It may take some time, however Trump is done. Michael Cohen, David Pecker, and Allen Weisselberg, all long-term allies of Trump are testifying against him.
The Trump Organization is now a target of investigations. His corrupt children and Jared Kushner will almost certainly be indicted soon enough. Trump is currently ranting about witch hunts on Twitter, as if that will stop investigations.
Firing Sessions would be a political catastrophe for Trump and for the Republican Party. So, craven and quite possibly also corrupt Republicans in Congress will do little to silence Trump as the elections approach. Which almost guarantees they will lose one and maybe both Houses.
Pence is dirty on many things. That means, if the Democrats take back the House, Nancy Pelosi could become president.
Hey Republicans, lie down with the pigs, they’ll call you a swine every time.
I was an altar boy for one mass at age 12, and left the Church at 14 because it meant nothing to me. Maybe I dodged a bullet or a pedophile priest or two by doing so, without even knowing it. But it’s not just the pedophilia. There’s way more rot.
None of this gives me pleasure in reporting. My great-aunt had a very hard life and the Catholic Church was her rock. How do we judge that against this sewer of slime:
A Catholic nun in 1871 was briefly excommunicated because her order exposed a pedophile priest. So, the pedophilia has been going for a very long time.
Nuns stole thousands of babies from hospitals in Spain, told parents the babies had died. The babies were put up for adoption and sold. This started with Franco and continued into the 1990’s. This is just flat evil and grotesque moral corruption.
Many thought Godfather 3 with the corrupt Vatican Bank was a ridiculous plot. It wasn’t. It happened. It was and is a very dirty bank.
Excommunicated nun:
Mary MacKillop‘s name was announced earlier in the Mass, evidence of the significant turnout of flag-toting Australians celebrating the humble nun who was briefly excommunicated in part because her religious order exposed a paedophile priest.
As a young nun, MacKillop and 47 other nuns from her order were briefly dismissed from the Roman Catholic Church in a clash with high clergy in 1871. In addition to bitter rivalries among priests, one of the catalysts for the move was that her order had exposed a pedophile priest.
Stolen babies:
Throughout much of 20th century Spain, a criminal network of doctors and nuns stole anywhere from 40,000 to 300,000 babies from their mothers at birth, constituting one of the most horrific yet least known events of the Franco dictatorship.
Following the requests of families who could not have children, a corrupt web of nuns, priests, doctors and nurses went to great lengths to steal babies — most of whom came from low-income families or single mothers — on their behalf or provide them with illegal adoptions
Vatican Bank crimes from Gerald Posner’s God’s Banker’s. Oh yes, the bank has been getting right on reforming itself for at least 40 years now. Really, it’s at the top of the list of things they need to get done.
Making money directly off the murder of Jews during the Holocaust (by investing in insurance companies that kept financial assets from murdered Jews. The bank was fully aware of what was happening.
Trying to buy fake securities from a Mafia-linked counterfeit ring A Vatican cardinal planned to use the faked securities as collateral in order to obtain financing. The counterfeit bonds would be undetectable unless the Vatican Bank lost money on its investments and was unable to pay back the loans, at which point the Vatican could claim ignorance of an outside scam.
Using $5 million to cover up monks who were squandering donations
Smuggling gold into Poland to overthrow the communist regime
Laundering money for the Mafia and other Italian elite In the 1970s, the bank bought a stake in the Italian bank Ambrosiano, which was led by the banker Calvi. For two years, the Vatican Bank moved money around Ambrosiano’s accounts, to allow banks and companies to pass financial inspection. Then they’d withdraw the money right after inspection, and keep a cut of the sum.
Ambrosiano later crashed in a massive scandal, and the Vatican paid a $244 million settlement without admitting to any wrongdoing.
Lake Mead supplies water to southern Nevada, Arizona, and California. Due to drought, an official shortage may happen in 2020. This would trigger reductions in allocations. Arizona would be worst hit. It has no plan due to internal squabbling, desperately needs to get a clue and a plan quickly, and to conserve more water. California banks water in Lake Mead and will withdraw it if a new plan isn’t reached soon, exacerbating the shortage. Yeah, it’s complicated.
As for Vegas. Everyone thinks we are water pigs. Quite the opposite. Vegas reuses and recycles all indoor water and has been toilet-to-tap for years. Further it consistently uses less than its allocation from the Colorado and thus is in far better shape than other cities that get water from the Colorado.
In recent years, the water authority has invested in a third intake and a low-level pumping station that will allow it to continue to take water from Lake Mead if the reservoir drops below dead pool, the point at which no water can be released from Hoover Dam downstream.
He also touted the water authority’s push to save water through conservation.
Nevada is entitled to use 300,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year, but it’s net consumption is currently around 240,000 acre-feet, Entsminger noted. As a result, there is more than enough room in the system to absorb the 30,000 acre-feet cut in the drought plan.
“Our delivery mechanism is guaranteed under all hydrologic conditions,” Entsminger said. “That’s not true for anyone downstream of us. From a physical water security standpoint, Las Vegas is better off than any other metropolitan area that takes water from the Colorado River.”
The MC5 was more than a band to me. They were unapologetic, stoned political radicals in the late 60’s-early 70’s. So was I. (They also got strung on white powders, got arrested, and I did too.) They were part of my soundtrack for that insane era of huge protests when cities burned and leaders were murdered. They were also astonishingly good, and took rock and roll where it hadn’t been before.
Wayne Kramer was their guitarist. Their first album “Kick Out The Jams” was a benchmark for pissed off politics, ferocious rock and roll, and definitely influenced punk and metal to come. Kramer is doing a 50th anniversary tour now with a seriously good lineup. He also just wrote a memoir, “The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities.” (PS. He survived all the madness and so did I.)
The parts about the late 1960’s will probably seem a strange planet to those who weren’t there. I was there (and do remember some of it, ha!) So when he talks about how the MC5 got poleaxed by those he thought were allies, like the Motherfuckers and SDS, I know who they were and what he means.
Yeah, circular firing squads AKA I’m More Leftie Than Thou. This was poison on the left then and still is. Some of it is due to ideology taking precedence over organizing and rationality. We Must Follow The Correct Line. No, start organizing, work with others, then what you need to do will become apparent. And of course any radical group then and now has informers in it who deliberately cause problems. That’s not paranoia.
One fascinating thing I didn’t know. Three of their allies in the White Panther Party were arrested for blowing up a building. At the trial, the government said they had the right to use wiretaps with no warrant because national security. The judge disagreed. The government appealed it to the Supreme Court, and lost. This had a major impact on government cases going forward.
From the book:
“Our White Panther illegal wiretapping case was the spark that led directly to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon and prison terms for most of his gang. Rather than reveal the scope and details of their illegal operations, the government decided to withdraw cases grounded in illegal wiretaps against the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen, and various antiwar, civil rights, and other organizations across the country that were caught up in Operation COINTELPRO.”
MC5’s Wayne Kramer talks ‘The Problem With Revolutions on the Left’ In candid memoir.
The greatest revelations, he feels, are in the MC5’s relationship with the counterculture and political left during the ’60s; Initially embraced as the musical arm of Michigan’s White Panther party, Kramer says the group was ultimately let down by those he and his bandmates felt firmly in league with.
“We expected pushback from the authorities and from Nixon and the police and parents and prosecutors,” Kramer says, “but we didn’t expect to be clobbered by the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and hardline Marxists and our colleagues and comrades on the left. They were merciless on us. Some of them viewed us as the enemy. We weren’t the enemy. We weren’t running a war in Vietnam. We weren’t polluting the planet. We were a band that shared the same ideas they did, and we were trying to tell the world about it.
“It’s the typical problem with revolutions on the left. It’s the circular firing squad, and they end up playing right into the hands of the people they’re fighting or revolting against. That was very disappointing.”
Rick Wilson is a Republican strategist, a conservative who decided very early that would oppose Trump forever, relentlessly, no matter what the consequences. He watched as many of his colleagues, after initially opposing Trump, went all in for him because, hey, that’s where the money is. After all, morals, ethics, conservative principles, and concern for the country as a whole is just so old school and tired, right? Wrong. Because, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” Wilson touches on this central theme again and again, detailing how once respected people like General Kelly got debased, corrupted, and had their reputations rightfully trashed by associating with and supporting Trump.
There are many such examples in the book. Wilson knows many of those who are now in the Trump orbit. As a leftie, it’s fascinating to read Wilson destroying Trumpism from a conservative viewpoint. Wilson emphasizes that Trump is a sleazy, corrupt opportunist with no ethics or guiding principles, and is not and has never been a conservative.
He also writes like Hunter Thompson and can be savagely funny while getting his points across.
He was targeted by Steve Bannon in 2015 for opposing Trump. He, family, friends, clients were attacked. When the Roy Mooore campaign came around, he was asked to create attack ads against Moore, who was backed by Bannon, and takes pride in helping bodybag both of them.
On the groveling conservative media:
“Meet the clickservatives—conservative media types more interested in web traffic and ad revenue than ideology—who have embraced Esoteric Trumpism at the low, low price of their integrity. It’s a deal with the Devil, and far too many in the conservative intellectual class and the commentariat couldn’t wait to sign. “Eternal damnation later for making libtard snowflakes cry now and raking in those hot clicks? Bargain!” Defending the principles of limited government, personal liberty, and strict adherence to the Constitution is old and busted. The new hotness? “Nationalism is the new black.” So many of them dropped their panties and put out on the first date because Big Donnie talks dirty to the media.”
On bodybagging Roy Moore and Steve Bannon:
“We helped craft a series of ads for a SuperPAC that carefully targeted Republican women in six Alabama counties, pouring in tightly targeted, researched, and tested messages. The strongest was released the night Bannon held his infamous rally in Fairhope, Alabama. You’re welcome, Steve.
Our closing ad was simple: a series of pretty, upset girls on screen look straight to camera while a voice-over asks, “What if she was your little girl? Your daughter? Your sister? What if she was sixteen years old? Fifteen? Or even fourteen? Would you let a thirty-two-year-old man date her? Undress her? Touch her? He called it dating. We call it unacceptable. That’s why we can’t support Roy Moore.”
Beating Roy Moore was a moral obligation. Beating Steve Bannon was a pleasure. Within days of the loss in Alabama, Bannon went from the GOP’s newest kingmaker to political leper. We all piled on, savagely. That’s how politics still works, even for people who think they’ve reset all the rules and defied all the structures.”
