ProPublica reveals that some of the money that was disbursed by Congress that was meant to help small businesses weather the economic impact of the pandemic shutdown went instead to family and friends of Trump.
Businesses tied to President Donald Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday.
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One of the questions that historians of the US ponder is how Thomas Jefferson could write stirring words about the equality of all men in the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, while himself owning hundreds of slaves himself. He is often pointed to as embodying the hypocrisy that has existed in the US at its inception and continues to this day. After all, he knew that slavery was wrong and frequently condemned it. Furthermore, he fathered six children with one of his slaves Sally Hemings, something that was disputed by the white descendants of Jefferson until his paternity was settled conclusively following DNA tests in 1998.
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Trump’s recent fiasco of a rally in Tulsa, OK had the effect of shining a light on the 1921 Tulsa massacre that I wrote about here. What is astonishing is how little known that massacre was, despite its horrific nature and the blatant racism that drove it. During it airplanes even dropped incendiary devices on the black community to start fires. The radio program On The Media says that there is a reason for this ignorance of one of the worst racist massacres in US history.
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Tim Miller, himself a former Republican political consultant who worked for Jeb Bush and is now a member of the Never Trump movement, asked some of his consultant colleagues for Republican candidates in races around the country why, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, their candidates don’t try to distance themselves from him, at least a little.
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The new book by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, exposes him to the world. The unsuccessful attempts to block publication resulted in the Streisand effect kicking in big time and greatly increasing interest in the book. As a result, the publisher shifted up the release date to Tuesday, July 14 but they also sent copies to the media and you can read excerpts from it in many places, such as this one.
Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, paints her uncle the president in a horrifying light and reveals explosive details about his character and disparaging comments made by his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry.
“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”
While the excerpts quoted in the article suggest that the book will make for entertaining reading, it also induces the sobering feeling of “How the hell could such a person end up president? What does it say about a country that would vote him in?”
In another article, Mary Trump’s lawyer Ted Boutrous is quoted as saying, “The more people see what he was like before, and really understand the kind of person he is and was, the more people will be horrified that he’s the president.”
I am not so sanguine that this statement applies to Trump’s supporters because they are a cult and cult members either refuse to believe anything negative about their Dear Leader or view what others see as his faults as actual virtues.
The one-time lover, confidante, business associate, and alleged procurer of teenage girls for abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and his friends has been transferred from the New Hampshire jail where she was over the weekend to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New York City. She is expected to appear in court on Friday at which the issue of bail will be discussed. Prosecutors will warn that she is a flight risk because of her money and her UK and French citizenship and connections, and thus should be denied bail, while her lawyers will likely argue that the fact that she had not already left the country (something that has puzzled me) means that she does not want to flee and so could be let out on bail
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Yesterday, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling of some significance. To understand why, you need to look at the truly weird system that the US uses to elect its presidents. So buckle up for a trip through that maze.
The first thing to appreciate is that the president is not elected by the majority (or plurality) vote of all the people in the country. While voters in an election do cast their votes for a specific presidential candidate, what they are really doing is electing members to an abstract entity called the electoral college and it is these electoral college members who vote for the president sometime after the presidential election is held, in a process that no one pays any attention to because it is assumed that they will vote according to the results of the presidential election so there should be no surprise.
Each state is entitled to a certain number of electoral college votes based on the following formula: one vote for each member of the House of Representatives from that state (which is roughly proportional to the number of voters in that state, with a minimum of one) plus two votes (for the two senators that each state gets). Since there are a total of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 senators, that adds up to 535 in total. Washington DC is not a state and thus has no congressional members but for the purposes of presidential elections it is treated as one and is allocated three electoral college votes. Thus there are 538 votes in all and to become president, you need 270 of those.
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I recently watched the above documentary that dealt with how the warming of the oceans is killing off the coral reefs all over the world. The filmmakers developed time-lapse cameras that they could place on the ocean floor to show how when temperatures rise even slightly, first the reefs get bleached white and then develop brown fibrous attachments all over them, giving them the look of ghostly apparitions. They focus a lot on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
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Even after moving to California, I still get a daily newsletter from Chris Quinn, the editor of Cleveland.com, the online news site affiliated with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A recent one once again showed why you should never, ever, believe the version of events that are put by the police following some fast-moving events because they will simply lie to deflect blame away from themselves and onto the victims of their violence. In this case, there was violence and property destruction in downtown Cleveland during protests last month following the death of George Floyd and the police were quick to issue a statement that said that it was initiated by the protestors and that was what caused the police to move in with force, using their arsenal of tear gas and so-called non-lethal weaponry which we know can inflict tremendous harm.
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This article describes how California went from being lauded for the way it controlled the outbreak to now being one of the states where there is a resurgence.
The Newsom administration’s four-phase plan to reopen slowly, while encouraging Californians to remain vigilant about wearing face coverings and maintaining distance to stop the spread of disease seemed “perfectly good and smart”, [Dr Bob Wachter, who chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco] said.
“But what I think we didn’t get right was the national political scene,” he said. California, despite its reputation as a progressive state, wasn’t immune to a growing conservative movement that rejects face masks as muzzles on independence and vilifies public health officials as enemies of the people.
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