As we approach the midterm elections, the Nuremberg-like atmosphere of Donald Trump rallies plus his flagrant abuses of power terrify his critics.  They raise the question: Is Donald Trump a fascist?
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There are two matters of fact regarding Donald Trump that are irrefutable.  The first is that he is not a conservative but is, in fact, the direct adversary of all the core beliefs of Ronald Reagan. The second is that in terms of his politics, that is to say, his methods of obtaining and maintaining power, Trump has been a practitioner of both fascistic strategy and tactics.

A study by Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz determined that “The New York Times and The Washington Post have run a total of 115 news stories in their print editions mentioning the caravan over the last three weeks,” including 13 on the Post’s front page and 12 on the Times.

...As Gertz writes, many of these individual stories are well-reported and “debunk the president’s lies and conspiracy theories.” Nevertheless, “the sheer volume of the coverage can’t help but fuel Trump’s claims that the caravan’s approach represents a crisis and suck oxygen away from other stories in the lead-up to the midterm elections.”

​...Gertz’s report suggests that major media outlets are continuing to let Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans drive their coverage, rather than making objective assessments of which stories would best inform their readers about the stakes in the upcoming election.

On Wednesday night Kansas Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach made an appearance on CNN. And it quickly turned into a disaster.

Kobach has been one of Trump’s biggest supporters. He ran Trump’s phony investigation into voter fraud. He has also been a big champion for voter suppression. And on Wednesday night he got called out for all of it on live TV.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin didn’t pull any punches when he joined Kobach on a panel to discuss Trump’s latest lie about changing the Fourteenth Amendment with an executive order. Toobin told the truth about Kobach. And the Republican didn’t like it one bit.
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Toobin flat out called Kobach a racist. And then he said, “Kris has devoted his career to stopping black people and poor people from voting. I mean that’s been your goal for decades.”

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen claimed that Trump told him in 2016 that his rallies are almost all white because black people are too stupid to vote for him.

Vanity Fair reported, “During our conversation, Cohen recalled a discussion at Trump Tower, following the then-candidate’s return from a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen had watched the rally on TV and noticed that the crowd was largely Caucasian. He offered this observation to his boss. “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’”

Gunshot wounds put an average of 8,300 U.S. kids into the hospital every year, according to a new analysis released Monday.

​Close to half of them were shot on purpose and another 40 percent were shot accidentally, the researchers reported. Six percent of those who made it to the hospital died, the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reported.

U.S. archivists on Wednesday revealed one of the last great secrets of the Watergate investigation — the backbone of a long-sealed report used by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski to send Congress evidence in the legal case against President Richard M. Nixon.
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The release of the referral — delivered in 1974 as impeachment proceedings were being weighed — came after a former member of Nixon’s defense team and three prominent legal analysts filed separate lawsuits seeking its unsealing after more than four decades under grand jury secrecy rules. The legal analysts argued the report could offer a precedent and guide for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as his office addresses its present-day challenge on whether, and if so, how to make public findings from its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, including any that directly involve President Trump.

Republican lobbyist and mudslinger extraordinaire Jack Burkman is targeting Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That much is clear. What’s ambiguous is the extent to which Burkman is involved in a complex campaign that, on its face, seems an ill-designed effort to pay women to accuse Mueller of sexual harassment. Questions surrounding Burkman’s legal vulnerability are expanding as quickly as the saga itself.
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One “Lorraine Parsons” sent multiple reporters and media personalities an email alleging that she’d been called by a British-accented man purportedly working for Burkman with an offer to pay her and cover her debt in exchange for claiming Mueller sexually harassed her.