One Pardon Short of Gross

Trump issued 143 pardons and commutations on his last day in the White House.

He pardoned Steve Bannon for his border wall scam.  He also pardoned Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., better known as Li'l Wayne, for illegal firearms possession.  Among 141 others.

I don't want to comment any more on this . . . 

Wacko Week

 Too much to talk about this Boxing Day . . .

Donald Trump won't sign a badly needed COVID relief bill without changes Congress is unlikely to make even as he vetoed a defense spending bill before sending a Christmas message to the troops thanking them for their service without irony, even as a bomb went off in Nashville.  Yet the biggest bombshell is a series of punishments for war criminals and for campaign operatives so corrupt to make even G. Gordon Liddy blush.  We could be heading toward Armageddon or something like it when the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve and we try to wish each other a happy 2021 . . . without irony.

Meanwhile, on the home front, that storm that blew through New Jersey on Christmas Eve spared me a power outage (though people in nearby Bergen County, New Jersey weren't so lucky), but the mail has been so slow that our cable bill is late getting to the cable company (and, as of Christmas Eve, past due!) while I wait for a paycheck that was mailed ten days ago as of this writing.  Israel once fought a war in less time than that.  And not only did I not get to see "A Charlie Brown Christmas" this year, I didn't even get to see the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott as Scrooge, which we do in my house every year, because our DVD copy of the movie got put away and now we can't find it.  We may not find it until Memorial Day.

I need not comment or rant any further . . ..

Pardon Me

I keep waiting for Trump to be chastened by the aftermath impeachment.  I don't expect him to stop acting like an autocrat, but I do expect enough people to to be so outraged that it actually affects his standing in the polls.  But Trump's approval rating is actually holding steady and in some cases ticking upward, and even his recent pardons apparently won't have a detrimental effect on his Presidency.  He commuted the prison sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who'd been serving time for trying to sell President Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat, and set him free early, and he also pardoned his fellow eighties robber baron Michael Milken for violating securities laws and pardoned former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik for ethical violations. He gave pardons to eight other individuals, too.  Trump's message is this: If you're guilty as sin of a crime, and he likes you - or if he doesn't like Obama and your special crime adversely affected the forty-fourth President - you get out of jail free.  Like Roger Stone, who is expected to be sentenced today.

And if you're railroaded and he doesn't care about you, well . . . 

Justice is blind, but I sure hope it ain't deaf.  Because these transgressions are screaming for retribution against Trump,.  Something has to be done.  Right now, the only thing that can be done is elected a Democratic President in November, and at this point, at this writing . . . I don't think that's going to happen.

Justice in America . . . :-(