Left Jabs

       We all know that Donald Trump lies with every breath, and that literally nothing he says can be trusted beyond the next sentence out of his mouth. Okay, we’re used to that. What we’re not used to, and need to be horrified by, is that the executive branch of the federal government is doing much the same thing. In matters affecting our health and welfare — literally our lives and deaths — all communication from our most vital agencies must now be assumed to contain MAGA propaganda. A culture of lies has taken over, and our own government cannot be trusted any further than we can trust Trump. Yes, there are many countries whose citizens have been through far worse, and for much longer than our single year in hell. They might be laughing at our panic, had not so many of them moved here to get away from the very thing they now see happening to their neighbors. But our homegrown, low-interest citizens have been a bit slow to see what’s going ...

       As Bleeding Minnesota continues to dominate both the news and our consciousness, there’s one episode that especially embodies the utter madness of the cultural spasm playing out in front of us. The January 18 th protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul has everything you’d want in a Trump-era legal crisis: institutional incompetence, political gaslighting, ostentatious cruelty, and bad faith everywhere you look. All the hits. Already, Pam Bondi is in way over her head, but that’s not stopping her. In her latest overreach, she arrested Don Lemon, last Friday, for his attendance as a journalist at that protest. If the stakes and the visibility weren’t already high enough, charging Lemon pushes them through the roof. I’m guessing Lemon planned for this. His brand has been more-or-less in limbo since his racially-tinged purge by CNN two years ago, and he knows that Trump, like dictators everywhere, lusts to see reporters stand trial. App...