Green Eagle

Trump has made his repeated promise to deport 20,000,000 minorities and foreigners a central feature of his campaign.  What does Trump intend to do with them?  History provides the key. And what history? The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, when another great power, seeking a cheap way to victimize a large part of its population to benefit the majority race, also started a program of mass "deportation" of minorities, in order to provide its majority race with more land, more money, more of everything, at the expense of the others.  There was a word for this: lebensraum, or "living space,"  the notion that the majority race deserved what it craved so much that it justified any abuse of those considered to be lesser humans.   Hitler proposed to "deport" Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and eventually all other non "Aryan" residents of the Third Reich.  The Nazis soon discovered that deportation was impossible; it was too expensive for Germany, and oth

 And nobody hears it, is it really running for President at all? First of all, a note about my absence lately:  My wife got me to sign up for an account at Threads, which is sort of like X without the assholes.  I've spent a little time establishing myself there, and I have to say, I do like the relatively immediate exchange of views, but I don't mean to give up my blog- there are still so many things that can't be dealt with in a couple hundred words, so, perhaps to your dismay, I am back. So, what motivated the above question is the fact that the Sunday New York Times today had seven articles about Trump, and absolutely zero about Kamala Harris.   The Republicans have a problem with Harris, in that virtually everyone who sees her likes her and immediately understands how qualified she is to be President.  They have tried mightily the last month to find some way to smear her, but have been spectacularly unsuccessful- the tactics of character assassination that worked so we

 A look at the price of DJT stock in the last few trading days: A little to know about DJT, from Bloomberg: "The company lost $344 million in the first six months of the year, mainly because of paper losses on derivatives, and took in just $1.6 million in sales." That would certainly explain the long slide in value of DJT stock since it was in the $70's last spring, as the company is clearly worth less than nothing, but what happened today? I'm not a stock market expert, but I am confident in saying that this is not a normal phenomenon.  It is obvious to me that certain forces (read here: the Saudis) are determined to prevent this stock from totally collapsing before Trump can at least salvage a big payoff from what was never any more than a giant scam.  Again, from Bloomberg: "Trump, who owns about 60% of Trump Media, is expected to be able to start selling shares as soon as Sept. 20, when a lockup period barring insiders from selling shares is lifted." Exp

Trump's behavior since Joe Biden withdrew from the Presidential race has certainly been, shall we say, erratic- a constant series of ever-escalating lunatic claims.  This has led many people to suggest that he is falling into deep senile dementia.  Now, I am the last person to claim that he is of sound mind; I believe him to be suffering from a very deep psychological disorder that could possibly justify being called psychosis.  I just think there is another explanation for his behavior the last couple of weeks. Here is what I think is happening:  Trump may be stupid and delusional, but he has always had a deep streak of cunning when it comes to promoting his own welfare.  Trump knows that, essentially, every single person that is going to vote in November has already made up their mind about him, for better or for worse.  No amount of jackass behavior on his part can, at this point, affect anyone but an utterly insignificant number of voters.  However, there are lots of potential

“Miriam, I watched (Sheldon Adelson, her late husband) sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, it’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor – that’s soldiers.   They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead,” Trump said. “She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal.” There have been plenty of comments about this statement, one of the most loathsome things ever said by an American President (most everything on that list came from Trump, but this is certainly at the bottom of all of them.)  The comments have almost entirely revolved around discussing the people who got the Congressional Medal of Honor, almost all at tremendous loss and suffering to themselves. Even Trump said, "because

  So Donald Trump emerged from the Mar-a-Lago basement today to hold a press conference, after seemingly hiding for several days.  I actually managed to watch a fair amount of it, and I must say that my reaction to it was quite different than the comments I have seen online and from the press.  These people described the event as a rehashing of the same old lies, from a guy who seems rather diminished and dispirited. Well, fair enough, but I actually think this event was a significant success for Trump.  What I think others don't get is the reason that Trump held this event.  I think right now, nothing worries him and his advisors more than Kamala's efforts to turn his own "senile old grandpaw" argument against him, now that he is the old one in the race, and is obviously diminished from the Trump we remember in 2016 or even 2020.   So he came out and spoke for an hour, and seemed in control of himself and pretty much all there mentally, even if the content of his rem

 For some reason, I didn't feel like saying this before Kamala made her VP choice, but I am very happy that she did not go with Josh Shapiro.  And here is the reason:  because Shapiro is a Jew. Now, before you attack me for being some sort of anti-Semite, let me explain why I feel that way.  If Kamala had picked Shapiro, the entire Democratic ticket would have been made up of minorities.  Only one thing wrong with that: you know perfectly well that, from that moment on, the entire Republican campaign would consist of telling white Americans that the Democratic party only exists to benefit minorities, and that only the Republicans represent white people, who are still a sizable majority in this country.  And you know that the Republican party already was prepared with a campaign strategy based on this single issue, and the mainstream press, supine to Republicans as usual, would allow it to define the 2024 election. Sure, that is a racial line that the Republicans have been selling a

I remember, not that long ago, in fact, just before Donald Trump emerged on the political scene, when it would be considered an act of the ultimate treachery for a previous President to publicly undercut the foreign diplomacy of a sitting President.  This behavior was strictly forbidden, and both parties understood that politics had to end at our borders. How Trump has changed things in the last eight years.  Today, in the aftermath of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' stunning foreign policy victory in uniting numerous allies to force Vladimir Putin to release a number of hostages, here was Trump's response: "Donald Trump Congratulates Vladimir Putin for Prisoner Exchange That Freed US Journalist... At a Georgia rally on Saturday, Donald Trump delivered a congratulations to Russian leader Vladimir Putin following the prisoner exchange between Russia, the United States and several other nations earlier this week that saw the release of United States journalist Evan Gershkovich.

 At least, here's my take.  As usual, the entire mainstream press corps seems to have devoted about two minutes to thinking out what happened.  First of all, they act like Trump just decided to show up for this event.  Anyone who has ever worked on a campaign knows this appearance was scheduled weeks ago, when Biden was still running.  At that point, Trump's advisors thought that there was a chance that he could take perhaps 15% of the black vote away from Biden, a not unreasonable goal considering the results of the 2020 election.  That might, in a close election, be just enough to throw a couple of States to Trump and put him back in the White House. Well, before he could show up, along comes Kamala, and Trump's hopes of making inroads with black voters pretty much went up in smoke.  So he had zero motivation to show up at this event and act like a decent human being, his least favorite activity on earth.  That resulted in his changing his entire goal for this appearance.

For months, I thought it would be abortion and what the Republican abortion bans promised for our future under Republican government.  An issue that we cannot forget, but not the key to this election. Then, I thought it would be the overriding struggle between American democracy, as flawed as it is, and straight out fascism.  This also is a very real issue that cannot be forgotten for a minute between now and November. But I now sense an issue that is likely to be bigger and more immediate to vast numbers of American voters:  happiness. Do you want to go on for another four years, waking every day in fear of what Republican greed and hatred are going to spawn in this country, or do you want some degree of happiness in knowing that you have a government that is at least trying to do the best it can for you?  Misery or happiness, that is the voters' true choice this November.  Four years of relative peace or four more years dominated by the ugly cravings and psychological deformities

Here's a photo from the AP of Donald Trump that was taken today, July 27, 2024.  Just to be clear, I saved this photo, took it into Photoshop and ran one iteration of the unsharp mask filter on it. Look at the picture for yourself.  Do you see any damage whatsoever to his ear, let alone the sort of damage that would result from contact with a bullet from a high velocity assault rifle?  I don't want to sound like a conspiracy loon here, but come on...where is there a sign of the slightest damage whatsoever? Something is really wrong here.

Get ready for the mainstream press' come to Jesus moment!  Any day now, they are all going to suddenly realize how grossly unfair it was to harp endlessly on one candidate's age and supposed infirmity, driving him out of the Presidential race, while utterly ignoring the fact that the other candidate is clearly a psychotic lunatic.  Well, they can't let themselves make that mistake again, can they, so for the rest of the Presidential campaign, it will be totally out of line to mention or speculate on either candidate's age.  There, that's fair, right?  That's the way to make up for their recent dereliction.  From now to November, it will be right out of line to mention Trump's age or clear mental defects.  That's the way to make up for the ten thousand lying stories about Biden that they used to destroy him.  Fair's fair, right?

Before making my comment, let me be clear:  I live in Adam Schiff's district.  I worked on his first Congressional campaign, and have always supported him.  There is not a single person in the House who was as forthright in the attempt to stop Donald Trump's rogue Presidency, and nobody who was as brave in standing up to the inevitable Republican attacks and smears.  I really like Katie Porter, but in the end, there was nobody who deserves the chance to move up to the Senate the way he does.  So why has he now seemingly stabbed the party in the back by apparently demanding that Joe Biden, the most successful President since FDR, drop out of the Presidential race, with no known person who could replace him and have a chance of winning the election? Well, I have two reasons.  Take your pick, or come up with another one if you can. First of all, Adam Schiff, like Chuck Schumer, represents one of the two main financial centers of the United States.  Both cities are chock full of bi

 Here is something important that I think has been lost in all of the talk about the (very likely staged) supposed shooting at Donald Trump at his Pennsylvania rally the other day. Before Making my remarks, I want to dwell briefly on why I believe I am qualified to say what I have to claim here.  I have two qualifications:  First and least of all, I have been counting crowds at demonstrations and rallies since the Vietnam protest days, when I learned that you could not trust mainstream media accounts of the number of attendees.  Second, and more important, is my 38 year career in film and TV production.  Why this is important, I will make clear below. Anyway, here, courtesy of the BBC, is an aerial photo of the rally site: And here is a rough plan (not to scale) of what you see above: Over the course of my film career, I have had to create the appearance of large crowds in the background of the principal action, say at a baseball game or other large event.  Of course, it's always a

 And who gives a flying fuck? I mean, of course I am speaking for myself- Trump will never experience the misery he deserves because of his lifelong subhuman behavior.  No, I am just saying this:  I have a feeling that the American people are just about fed up with this asshole's antics.  I don't think anything he does or that happens to him can really increase the number of fools who still think he is a decent human being.   In fact, I am predicting that this latest idiocy (and who knows how real it was, anyway?) will just drain away a few more drops of the remaining patience that Americans have with his clown show.  I think people have had it with the nonsense and the stress he imposes on us all.  Let's see what kind of circus he mounts at the Republican convention.  I suspect that all the free chances he is going to get to expose himself in public will actually, in the long run, diminish him.  Get yourself shot in the ear, get yourself stabbed or beaten, rave like a luna

 Here's a very brief post aimed at those fools that think that if Joe Biden is forced out of the Presidential race (yeah, they are still out there howling out their demands for capitulation,) Kamala Harris would be able to run an issue oriented campaign and beat Trump.  My following of right wing sites is much restricted these days, but here is an item I found on a wingnut website yesterday (no link, for obvious reasons.) "Thurs. 11 July 2024 Journalist Tucker Carlson has released multiple videos showing footage of US Vice President Kamala Harris working as a prostitute." I haven't found any of these alleged videos (of course they do not exist, because Kamala Harris is not a prostitute,) but this is the level of campaign they would run against her if she were the Democratic nominee.  So, give up the idiotic idea that any Democrat who dares run against Trump is going to be free from obscenities like this, and will be able to focus on the issues.  Remember Hillary eatin

Have their memories all been erased?  Listen, don't you guys remember "but her e-mails?"  Don't you remember Benghazi? Don't you remember the Obama birth certificate?  Don't you remember the Swift Boat lies?  Don't you remember how Al Gore supposedly claimed to have invented the internet?  Don't you remember Jimmy Carter and the Republican Iran Hostage Rescue sabotage?     Every single Democratic Presidential candidate comes up against monstrous lies like this, spread over and over again by sociopathic Republican billionaires, and here we go again, with the current hateful campaign of lies about Biden's health.  When will people like the miserable John Warner and even the likes of Paul Krugman stop falling for the inevitable campaign of malignant lies directed toward every Democrat? Now we see cowardly so-called Democrats stabbing the greatest President since FDR in the back, as the result of a two-week propaganda campaign by the same Republicans t

 I have spent decades depressed by the gutlessness of Democrats, but I am still stunned by the readiness of so many supposed liberals to turn their backs on Biden's incredible record as President and throw him to the wolves over a supposed bad debate performance, which means absolutely nothing.  Can Democrats really be stupid enough to believe that if Joe can be driven out of the race, Republicans will treat the next Democratic nominee with total fairness and run a campaign based on the issues?  Can there be a Democrat idiotic enough to think that the Republicans are not prepared to go to work on day one with the same pile of lies and smears against any possible Democratic nominee?   I want to remind people of what happened in the 2016 election, when Republican dirty tricks and collusion with Russia cost Hillary the White House.  Here is an image I compiled at that time of the covers of tabloids from the 2016 election, showing the kind of treatment Hillary received.  And remember,

 And then I am done with the subject. Biden's performance at the debate the other night was a massive failure, and utterly unacceptable given the stakes involved.  That does not mean that it is an excuse to turn the country over to a pack of corrupt, utterly lawless fascists, however.  Biden could have gotten down on his hands and knees and barked until he foamed at the mouth, and it still would not, for some reason, make me want to turn the country over to Nazis. Apparently some people disagree with me.  I mean, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and others like that.  Well, I'll stick to the notion that the fifty million dead that resulted from the world's last flirting with fascism is still enough evidence that repeating the experiment would be a bad idea.

"Donald Trump on Thursday brought up the idea of imposing an “all tariff policy” that would ultimately enable the U.S. to get rid of the income tax, sources in a private meeting with the Republican presidential candidate told CNBC." And the result   If Trump or anyone around him has the slightest contact with reality, they will know that this single position is the key to a landslide victory for him in November. There are two parts to this idiotic proposal: to do away with the income tax, and replacing lost Federal revenue with a massive increase on tariffs on all imported goods and materials. For a moment, let's deal with the second.  A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation by Robert Reich indicates that a tariff increase necessary to raise that much revenue would increase the prices of all goods sold in the United States by 60%- an almost immediate 60% raise in inflation.  Anyone who is familiar with the result of the Smoot- Hawley act will be well aware that a fa

"Trump on the debates: So, a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass. They want to strengthen him up. So he comes out. He'll come out. Okay. I say he'll come out all jacked up, right?" I don't know if anybody even will see my blog any more, but I couldn't resist commenting on this idiocy.  According to Republicans, Joe Biden is deeply sunken into senile dementia, but before next week's debate, he will be given drugs to get him to seem normal for a couple hours. I ask you to think about this.  There are, apparently, about seven million people suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other forms of senile dementia in the United States.  We have all heard stories about what a crushing tragedy it is for them and their families to go through this nightmare. Well, apparently, drug companies have a simple injection that can snap a person right out of their dementia and make them perfectly normal for at least a couple of hours.   Think what a blessin

I have seen a number of posts and articles lately expressing a considerable degree of satisfaction over the fact that Democrats seem to be outraising Republicans by a considerable margin in the funding race for the 2024 election. All of these self-satisfied comments ignore one fact that should be obvious to anyone who has followed American elections for any length of time:  Republican campaigns are largely financed by the avalanche of dark money that is poured into our elections by billionaires and their corporations; overwhelmingly so for the mountain of negative ads which are the main feature of the last month or so of the campaign, and which, sad to say, are a major factor in getting the stupid "undecided" voters to go one way or another in November.   This has been true for decades, but has been a primary feature of American elections since five corrupt Republican Supreme Court Justices rendered their "decision" in the Citizens United case, making the collaborat

 Well, here is the sorry state to which our justice system has declined, from the Washington Post today: "U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon heard two hours of legal jousting between prosecutor Jay Bratt and defense lawyer Emil Bove, who argued the language of the World War I-era Espionage Act that Trump is charged with breaking is too unclear to be the basis of an indictment against the 45th president of the United States. For most of the morning session, Cannon seemed to take the argument seriously... Cannon is set to hold the second part of the hearing Thursday afternoon, to discuss Trump’s claim that the Presidential Records Act should be grounds for the dismissal of charges that he mishandled national defense information. Trump insists that the law, which governs historical papers, means that he can declare even highly classified documents to be his own personal property." You do not have to be a lawyer to see that this claim is utter rubbish: "The 1978 Presiden

So the corrupt Republicans in the house today put together another sham "hearing" designed to damage Democrats, in this case, President Biden.   The sole witness" today was a dishonest Republican hatchet man named Robert Hur, a former Trump stooge who was unforgivably appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to manufacture a smear against Biden. Now, it is tempting at this point to dwell on the single worst mistake Biden has made in his time as President: the appointment of the hapless coward Garland to safeguard this country against the Republican assault on popular government.  Let us just note that Hur is only the latest in a long history of Republican  attempts to fabricate a phony case against Democrats.  These include, in reverse order, the criminal attempt by John Durham to  accuse Biden of taking foreign bribes, which took three years and cost untold tens of millions of dollars, resulting in absolutely no charges but fueled an unending campaign of smears and

 This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NcJvi5TYEk

 The short answer:  Nobody. Nikki Haley lost by failing to get 40% of the vote in her home State, essentially sealing the tomb on her obviously lost campaign for President. But Trump lost just as badly.  The absolute leader and dictator of his party, running (in Republicans' minds) as an incumbent, couldn't get 60% of his own party's vote.  Regardless of the in-the-tank-for-Republicans reporting in the mainstream press, this is not a crushing victory by Trump, but in fact a humiliating repudiation.   Contrast that outcome to a real winner, Joe Biden, who got 96% of the Democratic vote.  The truth is that Trump can barely win an election in his own party.  Of course, the press will go on declaring him to be a mighty colossus, striding toward victory, because that is what the rich owners of the press want to happen.  But the truth remains:  this is a character who, barring massive vote rigging in November, appears to be riding toward an incredible humiliation.

  https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/donald-trump-melania-wife-cpac-live-b2502010.html

 At the time of peak Taylor Swift frenzy, I collected a number of screen captures of right wing posts relating to her and the issues surrounding her.  Usually, when I ridicule wingnuts, it is about things they have said, but I think it is important to realize that a large part of their audience is, apparently, only remotely literate.  Visual images or videos have far more effect on them than any sort of reasoning, so I thought I would post a few of them here. Of course, a preposterous lie.   "Insider claims." She brought in millions of new fans, so they banned her.  Right. Okay, now we are deep into the weeds.  Not only is Taylor Swift a satanist, she is, of course, actually a transvestite.  Never could have predicted that one, huh?    As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as the "Academy of Music."  But they banned poor Taylor for life.  That will hurt. "Creepy tweet."  A little projection there, Trump idiots? Well, I shouldn't let Taylor have

 Or, another massive Trump victory in Federal Court today. Donald Trump's Brilliant Legal Strategy We hear from some sources that Donald Trump has already spent as much as $74 million dollars in legal fees to avoid the consequences of his multifaceted criminality, by clogging the justice system with idiotic appeals and other stall tactics, until he could run out the clock and postpone his reckoning past election day, when if re-elected he could crush any legal opposition to his rule.  Well, here is a fantasy that I had a few months ago.  When you look at Trump's adult life, it has consisted in an almost endless series of failures: six bankruptcies, two popular vote losses in Presidential politics, grotesque failures running the economy or the response to an epidemic, failures as a con man in his "university," his thieving charities and almost everything he ever tried to sell under his own name, and on and on.   Why should this be any different?  What I fantasized was

 A chryon I just saw on MSNBC:  "Judges still weighing Trump immunity claim." Still weighing?  Still weighing what?  The claim that, unlike anyone else on earth,  Donald Trump has the right to commit any crime he wants?  How long does any judge have to "weigh" that claim before responding that he is full of bullshit, and malicious, criminal bullshit at that?   I am not a lawyer, but I am not totally brain dead either, and I think I can figure out in about two seconds that it is not part of our legal system that one person is allowed to ride roughshod over the laws of this country and do whatever the hell he wants, no matter how it damages others.  And no amount of legalese can hide this basic fact.  This is obviously what the whole issue is all about: are some corrupt judges going to take their chance to license a would-be dictator to smash the legal structure of our whole country?   I just don't see how any halfway decent person can have the slightest doubt abo

This news from the Washington Post this morning: " Ex-IRS contractor who leaked Trump’s tax returns sentenced to 5 years" Five years in prison for daring to let the American people know that their sitting president was a common thief. As to Trump himself, who, as this leaked information helped reveal, stole tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS and the American people through a decades-long criminal scheme, well, no prison time for him, and so far he hasn't had to pay a penny in penalties for his theft. Seems about right to me, I guess. The judge in this case (unbelievably appointed by Joe Biden) had this to say: "U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes said Littlejohn had “pulled off the biggest heist in IRS history” He stole some documents.  Bigger than the hundreds of millions that Trump and his family stole, I guess. "Justice Department officials said Littlejohn’s disclosures were unprecedented in U.S. history." Not unprecedented, I guess

How can you look like a decrepit old geezer and an out of control two year old at the same time? I thought it might be nice to look in on wingnut world to see how they are taking yesterday's $83 million dollar Trump legal loss.  You kind of know that they will decide it shouldn't affect their opinion of him in any way, but it might be helpful to see just how the Republican party has trained them to reject any fact they don't like.  Not that surprisingly, a lot of the usual wingnut suspects didn't touch this loss at all, preferring to just ignore anything that interferes with their hateful daydreams, but here are a few excerpts from an article at Gateway Pundit, along with a sample of the hundreds of comments it received.  Enjoy.  Or not. "Trump attorney Alina Habba WENT OFF after the crooked New York City court slapped President Trump with an $83 million judgment for speaking out against the disgusting lies of a crazed woman who said he lured her into a Bergdorf Go

I'll make this brief.  In Iowa, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis got about 22% of the vote each.  Trump got about 52%; i.e. he beat them by 30 points each. So, DeSantis dropped out.  My guess at that point was that Trump and Haley would pretty much split DeSantis' 22 points, giving each 11 points, so the final result of the New Hampshire race should have been something like this: Haley: 33 points; Trump 63 points.  Instead, of course, Haley got 44 points in New Hampshire, and Trump only managed to weakly pick off 2 points from DeSantis's voters, coming in around 54 points. To my mind, this is a colossal failure of momentum.  It is not that this violent man and the hate-filled base that supports him could barely bully his own party's voters into giving him more than a bare majority, but that, as I think is obvious, something has gone seriously wrong with his march to the White House. As miserable as the mainstream press has been at even honestly presenting the horse race sid

 Here's an interesting bit of information about the United Nations and Hamas: "Despite the presence of a Hamas terror tunnel system in the Gaza Strip now thought to be larger in scale than the London Underground, the United Nations insists it had no idea the tunnels were being built. UNRWA alone has 13,000 employees in more than 300 facilities across Gaza. At least a dozen other U.N. agencies operate in Gaza. It has been well-documented that many U.N. employees in Gaza have professional and personal ties to Hamas." This is one of the most grotesque lies ever told.  It is clear that various UN agencies both knew perfectly well about these tunnels, and collaborated with the genocidal killers of Hamas to hide the fact.  Just keep this in mind when you are subjected to the inevitable, endless smears of Israel that come from UNRWA and other UN agencies which have been totally corrupted, and now support the most evil groups in modern history. And it is not just the UN.  Amnest

 I'll tell you a little thing that drives me crazy.  The way Trump has intimidated or conned reporters, politicians, just about everyone, into calling him MISTER Trump.  I hear this almost every time he is mentioned on the news or anywhere else.  Nobody ever called Barack Obama "Mister Obama," or called Bill Clinton "Mister Clinton."  We rarely ever heard of Mister McCain or Mister Bush or Mister anyone else, but somehow, this subhuman maggot has to be dignified by always being called Mister.  It's just one more example of him bullying everyone in sight, demanding respectful treatment that he is the last person in the country to have earned. Well, enough of it already.  I know the press doesn't have the honesty to refer to him as a raping, thieving traitor every time they speak about him, but stop with the "Mister" already.  Just calling him Trump grants him more honor than he has ever earned.