President Obama rarely comments on the puerile antics of Donald J. Trump. Let’s hope that changes when election season gets into full swing and he hits the campaign trail on behalf of our nominee. But for the most part, he’s faithfully observed tradition and held his tongue, despite the dopey depravities of our doddering dunce-in-chief.

But sometimes Trump is so noxious, even Obama, one of the classiest men on the planet, has to throw some shade.

And today he did just that with this quiet — yet thundering — tweet:

President Donald Trump began his Saturday attacking Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The city’s newspaper The Baltimore Sun unleashed on Trump for the racist attacks implying the residents were vermin or trash.

One of the consequences of the fragmented media environment fostered by the Internet has been the development of alternate realities. Americans increasingly get our “news” from sources carefully chosen to confirm our pre-existing biases.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with the divisions over Donald Trump and his slogan  “Make America Great Again.”

Company cited with 200 code violations

November 02, 2017, 11:45:00 AM EDT

Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz has revealed the existence of more than 200 code violations in apartments owned by the Kushner Cos. in Baltimore County, all accrued in the current calendar year. After threatening to withhold HUD rental payments and levy fines, necessary repairs were made in all but nine properties. Those nine unrepaired properties resulted in withholding of HUD rental payments and issuance of $3,500 in County fines.

The non-binding Senate resolution introduced this week in an effort to label “antifa” as “a domestic terrorist organization” is the product of years of well-publicized lies about antifa propagated by the right-wing press.

On March 22, tenured English professor Anthony Alessandrini was startled to see a photo of himself in the New York Daily News. The picture accompanied an article by reporter Larry McShane. The headline was damning: “Kingsborough professor, during campus event, urged donations to group with alleged ties to Palestinian terror group.”

“The Democratic Party,” a new column by Thomas Edsall (7/24/19) declares, “Is Actually Three Parties.”

Fascinating! Tell us more, New York Times columnist on “politics, demographics and inequality.”

Well, based on data from a CBS poll of “battleground states,” there are “three roughly equal groups”: Democrats who call themselves “very liberal,” Democrats who call themselves “somewhat liberal,” and Democrats who call themselves “moderate” or “conservative.”

Indiana has the largest, most costly school voucher program in the country.

The news that Donald Trump is openly feeding classified information to Devin Nunes should be upsetting.

Rebecca Phillips is wearing a black, narrow-brimmed hat, and has both a crucifix and reading glasses hanging from her neck.  She leans hard on her cane as she limps down the aisle created by tall steel shelves holding jars of peanut butter and boxes of Cheerios. Phillips turns toward a handful of rooms tucked in the corner of this converted Indianapolis warehouse that now serves as a St. Vincent de Paul food pantry.

INDIANAPOLIS – Legislation that has changed the lives of millions of Americans, including more than one in ten Hoosiers, marks its 29th anniversary today. The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law on June 26, 1990, and is considered the most significant piece of civil-rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Harry Targ 

Numerous international human rights documents firmly estab­lish the principle that no human being can be “illegal” or outside the protection of the law. Yet despite the clearly established principle that discrimination and abuse based on immigration status are violations of human rights, U.S. government policies continue to sanction human rights violations against migrants and im­migrants.

We can wring our hands about the corruption of the Department of Education, or the placement of ideologues on our federal courts, the encouragement of White nationalism, or the abandonment of democratic norms and the rule of law, but even those abominations pale next to the war being waged by Donald Trump and his GOP cult on science and the environment.

On The Law of Hybrid Wars

After Donald Trump ignited a firestorm by launching a racist attack on four Democratic members of Congress, the Beltway press last week temporarily revised a time-honored journalism tradition of forcing members of the president's party to respond publicly to controversial behavior. The results were utterly predictable, of course, with most Republicans refusing to criticize Trump's latest bout of open bigotry. But even the recent media questions for the GOP seemed muted, given the stunning and historic nature of Trump's racist behavior. 

Recently, Republicans have demonstrated a huge amount of concern over the idea that there might be someone in Congress who holds anti-Semitic views. Someone suggesting that Jewish Americans have divided loyalties. And it turns out this concern is very well-founded … as demonstrated ably by Missouri Republican Josh Hawley.

The House of Representatives passed historic legislation on Thursday that would gradually more than double the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2024. An increase in the federal pay floor would be a major victory for labor and racial justice movements, but a key portion of the bill is often overlooked: language that would phase out subminimum wages for tipped workers and workers with disabilities.

For a brief moment, the standoff in Oregon over climate change legislation seemed like an amusing bit of Wild West political theater. Last week, rather than stomach a losing vote on the bill, Republicans in the state Senate escaped—scattering to Idaho, according to rumors, maybe Montana—to deny Democrats a quorum, which is required to pass any legislation. When the governor threatened to send state troopers to bring them back to work, one of the “Absent Eleven” threatened violent resistance: “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” blustered Brian Boquist.

Ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the United States’ first national minimum wage in 1938, there have been Republicans and fiscal conservatives insisting that minimum wages are a job killer. FDR, however, told Republicans to relax — a mandatory 25 cents per hour wouldn’t destroy the U.S.

My therapist told me I’m adorable, and my gynecologist said I’m delightful, so yeah, it’s been a pretty good year so far!

To all those wondering about my absence—-or to that one guy wondering about my absence—-I’ve been dealing with fibromyalgia—-a subject so boring I don’t want to give it another line in this piece. I don’t want to belittle anyone suffering with this pain disorder—it’s awful. What else is there to say about it?

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America—the first African American to attain this exalted office. Hundreds of thousands crowded the National Mall during the ceremony to wish the new president well.

Can we stop looking at gun rights as an ideological issue? This is no longer ideological. I don't care how you feel in theory: I care what is happening in practice. In practice, there have been 351 mass shootings in only 336 days. More people will die by guns than in car accidents this year. In practice, this is a public health crisis.

Headlined “U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War,” the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention. Here’s the first paragraph

I arrived in West Lafayette in early September 1967 from Chicago. As a big city guy I was dismayed by the lack of restaurants, chain stores and restaurants, and lots of hip coffee shops. Over the years such enterprises, big and small, arrived.

But West Lafayette maintained its small-town flavor. Folks could bike to work, drive in town and to Lafayette in short order, and roads were clear of traffic.

Trump is often called an isolationist, but he is as interventionist as his predecessors. His strategy is simply to rely more heavily on US economic power than military might to coerce adversaries, which creates its own kind of cruelty and destabilization – and embodies its own brand of illegality.

As if the Trump Administration and its enablers in McConnell’s Court haven’t done enough to erode public confidence in America’s governing institutions, recent disclosures about the number of police officers involved in White Supremicist organizations should make the hair on the back of our collective necks stand up.

Fact-checking is a thriving media industry, but every now and then a fact-checker offers up a judgment so questionable that it shows just how biased a person can be in the name of “facts.” Take The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and team and a fact—yes, fact, accepted by Kessler as “numbers that add up”—offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders in last Thursday’s debate.

New York Times reporter Sydney Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders—which may be why the paper has her cover him.

Ember is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike.

....“The simple fact is that the Republicans who run Tennessee and other ‘non-expansion’ states have chosen to inflict misery on many of their constituents, rural residents in particular,” he continued before adding, “So if rural America is suffering, a large part of the explanation is gratuitous political cruelty. This cruelty has denied health insurance to millions who could have had it with a stroke of the pen. And rural hospitals are closing, rural doctors leaving, in large part because people can’t afford to pay for care.”

The combined wealth of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sergey Brin, and Larry Page is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom half of the American population.

They are the leaders of a second Gilded Age – ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet – which has spawned a handful of hi-tech behemoths and crushed competition.