THE FIRST TRUMP INDICTMENT

 

Well, it's official!  Today, for the first time ever, criminal indictment charges were made against Donald Trump, making him the first ex president to ever be indicted in American history.  And the amazing thing is that there are probably more on the way.

There's a certain inevitably to this: anyone who has read honest media reports about Trump for the past decade knows that he is a man who has always lived on the edge of legality, who acts (and talks!) more like a mob boss than a businessman or politician.  And like a mob boss who avoids prison while his underlings take the fall for him, Trump is surrounded by criminals who often have been caught committing crimes on his behalf.  From Trump's former lawyer and convicted criminal Micheal Cohen, who's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election started this whole mess for Trump, to former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos who was convicted of lying to the FBI, to Trump's long time accountant Allen Weisselberg who was recently convicted of tax fraud, some of the closest people to Trump have broken the law.  It's hard to believe that he himself would never  face some kind of charges.

The interesting thing about this indictment is that it may be the weakest of the 4 potential criminal charges that may be brought against him.  To get a felony conviction here, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have to prove to a jury that Trump both falsified business records while violating campaign finance laws. While this may be difficult, clearly Bragg thinks that he has enough evidence to make a case.  We'll see.

The second possible criminal charge against Trump, (and the one that seems to be the  strongest),  is the one coming from the state of Georgia.  As we all now know from a recorded conversation, after losing the election, Trump called former Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find" him votes.  He even implied that Raffensperger himself might face some kind of charge if he didn't find those votes.  The fact that this call came after the state had already recounted the votes twice without changing the outcome meant nothing to Trump, and his behavior certainly seems criminal here, even if was still the president when he made that call.

Then there's a Justice Department investigation over whether Trump's stirring up of the mob on January 6th counts as a criminal incite to riot.  This is a bit tricky, since freedom of speech is important and Trump did use the word "peacefully" while addressing the crowd.  On the other hand, he had the power to stop the riot while it was going on and he delayed doing that for hours.  He even sent out a tweet condemning Mike Pence as the riot was taking place, further inflaming the crowd.  Plus there was testimony during the House of Representatives's January 6th investigation that said that he wanted metal detectors removed from the rally because the protestors were  "not there to hurt me.”

Finally, there's the stolen document scandal, in which Trump's refusal to turn over classified documents after leaving the White House prompted an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that resulted in over a hundred secret documents being found.  The crazy thing about this possible crime is that it reveals just how immature and downright stupid Trump is: he was told that he needed to turn over all the secret documents he had taken with him after leaving the White House, and he only returned some of them, leaving the rest in a closet in his resort/home.  All he had to do was hand them over, but, like a small child crying finders keepers, he refused, seeming to believe that any document he got as president was his forever.  If this is the crime that finally nails Trump, he'll be guilty of criminal stupidity.   

Inevitably, there's some worry in the media that this unprecedented step will galvanize Trump's supporters into some kind of violence, and while that fear is understandable, there is no doubt that it  right thing to do.  Every American who commits a crime should face charges for it, no matter who they are.

DO CONSERVATIVES WANT POWER MORE?

 

Back in 1992, "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", a book that intended to improve communications between genders, was released.  The central theme of the book was that men and women inherently saw the world so differently that it was often hard for them to understand each other.  Personally, I think a new version of that book could be released now, entitled "Conservatives are from Mars, Progressives are from Venus" because of the deep, often fundamentally different ways that conservatives and progressives see the world.  As anyone who's tried to argue with someone with different political views, agreement, especially in the age of Trump, is hard to find.

One big difference I see in the two different political mindsets is that conservatives seem to assume that power is their right; with the conservative image being one of the strong, aggressive person (usually a man) in charge, their assumption of power seems baked in.   Imagine if there were 2 recent Democratic presidents that won the White House while losing the popular vote.  The howls of "illegitimate!" from the right wing media would de deafening.  But when it happened to George W Bush and Donald Trump, they both swaggered into office claiming that they had a mandate.  

This lust for power can be seen in recent presidential elections dating back to 1968.  In that election, we now know that Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, fearing that an end to the war would help his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey.   Add to that the coded racist language that Nixon used to win over white voters, known as the "Southern Strategy" and other dirty tricks his campaign pulled, and you can see that winning power meant more to him than anything, even when it meant prolonging a war.

Skipping over the presidency of Gerald Ford (who was, of course, appointed not elected) and we get to the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan.  Although Reagan's 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter was seen as a landslide, it had been quite close until negations to bring back the American hostages in Iran fell through, making Carter look weak.  Recently, Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, came forward to admit that he and other Republicans went on a trip to the Middle East before the election with one purpose: to make sure that the hostages didn't come home before the election. They did this by visiting Middle Eastern cities and telling regional leaders that Iran would get a better deal with Reagan.  While this may not have been as despicable as Nixon's extending the Vietnam war, it still was unconscionable, as it essentially kept the hostages in prolonged bondage to win the election for Reagan.  Add to that Reagan's continued use of Nixon's Southern Strategy (he announced his candidacy in the state of Mississippi, voicing his support of "state's rights", not far from where some civil rights workers were killed in the 60's while trying to register black voters), and we see another power hungry Republican President open to try anything to win the White House.

Eight years later, George Bush's won without sinking as low as the Nixon and Reagan campaigns did.  But he still resorted to an openly racist ad campaign by linking the furlough of felon Willie Horton with his opponent Micheal Dukakis, turning around the early polls that showed him trailing Dukakis.

2000, of course, brought the whole fiasco in Florida.  One of the uglier parts of that state's highly contested vote count was the reports that hundreds, perhaps even thousands of African American voters were turned away at the polls, told that their names were not on the voting lists.  We know now that they were victims of a voter purge done by the state to remove ineligible felons from the voting lists that also removed eligible voters.  The level of corruption in this election was such that George W Bush's brother, Jeb, was governor of Florida when all the madness occurred, and that the Supreme Court, which had members appointed by Bush's father, openly interfered in the election by  stepping in and ending all the recounts to hand the election to Bush.

And then there was the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump.  We now know that, even if the Trump campaign did not criminally collaborate with Russia during the election, that country definitely did interfere in ways both big (releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails) and small (false Facebook accounts posting made up stories) to tip the election in Trump's favor.  On top of that, we also know that the story of an  alleged affair that Trump had with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006 was killed before the election with a payoff made to Daniels by Trump's then personal lawyer, Micheal Cohen, who went to jail because of that payoff.  (Whether Trump will also be charged with a crime over it remains to be seen). 

There you have it, a brief history of conservative presidents using underhanded and sometimes criminal means to bring themselves to power.  And I haven't even talked about the means used by them and other conservative politicians to maintain that power, from passing laws specifically designed to keep black voters from voting, to gerrymandering voting districts, to opposing any limits on campaign financing, the modern Republican party has found a way to win elections even without getting a majority of voters.  Which means that, looking back at this history, I don't think I can see a future that will get any better, not when the next generation of  conservatives will continue to assume that power is their birthright.

WHY WE NEED BIG GOVERNMENT

 Bashing so called big government has been a go to talking point for right wing media for years.  Really, just putting the two words together conjures an  imposing and frightening image of a government imposing its will on the people like something out of Orwell's 1984 novel. (Or perhaps something by Ayn Rand).

But the boogeyman of big government is actually a lot less scary than what can happen when there's a lack of government in the form of regulations.  Recently, a train derailment in the small town of East Palestine Ohio released nearly 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride.  The effects of this on the local people are potentially devastating, with possible health issues lasting for years.  While there has been the usual amount of finger pointing from both sides of the political fence, about this,one thing is clear: a train carrying such dangerous chemicals should have had more safety regulations.  Not surprisingly, such regulations were put in place by the Barack Obama administration and then were later repealed by the Donald Trump administration.  Now to be fair, it's unsure at this time if the Obama era regulations would have prevented the crash, but what it does show is how much corporate profits are often put over the safety of the American public.

A similar situation occurred recently with the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank; once again, the Obama administration had passed a  series of regulations to avoid the same kind of banking crisis that tanked the economy back in 2008, and once again those regulations were weakened by the Trump administration in 2018, sowing the seeds for a once prosperous bank (SVB was  the 16th biggest bank in the country) to fall into ruin.

The frustrating thing about regulations is that there's no way to know just how many are needed; as these two examples show, some regulations are necessary, even in a free market.  But, as every Californian can tell you, the high speed rail train between San Francisco and Los Angeles that voters supported in 2008 has been so stymied by cost overruns and, yes, regulations, that it may never get built.

So again, there's no easy answer here, but to me, the real problem in this country isn't the amount of regulations, it's the lack of them (and the enforcement of them), which has brought on by the huge influence of money and lobbying in our government.  Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech in the Citizen's United case of 2010, more and more money has spent influencing (or you might call it bribing) the decisions of politicians, resulting in a country that is less safe overall.   When you compare America to other industrialized nations, it's clear that we generally have air, food and water, that is less clean than theirs, and we are more likely to be exposed to the kind of dangerous accident that occurred in Ohio.  An untamed free market can be a dangerous thing.

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

 

The recent lawsuit brought by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News has taken an interesting turn.  If you haven't heard,  the voting machine company is suing the news network because it believes that the news broadcasters and commentators on the network echoed Donald Trump's assertions that Dominion's voting machines were rigged against him in the 2020 election.  Those assertions were echoed without any proof, even when Fox News knew there was no evidence for them.  Not surprisingly, the network has responded to the lawsuit by claiming that they have freedom of the press and we'll see how it turns out.

The really crazy thing here is that the company's lawsuit against Fox has turned up some internal communications between people at Fox working both behind and in front of the cameras who knew full well that many of the claims made by the guest speakers on their shows concerning the election were simply not true.  Not only did they know that were untrue, they sometimes expressed that in stark terms: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.”  Messaged on air personality Tucker Carlson to fellow on air personality Laura Ingram.  She responded by saying that Powell was a "complete nut.”  Powell was the lawyer who pushed some of the more aggressive (and crazy!) conspiracies about the 2020 election, and who was given multiple chances to appear on the network and rant away unchallenged.   Another on air personality, Sean Hannity, called Powell a "fucking lunatic".  Meanwhile,  Fox News president Jay Wallace described the craziness of on air personality Lou Dobbs by saying "The North Koreans put on a more nuanced show."

What this reveals is what those of us who do not reside in the right wing news bubble have known all along: while they may be sincere in their conservative beliefs, many people at Fox do not  believe many of their own stories.  They fully understand that their network is more about making money than news reporting or even pushing a political agenda.  Putting it bluntly, coming up with ways to make their mostly old, white, male audience angry so that they won't change the channel is their bottom line.  If that means putting on people on their shows that they themselves characterize as  "fucking lunatics", then that's what they will do.  

This cynical, money driven philosophy by the biggest news network in the country shows what a lie the false equivalency people draw between Fox News and MSNBC is.  You can disagree with Rachel Maddow all you want, but the idea that she would have people on her show that she knows are liars and allow them to spew nonsense without questioning them, is absurd.  These communications show that Fox News (and let's face, most of the right wing media) lie openly to profit from telling their viewers what they want to hear without ever challenging them in any way.

The specific reason behind Fox's turn to conspiracies after the 2020 election illustrates that point: it was Fox News that first called the state of Arizona for Biden in the 2020 election, which was a big step towards Biden's eventual victory.  When Fox viewers, egged on by Trump, were mad about this "betrayal" (even though the call was correct), they started turning towards the new, even more right wing network, Newsmax.  When Fox saw this happening, they quickly turned towards stolen election theories in their "reporting", inviting on Powell and other conspiracy theorists.  So, it was just all about greed, or as Hannity messaged about the possibility of another conservative network rising during the fallout from the Arizona call, “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”

"I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S ANYTHING YOU CAN DO..."

 After the horrific beating video of 29 year old Tyre Nichols by five police officers was released to the public, Republican House member Jim Jordan spoke about it on "Meet the Press", saying "I don’t know that any law, any training, any reform is going to change...I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.”  While he was understandably disgusted by the violence on the video, his assertion that there's no training or reform that would change things speaks volumes.  It's obvious that the majority of the Republican party don't want any kind of police reforms passed, and will simultaneously call overly violent police bad while opposing passing any kind of changes, much in the same way that they condemn mass shootings without supporting any gun control measures.  Police brutality and mass shootings are two things that the party would rather shrug off than deal with.

To be fair, that's not true of all Republicans; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tried in 2020 to pass some reforms after the killing of George Floyd, but his bill died in the Senate when Democrats didn't think it went far enough.  There is a chance that this latest tragedy could lead to some reforms, but it will be hard to get them through the Republican House.

And there are so many reforms that should be passed, from banning choke holds to having police stop pulling drivers over for routine moving violations (officers can photograph the offenders license plate and sent the ticket in the mail).  One of the big problems is that over the years, police officers have been getting surplus army material from the military, from rifles and body armor to tanks (!).  Add to that the fact that in cities where violent crime is a problem, special task forces with macho names are formed by the police (the police officers who beat Nichols to death were part of a task force called SCORPION) as a way to show the public that they're serious about fighting crime.  So you're arming these police officers with military weapons that make them feel more like soldiers entering enemy territory than cops and then telling them that they're part of an elite violent crime stopping force, and basically you have a recipe for violent behavior.

After the killing of George Floyd, not only were no serious police reforms passed on a federal level, the early cries of "defund the police" were later turned against progressives by Republicans, and funding for the police often wound up being increased (this in a country that has failed at dealing with our problems with addiction, mental health and homelessness).  Hopefully this time there will be some positive changes made, with perhaps the most important change coming in the training and screening process of the officers.  As Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles deputy police chief and former SWAT officer once said,  “The guys who really want to be on the SWAT team are the last people you should be putting on the SWAT team.” 

BIDEN'S DOCUMENT SCANDAL

 Just a week ago, Joe Biden seemed to riding pretty high.  Oh sure, the Republican party was retaking the House of Representatives, but it was doing so with far less members than they had hoped for, and the clown show of multiple votes that were held to appoint a Speaker of the House made the party look weak.  Also, inflation finally seems to be letting up, and Biden's approval ratings were starting to rise.

But last week a story broke about how classified documents were discovered in his old office from his days as vice president during the Obama administration.  A further search found more documents in his garage.  While the White House tried to shrug all this off by saying that the documents were "inadvertently misplaced", it was not a good look. In fact,  shortly thereafter Attorney General Merrick Garland was compelled to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. Not surprisingly, this was all catnip to the right wing media, who immediately called Biden a hypocrite for previously condemning Trump for his hoarding of classified documents.  Calls for his home to raided, like Trump's was, rang all over right wing media outlets.

Part of me wants to quickly point out that what Trump did was far worse; he took hundreds of classified documents to Mar-o-Lago, compared to the ten or so that Biden had.  Perhaps even worse, when Trump was told by the Justice Department that he needed to return the documents, he did not return all of them, eventually prompting the FBI raid on his home.  Unlike with Trump, there is no reason to believe that Biden intended to hold on to these documents, and he promptly returned them.  Also, in an interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, Trump asserted that the documents in his home were declassified, because the president has the power to declassify documents just by thinking about it.  Isn't it then reasonable to say that the documents found in Biden's possession were  declassified because then president Barack Obama thought about it?  That's only fair, right? 

But jokes aside, this is a serious matter: Biden clearly was sloppy in his handling of the documents, and while that doesn't brand him the criminal that I think it does with Trump, it looks bad.  Sadly, this could be the "Hillary's emails" scandal of the next election. Since most Americans don't follow politics that closely, many of them will just hear headlines about Biden and classified documents and assume he did the same thing as Trump.  Of course, we have no way of knowing how much this story will affect the American public's feelings about Biden, and it may turn out to be more like the "Obama's tan suit scandal" than Hillary's emails.  One thing though, the timing of this couldn't be any worse, because this could be the break Trump needs; now Merrick Garland is the tricky position of possibly prosecuting an ex president for the same crime that the current president will be widely perceived to also have done.  So, like so many other times in his life, Trump will probably walk away from doing something terrible unscathed and emboldened.  How such a horrible person can have so much luck throughout his life is the best argument against the existence of a god that I can think of.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRAZY 30%

 

As a progressive, I couldn't help laughing at now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's pathetic four day bid for the speakership, in which he went down in flames 14 times before finally eking out a victory.  And to get that victory he had to make concessions to the far right Freedom Caucus, a group of house members on the extreme right.  So my amusement at McCarthy's string of losses is tempered by the fact that the house is now about to get down to business, and for many of those members that means attacking the Joe Biden regime with baseless investigations and holding up things like the debt ceiling vote, which could have catastrophic economic consequences.   While I have no sympathy for McCarthy, who condemned Donald Trump in congress after January 6th and then quickly flew out to Mar-o-Largo to kiss his ring, it will be hard to watch him trying to appease the extreme members of his party for the next two years.   

What the whole voting debacle shows is that there is a significant wing of the Republican party that see the role of government in America only as funding the military and protecting their guns.  Or, as former House Republican speaker John Boehner put in back in 2010 when he had to deal with the extreme Tea Party movement in the House, they only want “to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

The sad fact of the matter is that about 30% of the American electorate are on the extreme right, and because they own one party and vote faithfully, they are able to have an influence far beyond their numbers.  Just look at how the supreme court recently overturned  abortion rights despite those rights being supported by around 60% of the American public, and you can see how a determined minority can slowly but surely drive the country in their direction.  And it's not just abortion rights, the 30% are the ones who think that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, reject coronavirus vaccines, believe in Qanon, think that the earth is only 20,000 years old and marinate themselves in right wing media exclusively.  Quite simply, they hold the rest of the country back, trying to return the country to a past where white straight Christian men ran everything.

Is there anything the 70% of sane people in this country can do about this?  Not much other than vote and wait; the Republican party currently has a serious problem with younger voters, who strongly disagree with them on nearly every major issue.  The party is literally dying out as their voters age.  (And the old notion that people get more conservative politically as they age has never been proven true).  Someday the Republican party will have to start tempering its beliefs or time will throw it in the dustbin.  Sadly, the 30% will go down fighting all the way.