Trump family grifters have to pay fine and take courses

In a resolution of a case brought by New York’s attorney general Letitia James, a judge has ordered Donald Trump to pay $2 million to charities not of his choosing as a fine for the fact that he used his supposedly charitable foundation to pay for his campaign.

Judge Saliann Scarpulla said Mr Trump had “breached his fiduciary duty” by allowing funds raised for US veterans to be used for the Iowa primary election in 2016.

The money was raised in a televised fundraiser during a Republican primary debate that Mr Trump skipped.

“I direct Mr Trump to pay the $2,000,000, which would have gone to the Foundation if it were still in existence,” the judge wrote, saying it must be paid by Mr Trump himself and should go to eight charities he has no relationship to.

Mr Trump said the case had been resolved and that he was “happy to donate” $2m to the Army Emergency Relief, Children’s Aid Society, City Meals-on-Wheels, Give an Hour, Martha’s Table, United Negro College Fund, United Way of Capital Area and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Ms James said Mr Trump had admitted to “personally misusing funds at the Trump Foundation”.

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A town called Anna

Readers my recall my review of the film Green Book (2018) about a black classical pianist and his white driver going on a road trip during the Jim Crow era as part of a concert tour. The title of the film came from a travel guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book that was written by a US postal worker Victor Hugo Green to advise black travellers about what towns to avoid and what places they could stay at and eat. One of the most important pieces of information was to avoid so-called ‘sundown’ towns.

Logan Jaffe of ProPublica Illinois writes about one such small town called Anna in rural Illinois that had such a history and how it is slowly, very slowly, trying to put it behind them, though with only partial success.
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John Denver’s Country Roads in minor key

Thanks to modern technology, one can do things that one could formerly only dream about, such as taking a pop song and changing it from a major to a minor key and vice versa. Major keys tend to be used for upbeat songs while minor keys are favored if you are trying to achieve a more melancholy sound.

Via Rob Beschizza, I came across what such a transformation sounds like when you do it to one of the best known John Denver songs, Country Roads.
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Bloomberg running for president? Sure, why not?

If there is one thing that shows how corrupt and ridiculous politics in the US has become, it is that the mere report that former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is considering entering the race for the Democratic nomination for president has gained so much media attention. The reason for this is, of course, that he is a billionaire and nothing gives you more ‘credibility’ in the media on anything at all than being very rich, and the fact that he says he is willing to spend a lot of money on his candidacy just adds to that perception.

To me what his moves signifies is that the oligarchs are really concerned that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are drawing so much attention and doing so well in the polls and that Joe Biden just does not have what it takes to win and his understudies Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris are not likely to succeed if he fails.

As Sanders says about this new development:

It is easy to believe this is true

A new book by an anonymous author described only as “a senior official in the Trump administration” describes Donald Trump as being even worse than we supposed. There was always a question as to whether Trump was actually what he seemed to be, petulant, narcissistic, vindictive, irrational, ignorant, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, and corrupt, or whether at least part of that was a deliberate persona adopted by him because it plays well to his base. This book says that he really is as bad as he seems, so much so that there were plans for a large number of cabinet members to resign en masse in order to show to the world how bad things were.
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Ted Rall urges progressives to seize the moment

The cartoonist and columnist says that Trump’s presidency is what has galvanized the progressive movement and that they must seize this moment and avoid the siren call of nominating a Hillary Clinton clone such as Joe Biden. Instead they must take this opportunity to drag the Democratic party away from the Obama-Clinton-Biden Republican-lite mentality that has sucked the party into a neoliberal quagmire.

He says that Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump has actually worked out well for progressives who tend to be marginalized whenever Democrats win the presidency with their usual neoliberal candidates.
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A critique of commercialized mindfulness

I am sure that pretty much everyone has heard the term ‘mindfulness’ being bandied about in the media. While it has its roots in Buddhist meditative practice, it has been taken to mean that, at least in its most drastically simplified form, it involved ‘living in the moment’, that one should pay full attention to what one is doing at any given time and not be trying to do many things at once. i.e., it is the opposite of multitasking. For example when you are driving, focus on where you are going and how you are driving and don’t try to talk on the phone, text, read or daydream.
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