July 29, 2025

Mindboggling: Trump's going to start a MUTHAFORKEN STRIKE FORCE to punish Obama officials. If only this was merely a Marvel movie or video game. By Hal M. Brown

 



No shit, they are calling it a “strike force.” This didn’t have to use the term in the first sentence or to have it in blue as a link to jump off the page when I read the article in The Hill:

Holy fucken hot pile of stinking shit, they are going to call this exercise in revenge a “strike force.” As far as I can tell the term has been only used for actual crime fighting groups like the Federal Strike Force Program against organized crime (reference). Now we are supposed to see Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump crew as a modern day Elliot Ness Untouchables.

Could this be a more transparent attempt to distract from the Epstein scandal? 

Obama’s name is being bandied about as someone who may also be indicted in an actual attempt to try him for something illegal. In fact, as I write this it is being discussed on Morning Joe. Note the chyron about living on “Planet Trump.”

One of the panelists noted that thanks to the Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from being prosecuted from anything he did while in office, Obama is likewise protected.

The use of the word “strike force” is meant to be theatrical. 

This is not a Marvel video game staring righteous superheros like Captain America, the Incredible Hulk (the good Hulk, not Hogan) and Spiderman.

It’s also not an old movie or TV series about fighting crime.

This is real life America. 

Perhaps looking at fiction we should change the spelling and say it is real life Amerika since it is more like the movie about a Russian takeover of the country.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share

Leave a comment

July 28, 2025

My comment to Thom Hartmann became my Substack for today.


 

If you’ve never heard of Thom Hartmann, here’s his Wikipedia profile.

I spent so much time writing a comment on Thom Hartmann’s Substack this morning that I never came up with a topic to write about. There are so many things about Trump I could write about. However I have nothing new to say. Certainly his outrageous behavior in Scotland is being discussed in the liberal media.

As a therapist I’d be inclined to write about this story:

Then, really what could I say about how unhinged Trump is that isn’t it obvious?

This is why I am taking the lazy way out and using what I wrote earlier as my Substack.

I didn’t react to everything Hartmann wrote in his Substack, “This Is Not a Drill: Infiltrate Your Local Dems Before It’s Too Late.”

This is what I wrote:

I saw you on Ali Velshi and was glad to see you mention E.Lansing and SDS (when my partner and I had lunch with you we talked about our both being at Michigan State and involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests in different ways at the time). I knew several SDS activists but wasn't a member at the time. I was in Social Work grad school and ended up as the leader of our protests. We were the second department to go on strike (after the Psychology Dept) following the Kent State massacre. Nursing was the third, thus all of Baker Hall had departments close so we put an "on strike" banner on the building. I had the heady experiencing of announcing our demands (along with other student leaders) to an overflow audience in the jam packed auditorium. We never met but were in the very same march to the state capitol building. 

By the way, my partner is still in touch with the woman who came from Chicago with her husband to visit you and your team. I expect she is reading this.

As I refect back on those protest days and think about the protests against Trump and his dictatorship I am heartened in some ways and frightened in another. 

What inspires me is that the student protests were a major factor (along with the U.S. losing) that led to the country getting out of Vietnam. While at the time we had high hopes we'd make a difference we didn't know that we would. However, LBJ wasn't a dictator. When the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State the outrage resonated across the country and LBJ cared about this. He responded to public opinion. 

Currently we have the closest thing to a dictator in American history. Now we have Trump's Gestapo thugs going after immigrants. The outrage coming from the liberal media and, to varying degrees, the public is like water off a duck's back for Trump, Homan, Bondi, Miller and his Hitlerian psychopaths. Trump not only doesn't care, but as a paradigm of someone in the Dark Tetrad (the Dark Triad plus sadism) he feels good about being able to terrify and hurt his enemies.

While Trump's Gestapo hasn't gunned down anybody, at least not yet, yesterday I went into what I hope was hyperbole mode about the chance Trump would deport his victims to a country where they could be killed. They'd be dropped off in a desert in a host country like South Sudan that Trump would pay big money to, and then it would be out of sight and out of mind as far anyone knew. Their fate would never be known. 

There are people like a guy who said his name was Ryan who called in to a CSPAN show who support the shooting of immigrants. Trump has expressed fantasies of alligators in the Rio Grande and shooting people trying to cross in the legs. We have a sadistic president and sadists who support him. Now alligators come up again in his Alligator Alcatraz where his fantasy is them eating people who try to escape.

I agree that Democrats have to get their act together. But I despair that even if they do and take back both houses of Congress and win state and local races we may not even have a "next election" because Trump will have cemented his dictatorship and been able to establish total control. When I think of this happening, I don't think engaging in tradtional politics (and protests) can save us. The only hope I have is that if Trump comes close to pulling this off, declares martial law, and activates the armed forces against citizens, is that the true patriots in the military will effect a coup to depose him.

Update:

There was one reply to my comment on Hartmann’s Sunstack:

Hal, I am aware that those who protested that war like to pat themselves on the back for ending it, but in reality the protests evoked a reaction, reverse psychology, among middle America and they demanded victory and f...k them damned commie hippies.

What finally did the job Hal, is middle America watching aluminum coffins being unloaded , the daily body count and the 58,000 military funerals of their sons, brothers, uncles and cousins.

Middle America tired of the war Hal that is why it ended.

Middle Russia would tire of that war also, had they freedom of press and freedom of speech, and not the threat of prison or falling out of windows.

This is was answer:

I don't see this as "a pat on the back" as if I want to glorify what we did. You are correct that there was pro-war blowback and that it coincided with the Hippie Era (sometime called the counter-culture) didn't help our cause. In fact, however some of us looked like Hippies (Thom with long hair, for example), but we weren't. I don't think so-called Hippies were a major part of the anti-war campus movement, nor were the Yippies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party ) for that matter. It wasn't even SDS. It was ordinary middle class students that comprised the majority of the movement.

I don't think the impact of the student protests should be minimized. We did have an impact on the eventual end, but so did everything you say.

The looming threat of the draft was another reason people turned against the war. Those of draft age and their parents didn't wanrt anything to do with a war which had nothing to do with saving democracy in America. The growing death count couldn't be hidden.

Any history of how and the war ended must include what Walter Cronkite said and LBJ's reaction to losing his support. ( https://mediamythalert.com/2009/12/06/cronkite-moment-what-johnson-supposedly-said/ )

It also wasn't the protesting students but also how they impacted their families. Pro-war parents in many cases had to have been educated by their children.

By the way, Michigan State was one of the universities described in "Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era " ( https://www.amazon.com/Campus-Wars-Movement-American-Universities/dp/0814735126 )

From Amazon:

"At the same time that the dangerous war was being fought in the jungles of Vietnam, Campus Wars were being fought in the United States by antiwar protesters. Kenneth J. Heineman found that the campus peace campaign was first spurred at state universities rather than at the big-name colleges. His useful book examines the outside forces, like military contracts and local communities, that led to antiwar protests on campus."


—Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
"Shedding light on the drastic change in the social and cultural roles of campus life, Campus Wars looks at the way in which the campus peace campaign took hold and became a national movement."


History Today
"Heineman's prodigious research in a variety of sources allows him to deal with matters of class, gender, and religion, as well as ideology. He convincingly demonstrates that, just as state universities represented the heartland of America, so their student protest movements illustrated the real depth of the anguish over US involvement in Vietnam. Highly recommended."


Choice
"Represents an enormous amount of labor and fills many gaps in our knowledge of the anti-war movement and the student left."
—Irwin Unger, author of These United States
The 1960s left us with some striking images of American universities: Berkeley activists orating about free speech atop a surrounded police car; Harvard SDSers waylaying then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Columbia student radicals occupying campus buildings; and black militant Cornell students brandishing rifles, to name just a few. Tellingly, the most powerful and notorious image of campus protest is that of a teenage runaway, arms outstretched in anguish, kneeling beside the bloodied corpse of Jeff Miller at Kent State University.

While much attention has been paid to the role of elite schools in fomenting student radicalism, it was actually at state institutions, such as Kent State, Michigan State, SUNY, and Penn State, where anti-Vietnam war protest blossomed. Kenneth Heineman has pored over dozens of student newspapers, government documents, and personal archives, interviewed scores of activists, and attended activist reunions in an effort to recreate the origins of this historic movement. In Campus Wars, he presents his findings, examining the involvement of state universities in military research — and the attitudes of students, faculty, clergy, and administrators thereto — and the manner in which the campus peace campaign took hold and spread to become a national movement. 

Recreating watershed moments in dramatic narrative fashion, this engaging book is both a revisionist history and an important addition to the chronicle of the Vietnam War era.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share

Leave a comment

July 27, 2025

Who the hell is Ryan and why should we hope Trump never finds out about his solution for dealing with immigrants?

 Last night, precisely at midnight as it happened, I woke up and thought that Trump’s final solution about what to do with the immigrants his Gestapo rounded up could result in his paying a country like South Sudan to take all of them and then secretly do whatever they damn well wanted to in order to deal with them. They could be dropped at a remote airstrip far from prying eyes.

I thought that a specially selected military unit of whatever country that took them could shoot them as soon as the transport plane left. Out of sight, out of mind, as far as the American’s flying them to their ultimate fate would be concerned.

Dead men tell no tales. My morbid imagination told me how easy it would be for the story of these victims to be figuratively and literally buried in the desert.

Then this morning I saw this article on RawStory:

Excerpt:

During Sunday's Washington Journal program on C-SPAN, a man named Ryan called in to urge the president to be tougher on immigration.

"I like what the Trump administration's doing, but I think they could be doing a little bit more," the caller said. "Number one, they could militarize the border and shoot illegals coming into the country."

Then Ryan went on to say that “they could also process them like a military combatant, putting them in a military tribunal, finding them guilty, and then shipping them the hell out of the country.”

You can listen to Ryan here and watch the moderator manage not to react to what he is saying here.

I doubt Trump ever checks in on RawStory, let alone watches live CSPAN shows. I sure hope he doesn’t. If he does he may have heard what Ryan had to say. If he did, he just might think he could get away with eliminating the pesky problem of what to do with immigrants once ICE grabs them up with this drastic solution.

I won’t go down the road where this could lead if Trump ended up turning his ICE Gestapo into a force at his beck and call to deal with his political enemies and regular citizens who dare to opose him.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share

Leave a comment

July 26, 2025

What's wrong with these pictures and what could justify pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell after three years since what she did justified a 20 year sentence?


Ghislaine Maxwell may have done far worse than what she was convicted of doing. We are hearing reports from more and more victims that this is true. I won’t go into specifics here, but she’d have been crazy to tell Todd Blanche about this since she knew he was part of her ticket to get out of prison. The crucial person in all this is her old friend, Donald Trump, who she knows needs a report from Blanche to give him a reason to pardon her. She has to be portrayed as a victim herself. Maybe not as a saint, but as a victim of the nefarious devil Jeffrey Epstein.

Lots of criminals get away with avoiding punishment for acts because the prosecution doesn’t have enough evidence to make the case in court. Sometimes a jury lets a suspect off on some counts even though they are guilty. This can be because they don’t think the prosecution made the case beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury may convict them on other, sometimes less serious, counts.

Maxwell is 65 years old. Federal inmates serve an average of 85% of their sentence. They are required to serve aminimum of 85% of their sentence before becoming eligible for release. So at best she will be elderly when she is released if she serves her full sentence. I point this out because it is the judge who sets a sentence. They consider various factors, including the nature of the crime and the defendant's criminal history, before deciding on an appropriate punishment. The judge in her case knew that a 20 year sentence for a 63 year old was basically a sentence, if not for life, for until she didn’t have much of her life remaining. Obviously, a 25 year old who got that sentence would get out and still have much of their lives to live.

In a normal sane world nobody who had a friendship with a criminal who’d been incarcerated for a crime would be allowed to order them to be released. No way, no how! 

This is not a normal world. Trump has become the new sentencing judge. Blanche is about to provide him with what would in a trial be a pre-sentencing report. Trump, in his insensitivety to victim’s feelings and callous disregard of what is just, seems about to set this criminal friend of his free.

The poor innocent lady doesn’t deserve to be locked up in a federal prison in Tallahassee, right?

What will follow? It might be a celebration for her at Mar-a-Lago. 

Maybe she’s been practicing her dance moves to impress her new Big Daddy, Donald, at the gala he throws for her. 

After all, she is serving her time in Tallahassee knowing how close she is to Palm Beach, so near yet so far…

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

feel free to share

Share

Leave a comment

Mindboggling: Trump's going to start a MUTHAFORKEN STRIKE FORCE to punish Obama officials. If only this was merely a Marvel movie or video game. By Hal M. Brown

  No shit, they are calling it a “strike force.” This didn’t have to use the term in the first sentence or to have it in blue as a link to j...