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Within his first 100 days in office, President Donald Trump has accomplished what no other president has: He committed an act of war by bombing one country (Syria), dispatched an “armada” in preparation for possible war with another (North Korea, and threatened a superpower (Russia) with wartime sanctions for continuing to support an “enemy” country (Syria). The president has a taste for war, and it seems insatiable. It also seems he has free reign to customize his war menu.

Leid Stories has been discussing Trump’s recent military misadventures and their potentially cataclysmic consequences. Today we concentrate on the question: Whatever happened to so-called systems of checks and balances against despotic presidential power, especially the power to put the nation at risk of war?

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s attempt at shuttle diplomacy with Russia to salvage a pre-U.S.-bombing-in-Syria thaw in relations has failed. Fresh from talks with G7 nations in Lucca, Italy—where Tillerson was unable to deliver “clarity” about current and future U.S. policy in Syria—the U.S.’s top diplomatic envoy came into a blistering critique of the United States by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about recent Trump administration actions and statements that Lavrov said have eroded trust in working with the United States “across the whole spectrum of bilateral and multilateral affairs.”

The rapid downward spiral in U.S.-Russia relations mirrors an open breach at home between Trump and his political base—including some of his staunchest supporters—who believe their erstwhile hero has been “captured” by a cabal of military-globalist “advisers,” and, being himself politically naïve, is being manipulated into spheres and issues he had no intention of getting in involved in.

Leid Stories asks: Is Donald Trump is a captive president?

At an urgent meeting yesterday in Lucca, Italy, of G7 member-states, the focus was the situation in Syria and, specifically, last Thursday’s U.S. missile strike on a Syrian airfield. President Trump said it was retaliation for a chemical-weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a town under the control of rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Trump said Assad himself was responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun attack, which killed almost 90 people and injured more than 500.

The G7 representatives were looking for “clarity” about the U.S.’s action and the Trump administration’s current and future policy in Syria. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, however, appeared unable to offer it.

That’s because it doesn’t exist, says Leid Stories. 

The United States is at war with Syria, and the situation is escalating and rapidly deteriorating at the same time. Seventy-two hours after blaming President Bashar al-Assad for unleashing a deadly poison-gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a town under the control of rebels fighting Assad’s regime, Trump on April 7 ordered retaliatory bombing of a military airfield in Western Syria. The president’s unilateral action has touched off vigorous reaction and debate, both within the world community of nations and at home.

Leid Stories picks up our discussion on Trump’s action and its wide-ranging fallout.

Freedom is speaking your mind. And speaking your mind is what “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories is all about.

Come join us for a real intellectual jam session, where we exchange opinions and ideas about current events or issues you think warrant further discussion or debate.

Call 888-874-4888 and have your say.

 

President Donald Trump vowed yesterday to take some kind of “responsibility” for helping to bring the murderous chaos in war-torn Syria to an end. What that “responsibility” would be, Trump wouldn’t say, but he made it clear the task was President Barack Obama’s and Obama did nothing.

A chemical weapons attack Tuesday in northern Syria has claimed the lives of at least 86 people, most of them women and children, says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Syria is mired in a six-year multiparty civil war, including invading ISIS forces,  whose principal target has been the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and his regime. The world community of nations is seeking consensus on how to end the carnage in Syria, and is looking to the United States, which so far has not committed itself to direct military action.

Now Trump and Assad are both on the brink.

Bernie Sanders wowed ’em in Boston last Friday as the big draw at a sold-out fundraising event sponsored by Our Revolution, the political action group that grew out of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the popular Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts, preceded Sanders to the lectern with a long list of reasons to oppose the Trump regime.

The Sanders-Warren billing clearly worked to draw left-of-center support for the rally. But what, really, was this? Leid Stories answers the question.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a small team of close advisers and organizers had gone to Memphis, Tenn., to help boost support for the city’s black sanitation workers who were out on strike over pay, working conditions and rampant racism in the workplace.

King and his group stayed at the black-owned Lorraine Motel. As they readied themselves to leave for dinner and, afterward, a major community rally for the sanitation workers, an assassin’s bullet cut King down on the balcony of his second-story room. The human-rights leader was pronounced dead at nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital at 7:05 p.m.

Forty-nine years later, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King continues to be a vexing, tangled mystery. Official investigations named career criminal and prison fugitive James Earl Ray as King’s killer, but not even King’s family believed he was guilty of the crime.

King knew he was up against sinister forces that wanted him dead. But up until April 4, 1968, he fearlessly and fully committed himself to the pursuit of freedom and justice for all people, knowing his life was on the line. 

Welcome to the best open forum in Radioland. It’s “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories, and it’s all about what YOU think about topics we’ve discussed on the program, current events and news issues, or anything you think warrants further discussion and debate.

We talk things through. It’s how we do.

Call 888-874-4888 and free your mind.

Hillary Clinton is back and ready for a fight. Months after her devastating loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election forced her into retreat, a refreshed Clinton keynoted the annual conference in San Francisco of the Professional Business Women of California. Her speech centered on increasing the presence and power of women in all forms of governance, but it was clear she was sending a message about her political future. Leid Stories decodes her speech and finds clues.

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice, has filed a lawsuit against the president, claiming he sexually harassed her in 2007 by forcibly kissing her and touching her inappropriately.

Leid Stories discusses the irony that Trump’s lawyers are using the same defense President Bill Clinton’s lawyers did in his defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones—that presidents are protected from civil lawsuits.