Reporters for the Spectator are reporting that the House Intelligence Committee has seven different whistleblowers.

Politico is reporting that Donald Trump is raising millions of dollars for individual Republican senators who have signed a resolution opposing his impeachment.

This week, the Republicans began rolling out their classic "Two Santa Claus" scam. When Reagan became president, the national debt was less than $1 trillion.

A program funded by both the Bush and Obama administrations to catch and stop pandemics that could kill hundreds of millions of people was just shut down by the Trump administration.

People being killed by wildfires in California and people dying because they can't afford their insulin are the same thing. Both represent the capture of government by corporations-in other words, both are symptoms of democracy in the United States being replaced by a corporate state with little regard for morality, life or the law.

Wildfires destroying people's homes in California and people dying because they can't afford their insulin are the same thing. Both are examples of how corporations have risen up and taken over the legislative process, turning the power of government to their own ends of ever greater profits.

The sales pitch by so-called "moderate Democrats" and Republicans who take money from the insurance companies is that people "don't want to get kicked off their existing employer-provided health insurance plans." But workers don't make the choice of plans, their employers do.

The Global Wealth Report tells us that the worlds millionaires, composing less than 1% of the worlds population, own more than half the worlds wealth.

We complain that democracy is under assault from Donald Trump, but he's just a cog in a much larger worldwide machine that is tearing down democratic self-governance.

The number of Americans who called them selves Christian or religious has declined precipitously over the last decade, and the number of Americans who are "unaffiliated Christians", atheists, or unconcerned about religion or spirituality has increased.

Even those of us old enough to remember have probably forgotten that in the spring of 1979 the Attorney General of the United States appointed a special prosecutor to look into his own president's ownership of his peanut warehouse, to make sure that he wasn't, in any way, making money from his presidency.

We complain about the state of American politics; about a mentally ill billionaire in the White House and a Republican Party crawling with hustlers and conmen, and a few in the Democratic Party as well. The complaints are legitimate, but most people don't realize why the situation is as bad as it is.

The democratic debate, operating entirely within the context of corporate TV stars' questions and largely Republican frames, shows once again why a for-profit "news" operation shouldn't be running a presidential debate.

Fascism has often been defined as the merger of corporate and state interests, combined with belligerent nationalism. Donald Trump has now put an unprecedented number of lobbyists - nearly 300 - according to a ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigation - in powerful positions throughout government.

Donald Trump's pathetic betrayal of our Kurdish allies in northern Syria highlights the importance of Congress taking seriously it's constitutional obligation to define and authorize war.