Opinion

It's only Wednesday but it's already been quite a week for legal activity in Trumpworld. It's eerily reminiscent of those heady days back in 2017 and 2018 when everyone assumed that special counselor Robert Mueller's report on his investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election and potential connections to the Trump campaign was going to lay out all the ugly facts, leading to Trump's impeachment and conviction .. and then planet Earth would tilt back on its axis and we could all resume our normal lives. Yeah, that was dumb. And despite all this latest action from the state of New York as well as the Justice Department and the federal courts, it's highly likely the outcome will be the same this time.

There is some news that could change the equation, however, depending — once again — on what the authorities have uncovered. If they do have the goods, it then depends on whether or not the prosecutors have the guts to take Trump and his cronies to court over it.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, like a cat peeing on your bed, has found the most surefire way to get that sweet, sweet attention she craves: Holocaust comparisons.

It started last week when the QAnon congresswoman from Georgia made a glib and risible comparison between an ongoing mask mandate in the House of Representatives — necessary only because GOP congressional members refuse to get COVID-19 vaccines (or admit they did, anyway) — to literal genocide.

It's 2021, and Black Americans still struggle harder to climb the socioeconomic ladder compared to whites. For many, the trip is now downward, a situation worsened during a pandemic that has impacted them disproportionately.

Economists William Lazonick, Philip Moss, and Joshua Weitz have been researching the key economic forces that have disadvantaged Black men for decades. In a new study focusing on those with only high school diplomas or less, they find that corporate greed - abetted by government policies designed by the wealthy – turned the dreams of once-upwardly mobile citizens into ashes.

Sometimes cultural change takes generations or even centuries; sometimes it happens in the seeming blink of the eye. America's bad cops — and their enablers — are having their Harvey Weinstein moment.

Harvey was a big shot in Hollywood for decades when it was not uncommon for powerful men to help make women into stars in exchange for sex. It was so common that in a Cagney and Lacey TV show from the 1980s one of the characters openly asks the other if a particularly ditzy "movie star" character in that episode of the show "slept with the producer" to get the part.

On Jan. 6, Donald Trump's followers launched an attack on the U.S. Capitol. This was part of a larger coup attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and end America's multiracial democracy. Trump's forces carried Confederate flags and a Christian fascist cross, and were adorned with neo-Nazi, KKK and other white supremacist regalia. Many were believers in the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory. The forces that overran the Capitol that day had various weapons — although fortunately relatively few firearms. A weapons cache that included homemade explosives was also discovered nearby.

Trump's terrorist force intended to stop the certification of Joe Biden as winner of the 2020 presidential election. Part of their plot involved "arresting" then-Vice President Mike Pence as well as senior Democratic members of Congress, and perhaps also those Republicans deemed "traitors" or "enemies" by the Trump movement. The mob would have in all likelihood followed through on its threats to execute those people, perhaps using the functioning gallows that had been constructed on the Capitol grounds.

At the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, I feel compelled to warn you that if we forget and move on from the tragedies of this past year, we're setting ourselves on a dangerous path. Of course I understand the desire to forget all the unpleasantness and start a new chapter. But if we do, we're inviting greater tragedies in the future.

Let me remind you: Donald Trump lied about the results of the last election. And then – you remember, don't you? – he tried to overturn the results.

Last week, to very little fanfare, House Democrats released their 2020 "after action report," also known as an "autopsy." The team, led by Rep. Sean Maloney, D-N.Y., included Reps. Jim Himes D-Conn., Katie Porter D-Ca. and Nikema Williams, D-Ga., and was tasked with finding out how the House managed to lose so many seats in an election in which the Democratic nominee managed to unseat an incumbent Republican president. Working with senior staff, Democrats analyzed the voter files from the presidential election and other state and local data and compared them with 600 different House race polls in 2020. According to this report in the Washington Post, they didn't really find anything that most observers hadn't already assumed from the results.

It turns out that Democrats underestimated the number of hardcore Trump lovers, which they surmised made the "defund the police" and "socialism" lies more potent in the swing districts. That underestimation is attributed to bad polling, which has been validated by pollsters themselves. Many Republicans just aren't responding anymore and the pollsters failed to successfully weigh their polls accordingly. (This has been going on for a while and really needs to be dealt with.) Maloney told the caucus that such faulty polling led them to spend too much time and money on "red-to-blue" districts and not enough to defend their incumbents in what turned out to be tight races.

As we're struggling to recover from Trump's half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report

Last Wednesday, House Republicans voted against a bill that would establish a commission to investigate the coup attempt and attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. That outcome is in no way surprising. As a rule, criminals do not want to subject themselves to investigations and potential punishment.

The Jan. 6 commission bill finally passed the House on a vote of 252-175, with 35 Republicans voting in favor. Mitch McConnell has vowed that Senate Republicans will block the bill.

Republican pollster and Kevin McCarthy friend-slash-roommate Frank Luntz isn't afraid of boasting about his personal achievements. "Dr. Frank I. Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today," reads a biography on his website. But some of his former employees tell a remarkably different story.

Chris Ingram, a former senior vice president at the Luntz Research Company who worked at the company from 1997 through the early 2000s, told Salon that Luntz's claim to deliver objective data is a "total shtick and a scam."

The "COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act" signed into law Thursday by President Joe Biden has been hailed as a rare breakthrough in the partisan gridlock that poisons American politics.

That's a fair assessment, given that the law was passed by whopping margins of 94-1 in the Senate and 364-62 in the House of Representatives. The big story was the bipartisan goodwill -- however fleeting -- that accompanied a measure that will, among other things, provide long-overdue greater protections to members of the AAPI community.

I first met Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, the Israeli peace and anti-apartheid activist, on a sunny spring Sunday in Jerusalem almost exactly seventeen years ago, in 2004. It was at the end of the second Intifada, and a few of us clambered into a van so that she and a colleague could give us a tour of what it was like to be a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories. It was revelatory. We've remained friends ever since.

Angela's the director of Jahalin Solidarity, a non-profit dedicated to ending the forcible displacement of Palestinians and defending their rights, including self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation of their land.