Jennie Willoughby & The Undiminished Truth

Israeli security experts examine the wreckage of
an Israeli F-16 that was shot down on Saturday

Last night I stopped by my local in Lawrenceville, New Jersey to have a couple drinks and pick up a six-pack before heading to dinner at a friend's house over in nearby West Windsor.

My friend Patrick made an interesting observation about Donald Trump that stuck with me.

Pat is a white, married father and small business owner in his early 60's.

He was born in Germany but has been a U.S. citizen for decades.

We often chat about history, current events and books, after I made an off-hand remark about a news item that rolled across the ticker at the bottom of the screen on one of the TV's mounted over the small bar, Patrick shook his head and lamented the fact that so much of the mainstream media's focus these days revolves around Trump.

To the degree that more important stories don't seem to get adequate coverage.

For example, earlier this morning the BBC News reported that an Israeli Air Force F-16 crashed near the Israeli town of Harduf after suffering heavy damage from Syrian anti-aircraft fire (pictured above).

According to the BBC that was the first Israeli fighter jet to crash in combat since 2006.

The warplane was attacking targets inside Syria after Israel claims an Iranian drone crossed the border between the Golan Heights region in northeastern Israel and Syria's southwestern border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

The Israeli jet took out the Iranian drone before being shot down, and in response to the F-16 being shot down, the Israeli's ordered another airstrike inside Syria to destroy unnamed targets.

An Iranian drone operating from Syria crossing the Israeli border is a troubling escalation in an already-tense conflict where the U.S. and Russia are just some of the players on the ground in a Syria wracked by civil war and a massive humanitarian crisis.

It was just last Saturday that David D. Kirkpatrick's New York Times article shed light on the secret alliance between Israel and Egypt that has allowed unmarked Israeli jets, helicopters and drones to carry out extensive airstrikes against jihadists loyal to the Islamic State in the northern Sinai region of Egypt.

I'm not a defense expert, but ordering airstrikes in response to a drone flying over a border strikes me as more than a bit heavy-handed - and I'm sure it has nothing to do with Israeli police announcing their intent to file corruption charges against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday...

The deadly Israeli airstrikes, more than 100 in the past two years, and the alliance between these two former foes, mark a significant shift in the complex ongoing geopolitical conflicts raging across parts of the Middle East - including Syria, Iran, Egypt and Yemen.

As Seth Harp reported in an eye-opening Rolling Stone article last fall, the U.S. military currently has thousands of personnel stationed in Syria (though they don't like to talk about it), so this escalation on the border between Israel and Syria should be getting more American media attention.

Ex-White House secretary Rob Porter handing
Trump an executive order to sign theatricaly 

But as my friend Pat lamented last night, so much of American mainstream media news coverage seems devoted to the chaos of the Trump presidency, that more important stories are relegated to the proverbial sidelines.

Trump's publicly defending ex-White House secretary Rob Porter in the wake of the latter's resignation over troubling allegations of domestic abuse from two of his ex-wives is just the latest example.

This latest tone-deaf gaffe has once again placed the thrice-married POTUS on the wrong side of the current #MeToo movement - not a bright move from a guy who's been accused of sexual misconduct by no less than sixteen different women.

Not only did he defend the White House keeping Porter on staff for over a year despite the fact that his domestic abuse charges kept him from passing a mandatory FBI background check, 45 also used his Twitter feed to undermine the accusations leveled against Porter as well as the #MeToo movement. 

It's hard to gauge what the 52% of white American women who voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election thought of all this, but senior White House adviser and resident denialist Kellyanne Conway insisted that Trump "shows great compassion" for women during an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on This Week this morning.

Which is kind of like saying that xenophobic white supremacist White House advisor Stephen Miller shows "great compassion" for immigrants.

Was Conway suggesting Trump showed "great compassion" towards his 3rd wife Melania when he was carrying on an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels while wife # 3 was pregnant with their son Barron?

Rob Porter's ex-wife Jennie Willoughby

To her credit (and courage) Porter's ex-wife Jennie Willoughby was quick to push back publicly against Trump's defense of yet another Republican accused of sexual misconduct or domestic abuse.

Willoughby appeared on CNN to insist that despite Trump and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly publicly defending her former husband's character, Porter has some serious issues.


She also wrote a very interesting and thoughtful op-ed piece published on Time.com this morning titled, "President Trump Will Not Diminish My Truth" that is definitely worth a read.

In it Willoughby, an eloquent writer, expresses dismay at having to endure the humiliation of Trump publicly insinuating that she, and Porter's other ex-wife Colbie Holderness (whose photo of a black eye she supposedly got from Porter went public) were liars.

But she doesn't come off as being vindictive, bitter or some kind of "spurned woman" with an axe to grind as Trump and his top White House advisers have tried to paint her.

Willoughby comes of as intelligent, thoughtful and above all "woke" - she clearly knows exactly who she is and exactly what happened to her; and she makes Trump, John Kelly and Kellyanne Conway all look like insensitive, uninformed reactionary idiots for having the nerve to defend Porter as some kind of upstanding citizen who was victimized.

Seriously, click the link above and take a few minutes to read her words.

Willoughby offers some remarkable perspective on the larger issue of society's tendency to cast doubt upon those who level accusations of domestic abuse or sexual misconduct; she also expresses compassion for her ex-husband and recognition that he needs serious help.

Rob Porter's ex-wife Colbie Holderness 

"Everyone wants to talk about how Trump implied I am not to be believed. As if Trump is the model of kindness and forgiveness. As if he readily acknowledges his own shortcomings and shows empathy and concern for others. 

I forgive him. Thankfully, my strength and worth are not dependent on outside belief - the truth exists whether the president accepts it or not." 

As Willoughby writes, we as an American society are afraid of revealing unpleasant secrets that shed light on the reality of who we really are as a people - as she observes:

"It's as if we have a societal blindspot that creates an obstacle to understanding. Society as a whole doesn't acknowledge the reality of abuse."

As my friend Patrick observed last night, it's a real shame that Trump's own ignorance and personal conduct takes up as much of the media's attention as it does.

But in the same vein, as Jennie Willoughby wrote, "the truth exists", and the American media is duty-bound to report the truth of Donald Trump - if they'd done more of that in 2015 - 2016 he might not have been elected in the first place.

The sheer volume of headlines and space on Websites, television news coverage, newspapers and magazines taken up by the never-ending chaos of Trump's existence is staggering in the annals of American history - unprecedented scandal upon scandal on a scale never seen before.

If the press has to cover that non-stop until either the midterm elections or the Russia investigation brings about his removal from office - so be it.

As long as the truth that Jennie Willoughby writes about is not diminished.

Tuesday Night Massacre: The Car-Wreck Presidency

Trump greets James Comey at a White House
reception back on January 22nd

Think back to the unseasonably warm evening of February 28th when Donald Trump stood inside a packed House chamber before a joint session of Congress and a nationally-televised audience and boldly declared:

"We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption..."

Did anyone actually believe that?

How many people watching the speech rolled their eyes when they heard that line?

As the Hill.com reported, some of the Democratic members of the House and Senate assembled on the floor of the chamber actually laughed out loud when he said it.

Just over 73 days later it doesn't seem quite so funny.

While Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey late Tuesday afternoon has left many (including your's truly) in a state of utter disbelief, there's little doubt it had nothing whatsoever to do with the handling of Hillary Clinton's emails.

Both Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions smugly applauded Comey for altering the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections by publicly re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails just days before election day.

Two days after his inauguration at a reception at the White House, Trump swept into the room, saw Comey and swooned "Oh here's Jim." before puckering his lips and appeared to blow the former FBI director a kiss from across the room - but as Comey remained adamant about investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Trump suddenly did a 180 yesterday and sacked Comey for his handling of the same email scandal Trump himself milked like a fat overworked cow for months during the campaign.

Of course the loyal minions of White House Inc. did their best to offer up that laughable excuse to try and validate one of the most shocking examples of presidential overreach in modern history.

The sheer scope of the gall of Trump trying to use his own patently fake outrage over Comey's handling of Clinton's emails as some kind of flimsy shield to cover up his efforts to torpedo the FBI investigation into his administration's ties with Russia is almost incalculable by modern political standards.

Anderson Cooper rolls his eyes as Kellyanne
Conway tries to justify Trump firing Comey

It was a whopper of such immense dimensions that Trump actually trotted out the perpetually-lying Mistress of Obfuscation Kellyanne Conway to weave her confusing mix of "alternative facts" and incomprehensible BS.

Comey must have been getting close for Trump to pull Conway out of the media cellar where she's been stashed for weeks.

That's like the derelict sadomasochist biker Zed telling his sidekick Maynard to "Bring out the Gimp." in that horrifying scene from Pulp Fiction. 

Conway's lies last night were so overt that CNN's Anderson Cooper actually rolled his eyes in disbelief in the middle of the interview in which, among other things, she admonished him for "looking at the wrong set of facts."

Yup. In addition to "alternative facts", Conway now believes facts are divided into "sets".

Nonsensical claptrap like that has earned her such contempt and universal disdain that she's now referred to as Sewer Rat Barbie on social media.

The political and ethical ramifications of Trump firing the man leading a major investigation into ties between senior White House officials and the Russian government are profound, and as both Republican and Democratic political leaders shake off their stupor and decide how to respond (the Senate Intelligence Committee has already issued a subpoena to Comey to testify), for the moment at least, Trump has achieved what he wanted.

A distraction from the nationwide outrage over the contents of the draconian healthcare bill passed by the House last week which will strip at least 24 million Americans of their healthcare, raise premiums, allow insurance companies to refuse coverage for a laundry list of pre-existing medical conditions and transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars from Medicaid and other insurance subsidies into a massive tax cut for the country's wealthiest earners.

Instead of banging my head against a wall, over the past day or so I've been trying to make sense of this horror by re-reading Matt Taibbi's lengthy analysis of Trump's first 100 chaotic days in office titled "Trump the Destroyer" from the April 6th issue of Rolling Stone.

As Taibbi prophetically wrote, "A president like Trump can have an impact even if he never manages to get a single law passed, simply by unleashing stupidity as a revolutionary force."

Just think of the chaos Trump and his administration have thrown the government into; and the Republican-controlled House and Senate have yet to pass a single law.

Trump, Taibbi observed in his RS article, "swings wildly between buffoon and strongman acts, creating confusion and disorder."

That's what firing the director of the FBI was about.

A slide of Trump at a Kushner family event in
Beijing promoting a joint real estate venture   

When Trump stood at podiums inside halls and venues in various Red State enclaves before adoring crowds of disenfranchised and riled-up American voters during the 2016 presidential campaign and repeatedly bragged about his lofty plans to "drain the swamp", who knew he was planning to refill it with something far more toxic of his own making?

It's been nothing short of remarkable watching his administration further sink into an ethical morass the likes of which makes the rampant cronyism of Boss Tweed seem like an amateurish penny-ante scheme.


The past five days have been a startling example of ethical and moral decay on the part of the Trump administration and his advisers.

Just last Saturday the Washington Post broke the story of the Kushner family holding a public event in Beijing where they openly touted their connection with Trump to woo wealthy Chinese investors to cough up $500,000 to invest in a joint Kushner-Trump property in New Jersey to earn a pathway to American citizenship.

Yesterday the news broke about Trump preparing to sell a multi-million dollar luxury property in the Caribbean - and now he fires the director of the FBI to try and derail an investigation into his possible collusion with the Russian government to interfere with an election?

Where does it end? What does he have to do to make Congress take action and do their jobs to ensure that the checks and balances at the heart of the Constitution are functioning components of a vibrant and healthy Democracy?

As Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone, "But while we keep looking for his hidden agenda, it's our growing addiction to the spectacle of his car-wreck presidency that is the real threat. He is already making idiots and accomplices of us all, bringing out the worst in each of us, making us dumber just by watching."

7 Minutes and a Photo Op: Were HBCU Leaders Misled?

HBCU leaders stand with Trump as Kellyanne Conway
looks up etiquette on her cell phone
 

Like many people who don't consider themselves fans of the Trump administration, I must confess that I had mixed feelings about the decision by the leaders of America's Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU's) to visit the White House on Monday.

My initial reaction was shaped by the divisive nature of 45's toxic campaign rhetoric and the numerous culturally insensitive comments he's made in person and online.

And his overt pandering to racists.

After all, Trump is the same guy who famously spent well over a year aggressively promoting the bogus (and overtly racist) disproved right-wing nut-job conspiracy propaganda that President Obama was not born in the United States.

Remember back in September 2012 when Trump made a complete ass of himself with his videotaped recording of his offer to donate $5 million to charity if Obama proved he was born in Hawaii like some kind of cheap carny huckster?

So when I heard the news earlier this week that the HBCU leaders had accepted an invitation to attend a special sit-down "listening session" with the controversial new secretary of education Betsy DeVos, I was pretty skeptical.

The resident White House bungler adviser Kellyanne Conway fulfilled my low expectations for this meet-and-greet when she was photographed in the Oval Office casually seated on the couch with her legs exposed and her feet curled up under her tapping away on her cell phone as a roomful of formerly-dressed African-American college presidents and leaders posed with Trump while he signed yet another executive order.  

Given the formal setting in the Oval Office, the fact that the meeting took place during Black History Month, the larger historical context of HBCU leaders collectively paying a visit to the White House and the Trump administration's historically low approval ratings with African-Americans, Conway's puzzling decision to sit on the couch like she was at home in her living room was a remarkable display of lack of basic manners and etiquette.

Howard president Wayne Frederick (right) poses with
with Betsy DeVos at a Feb 22nd meeting at Howard

The optics of the widely-circulated image only served to reinforce the reputation of the Trump administration as being totally out of touch with, and contemptuous of, African-Americans.

Oh and that listening session with education secretary Betsy DeVos that was supposedly the entire focus of the White House visit?

It never actually happened.

Which really isn't all that surprising.


As an article posted on the NPR Website this morning reported, the actual listening session was interrupted when a White House staff member entered the room and invited the gathered HBCU leaders to step into the Oval Office for an unscheduled meeting with Trump.

NPR quoted a Medium article in which the president of Dillard University Walter Kimbrough said:

"There was very little listening to HBCU presidents today - we were only given about two minutes each, and that was cut short to one minute, so only seven of maybe fifteen or so speakers were given an opportunity today."

A minute each? Was that the Oscars?

Clearly fifteen people could not speak for thirty minutes each, but come on man, one minute is barely enough time for someone to introduce themselves.

Now obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but my sense is that the average reasonable person would agree that a White House event billed as a "listening session" with fifteen or so college and university leaders and the secretary of education should last a lot longer than ten or fifteen minutes.

U.S. Marshals escort James Meredith, the first
black student at Ole Miss, to classes in 1962
 

Particularly given the historical context of systematic discrimination in access to education in the U.S.

To top that off, DeVos, a billionaire who has spent decades and millions of dollars promoting charter schools and private religious schools in an effort to undermine American public schools, made yet another embarrassing cultural faux pas when she used her remarks after the meeting to promote her personal school choice agenda.



DeVos, who also took flak back on February 12th when the Dept. of Education misspelled the name of the famed African-American author and sociologist W.E.B Du Bois in a Twitter message then sent out an apology with another spelling error, demonstrated an alarming lack of knowledge of history by suggesting that HBCU's were an example of the success of school choice when she said:

"HBCU's are real pioneers of school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater equality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish."

Actually Betsy, the 107 HBCU's that still exist today are not "pioneers of school choice."

They are an important historical legacy of the institutionalized racism that systematically blocked African-Americans from attending many colleges and universities in the 18th and 19th centuries.

They were first formed back in 1837 starting with Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, but most were formed starting after the Civil War ended in 1865.

HBCU's were formed 27 years after Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1862 (which mandated federal funds to create land grant colleges for each state) in response to the Agricultural College Act of 1890 which, according to Wikipedia, required "states to establish a separate land grant college for blacks if blacks were being excluded from the existing land grant colleges." 

Which, in most parts of America, they were.

Graffiti on a Howard University sidewalk

Until HBCU's were formed, black students were completely excluded from attending colleges in the southern U.S.

My father graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in the 1950's, the first HBCU to open in the south in 1865 - it was founded by an Amherst graduate who fought for the Union during the Civil War named Henry Martin Tupper.

My father's experiences as a student at Shaw were absolutely central to his development as a man and later success as a professional.

So my guess is that he would have supported the decision by the HBCU leaders to visit the White House.

But reaction from other HBCU alumni and current students has been mixed.

This morning the New York Times reported about some of the backlash from HBCU students and alumni - including graffiti scrawled on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C. criticizing president Wayne Frederick as the "overseer" of "the Trump plantation."

Students from various HBCU's have expressed criticism on social media of their respective leaders meeting with a president who has surrounded himself with advisers like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller.

Men who now shape White House domestic policy and have also openly espoused racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant beliefs and who are also personally linked with known white supremacists.      

But not all HBCU students and alumni were critical of the HBCU leader's White House visit.

Morgan State University in Baltimore

This morning I spoke with a woman who graduated from Morgan State University in Baltimore, which was founded by Methodists in 1867.

She has her masters in education and worked as a public school administrator for years, and her view was that it was important for the HBCU leaders to attend that meeting, regardless of what happened or the reactions on social media.

Or the media's coverage of it.


This HBCU alumnus was adamant that federal funding for HBCU's is absolutely critical, and that given the challenges that HBCU's face in raising money, those leaders had a responsibility to take advantage of any opportunity to convey the importance of those institutions directly to the secretary of education or the president - whoever that might be.

She also shrewdly noted that HBCU's need to be directly involved with the upcoming midterm Congressional elections - as the battle for federal funding for higher education is really fought in the trenches of Congressional appropriations.

So I find my initial skepticism of the visit tempered somewhat by the bigger picture.

When viewed in the historical and political context, my sense is that it took courage for the leaders of those schools to collectively show up to the White House to represent the interests of HBCU's and their students, faculty, employees and alumni.

They know who Trump is, and they knew they would catch heat for going to the White House, but they were able to put aside their personal political views or opinions, be professionals first and show up.

And in my view that took courage.

So we'll soon see if Congress backs up Trump's show of support for HBCU's with funding for Pell Grants for lower income students and other federal support.

Even if that listening session with the secretary of education was intentionally cut short to get a photo op of those HBCU leaders in the Oval Office with the president, to be fair to Trump, there isn't a president I know of who wouldn't make sure to get that photo op.

So after thinking about it, my sense is that it was important for those HBCU leaders to be photographed in that room - especially with this particular president.

In this case I think the optics were important for both sides.

It's just a shame that Kellyanne Conway couldn't muster the decency and respect to stand up for what those leaders represent.

A Ship Adrift In 45's Swamp

Patriot? Or lying Russian lackey? Michael Flynn

Well before the erratic High Chair President assumed office it was clear that America was heading into uncharted waters.

The chaotic two weeks following the inauguration on January 20th brought to mind a quote from the writer James Joyce:

"Zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift."


The troubling revelations that have surfaced over the past 48 hours regarding the decisions and conduct of this fledgling White House show that these amateurs have a lot more zeal than they do sense.

But it's also now quite evident that the Republican leadership of this nation is indeed adrift in waters not found on any map - and the besieged captain has never even sailed a ship before.

Casting former national security adviser Michael Flynn overboard last night like ballast was kind of like stomping on the burning ember next to the fireplace while flames and smoke have already engulfed the house.

And watching Kellyanne Conway's sad attempts to "spin doctor" the potentially crippling crisis this White House is facing earlier today in an interview with Matt Lauer on Today was almost too painful to watch.

Matt Lauer grills Kellyanne Conway on Today

Seriously, take a couple minutes to watch her as she tries to answer Lauer's questions with the kind of meaningless claptrap the media is no longer tolerating from her or Spicer.

Three weeks into her job as White House counselor and this poor woman looks like she wants to flee Washington, D.C. with her kids and go live off the grid in a cabin in the woods of North Dakota. 

Just think about what she's going on national television to defend.

The bombshell revelation that the Department of Justice had personally notified 45 weeks ago that his recently-fired national security adviser Michael Flynn had intentionally misled top White House officials over his illegal communications with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. well before the inauguration made a complete mockery of indignant denials made over the past few weeks by VP Mike Pence, press secretary Sean Spicer and Conway.

And of course the big Cheeto himself.

Who apparently decided to sit on that information for at least four weeks before finally deciding to demand Flynn's resignation last night.

The fact that the leaders of this administration decided to publicly lie to the media and the American people to protect a man who either lied to them, or had violated the Logan Act at the behest of the Groper-in-Chief is so beyond the scope of Hillary Clinton storing emails on a personal server as to be almost mathematically incalculable.

But as most people around the globe have long suspected, there is far more to the allegations that the Trump campaign actively worked with Russian intelligence to undermine American's faith in Democracy and manipulate the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections.

Former Trump campaign adviser Paul Manafort

Slowly but surely, irrefutable evidence of 45's complicity in conspiring with a foreign power to rig an election is beginning to bubble to the surface of the swamp.

Earlier this evening the New York Times reported  that data collected from tapped phone calls and phone records analyzed by the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies show that members of the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.

At least a year before the election no less.

Those campaign members named by the Times include Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager who worked behind the scenes of the 2016 Republican National Convention to radically soften the Republican Party's hardline stance on Russia -which had stiffened after Putin ordered troops to invade Ukraine and seize Crimea in violation of international law.

As the Associated Press reported back in August, a report showed that ledgers revealed that Manafort helped steer over $2 million in payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political organization to two American lobbying firms in order to try and secretly influence U.S. lawmakers to relax their stance on Russia.

This as the-then Republican candidate for president repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin publicly, including the now-infamous invitation for the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails - which of course they did.

Public demands on the Republican led Congress to begin investigating the Russian ties are growing more intense, and with all 435 seats in the House up for election in two years, GOP Congressman are risking linking themselves to 45's flagrant ethical and legal violations by appearing unwilling to conduct hearings with the same zeal that they went after Hillary Clinton on Benghazi and her emails.

Remember, as Christopher Zullo observed on Twitter, this Republican led Congress spent at least $125 million in taxpayer money to conduct 13 separate hearings and 50 briefings using up 588,000 man hours of lawmakers time to investigate Benghazi.

As of today Congress has spent zilch investigating a foreign power illegally influencing our elections.

That swamp 45 promised to drain is starting to spillover like the Oroville Dam in California.

Fake Massacres, Smokescreens & MAGA

Kellyanne Conway peddles fabricated facts

Well it's the first Friday of February and we've reached inauguration-plus two weeks.

So how's that whole "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan-thing shaping up?

If repeating fake information and blatantly lying to the press is any measure of the success of this administration then they're doing a bang-up job.

As illustrated by White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway citing a totally fabricated "Bowling Green Massacre" that never actually took place during an MSNBC interview yesterday while trying to justify Trump's much-criticized restriction on Muslims entering the U.S.

Sure it's a total disaster that makes Conway look like an uninformed amateur, but who knows?

The way this clown car is rolling, it may well have been done on purpose just to elicit the kind of media and public reaction that it's garnered - why?

As a carefully-crafted smokescreen to distract public attention from the radical extremist agenda the administration, in cooperation with the Republican House and Senate, are trying to ram down the throats of the American people.

Have you noticed how these sorts of quasi-delusional kinds of outbursts pop up like clockwork?

Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull

I mean Trump's silly phone-feud with the conservative prime minister of Australia?

A Democratic nation that's been a close ally of the United States since the first world war?

I mean come on, really? Australia??

What the hell was that about?

My sense is that this administration's tactic of "lie then retract or deny" is being used to deflect attention from what they're really up to

Which ain't good.

Like the high-chair president's move to begin eliminating the financial regulations President Obama put in place after the catostrophic financial crisis of 2008 - which of course was caused in no small part by the loosening of financial regulations on the banking and financial industries.

(Props to Maureen Dowd for the high-chair president line, I love that.)

So while everyone's getting their panties in a wad about Kellyanne Conway lying about a massacre that never happened, the Republicans are trying to unleash some seriously next-level sneaky shit.

As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren noted on her Twitter feed yesterday, just as the Republican majority Senate confirmed former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, the Republican majority House of Representatives quietly passed a bill that would allow the aforementioned Exxon-Mobil to secretly funnel money to foreign dictators in the interests of extracting more fossil fuels from the earth.

Reunited and it feels so good - Tillerson & Putin

And most decidedly NOT coincidentally, Russia recently sold a 19.5% share of the "state owned" oil behemoth Rosneft for $10.2 billion Euros.

To who?

A shell company based in the Cayman Islands just as the Trump administration was announcing efforts to begin to ease sanctions on Russia.

The myriad conflicts of interest between Rex Tillerson being named Secretary of State and his Exxon-Mobil-fueled relationship with Vladimir Putin is staggering in the ethical sense.

It's fair to ask at what point will the millions of working class Americans who voted for the raving toddler-in-chief who now occupies the Oval Office realize what his real agenda is?

It seems as if all the little buttons that ignite prejudice and bigotry and engender discrimination based on religion, ethnicity and nationality have been pushed and prodded so often that the minions who swallowed the whole MAGA-thing are almost anesthetized to disturbing truths that Trump and his advisors want to normalize.

Like the banning of people based on their faith in the name of national security.

Which is like straight out of Hitler 101; a class Neo Nazi white nationalist White House policy advisor Stephen Bannon has certainly mastered.

By now it's pretty clear that the thin-skinned man-child intentionally uses his Twitter account as a free platform to toss out toxic chunks of political red meat to his followers and the media in order to distract them from the specifics of his real quasi-Republican agenda, which is of course to enrich himself financially.

So while many mainstream media outlets are reacting to his ceaseless petty feuds with his enemies, critics and increasingly (and disturbingly) America's traditional allies around the globe, they're not reporting about some of the really troubling things taking place on the ground (and behind Republican doors) as he begins to use the levers of executive authority to make himself and other greedy gazillionaires even richer.

And we're just two weeks from the inauguration? It's gonna a be a long four years.

Millions March & Spicer's "Alternative Facts"

500,000+ marchers gathered on the National Mall in D.C.

Throughout the course of the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump spent a lot of time boasting about having built a populist movement.

But yesterday was a rude awakening for The Grabber-in-Chief as he and other conservatives got a first-hand lesson in just what a genuine populist movement really looks like.

One that couldn't simply be dismissed with fake news.


Less than 24 hours after being sworn into office in front of a crowd estimated to be less than half of the 1.8 million who came out to see President Obama sworn in back in 2009, millions of people around the world took to the streets of cities and towns large and small to march in support of women and express opposition to Trump's election, conduct, statements, policies and Cabinet choices.

Aside from major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington D.C., cities like Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, Sacramento, Nashville all saw sizable turnout that some estimate could be as high as four to five million people nationally.

It could be higher, there were over 600 different marches in the U.S., including 51 in California alone - there were marches on every continent of the globe in places like Paris, London, Berlin, Melbourne, Australia as well as in New Zealand and Nigeria as well.

And contrary to commonly held assumptions about America being divided by conservatives in the mid-west and south, and pockets of "liberals" ensconced in large urban cities and on both coasts, as a Twitter user named Mel noted in a Tweet, "Don't ever tell me that Arkansas doesn't care. Don't write us all off as ignorant rednecks. We are out here. #Women'sMarch" reminding people that folks in "Red States" like Arkansas also came out to march on Saturday.

Another Twitter user named Diane Kaplan from Anchorage, Alaska observed, "Largest crowd I've ever seen in 33 years in Anchorage and it's 15 degrees out and white-out conditions."

Thousands gather in front of the State House in
Trenton, NJ on Saturday morning.

It wasn't nearly as cold as that on Saturday morning in Trenton, New Jersey but it was still a cool and damp January morning.

I was up at 7am and picked up my 82-year-old mother and two of her friends from Princeton, an elderly Jewish couple, as well as my mother's neighbor from across the hall - an elderly Jewish woman.

We found ample parking in the lots outside the state office complexes and it was about a five-minute walk to the Trenton War Memorial where the march began with a rally and some speeches.

The march was orderly, well-planned and peaceful; it was the epitome of textbook non-violent resistance.

On the sidewalk as we followed the crowds to the War Memorial, a representative from the ACLU was handing out small blue cards with instructions on what to do if in case of being stopped by the police; which proved unnecessary as everyone was peaceful.

Marchers, including me, actually went out of their way to wave at the Trenton police officers who were guarding various intersections, and greet them and thank them.

By the time we reached the steps in front of the Trenton War Memorial, over 1,900 people had already packed the theater inside where the speeches took place.

An overflow room inside was also filled to capacity with another 1,000 marchers, but large speakers had been set up outside the building where the stairs and plaza in front were packed with marchers.

Crowds listen to speeches at the Trenton War
Memorial before marching.

While my mother did manage to make it inside the theater, I ended up outside on the plaza in front of the building as I'd lingered outside to take some photos of the crowd.

You can see my vantage point from the photo I took at the left where I stood near the rear of the plaza balcony next to the flagpole.

To my right and left hundreds of other people stood packed together listening to the speeches, and behind and below the plaza were thousands of more people stretching back over five hundred yards.

It's not easy to describe the feeling that I had being shoulder to shoulder with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and socio-economic backgrounds.

Any such differences were instantly rendered meaningless in the face of our common mission, not just to march.

But to stand up for women's rights and express our collective opposition to Trump.

There was a common sense of purpose, a feeling of optimism and reassurance after weeks of anxiety about Trump's winning the election.

While it was a March for Women, that issue was like a solid platform that held a wide range of progressive issues including climate change, mass incarceration, immigration policy, voting rights and racial equality.

I was standing behind a blond-haired white guy in his 20's wearing a gray sweatshirt with "Black Lives Matter" hand-written in black marker on the back - I was actually surprised at how many white people I saw wearing messages or holding signs supporting Black Lives Matter.

(Remember the elderly Jewish couple I drove to the march? They told me they had a Black Lives Matter sign alongside a Hillary Clinton sign outside their Princeton home - both signs were defaced.)

Sign I got from New Jersey Working Families

But there was also a feeling of humor and wit at the march too as people used creativity to channel their frustrations and anger over Trump and the extremist Republicans who've coopted our government through misinformation, voter suppression, character slander, fake news and gerrymandering onto signs.

But perhaps the most important thing about the march was that it was real and it was happening less than 24 hours after the inauguration ceremony.

During the speeches, which included Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman and representatives from the National Organization for Women (NOW), Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Democratic Party and various local grass roots organizations, people in the crowd were sharing updates on other marches taking place around the world.

It was a living, breathing expression of Democracy in it's purest form.

It was an unmistakable message, and a clear warning, letting the Republicans who control the White House, Senate and House know that they do NOT have some kind of blank mandate to do anything they want - and a reminder that Trump lost the popular vote by millions.

It was also a visual reminder to Republicans that Congressional mid-term elections are only two years away, and while Trump won the presidential election, his reprehensible behavior, massive conflicts of interest, refusal to release his tax returns, open embrace of bigotry and vilification of the press have ignited the progressive independent and Democratic voter base and brought them closer together.

As Madonna noted during a fiery speech from Washington:

"It took this darkness to wake us the f*** up."

Sean Spicer's "Alternative Facts" - MAGA!

It's common knowledge that the Republican Party, in cooperation with the Russian government under the orders of Vladimir Putin used intentionally fake online news stories as part of a broader effort to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election.

So it was laughable that new White House press secretary Sean Spicer had the gall to come to the White House briefing room on Saturday and literally lie.

Not just about Trump's inauguration attendance numbers being far less than President Obama's, but as the New York Times noted, he also lied about total Metro ridership on Trump's inauguration day and tried to dismiss the turnout for the Marches for Women that took place all over the globe.

Faced with widespread criticism from the media in the face of overwhelming photographic evidence and facts that exposed Spicer's claims as lies, quasi-delusional White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway was quickly dispatched to appear on NBC's Meet the Press this morning where she doubled down on the Trump administration's policy of ignoring truth and facts and defending Spicer by saying that he didn't lie, he "gave alternative facts."

Trump and his top aides can try and justify their lying all they want, they can even introduce a new term for it into the lexicon as Conway did this morning - but the millions of people around the globe who marched on Saturday know the smell of a lie when they hear or read it.

As the Trump administration begins it's first Monday in office tomorrow, you can be sure they'll be slinging a lot of "alternative facts" in the coming days as they try to downplay that fact that a majority of Americans (and millions around the globe) soundly rejected Trump on Saturday.
 
As Trump likes to Tweet, "So sad".

Kellogg's Dumps Breitbart; Shiny Things & Cake

Tony the Tiger says no to toxic bigotry,
anti-Semitism and rampant misogyny  

Now I was never really a "cereal guy" as a kid.

My younger brother was almost fanatical about sugary cereals like Frosted Flakes or Boo Berry, but I was just one of those kids who never liked the idea of crunchy fibrous bits soaking in a bowl of milk.

But as an American child who grew up spending hours on Saturday mornings in my pajamas watching cartoons, I certainly recognized Tony the Tiger as one of the first corporate icons geared towards youth.

So it seems appropriate to kick off the month of December by giving a shout-out to Kellogg's for their timely decision to pull it's advertising from the "alt right" Website Breitbart News.

As Aimee Picchi reported in an article for CBS News' Moneywatch on Friday morning, large corporations and organizations including the AARP, Vanguard and 3M also announced that they will be pulling their ads from the Breitbart Website in an effort to disassociate their brands from the overt racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and white supremacist ideology which has become a hallmark of the site since the passing of it's founder Andrew Breitbart.

Picchi's article quoted statements from both Kellog's and Vanguard regarding their ad decisions, though neither went into too much detail, their recognition that Breitbart has become an offensive online hub for toxic hate was clear.

Kellog's said that Breirbart didn't align with the company's values and Vanguard said that it does not advertise "on any overtly political Websites."

So kudos to these organizations for recognizing that the overwhelming majority of the people who use their products and services, both here and around the globe, find the kinds of hate and divisiveness that Breitbart peddles in to be reprehensible and offensive to decent folks.

Anti-KKK marchers in Albany, NY on Saturday

Trump seems too busy publicly patting himself on the back for Carrier's decision to keep 800 jobs from moving to Mexico on his self-created "victory tour" to take much notice of the Breitbart kerfuffle.

Or the KKK's plan to march in celebration of Trump's election victory.

Fortunately the Klan's decision to honor Trump with a parade in a small town near Pelham, North Carolina was overshadowed by much larger anti-KKK rallies in Raleigh, NC, Albany, New York and elsewhere.

As Jeff Taylor reported on LGBTQ.com earlier yesterday, anti-Klan marchers gathered in Pelham, NC in an effort to try and find the Klan march to counter-demonstrate, but even after marching to nearby Danville, Virginia they were unsuccessful - perhaps the Klan opted to keep their Trump celebration under the hood.

It's been interesting to watch Trump and his advisors try and pretend he has nothing to do with the hundreds of overt acts of hostility against Muslims, African-Americans, LGTBQ-folk and others that have taken place around the country since the November 8th election.

Like the young Muslim woman who was verbally and physically attacked on a crowded New York City subway by three intoxicated white men yelling Trump's name, snatching at her bag and demanding she remove her Hijab last Thursday night - no onlookers helped her by the way.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway got into a pretty heated spat with Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri at a post-election discussion forum held at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government the other day when Palmieri called out the Trump campaign for deliberately stoking bigotry and racism.

Kellyanne Conway & Clinton campaign manager
Robby Mook at the Harvard forum discussion

As Wonkette.com reported, an indignant Conway asked Palmieri, "Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?"

Palmieri responded, "You did, Kellyanne You did." 

Meanwhile Trump's boasting about the Carrier jobs deal has been undermined by the fact that it's basically just a $7 million tax giveaway to United Technologies, the parent company that owns Carrier.

A corporate tax giveaway that will benefit Trump financially.

United Technologies is a defense contractor that also owns aircraft engine maker Pratt &Whitney and UTC Aerospace Systems, so not only does it have billions in defense contracts with the United States government, financial documents show that Trump also owns stock in the company - so his "deal" represents a staggering conflict of interest.

But does he Tweet about potential conflicts regarding his ownership stake in UT or other companies around the world?

No, his bizarre Twitter message about people burning the American flag being jailed or denied citizenship dominated much of the media coverage of the president elect this week.

It's pretty clear that he understands that using his Twitter account to repeat pretty much anything that comes into his head, no matter how disjointed or unsupportable by fact, has become his de facto MO.

Trump understands that his followers are easily distracted by bright shiny things that make a lot of noise - doesn't matter if they're true or based on actual evidence.


Remember just a few weeks ago when he was telling his followers that the election was "rigged"?

Now that he's won the election and evidence has surfaced of pro-Trump voter fraud, his lawyers (and individuals who support him)  are filing suits to stop recount efforts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Consider how much mainstream media coverage has been devoted to his Tweet about the leader of Taiwan calling him to congratulate him about his election victory - it's dominated the headlines this weekend and for Trump has served as an effective way to distract the American people from the rampant and unprecedented conflict of interests his global business relationships represent.

No wonder he won't release his tax returns; it makes Hillary's emails seem like a third grader's fudged report card.

Like the flag-burning Tweet, it just came out of nowhere - can you recall a time during the recent presidential race where burning the American flag, or Taiwan was an issue?

Would you personally rank either of those topics as in the top ten most critical issues facing the nation?

How many people could locate Taiwan on a map?

Trump has figured out that mainstream media is willing, and even eager to help him get his message out there, even though he's just using it as a smokescreen for his con game - reports have surfaced that his pro-Taiwan statement came after his overtures to build a hotel there.

His supporters aren't necessarily interested in facts, they prefer bright shiny things that twinkle in the light that are easy to digest and repeat.

Trump's unfiltered nonsensical Tweets have become almost like a 21st century version of "Let them eat cake", the quote incorrectly attributed to Louis XVI's wife Marie Antoinette that has come to symbolize the ruling classes' disdain, contempt and misunderstanding of the living conditions faced by the poor.

The president-elect has the same disdain for the poor and working class (as evidenced by his stacking his cabinet with billionaires and entrenched political elites), he's just become adept at using Twitter to distract people from seeing what's dark, and for Trump, quite profitable.

Amid Loss, Glimpses Of Hope On the American Horizon

PBS Newshour anchor Gwen Ifill dead at 61

With so many new stories of incidents of targeted bias based on race, ethnicity and sexual orientation cropping up all over the country in the wake of Donald Trump's election last week, it's been difficult to regain perspective and a sense of optimism for America's future.

The loss of a gifted and intelligent journalist of the substance, caliber and moral and ethical character of Gwen Ifill to cancer earlier today was yet another blow to the ranks of the Fourth Estate in this country.  

If there was any one member of the mainstream media I was depending on to ask the hard questions in the coming days of the conservative onslaught it was her - after watching countless reports and interviews with her on the PBS Newshour over the years it feels a little like loosing a friend whose presence you just take for granted.

But I'm not sure there's been a time since the 1960's or early 70's post-Vietnam / Watergate era when the need for quality journalism has been so critical for the American people.

As Julie Alderman observed in an article for MediaMatters.org earlier this morning, some of the nation's major news media outlets seem to be downplaying or totally ignoring the long-term impact of Trump's selection of Brietbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon as a senior White House policy advisor - in effect legitimizing a known white supremacist and anti-Semite and assuring that he will have the ear of the president.

But while things do seem bleak, there are glimmers of light breaking through the trees.

Kellyanne Conway on 'Meet The Press'

The hundreds of thousands of people who've taken to the streets of many American cities continue to make clear that Trump did not win the popular vote of the American people.

And he faces a huge grassroots firewall of opposition from across the nation from those who will not tolerate his policies of anti-immigrant hysteria, racial divisiveness, ethnic bullying, climate denial and rehashed failed Trickle Down economic / tax policy.

Trump campaign manager / advisor Kellyanne Conway had the gall to appear on NBC's 'Meet The Press' on Sunday and cast blame for the ongoing protests on Democratic leaders. 

After enduring two years of Trump's delusional stream-of-conscience blathering, bullying, juvenile insults, constant lying and threats, I don't know anyone who for one second takes seriously Conway's claim to NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday that Trump is "there for them. And he is going to be a president that listens and takes the counsel of many different people, including those from the other side of the aisle."

If Conway is going to become the White Press Secretary and we have to endure quasi-delusional spin like that, it's going to be an even longer four years than we already know it will be.

But as I said there are still signs of hope, particularly on the local and grassroots level.

While Trump, Conway and his other advisors and spokespersons seem content to pretend right-wing nut-bag racists defacing property with swastikas and the N-word all over the country is no big deal, organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center are taking the initiative to begin tracking these incidents of hate to record the data to be able to analyze and make sense of it.

They've undertaken an online survey of American teachers to update the findings of last spring's Teaching Tolerance project; merging information gathered from responses and input from some 2,000 teachers with survey data from teachers on how the hatred and divisiveness of Trump's election are impacting American students in the classroom.

If you or someone you know has heard of, or experienced an incident of hate or bias since the election you can report it to the SPLC. 

Grassroots movements are beginning to organize as well, as you've likely heard tens of thousands of people from across the nation are signing up for the Million Woman March planned for January 21, 2017 the day after the inauguration. 

A massive effort to not only steal Trump's thunder, but to also demonstrate that woman and men across the nation are not going to sit still while right-wing ideologues like Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence begin to dismantle court-mandated protections for women's rights, access to health care and control over their own reproductive choices.

While the presidential and congressional elections grabbed the headlines, there were some glimpses of hope on the local state level too. 

Particularly in the state of Kansas where citizens voted NOT to misuse a state retention vote designed to prevent judicial corruption to oust four of the state's Supreme Court judges.

Republican Kansas Gov Sam Brownback

As I blogged about back on September 9th, Republican Governor Sam Brownback and his vengeance-minded conservative allies in the Kansas state legislature were behind a massive effort to use a retention vote to try and remove four State Supreme Court Justices who ruled that massive cuts to Kansas public schools violated the state constitution.  

When the Justices put a stop to the Kansas legislature's efforts to turn the state into some kind of crazy Republican lab experiment, what did those right-wing lawmakers do?

Republican State Senator Mitch Holmes authored Senate Bill 439; a bill that would have radically expanded the legislature's ability to impeach State Supreme Court Justices.

Not for judicial corruption mind you - but to prevent those Justices from being able to rule that any laws passed by the legislature violate the state constitution; no lie folks, that is some seriously Banana Republic-type shit.

But in a positive sign for reason and hope, the people of Kansas showed that they have had just about enough of Sam Brownback's kooky hyper-conservative agenda - remember folks, this was the guy who used an executive order back in 2015 to rescind protections for LGBTQ state workers so that it would be legal to fire them for being gay.

On November 8th Kansas voters voted to keep the Justices in place; thwarting radical Republican overreach and preserving the balance of power that is so basic to American government.

It's not an answer to all the swastikas, harassment and fear-mongering, but it's a positive sign that in two years, Democrats along with more moderate Republicans could begin to chip away at the Republican majorities in state legislatures all over the country.

Like the ongoing anti-Trump protests and the thousands of people joining up for the Million Woman March in Washington, it's a sign that folks aren't going to just sit idly by while Republicans rip the fabric of this nation apart in order to sew it back together into something dark and unrecognizable.

Something many in this nation have no desire to wear.