Director Spike Lee, speaking at Cannes, denounced Donald Trump as a “motherfucker” because he failed to denounce the Nazis in Charlottesville who murdered a peaceful protestor. Considering that Trump has done even worse things, one wonders what Lee would say about those crimes against racial justice.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has $131 billion. What can/should be done with all that money? One thing is certain: no one man has what it takes to make that call. And Bezos is certainly not that man.
After a Trump Administration official joked that Senator John McCain, who is dying of cancer, didn’t matter politically anymore because he’s dying, media and politicians said the remark was inexcusable. (Never mind that it’s the kind of thing everyone says privately.) As we prepare for the inevitable lionizing of McCain after he dies, it’s worth remembering those he killed.
When the political climate was right, after the 9/11 attacks, CIA executive Gina Haspel gleefully supervised the torture of detainees who still remain uncharged by any court with any crime. Now she’s Trump’s nominee for CIA director. The climate is less pro-torture, so she’s telling Congressional interrogators not that she won’t torture, but that she thinks the CIA shouldn’t interrogate suspects. Which is not even close to the same thing.
Donald Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the $130,000 payout to his alleged former mistress, the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels. However, he’s new lawyer former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani went on Fox News last night in order to say that, in fact, Donald Trump paid back his lawyer Michael Cohen for the payout of hush money. Now the Trump administration is facing criminal charges. At a certain point, you have to ask, what are these guys thinking?
NBC News reported with great fanfare their exclusive story that Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was wiretapped by the feds. As it turns out, he wasn’t. But that didn’t lead them to walk back all their breathless analysis.
I sued the Los Angeles Times in 2016. They know that they will probably lose if my case ever makes it to trial so they have been using every trick in the legal playbook to delay and dodge justice. If I’m lucky, I will get a trial four years after I filed (five years after the events involved). Yet proponent of tort reform continue to insist that it’s too easy to sue in the United States.
President Trump is a “stress test” on the American system of government. Lord knows I am as critical of the U.S. as anyone else, but you have to give us credit. The fact that the U.S. government is plugging away and the economy is doing well despite the fact that Trump is crazy serves as testimony to the durability of the United States.
The Democratic Party has filed a lawsuit against the Republican party, WikiLeaks, and Russia. They blame everyone accept the candidate herself for her dismal performance against a disorganized and unhinged Republican candidate. If they were honest with themselves, they would see that her failure to move to the left or to accommodate the Bernie Sanders people led to her inevitable defeat.
There are a lot of bad things about Trump as president. One of the most damaging is that his shenanigans distract us from the very real problems like poverty and homelessness that we ought to have solved ages ago. As we marvel at his tweets and sex scandals, we’re letting the country go down the toilet. Which is something citizens of authoritarian states everywhere are well familiar with.
