Washington, D.C. — Today, Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released partial records from the third batch of documents produced by the Jeffrey Epstein Estate, which includes phone message logs, copies of flight logs and manifests for aircrafts, copies of financial ledgers, and Epstein’s daily schedule. The documents produced to the public include mentions of possible contact between Jeffrey Epstein and prominent figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and Prince Andrew. Further review of the documents, which were redacted to protect the identity of victims, is ongoing.
“It should be clear to every American that Jeffrey Epstein was friends with some of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world. Every new document produced provides new information as we work to bring justice for the survivors and victims. Oversight Democrats will not stop until we identify everyone complicit in Epstein’s heinous crimes. It’s past time for Attorney General Bondi to release all the files now,” said Oversight Spokesperson Sara Guerrero.
Within documents of Epstein’s schedule, there is evidence that Thiel and Bannon had scheduled meetings with Epstein, as well as evidence of a pending trip by Elon Musk to Epstein’s island. Prince Andrew is listed as a passenger on Epstein’s aircraft, with financial disclosures providing possible evidence of payments from Epstein to masseuses on behalf of an individual identified as “Andrew.” Extensive redactions have been made to protect victims as Committee investigators continue to analyze the new documents. This is a rolling production, and the Committee expects to receive more documents in response to these and other requests.
In the third batch, the Oversight Committee received 8,544 documents responsive to the Committee’s subpoena from August. The following was received:
Phone Message Logs from 2002-2005, which were produced previously in litigation
Copies of flight logs and flight manifests for aircraft, including helicopters, that Mr. Epstein owned, rented, leased, operated or used from 1990-2019
Copies of ledgers reflecting transactions recorded as cash transactions for Mr. Epstein and business entities. These documents were previously shown to Committee staff at in camera review.
On my weekly YouTube videocast “Halitics” political news seemed to be everywhere. Hal Ginsberg felt the Israeli aggression in Gaza might hurt everything Jewish: religion, the Israeli state, the people, etc. I felt and hoped the Israeli government and its leader Benjamin Netanyahu would be blamed, but increased antisemitism points to a wider blame for Jews that may last a long time.
We discussed the Charles Kirk assassination fallout and the MAGA attempt to frame him as a hero for all Americans. Hal and I pointed out that Kirk has a history of right-wing positions that put him far from the mainstream. And we wondered why ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel got fired (temporarily, fortunately) for mild statements that weren’t critical of Kirk, but “Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade is still working for Fox News despite literally proposing America’s homeless should be killed!
Another topic was the independence and impartiality that historically occurred in the Justice Department in previous administrations. That seems to have disappeared under Trump who makes all the decisions about who should be indicted and which lawyers will prosecute the cases against individuals most often perceived as enemies of Trump.
By Thom Hartmann/ Hartmannreport.com/ September 16, 2025
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was sitting under a tent that had “America Comeback Tour” printed in huge letters across all four sides. It was the theme of his tour of college campuses, a tour run by his Turning Point organization that was, according to NBC News, early-funded by ten morbidly rich rightwingers.
The question is “America Comeback” to what?
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office: — Fully two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class, — College was so cheap you could pay your tuition with a weekend job, — Healthcare was inexpensive and widely available, — Women and minorities had achieved legal (albeit not yet actual) parity with white men, — And school and mass shootings were largely unknown because weapons of war were mostly outlawed from our streets.
Today, however, as a result of the Reagan Revolution:
— Only around half of us are in the middle class, — College debt has crushed two generations to the point where they can’t start a family or buy a house, — A half-million families end up homeless or bankrupt every year because somebody got sick, — The GOP is leading an effort to make it harder for women and minorities to vote or maintain employment, — And, with more guns than people, mass shootings are an almost-daily occurrence.
It’s easy to see why an appealing pitch to the nation’s young people would be “comeback” or “Make America Great Again.” But what caused that “greatness” that we need to “come back to” and what wrecked it?
The American middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1900, only about 17 percent of us were in it; by the time of the Republican Great Depression it was about a quarter of us.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933, he embarked on a radical new campaign to create the world’s first widespread, more-than-half-of-us middle class. It had three main long-term components.
First, he passed the Wagner Act in 1935 that legalized labor unions and forbade employers from bringing in scab workers or refusing to recognize a union. That gave workers democracy in the workplace, and they used that power to demand that as their productivity increased, so would their pay and benefits.
Second, he established a minimum wage to make sure that people who worked full time would never end up in poverty.
Third, he raised the top income tax rate to 90% for the morbidly rich and 52% for corporations.
That high top tax rate on the rich meant that the average CEO took only about 30 times what the average worker did (because he’d be paying 90% or 74% after taking the first few millions), leaving far more money in the company to give raises and benefits to workers.
Corporations could get around their top tax rate by investing in their business. Research and development, new product roll-outs, advertising and marketing, and increasing pay and benefits were all tax-deductible, and that high tax rate incentivized them to do these things that built a strong and resilient manufacturing economy (stock buybacks were considered illegal stock manipulation until 1983).
Reagan undid all of that, lowering the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% to 27% (it’s since gone up to 34%), cutting the top corporate tax rate to 34%, and legalizing stock buybacks, so now CEOs are taking literally hundreds of billions out of their companies (Musk is set to make a trillion) and wages for workers have been mostly flat even since 1981.
In similar fashion, Reagan declared war on labor unions so effectively that that one-third of us protected by unions in 1981 has collapsed. Today private sector union membership rates are only 5.9%, with some states even lower (North Carolina 2.4%, South Dakota 2.7%, and South Carolina 2.8%.
Regarding college, 80% of the cost of an education in state-run colleges and universities was paid by government when Reagan came into office, leaving about 20% of the cost to be covered by tuition. The Reagan Revolution changed all that, so that today tuition covers the largest percentage and the state is only covering around 20%-40% (it varies from state to state).
Healthcare was inexpensive when Reagan came into office because most states required both insurance companies and hospitals to run as nonprofits. There weren’t any billionaire insurance industry executives like Dollar Bill McGuire until Republicans changed the rules of the game, letting insurance companies and hospitals run as profit-making operations at the expense of the American public.
Great strides had also been made in opportunity for minorities and women by 1981; just a decade earlier women had gained the right to have a credit card or sign a mortgage without a husband, brother, or father’s signature. Affirmative Action programs were pulling racial and religious minorities into the mainstream of the American economy, kicking off a widespread Black middle class.
So, if Charlie Kirk was all about an “American Comeback,” what were his positions on the issues that created that broad, widespread middle class that Republicans and Trump promise us they’ll restore when they “make America great again”?
On taxes, Kirk wants to replace the progressive income tax with a 10% flat tax, so even the poorest person is paying income taxes on their meager income while the morbidly rich get a massive tax break.
He called unions “cartels” and celebrated teachers losing the right to unionize.
On college tuition, he opposed any plan to reduce student debt or increase federal or state funding to higher education, calling free college a “bribe.”
And on healthcare, Kirk opposed the kind of universal healthcare every other developed country in the world has, calling the VA an example of failed “government-run” healthcare.
With regard to the rights of women and minorities Charlie was also outspoken, most notably saying about prominent Black women (including Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he labeled “affirmative action picks”):
“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.”
Finally, with regard to guns, even though 87% of Americans want reasonable gun control, Kirk was all-in with the firearms industry, arguing that “some gun deaths every single year” are worth the cost of Scalia’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. How do we protect our kids? Kirk said, quite simply, more guns was the solution:
“If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”
So, the question: How does doubling down on low taxes for the morbidly rich, keeping our healthcare for-profit, withholding higher education funding, gutting unions, increasing the number of guns, and trash-talking women and minorities make America “comeback”?
Republicans and their well-paid hustlers (Kirk took in hundreds of millions) have been promoting these positions for forty-four years and the result has been the gutting of the American middle class, now leading to anger, resentment, and political violence.
It’s way past time for America to return to the policies and positions that history proves (both in America and around the world) produce and build a strong middle class, the essential foundation for economic and political stability.
MSNBC, like all corporate media these days, wants to please Donald Trump and his loyalists. They were quick to apologize for one of their reporters after the Charlie Kirk shooting. Just to be safe they fired veteran political analyst Matthew Dowd, apparently for not being deferential enough to satisfy the president and his right-wing base.
What disrespectful things did Dowd say that led to his dismissal? They were offensive enough that MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler would call his remarks “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.” Did Dowd condemn the assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk? Did he call Kirk a racist or a provocateur? Not at all.
During the interview with MSNBC correspondent Katy Tur, Dowd wondered if the incident could have been a Kirk supporter “shooting their gun off in celebration.” He added, “Remember, Kirk is a diehard advocate of the 2nd amendment.”
“You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place,” Dowd said.
He said Kirk had been “one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups.”
“And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said. “And I think that is the environment we are in.”
All very reasonable, non-hateful commentary. That Kirk was assassinated while presenting his views to a university audience was tragic. Violence caused by political beliefs should have no place in this country and the world. All of us should agree on that.
But Dowd was correct, when, after his firing, he said that MSNBC bent its knee to a “right wing media mob.”
“The Right Wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob,” Dowd wrote in a a Friday Substack post. “Even though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of my words forgotten (remember I said this before anyone knew Kirk was a target), and that I apologized for any miscommunication on my part, I was terminated by the end of the day.”
Contrast that with the shocking statement on “Fox and Friends” by host Brian Kilmeade. In a discussion about homelessness, co-host Lawrence Jones said “You can’t give ’em a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you, or you decide that you gotta be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” That’s when Kilmeade suggested a more extreme option. “Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something, Just kill ’em.”
Last I looked, Kilmeade was back on the air at Fox News and Dowd was out of a job.
Despite the hero-worship gushing out from friendly right-wing allies that tried to make Kirk appear like he was the second coming of Christ, he was in many ways not much different than the typical MAGA supporter.
Kirk had charisma, most of the time was reasonable, and was friends with powerful people, among them the Trump family. Still, he is on record for saying a number of racist and bigoted things.
Kirk did say that it was a “huge mistake” to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” He called civil rights leader Martin Luther King “awful” and “not a good person,”
A few days later, Kirk released an 82-minute podcast episode titled, “The Myth of MLK,” which in part discusses “how the ‘MLK Myth’ keeps America shackled to destructive 1960s laws that have replaced the original U.S. Constitution,” according to the summary description on the podcast’s website.
Later that year, Kirk echoed similar sentiments about the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin, and prohibited segregation.
The legislation, he said on his podcast in April 2024, “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.”
Weeks after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023, Kirk argued in an Oct. 26 episode of his podcast that Jews had funded antisemitism in the U.S. by supporting liberal causes.
“Jewish donors have a lot of explaining to do. A lot of decoupling to do,” he said. “Because Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews. And now it’s coming for Jews, and they’re like, ‘What on Earth happened?’ And it’s not just the colleges. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”
Regarding guns, Kirk said: “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”
“And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk asked about the attacker of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, who suffered a skull fracture after being hit in the head with a hammer.
“By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like 30[,000] or 40,000 bucks. Bail him out, and then go ask him some questions.” https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/viral-claims-about-charlie-kirks-words/
“It is a growing consensus in the pro-life world that abortion is never medically necessary,” he told one female student, who then asked, if someone raped his hypothetical 10-year-old daughter, would he want the child to be born.”
“The answer is, yes, the baby would be delivered,” he said. He said having an abortion in that situation would be pandering to evil.
Charles Kirk is not ready to be carved onto Mt. Rushmore. His life and influence indicate someone with considerable talent, but like many other people, also had a lot of hatred in his heart. He should never have been killed for speaking his views, but it would be wrong to whitewash his imperfections and bigotry.
Charlie Kirk was not a good guy or a hero. He is less than perfect. And that needs to be recognized.
There are so many words and cliches condemning the killing of Charles James Kirk and none of the refrains are unique. “We need to dial back our discourse,” “We need to be tolerant of different opinions,” and “There is no room in American politics for political violence.”
Are people blind to the realities that have been swirling all around us? The language has been violent. The discord has been great. There has been a consistent invitation to dine at the table of heated racist discussion posing as legitimate political speech. The killing of Charlie Kirk fits within this arena of speech that is racist and hate-filled but is designed to pose as rational and logical political speec
In his rhetoric and so-called debate style this 31-year-old evangelical firebrand of the right has stated that Black pilots were incompetent, gays should be stoned, ironically he was opposed to gun control, abortion, LGBTQ rights, criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr., promoted Christian nationalism, advanced Covid-19 misinformation, made false claims of electoral fraud in 2020, and is a proponent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This Chicago-born suburbanite brought all of the racial innuendo to political speech and rhetorically violated the safety and security of Blacks, people of-color, the LGBTQIA community, perverted the history of race and racism in America, attempted to legitimize the nation as a white bastion of civilization and Christianity, and in general perfected the use of racial and hateful language and molded it into a form of acceptable and legitimate political debate and viewpoint.
But the legitimate debate aspect was far from legitimate historical benign speech, nor was it nonviolent in character. In fact, it touched all of the refrains of the vile language of the past that resulted far too many times in lynchings and other forms of racial violence and upheaval.
Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized “the radical left” for castigating the hate language of Kirk.
Don’t get me wrong, I am sorry for the death and killing of Charlie Kirk. I have stood over many coffins of people I did not agree with and said words of comfort to the families during my 40-plus years of ministry. In doing so I have looked at a person’s life to find something to say about their character, worthiness, and contributions they have made in their lifetime. Sometimes the task is easier than at other times.
As I look at the life of Kirk, he was a husband, a father, and what else I do not know. He had friends, I am sure. He played a significant role in his connection with community that was personal and also collective. But the problem I would have in affirming this life at an end-of-life ceremony is that he evidently did not care in his living about the security and comfort of others. He did not show empathy. Whether he believed what he espoused, or it was simply a marketing ploy for influence and money I don’t know, and no one will ever know for sure. But Charlie Kirk expanded hatred, marketed the vile speech of old racisms in new wineskins, and further jeopardized the lives and security of others.
The right wing is working hard to make a political martyr of him. US President Donald Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-mast ahead of any remembrance of 9-11. Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized “the radical left” for castigating the hate language of Kirk. If we are going to be truthful in this moment, the hate that Kirk put out came back on him, and the violent political language that continues to fly in this country will continue to manifest itself in ways where we will continually be praying for victims and their families.
Due to technical issues, my weekly appearance on Halitics (YouTube videocast) had me doing only audio, depriving America of my pretty face. But there was much to discuss. Ezra Klein’s lead story in the Sunday NY Times Opinion section advocated for the Democrats not funding the coming spending bill, giving the party a chance to stir things up and make some deals with the GOP, and with the public paying attention, talk about future Democratic Party policies.
Last March, Schumer gave in and received a lot of criticism. Hal and I agreed the Democrats should not be complicit with Trump and the GOP’s disastrous policies, and use the attention to make a deal as well as to make their case to the American people.
We also discussed a Thom Hartmann article about Trump blowing up a boat and killing 11 people in international waters near Venezuela. The Trump Administration claimed these men were bringing drugs to America. How do we know this? There is no evidence, no congressional approval, and no international authorization. This was murder, but Trump knows he won’t be held accountable because the Supreme Court has granted him immunity for crimes committed while in office, and there is no international court that will step in. This something fascist dictators can get away with. Let’s face it, everybody is afraid of Donald Trump, and no one can stop him from doing whatever he wants.
When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.
Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.
For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden.
The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.
What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.
This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it.
He did it in the full knowledge that six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have granted him immunity for crimes committed while in office, even international crimes. That ruling opened the door to precisely this sort of extrajudicial killing and stripped away one of the last guardrails protecting both our law and our global standing.
The official claim is that the boat carried members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But eleven people on a small vessel that couldn’t possibly travel as far as America doesn’t sound like a cartel’s drug shipment (typically there’s only one or two people manning such a boar); it sounds like desperate migrants fleeing a collapsing country.
That possibility makes the strike even more chilling when paired with a story Miles Taylor has told about Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller. Taylor recounts traveling with Miller and a Coast Guard admiral after a drug war event in Key West.
On that trip Stephen Miller asked the admiral if it would be legal to use a Predator drone to obliterate a boat full of migrants in international waters. Miller’s reasoning was that migrants weren’t covered by the Constitution, so what was to stop us from blowing them out of the water?
The admiral reportedly shot back that it would violate international law, that “you cannot kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.” At the time it was an alarming glimpse into the sadistic mind of a man who saw immigrants as less than human.
Now it looks like Trump has taken Miller’s reported hypothetical and turned it into policy. What was once an outrageous musing has become a bloody precedent.
This has profound legal and moral implications.
By attacking a vessel flying the flag of a sovereign state, Trump risked triggering a direct military confrontation. Venezuela could have fired back at American forces in the region. A firefight at sea can escalate quickly into a regional war, and Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro would have every incentive to turn to Russia and China for protection.
Leaders of both of those nations are eager to deepen their presence in our hemisphere, and this gives them an opening. It’s not inconceivable that Moscow or Beijing could send ships or aircraft to Venezuela in response.
That would put foreign military forces hostile to us within thirteen hundred miles of Miami. If shots were fired between American forces and Russian or Chinese deployments in the Caribbean, the slide toward a larger war would be real, very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 (except then we had a statesman as a president, instead of a corrupt buffoon).
World War I began with a simple assassination that pitted one nation against another and then the sinking of the civilian boat the Lusitania; this is how great power conflicts can begin. Trump’s reckless strike doesn’t just risk Venezuelan lives. It risks American troops, regional stability, and, in the most ominous scenario, world peace itself.
Meanwhile, at home, the timing is impossible to ignore. Authoritarians throughout history have turned to foreign crises to distract from domestic scandals.
Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia as Watergate began to close in. Reagan invaded Grenada days after hundreds of Marines were killed in Beirut. Trump has lived for decades under the shadow of allegations of sexual predation, including reports that Jeffrey Epstein recorded him with underage girls during the years he owned and ran Miss Teen USA.
If new evidence of that were to surface, Trump would need a distraction on a scale large enough to blot out the outrage. Creating a crisis with Venezuela, complete with martial language and threats of escalation while renaming the Department of Defense to Department of War, serves that purpose. It’s the oldest play in the authoritarian book: wag the dog.
Except this time the stakes are far higher. This time we’re dealing with a president who’s been told by six corrupted members of the highest court in the land that he’s above the law.
When Miles Taylor first revealed Miller’s macabre question about bombing migrant boats, some dismissed it as idle cruelty. It now looks like a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s policy mind. In this worldview, immigrants are vermin, human rights are optional, Democrats are “extremists,” and lethal force is just another tool of politics.
Combine that with the Supreme Court’s gift of immunity and you have a recipe for lawless violence on a scale America has never contemplated. The entire edifice of international law is designed to prevent precisely this sort of conduct.
Extrajudicial killings, violations of sovereignty, the targeting of civilians: these are the acts that international courts prosecute when they can, and that history condemns when courts cannot stop them.
And now we’re learning that Trump did something similar in 2019 when he was last president. He authorized a SEAL Team strike against North Korea, where they killedthree civilians in a boat who were simply out fishing.
If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.
Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).
The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.
But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Keep in mind, the same Stephen Miller — who reportedly wanted to blow up boats of immigrants to kill more brown people — just in the past week claimed that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.”
The doctrine of immunity means there is no legal backstop. The only remaining check is political will. And Trump’s fascist toadies are all in on more extrajudicial killings.
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete “Kegger” Hegseth said:
“We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike.”
Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio echoed the sentiment, saying during a speech in Mexico City yesterday that similar strikes “will happen again.”
This is why Democrats, independents, and every American who values the rule of law must call this out for what it is: an atrocity against eleven people, an assault on international norms, and a direct threat to American democracy.
Trump has shown us exactly how far he’s willing to go. He’s willing to risk a war in our hemisphere. He’s willing to put our troops in danger. He’s willing to risk drawing Putin and Xi into a confrontation with us that could spiral out of control. He’s willing to destroy lives to protect himself. And he’s doing it because six Republicans on the Supreme Court told him he could.
If Congress doesn’t act now to confront and contain this lawless behavior, if we don’t restore accountability to the presidency, then we’ll have surrendered not just our moral authority but our future.
The question is not whether Trump wants a distraction from his scandals; of course he does. The question is whether we’re willing to let Trump and his fascist toadies drag America and the world into catastrophe to get it.
This isn’t just about a boat off Venezuela. It’s about whether America will allow a president, blessed by the Court, to kill without evidence, without process, without even the pretense of law.
Eleven dead migrants are the proof of what immunity means in practice: impunity. If Trump can slaughter refugees today, what stops him from targeting dissidents, protesters, even political opponents tomorrow?
The answer, unless Congress and the people act, is nothing. And “nothing” is what those justices have left to protect us, our laws, and our humanity.
Is there a Democrat out there who can excite and motivate enough voters to knock off the MAGA GOP in 2028? A number of of them were discussed in a NY Times article, especially governors J.P.Pritzgar of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and California’s Gavin Newsom. Hal Ginsberg and I looked at those and several others on Haitics,the daily YouTube videocast.
No one candidate stood out, and Hal felt there should have been more discussion of their policy differences. I was more satisfied with the article as I saw its purpose was to touch on the reasons and qualifications they had that would allow them to be in contention for the nomination.
We talked about President Trump thinking and acting like he owns every part of the federal government, even if he doesn’t have the law on his side. Hal and I were not happy about a Democratic group called Chorus, a liberal influencer marketing platform designed to raise money for elections, but with many strings attached for donors. I noted that billionaires like Elon Musk can overwhelm election results.
Hal mentioned statistics showing the public favors many Democratic Party policies (taxing the rich, more health insurance, higher minimum wage, etc) it hasn’t helped them win elections because big donors usually get their way. That is no way to function as a democracy, and to say we are is naive.
It’s not in the headlines, but the indicators tell us boys are going through a tough patch. On the YouTube videocast Halitics, Hal and I are aware that boys are going to college at a rate lower than girls, playing less sports, having more mental issues, feeling lonely, etc. When similar problems were noticed over a century ago, society stepped up to solve these problems, with youth organizations created and many men working with the boys to help them. Two writers in The NY Times urge more men to get involved like they did then. It would help not only young boys, it would be a good thing for men too.
Hal and I noted newer atrocities committed by the Israeli military, this time killing five journalists in Gaza, with no indications Netanyahu will ease up anytime soon. We noted how President Trump promoted Operation Warp Speed to successfully find vaccines for Covid-19, but now is doing the opposite in science and health, discouraging government/business cooperation in fixing health problems and medical research today. We also commented about the current administration discouraging progress that might help minorities in favor of policies favored by white southerners, including sending federal troops into big cities in Blue states, while ignoring the crime-ridden cities in Red states.
Many people, me included, don’t understand how Trump cultists and MAGAs worship the current president, even while he shows himself to be mentally challenged, a felon, a classic narcissist, morally weak, greedy, seriously vengeful and bitter, exploits women, lies and exaggerates every day, etc etc.–you know what I’m talking about.
Could it be that right-wing news sources (e.g. Fox “News”) hide and ignore many of his most outrageous actions and speeches., and most of his followers are oblivious to them.
The following tracks his many disturbing actions:
Vote of No Confidence in Our Current Federal Government (origin unclear):
“We, the People of the United States, declare a vote of no confidence in our current federal government.
We do so out of love for our country and our liberties and to defend our democracy from an autocratic regime that aims to destroy it. Our goal is to help speed the winds of democratic change.
Exercising our constitutional right to peaceful protest, we offer this petition as an online march on Washington.
DECLARATION OF GRIEVANCES
The President of the United States:
Has shredded the Rule of Law and violated his solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States;
Has attacked First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, and assembly by intimidating those who oppose him;
Has misused the military and federal law enforcement to create a climate of fear;
Has abused his power by pardoning those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and by dangling future pardons to encourage criminal conduct on his behalf;
Has violated the principle of no taxation without representation by imposing tariffs through executive orders alone and by threatening tariffs to advance his personal agenda;
Has violated the constitutional principles of due process and the equal protection of the laws by using masked agents to kidnap law-abiding refugees for expedited deportation without judicial hearings and by detaining them in unspeakable conditions;
Has fueled racism and white supremacy by scapegoating communities of color;
Has endangered lives and our planet by disregarding science;
Has sought to manipulate the results of the midterm elections by using the FBI and the Department of Justice to facilitate gerrymandering by States his party controls;
Has violated the Constitution by soliciting and accepting bribes;
Has undermined the judiciary by attacking judges who rule against him and by failing to comply with court orders; and
Has denied justice to those he disfavors by exercising unwarranted control over the Department of Justice.
The abuse-enabling members of the Congress of the United States:
Have abdicated their constitutional duty to be check on presidential excesses;
Have gutted essential federal functions by accepting budget cuts Congress has not approved, rescinding monies appropriated for public services, and permitting the demolition of agencies and departments established by law;
Have willfully ignored challenges in healthcare, education, employment, housing, climate change, public safety, campaign finance and the preservation of democracy;
Have reinforced income inequality by enacting legislation that redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich; and
In the case of the United States Senate, have repeatedly confirmed unfit presidential nominees.
A majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States:
Has placed the President and his acolytes above the law;
Has evaded ethical accountability by tolerating conflicts of interest by its justices
Has demonstrated subservience to the President by using the so-called shadow docket to overturn without explanation well-reasoned lower court orders; and
Has squandered centuries of respect for the Court by rendering decisions that undermine legislation protecting civil and voting rights and other laws enacted by Congress.
NOW THEREFORE, we, the citizens of the United States of America at least 18 years of age, cast a Vote of No Confidence in the current federal government of the United States. We call for the redress of the grievances declared here and oppose the current regime’s assault on the rule of law, just as the signers of the Declaration of Independence rejected the tyranny of “The Mad King,” George III.”
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