A Promised Land

America as a Developing Country

Pardon Me

Stranger Than Fiction

The story could inspire a big-budget Hollywood political thriller. A cocaine kingpin – the corrupt president of a foreign country, no less – is convicted and jailed in the United States. But behind the scenes, right-wing tech billionaires persuade an equally corrupt American president to pardon the foreigner. In a violent side-story, the US president proudly orders illegal, lethal military attacks that kill scores of impoverished Venezuelan fishing villagers (some of whom may be small-scale traffickers) whose coke isn’t even destined for our shores and whose possible crimes pale in comparison with the kingpin’s.

In the hypothetical Hollywood version of this story, the truth comes out, the former president goes back to prison and his American counterpart resigns in shame.

In 2025, however, there is no shame and reality is stranger than fiction. Donald Trump publicly boasted of his planed pardon for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández before then granting it. Lost in the swirl of Trump’s other transgressions, the story disappeared from the headlines soon after first surfacing.

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Democracy in Flames: Will Charlie Kirk’s Killing Be America’s Reichstag Fire?

But...Hope, California and George W. Bush

On the night of February 27, 1933, a massive fire – apparently set by a Dutch communist who confessed to the crime, though other accounts suspect other communists or even Nazis – severely damaged the German parliament building, the Reichstag. Arriving at the scene, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler declared, “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

Within a month, Hitler incinerated German democracy.

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Funeral for a Friendship? Trump Spits at Polite, Pleasant, Insulted Canada

With Friends Like Donald...

And that’s not all we’re sorry about…

Strolling several years ago in Vancouver, Canada, I inadvertently crossed the street in front of a car after my light turned red but before the vehicle began moving. If you do this in the San Francisco Bay Area, the driver might toot and shout at you. In my native New York, you’d hear a loud honk and an even louder expletive.

The Vancouver motorist instead said, “Excuse me, did you know that you’re crossing against the light?”

Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Country

Canadians are among the nicest and most polite people on the planet. Americans are blessed to have them as neighbors.

Yet Donald Trump is spitting in these wonderful folks’ faces, on everything from fentanyl to immigration to tariffs to statehood. His spiteful barbs portend long-term damage to what once seemed our two nations’ unbreakable goodwill. This potential funeral for a friendship says much about America’s shrinking place in the world.

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Indian TV, Me and Trump’s LA Military Moves

It's Not Mainly About Immigration

Here’s my recent interview with the Indian TV network WION (World Is One News) about Trump’s deploying the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles. The interview starts at roughly 1:45 in the clip.

The Manchurian President

Speaking hypothetically...What if Putin really did control Trump?

In the 1962 film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” a US soldier is captured during the Korean War and brainwashed in Manchuria (a part of China bordering Korea) by Chinese and Russian agents. They then arrange his supposedly heroic “escape” that earns him the Medal of Honor back in America.

The point of this plan? Acting as an automaton, he will then unwittingly assassinate a presidential candidate and usher in an authoritarian regime serving our enemies’ interests.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. I am not suggesting that he’s been brainwashed or that he deliberately prioritizes the Kremlin over America. His main motivators instead seem to be money, power and narcissism.

But, speaking hypothetically, what  if Trump were in fact a “Manchurian President,” brainwashed  by Russia to  undermine the United States? What would he do?

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