Green Eagle

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.

I once lived in Israel (for a job, not out of any religious belief) and consequently I follow what is going on there pretty closely.  I get a lot of stuff about the Middle East online, from both sides of the conflict  Among this material, for some unknown reason, I have been bombarded lately with endless AI images of one sort and another on Facebook.  Many are political fabrications, many are intended humorously, but there are some others that have me totally puzzled.  I would like to show some of these images and ask if anyone out there can really explain them, other than as specimens of a culture steeped in some really hateful form of perversion, and totally out of control.  What I am going to post here is a tiny fraction of what you get if you make the mistake of hovering over any of them for more than a second.  The first group is of morbidly obese women in some sort of burkas, riding on motor scooters, usually carrying baskets of eggs.  Here they are: Some contain other things tha