We're now learning that the Department of Homeland Security officials were given talking points to share with the media the defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who traveled with his semiautomatic assault rifle from Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin to kill two people and blow the arm off a third.

America's first COVID death was on February 29 of this year, roughly 200 days ago. In that time, more than 200,000 Americans have died of the disease, the equivalent of 1,000 people a day.

That's how many people would have died if between February 29 and today three fully-loaded jumbo jets had crashed every single day, even on weekends, for 200 days.

What we saw last night was the dictator's playbook.

Tell violent white supremacist racists to "stand by" and encourage them to show up at polling places to intimidate voters.

Bully, bluster and threaten like Mussolini did, promoting your brand as "tough guy" when in fact you're a lazy coward.

Donald Trump swindled his father's estate for several hundred million dollars and turned himself into a phony billionaire. We now know it was all a con.

The Trump administration, according to today's New York Times, was leaning on the CDC to provide any kind of evidence, no matter how thin or meaningless, that could be used to justify opening schools. We now know that was all a con.

Back in the day, Donald Trump's niece alleges, he stole hundreds of millions of dollars from his father's estate, screwing his other family members and the IRS (you and me).

He then went on a massive spending binge, pouring that money into airlines, steaks, vodka, Trump-branded games, casinos, a fake university, etc. Virtually all of them failed, and he experienced multiple bankruptcies.

Those who forget history, the old saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

"Lawmakers on both sides indicated Tuesday that the Republican-dominated Legislature will call a special session by the end of the week to appoint its own slate of delegates to the electoral college," wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for The Los Angeles Times on November 29, 2000

In the power grab to fill the Supreme Court seat announced the same evening as the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell didn't do anything new. The GOP has a long history of playing hardball power politics.

One of the big lessons that Donald Trump has learned through his years at the center of the New York tabloid media is that he can normalize just about anything.

When he was getting bad press because he was having an affair on his first wife, for example, he called newspapers pretending to be his own assistant to say that Marla Maples was astonished with "the best sex ever." It changed the entire newspaper narrative, and Trump proved to himself one more time that he can normalize just about anything.

Donald Trump became president by exploiting a loophole called the Electoral College. The majority of Americans did not want him or vote for him as president, but he's there anyway.

Now he's planning on using a different loophole, the 12th Amendment, to hang onto power.

Donald Trump said in a rally last night that the coronavirus, "Affects virtually nobody."

Apparently "virtually nobody" means 200,000 dead Americans, ranging in age from the elderly to infants.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, and while everybody is focusing on abortion, the Supreme Court, if it falls into hard-core conservative hands, could do massive damage to the entire spectrum of life in America.

Although they haven't yet publicly acknowledged it in such stark terms, it's clear now that the Trump administration has decided pursue a herd immunity strategy to deal with the coronavirus.

Trump's new White House advisor on coronavirus, Scott Atlas, has said it on numerous occasions in multiple venues, and now our Attorney General, Bill Barr, is trying to argue that lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus are as bad as slavery. Trying to achieve herd immunity in the United States against the coronavirus, assuming it's even possible, would involve between two and 6 million Americans dying.

Last month Donald Trump brought a Fox News radiologist into the White House to advise him on the coronavirus.

Dr. Scott Atlas has no meaningful experience or training in public health or infectious diseases, but he offers his opinions in a way on Fox News that impressed Donald Trump.

Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are letting America die.

The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they are denying climate change while a dozen states in the west burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters in California and Oregon are identifying the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh.

Bob Woodward interviewed Donald Trump back in January and February and now tells us that, way back then, Trump realized that the coronavirus was not only quite deadly and would infect even children, but also was airborne and highly contagious.