Senator Reed concerned about Trump starting a war with Venezuela

We are not at war with Venezuela. Yet.

by Joan Johnson-Freese, Rhode Island Current

If Trump had actual proof to back his claims,
he would have shown it to us

I once sat next to my Air Force three-star general boss in an otherwise empty auditorium in Montgomery, Alabama, listening to two junior officers rehearse a briefing on U.S. space security efforts. 

At the time, I was the Air War College resident civilian space expert. The two officers tag teaming on statements about U.S. defensive programs also spoke about offensive efforts aimed at particular countries. 

I leaned over and asked the general if we were at war with these countries. 

“Good question,” he whispered back.

“ARE WE AT WAR?” he then shouted out to the briefers.

One firmly answered yes.

The other said no. 

The general was understandably taken aback. “Seems like we ought to have that figured out before going on the offensive,” he replied. 

This happened nearly 30 years ago. But the general could very well make the same common sense statement today, relevant to three U.S. military attacks in the Caribbean that could trigger a war with Venezuela.

The first took place on Sept. 2 when the U.S. military carried out an airstrike against a civilian speedboat the Trump administration said was carrying drugs in international waters off Venezuela, killing 11 people. Then on Sept. 15, a strike on another boat killed three people. A third strike on Sept.19 killed three more people. In each instance, President Donald Trump stated the attacks were against narco-terrorists, members of the Tren de Aragua cartel, on their way to the United States. 

Rhode Island’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has spoken out against what he calls the illegality of the assaults, calling them “reckless, unauthorized operations” that could “drag our nation into a conflict we did not choose.” 

Reed pointed out that miscalculation on anyone’s part during or after the attacks could have triggered a war. California’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff further stated that “blowing up boats without any legal justification risks dragging the United States into another war and provoking unjustified hostilities against our own citizens.” 

US obliteration of Caribbean boat was a clear violation of international ‘right to life’ laws – no matter who was on board

Trump claims the US has the right to destroy boats and kill passengers on the high seas if he suspects they are doing something bad

Mary Ellen O'Connell, University of Notre Dame

The moment before an alleged drug boat was hit in a
targeted U.S. strike. @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social

The U.S. government is justifying its lethal destruction of a boat suspected of transporting illegal drugs in the Caribbean as an attack on “narco-terrorists.”

But as an expert on international law, I know that line of argument goes nowhere. 

Even if, as the U.S. claims, the 11 people killed in the Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. Naval strike were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, it would make no difference under the laws that govern the use of force by state actors.

Nor does the fact that protests from other nations in the region are unlikely, due in large part to Washington’s diplomatic and economic power – and Donald Trump’s willingness to wield it.

Protest is not what proves the law. Unlawful killing is unlawful regardless of who does it, why, or the reaction to it. And in regard to the U.S. strike on the alleged Venezuelan drug boat, the deaths were unlawful.

Domestic U.S. legal issues aside – and concerns have been raised on those grounds, too – the killings in the Caribbean violated the human right to life, an ancient principle codified today in leading human rights treaties.

Killing in war and peacetime

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is one such treaty to which the United States is a party. Article 6 of the covenant holds: “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”

Through rulings of human rights and other courts, it has been well established that determining when a killing has been arbitrary depends on whether the killing occurred in the context of peace or armed conflict.

Peace is the norm. And in times of peace, government agents are only permitted to use lethal force to save a life immediately. The United Nations’ Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials reinforce this peacetime right-to-life standard, noting “intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

The principle is also supported by the fact the U.S. has bilateral treaties regarding cooperation in drug interdiction. The Coast Guard has a series of successful Maritime Law Enforcement Agreements – known as Shiprider Agreements – with nations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They commit U.S. authorities to respecting fundamental due process rights of criminal suspects. Such rights obviously do not include summary execution at sea.

Bypassing these bilateral and international treaties to dramatically blow up a ship not only violates law, but it will, I believe, further undermine trust and confidence in these or any other agreements the U.S. makes.

U.S. labor secretary gives thanks to Cranston firefighters but takes no questions from press

Why the secret Labor Day visit?

By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current

The US Dept. of Labor marked Labor Day by hanging a
giant Big Brother banner from its DC headquarters

The first official visit to Rhode Island by a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet turned out to be a largely private affair. 

U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer met with Cranston firefighters at their Pontiac Avenue headquarters Thursday afternoon as part of her “America at Work” listening tour. 

The secretary’s staff and security detail drove directly into the fire department’s bay-windowed garage shortly before 1 p.m., closed the doors, then opened them once she was inside. Reporters were kept at a distance, and the secretary was kept out of sight. Firefighters then ran through demonstrations in baggy, fluorescent-colored hazmat suits as the secretary toured the station inside.

A few hours before the event, Hunter Lovell, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Labor, said via email that Thursday’s visit builds on Chavez-DeRemer’s celebration earlier this year of National Apprenticeship Day, when she hosted the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) for a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on new apprenticeship standards for first responders. 

TACO Trump is back on his destructive tariff spree

An embarrassing exercise in economic and diplomatic futility

Stephen Robinson

Donald Trump just escalated his mindlessly self-destructive trade war against our (former) economic allies — again.

On July 7, Trump sent rambling letters informing 14 nations, including major trading partners Japan and South Korea, that the US government was slapping them with significantly higher tariffs as of August 1. 

These tariffs are separate from his previously announced sectoral tariffs on automobiles, steel, and aluminum. (This week, he also announced a 50 percent tariff on copper imports for August 1.) 

Trump sent more letters sporadically through the week, with an especially bonkers one to Brazil threatening a 50 percent tariff if the government proceeds with its prosecution of Trump’s partner in coups, Jair Bolsonaro.

Then, Trump announced a new 35 percent tariff on Canada, citing debunked claims about the country turning a blind eye to fentanyl flowing into the United States.

Trump’s new August 1 deadline is completely arbitrary, and his tariff numbers aren’t grounded in any rational economic policy. As everyone seems to understand but the president and his sycophants, these new tariffs will result in increased prices on goods Americans need and can’t magically produce ourselves. Other nations won’t shoulder the costs from tariffs. We will.

The letters all read mostly the same, like shockingly incoherent spam e-mails with the recipient’s name in an obviously different font. They are filled with alarming typos, random Capitalization, and sloppy errors. For instance, Trump’s letter to Željka Cvijanović, the chairwoman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, begins with “Dear Mr. President.”

Trump’s Big Bill Is Filled With Hundreds of Billions in corporate welfare

Children will starve but fat cats will get fatter

By Brett Heinz 

Here's $45 million down the toilet

Donald Trump and his allies in Congress claim their “one big beautiful bill” will cut government waste. Former White House official Elon Musk disagrees, slamming the bill as a “disgusting abomination” containing a “MOUNTAIN” (in all caps) of waste.

Musk is no expert on waste — his DOGE cuts did untold damage to the federal government while failing to actually reduce any waste. But Musk and other critics like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are correct that this bill is chock-full of wasteful spending.

The topline items are tax cuts for the wealthy and historically large health care cuts for everyone else. Those are bad enough. But tucked away inside of the bill, there’s also a massive amount of wasteful spending and corporate subsidies.

Lobbyists are working overtime to fill the bill with giveaways to their clients, adding hundreds of billions in waste that will significantly increase the national debt over the next 10 years. Many of the bill’s corporate subsidies are disguised as tax cuts, a common tactic Congress uses to hide how much money it spends.

For instance, hidden on page 916 of the bill is a subsidy for the indoor tanning industry that will cost $365 million. A few pages later, a new benefit gives the entertainment industry $153 million to buy recording equipment. Even deeper in the bill, a new tax break for firearm silencers will cost $1.4 billion.

Unnecessary provisions that further complicate the tax code are everywhere: a $58 billion subsidy for auto loans, a $20 billion subsidy for private schools, and a $5 billion extension for flawed “opportunity zones” that only benefit real estate investors. These are just the tip of the iceberg.

A Criminal President -- with Accomplices

Trump is not our first criminal president

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump has been indicted on seven federal felonies.

Most Americans view Donald Trump as an aberration, a one-off, the exception. He’s our first “criminal president” they think, the first to have committed crimes to get into office, while in office, or both.

Most Americans, in this regard, are wrong, and it’s a tragic statement about both the way we teach American history in our schools and the way our corporate media deals with past presidential crimes.

If previous Republican presidents had been held to account for their crimes the way it appears Trump is about to be, Trump may well have not been as brazen in everything from his violations of the Hatch Act to the Espionage Act to his explicitly asking Vladimir Putin to intervene in the 2016 election.

Everybody knows that Richard Nixon got caught orchestrating and then covering up a break-in at the DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex, and that he avoided going to prison by resigning his office. Yet it’s no secret that Nixon committed a far more serious crime — naked treason — just to get into office in the first place.

When the LBJ White House tapes were released in 2013, the world learned that Johnson had negotiated a secret deal with the Vietnamese to end the war in the late fall of the election year of 1968.

Nixon got wind of it and, through a campaign aide during a meeting in his New York apartment, reached out to the South Vietnamese ambassador offering inducements to pull out of the peace talks and scuttle the deal, which they then abandoned just as it was about to be signed.

Tests Are Vital. But Congress Decided That Regulation Is Not.

Lobbyists cut a hole in patient safety

By Anna Clark for ProPublica

A number of tests used by patients to make major health care decisions have once again escaped regulation by the Food and Drug Administration, following intensive lobbying on behalf of test-makers, professional associations and academic medical centers.

For years, experts have warned about the dangers of so-called laboratory-developed tests — including certain cancer screenings and diagnostic tests for everything from Lyme disease to autism — reaching patients without FDA oversight.

ProPublica recently published an investigation about popular prenatal screenings that fall into this category, which one expert described as an unregulated “Wild West.” Upwards of half of all pregnant people now receive one of these prenatal screenings. (We also have put together a guide for expecting parents.)

Congress was on the cusp of finally creating a pathway for the FDA to scrutinize these tests, as it does for many other common commercial tests. For much of 2022, the VALID Act seemed on track for passage — and then, in the final weeks of the year, legislators backed away.

The VALID Act, which had bipartisan support, had been developed after nearly a decade of debate among stakeholders about ways to close a regulatory loophole and clarify the FDA’s role in overseeing the testing industry. The legislation had momentum thanks, in part, to Theranos’ fraudulent blood-testing scandal and the coronavirus pandemic, both of which revealed the possible consequences of unchecked tests reaching patients.

But lawmakers left VALID out of a must-pass end-of-year bill that dealt with a range of spending priorities.

Gun Industry Pours Blood Money into Republican Pockets

Dirtbags, guns and money

By SARAH OKESON

By Matt Davies

Republicans in Congress received all but $12,000 of the almost $984,000 in campaign contributions that the gun industry has donated to federal candidates so far this year.

Sen. Paul Rand (R-Ky.), who is seeking his third term, received the most, $38,458, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. He was followed by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) with $38,380 and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) with $25,610.

Scalise has remained a gun-rights supporter even though he nearly bled to death in June 2017 when he was shot at a baseball practice.

“The ability of the industry to use money to advance its policy agenda has increased given the dramatic rise in firearm sales that we’ve seen over the past two or three years,” said Timothy Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University.

The Republican party’s support for gun rights led The New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle to call it the “American Carnage Party.”

By David Horsey

The National Rifle Association, the biggest contributor in the gun industry, gave $217,596 to candidates and parties and more than $5 million to other spending groups.

House Democrats are trying to pass bills that would raise the age to buy semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21 and bar large-capacity magazines. Republicans in the Senate are expected to try to block these bills.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) who has opposed eliminating the filibuster, which helps Republicans block gun legislation, is the only Democratic senator getting money from the gun industry. He has received $5,000 so far.

Checking in on Parallel Earth

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

Life imitates climate politics—again.

Personal, misinformed attacks on Dr. Fauci are reminiscent of climate spats over the decades.

Peter Dykstra for the Environmental Health News    

Dr. Fauci reads off Covidiot Rand Paul

As surely as the swallows make their annual return to Capistrano, the politics of climate change and science always foreshadow the larger political world.

Today, our headlines are positively rotten with denial-based news: January 6 denial. Election denial. Denying that mass shootings and gun deaths are problems. But some of these aren’t new.

COVID vaccine denial? Let’s travel back in time to meet your grandpappy, smallpox vaccine denial.

It's Montreal, 1885. The world’s last major smallpox outbreak gripped the city, killing nearly 2% of its 300,000 residents. Historian Michael Bliss details the 19th Century frenzy in his 1991 book Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal.

Even back then, French-speaking Quebec was a province apart from Anglophone, Canada. Faith in the smallpox vaccine reigned amongst the English, which automatically made Quebec a denialist province. 

The French-speaking majority of Montrealers saw the smallpox vaccine as a threat—a way for English-speaking Canada to show who’s boss. More than 90 percent of the smallpox deaths in the 1885 outbreak were French-speaking folks who refused the vaccine. 

But this is different, right, Rand?

 

RI House conservative Dems join Trumplicans in letter to McKee asking for vaccine exemption for first responders

Letter does not address why frontline workers who have seen the worst of COVID don’t want shots

By Will Collette 

Famous last words

A group of conservative Rhode Island House members, mostly DINOs, plus all of Blake “Flip” Filippi’s gang of Trumplicans sent a group letter to our accidental Governor Dan McKee, asking that health care workers be exempt from the mandate to get vaccinated against COVID by October 1. 

Never mind that the medical community as a whole is vaccinated and urges all eligible people to get vaccinated, somehow these state representatives, including Charlestown’s own Flip Filippi, think anti-vaxxer health workers should get a pass. 

These are the kind of health care workers our legislators
should be supporting

Personally, I think anti-vaxxer health care workers don’t merit any consideration at all and, indeed, I think their anti-science attitude raises questions about their qualifications to work in health care. Period. 

I'm not the only one who thinks that. 

Care New England President and CEO Dr. James Fanale said:

“While Care New England truly values each member of our staff, and respects the personal choice of individuals to make the best decisions for themselves and their families, it has a responsibility offer its patients peace of mind by providing them access to fully vaccinated health care workers to preserve their overall well-being. Those who opt not to get vaccinated are choosing not to fulfill a requirement of their position and will no longer be allowed to work.” 

Dan McKee, who has been wishy-washy ever since he took office after Gina Raimondo left for Washington, may cave in to this effort to halt one of his few strong actions to slow down the pandemic. 

The letter was apparently organized by Rep. Arthur “Doc” Corvese (DINO-No. Providence). “Doc” has the nickname because he is a practicing optometrist.  

In that respect, he is similar to anti-vax Trumplican Senator Rand Paul (Kentucky) who is an ophthalmologist who is himself self-certified by his own National Board of Ophthalmology. 

Neither Doc Corvese nor Rand Paul have any experience or training remotely related to the treatment of infectious viral diseases.

Here is the entire letter sent to McKee by Doc Corvese and his cohorts. 

COVID Corruption

And below is Rand Paul's view. Note that Rand Paul has just revealed that his wife also made an investment in Regeneron (presumably based on inside information Sen. Paul received). Such transactions must be promptly reported, but Rand Paul reported this SIXTEEN MONTHS past the reporting deadline. This offense came to light the same day Sen. Paul sent the tweet below.

Note also that Rand Paul filed a criminal complaint with the Justice Department against Dr. Anthony Fauci for allegedly lying about federal COVID research funding. Fauci, being a classy guy probably won't return the favor by filing against Rand Paul, but I hope someone will.

 

The Real Reason Republicans Say Fauci Has To Go

It’s Just Another Ploy to Bolster Donald Trump’s Ego

By Terry H. Schwadron

Leading Republicans in Congress are calling for Dr. P Anthony Fauci to resign or be fired as the nation’s top virologist.

They have a bunch of different reasons, but what they argue in common is that Fauci should have backed Donald Trump’s move to blame China for either accidental or intentional leak of coronavirus from a Wuhan lab. Joe Biden’s White House says Fauci is here to stay; live with it.

Eventually, cooler heads might actually get together to decide what this fuss is all about.

But for me, at least, absolutely nothing good for public health happens if this 80-year-old icon of medical research decides to stay home tomorrow.

Fauci’s would-be hastened departure might make selected Republican leaders feel good about the empty echo of their voices but were Fauci to concede that he doesn’t need these public whippings, the nation will solve exactly no problems.

If anything, Fauci’s resignation would merely add to the now long-list of I-wish-it-were-so thinking that substitutes for rigor these days. We’d still face the prospects of annual vaccines, we’d still have confusion about whether in-store shopping is fully safe from Covid, and we would be absolutely no closer to knowing whether coronavirus leaked from that Wuhan lab or what to do about it even if it did.

Why are they bothering to bark at this wrong tree? Now that we are emerging from the worst of coronavirus, what is to be gained from dumping Fauci besides some perceived political standing?

Wingnuts on parade

 

GOP resentment theatre

When President Biden condemned violent white supremacy, leading Republicans complained. Why?

By Jill Richardson

President Biden recently became the first president to condemn white supremacy by name in an inaugural address. Then some Republicans got mad because, they say, it’s an attack on them.

He’s “calling us racists,” Rand Paul complained. “According to the left, supporting border security and celebrating July 4 could make you a white supremacist,” Tucker Carlson claimed. “I was offended” by “the racism thing,” Karl Rove added.

These complaints are disingenuous.

First, consider President Biden’s exact words. After alluding to the racial justice protests over the summer, Biden turned to warn of “a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”

It seems clear that Biden was referring to the people who recently attempted a coup at the U.S. Capitol, where the presence of white supremacists has been well documented.

Move along...nothing to see here

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

Not a good look

 

Just drink your Kool-Aid

 

Who's to blame for January 6? Not us.