Trump's hate speech has crossed threshold of "Fire" in a crowded theater

Not since Andrew Johnson from 1865 to 1869 has a white racist president given subtle and not so subtle encouragement to violent racists. How many more will be shot or otherwise violated in the last 17 months of his presidency? Trump's incitement of white supremacists represents high crimes and felonies. Impeach now. Lives are at stake.

2 year budget: victory for war party, defeat for American viability

The two year budget passed by a bi-partisan Congress allocates 54.7% of all discretionary federal expenditures to national defense. That amounts to $1.478 trillion out of $2.7 trillion for fiscal 2020 and 2021. House Democrats signed on to the Trump administration deal because it provided a pittance of $27 billion more for domestic programs, even tho it both explodes the deficit and lavishes more precious treasure on the Pentagon than it requested. For Trump, the deal was strictly a matter of endless riches for the military, who can never get enough.

Under Trump, Republican deficit hawks turned into zombies. Their hair was on fire during Obama's administration tho it reduced the deficit an average of 11% after the critically needed first year stimulus. But they're mute while Trump's deficit has increased 15% so far with a 23% increase this year alone due to the 'Give it all to the rich' tax cuts.

This is how great nations decline; not with a bang, just a yawn as deficits soar to feed ravenous military hunger while the people's work is ignored.

Corporations engorge on profits while stiffing the commons

Lots of news about US budget deal with the two year, two plus trillion dollar deficit facing Americans for fiscal '20 and '21. Tax cuts for the rich and the corporations are fueling the deficit as well as an avalanche of goodies for the military and a few scraps for the folks in need. The well being of everything that really improves the quality of life: environment, education, health, infrastructure, revitalizing America's urban wastelands remains neglected. What struck me is how little corporations pay of the $3.645 trillion in revenue that leaves the gaping trillion dollar hole each of the next two years. How paltry? We taxpayers pay 50% of that revenue; corporations just 7%. The rest comes from Social Security and Medicare, excise, estate, tariff and interest revenue.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age.

Students smarter than legislators in South Dakota

Good God. In the last two years legislators in 19 states have passed or are considering laws requiring schools to prominently display the U.S. motto 'In God We Trust' to entering students. South Dakota is the latest, mandating the offensive typeface be at least a foot tall and be placed where no student can avoid it. Why offensive? It's a clear violation of the separation of church and state. Such sentiments have no place in the halls of higher learning...and I don't mean as high as a make-believe heaven. Some students in Rapid City pushed back, telling the school board to consider alternatives to God such as Buddha, Allah, Science or Ourselves. The first two are a joke; the latter two truth. Welcome to South Dakota...where the smart ones attend school and the dummies attend the legislature.

Keep 400 Illinoisans from departing to senseless, failed, murderous Afghan war

What of waste of Illinois' finest. That's what Gov. Pritzker called the 400 National Guard reservists being sent to our trillion dollar lost war in Afghanistan that has already killed 2,382 troops since its October, 2001 start. But Pritzker omitted that obvious truth about the Afghan war which should never have been fought, has cost over a trillion and maimed tens of thousands in body and mind to going along with the 2,382 dead. Now, while the US war party negotiates furiously with the Taliban for a face saving exit to get the remaining 14,000 US soldiers out from another failed US involvement in the Middle East, 400 of Illinois' best are needlessly, foolishly sentenced to a year trying to avoid being the last US soldier to die for a lost, worthless cause. What a waste of Illinois' finest, indeed.

Racist President helped perpetuate Red Summer of 1919

Woodrow Wilson, last racist president till the current occupant, governed during the Red Summer of 1919, in which hundreds were killed, mainly blacks, with thousands injured in over 50 race riots across the US. Chicago news outlets have focused on one of the worst, right here in Chicago, which ignited a century ago today. But missing from these reports was the response of the Wilson administration, which not only didn't speak out against white mobs that started virtually every riot, it blamed the entire outbreak on Bolshevist agitators who he claimed egged blacks on to defend themselves from encroaching violence with guns. Wilson didn't hold back declaring "The American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America." Government agencies and the media took their cue from Wilson. Young J. Edgar Hoover, early in his Justice Dept. career, told the Attorney General that the Washington D.C. riots were the "result of numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women" The Washington Post picked up the theme calling for a white "clean up operation" against black rioters defending themselves from the white mobs.

Wilson disgraced himself by governing with the easy racism he grew up with in Jim Crow Virginia. The current racist president doesn't have Wilson's excuse, growing up in privilege in tolerant New York. His false equivalency of white supremacists with anti racist protesters in Charlottesville, his demeaning of congresswomen of color, his endless demonization of inner city neighborhoods of his minority critics, his cruel, brutal treatment of minority asylum seekers are all of a piece with his racist core.

How sorrowful a racist president fueled racist violence in 1919 and a racist president in 2019 has learned nothing from his predecessor a hundred years on.