To recall: Appeals court: Trump wrongly diverted $2.5 billion in military construction funds for border wall.

To recall: June 26, 2020 Appeals court: Trump wrongly diverted $2.5 billion in military construction funds for border wall. A federal appeals court on Friday ruled against the Trump administration in its transfer of $2.5 billion from military construction projects to build sections of the U.S. border wall with Mexico, ruling it illegally sidestepped Congress, which gets to decide how to use the funds. In two opinions, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a coalition of border states and environmental groups that contended the money transfer was unlawful and that building the wall would pose environmental threats. Critics of Trump's wall praised the rulings on Friday for upholding the Constitution, which grants Congress the power of the purse. ~Military Times https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/06/26/appeals-court-trump-wrongly-diverted-25-billion-in-milcon-funds-for-border-wall/

To recall: Stopping U.S. Assistance to Central America is Counterproductive and Misinformed

To recall: June 17, 2019, the State Department said no additional foreign aid will be provided for Honduras, Guatemala & El Salvador until they take "concrete actions to reduce the number of illegal migrants coming to the U.S. border." Trump administration chooses a strategy that makes things worse. Instead of working with leaders in Central America to stabilize the situation there, the administration is eliminating aid intended to create better conditions that would help keep families home. The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, stated “all aid to Central America is not the way to build a safer, more prosperous region where people aren't forced to flee.” Lawmakers who were against the plan said it was cruel to cut off aid to countries dealing with hunger and crime. The move would be counterproductive, because it is more likely increase the number of migrants than decrease it. https://www.wola.org/analysis/stopping-us-assistance-central-america-counterproductive-misinformed/

Ukraine is our war, Biden is our wartime president

In 1987, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging Americans to stop paying to defend others, the big subtext being to leave NATO. (George W. Bush and Barack Obama also called for other countries to raise defense spending but didn't dream of using that as an excuse to compromise U.S. security.) These were Russian talking points parroted by a real estate investor whom the Russians were bailing out of bankruptcies. Trump in return laundered Russian oligarch/mob money through sales of U.S. property in all-cash, anonymous transactions. One example is the deluxe Trump Towers in Miami's Sunny Isles Beach, now known as "Little Russia." U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election to help elect comrade Trump. He came through for the Russians three years later when he blocked nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Trump claims that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine had he still been president. This is the opposite of true. Trump's advisers reportedly warned him that blowing up NATO would be unpopular and could cost him reelection. ~ Froma Harrop https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/columnists/froma-harrop-ukraine-is-our-war-biden-our-wartime-president-opinion/article_e1b62df7-f629-5f1d-9cb8-ecedd1639d56.html

This Republican about-face is so much worse than ‘cancel culture’

In other states, such as Georgia, GOP politicians have punished private companies for taking supposedly “woke” stands on issues such as gun violence. Republicans in Congress have likewise tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies whose public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike. This approach to governance was expertly modeled by Donald Trump, who as president frequently used the power of the state to reward friends and punish perceived political enemies. He did this through tax law, tariff policy and other proposed subsidies that chose winners and losers according to their political allegiances. He selectively enforced energy policies, such as allowing offshore drilling, to dole out favors to friends. He allegedly attempted to block a government contract to Amazon because its founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post; he also tried to raise the prices the retail giant pays for U.S. Postal Service shipping. He launched a bogus antitrust investigation into car companies that had opposed his lax emissions standards. He threatened to revoke the “licenses” of broadcast media firms whose coverage he disliked. And that’s not getting into all the times he tried to weaponize his presidency to prosecute or otherwise punish politicians and private citizens (rather than companies). At the time, these behaviors might have seemed like an aberration from standard GOP rhetoric and policy, the ravings and abuses of a would-be authoritarian leader. Occasionally his fellow Republicans even called Trump out on these command-and-control, Soviet-style efforts to intervene in markets and curb free enterprise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/04/republicans-embrace-trumps-approach-using-power-bully-opponents/?tid=ss_tw

The GOP is increasingly viewing politics with the zeal of religious absolutism

From article: Republicans have replaced the give-and-take of politics with religious zeal — the politics of absolutism. If God is on your side and the other side represents an existential threat, surely you wouldn’t let truth, comity, fairness or decency slow you down. In the grand scheme of things, what’s a little character assassination of a trailblazing Black female judge? That view of illegitimacy often stems from Christian nationalism. As Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, explains, “A worldview that claims God as a political partisan and dehumanizes one’s political opponents as evil is fundamentally antidemocratic.” He tells me, “A mind-set that believes that our nation was divinely ordained to be a promised land for Christians of European descent is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and equality of all.” Christian nationalism cannot be separated from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or the absolutist politics of today’s GOP. As David French, the evangelical Christian writer and former Republican, candidly acknowledges in the Atlantic: One of the most dangerous aspects of the effort to overturn the election was the extent to which it was an explicitly religious cause. January 6 insurrectionists stampeded into the Senate chamber with prayers on their lips. Prominent religious leaders and leading Christian lawyers threw themselves into the effort to delay election certification or throw out the election results entirely. In the House and Senate, the congressional leaders of the effort to overturn the election included many of Congress’s most public evangelicals. They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal; they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness and even outright delusion represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/28/republicans-ketanji-brown-jackson-hearings-reveal-politics-of-absolutism/?fbclid=IwAR0aC-

A month into war, Putin’s mind-set is complex — and dangerous

From article: Putin is something different — a Russian Orthodox Christian believer rather than an atheist, with an ideology closer to Benito Mussolini’s fascism than Vladimir Lenin’s communism. Putin described the bloody assault as salvation for Ukraine — and spoke of a religious duty “to relieve these people of suffering.” Astonishingly, he quoted the Bible to justify his blitzkrieg: “I recall the words from the Holy Scripture: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Putin’s religiosity is a little noted but powerful part of his personality. Putin’s mother, Maria, was a “deeply religious” woman, according to biographer Steven Lee Myers, who survived the siege of Leningrad in World War II after moaning for help amid a pile of corpses. When her son Vladimir was born in 1952, she "secretly baptized the boy,” Myers writes. “The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments,” Putin wrote. “One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed.” At the heart of Putin’s worldview is a sense that Russia has been humiliated by a Western conspiracy. Russia’s enemies are immoral, Putin argued. He believes deeply in the evil that he is doing. He sees the destruction of an independent Ukraine almost as a religious duty. Two obvious warnings emerge from this narrative: Handle the volatile mix that is Putin with care, lest it explode in a far wider war. And do not let him succeed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/22/putin-religious-russia-history-ukraine/