Vatican Likely Won’t Punish Those Who Covered Up Child Sexual Abuse

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According to the just-released grand jury report, in 1990, Bishop James Timlin of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was first made aware that a priest who had recently been transferred to his Diocese, Father Arthur Long, had admitted to having sex with underage girls in his parish in Harrisburg. Timlin was the bishop in the Scranton Diocese, which encompasses the entire northeast section of Pennsylvania, from 1984 to 2003. Prior to being the bishop, Continue Reading...

Will Trump & His Banana Republicans Spell Electoral Doom For The GOP? Maybe.

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Here are a couple of facts to make your head explode.  A mere 15 bills that are not ceremonial in nature or rescind existing laws have passed Congress since Donald Trump became president.  This includes a bill sent to the president this week that rescinds a law forbidding discrimination in car loans.  (I am not making this up.)   Meanwhile, the august House Rules Committee has sent a record-shattering 84 bills to the House floor this year under Continue Reading...

Torture Isn’t an Impediment to a Career in Washington

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Please, motherfuckers. Fucking, fucking please stop acting like anything other than confirmation is going to happen with Gina Haspel. When Barack Obama nominated John Brennan to be the director of the CIA, the vote to confirm him in March 2013 was 63-34-3. Brennan had been the third-ranked CIA official during the time of the torture used on supposed al-Qaeda detainees in the few years after 9/11, many of them completely innocent (although it Continue Reading...

All The President’s Lies: They’ll Catch Up To Him, But It’s Taking A Really Long Time

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The news last week that the president of the United States lied repeatedly about the $130,000 hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels was greeted less with outrage than a practiced yawn, and with every passing lie -- which come at the rate of four or five a day and a mind-boggling 3,000-plus since Donald Trump took office -- that attitude becomes increasingly dangerous.  This is because the pandemic of lies is so blatant and so vast that we risk Continue Reading...

Top Six Reasons Pompeo should not be Secretary of State

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NBC is reporting that Mike Pompeo lacks the votes in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to have his nomination to be Secretary of State be favorably reported out of committee on Monday night. Democrats on the committee have expressed fears that Pompeo, a warmonger, will reinforce the worst tendencies of Trump. Pompeo has been director of the Central Intelligence Agency for the past year. He was tapped to succeed ousted former Secretary of Continue Reading...

Erickson’s Congressman: A Paradox of Our Times

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I'm calling for a new phrase to enter the lexicon of political snark: "Erickson's Congressman." It's based the recent blog post by conservative wannabe-firebrand Erick "Erick" Erickson where he described wandering around a DC Safeway with an unnamed GOP member of Congress who fairly ejaculated a stream of invective and profanity about how much he despises President Donald Trump and how much Trump has wrecked the Republican Party. "If we're going Continue Reading...

Did The Kremlin Send In Manafort To Insure The Trump Campaign Played Its Game?

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It has been fascinating -- in the grotesque sort of way that a slow-motion train wreck is fascinating -- to watch the Russia scandal unfold.  From the first intimations in late 2016 that the dark hand of Vladimir Putin was at work to elect Donald Trump to our dawning realization that the Trump campaign colluded in that effort to our astonishment at how enormous and successful the effort was, there has been one revelation after another.  And so Continue Reading...

Cambridge Analytica as the Matrix: Information Dominance and the Next Level of Fake News

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The 1999 film “The Matrix,” written by Lana Wachowski (formerly Laurence “Larry” Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Andrew Paul “Andy” Wachowski), depicts a future in which human beings have been imprisoned by machines in capsules that siphon off their heat and energy and which create the illusion of everyday life to fool them into thinking they are at liberty. Continue Reading...

Tennessee and Kentucky: Grappling With Ending Child Marriage (aka “Letting Rapists Marry Their Underage Victims” Laws)

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On this International Women's Day, let us remember that in too many places in the United States, kids under 18 are allowed to get married to adults. Sometimes there is an age limit. Sometimes it requires a parent's approval. Sometimes it requires a judge. But, in almost every case, it's an underage girl and a grown man. It's sexual exploitation with the imprimatur of the government behind it. It's beyond fucked up that anywhere in the world in Continue Reading...

New Russia Scandal Twist: The Tale Of The Prostitute, The Oligarch & The Video

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Just when you thought the Russia scandal -- you know, the one that eventually will take down the Donald Trump presidency -- couldn't get any more surreal, it just got more surreal.  The main characters in this real-life version of Pulp Fiction include Anastasia Vashukevich, Oleg Deripaska and Sergei Prikhodko.  Among the secondary characters, and there are a slew, is Paul Manafort.  Yes, that Paul Manafort.  Vashukevich, who as a high-end Continue Reading...

Republican Deficit Fear Strategy

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Driving up deficits and then using deficit fear to stop spending on things that We the People want and need has been open Republican strategy since Reagan. Google “strategic deficits.” Tom Wicker explained in the NY Times in 1985, in IN THE NATION; A Deliberate Deficit, To hear Larry Speakes tell it, President Reagan emerged from anesthesia righteously demanding action on the budget deficit ”this week.” That sounds fine – except that it now Continue Reading...

The Nunes Memo, Spirit Cooking and Pizzagate

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The confident pronouncements by pundits and politicians that the Nunes memo is a dud, dead on arrival, neglect to consider the main tactic of the Republican right wing for some time now. It is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories carried Trump to the White House and many Republicans into Congress or state legislatures. Nunes cherry-picked intelligence reports to arrive at a narrative whereby the Obama FBI bamboozled FISA judges into Continue Reading...

America the Shithole

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It's not even surprising anymore when President Donald Trump, an angry pumpkin on top of a very large pumpkin on top of a smaller pumpkin, says or does something racist. He is a fucking racist. If you're a fucking racist, you do fucking racist shit all the time because that's who you are. If he didn't say or do a racist thing, we might say, "Oh, look, he wasn't racist in that moment." But just because a rat in your house didn't shit all over the Continue Reading...

The President Of The United StatesIs An Unapologetic Racist & Bigot

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The scabrous underbelly of American society was on full display during the year just passed, and no aspect of it is more repulsive as we slink into 2018 than the reality that the president of the United States is an unapologetic racist and bigot, the very embodiment of white power and white privilege.  And that an appalling number of us -- beginning with the timorous congressional majority, denizens of the fever swamp formerly known as the Party Continue Reading...