The single most important defining characteristic of an authoritarian dictatorship is that the authoritarian leader uses the power of the state to maintain his own personal power. This is something that "divided government" - three separate branches of government that are coequal - was designed to prevent.

Mike Pompeo lied to a reporter on the air, and then screamed obscenities at her afterwards. A few days later, he refused to allow another reporter from NPR on the state department airplane in punishment. Donald Trump just praised this behavior, Saying "You did a good job on her," as if it was some sort of a physical assault.

As a possible pandemic looms on the horizon, the United States is the only developed nation in the world without a national healthcare system. Medicare For All is not just about saving as much as half of all of our half healthcare dollars, it's also about national security.

The revelations in John Bolton's book, reported in today's New York Times, bring to mind the previous scandal surrounding a White House cover-up.

Lev Parnas recently told Rachel Maddow that he's more afraid of Attorney General Bill Barr than he is of the mobbed-up foreign oligarchs he has betrayed. Barr, after all, can weaponize our prisons to punish Parnas.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are officially in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, and they intend to go after them this year.

Interestingly, the current divide in the Senate gives us an insight into how powerful a genuinely progressive Democratic president could be, and how much he or she could get done. As we saw yesterday, the Republicans voted repeatedly to participate in a cover-up of Donald Trump's crimes.

While Donald Trump is on trial in the Senate impeachment hearings, many commentators are pointing out that the Senate is also at trial. Few, however, are pointing out that the fare and future of our country may will also be decided by this trial.

Donald Trump refused to brief the only branch of government that has the power to make war about his attack on Iranian General Soleimani.

Lev Parnas tells the story of how Donald Trump fired ambassador Marie Yovanovitch at least "four or five times," and that they were afraid that he would "fire her with a tweet." This is not the first time we have heard from White House insiders that the president often gives irrational or stupid orders that his staff then ignores.

Donald Trump has corrupted pretty much every federal agency, but the one that is most concerning is his corruption of the Department of Justice. Bill Barr, in 1992, ran the cover up of the Iran/Contra treason scandal on behalf of George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan. Now he's running, according to Lev Parnas, multiple coverups for Donald Trump.

New evidence shows that a Republican candidate for Congress was helping Giuliani and Trump in surveillance of US ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in Ukraine. If the Attorney General continues to refuse to investigate this crime, he should be impeached along with the president.

Now that Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are both starting to pull really well, the two of them combined well ahead of Joe Biden, the knives are coming out in the media. This morning on both MSNBC and CNN, commentators were complaining about how dramatically both of them plan to increase federal spending over the next decade.

Big Pharma spends a small fortune every year buying politicians to make sure we can't import prescription drugs from Canada, but they're more than happy to sell us contaminated medications from countries with weak manufacturing controls and exploitable labor that ensure high-profit margins.

Newsweek is reporting that the United Nations investigation of developed countries around the world finds that poverty in the United States is now so widespread and severe, with over 40 million Americans below the poverty level and many of them living without basic sanitation or enough food and without any access to healthcare, that large parts o