Saturday Report 2/17/24 - Trump is a Serial Criminal

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Trump was fined $364 million in his second major fraud conviction. You’d think that people would have figured out that Trump was a lying, cheating fraud when his so-called “Trump University” (which wasn’t a university and wasn’t a licensed school of any sort: just a giant scam) was busted and he had to put up $25 million to make his victims whole. Now the State of New York has found he committed fraud in another big way, lying about the value of his properties to get cheaper insurance, better loan rates, and lower taxes. Most interesting, the judge, Arthur Engoron, determined that Trump is such a serial fraudster that he isn’t allowed to run a real estate business in that state for at least 3 years. Voters should take notice: if the guy is such a criminal the State of New York won’t let him run a business, do you really think he’s competent or honest enough to run a country? Don’t forget, he screwed up the nation’s response to Covid so badly than a half-million Americans died unnecessarily (we had the highest death rate in the world), five of his cabinet officers were referred to the DOJ for criminal indictment, and he’s already done serious damage to NATO and the prospects for peace in the world. This guy is a serial criminal who never should have gotten anywhere near the White House.

— Trump’s “owner,” Vladimir Putin, murdered Alexei Navalny. Fulfilling the dream Trump has repeatedly expressed of “going after” his political opponents with a second term, Putin threw Navalny in prison and has now murdered him. This doesn’t seem to bother folks like House Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson or “Putin Shoeshine Boy” Tucker Carlson. Johnson recessed the House so nobody could present a discharge petition to get aid to Ukraine, which is running out of ammunition as you’re reading these words, and Tucker, when asked about Navalny by an Egyptian journalist, said, “Leadership requires killing.” Thank G-d Tucker Carlson is not our nation’s leader! And let’s do everything we can to prevent Trump (or anybody like him) from ever again getting near the levers of American power.

— The FBI blows up the latest Republican scam to impeach Biden. James “Comer Pyle,” Republican head of the House Oversight Committee, has been going on and on for a year or more about the killer witness he had who was going to testify that he’d personally overheard conversations in which Joe and Hunter Biden took a $5 million bribe. It’s been reported literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of times on Fox “News” and other rightwing hate venues, and was going to be the basis of Moscow Mike and Comer’s efforts to impeach the president. But now, it turns out, it was all a lie. The witness was arrested this week in the Las Vegas airport as he returned from an out-of-country trip and is facing prison time for lying to the FBI about his Biden bribe allegations. But don’t feel sad for James Comer: this week he and Robert Hur are getting together to plan for House hearings in which Republicans will be investigating how old Joe Biden is and whether Hur thinks Biden’s memory is any good. The GOP is queuing up this new circus because they don’t have anything to offer the American people other than more tax cuts for billionaires and more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. It’s sick, and the American people are seeing through it.

— Geeky Science: Is this the future of Covid? In the last decade of the 19th century a coronavirus jumped from cows into humans, kicking off five years of Covid-like deaths across Russia, then Europe, then the whole world. After five years, though, the virus appeared to have vanished and has never resurfaced. So, what happened? There are four main coronaviruses that cause the common cold and apparently one of them is that one that made the leap into humans in the 1890s — and then mutated enough that it’s still highly contagious but no longer causes any symptoms beyond a runny nose and occasional cough. Scientists are now speculating that all four common cold viruses may have started out this way, as a deadly coronavirus infection that, after a few years, mutated to a point where they’re no longer deadly. And the corollary speculation is that the same thing will be happening in the next few years with Covid. At this moment it’s just a theory, but it has strong science backing it: that would be good news! Now, if this is true, we all just have to avoid getting infected with the current, deadly strains before the less-lethal mutant makes its appearance.

— Russian arms production worries Europe’s war planners while the Baltic states ready for an invasion. Russian defense spending has exploded to 7.5% of that nation’s GDP as Putin puts the entire nation on a war footing. Factories making ammunition and military vehicles are running 24/7 with workers on “mandatory 12-hour shifts with double overtime” as the world fears Putin is preparing for an invasion of the Baltic states and a subsequent war with NATO. The Russian government announced that their military-industrial complex has created 520,000 new jobs and now employs an estimated 2.5% of that entire nation’s population. This is a very, very bad sign for world peace and raises the probability that, if Russia succeeds in seizing Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are next. Those latter three Baltic states aren’t waiting: they’re building hundreds of bunkers and fortifications along their borders with Russia. And Moscow Mike and Republicans in the House (and a few in the Senate) are more than happy to help Putin out by cutting aid to Ukraine. It doesn’t get more nakedly treasonous than that.

— Does America have MAGA fatigue? Chauncey DeVega, a frequent guest on my radio/TV program, suggests that Tucker Carlson “being summoned to Moscow” is a show of weakness, rather than strength, for both Putin and the Republicans in the United States who support him over America and democracy. He speculates that Americans are starting to get MAGA fatigue, so the Republican politicians and media front-men have to continuously come up with new and over-the-top things to get outraged over. So far they’ve gone through quite a list of frankly pathetic freak-outs: book bans, trans bathrooms, trans athletes, Black history, “Don’t Say Gay,” etc., etc. I think Chauncey is right, which raises the question: What will it be next? Nobody knows for sure: if you have ideas, let us all know in the comments to this newsletter.

—Crazy Alert! Republicans in Utah want the 10 Commandments to be taught as “American History” to young children in public schools. This is bizarre. Only two of the ten mention things that are actual laws in America: stealing and killing. The rest are all religious injunctions, like the requirement that parents stone their kids to death if they talk back, or that people who do work on Saturday must be killed. That’s not going to stop white christian nationalists like Utah Representative Michael Petersen, though, in their crusade to end over 240 years of secular American government and replace our leadership with rightwing preachers. Jefferson, Paine, and Madison are rolling in their graves.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: How to Remember Names. When we’re first introduced to people, we’re often so busy thinking of what to say or worrying about how they’ll judge us that we forget to register their name. But there is a solution, laid out in the newest free Hunter in a Farmer’s World newsletter:

ADHD: How to Remember Names

— Trump wants to turn the RNC into his own personal slush fund. This serial criminal tries to figure out a way to convert everything he touches into cash. He made