Saturday, December 20, 2025
Solar Program Designed to Help Low-Income and Environmental Justice Zone Residents Instead Leaves them Stranded
Louisiana contractor picked by McKee administration abruptly goes bankrupt
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
The program was supposed to put solar panels on
roofs and help Rhode Island’s low-income families with their electric bills.
Instead, it left homeowners dealing with a bankrupt company and nowhere to turn
for help.
Question: what due diligence did the McKee
administration do before giving out the contract?
Nearly two years ago, Gov. Dan McKee announced the Affordable Solar Access Pathways (ASAP) program. The
idea behind it was simple: provide cash incentives for homeowners in low-income
and environmental justice zones to install solar panels on the roofs of their
homes.
The state, using money from the Renewable Energy Fund, would
give incentives to a vendor to provide solar panels, leases and power-purchase
agreements to qualifying homeowners. Leases would be signed for 25 years. The
state would also provide energy efficiency measures and a home energy audit to
the homeowners, at no cost to them, as part of the program.
The idea behind the initiative was to spur solar panel
adoption among low-income homeowners and lower their energy costs. Areas of
Woonsocket, Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, Cranston, West Warwick, East
Providence, Warren, Middletown, and Newport would be eligible to apply.
The only other requirement for households was to have a roof
in good condition and have an income at or below 80% of the state median. There
was no credit score required, and homeowners in default electric service could
apply. The program, as designed, was guaranteed to provide savings for
homeowners in the first year.
“Low-to-moderate income communities have been historically
underserved in the solar marketplace and often experience the negative impacts
of climate change firsthand,” McKee said in a January 2024 press release announcing the launch of the program.
“Providing environmental justice communities with affordable access to rooftop
solar is essential to ensure all Rhode Islanders benefit from the renewable
energy transition.”
The state hired PosiGen, a Saint Rose, La.-based company, to administer the
program, which was similar to the service PosiGen provided, except the state
would subsidize a big chunk of the leases for enrollees in the program.
Why ultra-processed foods make teens eat more when they aren’t hungry
There's a reason why it's called junk food
Virginia Tech
Rates of excess weight are climbing among young people in
the United States.
An analysis published in The Lancet predicts that by 2050,
about one in three Americans between 15 and 24 years old will meet the criteria
for obesity, putting them at higher risk for serious health problems.
Many influences contribute to this trend, including genetics
and low levels of physical activity, but diet plays a central role.
Ultra-processed foods -- which make up 55 to 65 percent of
what young adults eat in the U.S. -- have been associated with metabolic
syndrome, poor cardiovascular health, and other conditions in adolescents.
Health insurance premiums rose nearly 3x the rate of worker earnings over the past 25 years
Health insurance inflation is a problem for almost everybody
Premiums can rise if the costs of the medical services they cover increase. Using consumer price indices for the main components of medical care – such as services provided in clinics and hospitals as well as administrative expenses – based on federal data and data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, we found that the cost of hospital services increased the most, while the cost of physician services and prescription drugs rose more slowly.
Some of the premium increases can be attributed to an increase in hospital outpatient visits and coverage of GLP-1 drugs. But research, including our own, suggests that premiums have rapidly escalated mostly because health system consolidation – when hospitals and other health care entities merge – has led hospitals to raise prices well above their costs.
Friday, December 19, 2025
After all the noise, the Westerly School Committee does the right thing
Westerly School Committee votes down anti-transgender student athlete policy
 |
| Westerly is ready to compete |
Asked for his professional opinion, the School Committee
Attorney, William Nardone, was unequivocal in his opposition: “…one
of my roles in this position, probably my most important role, is to keep you
out of trouble as opposed to getting you out once you get yourselves in. This
is a perfect example of my opportunity to attempt to keep you from getting into
some trouble.”
The effort to discriminate against transgender, gender
diverse, and transitioning students seems to be led by a small group of
bigoted Christian Nationalists, with the support of Committee member Wycall, who seems desperate to pass something that will somehow fit into Rhode
Island’s strong laws protecting the rights of LGBTQIA+ students, while also
discriminating against them. Unfortunately for Committee member Wycall, there is
no squaring this circle. Any effort to pass and enforce such a policy would be
bigoted, discriminatory, and against the law.
The Westerly School Committee has been wrestling with this
right-wing manufactured “controversy” for months, even years. Even after the
policy’s definitive rejection in last night’s meeting, proponents of
discrimination promised to keep taking shots at it.
Here’s the relevant video from Wednesday’s Westerly
School Committee meeting:
Compassion tied to higher life satisfaction
Feeling happier starts with kindness
By Linda Schädler, Universität Mannheim
edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Robert Egan
Key findings from the meta-analysis
While the link between self-compassion and well-being is well established, this effect has hardly been researched with respect to compassion for others.
In a meta-analysis, the research team analyzed data from
more than 40 individual studies.
On
average, these people's psychological well-being was higher. The link between
compassion and a reduction in negative feelings, such as stress or sadness, was
weaker. However, slight positive trends could also be seen in this respect.
Likely Brown University killer found dead in New Hampshire
Suspect in Brown University mass shooting found dead in New Hampshire
From a press release posted by SteveAhlquist.news
 |
| The above video still of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was taken from Alamo Rent a Car on November 17, 2025. This shows Valente picking up the car. |
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, the Providence Police Department, the Rhode Island State Police, the Boston Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Rhode Island are today announcing the death of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the individual responsible for the murders of two students during a mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday, December 13, 2025.
You
can watch the news conference video here.
“While we’ll
never be able to prosecute this individual, I hope this result begins to
provide some small measure of closure for the victims and their families. I
want to extend enormous gratitude to all of our law enforcement partners for
their outstanding work in this case. Since Saturday, these men and women have
worked around the clock to achieve justice for the victims and restore a sense
of peace to Rhode Islanders.”
On December 18, 2025, a Rhode Island state court, based on
an affidavit from a Providence Police Detective, issued a state arrest warrant
for Neves Valente, charging him with two counts of murder and 23 felony counts
of assault and felony firearms offenses.
Earlier this evening, law enforcement located Neves Valente
at a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. After obtaining a federal search
warrant for the unit, authorities entered and found Neves Valente deceased from
a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Neves Valente (age 48) was born in Torres Novas, Santarem, Portugal, and was a Legal Permanent Resident of the United States. Neves Valente arrived in the United States in August 2000 as an F-1 student at Brown University and subsequently obtained U.S. lawful permanent residency in April 2017. While at Brown University, he enrolled in a doctoral program but later withdrew from the university.
Full details of the investigation and subsequent
identification of Neves Valente can be found
in this affidavit.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Valente is also believed by authorities to have killed MIT nuclear scientist Nuno F.G. Loureiro on Monday at his home in Brookline, MA.
Predictably, Trump's Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has suspended the program that allowed Valente to be granted a green card.
Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Accusations of Mortgage Fraud by His Enemies
Classic Trump: He does what he accuses others of doing
Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.
But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Birthright Citizenship Is in the Constitution Plain As Day
Almost the entire Trump family, including Donald himself, are children of immigrants.
The case at issue, Trump v. Barbara, involves
birthright citizenship — the principle that you’re a citizen of the country
where you were born.
In the United States, birthright citizenship was written
into the Constitution after the Civil War. Following the end of slavery, the
amendment confirmed that the fundamental rights of citizenship do not depend on
white ancestry, but belong to everyone born in this country.
On Day One of his presidency, Trump issued an Executive
Order to overthrow that principle. He ordered that babies born in the
U.S. of undocumented immigrants should not be considered citizens.
If Trump’s order were deemed legal, he would have the power
to annul the citizenship of tens of millions of Americans, deny their right to
vote and other legal entitlements, and even deport them. Trump’s endorsement of
racial targeting in ICE arrests confirms that, in revoking citizenship, he
would focus on people of color.
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” he
continued. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as
clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
Coughenour is no “radical liberal.” He was appointed to the
bench by conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan. But any reasonable
judge would reach the same conclusion — and many did, including judges of the
Ninth and First Circuits.
Disturbingly, however, the Supreme Court may validate this
“blatantly unconstitutional order.” Under Supreme Court rules, at least four
justices must vote to take up a lower court ruling. So at least four decided
Trump’s incredible claims were sound enough to put on the Supreme Court docket.
The decision is unsupportable. The Fourteenth Amendment
begins with this plain statement: “All persons born or naturalized in
the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump’s lawyers assert that children born in the United
States of undocumented immigrants aren’t citizens because they aren’t subject
to U.S. jurisdiction. That’s nonsense — jurisdiction has nothing to do with
whether someone is legally in the United States.
“Jurisdiction” refers
to the lawful authority a government exercises over individuals within its
territory. If someone is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, that means U.S. laws
don’t apply to them.
The Triple Tax on U.S. Scientific Research
Science relies on the shared, free flow of information
.webp)
What the uproar really revealed, however, was something subtler but just as corrosive: the hidden economics of how science gets published and accessed.
Most Americans don’t realize they are paying not once, not twice, but at least three times for the same body of research.
Inside universities, this academic triple tax, as I think of it, is so normalized that faculty barely notice it, and they feel paralyzed to do anything about it. It’s woven into the daily routines of professors, grant writers, peer reviewers, and librarians. Yet it quietly drains billions of public dollars each year, enriching a handful of for-profit publishers while eroding the budgets of the very institutions that produce the research.
Restaurant angst
If you're looking for a distraction from real problems, here it is
By City St George’s, University of London
Most people recognize the familiar moment at a restaurant or
dinner party when their meal arrives, yet they hesitate to begin eating because
others are still waiting. This long-standing custom was the focus of new
research co-authored by Bayes Business School. The findings show that
individuals tend to worry more about breaking this norm themselves than about
others doing so.
The study, conducted by Irene Scopelliti, Professor of
Marketing and Behavioural Science, and Janina Steinmetz, Professor of Marketing
at Bayes, together with Dr Anna Paley from the Tilburg School of Economics and
Management, explored how people judge their own behavior compared with what
they expect from others in the same situation. Their work drew on six separate
experiments.
Participants were asked to imagine sharing a meal with a
friend. In some scenarios, they received their food first; in others, they
watched their dining partner receive a meal before them. Those who were served
first rated, on a numerical scale, how long they felt they should wait or
whether they should start eating. Those who were still waiting evaluated what
they believed their companion ought to do.
The results showed a clear gap between how people judge
themselves and how they judge others. Individuals served first thought they
should wait significantly longer than their dining partners actually expected
them to.
Trump Economic Approval Hits All-Time Low as White House Official Insists ‘Nothing Bad Is Happening’
Two-thirds of the public don't believe him and he's pissed
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The latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research poll released Thursday found that only 31% of voters approve of Trump’s
handling of the economy, the lowest figure in that survey throughout either of
his two terms in office. Overall, 68% of voters said that the current state of
the economy was “poor.”
What’s more, Trump’s approval rating on the economy among
Republican voters now stands at just 69%, a strikingly low figure for a
president who has consistently commanded loyalty from the GOP base.
Despite the grim numbers, the president and his
administration have continued to say that the US is now in the middle of an
economic boom.
During a Thursday morning interview on CNBC,
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the US now has “the greatest $30
trillion economy in the world.”
“We are doing great,” Lutnick said. “Nothing bad is
happening. Greatness is happening. We grew at 4% GDP! Come on!”
Lutnick’s message echoes the one Trump delivered earlier
this week during a rally in Pennsylvania, where he
said that voters’ concerns about being able to afford basics such as groceries,
electricity, and healthcare were
a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.
“Prices are coming down very substantially,” Trump falsely
claimed during his speech. “But they have a new word. You know, they always
have a hoax. The new word is affordability.”
Wednesday, December 17, 2025
School shootings dropped in 2025 - but schools are still focusing too much on safety technology instead of prevention
US owns almost half of all the guns in the world, around 500 million
Active shootings represent a very small percentage of on-campus university violence.
Wrong questions. Wrong answers
But among those that do happen, there are patterns. And as law enforcement officials continue to investigate the Dec. 13, 2025, Brown University shooting, similarities can be seen with other active shooter cases on college campuses that scholar James Densley has studied. “They tend to happen inside a classroom, and there tends to be multiple victims,” Densley explains.
The Brown University tragedy, in which a shooter killed two students and injured nine more, marks the fourth deadly shooting at a U.S. university in 2025.
The Department of Education in Rhode Island, where Brown University is located, said on Dec. 16 that it is urging local elementary and secondary schools to review safety protocols.
Amy Lieberman, the education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Densley about how schools have been given what he describes as an “impossible mandate” to try to prevent shootings.
What is the overall trajectory of school shootings over the past few years?
K-12 school shootings appear to be trending downward, at least in the past two years. But we actually saw the largest jumps in this type of violence in the three to five years leading up to 2024, which trends closely with the broader rise in homicide and violent crime we saw in the pandemic era.
In 2025, there have been 230 school shooting incidents in the U.S. – still a staggeringly high number. This compares with 336 school shootings in 2024, 352 in 2023, 308 in 2022, and 257 in 2021.
How this relates to an increase in schools trying to institute security measures to prevent shootings is an open question. But it’s true that many schools are experimenting with certain solutions, like cameras, drones, AI threat detection, weapons scanners, panic apps and facial recognition, even if there is only weak or emerging evidence about how well they work.
Schools are treated as the front line, because the larger, structural solutions are too difficult to confront. It is much easier to blame schools after a tragedy than to actually address firearm access, grievance pathways – meaning how a person becomes a school shooter – and the other societal problems that are creating these tragedies.
Incentives
An example of truth being stranger than fiction, here is an actual Homeland Security recruitment ad
How To Have a Plastic-Free Holiday Season
Some suggestions
Most Americans are sick of plastic
use, but manufacturers continue to push the product on us. This holiday
season, is it possible to have a plastic-free celebration?
There’s no substitute for systemic policy change to regulate
plastic use, but individual actions on a mass scale can have an impact. They
can also be a dinner table conversation, potentially spurring cultural shifts
and inspiring local activism.
“None of us voted for more plastic,” says
Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond
Plastics. Enck, who served as regional administrator at the Environmental
Protection Agency in 2009, adds that “the reason we have so much plastic is
because there is a glut of fracked
gas on the market.”
Enck says it’s entirely possible to have a plastic-free
holiday season. She suggests forgoing disposable dinnerware for your Christmas,
Hannukah, or Kwanzaa meal. “You can rent glassware and plates and beautiful
reusable tablecloths and napkins from local vendors,” she says.
Trump Administration asking universities to provide lists of Jews.
This is never a good thing.
So, when the university that granted me my doctorate and
educated four generations of my family was
asked by the Trump administration in July for lists of Jewish faculty
members, I held my breath. Would I be able to continue to be proud of the
University of Pennsylvania, the place I learned so much from?
In the past year, universities have varied widely in their responses to demands from the Trump administration to fall into line on ridding their campuses of wokeness and antisemitism. Columbia University (my undergraduate alma mater) settled with the administration, paying $21 million in return for restoring its federal research grants.
It’s hard to see how cutting basic science research will help reduce
antisemitism. It will likely only cause Jews’ presence at a university to be
seen as somehow disruptive. (See the recent
arguments that women ruined the workplace.)
Other universities have variously complied with
administration demands or resisted, but a few, such as Barnard College
of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, acquiesced
and shared personal cellphone numbers of Jewish faculty. (Penn
refused, and is now being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission.) Nara Milanich, a Barnard history professor, said it
reminded her of 1930s Italy, when lists of Jews were put together by the local
government. “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars,” she
said.
It also troubled Milanich that the government appeared to be
“fishing” for reports of antisemitism: According to the Forward,
the University of California, Berkeley said it had provided the names of 160
individuals involved in cases of antisemitism. “Evidently, they don’t
have sufficient people to file lawsuits, so they have to go shake the trees to
find people?” said Milanich.
Lists of Jews are never a good thing. Amanda Shanor, a
professor at the Wharton School and Penn’s law school, told
The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper: “The history of government
demands for lists of Jewish people is one of the most terrifying in world
history. I hope that students, faculty, and staff — Jewish and non-Jewish alike
— will tell their family and friends about the government’s demand for a list
of Penn’s Jews.”
Five big moments when your brain dramatically changes
Here are the five biggies
University of Cambridge
Neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge report that the human brain moves through five "major epochs" as it rewires itself from early development to late old age.
Each stage reflects a different
way the brain supports thinking, learning, and behavior as we grow, mature, and
eventually experience age-related decline.
A team from Cambridge's MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences
Unit analyzed MRI diffusion scans from 3,802 individuals ranging from newborns
to 90 years old. These scans track the movement of water through brain tissue,
which helps researchers map the networks that link one region to another.
Their findings, published in Nature Communications,
show that the brain's structure progresses through five broad phases. Four key
"turning points" divide these phases, marking ages when the brain
undergoes meaningful reorganization.
White House Abruptly Cancels Meeting on FEMA’s Future After Leaked Report Revealed Plan to Gut the Agency
Trump continues baffling attack on FEMA. Is it another distraction?
A meeting that was supposed to chart the future of America’s disaster-response agency ended on Thursday before it could even begin.
The final report of a committee tasked by Donald Trump with reviewing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was scheduled to be presented and put to a vote Thursday afternoon. But shortly before 1 p.m., when the FEMA Review Council was scheduled to convene in Washington, a draft of the report was leaked to news outlets and the White House abruptly canceled the session.
The shakeup appeared to surprise even some of the review council’s own members, several of whom were still awaiting instructions outside the meeting’s planned location less than an hour before it was supposed to start, The Washington Post reported. Registered attendees only received notice of the meeting’s postponement after the event was scheduled to conclude. That announcement, a two-sentence email from the council’s designated federal officer, Patrick Ryan Powers, did not provide an explanation for the cancellation or a date for a rescheduled meeting.
The draft of the report signaled the review council’s plan to dramatically cut the agency even as climate change-fueled disasters increase, provoking swift condemnation from advocacy groups and emergency management experts. Critics panned the draft as a blueprint for weakening the nation’s primary emergency-response agency and shifting responsibility onto states unequipped and unprepared to manage crises alone.
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Human Rights and Democracy Replaced by Profit
Trump’s Distorted World View
Beyond the fallout of defending U.S. strikes on suspected
drug boats, increasing threats of an undeclared war on Venezuela, the excesses
of a mass deportation campaign spiraling out of control, unending tariffs, and
flailing attempts to force Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia, we got a
new National
Security Strategy document that lays out Trump’s values as if they are
ours.
Together, they reflect the clear vision of an autocratic,
power-minded Trump who wants to dictate to Americans and the rest of the world
that they should forego human rights and democracy, recognize a U.S.
hemispheric dominance, and kowtow to us because of our national wealth, not our
ideals.
As
The New York Times concluded in an analysis of the strategic document,
“The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its
vast powers to make money” at the expense of support for dictators and caring
about those without wealth.
“Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a
global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing
migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing
them as sources of cash,” The Times analysis said.
King Donald's new scheme to bring in more rich people. What's his cut?
This is a real thing. Not a joke. Not a meme.
Tariffs 101: What they are, who pays them, and why they matter now
Understanding Trump's new national sales tax
Kent Jones, Babson College
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The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case to determine whether Donald Trump’s global tariffs are legal.
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Until recently, tariffs rarely made headlines. Yet today, they play a major role in U.S. economic policy, affecting the prices of everything from groceries to autos to holiday gifts, as well as the outlook for unemployment, inflation and even recession.
I’m an economist who studies trade policy, and I’ve found that many people have questions about tariffs. This primer explains what they are, what effects they have, and why governments impose them.
What are tariffs, and who pays them?
Tariffs are taxes on imports of goods, usually for purposes of protecting particular domestic industries from import competition. When an American business imports goods, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sends it a tariff bill that the company must pay before the merchandise can enter the country.
Because tariffs raise costs for U.S. importers, those companies usually pass the expense on to their customers by raising prices. Sometimes, importers choose to absorb part of the tariff’s cost so consumers don’t switch to more affordable competing products. However, firms with low profit margins may risk going out of business if they do that for very long. In general, the longer tariffs are in place, the more likely companies are to pass the costs on to customers.
Trump’s Draconian Border Policies Are Menacing the 2026 World Cup
Trump is banning travel from more than 30 countries
Maybe this is why FIFA gave Trump his phony "peace prize"
By Nora Loreto
This article was originally published by Truthout
In addition to the matches, 84 training sites and 178 practice fields will be spread across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Plus, tens of thousands of broadcasters from around the world will cover the games for their home countries.
Holding the games in three countries means that ease of crossing borders is a fundamental part of the World Cup going smoothly. Hundreds of thousands of players, staff, and fans will need to move across the U.S.-Mexico border and the Canada-U.S. border multiple times in order to attend the matches over the course of six weeks in June and July 2026. But already, months before the games begin, concerns are mounting over whether attendees will be able to enter the host countries at all.
Monday, December 15, 2025
Russia’s Most Dangerous Weapon is Donald Trump’s Mind
How did the United States Come to Back a Vicious Dictator against All Its Allies?
Dr. Bandy X. Lee
The disintegration of Donald Trump’s mind—now obvious for everyone to see—is metaphorical of the disintegration of our society. Unfitness means that there is no one in charge of the government; there is no one home. Rather, the appearance of someone being home makes him a prime target for nefarious forces to do their mischief.
I warned in The
Psychology of Trump Contagion, published before the 2024 presidential
election:
Sometimes the greatest threat to national security is
someone who can be leveraged and compromised—so as to parrot our enemies’
propaganda, to destroy American democracy from within, and to assist their rise
in global dominance.
One of these enemies is Vladimir Putin. Russian forces
launched 704 total missiles and drones against Ukraine overnight on December 5
to 6, 2025, heavily targeting railway and energy infrastructure in this proxy
U.S.-Russia war. The goal is to freeze our fellow pro-democracy Europeans, so
as to force them into submission as winter approaches.
So, how did the U.S. come to aid and comfort a hostile
opponent bent on reestablishing the Soviet Union? Astute political
commentator Thom
Hartmann makes a critical observation from the Epstein emails:
The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are
apparently not the only ones who’ve paid the price for Donald Trump’s long
relationship with that notorious pedophile.
Epstein’s “partying” with Trump has apparently also led to
thousands of civilian deaths abroad, the collapse of America’s credibility
around the world, and a serious threat to the future of democracy in Europe….
In Epstein’s emails, he boasts of offering to advise
Russia’s senior-most officials about how to manipulate Trump: “I think you
might suggest to putin that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] lavrov can
get insight on [Trump by] talking to me…”
Consider Trump’s secretive and beta-submissive behavior
toward Vladimir Putin, especially in Helsinki when he trashed our intelligence
agencies and sucked up to Putin, and more recently with his red carpet in
Alaska, and it’s impossible to ignore what this newest Epstein revelation
implies.
If Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is a direct or indirect
result of things Trump did with Epstein, it’s naked treachery. Consider the
pattern:… the Russian military targets … are not accidents of war. They’re the
deliberate targeting of civilians, children, doctors, classrooms, apartment
buildings, homes, and hospitals….
And all of this—the horror of what’s happening in plain
sight that’s the clear result of Trump’s repeated and pathetic kowtowing to
Putin—appears, from the Epstein emails, that it may be getting so much worse
over the past 10 months because Putin took Epstein’s advice and threatened
Donald Trump with exposure.
We still don’t know what was said in that room in Helsinki
because Trump covered it up, making sure we’d never know. He ordered his
American interpreter to move away from his private conversation with Putin, and
afterward seized and destroyed her notes.
Similarly and more recently, in Alaska, Trump dismissed his
aides and rode with Putin privately in his car where they engaged in another
lengthy, secretive conversation.
That’s the behavior of a man with something to hide,
who’s terrified by some horrible secret….
Donald Trump's bonkers social media post about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife.
If his people won't invoke the 25th Amendment, they should at least take away his cell phone
Kash Patel's terrible pre-mature victory lap in the Brown shooting
Eager to show he isn't the total screw-up most non-MAGA feel he is, Patel tweeted this yesterday to claim credit for the capture and arrest of THE WRONG GUY. No thanks to Patel, his false statement interrupted the investigation for the real killer who, at this writing, is still on the loose.
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