Clusterf&$K

 

— Will we regret Trump being able to use a nuclear weapon? America confronts two very weird aspects to Trump’s involvement in Netanyahu’s “stay out of jail” attack on Iran. The first is that Russia — oligarchs friendly with Putin, specifically — built the Bushehr nuclear power reactor in Iran and currently has a contract to build eight more, bringing billions in revenue to Russia, Putin, and his buddy. 

Those billions could well go up in smoke with regime change in Iran, so it’s entirely possible that Trump’s sudden “two weeks pause” on deciding to bomb Iran is simply a favor to his owner and handler, Vlad.

After all, they’ve had two phone conversations in just the past few days, according to Trump, following Putin sending him a beautiful large portrait of Trump holding up his fist after being shot at and having his ear splattered with the blood of the man standing beside him who got hit with the bullet.

The second weird take is that an “anonymous” White House official is being quoted over on Fox “News” saying that Trump has not taken dropping a nuke on Iran off the table. Eli Clifton, one of the senior advisers over at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, tweeted, “The US is considering using a nuclear weapon for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki because our client state murdered our Iranian negotiating partner and started a war?”

Is this all a distraction from the Big Brutal Bill like Congressman Mark Pocan asserted on my show this Wednesday? Or a distraction from ICE abuses? Or just more of the bizarre reality show that Trump’s running because that’s the only thing he’s ever successfully done in his life? Stay tuned…

— A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals backed Trump’s National Guard deployment to LA: what will this mean for other Blue cities Trump is trying to provoke to riot? The three judges — two of them Trump appointees — defied common sense and the reality we could all see live on TV and ruled that LA did not, in fact, have the ability to control the disturbances outside the Federal Building. Therefore, they argued, Trump could deploy the California National Guard in defiance of the governor, mayor, chief of police, and sheriff all asserting they had everything under control.

Trump and his fascist minions are hell-bent-for-leather to create a large enough disturbance that they can invoke emergency powers to nationalize city government and end the power of elected officials to run the city. 

If you think that sounds too weird or even impossible, remember that that’s almost exactly what Republican Michigan Governor Rick Snyder did (without the riot) to Detroit, Flint, Benton Harbor, Allen Park, Pontiac, Highland Park and other cities in that state, replacing elected mayors and city councils with corporate-friendly “emergency managers” who then turned the resources of those cities to the benefit of Snyder’s political donors (who then managed to poison the children of Flint). 

There’s precedent here and — particularly since Trump has now promised to send troops into other Blue cities — we ignore it at our own peril.

— Racist Alert! Did Trump ever complain before about too many holidays? Why just on Juneteenth? To celebrate Juneteenth, Trump had the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. removed from the Oval Office and replaced it with a bust of a British white guy (Churchill). Just a few days earlier, U.S. District Judge William Young (a Reagan appointee) noted Trump’s defunding NIH research related to racial and gender minorities, saying: “I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.”

For the past half-century or more, the White House has always issued a statement celebrating every federal holiday; this Juneteenth, though, the White House was silent. Instead, Trump took onto his Nazi-infested social media site to complain that there are, “Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed.” Right. It’s only “too many” holidays when we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in America. I told you he wants to reinvent the Confederacy…

— Look out! Retirees being forced into privatized, for-profit, rip-off Medicare “Advantage” plans. New York’s top court just ruled that the sordid deal NYC’s corrupt Mayor Adams worked out with a Medicare “Advantage” provider to force that city’s ~250,000 retirees off real Medicare and into the insanely profitable “Advantage” scam plans was completely legal. 

The so-called “Advantage” plans are generating hundreds of billions in profits for insurance companies — for many, it’s their primary profit center now — and some of that money is being recycled into “lobbying” for schemes like this one, leaving workers screwed, particularly when they get seriously ill and the “Advantage” providers begin denying payments for care.

Republicans won’t do a thing about these scams because they’re also on the take from the insurance industry (and George W. Bush invented them), but if Democrats ever get back in control of the federal government, they must make real Medicare reform and an end to the “Advantage” scam a top priority.

— Astonishing: Give Trump a million dollars and you get to become an Army officer, complete with uniform and everybody must salute you! You, too, can play warrior if you’re a large enough Trump donor! Hegseth’s Army just rolled out a new program called “Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps” that says its goal is to “fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.” That bullshit-speak for “we’re going to give tech billionaire Trump donors an officer’s commission and a uniform.” 

So far four tech moguls have jumped at the opportunity to strut around in uniform with Lieutenant Colonel’s silver oak leaves on their shoulders, forcing enlisted and inferior officers to snap to attention and salute them, and every one of their companies have shoveled at least a million into one of Trump’s slush funds. This is Kristi Noem-level corruption and cosplaying, funded with your tax dollars.

— Geeky Science. Will Children born now live in a world where the US can only produce half as much of its key food crops? Global warming takes a big bite out of crop yields, in part because of heat and in part because of weather extremes including droughts and flooding. A new eight-year-long study of the issue by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability looking at six crops — maize/corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum — in more than 12,000 regions across 54 countries found that as warming continues it’ll devastate our ability to grow all of them except rice.

The United States, they predict, could see as much as a 50% drop in production. This is particularly dangerous since these six crops represent about two-thirds of all the calories consumed by humans planet-wide. The consequences of fossil fuel executives and their paid-off Republican shills lying to us about climate change for a half-century are starting to come home to roost in a serious and deadly way.

— Bob Kennedy and his anti-vaccine freaks were just caught lying to Congress again about the COVID-19 vaccine, just as a new variant touting a “razor-blade sore throat” arrives. NewsGuard Reality Check has again busted Kennedy and his anti-vax cultists for lying about scientific research. This time, they claimed that getting the Covid vaccine increases chances of miscarriage and placental blood clots, citing two peer-reviewed published studies.

News Guard reached out to the authors of those studies, and they called out Kennedy’s people’s lies, saying they’d never said any such things and that the actual science proves that getting Covid vaccines actually helps prevent Covid-caused miscarriages and blood clots. Republicans and the truth continue to operate in different universes.

-Thom Hartmann