Tag Archives: MAGA

crime news

Epstein getting last laugh

Wherever he is roasting in hell where he belongs, Jeffrey Epstein must be laughing his sorry ass off at the tribulation that continues to dog his former pal Donald J. Trump.

I have to admit to enjoying the squirm and the wiggle Trump is employing to wriggle free of the connection he had with the serial child molester, sex trafficker and all-round despicable piece of dog dookey that was Epstein.

This scandal won’t go away for as long as Republicans maintain control of Congress and for as long as Trump hangs his hat in the Oval Office.

Trump won’t win any court battles. Congressional Democrats and a growing number of MAGA Republicans will keep the heat turned up demanding full release of those Epstein files that could reveal the extent of the friendship between the sex trafficker and the future president of the United States of America.

Am I worried that it will inhibit Trump’s ability to do his job? Not one damn bit. He isn’t doing a damn thing as it stands!

political news, State news

Get a grip, Texas Democrats

Texas Democrats need to get hold of themselves and stop all this wishful thinking about whether they’re on the verge of breaking the Republican visegrip on electoral public office.

I keep getting text messages from this and/or that candidate — real and potential — for any statewide office. They keep demanding money from me. I don’t have it to give. When the beseech me, they tell me their polling shows them leading their Republican foes. Uh huh, sure thing.

Colin Allred said the same thing in 2024,  but then lost to the Cruz Missile — aka Sen. Ted Cruz — by double digits. Allred, a former Dallas congressman, got stars in his eyes because Beto O’Rourke damn near beat Cruz six years earlier, losing to Cancun Ted by 2 or 3 percentage points.

Now we have another MAGA darling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, rearing his ugly puss from the crowd, He leads Sen. John Cornyn in GOP primary polling by about 5 points. What does that mean for Democrats? It means, as near as I can tell, that they’re going to have find a new strategy to deploy if they have any hope of prying the GOP jaws off this statewide office. Democrats last won a Senate election in 1988, when Lloyd Bentsen was re-elected while losing as the VP candidate on the national Democratic ticket led by Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis.

I want the Democrats to break through. I want Texas to become a competitive place where candidates from both major parties can argue their differences clearly, cleanly, passionately and without fear.

At the moment, it appears to this blogger and longtime observer of Texas politics that the GOP is being choked by the MAGA morons who continue to swallow the swill served by the nation’s chief Republican In Name Only, Donald J. Trump.

I’ll just add one more observation. Trump once said before he became an actual politician that were he to run he would do so as a Republican, because Republicans were the more gullible Americans he would need to persuade to follow him down some path to oblivion.

Trump was right!

media news

Double down on news boycott?

Time for an acknowledgment, which is that my declaration some months ago that I was commencing a boycott of political news on TV is beginning to lessen … just a bit.

However, even though I keep the TV on to listen to the political news only with one of my ears, I am consdering a doubling down on that earlier declaration. I mean, even though I am paying partial attention to the machinations of D.C., Austin and even the local news, it is tiring to hear the same thing repeatedly.

I am waiting for a grand revelation. A “Eureka!” moment when someone tells me something no one else has reported. I want an intrepid reporter to deliver the scoop for the ages on what no one else on Earth knows about Donald Trump, or any of his sycophants.

Print journalism reached its high-water mark in the 1970s when two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were given license to ferret out the truth behind the Watergate scandal. They were so successful that the “gate” terminology has become a suffix for any scandal that boils up … you know, Russiagate, Hegseth-womanizergate, whatever.

The media have been sufficiently demonized by Donald Trump and his moronic MAGA minions that even tried-and-true shoe-leather reporting is now deemed suspect, of peddling “fake news.”

It’s not fake. It’s real. But the media seem reluctant to sic the reporter hounds loose to tell us the full truth. Instead, we get a mere regurgitation of what we know already.

I haven’t yet decided to fire up my news boycott. I might do it. I am going to wait a bit longer and hope someone can produce the next scoop for the ages.

crime news

Trump nationalizes DC cops? Really … ?

Let’s stroll for a moment down a memory lane filled with frightening images and unprecedented presidential dereliction of duty.

Jan. 6, 2021 signaled the start of an insurrection against the federal government. Thousands of Americans stormed the Capitol Building that day, smashed through the windows of our government, battled DC and Capitol police, threatened the life of Vice President Mike Pence, defecated on the floor of the building, injured officers who were trying to protect Congress members … and Donald Trump didn’t lift a finger to halt it.

This weekend, Trump decided that crime had gotten so out of control in DC that it was time to nationalize the city’s police force, call up the National Guard to patrol the streets and issue arrest warrants. Was the weekend a horrendous one? No. It wasn’t. It was a typical time in the nation’s capital city.

Trump’s latest gambit is just one more dubious attempt to divert attention from the growing scandal involving the late Jeffrey Epstein, those files with all those names in them and whether Trump should release the files for public review to let us determine whether there’s anything incriminating about the POTUS.

Trump is a madman who is looking and sounding like a desperate individual looking for any and all methods to keep the law at bay.

If the numbskull in chief is going to insist on nationalizing the DC police force and deputizing the National Guard to make arrests, he’ll have to come clean with tangible evidence of a crime wave that he says is overtaking the nation’s capital city.

local news

Diversity being tested

My family — immediate and extended — is a diverse lot, comprising “yellow dog Democrats” and “rock-ribbed MAGA Republicans.” So, I cannot say they influenced my own world view, as I have charted my own path over the course of my 75-plus years on this Earth.

One of my family members, who considers herself to be a mainstream, social and fiscal conservative Republican, has just informed me that, in her view, “Texas is really screwing the Democrats.” How so? In her mind, it’s the midstream reapportionment debacle unfolding in Austin that just gets her motor running.

My aunt is a kind and serious woman. She is not prone to latch onto cults the way many in both political parties seem prone to do on occasion. Therefore, the target of her anger is the MAGA cult that has attached itself to Donald Trump’s world view, such as it is. Trump has singled out Texas, with its strong GOP ties, to help him solidify the slim Republican majority in the U.S. House. He declares the Legislature, which is meeting in special session, can redraw five strong Democratic House districts into five GOP districts.

Trump wants to disenfranchise minority voters who are represented in Congress by representatives who reflect their views. We can’t have that, Trump has said.

The guy’s a maniac! And a dimwitted one at that! If he can piss off a reasonable Republican such as the member of my family I have just illustrated in this brief post, imagine how many others out there might be willing to rebel against the elected officials who are so damn willing to crater to this dipshit’s cravings.

crime news, national news, political news

No apology for being right about this clown

A critic of this blog just cannot seem to grasp the notion that my mind was settled long before Donald and Melania Trump glided down the escalator in the summer of 2015 to begin Donald’s career in politics.

I concede the obvious. Yep. My mind was made up a long time ago. And the 45th and 47th POTUS has done nothing at all to change it. I believe then what I believe now, which is that Trump is categorically unfit for public office.

But you know that already. Correct?

What none of us knows at this moment is what can be done to improve matters in D.C.

I’ll start with a couple of possibilities. One is to turn the House of Reps into an organization led by Democrats. Voters need to wrest control of that chamber from Republicans. If that occurs in the 2026 midterm election, then the fun can begin anew. There might be a third impeachment of this fundamentally corrupt individual. This impeachment could center on his involvement with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein hanged himself in a federal prison cell. Trump is now believed to have had something more than a passing acquaintance with this sexual predator. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump sent Epstein a birthday greeting card years ago. Trump denies it. He has sued the Journal, which stands by its reporting. I’m inclined to stand with the WSJ.

We have seen some fracturing among the MAGA fanatics who have supported Trump since he rode the escalator with Melania. Many of them want Trump to release the documents that could reveal a whole lot about Trump and whether he and Epstein were besties.

The other option is to elect someone to the presidency in 2028 who is clean, scandal-free and who knows how in the hell to govern. It won’t be Trump … no matter what some of his ardent supporters would like to see happen. The Constitution has labeled Trump a lame duck until Jan. 20, 2029.

Then it will be good bye and good riddance to the singularly most stupid individual ever elected to the presidency. Then we’ll have to ensure we cannot make that mistake ever again.

national news, political news

Voters are a confusing bunch

The run-of-the-mill American voter appears to suffer from some form of political schizophrenia.

Think about this for a moment, because that might be all the time you care to ponder what I am about to put forth.

Americans twice elected a young man who blazed trails everywhere he went, as the first Black editor of the Harvard Journalism Review, the first Black president of the United States, who was faithful to his wife and who avoided any semblance of scandal during his two terms in the White House.

Then voters in 2016 and in 2024 elected arguably the dumbest man ever to hold the office, who has acknowledged cheating on all three of his wives, who paid a porn actress to keep quiet about a sexual encounter he said never happened, who has never acknowledged a single failure in his professional life, who denigrates war heroes and Gold Star families, who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, who selects certifiable morons to serve in the Cabinet, who lies at a breathtaking pace, who provoked an armed attack on the federal government to stop the certification of a free, fair and legal presidential election in 2020, the one that the president has never admitted he lost.

This is the kind of strange behavior that defies description. It challenges anyone to explain how an electorate can transform itself from a body of Americans dedicated to real-life change for the better to one that falls victim to a cretin’s call to follow him backward into the era of Jim Crow.

My hope is a simple one. That we can reverse what we have done to our nation in 2026 and again in 2028. We are far better than what we have delivered to ourselves in the form of a national government.

crime news

Let’s see if there’s nothing to see

Donald J. Trump’s administration is doing a marvelous job of pissing off its political base, not to mention the rest of the country.

It has done pirouettes around the question of whether to release information about convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s prison time and the friends he made while steering girls into prostitution. Trump said initially that he wanted the information released. He incurred the wrath of his loyalists, who don’t want the material released.

He then changed his mind, angering the MAGA cultists who have joined their more progressive antagonists in insisting that Trump release the info.

Trump’s team, though, says there’s “nothing to see.” Really?

Hey, here’s a thought: Why don’t you release the information and let the public determine whether there’s any substance to reports that Trump and Epstein were besties … and that includes reports that the future president of the United States might have been up to his armpits in criminal behavior.

legal news

Loathing is alive and well in DC

Oh, boy … I just hate watching spectacles like the one I watched unfold today in a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

However, given the loathsome attitude that permeates the nation’s capital, it’s not surprising and it isn’t likely to be nearly the last such demonstration.

Committee Democrats stormed out of the hearing today because the Republican leadership on the panel wouldn’t allow further debate on a truly horrible appointment to the 3rd U.S. District Court of Appeals. Donald Trump has selected his former personal counsel, Emil Bove, to a lifetime post on the federal bench. Committee Democrats wanted to debate Bove’s appointment further. GOP Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa said “no.” He ordered that the appointment proceed to a committee vote.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey pleaded with Grassley, who he praised as a man of decency and character, to grant the extra time for debate. Grassley was having none of it. Booker wanted to know what kind of control Trump had used to coerce Grassley into denying the debate.

Bove is a patently preposterous choice to become a federal judge. This is the guy who once said it was OK to tell a court to “fu** you” while disobeying a court order. He represented Trump in his case against the woman who won a court judgment that held Trump liable for sexual abuse. He also has said it might be possible for Trump to seek a third term as president, even though the Constitution limits presidents to two elected terms. Roll that around a while … eh?

Never in my entire life have I seen relationships between the legislative and executive branches of government degenerate to the level where it sits today. I have implored all the parties concerned to seek common ground. They need to return to an era where political rivals can disagree on policy but retain a certain level of personal decorum.

It’s all shattered. I fear it is gone forever.

crime news

Open Alcatraz? What the f***?

Donald Trump’s well-spring of purely stupid notions has zero bounds, it is a bottomless pit of nonsense.

For instance, he is considering reopening Alcatraz prison, the long-abandoned lockup in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Holy crap! What in the name of ridding the government of wasteful spending is going on here?

The prison has been vacant for many decades. It is falling apart. It is now part of the National Park Service’s list of tourist attractions. Trump wants to reopen it? He wants to house prisoners there?

Why? For what possible reason? What is the incentive?

Has anyone told the dipshit in chief the cost of such a project? I will cost the government billions of dollars!

OK. All of that is the bad news. The good news is that it isn’t likely to happen. Congress won’t allow it. The matter will end up in the court system after someone decides to sue Trump over this latest form of pure political idiocy.

It’s worth calling brief attention nonetheless to the kind of nonsense that flutters around that vacuous skull that sits on Donald Trump’s shoulders.