The Latest On Trump

After hearing about the court memos thanking Michael Flynn for his cooperation in the Trump case and recommending little if any jail time and insisting that Michael Cohen should get lots of jail time for his various crimes - including the funneling money to keep two of Trump's affairs hush-hush and lying about when a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow was terminated - the news that Paul Manafort has broken his plea deal, and the growing evidence of possible collusion with Russia on the part of someone in the Trump presidential campaign if not Trump himself, along with several other things that don't seem right, I have come to a decision. 

I can't comment on any of this; the whole thing is such a mess that the fact that Trump is in such hot water over everything pertaining to his various dealings as President and possibly as a private citizen has long since convinced me that he needs to be driven from office somehow - if not through impeachment and removal from office, then definitively in the next election - so why bother picking apart all of this news?  It's making my head spin.

By the way, I wouldn't have had to talk about this if the Democrats had nominated Martin O'Malley for President.  The end.

When The Levee Breaks

The remnants of Hurricane Florence are expected to reach my area late tonight into tomorrow, and even though we'll get a lot of rain and maybe a thunderstorm, it won't be nearly as bad as what people in the Carolinas have been getting from the storm in its full fury.  And Trump is reacting to this catastrophic hurricane by bitching about the reports surrounding the last catastrophic hurricane.  He's trying to deny that three thousand people - about the same number of people that perished on 9/11 - died in Puerto Rico as a result of the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria.  The government is only beginning to deal with Florence, and Trump is responding to the last storm as if he were fighting the last war.

The dam is breaking, and I'm not talking about the Santee Dam holding back Lake Marion in South Carolina.  I'm talking about Trump's "Presidency."  Trump has had to deal with Paul Manafort confessing to every campaign finance violation he's been charged with, and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is dealing with allegations of sexual harassment dating back to - really - his high school years.  (Kavanaugh tries to present himself as a nice guy, but how is this possible with a charge like this?)  Kavanaugh is facing charges from one Christine Christine Blasey Ford, a professor in California who claims that he assaulted her so hard that he could have killed her by mistake.

Oh dear . . .. Despite all that, Kavanaugh may still have the votes in the Senate (courtesy of a power-hungry Republican caucus) to squeak through and get on the Court, but once on the Court he could be forced out by the Me Too movement, and hopefully they'll also take out Clarence Thomas in the process.  All of this pressure on Trump's associations and his attempts to bend the will of the judicial system to his own will is only making it more likely that the Democrats are going to win back the House in the 2018 midterms . . . and possibly the Senate.

And Trump wants to re-litigate Maria?

When the levee breaks, America will be a far different country than it is today. 

Down For the Eight Counts

Michael Cohen.  Guilty on eight counts including fraud, bribery, and campaign finance violations.  Guilty plea.

Paul Manafort.  Found guilty on eight counts - five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts, two counts of bank fraud. A ,mistrial on ten more counts that could be retried later, with another criminal case slated to be tried in a Washington, D.C. court after this trial in Alexandria, Virginia.

Good guys, both, says Donald J. Trump.

I got news for you.  A Democrat will not be elected the 46th President of the United States in 2020.  A Democrat will be elected the 47th President of the United States in 2020 because Mike Pence will become the 46th President of the United States after Trump is gone . . . and become only the second accidental President since Chester A. Arthur to be denied a term in his own right (Gerald Ford was the first).

Don't waste your time trying to impeach Trump, though, Democrats.  He'll resign first.  And he'll know when to leave - unlike Nixon, who had to be told to quit.

And when this is all over, we should take the advice of Al Czervik, Rodney Dangerfield's character in Caddyshack:

"Hey, everybody - let's all take a shower!" 

Summits and Nadirs

So what's my takeaway from the Trump-Kim summit?  I think that they established an excellent framework for President O'Malley to use to strike a deal with North Korea in 2021.

Seriously, though, it's a good thing that Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are talking and have agreed to eventually denuclearize the Korean peninsula and lessen tensions between the one-and-half countries.  It's good that two megalomaniacs who threatened to annihilate each other are now talking to each other.  But the statement over how to achieve this was too vague, sort of like the deal Roosevelt and Churchill negotiated with Stalin on what to do with Berlin after the war ("We'll figure it out later!"), and Trump's promise to cancel U.S.-South Korean military exercises will make South Korea less secure and less ready to fend off another North Korean invasion.

Even more troubling is that Trump is treating Kim like a buddy even as he alienates Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron over trade while disrespecting Angela Merkel and Theresa May over the fact that they're women.  Even though they're all - you know - democratically elected leaders?  Trump, of course, was not democratically elected, as 54 percent of the American electorate voted for someone else but Trump won in the Electoral College.   But even the 46 percent of the American electorate that did vote for him, and certainly the 50 percent of Americans of voting age who stayed home on Election Day 2016, couldn't possibly approve of separating migrant children from their parents and keeping them incarcerated in an abandoned Wal-Mart and keeping them inside 22 hours a day with two hours of regimented yard activities like they're criminals.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions quotes the Bible to justify this action by referencing in Romans 13:1, to obey the laws of the government: "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God."  Aside from the fact that this quote was used to justify slavery before the Civil War and pro-British loyalism before the Revolution, he completely ignored the compassion emphasized in Romans 13:10: "Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law."  And Sarah Huckabee Sanders defends Sessions.

And the GOP is going to win the 2018 midterms because of a robust economy and a booming stock market? 

Trump's only worthy accomplishment, apart from reducing tensions with North Korea, is breaking the Bush-Clinton dynasty continuum with his election victory.  But it's long since time to fight back and stop him from doing more damage.  And then, in 2020, we work for . . . new leadership.

Meanwhile, Paul Manafort is going to jail.  It's a start.

Troll Trouble

Robert Mueller has caught so many parties in his Russia probe that I can't keep up with them. So I'll focus on the one that may be most important - this past month he indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies on charges of conspiracy for trying to persuade voters in 2016 to support Hillary Clinton's various opponents and vote against Hillary herself.  The companies include the Internet Research Agency, based St. Petersburg (no, not St. Petersburg, Florida), which produced the political propaganda aimed at American social media and the two companies that helped finance it.

The tactic was simple - troll the voters.  The object was to discourage people from supporting Hillary and make sure she lost.  The Russians posted memes and fake Facebook pages promoting not just Donald Trump but Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Dr. Jill Stein in the general election.  There is not proof that Trump knew about this or was involved in it, and Trump naturally insists that it exonerates him.  It doesn't, of course, but it lets him off the hook for the time being, and it also buys Mueller some time.  And in that time so far,  he's managed to indict former Trump camping manager Paul Manafort on money laundering and bank fraud charges after former Trump aide Rick Gates pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.  Gates had lied about the details of a 2013 conversation about Ukraine involving Manafort, a member of Congress, and a lobbyist.  Manafort and Gates have consulted Ukrainian politicians.

As for the 2016 disinformation campaign . . . well, it definitely proves even to those who dismiss the bot stories and the Russian "fake news" strategy as drivel that the Russians indeed tried to influence the outcome of the election.  But let me be clear.  I do believe that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election and were using an online disinformation campaign.  I just don't think it determined the outcome.  To suggest otherwise would be to absolve Hillary Clinton of blame for blowing the easiest election for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 (2000?  No, Al Gore won and the Presidency was stolen from him!) and would be to suggest that voters who went for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and went third-party in the general election (myself included in the latter instance) don't have minds of their own and are subject to Russian brainwashing.  The people who blame the Russians for influencing the outcome, by the way, are the same people who dismissed Ronald Reagan's Soviet-bashing as xenophobic paranoia.  I'd vote for someone other than Hillary in opposition to Trump all over again.

I just don't know if I would still vote for Dr. Stein.  As a presidential candidate, Dr. Stein was not the best messenger the Green Party could have gotten behind to promote and advance its agenda.  Also, she failed to get the Greens to five percent nationwide, rendering them ineligible for federal matching funds in 2020.  Dr. Stein is right when she says that the Democratic establishment is trying to silence liberal voices both within and outside of its own party, and she noted that the Greens were promoted with a couple of Russian-generated memes out of a trillion that were posted on social media.  But her willingness to meet with anyone and everyone on the subject of global affairs - including the infamous Moscow dinner that placed her at the same table with Vladimir Putin and not-yet-then Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn - continues to embarrass some of us who voted for her.  To be fair, she did stress before that her trip to Russia was "about promoting diplomacy, peace, and international cooperation on pressing global issues," and that she was one of several Americans at that Moscow dinner promoting a saner and more just foreign policy.  And there was no intent on her part to conceal her dealings in Russia.  But it's not Dr. Stein's transparency that's in question; it's her judgment.  She wanted to be taken seriously as a third-party U.S. presidential candidate, yet she was seen hobnobbing not only with America's worst foreign adversary but also with its most ethically dubious retired Army man, Michael Flynn.

As a Martin O'Malley supporter, I wonder if I should have written O'Malley in back in November 2016.  The only problem is that you don't vote directly for a presidential candidate in the United States - you vote for Electoral College candidates pledged to vote for your presidential candidate.  New Jersey has fourteen electoral votes, and you vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their identities.  There are no Electoral College candidates for an undeclared write-in presidential candidate, of course, so how could I vote for fourteen O'Malley electors who didn't exist?  My vote for Dr. Stein actually offended some of my friends, which wasn't worth it.  One such friend, a dear, sweet woman I've know for a few years now, chastened me for my vote and told me I helped Trump.  

I give up.  I'd rather have voted for O'Malley and been ridiculed than voted for a third-party candidate on the ballot and be scorned.  Why not write in O'Malley? After all, no Russian meme encouraged anyone to vote for him in any way, shape or form.

And I've got a mind of my own.

(Oh yeah, the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo was finally released.  Yay.  Whoppee. :-p)

Tangled Web

Hillary Clinton celebrated her seventieth birthday last week and got a present from Senate Republicans - an investigation.  She learned, as did the rest of us, that the Senate was planning to investigate her for approving a sale of a uranium mine to a Russian company while Secretary of State and receiving a donation for the Clinton Foundation from the company that sold the mine to the Russians . . . and for colluding with the Democratic National Committee into paying for the compilation of a dossier of records showing a relationship between Donald Trump and Russia that was assembled and written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, between June and December of 2016.  This was more of a gift for Trump than for Hillary; he pounced on both reports hoping that they would be bigger news than the indictment coming from Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump, which everyone knew would be against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.  So who cares about Paul Manafort, who left the Trump campaign early?  Especially with Hillary conspiring with Russia! 

As expected, it was Manafort who, along with a guy named Rick Gates, got indicted for, of all things, money laundering.  But also caught with his pants down was ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, who was found to have been in contact with foreign nationals tied to the Russians offering dirt on Hillary and seeking a connection with the Trump campaign.  Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying about it in early October 2017.

The Papadopoulos case is more serious for the Trump White House.  Manafort's charges pre-date his association with Trump.  But Papadopoulos's role in the campaign may reveal something about the Russia connections Trump has that he doesn't want anyone to know about.

Oh, and about the charges against Hillary . . . Uranium One, the Canadian company that sold the mine to a Russian company - the uranium for which must be used for energy purposes and can't be exported out of the United States - was approved by a board independent of the State Department, and that dossier had been started for one of Trump's Republican presidential primary opponents.

Trump should just admit that he's trying to deflect attention from charges against his cronies.  But investigations against Hillary are likely going to proceed anyway.  I don't know why.  She's irrelevant.  The way Trump and the GOP are still going after her, you'd think the entire Democratic Party didn't matter!

Ha ha, perish the thought!

A tangled web indeed . . .