Category: Congress

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A Trifecta Kind of Day — Maybe good things come in threes

A Trifecta Kind of Day

Maybe good things come in threes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 8th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There were three news stories today that were a refreshing change from the unrelievedly grim news out of such diverse places as the Ukraine, the Canadian North, and Florida.

In ascending order of importance:

Pat Robertson is dead, age 93. This hateful televangelist has been a stain on American discourse for decades, and frankly, I’m glad he’s dead. He had his professed opinion on the nature of the afterlife, and I believe that when you die you simply wink out of existence and revert to the state of being you had for the 14 billion years before you were born. Ironically, he may be lucky if it turns out I was the one who was right.

The second most important story was the federal indictments that the justice department will unseal Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. This is the documents case, and there are reports that they include willful obstruction of justice and violations of the espionage act. The indictments will come from a Florida Grand Jury whose existence was a very well-kept secret until next week. This means the trial will be in Florida, negating Trump’s planned howls that he couldn’t get a fair trial in Washington or New York. The back up plan of course was to pretend the indictments were political and partisan. A Faux News “journalist” wanted to know if there was a REASON this was all happening “in the middle of a presidential election campaign.” I’m told that the respondee was unable to keep a straight face. Propaganda has to have at least a kernel of plausibility among the True Believers, and that one won’t even reach that low bar. To me, it reveals the vacuous desperation of the Republican party. I think Trump will be pretty much reduced to arguing he was innocent of breaking law because he was accused of abusing powers he didn’t actually have.

The most important story was the Supreme Court ruling on Allen v Milligan. By a 5-4 majority, the court ruled that the redistricting in Alabama was a clear violation of section two of the Voting Rights Act and was discriminatory based on race.

That the redistricting was discriminatory was pretty much indisputable on the face of it, and instead, what Alabama was asking the SC to do was simply junk the law the action violated. This was a step too far for John Roberts, who wrote, “The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew. We find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requests.” Brett Kavanaugh joined Roberts in crossing over to the Dark Side (“We have cookies!”).

Nobody thinks for an instant that these two puppets of the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues have had a change of heart and want to uphold Civil Rights in the US. They may have simply realized that the legitimacy of the Court, already in tatters, could collapse entirely with a second incendiary and highly unpopular ruling in the same year. At least they could hide behind stare decisis and explain to those holding their leashes that they had to pretend to uphold case law, at least for now. I don’t trust their motives, whatever they are. But they flat-out declared the redistricting done by the bigots of Alabama to be unconstitutional.

But the results in the short term are monumental. Alabama will have to redraw their districts well before the next election, and further, similar cases in Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia are now effectively decided. That means that four states with 73 electoral votes will have to hurriedly redistrict, and the resulting shifts should create about 20 black-majority districts that didn’t previously exist. While it may not affect the presidential race (all four states have a winner-takes-all for the president candidate with the most votes statewide) it will affect congressional races—up to 20 seats may change. Had these redistricting had been struck down in 2021, the Democrats would currently enjoy at least a 5 seat majority in the House.

And for now, at least, Section Two of the Voting Rights Act remains the law of the land. It’s an encouraging development at at time when the Supreme Court is normally in the vanguard of a fascist coup against the country.

Robertson dead. Trump indicted (some more, this time federal). The VRA still alive.

Yup. Good things come in threes.

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…–Trump Audio recording eliminates any defense he had

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 31st, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The denouement of Trump’s defense in the documents scandal came from a New Yorker story by Susan Glasser that, by itself, was utterly horrifying. The story details how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley opposed Trump, both openly and behind the scenes, to stymie Trump’s impulse to launch a full-scale military invasion of Iran.

Milley presumably realized that this would be the greatest military blunder in American history. Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and Korea would all pale next to it. Those were all small, comparatively weak nations and time after time the US sank into a quagmire they eventually lost. Iran is neither small nor weak, and an attack there would almost certainly draw in the Russians. It probably would be the start of World War III. Milley went so far, according to the story, to surreptitiously tell the military to ignore any “illegal orders” that might come from the President.

The story utterly infuriated Trump (OK, for once I can at least understand why he would be pissed). But his endless need to self-justify and his thin skin led him to what perhaps was the most damning error he has made, post-presidency.

Per CNN, “President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.”

The story goes that two writers for Mark Meadows “autobiography” met with Trump at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. That autobiography contains an account where Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.” It’s anyone’s guess if Milley was contradicting himself, or this is just one of the obligatory scenarios the military delight in creating (“What happens if Lower Slobbovia invades Delaware? Or vice-versa?”) but Trump seized on it as proof Milley was lying.

Trump rattled some papers at the interviewers, and said that these were classified documents that showed the truth of the Meadows claims, and he would like to show them to the interviewers, but the documents were classified, so he couldn’t.

How do we know this?

Oh, lord, there are tapes, part XI. The interviewees, with Trump’s knowledge and consent, were recording the meeting. Trump either forgot, or was so irate he simply lost his temper, or both.

And Jack Smith has that tape. Lawdy, lawdy.

I can envision dozens of felony counts awaiting Trump just on the documents case. But for the first time, I think the DoJ has a prima facie case to persecute Trump for espionage. Combined with the probable indictments for the January 6th case (insurrection) and the Georgia vote count (election tampering) Trump’s most likely future will include dying in prison. This one tape demonstrates that Trump was lying about declassifying the documents, or that he COULD declassify them, or that he didn’t know he had them, or that he ever misused them in any way. This tape is more damning than all the Nixon tapes combined, including the infamous missing “14 ½ minutes.”

It came at the same time that Trump revealed just how far his contempt for the Constitution went by vowing to rescind the 14th amendment through executive order. Even Slappy Thomas would have trouble justifying that one. Trump is irked that the constitution specifies that anyone born in the territories of the US are American citizens, including babies who don’t speak English. (That would be most of them, I would hazard.)

He also threw his weight behind preventing the impeachment of Ken Paxton in Texas who was, of course, promptly impeached. It shows how weak his grasp on the party has become, even as the marching morons continue to chant his praises.

Trump legally, is a dead man walking. He won’t be a candidate in 2024 because he will be in prison. He may still claim to be a candidate, but his campaign will be as quixotically ridiculous as the one run by Lyndon LaRouche back about 30 years ago. The Republicans who, under Trump, let the lunatic fringe take over their party are in such disarray that they will have severe trouble coming up with any candidate at all. They may no longer even be a single discrete party at that point.

The voting on the debt ceiling limit is taking place as I write this, and its passage is extremely likely. For a small number of concessions, Biden got the Republicans to throw away the only real weapon they still possessed, eliminating the debt ceiling until after the 2024 election. Yes, Biden is smarter than the GOP—combined. I was of the strong opinion that Biden shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, but the implications of this agreement please even me. Biden lost a couple of minor skirmishes, but won the war. The same Republicans who had been howling that Biden was so senile and/or incompetent he couldn’t find his trousers just learned they lost their own pants in a poker match against him.

I’m starting to feel hope that America is going to survive Trump, and MAGA, and Qanon.

In any event, the next few weeks should be entertaining as all hell.

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Hawks and Owls — GOP continues lemming plunge

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 18th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I wonder which will happen first? Will the Republicans’ extremism that sometimes slops over into outright treason and fascism cost them enough votes to neuter them, or will they destroy the country first in a mindless attempt at extortion?

Of course, things aren’t going well for them. They lost two mayoral elections Tuesday, both in deep red areas, one under the purview of Ron DeSantis, and the other in the district to Lauren Boebert. Both had been considered locks for the GOP.

Speaking of Bo-bo, she’s getting divorced, and that’s already turning into a white trash rodeo, Palin-style. Maggie Armpits is also getting divorced. Family values and all that.

The GOP is clinging to George Santos because they need his vote so desperately, and the Dems gleefully maneuvered them into voting against expelling the con artist. The Republicans think they can strike back by voting to expel Adam Schiff, because two actions are always the same no matter what. Just like having Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is exactly the same as having Thurgood Marshall.

Speaking of the “all things being equal” mentality, Armpits is whining that “white nationalism” is the same as the N word, because ‘slaveholder’ means exactly the same thing as ‘enslaved.’

Trump is claiming the Durham report proves that he tried to stop Biden from committing war crimes or something. Trump’s buddy Putin has his mercenaries firing on his own troops and he just fired the scientists who developed their hypersonic missiles because, like the jet planes under Hitler, it failed to change the course of the war. Stay in your bunker, Putie. Someone will be by shortly to scrape you up.

Then there’s the Jordan ‘hearings.’ How many courts could a kangaroo court if a kangaroo could quartz courts? The clowns in the little car are the only part that makes any sense. It seems the dawg ate Gym’s homework.

In Arizona, election and reality denier Kari Lake called her star witness, Jacqueline Onigkeit, She was supposed to establish improper verification of voter ballots. She did the exact opposite. The Arizona Republic bemusedly reported, “As a witness for the defense, Onigkeit was dynamite. The problem is, she was supposed to be the star witness for Lake.”

But of course, there is the budget blackmail that is still ongoing. Republicans are hoping Democrats will cave before they have to murder the country, and Biden doesn’t look to be in a caving mood. The crazier boobs of the Republican Party are hoping that they can stay with their tried-and-true approach to governance: Fuck things up, and leave it for the Democrats to fix. This would be more of the same, piled higher and deeper.

Racking up bills is always more enjoyable than is paying them, and for many years, Republicans have gotten away with the lie that the Dems rack up the bills. Don’t believe me? Here’s something my friend Isaac in the Weasels posted this morning: It shows that over nine out of every ten dollars in the debt is from Republican policies and misadventures. It’s only gotten worse since it began with Reagan. It also shows the Democrats tried to staunch the flow of Republican largess to the rich. Read it and weep:

Here’s a look at the budget deficit each president since Lyndon Baines Johnson inherited from his predecessor, and what the budget deficit was when he left office.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (D)
Assumed office November 1963: $5 billion deficit
Left office January 1969: $3 billion surplus
Reduced the deficit by $8 billion

Richard Nixon (R)
Assumed office January 1969: $3 billion surplus
Left office August 1974: $6 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $9 billion

Gerald Ford (R)
Assumed office August 1974: $6 billion deficit
Left office January 1977: $54 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $48 billion

Jimmy Carter (D)
Assumed office January 1977: $54 billion deficit
Left office January 1981: $79 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $25 billion

Ronald Reagan (R)
Assumed office January 1981: $79 billion deficit
Left office January 1989: $153 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $74 billion

George H.W Bush (R)
Assumed office January 1989: $153 billion deficit
Left office January 1993: $255 billion deficit
Increased the deficit by $102 billion

Bill Clinton (D)
Assumed office January 1993: $255 billion deficit
Left office January 2001: $128 billion surplus
Reduced the deficit by $383 billion

George W. Bush (R)
Assumed office January 2001: $128 billion surplus
Left office January 2009: $1.4 trillion deficit
Increased the deficit by $1.5 trillion

Barack Obama (D)
Assumed office January 2009: $1.4 trillion deficit
Left office January 2017: $665 billion deficit
Reduced the deficit by $735 billion

Donald Trump (R)
Assumed office January 2017: $665 billion deficit
Left office January 2020: $3.7 trillion deficit
Increased the deficit by $3 trillion

Joe Biden (D)
Assumed office January 2021: $3.7 trillion deficit
Fiscal year 2022: $2.775 trillion deficit
Fiscal year 2023: $1.376 trillion deficit
Reduced the deficit by $2.3 trillion (so far)

So in the past 60 years, only one Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had a larger budget deficit in his last year in office than he inherited from his predecessor. All six Republican presidents had larger deficits in their last budgets than they were handed at the start of their term.

In other words, Republicans love to spend taxpayer money. And yet so many gullible voters have swallowed the GOP line that it’s the Democrats who are spendthrifts, the basis for McCarthy’s current threat to refuse to pay the nation’s bills — something Republicans never did as Trump was adding $8 trillion to the national debt in just four years.

Yes, the party of Trump, DeSantis, Greene, Santos, Luna, Boebert, Lake and Jordan is going to save us all for irresponsibility and financial ruin. Oh, did I say “for.” Cough. I’m aFreud I made a typo…

Let me put it as plainly and as bluntly as I possibly can: if you think the Republicans want to help you, and help the country, and the Democrats don’t, well, you’re a fucking fool.

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The Debt Ceiling — Republicans hate black males, but love blackmail

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 29th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Imagine that you are the owner of a small business. Tax time is approaching, and you’ve spent much of the previous month conferring with your tax accountant agency, ensuring that they have all the proper documentation and a full assessment of all credits and liabilities. Your main preparer has told you will will owe a certain amount on your income, but that comes as no surprise. Just part of the cost of doing business.

But then, a week before the tax deadline, your preparer comes to you with an offer he thinks you can’t refuse. He’ll send in the documents and a check, but only if you fire 10% of your employees, raise prices for your customers, and buy lower quality raw materials for your product. And he wants you to hire only people who attend his church. Or he’ll withhold the tax documents, leaving you to face a load of penalties, a possible audit, and damage to your credit.

Under the law, that is extortion. It’s a felony. The accountant would face many years in prison for pulling such a stunt. He’s abusing your legal obligations for his own gain.

The Republicans in the House are pulling that type of stunt right now. It’s not the first time they’ve used a constitutionally dubious provision in the law to threaten to ruin the credit of the United States. They’ve been doing it, always during Democratic administrations, going back to when it was the brainstorm of the vicious and feckless Newt Gingrich during the Clinton administration. He was the first to hit on the idea of blackmail as official legislative policy. (He and the Republicans tried a similar stunt with the budget, and that blew up massively in their own faces when the country discovered that holding the budget hostage included shutting down Social Security checks, national parks, post offices and many other beloved government functions. Newt, beaten badly on that and facing personal scandal, backed down.

But the Republicans knew a good blackmail ploy when they saw it. Simply threaten to withhold mandated action and demand things that could never ever pass legislatively, such as cutting veterans’ benefits or food stamps or school funding, and leave the Democratic administration to take the blame for it since it would be his signature on a non-bill no member of Congress could be held responsible for.

In 2011, the Democrats called their bluff, and the early stages of a fiscal avalanche that is default began. It cost the country an estimated $2.4 trillion (yes, trillion, with a “tr” – 2,400 billion) and provoked a mild but long-lasting recession.

Republicans can’t govern. Even when they had a Speaker who wasn’t a beholden wimp, and a reasonable majority, they couldn’t get a budget passed, but had to punt the ball down the field, in the form of a “continuing resolution” which basically rubber-stamped the previous years’ budget onto the next one. Between the inflexibility and inflation, it amounted to a slow strangulation of the economy. But, knowing the majority of voters hated what they wanted to see done, they didn’t dare put it out there in black and white, but instead, simply tried to blackmail the country.

They’re at it again, and between the civil war that exists between the zealots and the banksters, and the tiny amount of votes they have in the House (5) they can’t even really say what it is they want. The poison-pill laden extension McCarthy managed to get through by just two votes took a meat-cleaver approach: The plan would cut a wide swath of government spending to last year’s levels, a decrease of about 9%. From that point, growth would be capped at 1% annually over the next 10 years. More of that slow strangulation Republicans so love, and nobody’s fingerprints on the pain. One of the few specifics was to cut the $80 billion or so left from funds to battle COVID, although the Administration has already earmarked that money, reallocating it to veterans’ health care and medical research. It would eliminate Biden’s $400 billion student debt relief, a program Republicans hate because it is popular and prevents the cost of education from making a life-long fiscal slave of the student. It cuts increases to the IRS because the IRS is inconvenient to plutocrats, who resent having to give 1% of their income to the country that wet-nursed them. It would repeal incentives for electric vehicles and sustainable energy because that might annoy the fossil-fuel companies that pay for those Republicans. And they would mandate work for people on Medicare or food stamps because employers would welcome would-be workers who are destitute, desperate, and with no options. It’s the capitalist dream, you know.

None of these poll well, but the Republicans don’t really care about cutting the deficit. (If they did, they would repeal the Trump tax cuts and the huge incentives paid to oil companies, and reduce funding for military allocations, but they won’t.) They just want to threaten the country to weaken Biden, and hope that whether he accepts the blackmail or he doesn’t that he, and not the Republicans, will be blamed for the ensuing fallout.

It’s tawdry, it’s cynical, and it’s a betrayal of the country. It’s the entire Republican package, rolled up into one sleazy political gambit that less than 1/100th of one percent of the country would benefit from.

Ask Biden to stand firm on his demand for a “clean” debt-ceiling raise. Allow no blackmail from these vicious sleazeballs.

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Perp-traitors — Donald and his legions about to perpwalk

Perp-traitors

Donald and his legions about to perpwalk

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 19th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There’s all sorts of crazy rumors flying around this weekend as the possible indictment (and yes, possible actual arrest) of Donald J. Trump is likely to occur Monday or Tuesday. Armed neo-Nazis will surround Mar-a-Lago and open fire on US Marshalls. Other groups will storm the New York court issuing the indictment. And of course, there is talk of storming Congress because, you know, Congress welcomes peaceful tourists. Why, Josh Hawley was so happy to see them he ran out to greet them, you know.

Assuming they actually do arrest Trump for the crimes his lawyer, Michael Cohen, already carried out and served time for at Trump’s behest, I expect scattered protests and lots of angry rhetoric on cesspools like Truth Social and Twitter.

But that’s about the extent of it.

My reasoning is simple enough: Trump’s star has dimmed considerably in the two years since the storming of the Capitol. The events of January 6 shocked those moderate supporters among independents and Republicans. Since then, there have been the 1/6 Committee hearings, which reminded most people of how Congress does when it actually works right (and we have the McCarthy-Greene-Jordan circus going on now to remind them of what Congress is like when fools, nuts and crooks are running the show).

There’s been the endless parade of right wing outrage staged over such things as green M&Ms, furries in the schools, drag queens, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. While Fox and Trump purposefully cultivated fools, they drew in a significant number of people who, while credulous and easily convinced of the evil of Democrats, knew damnfoolishness for what it was. Litter boxes in school restrooms? Bugs Bunny in a dress is a bigger threat to children than the thousands of pedophile priests? Those are bigger threats than mass shootings or climate change?

Putting zealots on the courts has backfired massively. Most Americans—including most Republicans—are frightened and angry at the ongoing assault on the rights of women, African Americans, undocumented aliens and other minorities. The notion that there are zealots on the courts who want a Christian version of Afghanistan or Iran is horrifying, and anyone who knows history knows that is exactly what they envision, with the best of motives. Serving God is a hard thing, you know. The unfaithful must pay a price.

They will also notice that promises to arrest and convict {Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, dozens of other Democrats} have never ever amounted to anything. Certainly nothing like the NYPD and Secret Service sitting down and planning how to turn Trump over to the police when they come to serve the arrest warrant. (The Trump people aren’t cooperating with the police, of course.)

The significance of the endless feigned outrage is finally wearing thin. Banks didn’t fail because libertarian tech bros who exploited them were woke; they failed because Trump and the Republicans stripped away rules that prevented such exploitation. Trains didn’t derail because Democrats didn’t care about rural white communities; they derailed because Trump stripped necessary safety regulations imposed during the Obama administration. Those weren’t peaceful tourists; those were terrorists and Nazis. The lies are getting ever more shrill and more transparent.

But the main reason Trump’s hoped-for revolt is going to fizzle is because the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit revealed once and for all that the whole “stolen election” lie upon which the storming of the Capitol and the outrage of Trump supporters rested was in fact a sham and a complete fabrication, and the propagandistic filth posing as “reporters” for Faux News knowingly and maliciously perpetrated the lie, aware that it was a lie, and aware of the damage it might do to the country.

There has always been a hard core of MAGAts who were absolutely unswerving in their support of Trump and the Big Lie. They truly believed the election was stolen. They were certain that it was orchestrated by Biden, George Soros, Hugo Chavez and drag queens. They made up perhaps 20% of the people who voted in 2020. That’s a sizable number, but similar numbers believe in faeries, that we’ve never been to the Moon, or that Ivermectin is the only treatment for COVID. Keep in mind that statistically, 20% of the population has an IQ below 90. That isn’t unrelated; many of these people are pure stupid and will die stupid.

But the Dominion findings have managed to penetrate even that rock of impermeable idiocy. In the weeks since the stories of what Tucker really thought of Trump and why Murdoch allowed this to happen and the rest, a full 21% of viewers who trusted Fox News no longer do. That’s a seismic shift in belief. (One of the weirder findings in that poll were the 23% of Fox viewers who didn’t trust the station to begin with.) There aren’t many substitutes for Faux: OANN and Newmax face oblivion, done in by their own excesses. That leaves just the howling nuts on talk radio and Youtube.

Even amongst the steadfast, there have to be doubts creeping in. When Tucker tells them they have to get out and save their country by facing the police and national guard, how many of them would now do so unreservedly? They know that over a thousand people have been convicted in the wake of 1/6, and thousands more convictions await. They know they won’t take the authorities by surprise this time, and Trump and his planted traitors won’t be available to blunt the response of authorities, or promise pardons to those who would betray their country.

Some will even think it through, and realize that fighting for the lies that Trump and Fox told them meant they actually were betraying their country. And they would then realize that Trump is an infinitely stupid hill to die upon.

I expect protests and angry rhetoric, and that’s fine. Those people have the right to protest and declaim.

But in the end, it will be an empty rattle, as devoid of authenticity and reason as the frantic lies spewed by Faux News.

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Fox News — Where whirlwinds go to die

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 2nd, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.–Hosea 8:7

The term “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” was first popularized by Hillary Clinton in 1998. She didn’t invent the specific term: it was in use in the US at least three years earlier, and in the UK in 1991. The far right, stung, tried to ridicule the phrase, with various deplorables going on line to proudly announce they were part of the VRWC. It didn’t deflect the validity of the phrase—people just pointed to Fox, to Rush Limbaugh, to the panoply of other right wing outlets: Regnery Press, the Scaife media empire, the vast array of right wing think tanks, including the Federalist Society, the Kochs, and the empire of the Christian falangist right, then known as the Moral Majority.

It was around long before 1991, of course. America has always had an authoritarian right wing streak, dating back to the “Know Nothing” party and slavers before the Civil War, and Southern Democrats and groups such as the KKK after. That in turn morphed into the German American Bund, Father Coughlin, and a rise of radio hatemongers. After the second world war, with the term “Fascist” so thoroughly discredited, the far right appropriated the title of “conservative” and began a general infiltration of the actual conservative party in America, which was caught off guard because the new breed of fascists launched by Koch money in the form of the hyper-patriotic John Birch Society were flag wavers and bible pounders. Patriots and God-fearers couldn’t be bad, right? And like most Americans, conservatives thought they were immune to the power of propaganda. Only slave populations like those of the Soviet Union could fall for alluring lies, right? Americans were educated and smart and laughed at propaganda.

Fascist plutocrats such as Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs, and Richard Scaife knew better, and took the lessons taught by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and turned a blare of misinformation on the American public.

Their target was the low-information voter. The methods were time honored: repeat simple lies over and over; persuade their targets that they, and only they, possessed “family values” and held true to American ideals. Sneer at liberals, intellectuals, and non-Christians and imply that they were hostile to America and American values. Explain that public schools, unions, and public interest groups were “communist.” Persuade people that marginalized groups (such as African Americans) were responsible for their poor pay and lousy jobs, and not the plutocrats who spent tons of money in hundreds of outlets to convince them of this.

They targeted the poorly-educated, the impoverished, the fundamentalists, the disaffected and the resentful. They wanted an army of angry morons, not to put too fine a point on it.

But the art of riling up people and getting them angry has a trap. People eventually become numbed to the same provocative speech, repeated over and over, and concepts that once might have created angry mobs just become a background hum in a dull life. So they have to keep topping themselves. Liberalism isn’t just unAmerican; it’s ANTI-American. Blacks don’t want to go to your schools and work in your jobs; they want to take them over. People getting $500 on food stamps are the reason the country is broke, and not the billionaires who pay little or no taxes. Abortion isn’t just unpleasant; it’s murder!

Not enough. People get inured. And of course in instances where the far right could prevail, such as turning back civil rights or banning abortion, they didn’t dare actually try to win because their followers would just look at them and say, “OK, we won. Now what?” Reagan and Bush Junior both ran on anti-abortion platforms, and neither tried to implement change. Bush Junior and the radicals in the House tried to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into an insurance scam and it cost them dearly in the next election.

It was one thing to bellow angry imprecations into the wind, quite another to act on them.

Newt Gingrich took the GOP to a posture of wild and mostly idiotic stances, blind intransigence, and endless scandal-mongering. He was the face of the VRWC, as Hillary Clinton so deftly noted. Not surprisingly, a lot of this platform blew up in right wing faces (the “Contract for America” quickly became a joke, people noticed the GOP was more interested in posturing rather than governing, and the effort to impeach Bill Clinton actually made him more popular. Newt ended up leaving in disgrace.

But the right wing noise machine was there to soothe the injuries of exposed hypocrisy, social amorality, and blind opposition to providing direction to the country. It was all the fault of the liberal media and social justice warriors, they explained. Newt was a victim. The GOP was a victim. You are a victim.

It worked, for a while.

Then Obama was elected, and suddenly every racist coward in the country was scrambling aboard the GOP noise machine to air their grievances. The tone of the VRWC, never sunny and warm, turned far darker and uglier.

The GOP recruited the racists, and the conspiracy theorists. The latter, being the most credulous and dim-witted of the population, were eager to join powerful forces who would at least pretend to validate their crackpot and often flat-out crazed notions. Yes, the government is lying about UFOs. Yes, Jews secretly control the world. Yes, the Moon landing was faked. Yes, you can turn water into gasoline with this simple little pill.

Enter Donald Trump, amoral, narcissistic, and vicious, but wily enough to know that all he had to do was stir the shit just a bit, and he would have an army of howling, screeching lunatics and toy Nazis set to do his bidding.

Which we saw on January 6th, 2021.

And it is still cresting with the House taken over by the worst of the worst, regular Republicans too weak and cowardly to resist, and the claims getting wilder and wilder, the proposed “solutions” more and more draconian and ridiculous. Ban the Democrat [sic] Party! Jews are out to replace us! They have space lasers! M&M candies are attacking American sexual purity! Litter boxes in school bathrooms! The rest of the world thinks America has gone nuts. It’s actually a smallish group of nuts, but then, so were Hitler’s followers in 1933, or Lenin’s in 1919. They are dangerous, no matter how ridiculous they look.

But the Fox News implosion, combined with the tidal wave of accountability facing Trump and his minions, may cause that wave to break and foam and froth harmlessly back out to sea.

The fascist right spent years cultivating morons. They succeeded. Then the morons took over. Hosea 8:7.

And now, hopefully the end to the fascist right-wing madness is in sight.

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McCarthy to Carlson to Lindell — An Infield from Hell

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 26th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” – Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

You have to wonder how many deaths Kevin McCarthy will suffer before Death,the real one, takes pity on the pathetic little sod and hauls his craven, twitching little ass away. It really would be a mercy at this point; I honestly cannot think of an individual in the entire scope of American history whose personal cowardice even approaches that of McCarthy.

He became Speaker, not because he was resolute and stood firm for what was right; the GOP wanted him because he was never either of those things in his entire political life. The extremists in the MAGA caucus knew he had the spine of a jellyfish and the ethical standards of a sewer rat. The rest of the GOP, not exactly great American heroes themselves, knew the bigots and traitors of the extreme right would block any other nominee.

There have been many instances in American history where groups of opposing views have agreed on a least objectionable candidate. Political conventions are famous for such. The results are usually either bad (Alf Landon),or mediocre (Hubert Humphrey), and sometimes the unobjectionable nebbish turns out to be a lion. (Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and now, it seems, Joe Biden).

This is a far rarer situation, where a rump party minority holds out for the MOST objectionable candidate, and will accept no alternatives. I’ve tried to find instances in history where this has happened and come up short. Short of invading countries installing puppet rulers (American products included a number of regimes in Central and South America), the closest I can think of would be Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both chosen explicitly by their party because they were easy to control and put a pleasant smile in front of an ugly reality.

With McCarthy, even the pretense of decency and resolve is completely missing. They didn’t want someone to look pretty for the cameras; they wanted someone who would do whatever the fuck he was told and not even hesitate.

When he was giving away the store to the lunatics of the far right in order to get the fifteen votes he so desperately needed in order to become elected speaker, he told them he would release all the video tapes from the Capital area that recorded the events of January 6th, 2021. That would be 41,000 hours of video recordings from over 5,000 cameras that explicitly showed all the emergency protocols used to protect members of the government on that day, both known and confidential.

If McCarthy had just released them to the press, that would have been a grave act of irresponsibility. Some of those recordings would show how to assassinate members of Congress by revealing the protective steps taken when dealing with a hostile invader. Anyone who hates America and the American government will love getting access to the information on those tapes.

But McCarthy didn’t do that: he released the tapes to Tucker Carlson.

Carlson isn’t even remotely a journalist. He is a propagandist, a paid liar, and a stooge for the far right. He’s a fascist and a demagogue, and recent revelations have shown incontrovertibly that he will cheerfully destroy the United States in the name of ratings and a small modicum of power. He’s quite possibly the sleaziest and most reprehensible character McCarthy could have picked. Carlson, of course, is the darling of the lunatics who made McCarthy’s speakership possible. And McCarthy, in an action so craven it would appall Doctor Smith of the old Lost in Space television show, gave Carlson exclusive rights to the footage.

Enter Mike Lindell. You know. The pillow guy. He has two things in common with Carlson. He’s getting sued for defamation by Dominion Voting, and he is Carlson’s equal as a journalist. Basic arithmetic, that: zero equals zero. The only real difference is that Lindell, who is something of a crackpot, apparently genuinely believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020. Carlson, of course, never believed a word of that.

So Lindell is now suing McCarthy, arguing that he has at least as much right to those video recordings as Carlson does. (Again, true. 0=0).

I suspect there are going to be many such suits filed. The Proud Boys will want those tapes. So will the Oath Keepers, Qanon, Al Qaida, Putin, and Xi. You never know when you might need information making it easy to wipe out most elected officials in Washington in one fell swoop.

McCarthy will eventually face civil and criminal charges for his actions. He belongs in prison for at least twenty years just for the security breaches. His actions, giving sensitive national security date to a hostile party (and Carlson has proven his hostility to the United States) border on treason.

McCarthy belongs in a prison cell, one next to Donald Trump’s.

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SOTU 2023 — Biden—his time

SOTU 2023

Biden—his time

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 7th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I had been kind of ignoring the State of the Union address in recent years. They were pretty bland and formulaic under most presidents—yes, folks, the state of the union is strong and gawd bless the troops. And under Trump, as with most things under Trump, it was a grotesque travesty.

But I had a feeling I might want to watch this, and boy, am I glad I heeded that sense.

Biden staged a masterwork in challenging the GOP in the most conciliatory way possible. It was amazing to watch. He started out lavishing praise on the GOP for all the bipartisan legislation that got passed (some of which only had a handful of GOP votes and caused considerable discomfort amongst the Republicans, who really hate to be seen as cooperating with the Democrats in any way, shape or form.

Then he put the Republicans on the spot by making them sit on their hands while reciting facts that brought thunderous applause from Democrats and the vast majority of Americans watching: the twelve million new jobs, the lowest unemployment since 1969, the rise in working class pay, the explosion in domestic manufacturing jobs, the CHIPS act, the IRA, the COVID relief measures. Republicans had to show they oppose all those things.

Then he spoke about the deficit, which has been falling at record levels since he took office, and noted that a full quarter of the national debt had been racked up under “my predecessor.” While he hid it extremely well (I don’t want to play poker against Joe Biden) this last caused the MAGA caucus to lose their little minds and start screaming at him.

He didn’t try to shut them down, but then, why should he? HE wasn’t the one being embarrassed by them. Instead, he invited them to stop by the White House and he would give them the facts and figures.

He was able to goad the Coo-Coo Caucus a couple of more times, on abortion rights and gun control, and there were loud shouts of “order!” which is was interest to note came, not from Democrats (THEY weren’t embarrassed by these fools, either) but Republicans.

Biden, with surgical skill, went on to recite a number of issues where the majority of Republicans at least tacitly agree with him (debt ceiling, pay for school teachers, etc.) and and really worked the intraparty divisions that exist within the GOP. Biden put his thumb in the gap and twisted, mentioning securing the border and stopping fentanyl.

Watching Kevin McCarthy was a treat. Yes, I just said that. He isn’t a good poker player, and his growing discomfort over the antics of the MAGAts eventually turned into an open glare after the fifth or so outburst from the “Toilet Training is for Sissies” contingent.

So Biden managed the very neat trick of taking the role of “Together, we can make it work” and simultaneously opening the rift between the crazies and the rest of the country wider. And there was no duplicity involved, which is the amazing thing. He did it simply by saying what he had accomplished, what he wanted to accomplish, and why he wanted to do so, and watched as Voltaire’s prayer was answered. “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” Biden defeated the zanies and zealots with the one weapon they cannot counter: sweet reason and even temperament.

It made for the most entertaining SOTU since the days of Clinton, and while the zanies aren’t going to shrivel up and blow away, Biden has done a tremendous job of defanging them by making the show their fangs in response to friendly overtures.

Listening to Huckabye now. She is a hero because her mom survived cancer, and Trump was the greatest leader in history, and Biden has surrendered to a Chinese balloon. She isn’t staging a great comeback. Trump was a great hero. OK, Huckster. Whatever. Not one word about policy or goals; just the usual pseudo-patriotic pablum mixed with the usual god-flogging. America is in danger and god hates us, waaaaugh!

So: all in all a satisfying evening.

One thing for sure: the people who caught the SOTU in order to hate-watch are going to find it a whole lot harder to dismiss Biden as senile or foolish. He’s neither, and he’s smarter than most of you.

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Two Proposals to Destroy the Economy — And if that doesn’t work, kill the pensions and what little health care there is

Two Proposals to Destroy the Economy

And if that doesn’t work, kill the pensions and what little health care there is

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 29th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

If you need evidence that the Republican party has been taken over by lunatics, consider this: As part of his deal to get the votes needed to become speaker, Keven McCarthy agreed to let a proposal for a thirty percent national sales tax to sail through committee and get a vote on the House floor.

In most countries, a 30% national sales tax would provoke widespread rioting in the streets, and could possibly lead to a coup or a revolution. Even sales taxes at the state level that are about one fifth or less that big are widely unpopular. For working people and the poor, who have been steadily losing ground ever since Reagan decided to feed the birds by giving all the grain to the horse, it would be a death blow. Groceries that cost $100 a week would now cost $130. Gas would jump between a buck a gallon and $1.50 depending on base price. Just about anything you buy retail other than labor would jump 30% overnight. If you thought 8% inflation was bad, this is dozens of times worse.

Of course, to even be seen as even thinking about such a mad idea is political suicide, but the MAGA and Qanon extremists who hold McCarthy’s leash seems to have convinced themselves that imposing such a tax would take much of the burden off our poor suffering billionaires, and give working people a sense that they were contributing to our society. No, really. That’s what they think. Did I mention the same bill would abolish the IRS outright? Billionaires would only have to pay taxes if they felt like it.

Any second semester economics course will teach that a large spending tax is far more likely to depress an economy than any earning tax. Earning taxes, particularly progressive ones, tax those who can afford to pay the taxes, and in the 50s and 60s, when the top income bracket was 93%, the government cleverly allowed tax breaks for investing back into the economy, such as local manufacturing and retail, and paying employees well. It’s one of the things that made America’s economy the strongest in the world.

Spending taxes (which is what a sales tax is) hits the poorest the hardest. If they can no longer afford food and clothing, they do without. And the billionaires who were hoping the sales tax would cover their new life free of income taxes suddenly find that without sales, there is no sales tax. In short order, they discover a great depression is even more expensive. One reason the New Deal arose in the first place was that unrestrained capitalism and increasing burdens on the working people was what caused the crash, and the New Deal was the only thing that could save capitalism for itself.

Needless to say, Democrats are overjoyed that the Republicans have wrapped this sales tax albatross around their necks. It doesn’t have a prayer of even passing the House: not all Republicans are mad, and the sane ones will vote against it by the dozens. But the self-inflicted damage will be done. The genius who is forcing this vote is Andrew Clyde of Georgia, the same clown called the Sixth of January rioters just regular tourists. He’s both nuts and stupid.

The other proposal the GOP are making is the old tried-and-true gambit of refusing to permit payment of bills already incurred, known as “the debt limit.” This would also crash the economy by wiping out the good credit of the United States, which by itself would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. They want vast spending cuts or they’ll push debt through the roof, which is a bit like saying “fix the crack in my windshield or I’ll drive us at 90mph into a brick wall.” Yeah, that’ll show that old windshield. They won’t admit it, but the Republicans want to decimate Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare. They’re popular, they help people, and people associate them with Democrats. Therefore they must go.

They also want big military cuts, and since I’ve argued for the same thing for years, I can’t just condemn it out of hand because Republicans are proposing it. But the devil is in the details: WHAT do they want to cut, and WHY do they want to cut it? Remember, several dozen of them happily side with Putin over their own country and are not to be trusted.

At least some of this is driven by Republican desperation. Although the fascist bullhorns of Fox and other propaganda outlets obsess on inflation, the truth is the overall economy has absolutely boomed since Biden became President, breaking records in employment growth, worker income, and small business gains. All those bills he and the Congress passed lit a fire under an economy that was contracting under Trump, and pulled us back from a recession. Because it’s good for Americans, it’s good for Democrats, and therefore Republicans must destroy it.

By the way, this sort of fiscal lunacy isn’t limited to the House MAGAts. Rick Scott, considered a leading GOP contender in ‘24, wants this. Not quite as instant death to the economy as Clyde’s crackpot scheme is, but still plenty bad.

Since Clyde’s deal is dead on arrival, and Biden is likely to call the Republican bluff on the debt ceiling, there may actually still be an economy for Scott to try and destroy as his campaign promises broaden.

Remember, billionaires and big corporations are not your friends. They pretend to like you, but if you get in their way, they’ll cheerfully crush you. And Republicans serve billionaires and big corporations. They are not your friends.

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The Squeaker Speaker — The vote was close; the winner’s a rat

The Squeaker Speaker

The vote was close; the winner’s a rat

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 7th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

You may not have heard about this, but there was a little bit of confusion surrounding what is normally the routine election for Speaker of the House. Oh, you say you have heard about it and for gods’ sake, Zepp, don’t natter on more about it? You say you’re sick to death about it?

Well, that’s understandable. Five days of eating popcorn and laughing can get a bit stale. By about half-way through, I was paying more attention to the weather myself. Granted, northern California has been having …interesting… weather. More interesting than Kevin McCarthy, at least.

Now, in defense of the weather, it doesn’t have McCarthy, Boebert, Taylor-Greene, Gaetz or Jordan falling from the sky, attractive as that mental image might be. And have I just invented a necessary new genre? Splatter/Political Commentary? Gym Jordan is sure the Founders had something like that in mind when they invented MAGA.

Kevin McCarthy is finally Speaker, and despite the general support he had in the caucus, he’s widely viewed as the Ted Cruz of the House; a dishonest and unnecessarily vicious snake, one whose malevolence is blunted by his utter nihilism and lack of any personal courage. Adam Schiff gave an interview a few days ago where he explained exactly what sort of creature McCarthy really is. Yes, Twitter is still a thing. For now.

We should do a ripoff of an English newspaper who, in the dying days of Liz Truss’ doomed Prime Ministry, put up a picture of her and a head of lettuce, and asked readers which they thought might last longer. The results for our present moment here in the States might look like this:

McCarthy gave away so much in his frantic efforts to gain a majority vote that any whim by any member of the House could force what in effect would be a vote of no-confidence. The first time Kevin breaks a promise to the insurrectionists (and maybe we would need a soap bubble for a shelf-life comparison on that one), or even if he simply refuses further blackmail (“do as I say or I’ll call a vote!”) we’re start seeing such votes. A few of those and you’ll see Democrats gleefully joining in just to further the chaos on the GOP side.

And while that’s an ugly prospect, a stable contingent of Republicans in the House is even uglier. “Stable” is a relative term here, folks. Republicans don’t have any policy or even philosophy per se: they want to investigate Hunter Biden in hopes of embarrassing the President (and they will have to subvert the DoJ to have anything they uncover bear fruit, unless they somehow come up with the sort of rock solid evidence the January 6th Commission did). They want to undermine investigative agencies and the IRS for much the same reason the Mafia would if they had the power. They firmly believe that if Republican criminals aren’t safe, then no criminal is safe, and they want to be safe. They don’t want to neuter the FBI or revenooers because they are a threat to us; they want to do it because they are a threat to them. They don’t mind America being saddled with over half a million cops, many of whom are ill-trained, sadistic, racist and stupid, but the thought of the IRS having 74,000 agents who might look at what Nepo Children are doing with their unearned income is utterly horrifying.

The GOP are out to destroy America. They’ve managed to persuade enough people that government is the enemy of America (and America as a country doesn’t exist without government) that they have some of these opportunistic traitors running the House. Some were involved in January 6th. Some deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. The rest are just your usual opportunist crooks and greedheads, of no value to society (America doesn’t exist without government, but it will do just fine without the people the GOP really represent.)

So if the Republicans remain chaotic and totally subsumed in their own petty strife, that’s actually doing the rest of us a favor.

Meanwhile, the population of America gets two more years to see, once and for all, what we’re really dealing with.

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