 15% was Biden, not Buttigieg or Bloomberg. So I voted for safe, unthreatening Joe. So did enough Democratic Primary voters across the many Super Tuesday states. 

So, Joe won the nomination. Not because throngs showed up at rallies filled with passion for him, but because he was not, and could not be characterized as a lefty extremist. 

And then in November more voted for the Democrat and against the execrable Trump than ever before in history. It was the country rising up to say no to Trump and his extremist authoritarian cult.  

And Joe, the politician and negotiator, has done a fine job as president. But I want him to step aside and let Gretchen Whittmer, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzger, Josh Shapiro, etc., all very talented centrist Democratic politicians compete to take on the deeply corrupt and flawed Republican nominee and his cultists. 

Thanx, Joe.  Good job.  

Please follow the precedent of a previous Democratic President with many legislative accomplishments who realized he would likely loose the election, LBJ.  Please announce that you will not run and you will not accept the nomination for president. 

Good president.  Terrible campaigner. He looks old, shuffling, sometimes stumbling, forgetful, confused.  Unfair, perhaps, but if you’re a bad campaigner you don’t get re-elected. 

The only thing that matters in 2024 is that Trump and the authoritarian, anti-democracy Republicans loose and loose decisively.  If they win democracy in America is over for at least a generation. 

America needs to see and turn away from Trump and his extremists

What was it like living in Germany in 1933?  Maybe it was a little bit like living in America in 2023, 90 years later.  What happened when enough of the voters were Nazis?  What could happen if enough voters in America are MAGA extremists?  What could go wrong?

Why don’t we look at what Trump says he will do if re-elected?  Here is a good list from Chauncey DeVega of Salon:

• “Donald Trump told Glenn Beck during an interview last week that he is going to put President Biden and other "enemies" in prison when he takes by the White House in 2025”…the ex-president's desires to imprison his "enemies" are not new:  The "enemies" that Trump and his next regime want to put in prison or worse, include not just:
• President Biden, 
• the Democratic Party's leadership, and 
• the members of law enforcement who are prosecuting Trump for his crimes,
• but all people who he and the Republican fascists and MAGA movement deem to be "the enemy" and "un-American…
• If you are a black or brown person, 
• a Muslim, 
• Jewish,
•  an atheist, 
• not a White Christian, 
• a members of the LGBTQI community, 
• believe in women's reproductive rights and freedoms, 
• are deemed to be "Woke" 
• or tainted by the "Critical Race Theory Mind Virus" 
• or otherwise deemed to be the Other 
• you will also be targeted by Trump's next regime and movement.

But is Trump just blowing steam? Getting headlines? Or does he have an actual plan?  Oops, there is a plan:

 “Trump's Agenda 47 is a plan to radically remake the presidency and American government (and American society) in service to his neofascist vision that includes such goals as:

• ending birthright citizenship, 
• criminalizing migrants and refugees, 
• putting homeless people in camps, 
• instituting national stop and frisk laws, 
• restricting freedom of the press, 
• ending academic freedom at the country's universities and colleges and other institutions of higher education,
• replacing quality public education that teaches critical thinking and the country's real history with a form of fascist "patriotic" indoctrination, 
• ending environmental regulations, 
• more gangster capitalism and power for the richest Americans and corporations, 
• reversing the progress of the civil rights movement and the Black Freedom Struggle, 
• taking away the rights of gays and lesbians and other queer people, 
• further restricting women's civil and human rights, 
• and ending US support for Ukraine.

And, oh yes, helping Putin and Russia take Ukraine, the Balkans, and destroying NATO. 

How about the rest of the authoritarian party that still calls itself the Republican Party?  Do other authoritarian leaders have any plans? Yup:

“Project 2025 is a strategy that has been developed by right-wing think tanks and interest groups such as the Heritage Foundation. The main focus of Project 2025 is to launch a blitzkrieg assault on the American government by 

• ending career civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists with the goal of eliminating any internal opposition to the Trump dictatorship. 
• In essence, these Trump loyalists will place his vision above the Constitution and the rule of law

Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the sweeping new initiative called Project 2025, offers a policy agenda, transition plan, a 

• playbook for the first 180 days and a personnel database for the next GOP president to access from the very beginning to 
• take control, reform, and eliminate what Republicans criticize as the "deep state" bureaucracy. 
• Their plan includes the possibility of firing as many as 50,000 federal employees.

When a psychopath tells you who he is and what he will do, believe him, please. 

And when a political party, the Republican Party, knows it can no longer win popular elections except in highly concentrated red areas, believe that they will enact their plans to get by force what they can’t win by persuasion. 

Trump is a vengeful child who wants to hurt all who do not submit to him. I think he may be more Henry VIII than Hitler. But remember that he will have nukes

But the Republican Party has a couple of very dedicated groups - white Supremacist extremist Christians bent on enforcing a Christian Taliban rule, and Plutocrats who want a weak, impoverished, submissive work force desperate for jobs. 

If Trump is re-elected he will never leave office. Elections will be as they are in Russia, Cuba, dictatorships everywhere, and the dictator will always be elected in a "landslide".  And many mini-Trumps will follow. 

If they get their way.

But they won’t. 

Because America is better than that. 

America has an unique magic, it embodies a hope not just of Americans but of people all over the world. It has always been the place to look to for a better life, and the world will not let that dream be squashed by an orange pig of a man and his wannabe autocrats. The world needs and demands that America be a force for good. 

And America is going to say yes.