Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example:" I have the report right here, but unfortunately it's written in disappearing ink."  

Pic from bloomberg.com

Burning churches and hiding taxes.

I know that most of you don't know this, but over the past few weeks black churches were being burned in Louisiana. It was an act of domestic terrorism that went almost unreported. (Imagine if white evangelical churches were being burned in Alabama, it would lead the national newscasts every night.)

Today we learned who the alleged arsonist is, and you will not be surprised to learn that he is a young white male who dabbled in heavy metal, Neo- Nazi websites,  and paganism. This also will not be a big deal to the American media, we have a tendency to gloss over these types of acts when they are committed by home- grown folks from the majority population.  Again, can you imagine the outcry on FOX News if a young Muslim male was arrested and charged with burning white evangelical churches in Alabama? Mr. trump would hold a news conference (with Mike Pence standing by his side) to declare that all Muslims would be rounded up and put in internment camps set up all over the country. But not all acts of domestic terrorism are created equal. Had the scenario I outlined to you actually taken place, the New York Post would splash the picture of the evil Muslim perpetrator all over their front page. We know this, because the Post, like FOX-- another entity owned by the Murdochs-- clearly has an agenda. Just check out their despicable characterization today of congresswoman Ilhan Omar. 

Finally, Mr. trump's sister, a federal Judge, is stepping down from the bench. She is not doing this because she wants to, she is leaving the bench because she did not want her dirty laundry to be revealed for all of us to see. Apparently she is allegedly involved with some shaky tax schemes with her brother the president.

Now that she is stepping down,  the Judicial conduct board will drop the investigation. She can now collect her big fat pension and run off into the sunset.

Here is what Vox had to say about her curious departure:

"The retirement of a federal appeals court judge is normally not a huge national news story, and while the fact that Maryanne Trump Barry is the sister of the president of the United States makes her decision a bit more noteworthy, on its face, you can still see why it’s been treated as relatively minor news.

But peer a little bit deeper and the reason Barry is stepping down makes it clear that the story is a very big deal indeed.

The key is that last fall, the New York Times published a bombshell investigation of Donald and Maryanne Trump’s father Fred Trump’s finances that appeared to reveal, among other things, that he illegally evaded taxes in transferring much of his wealth to his children — including both Donald and Maryanne.

All this happened a long time ago, and the statute of limitations would have expired on any possible crimes. But some shrewd people noted that there is no statute of limitations on judicial ethics investigations and filed a complaint against not Donald Trump but Maryanne. This would have launched an investigation of her that would, were she found guilty of wrongdoing, have implicated the president as well. 

Now, according to Russ Buettner and Susan Craig of the New York Times, Barry has retired, which renders the investigation moot. Their reporting indicates that this all actually happened in February. The complaint was filed in October, and then on February 1, a court official notified the people who filed the complaint that it was “receiving the full attention” of investigators. Ten days later, Barry filed her paperwork to resign.

And it certainly raises questions of whether she and her brother might have something to hide.

The Trump family’s shady schemes

A lot of what the Trump family did to pass on wealth tax-free to the next generations falls pretty clearly under the heading of “the real scandal is what’s legal.” But some of the Trump family shenanigans uncovered by the Times have a look of actual criminality to them.

Related

Did the Trump family’s tax practices break the law? An expert explains.

The most striking of these, to my eye, began in 1992. The Trump kids, including Donald and Maryanne, were set up as the owners of a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. All County then sold boilers, refrigerators, cleaning supplies, and other equipment at unusually high prices to buildings owned by Fred Trump. On its face, this looks a lot like an illegal effort to evade gift and estate tax by masking it as a business transaction. What’s more, Fred Trump then compounded the offense because the buildings in question were rent-regulated and he cited the high prices paid as legal justification for rent increases.

This is one of several schemes the court ethics panel was in a position to look at, but now the investigation is off.

There’s a big political fight over Trump’s tax returns

This all makes for extremely relevant context as the Trump administration continues to defy legally valid requests from congressional Democrats to see his tax returns.

There has been, for years, considerable speculation around what Trump might be hiding in those returns. Guesses range from fairly wild conspiracy theories that link the tax questions to the Russia investigation and other dark plots to the apparent GOP consensus that Trump is just being touchy about something basically innocuous, like he’s maybe not as rich as he says or that, thanks to loopholes, he pays a very low effective rate.

But a possibility raised by the Times’s examination of Fred Trump’s returns is that examining his son’s returns would, likewise, reveal tax evasion.

Fred Trump evidently managed to slip these shenanigans past the investigators at the IRS, and in more recent years, the IRS enforcement budget has been cut to the bone. It makes a lot of sense for a wealthy and unscrupulous person to take a calculated risk and just break the rules. But if those returns were to be disclosed today, they would obviously attract a ton of attention from the media and various outside experts, and Maryanne Trump wouldn’t be able to avoid accountability by quietly retiring."

[Source] 

Of course we would all like to see her brother's tax returns as well. But it is going to be hard, because he is expanding his crime family to include government officials. 

Mad man in charge.

• 

I am not sure Americans realize how truly f****d we are with this clown in the White House.

Every day we see American ideals and principles being chipped away, and no one seems to give a damn.

It has become so bad with this guy that every new scandal just elicits a yawn from us, and they never seem to last more than one news cycle.

I have been saying for some time now that the president of the United States is more than likely clinically insane, or that he is suffering from some kind of medical condition that is causing his mental faculties to deteriorate.

After reading an article in Raw Story about a Yale professor who is so concerned about the president's mental state, that she actually wrote a book about it.

"On February 28, we published a post, "The Elephant in the Room: It’s time we talked openly about Donald Trump’s mental health," which went viral with close to a million reads. People on both sides of the political spectrum—as well as some mental health professionals—weighed in with hundreds of comments.

One comment was from Hal Brown, MSW, a colleague of John Gartner, Ph.D., whom we mentioned in the post. John is the founder of Duty to Warn, an organization intent on warning our country that we are in dire trouble due to our president’s mental instability. More than 60,000 mental health professionals have signed John’s petition, which states:

“We, the undersigned mental health professionals, believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’”

John requested an interview with Phil for a podcast and then asked him to participate in a short documentary film that was recently released. So far, nearly 2 million people have viewed the documentary.

In mid-March, we received an email from Bandy X. Lee of Yale University. To give you a little of her amazing background, she is an M.D.; M.Div. (Master of Divinity); assistant clinical professor, Yale Law and Psychiatry Division; co-founder and director of the Violence and Health Study Group for the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; as well as co-leader of Academic Collaborators for the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance. We were honored, and a little scared, when she asked us to contribute to a new book she was putting together, with the working title, Duty to Warn. The book was time-sensitive in that she, other contributors, and interested publishers felt an urgency to get the book into the hands of the public and governmental powers-that-be as soon possible. We had less than a month to send our essay to her.

All other projects were sidelined as we devoted the next two weeks to researching and writing. Fortunately, we had "The Elephant" as an outline and our time perspective expertise in observing Trump’s extreme present hedonistic behavior to help us determine our findings. As we dug deeper into the fallout of Trump as president, we became increasingly alarmed by how one person can affect an entire nation. We used this newfound knowledge for our book chapter, as well as two subsequent PsychogyToday.com post: "The Trump Effect, Part I," about the increase in bullying in schools and a small adult population across the U.S. since the 2016 presidential campaign; and "Part II," about the increase in sexual harassment incidents." [Source]

We know now that Mr. trump lies about where his father was born, has a problem pronouncing basic words, seems to forget what he says from one moment to another, and shows signs of paranoia and delusion when he speaks about certain things. Throw in his need for attention, and his petty fixation with his image and it's clear that we have a mad man on our hands.

*Pic from epictimes.com

No, our country isn't full, but the president is full of it.

• 

We can now add the embattled DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, to the long list of folks who just could not take trump world anymore and decided to leave, or were fired. This is all because the orange one did not believe that they were loyal enough to him. 

This leaves only two women remaining in the trump cabinet, and a whole bunch of folks playing the role of acting butt kisser. 

Apparently trump wanted someone who is tougher for the job, and Nelsen didn't fit the bill. Good luck with that. My guess is that nothing will change in this country when it comes to immigration. trump tried to play tough guy and threaten to shutdown the border, but that plan was so foolhardy that members of his own party were laughing of the lunacy of it behind his back.

Still, trump know that he has to do something, because part of the reason that he got elected is because he pushed this type of racist xenophobic rhetoric against immigrants to get elected. In fact, it's how he kicked off his presidential campaign. Now he says that the country is"full", and that we just cannot take anymore immigrants, legal or illegal. I wonder if when he met his Eastern European mistress (who is now his wife) he felt that way. I guess our country wasn't quite full back then. We still had room for a few Eastern European models.

But this is where we are in America. We have a president who normalizes bigotry and xenophobia and 30% of the electorate who is buying what he is selling.

Writer Catherine Pigg summed it all up perfectly right after trump got elected after giving her own personal story.

 "The U.S. is made up of immigrants; nearly everyone in the U.S. has a relative or ancestor who immigrated to this country. Even President Trump’s grandfather was a German immigrant named Friedrich Trump who came to the U.S. on the SS Eider in 1885. Trump’s mother was also an immigrant from Scotland, who boarded the SS Transylvania in 1929.

Yet despite his close ancestry, President Trump pushes to limit the amount of immigrants who enter the U.S. To do so is simply un-American and hazardous to families of immigrants and those who seek refuge in this country. Xenophobia has always been an underlying issue within the U.S., but now it is becoming normalized because of President Trump’s declamation.

His xenophobic rhetoric is used by several of his supporters who verbally or even physically assault anyone who does not fit their narrow mold of what they believe an American should look or sound like. A rise in hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, Latinx individuals and even the Asian community has taken place since President Trump’s election.

My own family even faces a few of the negative repercussions of his rhetoric. My mom moved to the U.S. from Mongolia after marrying my dad, who is a natural born citizen of the U.S. She became a U.S. citizen along with my sister after moving here while I was born in this country.

I will state we all have the privilege of being legal citizens, something not every family with immigrants is fortunate enough to say. And even though I am biracial, I do benefit from white privilege because I am not as targeted as my mom or my sister when it comes to xenophobia.
Despite my mom being a legal citizen, some people continue to question the validity of her citizenship and this only increased since this past election. My mom and sister are not strangers to bigotry and xenophobia. It has been a part of their struggle since living in the U.S. However, recently there has been a noticeable rise in how many outspoken xenophobic strangers they meet.

My mom often struggled to obtain a job, despite having a Master’s degree in agriculture. One of the biggest critiques of why she was not hired is because of her accent. Despite being able to speak multiple languages, her accent was seen as a hinderance  for multiple jobs. Many can easily disregard or overlook this, stating it is just a company preference, but it is hard to understand why an accent would be the defining factor for a job especially since she can speak English fluently.

President Trump often states his belief businesses should not be hindered and should be allowed to choose who they can or cannot hire for any reason. Although we do have some laws protecting against job discrimination, an understandable fear of many minorities is President Trump’s administration could derail some of those protections. Without these laws, minorities, my family included, face the worry of losing jobs simply because of racism or xenophobia.

Another issue popping up on social media throughout the country since his election is people getting harassed in public for speaking in a language other than English. Videos stream filled with angry xenophobes yelling at the victims to go back to their country or telling them to speak only in English because they are in America, even though the U.S. does not actually have an official  national language.

This issue definitely hits home, as my mom often speaks to friends and family in Mongolian. There have been a few times where someone felt the need to criticize her for speaking a foreign language in public or for simply speaking English with an accent.

This particular issue always played a part in my family’s life and our dynamic. In elementary school, my sister’s teacher told my mom she needed to stop speaking Mongolian at home so my sister and I could learn English and fit in better. This negatively impacted my sister and I growing up because neither of us can speak fluent Mongolian. Consequently we lost a piece of our culture as well as our identity.

Many have even assumed my mom married my dad purely for monetary gain or citizenship. Some went as far as calling her a gold digger or even a mail-order bride, simply because of problematic stereotypes stemming from xenophobia and bigotry. My mom actually made more money than my dad when they met in Mongolia and held a higher working position than him.

The topic of xenophobia within the U.S. can be very complex and multifaceted because not every minority faces the same prejudices and hardships, although many can be similar. Shining light on this issue is definitely a step in the right direction, but also calling it out within our communities, our legislation and ourselves is one of the best courses of action to take.

The next four years will be hazardous to many families with immigrants, especially for those who are not fortunate enough to have citizenship or are being targeted for their religious beliefs. Americans must be willing to welcome immigrants and make the path to citizenship easier because the U.S. is stronger together, not divided." [Source]

Well, those four years are almost up, and Ms. Pigg's predictions are sadly turning out to be true. 



 

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from rollcall.com 

Still hunting the witches.

Remember when trumpnuts were celebrating Mr. trump's vindication by the Mueller Report? Well, as it turns out, they were doing those victory laps and spiking the ball in the end zone a little too soon.

"Some members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team told associates that Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election did not fully represent their findings, according to a New York Times report published Wednesday.

Government officials and other sources familiar with the special counsel team's work revealed to The Times that Mueller’s nearly 400-page report would be more damaging for  President Donald Trump than what Barr had set out late last month.

"The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained," The Times reported. The investigators also told The Times they had concerns that Barr’s narrative of the findings would have hardened public perception by the time the full report became public.

The special counsel's investigators said they thought Barr should have included more details of their findings in his letter, which was delivered on March 24, barely 48 hours after Mueller submitted his completed report." [Source] 

Of course no one is surprised that the man Mr. trump picked to cover up the Mueller Report and paint it in a favorable light to trump would do just that. What is surprising (and maybe not) is how the American press was quick to buy into Barr's  four page summary of the Report which concluded that trump and his crime family did not conspire with the Russians. They were all too willing to say that the witch hunt didn't snare any witches. The headlines all over the country and in major newspapers was that trump had been exonerated and the dark cloud over his presidency had been lifted. We all know that this was far from true. We had seen too much evidence to the contrary.

Now, as is to be expected, William Barr's cover up is in full effect. He will not release all the information in the report because it is now becoming increasingly clear that it is far more damaging to Mr. trump than first believed.

"Last evening, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that reporters and House Democrats were smearing Attorney General William Barr by implying that his summary of the Mueller report was anything other than completely faithful and representative. The Journal sneered at “the impression, abetted by a press corps that was fully invested in the collusion story, that Mr. Barr is somehow lying about Mr. Mueller’s real conclusions.” This was “preposterous,” the editorial explained, because Barr “surely understood on releasing the summary of conclusions last week that he would be open to contradiction by Mr. Mueller if he took such liberties.”

The editorial was published at 7:24 p.m. Minutes before, and probably too late to make any alterations, the New York Times broke the news that Barr was in fact contradicted. How could anybody think Barr would be stupid enough to lie when Mueller could expose him, asks the Journal, at almost literally the precise moment when Mueller’s team exposes Barr for lying.

The Times reports that Mueller’s famously leak-free team was moved to break its silence by Barr’s slanted summary of its work. The news from the Times, as well as the follow-up report from the Washington Post, conveys very little information about the substance of the report. There’s no reason to doubt Barr’s conclusion that Mueller was unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government. Whether the unflattering information in the report contains evidence of noncriminal misconduct with Russia — remember, collusion is not a crime — or centers entirely around obstruction of justice remains to be seen.

It does seem clear, though, that Barr has not been dealing from the top of the deck. More evidence of his bad faith can be found in his putative reason for abridging Mueller’s conclusions. The special counsel’s report provided summaries of its work. The Times, apparently relying on Justice 
Department sources, reports that Mueller’s summaries could not be published, because they “contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.”[Source] 

So it looks like we are back to square one. Put the ball down trumpnuts. This game is going into overtime.

The head birther lies about his own father's birthplace, and the American press just yawns.

• 

It's been an interesting few days here in these divided states of America.

First, is there a crazier set of people than trump supporters? Look at this and this and tell me if you think that these people are normal. But this is what happens when you belong to a cult, you lose all sense of decency and your ability to reason.

It is also what happens when you fall for a con.

Hakeem Jeffries summed up the conman perfectly:

• "Billionaire”, but no tax returns. “Stable genius”, but no grades. “Exonerated”, but no #MuellerReport. “Party of Healthcare”, but no plan. The American people are being hustled straight out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. "

 And the conman in chief was at it again today. The man actually lied about where his father was born for crying out loud.

“My father is German, right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany,” Trump said during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is from Norway. 

Ahhhm, no Donald, your father was born in New York. I mean seriously, who does this? Who lies with all the world watching about where his father was born? I am starting to think that the man just can't help himself. Surely he must have known that this could be easily fact checked. I suppose that when you tell so many lies and you are used to getting away with them you become emboldened to just tell more. 

For instance, trump lied that his government gave Puerto Rico (one of those three Mexican countries) ninety one billion dollars, while trying to make a point about the ungrateful people on the island.

Again, it was easily fact checked, and his lie was exposed. 

But I don't blame trump, I blame the main stream news media for giving him a pass over and over again. These lies and his behavior ( he said oranges instead of origin at least three times today) should give us all cause for concern. Instead, our major news outlets continue to label them misstatements and ignore the fact that the man might actually be insane. 

No post.

I'm on the road field hands. I will holla when I get back.

Mr. Schiff goes to Washington.

Look at this guy, does he look like someone who should be making fun of Adam Schiff's neck? 

Anyway, speaking of Adam Schiff, his beat down of republicans in Washington yesterday was epic, and the transcript from it is worthy of an entire blog post. 

 "Adam Schiff, speaking before the House Intelligence Committee meeting on March 28, 2019:

My colleagues might think it’s okay that the Russians offered dirt on the Democratic candidate for president as part of what’s described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign. You might think that’s okay. My colleagues might think it’s okay that when that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, that the president’s son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help — no, instead that son said he would ‘love’ the help with the Russians.

You might think it was okay that he took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience running campaigns, also took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that the president’s son-in-law also took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that they concealed it from the public. You might think it’s okay that their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better. You might think it’s okay. I don’t.

You might think it’s okay that, when it was discovered a year later that they had lied about that meeting and said it was about adoptions, you might think it’s okay that the president is reported to have helped dictate that lie. You might think it’s okay. I don’t.

You might think it’s okay that the campaign chairman of a presidential campaign would offer information about that campaign to a Russian oligarch in exchange for money or debt forgiveness. You might think that’s okay. I don’t. You might think it’s okay that that campaign chairman offered polling data, campaign polling data, to someone linked to Russian intelligence. I don’t think that’s okay.

You might think it’s okay if that the president himself called on Russia to hack his opponent’s emails, if they were listening. You might think it’s okay that, later that day, the Russians in fact attempted to hack a server affiliated with that campaign. I don’t think that’s okay.
You might think that it’s okay that the president’s son-in-law sought to establish a secret back-channel of communication with Russians through a Russian diplomatic facility. I don’t think that’s okay.
You might think it’s okay that an associate of the president made direct contact with the GRU through Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, that is considered a hostile intelligence agency. You might think it’s okay that a senior campaign official was instructed to reach that associate and find out what that hostile intelligence agency had to say, in terms of dirt on his opponent.

You might think it’s okay that the national security adviser-designate secretly conferred with a Russian ambassador about undermining U.S. sanctions, and you might think it’s okay he lied about it to the FBI.

You might say that’s all okay. You might say that’s just what you need to do to win. But I don’t think it’s okay. I think it’s immoral, I think it’s unethical, I think it’s unpatriotic and, yes, I think it’s corrupt, and evidence of collusion.

Now, I have always said that whether this amounts to proof of conspiracy was another matter. Whether the special counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt the proof of that crime was up to the special counsel and that I would accept his decision, and I do. He is a good an honorable man and he is a good prosecutor.

But I do not think that conduct, criminal or not, is okay. And the day we do think that’s okay is the day we will look back and say, that is the day America lost its way.

And I’ll tell you one more thing that is a propos of the hearing today. I don’t think it’s okay that during a presidential campaign Mr. Trump sought the Kremin’s help to consummate a real estate deal in Moscow that would make him a fortune. According to the special counsel, hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t think it’s okay that he concealed it from the public.  don't think it's okay he advocated a new and more favorable policy towards the Russians, even as he was seeking the Russian's help, the Kremlin’s help, to make money.

I don't think it's okay that his attorney lied to our committee. There is a different word for that than collusion and it's called compromise. And that's the subject of our hearing today."

Mr. Schiff, you have my attention.





 

"Mueller Report Does Not Disprove that Trump Is a Crook The truth is less dramatic, but more sordid."

I gotta give it to Adam Schiff, he is so all of us right now. Like most of us with common sense and a functioning brain, he is not letting trump off the hook. He understands that Mr. Mueller's investigation could not meet the tough criminal standard to prove collusion, but he also understands, like most of us, that Mr. trump and his cohorts did a lot of shady things in plain sight, and that a lot of them have been charged and convicted of their crimes. I just wonder how long Mr. Barr can keep the full report from the citizens of this country.

Mr. trump might not have colluded with the Russian government, but he certainly colluded with RUSSIANS who might or might not been connected to the government.

In the meantime, I have an essay for you to read which you might find interesting.

"The report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which does not establish that Donald Trump or his campaign actively took part in a conspiracy with Russia to subvert the 2016 presidential election, is a major blow to Trump’s political opponents.

Trump, of course, is taking it to the hoop, claiming that the report is a “total exoneration” (despite an official summary that states that it is not) and saying that the entire investigation was driven by people who did “very, very evil” and “treasonous things against our country” and promising a counter-investigation.

Critics on the left and the right have attacked news outlets that pumped up the Russia investigation, inflating hopes for defeating Trump based on the theory that he was a real-life Manchurian Candidate, elected by conspiring with Russia to subvert the outcome of the 2016 election.
The truth is less dramatic, but more sordid: It’s not that Trump engaged in secret dealings with the Russians in order to become President of the United States; it’s that Trump ran for President as a publicity stunt, figuring he would lose, all the while focusing on his real goal: a secret hotel deal he was working out with the Russians to build his Trump Tower Moscow.

We learned the details of that scheme from Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, who testified before the House Oversight Committee: “To be clear, Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump-Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it, because he never expected to win.”

Cohen, who pleaded guilty to felony charges and was sentenced to prison after lying to Congress to protect Trump, is one of the many people with close ties to Trump who have been criminally charged as a result of the Mueller investigation. Others include Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, and former campaign strategist Roger Stone.

The claim that the Mueller investigation was a big nothingburger flies in the face of all thirty-four indictments by the special counsel, as well as the facts that we know were uncovered—even without reading the full report.

---

In fact, Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary disproves Trump’s claims that the investigation was simply a “witch hunt.”

Barr notes that Mueller found plenty of evidence of Russian hacking and a disinformation campaign aimed at tilting the outcome of the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. That alone is sufficient justification for the investigation.

Mueller also explicitly stated, according to Barr, that, on obstruction of justice, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
What the Mueller investigation did not find was an explicit agreement between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to subvert the election. Mueller left it to the Attorney General’s office to decide whether the investigation had uncovered conclusive proof of obstruction by the President. The Attorney General quickly decided to clear Trump on that charge. Members of Congress are demanding to see the evidence. And they should.

Meanwhile, thanks to Mueller, we have learned a lot more about the mobster-like behavior of the President of the United States. As Cohen explained to the House Oversight Committee: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.”

“Mr. Trump had made clear to me through his personal statements to me that we both knew to be false, and through his lies to the country, that he wanted me to lie,” Cohen continued. “And he made it clear to me because his personal attorneys reviewed my statement before I gave it to Congress.”
In other words, Trump is smart enough to hint about crimes he wants his aides to commit, without coming out and making an explicit agreement to that effect.

What is important here is not whether Trump directed the Russian government to interfere in the election. What’s important is that the Russian government meddled in our election to help him, and that we now have a President of the United States who lies continually, who puts his own financial interests ahead of the interests of the country, and who is stunningly unprepared and uninterested in his job, and was as shocked as anyone that he was elected in the first place.

Trump has used his time in office to stir up conflict and petty personality wars to serve his own ego, and to continue running his family business, Sopranos-style. Cohen is going to prison in part for a scheme to use campaign funds to make hush-money payments to a porn star for Trump.
We are sure to learn more tawdry details about the Trump organization’s business practices and campaign finance violations from the investigation now underway in the Southern District of New York.

This much is clear: The case against Trump is not over with the Mueller report. Forget the spin about a report that did not find specific criminally indictable evidence of a conspiracy with Russia. Focus on the mountain of evidence that the President is unfit for office." [Story]

Disappointment and then anger.

A        As a kid growing up in a Seventh Day Adventist home, I would hear talk about The Great Disappointment from time to time. Every Adventist knew about that day on October 22, 1844, when William Miller declared that the Lord would return to earth.

People sold all their belongings, quit their jobs, and waited with their families for that great day. Sadly, it never happened. It turns out that poor William Miller got the book of Daniel out of the bible  all wrong.

A lot of democrats and progressives are feeling like those Millerites felt back then. The Mueller Report was, to them, a modern day version of the Daniel 8 prophecy.

Bob Mueller decided that he did not find enough evidence to proclaim that the trump crime family colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 elections. Folks are upset, and they believe that the fix was in all along. How could he not? I mean what was that Trump Tower meeting with Russians all about? Why would everyone around trump lie about their contacts with the Russians? How do you explain trump's behavior towards Putin? A real punch in the gut. (Now a lot of you folks know how people of color feel about the justice system in this country.)

The truth is, it was always going to be hard for Mueller to prove collusion. The brilliance of trump's ploy was that he beat the word collusion into the national conversation, and as a result finding him guilty of anything less than collusion would vindicate him.

Now, as is to be expected, he and his minions are doing victory laps because the Mueller Report did not find that there was collusion between trump and the Russians. Poor Mr. Mueller was always going to have a hard time proving collusion, because when you are an expert at cheating and playing outside the lines like the president, you are not going to be dumb enough to get caught.

Of course, contrary to what you are hearing from from folks on the right and some cable talking heads, It was not a total vindication. Bob Mueller stated in no uncertain terms that he cannot say for sure that the sitting president of the United Sates did not obstruct justice. The very thing what we impeached Bill Clinton for, and what we started to impeach Tricky Dicky for before he walked away in shame.

What we are seeing now is the trump handpicked AG write a four page summary to congress of Mr. Mueller's report , and then declare that there was no obstruction. This of course is not what Mr. Mueller said. And we still have not seen the full report. Legal experts question William Barr's rationale for exonerating trump,but we don't need legal experts, our common sense tells us all exactly what is happening here. There was a reason that Mr. trump wanted this guy to be his AG. 

So yes, the folks who are disappointed have every right to be. More importantly, though, given what William Barr did, they have a right to be angry as well.