Even the professional war criminals, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, are not willing to show up to this weeks Republican convention.

Donald Trump has gutted his party, although we should probably be grateful.

Steve Bannon was just arrested for running a giant con on Trump supporters.

He and a few buddies started a "charity" inviting people to make contributions to help "build the wall" on our southern border. Gullible and vulnerable people gave them millions of dollars, and they used that money for their own purposes.

Next week, the Republican Party is holding their convention to crown Donald Trump as their candidate for a second term in office.

They've invited a few people who are noted mostly for their threats of violence or extreme bad manners, including the two multimillionaires who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in front of their St. Louis mansion and the smirking MAGA kid who stared down a Native American elder.

The major theme that emerged from last night's Democratic convention was that Joe Biden is a decent man while Donald Trump is corrupt, incompetent and mentally ill.

Which raises three questions : How did we end up with a corrupt, incompetent and mentally ill president; how did he get enough power to be able to twist the levers of government toward his own reelection; and why do Republicans in the US Senate continue to support him?

Joe Scarborough, on his morning TV show, had a roundtable with George Will and David Frum in which these three old conservative war horses discussed the possibility of the Republican Party returning to its "conservative values."

Those values they identified included balanced budgets, personal responsibility and small government. It's important for Americans to understand what conservatives mean when they use these words.

What could happen to America if Trump were to further, severely crash the U.S. economy the day after Joe Biden is announced as the winner of the 2020 presidential race?

As Trump tweeted on June 15, 2019, "if anyone but me takes over... there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!"

Last year the US Postal Service delivered over 1 billion prescriptions to Americans. It's the main way that veterans get their medications, and increasingly all across America people are getting their pharmaceuticals that way.

Donald Trump doesn't care. He doesn't care how many people die because their medications are late and they go into diabetic shock or their blood pressure explodes. He just doesn't care.

Around the same time Donald Trump issued an executive order to slash the revenue to Social Security, a Republican sheriff in Florida required police and people who come to the police station to take off their masks.

This is the face of the Republican Party: greedy, petty, angry, and stupid.

The single most consistent defining characteristic of an emerging dictatorship in a country that started as a democracy is that the dictator regularly holds elections and always wins, because he uses the instruments of government to make sure he wins.

Trump has now done this with the Justice Department, the Post Office, the Department of Homeland Security, The Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, and our intelligence agencies.

Trump says he is going to boost unemployment payments by $400, stop evictions, cut payroll taxes, and extend student loan relief.

In fact, these are all lies. As usual, it's a new con job, a grift from our grifter-in-chief.

This just in from Lori Wallach, Director Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch - In his speech now underway at Whirlpool in Ohio, Trump claimed to have met all of his trade promises from 2016. NOT!

The Republican hostility to helping people who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus, to expanding healthcare to all the American people, and their hostility to doing anything about climate change all come from the same source: greed and the big money it produces.

America needs to talk about Trump-proofing democracy for 2024 and beyond.

The billionaires with strong fascistic tendencies are carefully watching Trump and his administration to see what works and what doesn't as he pushes to tear apart our institutions of governance and divide America as a political strategy.

It's showing up in the obituaries.

People in the throes of agony from losing someone close to them are writing things like, "Instead of flowers, donate to a Democrat," or "instead of flowers, tell everyone to vote against Trump and the GOP this fall." It's become a national trend.

Donald Trump just tweeted his outrage that the State of Nevada is going to make it easy for all their registered citizens to vote by mail.

He knows, as Republicans have known for 40 years since Americans first started rejecting Reaganomics in widespread numbers, that when everybody can vote in America, Republicans lose elections.