Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston formed nationwide political groups, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, primarily as a means of opposing abortion rights, with an appeal to the Republican party. It became difficult to distinguish partisan political positions from the brand of Biblical theology preached by Evangelicals, including open endorsements of Republican candidates from pulpits. It is a blend of partisan politics, fundamentalist theology and the white, Christian nationalism that has been part of Evangelical eschatology for a little over a hundred years.

Stephanie Messina, whose story about her exodus from the MAGA cult is linked above, provides insights as to what most of the pseudo-Christians on the political far right believe that not only identifies them as a cult, but sets them aside from mainstream Christianity, placing them into a category that I call "pseudo-Christian," because they use a lot of the language and the structure, but have actually abandoned the Christian gospel, the core teachings of Jesus.

Messina says, of her church and pastor, "We were told Trump had been chosen by God, that he was a disheveled man like David, who was also an adulterer. Trump was a 'baby Christian', meaning he had just gotten saved, so we should give him grace because we're all sinners. Since he was a new creature in Christ, you couldn't hold anything against him."

"We saw Trump as the persecuted white savior," Messina goes on. "We believed Trump's critics were just blinded by Satan, and he was fighting for us."

The problem with this is that Trump is not "a baby Christian who had just gotten saved." Trump has repeatedly rejected the Evangelical interpretation of Christian conversion. He cannot get past the step requiring acknowledgement of being a sinner in need of God's grace. He has repeatedly and publicly declared, in media interviews where he is asked, and by several of the right wing evangelists who have been at great pains to try and make him look converted.

"I haven't done anything that requires God's forgiveness," has been Trump's repeated response. So Trump is not, by his own admission, a Christian at all. So he can't be "fighting for Christians."

The Senate will vote on the continuing resolution keeping the government funded today. But this bill does much more than that. It basically concedes powers given to Congress to Trump and Musk. It is one more step down the road to dictatorship, planned by an administration that is following their Project 2025 playbook to the letter.

We know that government shutdowns can be rough. But let me tell you, if this bill passes, it will be much rougher. There are concessions in it that would take what little leverage the minority party in the Congress still has to protect American democracy, and give it away.

Politics is once again disabling the Democratic party and its ability to function as resistance and opposition to the destruction of American democracy. They keep telling us that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, and then, instead of stepping up and taking the bold action necessary to stop him, they start to think of their own political rear ends, and they back down.

I'm sorry, Senator Schumer. You were in charge in 2020, when the Senate could have make a risky, but bold move, broken the filibuster, packed the damn Supreme Court, saved Roe, eliminated the threat of a presidential immunity ruling and pushed Trump's insurrection trial to a speedy conclusion. We wouldn't be here now if that had happened then.

Well, this is also risky, and bold. But if sticking up a finger to see which way the political wind is blowing is the modus operandi of Senate Democrats, letting the bill go without passing it, which would lead to a government shutdown, shows the wind to be in your favor. Americans, who had the truth hidden from them during an entire Presidential campaign, are waking up to the consequences of having a demagogue and an unelected foreigner trying to run the government by executive order. Democrats have not even been involved in any of the negotiations for this bill, how in the world can they be blamed for not voting for it? And the fact of the matter is that this isn't as risky as it might seem, because of that fact. The Republicans are in charge, the blame for a government shutdown will fall on them.

So come on, Senator Schumer, and any others who are thinking of pushing this through because it might look political. Grow a pair. Or step down and let Governor Hochul appoint AOC to the Senate.

Look, let's not beat around the bush here. We know what needs to be done to get this country back on track, and that is to somehow remove Trump from the Presidency. This fact is painfully obvious, just a month and a half into his second term. In spite of the fact that his caterwauling and hollering about the 2020 election being stolen from him was quite the strategy in preventing Democrats from making the same accusation of him this time around, I remain unconvinced that he won this election legitimately. The media is going to great lengths to try and make it appear otherwise, in spite of some glaring evidence that has been dug up by credible sources.

That being said, I also need to point out what we have learned about who we are as Americans in the 21st century. Education, specifically the system of public education that we have developed since the Civil War, has been the primary means of providing an informed and effective electorate, capable of maintaining a constitutional democracy that is truly of, by and for the people. Democracies do not always succeed because, in some countries, mostly underdeveloped and undereducated countries, the electorate does not have the educational background to understand how democracy works and how the people are empowered by it. The sign that we have reached this point in the United States is the number of votes Trump got, plus the number of people who are eligible to vote, but didn't participate at all. Education, as one of the primary means for preserving and protecting government of, by and for the people, has failed to do so.

We have a partisan political element that has been at work for at least 45 years, undermining the balance of power in the Constitution, pushing a white supremacist, Christian nationalist agenda, systematically undermining the function of the constitutional republic by using the opportunities it has when it is the majority party to take control of the judicial system that can't work the way it was designed in the balance of powers when it follows a partisan agenda rather than the rule of law. Republicans have abandoned compromise and negotiation as a means of making government work, and are bent on seeing it fail by demonizing opponents, and undermining the Constitution and the rule of law. Every Republican administration since Reagan has followed this pattern, testing the waters. Trump simply brings the most destructive elements to the table in his gross incompetence, mental instability and moral bankruptcy.

Our options, under the rule of law, include impeachment and removal, the invoking of the 25th amendment, or his resignation. But, there are some important steps that we can take now, which will demonstrate whether or not the Democratic party leadership in the Congress is a genuine opposition group, or a bunch of self-serving pretenders who are not capable of defending American constitutional democracy.

The tone and format hasn't changed one bit all through the 2024 election cycle, post-election and now, a couple of months into the worst Presidential administration in American history. The Stephanie Miller show is still a bright beacon of light in a sky full of dark clouds. I was a regular listener, catching the opening half-hour on my commute to work every morning and then, once things settled down and I could get to my routine, listening in my office. Since the election, it's the one thing that helps me get through the day.

It's unique in that it isn't the typical talking heads commentary or even call-in format of typical political programming, nor is it a headliner for the host, like so many so-called news and commentary programs. It is entertainment, with a heavy dose of light hearted humor, which makes the litany of incompetence and destructiveness going on in the Trump administration a little easier to take. There is no compromise on facts. If they provide information, it's accurate, and it is delivered with the expected natural reaction sane, solid thinking people tend to have when they hear something that sounds ridicuous and incredulous, which is an every moment occurrence with Trump.

What it makes me feel like is that there is a normal world out there, that things are moving on, that we will get through it and in the meantime, we can temper the ridiculous and stupid with some humor and laughter about it, rather than worrying over it and getting an ulcer as a result. The show is a way of knowing there are plenty of people out there who think along similar terms and are also trying to figure out how to navigate through four years of chaos in government.

My wife has a close friend who served some time in the military after graduating from high school, prior to going to college. Her time entitled her to veteran's medical benefits, which have come in handy for her on more than one occasion. She is fortunate to live in a community where the V.A. has a clinic and which is about 65 miles from the closest V.A. hospital. I wouldn't trade the private insurance, paid for mostly by my employers, that I've used most of my life, which gives me a measure of freedom she does not have, but she earned those benefits, for the time that she served, and is entitled to them.

And yes, I mean entitled. I have been listening to Republicans lie about Democrats, using the plight of veterans in this country as an issue, claiming that Democrats want to flood Ukraine with money and resources but don't want to take care of our own poor veterans. And yet, the record shows that every benefit that has either been added to, or expanded, to veteran's services, especially in mental health and in healthcare services, is the result of an initiative of a Democratic political administration during a Democratic controlled Congress.

Nothing prior to now has compared with the shutdown that has happened over the past couple of months. And this is just the beginning. They don't know yet what else may become a thing of the past due to the government saving money becoming a higher priority than providing benefits to those who served our country.

I saw the shocked and surprised look come over my wife's face earlier this past week when, after talking to her friend on the phone, she disclosed that her friend had said to her, "I sure regret voting for Trump," and "you were right."

That was an admission nine years in the making.

Then we had four years of what can only be honestly characterized as the single most incompetent Presidency in American history. Trump did not know the law, and felt like he was personally not bound by it. He made all of the mistakes that he did which caused the failure of multiple business ventures of his own. The country was saved from more damage than he potentially could have done by Democrats winning the mid-term elections in 2018 and putting a stop to his Presidency.

For months, there were those in the media who speculated that if he lost the election in 2020, he would not leave the White House peacefully. And that's exactly what happened. He was restrained by a few people still in his administration determined to keep out the worst abuses. But he instigated the insurrection that attacked the capitol and tried to prevent Congress from certifying electoral votes that added up to victory for Joe Biden.

So how is it that he could get away with doing all of that, and not be held accountable for it? That's where part of my frustration lies as a democrat.

We entered 2021 with a majority in both Houses of Congress, not a super majority, but one that had the potential to take a few risks to get things done. And there were some things that were discussed. It would not have been easy, but risks never are, and there is always the question about how the other side would take advantage of it when they get back in power. But the gravity of the situation needs to be considered, and that means taking the risk, and then doing some smart thinking while we still have a majority in both houses to make things a little more difficult.

I've been convinced, by several experts in the field, including a few who comment on television, that the filibuster should have been done away with, for the purpose of packing that damn Supreme Court and getting three things accomplished. One, keeping the court from the ridiculously unconstitutional ruling they issued on Presidential immunity, which we did see coming when the appellate court pointed out why it was unconstitutional in succinct, clear terms. Two, preventing Roe from being overturned. And three, expiditing his insurrection trial, which the court could have simply picked up out of the docket, heard immediately and then ruled that what he did was insurrection. A legal expert no less prestigious than Jill Wine Banks made that observation.

For the first time in American history, a sitting President of the United States abandoned a fellow democratic world leader of a developing democracy at war with an avowed enemy of the United States. Delivering a litany of distortions, outright lies, and an especially false narrative invoking the name of former President Biden, Trump loudly proclaimed to the world that the ideals of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and all of America's founding fathers are no longer honored or practiced by his Presidency.

Never before has the United States abandoned a country in which there were people who were committed to building a constitutional democracy, and bringing the kind of freedom we enjoy as Americans to a group of people whose history has never provided a place for them to experience this kind of freedom. But our current President only sees the world, and measures it, in terms of monetary value. Idealism is well beyond his grasp, unless it can be turned into something off of which to make a profit, and he's not above stealing even that from the American people for his own personal benefit.

The world watched that press conference today, which showed the President and Vice President of the United States cannot be trusted to tell the truth, are not honest men, and one is a weak sycophant, while the other is an insane egomaniac. They showed that the United States does not have competent leadership, a position that makes us extremely vulnerable to our enemies. Their blatant misrepresentation of the United States, especially the lies they told, borders on treason. The false narrative they spouted puts the United States and its diplomatic corp around the world, those that Musk hasn't fired yet, in grave danger.