Here are comments      I just posted on the Washington Post website on its  editorial, How to avert a U.S.-Europe breakup -- As the transatlantic alliance becomes   transactional, Trump’s tough love is no reason to get in bed with China:   

"The Post's Editorial Board is once again cozying up to Trump by ignoring realpolitik. The piece calls on Europeans to rally around a common enemy. Tragically but realistically NATO and ordinary Europeans recognize that the common enemy is the Trump-Putin axis. It is ludicrous to expect that Trump's demands insist that NATO members pay their "fair share," as he is dealing and wheeling with Putin over Ukraine and providing aid and comfort to fascist parties across the continent, to be seen as anything less than reprehensible. The guy is neither an honest broker nor trustworthy. Europe's outreach to China is problematic, but no less so the Post's naïve critique of it." 

Democracy dies in deception and in the news media being controlled by billionaires like Bezos, who are willing to do anything to curry this Regime's favor. 

 Bio 

Bob Williams has lived and worked in DC for over 40 years.   His career has included serving as a Senate aide to Lowell Weicker, monitoring the closure of Forest Haven, helping pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, and directing federal disability programs.  Williams uses a speech-generating device and helped found CommunicationFIRST, a civil rights organization centered on advancing the rights of people with little to no understandable speech.    

 There's Nothing Polite About It:   

Pardoning is One of Trump’s Ways of Stomping Out The Rule of Law?  

If you are lounging about this Sunday and need a swift kick to dive into the shower to scrub all the dirt and slime away, the piece below is sure to do the trick.  All of the characters described in it are as venal (i.e., beyond pardon) as the others.  The Washington Post article deals with the latest of the 140 and counting “Presidential pardons” Trump has issued in 2025 alone. And, just think, the holiday festivities are only now beginning!   The latest lucky fella to receive one is a felon convicted of $38 million in Medicare nursing home fraud by Trump’s Department of Injustice.  Nursing home magnate Joseph Schwartz was pardoned by Trump a few months later because of the able representation of two “lobbyists, right-wing provocateurs Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl,” who, among other things, were previously convicted of a robo call scheme in Ohio aimed at deterring and diminishing voters there, and a similar case is pending against the dynamic duo in Michigan.  Schwartz paid the pair $960,000 to “seek… a federal pardon”, a paltry amount all things considered.  The White House flatly denies that Schartz won his full and unconditional pardon through any sort of pay-for-pardon exchange.  For the sake of argument, I’ll concede that this theoretically could be true, especially given the ever-abundant emoluments and other perks being readily thrown the Don's way.  No, the real problem is not that Trump is enriching himself by handing pardons to whoever he wants, whenever he wants, and for whatever whim or reason that strikes him.  Anytime a public official enriches themselves, it is a problem and an infraction.  But what Trump is doing, handing out pardons whenever it suits him, is a way of saying that laws do not matter and that he is the sole arbiter of which laws apply, how they should apply, and when laws must be nulled and void because he decrees it.   Pardoning is one of his ways of incessantly whittling away at the rule of law.  It might seem too cute by half, but symbolically it packs a dastardly wallop.  Trump and his gang gleefully point out that the 236-year-old Constitution and subsequent court decisions grant all Presidents broad, some say unlimited, powers to pardon.  Kings were once granted unlimited, inconvertible power to pardon.  Trump seeks such powers not just to pardon but to dictate. Why are the Congress and the Courts meekly standing by, enabling him?  And, most importantly, when do we intend to reclaim our Democracy?

The case of a felon who paid lobbyists nearly $1 million to seek a Trump pardon - The Washington Post