Opinion – Page 4 – Capitol Hill Blue

Do Democrats have the guts to take down King Trump?

May 9, 2019May 9, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

America is in its worst Constitutional crisis since the sordid Watergate affair.

This one is worse than Watergate. The crisis spawned by wannabe king Donald John Trump is an assault on our government, our democratic republic and our way of life.

Trump is openly flaunting the law and the Constitution to protect his corruption, his flagrant ethical lapses and his “high crimes” against this nation.

Trump moved this week to exert his “executive privilege” on any and all documents relating to the special counsel investigation by former FBI director Robert Mueller, concluded last month after a long probe and one that, while not saying one way or the other that Trump violated the law, lists at least 10 occasions where collusion and obstruction of justice occurred.

Trump claims the report “totally exonerated” him. Those who ignore politics and look at the legalities disagree.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says Trump’s actions are encouraging the House to impeach him. That’s probably true because Trump believes impeachment will rally his base and the GOP-controlled Senate will never convict him.

As usual, politics trumps the law (pun intended). The most corrupt president in modern history, and most likely of all time, truly believes he can, as he always has, keep breaking the law and get away with anything he wants.

The Democrats who control the House are also playing politics. They worry that impeachment could backfire and threaten their majority in the House and stall their hopes to once again control the Senate.

Washington attorney Jack Quinn, who served as counsel to former president Bill Clinton during his impeachment fight, says Trump is forcing an option that could lose.

“They are doing it so broadly and with so little judgment that I think they are debasing their overall approach to this,” Quinn told The Washington Post. “The overreliance on executive privilege, in the end, will be problematic for the White House.”

So, Quinn adds, is impeachment.

“There is absolutely no constitutional way they can block the impeachment powers granted to the House,” he says.

House Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer is not reluctant to discuss impeaching Trump.

“If the facts lead us to that objective, so be it,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Article 3 of the “Watergate Articles of Impeachment” accused then-president Richard Nixon of “violating his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws by refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas.”

“People are mindful of that,” admits Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, a Democratic leader in the House.

“This is a really dangerous and unprecedented set of actions that the president is taking,” says Washington State Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who is also chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Some Democrats worry that Pelosi is too cautious.

“We get the narrative from our leadership that we all got elected on health care and the economy and all of that,” says Rep. Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, “but we also got elected to impose checks and balances on a president who is unchecked and unbalanced.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, serves on the House Judiciary Committee and says Democrats may finally have the gumption to fight Trump’s obstructionism.

“My grandfather used to say that duck hunting is a lot of fun until the ducks start firing back,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “We’re starting to fire back.”

Aim well. The survival of this nation depends on your marksmanship.

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The Liar-in-Chief is destroying America

May 8, 2019May 8, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

My 23 years in our nation’s capital gives one a perspective on what does or does not work in government.

Washington, DC, is — for better or worse — a microcosm of the nation it purports to both represent and govern.

When the national capital region works, the nation thrives and feels proud.

When it doesn’t, America turns into a chaotic, nasty place.

Which is exactly what America is today.

Mass shootings have become a normal part of American life.

So has racism and bigotry.

Both have always been part of a sub-culture just below the surface of American life but now dominates discussions and actions fare too often in what should be a “civilized” society.

Much of this can be attributed to an opportunistic president who thrives on spreading hate and fear.

In more than 50 years of either covering government as a newspaperman or working within it as a political operative, I have never seen such a contemptible leader of our nation.

“President Trump tries to undermine its constitutional right and responsibility to oversee the executive branch,” writes former Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan. “His cavalier refusal to provide information requested by Congress has dangerously upended the careful architecture of the Constitution, and the nation will pay a price for his recklessness if he succeeds.”

Fact-checking services, perhaps the only “growth industry” in today’s America, have tabulated more than 10,000 lies by America’s current president.

His is a liar by nature, a con man by profession and an accidental president elected by the politically-stacked electoral college after losing the popular vote by the largest margin in history — more than three million votes.

“Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity,” says columnist Maureen Dowd. “The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id.”

She adds:

President Trump obstructed on nearly every page of Volume II of the Mueller report, even though Robert Mueller was too lost in legalese to throw the book at him. The report counts as the Worst Exoneration Ever, replete with incrimination. And Trump’s motivation for trying to subvert justice and turn the White House into a writhing nest of liars? His ego.

Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a member of the same Republican party that claims Trump as their own, calls Trump’s rhetoric “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

“He has a pattern of racism that goes deeper than his campaign and time in office,” writes Atlantic magazine writer Vann R. Newkirk II. “At this point, open bigotry seems to be the substance of much of his engagement with people of color.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has cited Trump’s companies with housing discrimination against African-American renters. He settled the lawsuit out of court.

“Donald Trump is a racist,” write David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick in The New York Times. “He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.”

They add:

“His political rise was built on promulgating the lie that the nation’s first black president was born in Kenya. He then launched his campaign with a speech describing Mexicans as rapists.”

“No, I’m not a racist,” Trump told reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla. “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.” Of course, these comments come from the man who claimed he had “facts” to prove Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not in America and continued to make the claim after it was proven wrong.

He told voters in the 2016 election that they should support him because “I will always tell you the truth.”

Fact checkers have documented more than 10,000 lies by him since he became president and the list continues to grow. _______________________________________________________ Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue

Donald Trump: Stupid is as stupid does

April 25, 2019April 24, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

The toxic swamp that envelopes the corrupt and scandal-scarred administration of Donald John Trump stinks at putrid level never before seen or smelled in the halls of power in Washington, DC.

Trump added more stink with a claim that he may have the Supreme Court intervene in any attempt by Congress to impeach him.

Too bad Trump hasn’t read the Constitution, the document considered the rule of the land, that delegates impeachment proceedings to Congress, not any court — including the “Supreme One.”

“I did nothing wrong,” Trump said in his way to talking to most people, in a tweet on Twitter. “If the partisan Democs ever tried to impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only are there no ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,” there are no crimes by me at all.”

One could argue, without even a hint of irony, that Trump’s very existence is itself a high crime against humanity. He has destroyed the presidency, disgraced the nation and replaced “land of the free” with “haven for racism” and “home of the brave” with “house of ill repute.”

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, an acknowledged expert on Constitutional law, calls Trump’s claims “idiocy.”

Tribe writes on Twitter: ““Not even a SCOTUS filled with Trump appointees would get in the way of the House or Senate.”

There’s no “get out of jail free” care for Trump.

John Wagner, writing in The Washington Post, quotes another constitutional law professor (from Georgetown), Joshua Matz, who says Trump, as usual, “reflects a profound misunderstanding.”

Adds Matz in an email:

If the President were to seek judicial intervention in that fashion, the courts would almost certainly refuse to hear the case on the ground that it is a ‘political question’ textually entrusted to Congress by the Constitution.

In an interview with the Post’s Greg Sargent, Matz adds:

In our constitutional structure, the impeachment power is mightier and more fundamental than virtually any interest that the President might raise against it.

Trump constantly claims that he knows more about everything than anybody else. In reality, he knows little about anything. He’s an uninformed, ignorant fool.

Ignoramus comes to mind. So does idiot.

Sadly, so are most of those who make up his “base.” Paranoia feeds their stupidity while bigotry drives their hatred.

“Stupid is as stupid does,” says an old English proverb that dates back to at least 1862.

Stupid is Donald Trump.

Stupid does are what happens just about every time he opens his mouth or pounds out a tweet on his phone.

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Is Trump scared? He should be

April 23, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

Some close to beleaguered president Donald Trump (at least the ones willing to talk off the record) say the liar-in-chief is lying again when he claims he is not worried or bothered by what a fuller review of the Mueller report reveals about his corrupt administration.

“Not even a little bit,” Trump answered Monday to a question on whether or not he is concerned.

“He’s lying,” says a former White House aide. “He’s sweating the details and they keep getting worse.”

Mueller’s report reveals White House aides who feel let down by Trump.

“He ignores loyalty with criticism and blame,” says another former aide.

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen found that out when Trump dumped him after years of protection by the attorney called “his fixer” and who said he would “take a bullet” for “the Donald.”

Some have jumped ship. Other are talking and providing vital information to ongoing investigations of Trump and his misdeeds.

“Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers,” writes Eliot A. Cohen (no relation to the former Trump attorney), professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, in The Atlantic.

He adds:

To be sure, Trump could hang on until the 2020 election. It is even possible, if considerably less likely, that he could be reelected and march off into a glitzy retirement at Trump properties in Florida and New Jersey, his retreat from public life punctuated only by bursts of increasingly senile bombast. But it does seem more likely than it once was that he will go down in disgrace.

Disgrace has long been a constant companion to Trump, the thrice married adulterer who squandered much of his inheritance on casinos that went bankrupt while he cheated investors, stiffed vendors and defrauded those who could not afford his schemes like the phony Trump University shut down after investigators found it was nothing but a con.

Cohen notes:

A tyrant is unloved, and although the laws and institutions of the United States have proven a brake on Trump, his spirit remains tyrannical—that is, utterly self-absorbed and self-concerned, indifferent to the suffering of others, knowing no moral restraint. He expects fealty and gives none. Such people can exert power for a long time, by playing on the fear and cupidity, the gullibility and the hatreds of those around them. Ideological fervor can substitute for personal affection and attachment for a time, and so too can blind terror and sheer stupidity, but in the end, these fall away as well.

The question, however, is whether or not American survives from what many have called the treasonous acts of his failed “leader.”

Presidential historian Joh Meacham says Trump’s actions represent “the definition of treason” by knowing of Russia’s attempts to interfere with the tainted 2016 election that made him president.

“There is a live question about whether he has been giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which is the definition of treason in the Constitution,” Meacham told former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough on the “Morning Joe” cable-TV program. “”This is an existential constitutional crisis, because it’s quite possible that the president of the United States right now is a witting or at least partially witting agent of a foreign power, and I say that with great care, but that’s a possibility.”

Meacham says that all Trump had to do was “know” about the Russian efforts and his failure to take action is, in itself, “aid and comfort” to the enemy.

Complacent Republicans in Congress, who sat on their hands, may be equally guilty of treason to the nation.

The ultimate punishment for treason against America?

It’s no longer death by firing squad. The Criminal Justice Act of 1990 set the maximum punishment for treason as life imprisonment with no parole for at least 40 years.

No wonder Trump is worried.

Instead of running for re-election, maybe Trump should be running for the border of the nearest country that does not have an extradition agreement with the United States.

There’s always Russia. Trump has often made it clear that he prefers to company of a murdering dictator than any ally of America.

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Dump Trump into his own sewer

April 19, 2019April 19, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

Despite the effort of spin by William Barr, clearly the most politically tainted attorney general since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell, the 448 pages of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the sordid presidency of Donald Trump details corruption, lies and fragrant attempts to cover up the truth by America’s criminal president.

Washington Post writer Greg Sargent notes “Trump’s ascension to the presidency was saturated in corruption and partly enabled by criminal schemes. And it is all of this that Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation were designed to keep from ever seeing the light of day.”

“Trump is a cancer on the presidency,” says Republican New York attorney George T. Conway III, echoing comments by former White House Counsel John Dean during the Watergate investigation that sank the presidency of Richard Nixon. Conway is the husband of Trump’s White House apologist Kellyanne Conway. “Congress should remove him.”

Like many other Republicans, Conway walked away from Trump. Good for him. As a former political operative, I hang my head in shame for ever having anything to do with a political party that put Trump in office.

Adds Conway (quoting from the Mueller report):

Trump tried to “limit the scope of the investigation.” He tried to discourage witnesses from cooperating with the government through “suggestions of possible future pardons.” He engaged in “direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.” A fair reading of the special counsel’s narrative is that “the likely effect” of these acts was “to intimidate witnesses or to alter their testimony,” with the result that “the justice system’s integrity [was] threatened.” Page after page, act after act, Mueller’s report describes a relentless torrent of such obstructive activity by Trump.

“Mueller’s report paints a damning portrait of Trump’s presidency,” says the column headline of Dan Balz in the Post.

Balz continues:

The 448-page document is replete with evidence of repeated lying by public officials and others (some of whom have been charged for that conduct), of the president urging advisers not to tell the truth, of the president seeking to shut down the investigation, of a Trump campaign hoping to benefit politically from Russian hacking and leaks of information damaging to its opponent, of a White House in chaos and operating under abnormal rules.

“It’s not the collusion, it’s the corruption,” says David Brooks in The New York Times:

He concludes:

Donald Trump represents a threat to the American systems of governance. Centuries ago our founders created a system of laws and not men. In our system of government there are procedures in place, based on certain values — impartiality, respect for institutions, the idea that a public office is a public trust, not a private bauble.

When Trump appears in the Mueller report, he is often running roughshod over these systems and violating these values. He asks his lawyer to hamper an investigation. He asks his F.B.I. director to take the heat off his allies. He tries to get the relevant investigators fired. I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.

Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, calls Mueller’s report “damning.”

“The report details egregious evidence of obstruction,” says Bookbinder, adding:

As the report emphasizes, “It is important to view the president’s pattern of conduct as a whole” — including the ways in which the president “used his unique ability” to influence others by attacking the investigation or potential witnesses via mass communications.

Editorializes The New York Times: “The special counsel’s report reveals a pattern of deceit and dysfunction. What comes up next is up to Congress.”

Which Congress? The House of Representatives, controlled by a Democratic Speaker of the House who urges restraint when talk about impeachment comes up or a Senate controlled by Republicans who have no intention to try their president. He’s one of their own.

Trump took control of a government already tarnished by corruption and mismanagement (through Democratic and Republican misuse of “executive orders” and other abuses) and raised corruption and unethical behavior to new heights.

His corruption added to the toxicity of Washington’s political swamp — the one he promised to “drain” — and spread the stain throughout the government and the nation.

Yes, he must be removed from office, but by “whom?” Congress is not to the task. Neither is the Justice Department with head Trumpian William Barr installed as attorney general.

We may have to wait until the 2020 election to see if the votes might stand up to the Trump terror and attempt to put the public back in control. If they don’t and Trump is re-elected, we won’t have to worry about what happens in 2024. By then, he will have destroyed what little is left of America.

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Warning to Trump: Your reign of terror is coming to an end

April 16, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

Donald Trump: Shouting lies and revealing his insanity.

Beleaguered president Donald Trump claims the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller “totally exonerate” him of suspected criminal activity in the White House.

As might be expected the most distasteful, corrupt, twisted and immoral leader this country has ever suffered, that claim is just another lie from a pathological liar who, sadly, occupies the White House.

I way that as someone who once worked as a political operative for the party of Trump, a party disgraced beyond repair by a the crook it accepts as its leader.

For a dozen years (1981-93), I “served” (a questionable action to be sure) the GOP in various functions to run Congressional offices as a chief of staff, promote their actions as a press secretary, provide political strategy for elections and worked for two GOP presidents (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) before topping that questionable list by running the nation’s largest political action committee (as division vice president for the National Association of Realtors).

I had come to Washington in 1981 to become press secretary to Republican Rep. Paul Findley of Illinois. By 1983, I was chief of staff for GOP Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana. I had left what I thought was an “honorable profession” as a newspaperman of 17 years — first for The Roanoke Times in Virginia and later The Telegraph of Alton, Illinois in the St. Louis metro area.

Originally, i called the trip to the nation’s capital a “sabbatical” to help me understand more about how Washington worked so I could take that knowledge back to newspapers to make me a better reporter. “Two years or so,”I promised, “and then I go back to the real world.”

Instead, the unreal world of politics and Washington gave me a sordid education on how power and money corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Returning to the journalistic world would require taking the first top towards sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous and a determination to report truth rather than support the perjury of politics in the governing of America.

In less than two months, I hope to celebrate 25 years of sobriety and re-energize a commitment to expose the desecration of America by con artists like Donald John Trump.

Consider what the America of Trump has become: A place where hate replaces hope, where racism destroys reason and lies displace learning.

Trump tweets lies and distortion in a hateful attack on a Muslim member of Congress and his hate-driven cult of followers cheer. Fact checkers, a growth industry in the age of Trump, find a president who lies publicly more than 15 times a day.

He hides his tax returns — a first for a modern president — because he knows that they will show he lies about his claimed net worth and they will show his money comes from questionable sources.

His is a racist who praises white supremacists and encourages violence against those who support tolerance and compassion.

Enough. As a newspaperman who learned, the hard way, how the corruption of power consumes us, I say it is time to declare war on the likes of Trump, his party of political corruption and the culture that spawned and supports him.

On this day after many Americans found — sadly — that Trump’s promised “tax cuts” did not help most of them but instead left them in an even deeper financial hole, it is past time to drive this demonic son-of-a-bitch from office by legal — but harsh if necessary — means,

Get ready, your bloated bastard. Justice is coming.

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Declaring war on Trump and Republican racism

April 6, 2019April 6, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

What Trump gave America was what he is: A racist.

America today is more divided than at any point of its history since the Civil War and the hate seeps out of the toxic minds of those who want a land where white bigots dominate and anyone else must hide in fear.

Racism thrives in a divided government in Washington and a volatile combination of hate and fear of economic uncertainty after the Great Recession.

America’s racism rebirth came in 2008 with Barack Obama’s election as president. For many, his victory signaled hope for a nation that killed many of its own men, women and children in a Civil War that tore the country apart.

But while millions cheered Obama, others saw him as a powder keg to rally white supremacists. Racism created the Tea Party and used divisions that have existed since America’s birth to spread fear and encourage hate of anyone who wasn’t white, Anglo-saxon and protestant.

In just the eight years between 2008 and 2016, America went from being a nation of hope to a racist land where hate and bigotry dominates our government, our culture and our way of life.

“An era that started with hope and change had how become one of unapologetic hate,” reports CNN.

Reported the network in 2018:

The hate created two Americas. Two realities. Split-screen reactions to the same events, that continued and were exacerbated with President Trump’s victory and time in office.

When a gunman massacred nine people praying at a predominantly black church, America wept and asked for grace. But the virulent racists cheered, hailing the gunman a hero for helping to start the race war they dreamed of.

When much of America was horrified by the sight of neo-Nazis in their streets in 2017, white supremacists were almost gleeful their views were front and center.

And when a gunman stormed into a synagogue, declaring “all Jews must die,” Americans wept over the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history. But white supremacists breathed a sigh of relief. One of their biggest targets had been successfully attacked.

“We have a black man in the White House and you need to do something about it,” gloated Ken Parker, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon and neo-Nazi shortly after Obama took office in 2009. “We would even joke amongst ourselves, we’re going to send President Obama an honorary membership to he the Klan because he’s our biggest recruiting tool.’

At Tea Party rallies their members displayed signs with photoshopped images of Obama as a witch doctor.They called then first lady Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.”

In New York City, real estate tycoon and reality show host Donald Trump called Obama “Muslim’ and questioned his citizenship, saying the president was not born in America.

He used both of those dishonest claims often after his announced his plans to run for president. He called Mexicans “rapists” and “murderers” and denigrated his opponents with slurs and insults.

White supremacists and racists cheered his outlandish behavior. They had found an ally. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, now headed for prison for multiple crimes, would later testify that Trump never expected to win the election. He ran to try to help his business.

As a businessman, Trump proved his racism. Federal authorities fined him often for housing discrimination. When he owned casinos, managers of the establishments would later testify that Trump ordered them to remove any minority employees from areas where Trump and his wife would dine or play. He ordered a black accountant fired because “you just can’t trust such people.”

As president, he referred to African nations as “shithole countries” and surrounded himself with a lily-white staff. He called the white supremacists who brought violence to Charlottesville “fine people” and repeatedly refused to disown the support and embrace of racist groups.

Trump did not create America’s racism, but he gave it a bigger stage as president because he is one of them — a racist and bigot who uses hate to fuel his base.

He claimed he would “make America great again.” Instead he is destroying it. He, and those who support him, turned America from a nation that thrived into one that died.

Today, we live in one of the two parts of a divided America. That division, for the first time in my 71+ years on this third rock from the sun, leaves me an ashamed American.

We could leave, as may others have done or might do, but we don’t run. We will stay and fight to restore the America that we knew and loved.

We will work with other Americans to get them to the polls to rid our crippled nation of the racist in the White House and the too many other racists and bigots in Congress. As a political operative, I won 95 percent of my races.

Stand with us or stand aside. This is war.

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Donald Trump is a murderer

April 5, 2019April 5, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

President Donald Trump (R) meets with fellow murderer Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Donald Trump murders people

He kills them without remorse, without shame he should feel and with does so with immoral prejudice.

He’s a murderer.

“Even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans, writes Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

Writes Krugman in the April 4 edition of the Times:

Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”

Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)

Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren’t getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.

In America, all but seven states have laws that consider anyone who is involved in actions that result in needless death can be charged with murder.

Trump’s actions result in unnecessary and needless deaths throughout America. Thousands of U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico died because Trump intentionally delayed needed rescue efforts during disasters.

Thousands have been slaughtered by the heinous white supremacists Trump emboldened by his unwillingness to condemn their actions and called them, as Krugman noted, “very fine people.”

Elsewhere in the world, Trump’s unflinching support for a murderous leader like Russia’s Vladimir Putin put a U.S. Seal of Approval on the deaths of thousands of Russian dissidents.

The same can be said of Trump’s support of North Korea’s homicidal “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un or his nasty habit of looking the other way at the dismemberment and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, an American citizen, by a Saudi Prince who helped the Trump family make millions on building projects.

Trump’s sleazy cutback on federal regulations on the meat industry has increased deaths from foodborne illness and the hundred of deaths from just two recent crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 jetliners are tracing back to cutbacks by FAA regulation of the airline industry. Trump put a former Boeing senior officer in charge of the FAA.

Trump and his appointees kill children with reckless abandon. Youngsters taken from their parents by reckless immigration agents acting under the president’s direction led to their deaths alone in prisons along the border.

Hundreds of children received serious and fatal injuries from Britax stroller that kept losing wheels, causing them to trip over and slam children into sidewalks and payments. When the company refused to issue a voluntary recall, a forced one was imposed until Trump appointees stopped the action.

Trump, who monitored and approved stopping the recall, offered no explanation or apology to the hundreds of parents whose children were seriously injured, their faces smashed and deformed or those who died.

The record is definitive and no amount of lies by his supporters to claim otherwise cannot sidetrack the truth.

Trump is a murderer and he should be punished as such.

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Donald Trump’s House of Lies

March 31, 2019March 31, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

Reading the news on this Sunday morning shows a lot of attention by the media president Donald Trump calling his tribe the “party of health care” when neither he nor his party have any proposed program to replace the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Trump’s Republicans are running for cover on this one.

Report Seung Min Kim and Josh Dewey of The Washington Post this weekend:

Republicans have no intention of heeding President Trump’s urgent demands for a new health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, fearing the potential political damage that such a proposal could cause in 2020 and hoping he will soon drop the idea, according to interviews with numerous GOP lawmakers, legislative staffers and administration aides.

Not only is there no such health-care overhaul in the works on Capitol Hill — there are no plans to make such a plan.

In other words, more lies from a president who has no allegiance to truth.

Trump used to call up newspapers and magazines and claim he was a “press agent” named John Miller or John Barron.

Reported The Washington Post in 2016:

A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron” — public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself — who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides.

The Post detailed calls like the one Sue Carswell, a People magazine reporter assigned to do a story on Trump’s affair with Marla Maples, who became his second wife after he divorced Ivana, received after she left a message requesting an interview.

Within five minutes, Carswell got a return call from Trump’s publicist, a man named John Miller, who immediately jumped into a startlingly frank and detailed explanation of why Trump dumped Maples for the Italian model Carla Bruni. “He really didn’t want to make a commitment,” Miller said. “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”

Miller turned out to be a remarkably forthcoming source — a spokesman with rare insight into the private thoughts and feelings of his client. “Have you met him?” Miller asked the reporter. “He’s a good guy, and he’s not going to hurt anybody. . . . He treated his wife well and . . . he will treat Marla well.”

In typical Trump fashion, he called the Post report “Fake News” and claimed he never pretended he was his own publicist.

In 1990, however, Trump testifying in court under oath, said: “I believe on occasion I used that name.”

A voice analyst used the Post verified that the voice of “John Miller” on that interview tape was, in fact, Trump. The same conclusion from examination of other tapes of phone interviews with both “John Miller” or “John Barron.”

In 2016, 44 minutes into a telephone interview with Trump about his finances, a Post reporter asked: “Did you ever employ someone named John Miller as a spokesperson?”

Trump hung up without saying anything. Attempts to call him back went to his secretary, who said: “I heard you got disconnected. He can’t take the call now. I don’t know what happened.”

Stunts by this president includes fake Time magazine covers posted in his golf clubs with his photo.

Donald is not the only Trump who lies. At the Republican National Convention in 2016, Melania Trump, the former nude photographer’s model who is the president’s third wife, told the crowd she graduated from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia with a degree in architecture.

Her website said the same thing. So did her biography on Trump’s campaign website.

The University, however, says she finished just one year of studies at the school and left to pursue her modeling career. With her lie discovered, her website went dark and her biol disappeared from the campaign site. She also came under fire for using lines from Michele Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention in 2008.

Trump blamed the plagiarism on speechwriter Meredith McIver. Before that revelation, Melania claimed she had written the speech.

Lies, misinformation and exaggerations have become routine in Washington nowadays. In January, the Fact Checking service of The Washington Post found 8,158 “false or misleading” statements by the president in his first two years in office. On Feb. 17, the count was 8,718. It will top 10,000 by year’s end.

In 2018, Trump issued an average of 16.5 lies a day.

In a heated discussion with a Trump supporter over coffee recently, he said Trump “is the only president who gives Americans the truth.”

I asked for an example.

“The tax cut,” he said. “Trump delivered the largest tax cut in American history. He promised to do it and he did.”

Although Trump claims his tax cut is “the largest ever in this country, data from the U.S. Treasury Department says otherwise. Trump’s tax cut amounts to 0.9 percent of Americans Gross National Product, which ranks it eighth largest since 1918. His tax cut ranks behind two of the tax reductions of previous president Barack Obama , two by Harry S. Truman or cuts by Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ranks modern era tax cuts this way:

Our current president should call himself the “Liar in Chief.” Of course, he would claim that is “fake news” but the real fake news coming out of Washington these days comes out of the diarrhea mouth of Donald John Trump.

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Time for Democrats to regroup & refocus

March 25, 2019March 25, 2019 by DOUG THOMPSON

Robert Mueller’s special counsel final report decided neither Donald Trump or his campaign “colluded” or “conspired” with Russia to influence the 2016 election, which Trump won in a stunning upset.

He left the question on whether or not Trump obstructed justice open, saying it would be up to someone like Attorney General William Barr to pursue any further investigation.

Barr is ruling out any future investigations into obstruction by the Department of justice.

Democrats say they plan to push investigations, using the party’s control of the House of Representatives.

Bad idea. The Democrats should back off and let the New York Attorney General continue to probe Trump’s business dealings, his now defunct foundation and questionable expenditures in the inauguration.

Suggestions for the Democrats:

Forget chasing Trump with investigations;
Concentrate on advancing legislation;
Find a good, moderate candidate to nominate and then help him or her convince the voters to dump Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

To win in 2020, Democrats need to concentrate on key districts that control the Electoral College process. That approach should allow that process to match what the voters want.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes — the largest winning count in any election where the electoral college voted the other way.

To get the electoral vote match the popular vote, Democrats should concentrate on key suburban districts in key states

And they need a good candidate, which Clinton was not. She too often looked tired and said asinine things like calling Trump supporters “deplorable,” which caused swing voters to turn against her.

Writes former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough:

So, yes, Democrats, Attorney General William P. Barr’s letter to Congress may have ruined your weekend. But if you focus on the present needs of American voters, instead of the past misdeeds of Russian actors, you just may keep this unfit commander in chief from serving another four long years. That would make the shock of this weekend a harmless, distant memory.

Adds George Will:

Robert S. Mueller III’s report is a gift to the nation, which now knows what was already a reasonable surmise: that its chief executive’s unlovely admiration for a repulsive foreign regime, Vladimir Putin’s, is more a dereliction of taste and judgment than evidence that he is under that regime’s sway. The report is an even larger gift to the nation because it might help stabilize the Democratic Party — if the party reacts more reasonably to it than most of the party’s most conspicuous presidential candidates have been reacting to the political stimuli of 2019. What Mueller’s report makes possible is something like a normal presidential election in 2020.

Combining a good, moderate candidate with an aggressive legislative program can persuade enough voters — both actual and electoral college ones — to send Trump packing and, in the process, make it easier for prosecutors to put him where he belongs — in jail.

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