Trump’s DOJ lies and lies and lies some more

They are lying about the few Epstein files that have been released.

For example — the DOJ inserted this photo in the Epstein files.

The White House has been caught. The administration inserted a photo of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross into the Epstein files and falsely implied it showed them with victims. In reality, it’s a publicly available fundraiser photo featuring Jackson and Ross’s own children.

IN FACT — this photo has nothing to do with Epstein — it was a fund raising photo — see the original below.

People who live in glass houses . . .

Charlie Kirk quote:  “Kentanji Brown Jackson is a diversity hire.  She is only there because she’s a black woman.”

Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson received both her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University. She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Government and earned her JD degree from Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude.  While at Harvard law school she was supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Charlie Kirk dropped out of community college.

Secretary of (Whatever) Hegseth now turns his fascism to the military Chaplains Corp

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking time away from murdering boaters in the Caribbean to take aim at the Army chaplain corps’ “Spiritual Fitness Guide.” Now that’s multitasking.

Hegseth is mad that the guide only mentions God once and never mentions virtue, but does mention “feelings” 11 times. The horror.

So, he’s getting rid of it. He posted a video on X with a caption reading, “We are going to make the Chaplain Corps great again.”

Donald Trump’s toadies are all such monsters, but they are also so cringe. Imagine having to constantly frame everything just as Dear Leader would, ever striving to hit that note of petulant bullying that comes so effortlessly to the president.

But back to Petulant Pete.

Cartoon by Jack Ohman

“In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers. Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care,” he whined.

Yeah, wouldn’t want a religion that nourishes the body and soul now, would we? That stuff is for pussies.

Apparently, it’s not just that the guide was too touchy-feely. Hegseth also thinks that the military’s recognition of a wide range of religions is an “ongoing war on warriors.”

So Hegseth is going to “streamline” the list of which religious affiliations will be recognized by the military. No, he hasn’t bothered to explain what will count or how he will decide, but you can count on servicemembers being forced into Hegseth’s “religion.”

“There will be a top-down cultural shift putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as mental and physical health,” he declared.

Unfortunately, we know what “spiritual well-being” looks like for Hegseth, and it is not great.

It looks like Hegseth pushing violent Christian nationalist content on official government social media accounts.

It looks like grooming codes that violate the religious freedom of Muslim and Sikh soldiers by forcing them to either violate their faith and shave, or be forced out of the military.

It looks like Doug Wilson, the head of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

Hegseth attends a CREC church, and here are some of Pastor Doug’s cool beliefs:

  • No same-sex marriage or even Pride parades! 
  • Some enslavers were totally good people! 
  • Non-Christians should not hold elective office!
  • Women should stay home! 
  • Sex is an act of colonization where a man conquers and a woman surrenders!

It looks like Hegseth’s Deus Vult tattoo is deemed by the Dept of Defense to be a symbol used by white Christian nationalists. As a D.C. National Guard member, Hegseth was detailed to protect Joe Biden during the 2021 inauguration until a fellow service member informed leadership that his ink was a white supremacist symbol.

It looks like Hegseth’s “kafir” tattoo. Written in Arabic, the term translates as “infidel” or “unbeliever” and is used by far-right Islamophobes. Proud Boy Joe Biggs also sports one.

Hegseth is openly trying to transform the military—once a shining example of American diversity into an all-white, all-christian, all-xenophobic fighting force that will follow Trump anywhere.

Probably to war in Venezuela first.

But at least soldiers won’t have to worry about chaplains giving them any comfort. Just muscular virtue all the way down.

 

We told you Trump would betray America and now he has

Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know – Russia – the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.

We’re now there.

It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc.), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.

At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.

In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.

A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20% of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.

Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.

As the National Security Desk writes:

“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”

Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:

“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”

David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by The New Republic:

“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”

Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:

“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:

“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’

“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”

Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.

And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.

Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.

Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.

NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:

“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”

Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.

And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.

These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.

Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”

This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.

Pass it along and help wake up our country.

Time to admit it: HILLARY WAS RIGHT!!!

If we Democrats could fully accept Hillary Clinton’s action of correctly labeling MAGA Republicans “ as a basket of deplorables,”  the country would stand a fighting chance.  Far from blaming Hillary, I am charging the liberals with allowing the truth to become a weakness.   Having lived through her campaign, she predicted lawlessness, chaos, and xenophobia, which are all deplorable, and Democratic advisors and pundits demurred at every turn, running from the truth.  Ten years after President Donald Trump told us that, in “two weeks,” he would present a plan to replace former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, nearly thirty million Americans are now poised to choose between seeing a doctor and buying food.  

Donald Trump never wanted to replace the ACA because he had no idea then or now how.   What he has always wanted is to replace Barack Obama’s legislative legacy.  For years, the GOP has propagandized the American public with the lie that the Democrats forced Obamacare down their throats.  If one were to look back, one would see former President Obama eschewing universal health care in favor of a compromise that adapted the foundation of a GOP plan devised by Mitt Romney.  He and then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asked Republicans to help refine the “kinks.”   “Maybe now that I’m leaving office, maybe Republicans can stop with the 60-something repeal votes they’ve taken, and stop pretending that they have a serious alternative, and stop pretending that all the terrible things they said would happen have actually happened, when they have not, and just work with the next president to smooth out the kinks,” Obama said.

Nancy Pelosi joined the call for compromise, a day after Republican efforts in 2017 to repeal the ACA again: “Democrats extend the hand of friendship, and look forward to our working together in the regular order for the good of the American people,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Democrats tried to live up to the admonition later articulated by former First Lady Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” What the Democrats did then and have continued to do too many times is to look for a middle ground in the midst of their writ large apology for the truth.  Obamacare was a middle-ground stance that effectively killed Universal Healthcare, widely known as Medicare for all.  My views on gun ownership are widely known and unapologetically radical.   I would take guns out of society.  Unless you hunt for a practical or professional reason, or are in law enforcement or the military, put your weapon in the box for incineration.  That view is not as radically out of the mainstream as one might think.  In the 1970s, when my kids were little, the push to remove guns from their lives was widespread.  It was considered the height of crass behavior even to give your kid a cap gun because the country was realizing that guns and violence were on a trajectory to outnumber the population.

Now, at the mention of guns, Democrats start every conversation with the caveat, “I support the Second Amendment, but…. ” Some have even gone so far as to tout their own gun ownership as a leveler to enter the discussion.  So, while Democrats clutched their pearls at the word deplorable, Republicans cranked up their racist and xenophobic machine.  The current President called Mexicans (not an individual Mexican) rapists and murderers.   This was applauded at rallies and speeches by what we have come to know as MAGA: no apologies, no running from their candidate, but both loud and quiet acceptance.  Dr. King said“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” No, I am not advocating for cruelty or lies to guide the Democratic party, just an acknowledgment of the truth: the Republican party is deplorable.

Last night in Pennsylvania the President of the United States took the kid gloves off his racist little fingers and called for the whitening of America.  Amidst the lies and insults, he confirmed calling Brown and Black nations shitholes—something he had denied in the past.   “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?” Trump said onstage.  “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?” Not satisfied with the lukewarm response, he went further,… “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.”  He added for emphasis that those places “are a disaster, right?  Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”

I can guarantee tonight the GOP toadies and apologists will take to the air, excusing, minimizing, and admiring the words of the President with phrases like straight-talker.  The GOP is in the corner of an adjudicated rapist, 34-count convicted felon, and suspected pedophile who sees racial bigotry as a bargaining chip — exactly what qualifies as deplorable.  Democrats should embrace the obvious and full-throatedly say, Yes, Hillary was right, the Republican party is DEPLORABLE.