Today comes a new report that the Trump team was rattled by learning yesterday that the FBI had conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and taking away boxes of stuff. The raid was presumably done at the request of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating various charges involving the Trump campaign and Russian involvement in it plus matters arising from it.
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The Trump Justice Department is investigating a complaint by some Asian American groups that Harvard University discriminates against Asian students by requiring them to have higher scores than all other ethnic groups in order to gain admission. This complaint is backed by some of the same groups that have sued universities in the past, claiming that their admission policies discriminated against white people
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Robert Jeffress is an evangelical pastor who has been a steadfast supporter of Donald Trump and even said during the election campaign that he would never support a presidential candidate who embodied Jesus’s message, saying ” I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.” Now Jeffress claims that his god has given Trump the “authority to take out Kim Jong-Un” and go to war with North Korea.
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During the days of the George W. Bush presidency when the country was dragged into disastrous wars on the lies propagated by Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and others, Tom Tomorrow had a cartoon where he ‘explained’ how it came to be that Bush and Cheney had embarked on this disastrous course. The cartoon said that the two had actually been pot-smoking hippie radical friends in their youth and carefully planned a long time ago to pretend to be arch-conservatives so that they could rise to power and destroy the US from within by advocating policies that would destroy it.
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Let us fervently hope that Donald Trump, who is clearly envious of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, does not release photos from his current summer vacation similar to the ones Putin released from his. I do not think the Republic could survive it.
Fox News seems to one ghastly pit of sexual misbehavior and harassment. Now comes yet another story alleging that Eric Bolling, Fox News host and ardent fan of Donald Trump, sent photographs of his genitals to co-corkers. I must admit I find such actions hard to fathom. If these were adolescents, I could understand. Young people do risky and foolish things all the time, oblivious to possible negative outcomes. It might also be understandable behavior by an adult if it was sent to an intimate partner who expected or asked for such things, though even there one would expect prominent people to hesitate given the fact that emails are hardly confidential anymore.
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Almost on cue after my post yesterday on how ambitious politicians in the US have to fake religiosity, I came across this Tweet that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that he is no longer an atheist and that religion is very important. He had said this last December but I had missed it.
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The fallout of the leaked transcripts of the phone calls between Trump and the Australian and Mexican leaders continues. In an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Caerota, former Mexican president Vicente Fox was brutal about Donald Trump.
One of the cardinal rules of American politics is that if you want to gain high office, you have to express religious beliefs. If you are not a believer or are lukewarm, then you have to fake it. Some fakers are better than others at conveying sincerity but it does not really seem to matter even if you are a pretty obvious phony. All that the religious base cares about is that you pay lip service to the Christian god. If you also push for the policies that the religious right favors (anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-LGBT, and anti-sex), then it does not matter even if you do not go to church regularly or mangle your religious references.
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The film War Machine (2017) that I reviewed recently is a satire on US efforts to win the war in Afghanistan that follows a cyclic pattern. A president gets increasingly frustrated with the fact that the war is just dragging along in a stalemate, decides that what is needed is a new strategy and new leadership, fires the existing military commander and appoints a new military commander who has a sterling reputation gained elsewhere, that person says that he needs more troops to deliver a crushing blow to the enemy, gets the troops but the blow fails to be effective, gets fired, and then gets replaced by a new commander and the process begins all over again.
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