World

Evidently, when you consider yourself not only to be above the law, but to BE the law, paying taxes is beneath you. Derek Chauvin and Kellie Chauvin, of Oakdale, were each charged by summons in...

Baseball is back — with a bang, with dignity, with a national hero throwing the ceremonial pitch, with both teams taking a knee and a thumb straight in the eye of the most undeserving one. OK,...

According to the Trump Twitter archive, Trump hasn’t posted about Rep. John Lewis since January 2017, when he felt compelled to whine about Lewis’ decision to skip Trump’s inauguration. Since Lewis’ passing yesterday, Trump has yet to...

Here’s some uplifting news!  Capt. Thomas Moore, a 100-year-old British WWII vet, set a goal of doing 100 laps in his garden (yard, in America) to raise 1000 British Pounds for the UK’s National...

"Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) died on Friday at the age of 80 after battling with pancreatic cancer, per multiple reports, including NBC News and Politico. Why it matters: Lewis, one of...

Most tinhorn dictators, or in Trump’s case, wannabe dictators, tend to celebrate “victories” by doubling down on their authoritarian instincts. Trump celebrated the commutation of the jail sentence of his accomplice in crime Roger Stone with a ridiculous and unenforceable demand for Christopher Steele to be extradited to the United States for — well, we don’t quite know. Certainly nothing good. What we do know: Christopher Steele is a former MI6 agent with a sterling reputation among the Western intelligence community, who created a dossier of information documenting Trump’s deep and criminal ties to Russia. The intelligence in them was raw, some unverified, and though some minor inclusions in his dossier have had doubt cast on them (as he predicted some of it would), all of his major points remain undisputed. For three years, Trump and his sycophants have conducted a scorched-earth propaganda war against Steele, falsely tying him to the “failed” Mueller investigation and blaming him for everything from the Trump impeachment to Trump’s ridiculously bad golf game. Saturday morning, Trump sat on his royal potty throne, and farted out the following tweet: This man should be extradited, tried, and thrown into jail. A sick lier who was paid by Crooked Hillary & the DNC! https://t.co/ywMBeAgaGz — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2020 If you can’t read his bloviating bullshit, he retweeted a post by the discredited “journalist” John Solomon wrote the following: “Credibility shredded? British court identifies at least five inaccurate or unproven allegations in just one of the many memos that made up Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier.” Trump added: “This man should be extradited, tried, and thrown into jail. A sick lier who was paid by Crooked Hillary & the DNC!” Trump’s spelling (“lier”?) is as bad as his reasoning. No charges in any US court are pending or contemplated against Steele, so there’s no reason to extradite him. Without charges, you don’t try anyone, and without a trial, you don’t throw anyone in jail. The charge that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign in conjunction with the DNC is a half-truth. The Steele dossier was originally commissioned by the research firm Fusion GPS via the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative newspaper whose owners did not want Trump as the 2016 presidential nominee. Clinton’s campaign agreed to take over the Fusion GPS contract after Trump won the primary and the Beacon lost interest in pursuing the investigation. (No one in the campaign or the DNC knew anything about Steele’s assignment.) About 20 minutes after the first tweet, Trump had another Twitter movement and shit this out: Bring back Steele!!! https://t.co/jL5c8WF28Z — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2020 Trump again retweeted a post about Steele, demanding “Bring back Steele!!!” We all know that Trump doesn’t know a goddamned thing about the US justice system. He sees himself as a Roman emperor, demanding that a political or family enemy be brought for him, forced to his knees, berated by God-Emperor Trump, and fed to the lions. Who exactly does he see “bringing back Steele” to the US? The UK has no legal reason to extradite him. No US law enforcement agency has a legal right to demand his extradition or hold him. Trump doesn’t care. He wants what he wants and he will bang his princely rattle on his kingly […]

It’s very late.  The waning hours of night have an otherwordliness about them, like people aren’t supposed to be here.  Everybody else is asleep.  All is still.  Even a moth can be startling. It’s still...

I know Trump is an idiot. You know he’s an idiot. Incompetent buffoon, racist, traitor, and that’s just from the last few days. But it seems like every few days, we find out something new and horrifying about the orange Nazi shitbag, and usually something that poses a threat to our society or the entire globe. This one is a global threat. For years, Trump has been making classified calls with world leaders that are humiliating and embarrassing for us as a nation, and pose an actual threat to our national security. This assessment comes from staffers and confidants of the following people: former National Security Directors H.R. McMasters and John Bolton, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein — yes, that Carl Bernstein — interviewed the subjects and wrote the report. I’ll give you a moment to yell “Holy shit!” at the nearest wall or furry animal. Bernstein writes that Trump’s behavior towards these world leaders is so extreme that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. The conversations, which of course are still taking place, are worse than you might expect. He berates, bullies, and insults the presidents and prime ministers of our allies, especially the female ones. He fawns over the dictators, regaling them with tales of his own superiority and machismo. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest. The story became doubly important after we learned that Trump is countenancing and perhaps even approved the Russian practice of putting bounties on the heads of American soldiers stationed overseas. According to Bernstein’s sources, Trump made multiple calls to Putin after the US intelligence community learned of the bounty program, and though he and Putin discussed an American withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan — a move that would play directly into Putin’s hands — they never discussed the bounty program at all. (For the record, I do not believe whatsoever the denials from Trump and the White House that he was never briefed on the matter. He might have been too stupid to pay any attention to it, or didn’t give a damn about the American troops who were and are being stalked by Afghan militia members for cash payments from Russia. But he was certainly briefed about it.) (Update: Just saw this. Bolton briefed Trump on the bounty program, in March 2019. March. 2019. Let that wash over you.) He talks repeatedly to Turkey’s Erdogan, according to the report, as well as his matinee idol Vladimir, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammen bin Sultan, and the dictator he “fell in love with,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Bernstein writes, Trump incessantly boasted to [them] about his own wealth, genius, “great” accomplishments as President, and the “idiocy” of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the […]

The Iranian government on Monday issued an arrest warrant for U.S. President Donald Trump and recommended that he face "murder and terrorism charges" over the January assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani that brought the...

Treason is a serious accusation. Donald Trump throws it around like a Frisbee, accusing Barack Obama of treason for no good and defensible reason. And we all know that when Trump accuses someone of something, it’s almost certainly because he’s guilty of it himself. It’s called projection. Usually, I respond to his kind of projection by posting the relevant “I know you are, but what am I?” clip from Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure, but I’m not going to do that tonight. This isn’t the time for that. You can do one of two things to earn a conviction for treason, according to the Constitution. One is to “levy war” against the United States. The other is to give “aid and comfort” to an enemy of the United States while they are making war against us. Trump has broken the second protocol. The short version of Trump’s actual treason against the United States: Starting in 2019, a Russian intelligence unit offered, and paid out, bounties to members of Afghan militias who killed American soldiers. US intelligence agencies have known of this since at least March 2020. Trump was specifically briefed on the actions, and has chosen to do nothing in response. Nothing. According to the New York Times: Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the [anonymous White House] officials said. The Times went on to write: Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations. Yet Trump did nothing whatsoever to respond to the Russian offensive against US soldiers. Nothing. He has not revealed it to the American public (did he think we would never learn about it?). And, less than three weeks ago, Trump threatened to upend the G7 economic summit unless Russia, and particularly Vladimir Putin, was invited. Not only has he kept quiet about it, and done nothing to retaliate against Putin and Russia, he continues to promote Russian interests — Putin’s interests — above our own. The actual New York Times article is here, but if you can’t get through the paywall, you can read a shortened version of the story here. You can read what appears to be a well-summarized version here. According to Times reporter Michael Schwirtz, the same Russian intelligence unit is responsible for the attempted poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in Britain, and an attempted coup against the lawful government of Montenegro. This the same group, Unit 29155 of Russia’s military intelligence agency, implicated in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Britain and a coup attempt in Montenegro. It has never been publicly accused of involvement in attacks on Western soldiers — Michael Schwirtz (@mschwirtz) June 26, 2020 The response, as you can imagine, has been fierce. Politico reporter Eric Geller wants to know why Trump isn’t stopping Russia from actively working to have US soldiers killed. Good question. Why isn't Trump trying […]