Military consultant, Rufus T. Firefly, on the phone with DJT, engineering an end to the war between Armenia and Cambodia.
Trump Ends Another War
Category Archives: Politics
Thank You CBS – Something Is Better Than Nothing
SURPRISED to see CBS Sunday Morning doing a short piece about how DJT’s attack on Kimmel and the media in general is jeopardizing the future of free speech in America.
Did the sale go through, or is Shari Redstone on the phone right now, firing people?
Okay, the sale was approved by the FCC in July, so no big deal. I guess. I’m having a very hard time following events in our new world of chaos created by big daddy Trump. Papa Doc, keeps popping into my head.
All of it leaves me mad as hell and exhausted. This is not how I planned on spending my golden years, watching the deconstruction of our free society. The massive amount of ignorance out there may be the hardest part. I try and assuage my feelings with the knowledge that a great many of my fellow citizens were duped by algorithms coming from computer labs somewhere deep in Siberia.
Are Media Giants Writing Their Own Obits?
By my way of thinking, the late night talk show hosts that are being bumped off the air are far more than comedians. They’re filling a void created by the loss of columnists due to the death of the American newspaper industry. As such, they are providing a valuable service as the media landscape continues shifting from print to cyber.
In that light, aren’t Kimmel and Colbert as much journalists as Mencken or Breslin? Aren’t they generally truthful in their presentations and due all the same First Amendment protections normally extended to newspapers? Won’t the giant media conglomerates refusal to fight for free speech rights only lead to demands that the monopolies, 6 of which control 90% of the American media, need to be broken up? Didn’t “merger madness” get us here, and isn’t it time to begin the push for a new wave of trust busting, leading to an increased number of media jobs from more and not fewer companies providing a broader spectrum of news and information?
Shouldn’t the 6 American media monopolies be as concerned with protecting the Constitution as they are with protecting their bottom lines?
Oh sure, it’ll take a while, but won’t the worm eventually turn?
We Are Where We Are, Because The Democrats Messed Up
So they’ve taken Jimmy Kimmel off the air while Donald is in England, taking carriage rides, dining with the Royals and cutting business deals – and some or maybe many on the left are going a little nuts about it all.
Okay, it is what it is. That being the case, something occurred to me. The Democratic Party is to blame. For all of it.
If only the Dems had effectively controlled immigration, at least made a move to lock down consumer prices, particularly at grocery stores, and then put up a candidate that was electable, they probably would have won. Trump, would have lost, and we wouldn’t be wondering if what we’re experiencing can legitimately be compared to Germany in the 1930s.
So blame the Democrats. They blew it. Big time. And stop saying they tried to control immigration but were stopped by the Republicans. Trump did it, and they could have too, but they failed. And here we now are.
If you’re a Democrat, it might be time for you to think about what will be necessary to win the next election(s) as opposed to being as PC as you possibly can. It isn’t working.
Negligence
In the U.S., Americans struggle to pay ever-increasing grocery prices while long established vaccine science is being undercut in Washington by supporters of Donald Trump.
Overseas, the death count continues to rise as Israel bombs the hell out of Gaza with almost daily charges of U.S. supported genocide being raised. In Europe, Putin continues murdering civilians in Ukraine, threatening the NATO alliance by sending drones into Poland and Romania.
At the same time, not all that far away, the alleged leader of the free world, a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, is taking an ass-kisssing carriage ride with a royal guard leading to the steps of Windsor Castle, before attending a formal dinner with the King of England.
How long can this be sustained? Where the hell is the Republican congress? Bought, paid for and cowering in fear? Who will stand up to this madness?
Time To Man The Pumps?
Just read that Kodak may be going out of business. Frankly, I wasn’t sure they were still in business. That said, it’s difficult for me to imagine a world without Kodak.
Trump’s co-opting the Kennedy Center Awards, is also making the rounds. Increasingly, he seems to be acting on whatever pops into his head, no matter how silly it might be. Like the notion that he has anything resembling an appreciation for the arts. Apart from fake gold leaf and the Village People.
Trump is pledging that his new and improved Kennedy Center Honors, will be devoid of “wokeism.” Well, thank God for that. And all the while I was under the impression that the concept of “wokeism” was nothing but another invention of the far-right. Along with the ever-present threat of “Antifa.” Presumably a gang of drooling octogenarians, armed with scowls and slander.
Hope Donald doesn’t trade away Canada for a luxury yacht – for the Navy, of course. Something that would go with his new luxury 747 (for the Air Force).
Despite being in the limelight 7/24, Trump appears to be starved for attention, like a 6 year old tugging at his mother’s skirt. Maybe he’ll stop by for a visit with Sarah Palin, while he’s up in the great white north. She can see Russia from her back porch, you know.
Seeing things. It’s a Republican gift. Remember that old movie, “The President’s Analyst” starring James Coburn? Might not be too far from the truth. Might be something the Surgeon General should be looking into?
Don’t like the Labor Deptartment stats? Fire the statistician. Don’t like the path of a hurricane? Get out your magic marker and draw a new one.
Are the wheels about to come off? Is it being adequately reported? Does it even matter, if so many have tuned out and stopped reading? Other than something that only reinforces their built-in bias?
Or perhaps, they’re all just that much smarter than we are, Trump and his acolytes, I mean. Perhaps our best move, those of us in the media, academics and other evil intellectuals, would be to just back off and follow the lead of this stable genius God has delivered unto us, at this, our hour of need.
The celebration of mediocrity and ignorance isn’t such a bad thing, if you happen to be mediocre and stupid.
Maybe Donald Trump will emerge from the Alaska summit with a great new deal for us all. One that ends the war in Ukraine and convinces Vladimir Putin, that peace is a far better option than war, convincing him to withdraw from his recently conquered territories, while we gather together and await the Rapture while enjoying the benefits of our new Trumpist economy enveloped by the stench of neo-feudalism, wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible.
Welcome To The New American Collective
It feels more and more like we’re falling backwards into an Orwellian nightmare. A bad dream of such complexity, with so many hi-tech moving parts, that we can’t adequately grasp what’s happening. But it’s definitely there. It’s our new American Collective, and it’s far more than those of us on the Internet being profiled by marketers who want to sell us piles of junk.
All those profiles, some of them drilling deep into who we are, will eventually be pulled together into one massive data bank with the ability to better contain and control us. At the same time, newspapers have been going out of business, with the latest attack against a free press aimed at the Wall Street Journal, for an expose of Donald Trump.
Hopefully, Murdoch and the Journal won’t follow in Shari Redstone’s footsteps, with Paramount’s $16 million dollar payout to DJT’s protection racket. It was the utter castration of a once proud network news operation, with Paramount’s Board of Directors, wielding the scalpel.
Don’t take it personally though, it’s only business, even if it does result in our increased collective ignorance.
Politico reports that more than two-thirds of the country’s newspaper jobs have vanished since 2005. The ax is falling in newsrooms at many local tv stations as well. I know this to be a fact, as some of my friends have been victims of the corporate cost-cutting (p)urge. There is also PBS. Obviously Donald Trump and his minions want that to just go away.
Oversight, the kind provided by a free press and guaranteed by the First Amendment, can be such a pain.
And there you have a couple of fronts in the war against American Democracy, the aggregation of information about each and every one of us via the Internet, while, at the same time, traditional sources of news and information are being shut down or are going under as their traditional revenue streams leave for cyberspace, which increasingly steals the eyeballs of readers and viewers.
Absent professional Journalism, people are getting what they want, and not what they need. It’s the perfect storm for a burgeoning autocracy, all of it fitting nicely into the plans of any traditional autocrat or fascist.
Historically, killing the flow of information provided by a free press is near the top of their primary agendas when subduing a soon to be conquered people, as the oligarchs eat away at our freedoms bit by bit. So little goes with each bite, that it’s hardly noticed. Even if it is noticed, it seems relatively harmless, until you begin to add it all up.
Without a free press we are increasingly ignorant, making it increasingly difficult or even impossible to hold our elected leaders accountable, making it next to impossible to sustain a working democracy. All the while they continue collating new data on each of us. And even with all of this, we still haven’t gotten to the cameras.
It started with security cameras in retail outlets and government buildings, I guess. Then, suddenly, there were cameras at almost every intersection. Cameras, cameras, everywhere, inside and out. But who’s complaining? It was all about keeping us safe, right? It was cost-effective too, using cameras instead of people to keep an eye on things.
That’s what I was thinking as I recently installed our new video doorbell. Something I was prompted to do after that recent home invasion robbery and double murder back in Encino. A video doorbell, only seemed to make good sense. And it works very well, I must say, giving us a running record of everyone who comes to the door, and more. With AI, it remembers faces and cars. Amazing, no? Well, it’s amazing to me. I can remember when we had just one wired phone and it was on a “party line” back in rural Minnesota.
This new era of extreme audio and video coverage is both wonderful and dangerous, as eventually some new “collective” will have gathered not only digital personal profiles on us all, they will have also patched all the cameras together, keeping tabs not just on every damn thing we’ve done, but whatever we happen to be doing at any given moment.
Even now, privacy is a distant memory for those of us old enough to remember what it was.
Live and in color, the collective will be watching and listening. It’s more than something Orwell dreamed up, it’s our new reality, and it’s probably more akin to the Hitler Youth Movement keeping an eye on everything that happened in the neighborhood. That one really snuck up on the Germans, didn’t it?
But in the here and now, nobody seems to be all that worried about it. The big digital information gathering and traditional press killing picture, I mean. Even while Donald J. Trump, files his most recent lawsuit against the press, attempting to discourage and contain allegations of who really knows what with regard to his former good buddy Jeffrey Epstein? If only the government would release all the files, not just from the grand jury, but the complete FBI investigation. Suppose Pam Bondi, will ever do that? Without being ordered to by Trump, I mean.
Again, oversight can be such a pain. All those reporters poking around, with no agenda other than digging out the truth. We can’t have that. Oh, hell no. What we can have is a new collective, armed with our personal profiles while video and audio coverage of our each and every move increases daily, with the installation of each new camera.
Driven by fear, under the banner of “I have seen the enemy and he is us,” we could very well be assisting in the destruction of our free society, as the free press dies and our democratic institutions are torn to pieces while we the people install cameras, both inside and outside our homes, all of them standing by for some massive all in one AI hookup.
Welcome to the new collective, comrade. And please remember, when our free press is gone, our freedom will be going with it. Now that’ll be a real deep state. And they’ll have it all, each and every painful moment of it, on camera.
War… What Is It Good For?
While watching Iran lob missiles into Qatar, it occurred to me that much of the world is being led around by the nose by two very questionable characters.
Leading the charge in what could turn into WW III, is Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. A wanted man, with an arrest warrant having been issued by the International Criminal Court, for suspected war crimes. A man who has been lying for years about just how close Iran is to developing a nuclear bomb. There’s more, like his failure to secure Israel’s borders, but that should probably be enough. Just understand that he needs something to provide him with cover for all his failures at national leadership.
Then there’s Donald J. Trump, found guilty on 34 felony counts, indicted four times and impeached twice. A man who, apparently, will give you whatever you want, if you are willing to massage his ego. A man who promised to avoid getting the United States into yet another endless war in the Middle East. And yet, here we all are.
We had an agreement with Iran, that they would hold off on developing nukes, but Trump, acting in conjunction with Netanyahu’s wishes, trashed it back in 2018.
It’s widely believed that Trump killed the deal the United States, much of the world in fact, had with Iran, because he was out to smash anything that could be construed as an achievement of the Obama Administration, because he, Mr. Trump, has a problem with black people, and he couldn’t stand for America’s first black president to have had any success whatsoever.
Based purely upon the evidence, you could say that Donald Trump and Bebe Netanyahu, needlessly created the highly volatile situation within which we are now entangled.
These two guy are the best Israel and the United States can do? A terminal business failure/felon and a fugitive from international justice who appears to have repeatedly rejected solutions to endless war? These two guys are leading us around by the nose?
Terrible Hollow Feeling
I’m stuck with a terrible hollow feeling that we might not get the country back. That the rule of law and due process are slipping away. That all the futurists were right, that the threat would come from the inside, wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible.
It’s so easy to tear things down, so difficult to rebuild. And the outcome will be on the Roberts Court. Two decisions, tore us down. Citizen’s United and the ruling that the President, is beyond the reach of the law. Horrible decisions. Official acts of negligence by people who are supposed to be intelligent and educated enough to stand in support of the Constitution. No degree from Harvard Law, necessary.
Ignorance, fear and hate landed on us big time. Even now, fear is the enemy. Give in to it, and it’s over. I may lose some friends, but I am done pretending everything’s okay. It most definitely is not.
We May Have To Let Them “Fight It Out”
The first time we heard the idea that “sometimes they have to fight it out,” was Donald Trump talking about The Russians and Ukraine, after it became apparent that he, DJT, would be unable to deliver on his campaign promise to end the war. So here we are, with Russia and Ukraine, continuing to “fight it out,” something Trump idiotically compared to a couple of children slugging it out on the playground. An analogy quickly refuted by Ukrainian President Zelinsky, as it should have been.
Now, just very recently, we’re hearing those same words come out of Trump’s mouth, but this time in regard to Israel and Iran. Again, DJT is suggesting that perhaps we’ll have to let them “fight it out,” as again, he has failed in his campaign promise to end the war in the Middle East.
Letting two parties “fight it out,” appears to be Trump’s new catch-all phrase when he wishes to avoid talking about his failures in ending international conflicts. Let’s hope he never tries to use it with regard to the left and the right slugging it out here in the United States. It isn’t all that difficult to see it coming, considering the way Trump continues to do all he can to divide the country into two camps.
It’s important to listen to what Trump says, even if it’s sometimes next to impossible to discern between what he actually believes and what he simply imagines. Right now, he may be imagining two sides eventually fighting it out on the streets in a politically polarized U.S. It could be his plan. A convenient catch-phrase for “I failed again.”
The Real Harvest Of Shame
A couple of days ago some of us watched George Clooney, portray Ed Murrow, being demoted by CBS from his regular show back in the 1950’s to doing 5 documentaries, including “Harvest of Shame,” exposing the plight of migrant farm workers in America. Now, just a couple of days later, that same drama continues playing itself out on the streets of Los Angeles.
So much for politicians solving our immigration issues, regardless of how badly we need immigrants to pick our food and clean our hotel rooms and houses, all the while contributing to Social Security. But what the hell? It’s only been 65 years since Harvest of Shame was aired by CBS.
A ride-along with the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the “INS,” was among my first assignments after arriving in Los Angeles in 1982. They were going on a raid, up in the onion fields of Ventura County. Their effort was successful, as they arrested maybe two dozen migrant farm workers, herding them onto busses like cattle. On the ride back to L.A. one of the INS agents asked me something I’ve never forgotten. “Do you speak Spanish?” he said. “No,” I replied. “You’d better learn,” he said.
The INS, the government, knew what what happening. Those of us that lived in the Southwest, knew where it was heading, as did the politicians, who year after year, decade after decade, have failed miserably when it comes to fixing our broken immigration system.
Fast forward to the present day here in Maryland, where watermen and their blue crab processing plants are threatened with extinction. According to “The baynet.com, “Maryland watermen say their way of life is being pinched from both sides: a flood of cheap crab meat from Venezuela, and an increasingly unreliable stream of foreign guest workers, without whom the industry simply can’t function.”
It’s okay to secure the borders and go after dangerous criminals. The problem, it would appear, is that more than a third of the country still has no idea that many of the people being caught up in Trump’s theatrics are honest, hard working migrants, who are badly needed by the country to do the jobs none of our sons and daughters are willing to do.
Please do go after the actual criminal element, Mr. Trump, but stop pretending that the sledgehammer you are using in Los Angeles, by federalizing the Guard and threatening to call up the Marines, is for anything but theatrics to satisfy your base and divert from the issues you currently have with Elon Musk and your “big, beautiful bill.” You are tearing families apart and hurting our economy and it is not necessary.
Instead of calling up the Marines, why not get together with the Democrats and maybe even a few officials from the Mexican Government, and work out a plan to fix our broken immigration system? You can be the hero that finally gets it done after decades of failure. Or, you can continue to fail. Perpetuating our decades old harvest of shame while the watermen go broke here in Maryland and California’s crops die in the fields.
The Prez Of South Africa Sucker Punched In The Oval As Trump’s “Fear The Others” Campaign Moves Ahead
Just watched the travesty of Donald Trump sucker-punching the President of South Africa with a right-hook of disinformation in the Oval Office.
Poor President Ramaphosa. He probably thought he and Donald were in the Oval for a photo op, prior to serious one-on-one talks. Instead, Trump unleashed a carefully planned audio/video media assault on Ramaphosa, alleging in loud tones just short of shouting that there is a genocide taking place against white Afrikaner farmers carried out by black South Africans.
Some quick fact checking proved it to be a lie, or perhaps we should say another lie, as there have been so many.
I swear to God, it looks like Trump is trying to get a race war started prior to the midterms, which will probably be a blue wave – if we can get there. Now he’s spreading total nonsense about white Afrikaners being murdered in a black on white genocide. First it was the overblown Latino threat on US soil, now it’s South Africa. It looks and smells like a “white Americans vs. the others” setup as the one thing the “others” have in common, is that they are all ppl of color as opposed to Donald’s overwhelmingly white base.
It’s right out of the Hitler/Manson playbook. Can’t believe we are watching it happen. So many are either in denial or just plain ignorant, with no desire to ferret out the truth. I vacillate between depression, disgust and anger. Ignorance is a terrible thing and this current situation, where real truthful media is fake and fake media – those who give you what you want and not what you need – is deemed to be real by Trump’s followers, who have followed Vance, Hegseth, Rubio and our Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who doesn’t know what “habeas corpus” means, down the rabbit hole.
DJT has already led an attempted coup, now he appears to want a full-blown race war by whipping up an imaginary genocide in South Africa. The Prez of So. Africa, did get in one good shot, saying he was sorry he couldn’t give Trump a jet. Donald, then used the occasion to announce that he has decided to accept the 747 from Qatar, apparently with no approval, no advise and consent, from the Congress. A personal gift, which he, King Donald, unimpeded by the Congress, has decided the United States will happily accept.
Why bother with oversight? King Donald, will just ignore it. Did you see the report verifying that 50 of the immigrants Trump sent to Salvador, were in the United States legally? Donald doesn’t seem even remotely interested in bringing them back, following what appears to be their kidnapping and false imprisonment by the Trump Administration.
This is madness.
MSNBC and CNN, did a good job of reporting out this latest incident in the Oval, with live fact checking to correct Trump’s lies as he blathered on about a “genocide.”
I’m wondering if the traditional media is too little, too late, considering YouTube is the front-runner in the race for eyeballs. Also wondering if we’ll make it to the midterms in one piece if Trump keeps this up and the Republicans continue their refusal to take a stand against their liar in chief, who appears to be more deeply deluded on a daily basis.
Why Smear Joe Biden?
Why the smear campaign against Joe Biden? Haven’t he and his family given enough to the country, with Joe offering a lifetime of service, and one of his sons dying from a condition possibly acquired while serving overseas? Shouldn’t the nation be grateful?
I agree that he may have been too old to run for that second term. I was among those thinking he shouldn’t do it. I hoped he wouldn’t do it, but he did. And with a couple of exceptions, he did a pretty good job. Far better than this current president, who unleashes a wrecking ball on our democratic form of government at every turn, recently returning from the Arab world, not with any new substantial treaties, but with bags of loot and the offer of a “free” 747 luxury jet the Quataris clearly no longer need or want. Or they wouldn’t be giving it away as a bribe to DJT.
By now we should all be getting it. Donald J. Trump, has turned his back on our allies while appearing to support the enemies of democracy, like Vladimir Putin, with whom he is clearly enamored. A tyrant and dictator, who puts up a front of keeping the door to peace talks open, while launching a drone attack on old ladies in a van in Ukraine. And children in the street. And thousands of other Ukrainian non-combatants.
As for Netanyahu, and the continued slaughter of Palestinians, who knows what Trump currently believes, as his push for any given policy is erratic at best, apparently changing on a whim from one hour to the next as his need to become America’s first dictator continues?
If ever there was a U.S. President, whose mental fitness should be called into serious question, it is Donald J. Trump. And that, makes it all the more curious that media outlets just recently launched what appears to be a campaign against the past administration of Joe Biden. A man whose family has already given so much, only to be smeared while in retirement.
I admit to being a Democrat. A very bad Democrat, who switched from my former lifetime status as an Independent upon moving back to Maryland, which has a closed primary, making it necessary to join a party or be shut out of voting in the State’s antiquated primary elections. By my way of thinking, that makes me something less that one of the “party faithful.” I am a Democrat out of necessity, not because I back the party’s platform.
Millions of Americans, I believe, really do put the general good of the country ahead of personal passion for one special interest issue or another. Consequently, a great many Americans feel left out of the process, with Republicans peddling fear, hatred and lies, while Democrats, appear to represent nothing short of the old “tail wagging the dog” scenario, with a few far left special interest cliques running things. It may not be entirely true, but in politics, appearances can be all important to the outcome.
For Donald John Trump, the one overriding personal passion appears to be open self-aggrandizement. He isn’t even trying to hide it, as he appoints unelected lieutenants to attack our hard-won freedoms, our democratic institutions, paid for with the blood of our ancestors, while he tries to intimidate the judiciary into inaction through overt threats in the media. A media, which, in its infinite wisdom, has currently turned its focus to a critique of the job Joe Biden did, rather than the questionable mental condition of this current president, who has been diagnosed with malignant narcissism, and other conditions, by mental health professionals with impeccable credentials. Warnings a nation in denial continues to largely disregard.
Compared to Trump, Joe Biden was sharp as a tack and a great patriot, who gave nearly all he had and then continued to give even more. Yes, he failed to lock down the border and lower grocery prices. At the same time, he pulled the country out of the Covid pandemic and the economic crisis it created. Unlike Trump, who appears to be obsessed with improving tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest citizens regardless of the impact his actions will have on our middle-class and the poor. There really is no comparison between the two. Joe Biden, cared for America. Trump, cares only for Trump, and refers to those who put country first as “suckers and losers.”
Setting aside any number of violations of constitutional law, like repeated violations of due-process and sending out masked federal goon squads with questionable warrants to break into private property and kidnapping people from the streets, the emoluments clause alone should be enough to put an end to Donald Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office.
His questionable mental health is another issue, which may outstrip all the others. It is however, of little meaning, lacking Republicans with the spine to take action against a man who is turning out to be America’s version of mad King George III of Great Britain.
Who can possibly agree with Trump’s latest mad proposal, to somehow “move” a million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya? How to get them there and what to do if they don’t want to go, little details like that, apparently never crossed Trump’s mind. Or what’s left of it. Maybe he feels that just thinking about it will make it happen? Maybe he’s “hearing things” again?
As DJT becomes increasingly irrational, establishing crypto currency funds his anonymous admirers can dump millions of dollars into in the hope of influencing his administration, while he demands that Canada becomes the 51st state and that the United States should act, possibly militarily, to annex Greenland and Panama, in short, acting in a fashion that is in the country’s worst rather than its best interest, a few Republicans appear finally to be waking up to the fact that something needs to be done, possibly before the mid-terms. Hopefully, their numbers will grow.
To assume we’ll get through this by any means other than removing DJT from office, like trying to wait this madness out, could be a fatal assumption for American Democracy. Complaining about the job Joe Biden did, is nothing but a diversion from what Trump is doing. Our media needs to stop falling for it, and go after the real problem, the old guy who is currently in office, not the old guy who is no longer there.
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(News of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis was released just hours after this piece was posted.)
New York City 4-5-25
The Future Is Now
Turkey and Israel are on the verge of civil wars because of far right extremism. In Paris, tens of thousands are in the streets protesting the far right and racism. French President, Emanuel Macron, is calling together a “coalition of the willing” on the 27th, to help defend Ukraine, by taking a stand against Vladimir Putin and the Russians – backed presumably by their old friend and apparent ally, Donald J. Trump.
Would Israel, be on the verge of a civil war had Kamala Harris been elected rather than Trump? Probably not. It’s doubtful she would have been able to do anything about the situation in Turkey, but she would have at least tried.
If only DJT were able to connect the dots. Instead, he’s attacking our institutions of higher learning, closing the Dept. of Education and threatening to shutter Social Security. He was about to give the keys to the Pentagon to Elon Musk, before his misstep was narrowly averted after being exposed by the New York Times. At the same time, like an angry child, he revoked the security clearances of true American patriots.
Would we be having any of these issues had Kamala Harris been elected rather than Trump? No. Instead, Kamala Harris, is one of the American patriots who has had her security clearance revoked by Donald Trump.
Stand by for news.