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Cooperation – The Manafortress has Fallen

September 14th, 2018

Paul Manafort has flipped. He’s going to give Bob Mueller everything he knows; about that Trump Tower meeting, about any and all other contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and the exact degree each played in subverting the Clinton campaign and forced propagandization of the public discourse.

It’s a devastating blow for Trump, le coup de grâce, and it’s now becoming very unlikely that he will still be president six months from now.

It’s bad enough for a president when his campaign manager pleads guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States. (Trumperdoos, “Conspiracy” is the legal term for “collusion”).

Trump, when Manafort’s going to spill the beans, rat you out, sing like a canary, give it up to the G-men, telling them every thing you did as a part of that, you have a pretty sizable problem.

Mueller has a death grip on Manafort’s throat. In addition to the two guilty pleas and promise of cooperation, Manafort has agreed to give over nearly all of his personal wealth, some $145 million including four mansions, to asset forfeiture. It leaves just enough so his wife and kids won’t starve while he rots in jail. Manafort is clearly a man with no options and no bargaining chips, other than to give over Trump and many others close to Trump. This way, his family isn’t destitute, and he might actually live long enough to get out of prison, something not in the cards last week.

Shortly after Cohen decided to plead out and turn evidence, Trump got asked about ‘flippers.’ His answer was characteristically weird, in that he said he knew a lot of flippers and they were just part of his regular environment.

You have to wonder what other crime lords would have made of that statement. James Cagney’s characters would have prefaced any remarks made to suspected flippers with “Youse doity rats” and ended up with escapades involving cement overboots and the East River. Real mobsters would have arranged for brake failures, or skiing accidents (“Both legs”). For a man who supposedly demands absolute personal loyalty from all the people he’ll eventually betray, it was an oddly tepid response.

If America had to elect a mafia don president, at least they picked one that was profoundly incompetent and abjectly stupid. Trump can’t even call his little friend and arrange for Manafort to have an adventure involving ricin, polonium or novichok. It’s too late.

Manafort has already given everything he has to convince Mueller to let him off with just a decade or two and $145 million. All he had to do was sign the paperwork, and all that evidence were there for Mueller to do with as he pleased.

It’s too late for Trump to pardon his way out of it, too. A lot of the evidence will go to the State of New York Southern District, who will use it for state charges. Trump can only pardon federal offenses.

A lot of that evidence stands to implicate Trump himself. Even with Trumpenstooge Kavanaugh on the court (not a foregone conclusion at this point) the Court is unlikely to rule that a president indicted for criminal conspiracy against his own country (which is now quite likely) can pardon himself. Even Dead Tony would have trouble arguing that this came under the aegis of original intent.

I suspect that it wasn’t for their damp lust to get Kavanaugh on the court, thus assuring a corrupt corporate majority, the Republicans would have dumped Trump by now. Unfortunately for them, they need to maintain the few remaining tatters of presidential legitimacy Trump possesses for them to get Kavanaugh confirmed.

But it’s costing them massively, since the American people, Republicans in particular, are beginning to realize that this isn’t a witch hunt or a librul conspiracy; this is real, and Trump’s position becomes less defensible by the day.

A lot of Republican Senators, even those in safe states, are wondering what the real costs may be of forcibly rubber-stamping a man to the highest court in the land by a president facing indictment for criminal conspiracy against the United States. For Republicans, the question is no longer, “How badly will we lose the mid-terms?”

They have to ask if they can survive at all as a party, or even a movement. They’ve bet all their political, ethical and moral legitimacy on this one last toss of the dice.

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Nothing to Fear but…: A review of Fear

Fear: Trump in the White House

Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster September 2018

Yes, I know the title of the book is Fear, and I should have regarded that as fair warning.

But FFS, I thought I would at least get through the Prologue without being reduced to mindless, numbing, existential terror!

In a well-reported vignette from the book, “On the desk was a one-page draft letter from the president addressed to the president of South Korea, terminating the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement, known as KORUS.” Woodward goes on to relate the immense strategic, tactical, economic and diplomatic damage the United States would suffer as an almost immediate result of a sudden, unilateral withdrawal from KORUS.  

Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser, spotted the draft and stole it from the President’s desk, counting on Trump’s sparkler-like mind to forget about it. And in fact, he did.

Woodward writes, “It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.”

That’s pretty scary right there.

Woodward goes on to relate a power struggle, with Trump and Kushner on one side, and Mattis, Cohn, and Porter on the other. Trump was determined to destroy KORUS, but only intermittently, and Kushner’s agenda was focused on real estate and Israel, so he didn’t seem to be behind the memos to destroy the pact.

So who was behind it? Woodward doesn’t know. Possibly even Trump doesn’t know.

That’s very scary. An unstable, mercurial president who is easily manipulated is bad enough, but when nobody even knows who is pulling his strings, that is truly terrifying.

Fear is a surprisingly easy read, broken up into 42 easily-digested chapters. A lot of them won’t taste very good, but that’s not Woodward’s fault—he just reports what he saw. And he saw a lot.

Just how crass, craven, amoral and reckless with the truth is Trump? This vignette, from the Chapter detailing Trump’s contentious relationship with NATO, sums it up nicely:

A staffer who sat in on several calls that Trump made to Gold Star families was struck with how much time and emotional energy Trump devoted to them. He had a copy of material from the deceased service member’s personnel file.

“I’m looking at his picture—such a beautiful boy,” Trump said in one call to family members. Where did he grow up? Where did he go to school? Why did he join the service?

“I’ve got the record here,” Trump said. “There are reports here that say how much he was loved. He was a great leader.”

Some in the Oval Office had copies of the service records. None of what Trump cited was there. He was just making it up. He knew what the families wanted to hear.

It’s been a week since the pre-release reviews of this book rocked the Trump White House. Since then, the op-ed by Anonymous came out, Trump called Woodward a liar and Woodward promptly produced a tape showing he talked to Trump, Trump made fist-bumps to celebrate 9/11, and his son Eric, poster child for post-partum abortion, made a stunningly anti-semitic remark about Woodward. Trump declared the catastrophe of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico an “unsung sucess” and promised to bring that same high level of preparation and competence to the Carolinas when Florence makes landfall late tomorrow.

I feel sorry for the Carolinas and wish them well.

It seems like in any given week, Trump manages to recapitulate the worst of Nixon, Reagan and Bush the Lesser.

As I finish Woodward’s latest and perhaps greatest, I’m reminded of another President: “…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”

In those dark days, reality was what we feared, and Franklin Roosevelt was what stood up to it.

In these dark days, Trump is what we fear, and we have to stand up to him. Woodward is one of the strongest voices yet to do so.

We have nothing to fear but Trump himself.Nothin

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Our “Oh Shit” Moment – We’re at Meltdown Point for Trump

The Bob Woodword book,  Fear: Trump in the White House was probably the body blow. Certainly, it sparked the events of today.

The most lenient things in the book we already knew; that Trump was erratic, prone to rash and ill-considered moves, amoral, and the world’s nightmare boss. The worst were things we suspected, such as the military effectively removing him from chain of command (in normal times, mutiny punishable by death), aides scrambling to hide proclamations written by his vilest advisors (Stephen Miller and the absent-only-in-person Steve Bannon) that would be likely to spark a civil war or revolution.

Recent books, most notably Everything Trump Touches Dies by GOP operative Rick Wilson have broadly hinted at this.

But this is Bob Woodward, chronicler of Administrations going back to Nixon (who he helped pull down). When it comes to credibility, he is at the top. And the wild, galvanic reaction of Trump to the pre-release reviews of the book only add to the sense that horrific as it is, Woodward has nailed this administration. The book doesn’t even go on sale for a week, and I find myself wondering if Trump will even still be President at that point.

His bizarre recorded conversation with Woodward from last week, after the galley copy had gone to the publishers and it was far too late to influence the contents of the book in any way, showed that Trump, emotionally and intellectually, was at the end of his tether.

Affirming the point the book was making: Trump, bellicose, ignorant, vicious and thin-skinned, is utterly unfit to be President, his is a White House in paralysis, the government is in chaos, and America is facing political collapse.

The existence of the Woodward book led to today’s even more extraordinary events. Trump came out and screamed about the media being the enemy of the people and he was the best president America ever had. Senate Republicans all ducked and went silent, intent on getting their amoral and possibly criminal stooge onto the Supreme Court in a last-gasp effort to maintain perpetual power. All they ever wanted was power, so fuck Trump, fuck Woodward, and fuck the country.

They are broken and twisted creatures of a broken and twisted philosophy, and Trump is their hireling. You just can’t get good help when your cause is morally bankrupt.

But one of them, intent on saving his (or her) ass and perhaps being able to pretend he was thinking of America all along, wrote an anonymous editorial to the New York Times. Make no mistake: the author of this piece is self-serving scum, gleeful at the damage the GOP has done to the country. This is clear early on: “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.”

OK, the writer is happy to shaft Trump, but is going to promote Trump’s more egregious lies about the efficacy of GOP policies that have been inflicted on us.

The author continues, “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.” Translated: Trump’s greedy nihilism is more visible and exceeds what we think we can cover up.

The author is delighted that the administration has enabled stealing another trillion from the public treasury for the ultra-rich, destroyed efforts to combat the threat of climate change, stripped millions of health care access, and is working hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security.

“But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.” What fascists need as they rape the country is a leader who can good dignified and resolute as he destroys us. At at time when the GOP when needs a Calvin Coolidge to look dignified and resolute as they steal the country blind, they have Rufus T. Firefly. Only without Firefly’s ability to think quickly.

So the author is no hero: the author is just a rat deserting a sinking ship and probably hoping for a book deal out of the wreckage.

Trump of course, had a public meltdown over this, epic even by his standards. He had some ceremony honoring cops, and was backed by a rather clownish-looking choir of sherrifs as he howled about the “failing New York Times” for their “gutless editorial.” He vowed that the media “the media will be out of business” by the time he leaves office (that departure might be next week at this rate).

The cops dutifully applauded. Authority uber alles.

This is an Alex Butterfield (“Oh, didn’t you know? President Nixon taped everything in the Oval Office!”) and John Dean moment. It is truly the beginning of the end for Trump.

Now all we have to do is survive the Fall of Trump, and then drive the fascists who made him possible out of office.

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Kava-no-no – The wrong man for the wrong job

September 4th, 2018

The Senate confirmation hearings to place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court began today. It turned into a circus immediately, with Chairthing Chuck Grassley blowing off Democratic complaints that a 42,000 page document dump, performed late the night before, needed to be examined. Grassley is demanding they use these documents now in their deliberations, while not giving them enough time to even check to make sure the boxes are not just full of New York City telephone books from last year.

Grassley justified the 100,000 other documents withheld on ground of executive privilege on the weird grounds that one or more of them were in video form, and the Senate had never had to deal with such evidence in an SC nomination hearing before. And he refused to entertain a motion to adjourn so members of the committee could look at the new evidence and continue to determine what legal advice he had for the Bush administration on such matters as civil rights, worker rights, abortion and freedom of speech.

William Rivers Pitt observed that Grassley is what happens if your toilet doesn’t flush. The toilet in question is the corrupt and authoritarian Republican Party, which believes it is entitled to impose questionable candidates such as Kavanaugh on us, and not have to put up with any dissent. As a result, we have “hearings” that are on about the same level as Soviet show trials in the 1930s.

The Republicans, tiresome and vicious hypocrites, sat on the nomination of Merrick Garland for over a year, and now say that this nomination has to be rushed through before September 15th, eleven days from now. But they are withholding much of the government records needed to assess Kavanaugh’s stances on vital matters that he may be ruling on for the next four decades. The claim of “executive privilege” is insane, given that Kavanaugh was working for the GW Bush administration, and not for Trump.

His stances on the Constitution and rights in general are enough to suggest opposing his place on the Supreme Court. He strongly favors the rights of corporations and churches over people, and the court is already over-represented by fascists.

But even though that represents legitimate reason to oppose his nomination, it doesn’t disqualify him from the court. One of the greatest weaknesses of a free society is that it gives freedom to those who would work tirelessly to destroy that freedom, and creatures like Scalia and Roberts are part of the cost of freedom. Ideally, they are there to make us stronger. In practice, they make us stronger in much the same way that termites repair homes. But you can’t have freedom without tolerance for such types.

But there is another reason why Kavanaugh must be kept off the court: he is morally and intellectually unfit for the office.

In 2009, Kavanaugh authored a legal thesis entitled “Separation of Powers During the Forty-Fourth Presidency and Beyond.” In it, he wrote, “The decisions a President must make are hard and often life-or-death, the pressure is relentless, the problems arise from all directions, the criticism is unremitting and personal, and at the end of the day only one person is responsible.”

This led him to conclude, “I believe it vital that the President be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible. The country wants the President to be ‘one of us’ who bears the same responsibilities of citizenship that all share. But I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office.”

Therefore, he now believes that no sitting president should ever have to respond to a summons or indictment on any civil or criminal matter.

It’s easy to see why he would be extremely attractive to Donald Trump, a man neck deep in a vast criminal and civil morass of his own making. He would love to have an automatic vote to dismiss on the Supreme Court.

But Kavanaugh didn’t always feel that way. He was a member of the Starr Chamber during the politically-charged impeachment process against Bill Clinton, and very avidly pursued the persecution, to the point where Kenneth Starr had to draw him back. Among other questions he wanted Clinton asked in order to add to his humiliation were these gems:

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she [be] lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid with her in the Oval Office area, would should be lying?” Kavanaugh liked the cigar a lot, it seems. He asked about it twice in ten questions.

He was one of the lead authors of the Starr report, and responsible for its gruesome and loving obsession with the salacious. Kiddies, if you need to know what ‘analingus’ is, just ask your Uncle Brett.

Kavanaugh’s high moral dungeon stemmed from a belief that he thought a president should be impeachable for “lying to his staff and misleading the public.” Neither are criminal acts, by the way. If they were, Trump would already be in jail.

He now claims that his actions above were a mistake, and his cohorts have even offered the explanation that he was sleep-deprived when he wrote the memo.

I can see it now: “Sorry about that SC ruling making Trump Dictator for Life. Brett needs his nappie.”

But Kavanaugh now believes, ““Looking back to the late 1990s, for example, the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.”

OK, it takes a mensch to admit that he’s wrong, but something about this suggests that it wasn’t so much a change of heart as it was a total abandonment of principle, if principle was ever a part of his stance on Presidential liability to begin with. He wanted Clinton to be shamed, attacked and driven from office because Clinton was “lying to his staff and misleading the public.”

OK, that just about describes the Trump presidency in a nutshell. The man is an absolute and inveterate liar. He lies to his staff. He lies to his lawyers. He lies to us. He lies to everyone. With Clinton, it was some personality flaws. With Trump, it is the entirety of his existence.

I can see Kavanaugh changing his stance on immunity, even though I believe the Founders never intended for a President to be above the law, and a nation that holds a president in such regard has no future as a country.

How can any man with integrity or decency migrate from wanting to destroy a man for fibbing about a consensual affair to utterly forgiving a man in advance whose sociopathic and demented antics threaten to destroy the country?

Answer: He cannot.

Kavanaugh is not fit to sit on the court.

 

 

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Labor Day – Time for Labor to Rise Up

September 2nd, 2018

It’s Labor Day.

It’s a good time to talk about democratic socialism.

Senator Bernie Sanders, of course, has been a democratic socialist since the 1960s. Back then, he was considered a progressive liberal, slightly to the left of LBJ. He hasn’t moved left: the country has moved drastically to the right.

Despite the best efforts of Democratic centrists and the corporate media, he did astonishingly well in the 2016 primaries, rising from a 3% no-chancer to a 40% existential challenger to the smug and somewhat tepid Hillary Clinton, forcing her to accept a compromise party platform that included fighting for a minimum wage of $15/hour and fighting for universal health care rather than the patchwork Obamacare.

She promptly abandoned both positions after the conventions, and millions of working and poor people stayed home. A small, but very stupid segment of Bernie voters actually voted for Trump. Clinton unexpectedly lost the rust belt states where Bernie ran well and where Trump pushed his false populism the hardest.

The lesson was unmistakable; there was a groundswell of support for leftist, New Deal-type policies. Not a bad compromise $12 an hour like Hillary wanted, but an indexed $15 an hour. Not the weak compromise Obamacare, far better than what America suffered under the old system, but far short of Medicare for all.

Democratic centrists will forget about workers’ rights the day after Labor Day: democratic socialists make it a centerpiece of their platform. Most importantly, they will stand up to the Republican fascists, the thieves, the liars, the authoritarians and the traitors that the captive corporate media keep insisting are “conservatives.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat incumbent House Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District. An unalloyed leftist, she called for a “political revolution” including higher education for all, gun control measures, an end to private prisons and the abolition of ICE. She won, upsetting Crowley, an eight-term entrenched Democratic centrist who was being groomed for party leader, another Democratic Washington General to the GOP’s Harlem Globetrotters.

People have gotten tired of Democrats who talk a good game about rights and worker rights, but are nothing but ineffectual foils for the out-of-control Republicans. She will win in November, and the media will express surprise. After all, socialists can’t win.

Except they are, more and more, as a growing revolt against the fascistic policies of the GOP takes root.

More recently, a Democratic Socialist scored a major upset in the Florida primary for governor. The race was seen as a contest between two tepid centrists, and Politifact ( https://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2018/aug/27/fact-checking-florida-primary-candidates-governor/ ) lumped the eventual winner in with the “also runnings,” dismissing him with just once sentence: “Gillum, an African-American who has emphasized his working class roots, has drawn the backing of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of the party in a state that Sanders overwhelmingly lost in the 2016 primary.” A week later, Politifact hasn’t even updated that.

Andrew Gillum, of course, won. The corporate media said,“He can’t win, because he’s a socialist.” But he won. And not by a tiny margin.

He is African-American, and that rises the fear of the GOP to a blind racist panic. They look at what Fox News calls “Soros-backed Gillum” and see a potential Obama, only an Obama who isn’t a tepid centrist. Gillum looks as ready to fight for his beliefs as a cat with its back arched. He’s the worst nightmare the GOP could have.

His GOP opponent, Ron DeSantis, immediately unleashed some dog whistles marveling at how articulate Gillum is (He is definitely more articulate than the brain-damaged Trump) and coming up with the singularly oddly-phrased, “We can’t let him monkey this up.” Some neo-Nazis promptly jumped in with a truly vile robo-call that had a purported Gillum speaking in a minstrel voice while jungle noises sounded in the background. DeSantis promptly condemned the tactic, but the tone has been set. This is the party of Trump, a liar, a racist, a tin-horn dictator and a possible traitor, and the rot spreads from the top. And DeSantis describes himself as “A Trumpist, through and through.”

Gillum will win, and the media will be astonished. He’s a commie! He can’t possibly win!

Even the Guardian is playing that game, as they did in the 2016 primaries. Gillum, at most a New Dealer, is “Left wing”. DeSantis, a proud Trumperdoo, is described as “conservative.” Trump is about as conservative as a rabid dog.

The Democratic Socialists of America (dsa.org) describe themselves thusly: “We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.”

I take a similar tack: People should not be existing to support the economy. The economy should exist to support the people.

They support strong unions, good wages, abolition of Citizens United, and Medicare for All. And they will fight for them.

If you share those beliefs, support DSA and other candidates willing to fight for those beliefs. The “Third Way Democrats” had their chance, and showed they aren’t willing to fight. It’s time to move on.

Be wary, however, of frauds, morons and charlatans. The DSA had one candidate this summer who claimed to be a Columbian immigrant. Turned out she was born in America, and while her father was from Columbia, he was naturalized before she was born, which made her memories of being raised in a remote Columbian village rather farcical. Every party gets those: the Dems had John Edwards, the Greens have Jill Stein, and the Republicans…well, the Republicans seem to prefer frauds, morons and charlatans. They are, after all, the party of Trump.

They are a danger, and gravitating to a weak center isn’t going to stop them. If you want to fight these fascists, you have to start right now.

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Three Funerals…And Some Precedence for Presidents

August 31st 2018mcains final salute

They buried John McCain and Aretha Franklin today. Both had Presidents in attendance (Bill Clinton at Franklin’s and he and all the other retired Presidents at McCain’s) and both were free of Trumps. Both ceremonies were on the telly in the background and I didn’t pay deep attention. I don’t intend to eulogise either of them here, not out of disrespect, but simply because I have nothing to add that hasn’t been said thousands of times over the past week. I’ll simply note that 250 years from now, should we survive, every historian will know who McCain was, and every music lover will know who Franklin was.

I don’t mean to sound churlish—McCain had hundreds of very important people who said very important things about him, but I can’t help but think that the praises heaped on him, and the expositions of his importance to the country, were a bit more effusive and ebullient then they actually needed to be. It’s almost as if they were rubbing it in, somehow.

Well, the headline over a David Smith article at the Guardian let the cat out of the bag: Trump sits alone ‘sulking’ as Washington pays its respects to John McCain.

Ah, poor widdle Donnie needs his nappie changed! His behavior towards McCain has always been churlish—really churlish, and not just me trying to avoid sounding that way. Trump is a man whose soul resides where the sewer rats won’t go, but he hit new personal lows in his response to McCain’s death this week. That stunt of ordering the flags back to full mast the day after McCain died…

One of the Weasels noted that McCain’s family missed a bet. They should have invited Justin Trudeau.

Vice President Pence, who always looks like Leslie Nielsen with severe constipation, spoke at the McCain ceremony, and I believe he was the only one who uttered the words “President Trump.” The pained, sullen silence that greeted his invocation of the Glorious Leader must have seemed very strange to him: he’s used to watching cabinet members cheer, stomp and hoot every time Trump’s name is mentioned. Maybe he went home afterward, dropped to his knees, and said, “Jesus, you gots some ‘splaining to do…”

Aretha’s funeral was a happier, more boisterous affair. The eulogies were cheery, heartfelt, loving and often funny. But the most amazing tribute was one played by a small and rather unremarkable marching band some five time zones east. The Buckingham Palace Guard, in their traditional Changing of the Guard ceremony, played “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” It was unthinkable, and couldn’t have been done without the Queen’s knowledge and consent.

At McCain’s funeral, people showed respect. At Franklin’s, they sang it.

Trump knew of Franklin’s death, of course, tweeting that she had worked for him on several occasions. Even by Trump standards, it was a weird response. Imagine Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry tweeting, “Stephen Hawking? Oh, I had him on my show once!”

I’m not sure Trump actually knew who Franklin was, though. Otherwise he might have tweeted something like “Imagine how great quality a singer if she had been white!” Yes, I know some of you are wincing, but admit it: you could see Trump coming up with something like that. Nobody else. Just Trump.

Glioblastoma, one of the most loathsome forms of cancer around, caused McCain’s death, and played a role in his funeral. His death came nine years to the day after Ted Kennedy died of the same disease, and one of the eulogies was delivered by Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau died of the disease at age 46.

The funerals are over now, and Trump can stop pretending he’s concentrating on his golf game and continue preparing for the burial of his presidency. It’s Friday, and the Office of the Special Counsel (note spelling, Donny!) often has new announcement and new indictments on a Friday. There’s an unofficial courtesy in Washington that legal attacks on a campaign should not occur after Labor Day, but of course, Trump himself isn’t running for office this year.

So now he can have the flag put back up to full staff, and hopefully, as he does so, he can study the flag and learn which colors go where in case he ever has to crayon another flag. (Hint, Donnie: none of the stripes are blue. Not on the American flag, anyway. Your flag probably does have a blue stripe.)

So Trump can stop worrying about those greedy, selfish people who keep upstaging him by dying. Hopefully there won’t be any others for a while.

In the meantime, Trump can draw solace in the knowledge that his own funeral is one of the most highly-anticipated events of the century.

The downside: it will be the lightest attended.

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Donald, Duck! In the wake of the Manafort and Cohen catastrophes, more looms

August 23rd, 2018

Did you spill your popcorn following the Travesty of the Donald this week? Leave it. Things are going to get fast and furious, and you aren’t going to have time to make more popcorn.
Pecker! That’s what this complex of scandals was missing! A corrupt pseudo-journalist named Pecker turning on Trump. Now this David Pecker is a newspaper man in much the same way that Trump is a president: he has the power, and the accoutrements pertaining thereto, but he’s still just a dangerous joke.
He’s the owner of the supermarket tabloid, the National Enquirer. Long the province of psychics, bat-boys, and endless scandalous (and almost always false) rumors, it branched out into politics in the 1990s, breathlessly detailing secret meetings between Bill Clinton and space aliens. It was unbelievably stupid, but it put Clinton in a bad light (space aliens, really) so it became a new bible for the types of morons who think the notion that Earth is a big old ball just hanging in space is just a conspiracy by scientists to make us all not love Jesus. The Ray-de-oh is broke, so they can’t listen to tINFOil WARS.
So when you have a candidate come along who bangs porn stars, and is possibly a Russian agent and might have had hookers put on a golden shower show for him, you would think the National Enquirer would expand to 500 pages weekly just to keep up with all the lurid scum flowing from this walking sewer of a candidate.
Um, no. They didn’t. In fact they went out of their way to protect him, buying up tell-all stories from women who got paid not to discuss having sex with Trump, and starting an unending stream of attacks on Hillary.
Rachel Maddow tonight showed a bakers’ dozen covers from the NE, putting Trump in a god-like light, and blasting Hillary Clinton over and over.
Interestingly, much of what they accused Clinton of was things we know Trump was doing. She was corrupt, swindled people, kowtowed to foreign agencies, was secretly a lesbian who banged porn stars, ran a fake charity, and lied a lot. It was part of the standard right wing propaganda: protect your candidate from his own ruinous behavior by accusing his opponent of the same things. It confuses the cows in the supermarket line.
Interestingly, the tab also accused Hillary of being far sicker and more senile than she looked, and having a severe drug problem. Was that part of the same pattern? Are these Trump problems being projected?
You know, things with this administration phase between ‘chilling’ and ‘ridiculous’ so fast and so often it’s frequently hard to tell which is which.  But this one involves long-time scandal rag ‘National Enquirer’ covering up for a corrupt politician on multiple sex scandals, so let’s call it ‘ridiculous.’
In any event, Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal (who seem to be getting very fed up with Trump these days) reported that Pecker and his Vice President and Chief Content Officer, Dylan Howard, were granted immunity in return for some nice long chats (30 hours worth?) with Robert Mueller’s people. There are lurid rumors of a safe in Pecker’s office that is crammed with hundreds of stories the NE has covered Trump on.
Trump is openly musing a pardon for Manafort trial even as the second one looms. This, by itself, is a federal felony by Trump, an open move to obstruct justice. Mueller probably grinned mirthlessly and added it to his very long list.
Cohen is going to have some nice long chats with the Special Counsel’s office himself. Apparently he’s not too fond of Captain Pissmop any more and wants to share more items. One line in the court proceedings where he entered his pleas might give a clue as to what he wants to discuss: “The $50,000 represented a claimed payment for ‘tech services,’ which in fact related to work COHEN had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.”
OK, here’s the thing: The Trump campaign detailed all their spending in regards to computer servers, use and communications.
Except this. There’s a hint the ‘tech service’ in question was based in Russia.
If there was direct clandestine communication between the Trump campaign and Russia during the campaign, even the corrupt, venal, cowardly and unpatriotic Republicans in Congress will have to abandon their dreams of enslaving the American people and cut their losses—and Trump’s throat.
If you have any popcorn left, hang on to it tightly, no matter what your dog suggests.

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The Squirrel Seller

Khalid rubbed the dusty and sunburned bridge of his nose and tried not to glare in disgust. The man before him was aged, and perhaps not quite right in the head. The Prophet taught the virtue of compassion for the aged and the infirm, even if they were assholes. This particular asshole may have stood tall just a few decades before, and a small ring of blubber around his midriff suggested he might have been portly at the every least. Khalid could imagine him waddling about an almost-forgotten green and verdant golf course, relics of cool and wet times. Now he was as dessicated and worn as the sun-and-wind blasted lands in which they lived.

“I have no interest in your squirrels,” Khalid explained patiently. “Half the people within a day’s journey of here have squirrel farms, including myself.” He pointed to a board behind him. The board read “Fresh water: One liter for one cat. One half liter per chicken. One liter for one kilo of edible nuts, fruits, tubers. One liter for small dog, two for medium (10-30 kg) three for a large.”

He tapped the board meaningfully. “No squirrels. No chipmunks. No rats. No rodents of any kind. Everyone has all they can eat, and then some. Bring me a live turkey, and I’ll give you three liters. I’ll give you twelve liters for a tom.”

“I don’t have any toms.” The supplicant, bald but for a few straggled wisps about the ears, sagged, the very picture of abject misery.

Khalid, burdened with the idealism of youth, might have been a bit more sympathetic, but the man had a long history of lying, cheating, and flat-out swindling. He often had contracted with someone, receiving a good or service, and then sneering and simply stiffing the person with whom he had made his agreement. If pressed, he would offer coins of silver or gold, arguing that their value easily exceeded that of the food or water or labor he had received. In theory, that was true, but people had discovered that they could not eat gold and silver, and everyone was desperately clinging to survival and couldn’t be bothered with jewelry and ornaments.

The Prophet’s Law taught that the visitor should be afforded amenities and courtesies, and that to turn away a beggar was shameful, and to do so to a man incapable of caring for himself was a deep disgrace. Outside of the conclave lay only dust and heat and the rapidly decaying ruins of what had, just twenty years before, been a prosperous suburb with cars and trees and running water. A young and vigorous man armed with knowledge and quick wits might survive in the deserts of Maryland, but this old wreck was not young, nor vigorous, and it was doubtful he ever possessed knowledge or quick wits.

Some of the residents argued that he should be expelled anyway. He was a thief. He was also a braggart, a conceited blowhard who demanded respect he had done nothing to earn, boasting of great wealth and power, and had even been known to use such sad flourishes to bully some of the village children. At least once he had been beaten, when his hand brushed against a woman’s breast once too often for it to be mere coincidence.

The beggar glared. “Someone told you not to take my squirrels. I will find him, and he’ll pay. Believe me. He’ll pay.”

“No one told me not to take your squirrels. I don’t take any squirrels. I can’t sell them, I can’t trade them, and I don’t need them for food. Come back with some cloth, or unbroken glass, and I will treat with you.”

“You are a poor businessman. You have goods to trade, I have goods to trade. What is the problem?”

“You need my goods. I don’t need yours.”

“I could make better use of them than you.”

Khalid ignored the jibe. “But I have no need of your goods. The art of the deal is based on the value perceived by each party, resulting in a trade.”

“Who taught you that shit? Look, these are fine squirrels. The best squirrels. I raised them like they were my own children. Believe me, you will never regret buying these squirrels.”

Khalid glanced into the cage, where a half dozen dusty and disheveled rodents resided. One blinked at him slowly with rheumy eyes, and another appeared to be in the throes of an epileptic seizure. The beggar gestured at them, beaming with pride. “These are quality squirrels.”

“If you raised your children like you raised these poor creatures, it would explain why your children are not helping you in your dotage.”

“Those swine.” The old man spoke without passion or conviction, but spat precious bodily fluid into the dust. “They abandoned me in my hour of greatest need. I was a great father, the best father, and they turned away from me. They were disloyal!” Now the beggar’s voice rose, and his eyes flashed. “Disloyal!”

Khalid sighed. This was a well-worn recording. Left uninterrupted, the screed would expand, until Earth’s once-teeming billions had all risen up in conspiracy and envy to destroy this man. And indeed, Khalid had heard reports that had civilisation not collapsed in 2019, this man might well have been in prison today, along with his wives and children. If any of his family remained alive, Khalid thought. It was little wonder they would eschew this vile man.

Khalid’s patience was at an end in the sweltering day. He rose from his seat, towering over the old man, who shrunk in on himself, revealing a personal cowardice.

“Look, enough is enough. I have told you what I am willing to trade fresh, clean water for. If you cannot find items of value, you can drink from the river everyone else drinks from. It won’t kill you.”

“But it’s scummy and tastes bad,” the beggar whimpered. “Do you have any idea who I am? I am the most important man in the world! You can’t make me drink bad water!” His eyes glittered, whether from self-pity or calculation Khalid couldn’t tell.

This, too, was a familiar tack in the squabble. The man would describe how he had smote nations, and punished the parasitic poor. It was a bloody canvas of greed and avarice and vainglory, and Khalid had no desire to sit through the demented diatribe.

He slapped his hands on the rough-hewn counter, and again the beggar shrank back, quailing.

“Look, Donald,” Khalid growled, using the beggar’s name for emphasis. “One last time.”

He pointed to the board. “This is what I want for my water. Produce that, or leave.

“And don’t waste my time telling me how powerful you once were.

“The fact is, I don’t care what you were President of.”

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Omarosa Crazed crying lowlifes, Unite!

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

Well, OK then. Apparently it is the role of the President of the United States to give politically sensitive jobs paying nearly a quarter million a year to “crazed, crying lowlife(s).”

Usually mercy hires are for custodian, or mail clerk. Something with limited responsibility, even more limited visibility, and where if it doesn’t work out, the damage can be swiftly addressed. Press Liaison for the White House might be above the paygrade of your typical crazed, crying lowlife. It might be suitable for a dog, or even a cat: Bo, Millie and Socks are all very good press liaisons for their respective administrations, and they weren’t even asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. But it was generally assumed the White House would avoid crazed crying lowlifes since the Mary Lincoln incidents. Normally, crazed crying lowlifes are not well suited to be envoys and ambassadors for the President. Until now.

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”Back when she was hired, days after the election, I knew little about her, but considered the choice to be a joke. A reality-TV show actor whose main claim to fame was she was the resident Samantha Bee word. A close match for the President elect, who fitted the same description, but at the time, I had no idea he was hiring her because she was a crazed crying lowlife. As a liberal, I like to see all segments of society represented in government, but this seemed a bit beyond the necessary courtesies of inclusionism.

In short, I regarded Omarosa, and her subsequent dismissal, as just one more minor sideshow Trump’s Big Top, appearing soon in a Stephen King novel near you. Her role in this chaotic administration could be equated to noticing a dog lifting his leg against a woman’s expensive boots during a nuclear attack. No catastrophe is complete without its moments of low farce, and Omarosa seemed perfect for the role of minor low farce.

Then I heard about the tapes. I didn’t expect them to amount to much. Trump has boasted he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, and Republicans and Faux News are intent on proving him right. Even if the tapes had something damning, Republicans are far too lost and amoral to care. They smell power, and so fuck morality, fuck propriety, fuck the country, fuck everything.

My opinion of Omarosa went up minutely, though. She had enough common sense to tape her interactions with Trump.

Now it’s coming to light that taping Trump was de rigueur at the House of the Orange Pomposity, and damn the non-disclosure agreements. People simply felt a need to protect themselves.

This isn’t something about Trump we didn’t already know. During the campaign, it came out that his lawyers got in the habit of conferring with him in teams of two or more. The reason was simple: Trump was the ultimate nightmare client. He would not only lie to his lawyers, but if cornered, he would lie about them. In fact, he would lie for no particular reason at all.

We’ve seen this literally thousands of times during his presidency. Trump lies. He lies when it suits his interests. He lies just for the hell of it. He sometimes even lies when it does nothing but hurt his own interests. There’s an old political joke: “George Washington couldn’t lie, FDR couldn’t tell the truth, and [incumbent] can’t tell the difference.” I first heard it during the Nixon administration, and just about for every administration since.

Only now it isn’t a joke. I doubt Trump usually knows if he’s lying or not, and wouldn’t care either way.

His lawyers figured that out fairly quickly, and double-teamed him because he would, inevitably, betray them and throw them under the bus. He wouldn’t even need a reason.

Getting elected president didn’t make him better, any more than feeding a rabid dog will make him a good playmate for the kids. (Yeah, I just compared the President of the United States to a dog. What goes around comes around!).

So we have a White House where the leader is so chaotically temperamental and destructive that the people putatively working for him are recording him to cover their asses. Despite the non-disclosure agreements.

Speaking of which, campaigns often have their volunteers sign NDAs. I came across a copy of the one required by the Obama campaign in 2008 ( https://obama.3cdn.net/d33f3886bfb70a0cca_zrs9mvxyt.pdf ). Its scope is significantly more limited than the one Trump used ( http://slnews.us/sf081418a ), both in terms and range of items not to be discussed. One limit was that it forbade disclosures that might hurt the campaign, giving it a term of the day after the election. Trump’s is indefinite, and thus may not hold up in court. The Trump campaign supposedly is suing Omarosa “for millions of dollars”, so it will be interesting to see if a court considers it enforceable or not.

It’s being reported that Trump had administration hires sign and NDA, as well, and that’s far more problematic. Security clearances (which Trump tried to grandly ignore) are one thing: it’s reasonable to set limits on access to national security elements. But NDAs, something no other administration has ever required, is another. Is it reasonable, or even legal to require government employees to keep non-national-security items secret from the public? I suspect that’s going to get tested in court in fairly short order.

In the meantime, if you’re an employer, owner of a large firm, and you want to show how big-hearted you are and hire a crazed, crying lowlife, that’s probably a nice thing to do, but one word of advice: don’t put that hire in charge of your public relations. Get a dog instead.

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Trump Bumps — His Road to Ruin is not a Smooth Ride

August 12th, 2018

Despite the obvious peril and potential for great harm to the nation and the world, it’s enjoyable watching Trump continue to personally disintegrate as all his crimes and disgraceful behavior catch up to him. But make no mistake: it’s a very dangerous time.

The nation has been here before. Nixon, of course, but before that, as well. In 1932 FDR and the Democrats won the election by vast margins, but the nation was on the verge of collapse, and it would be a full four months before FDR and the Democrats assumed control. In the meantime, Herbert Hoover and the Republicans, ideologically incapable of addressing the Great Depression, were in control, and persuing the same destructive policies that had served them and the nation so poorly over the past 3+ years. Hoover was not a villain, not insane, and not heedless of the destruction that was driving the country into a morass. In desperation, at one point he offered FDR a “copresidency” to work through to the day, still months off, when FDR would be inaugurated. FDR sensed a trap, or at least a no-win situation, and declined. The country writhed in agony.

By the time FDR did take office, a third of the banks were shuttered, a dozen states were using script because US currency was no longer trusted, and unemployment was over 30% and starvation was widespread.

The political situation caused by the long gap between the election and inauguration was so dire that a Constitutional Amendment (20th) was passed, making the inauguration the twentieth of January, and the convening of the new Congress even earlier, January 3rd. Never again, it was resolved, would the country go through a slow-motion hanging as it did during the winter of 1932-33.

When Nixon fell, the denouement, after two years of investigations, was relatively rapid. Despite the sense of crisis, the country sensed that Congress would do its job if required, and the Court would rule in the national interest. When the Supreme Court did rule, 8-0, that he must release the tapes, Congressional leaders went to Nixon and told him he no longer had any hope of avoiding impeachment and conviction, and a few days after that, he was gone.

The moral rot in the GOP began in 1964 when the right wing first seized control of the party, making it the party of the loony John Birchers. Four years later, and Nixon embraced the bigots and aggrieved whites of the South, the infamous “southern strategy” which put the party on a pernicious path of ongoing public deception. So both fiscally and socially, the party had to put false faces on their true aims, hiding designs on the public treasury behind false concerns about ‘big government’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ (and they went on to triple the size of the federal government and are responsible for nine out of every ten dollars in the national debt), and hiding their racist and authoritarian aims behind fake patriotism, fake religion, and loud claims that anyone who opposed them was socialist, if not disloyal.

It was a toxic stew even before it embraced the loony fundamentalist movement under Reagan, and the belief that the law existed to harass and persecute non-Republicans under Newt Gingrich.

It explains why Trump came to be the presidential candidate for the GOP, and why the party is utterly supine in the face of his obviously disastrous presidency. He is their Frankenstein’s monster, and like the doctor, they have lost control of their creation.

During the Hoover crisis, Hoover was a decent man trapped in an impossible situation, locked in by the always-destined-to-fail policies of Wall Street. He went on to serve the country honorably after the war and redeemed himself. Nixon may have had little interest in the welfare of the citizenry, and his patriotism is certainly open to question, but Republicans, at least, realized his position was untenable, and they needed to do the right thing, if only to save their own asses.

The safeguards that saved us in 1933 and in 1974 aren’t there. Republicans, trapped between voracious plutocrats who sense a change to make America their own private property, and the toxic little authoritarians of the trash right who want to make America a racist theocracy, can’t move without risking an eruption and rebellion by their base. The Supreme Court is compromised, and stands to be a plaything for fascists if the Republicans ram through the Kavanaugh nomination. And of course, Trump is completely amoral, and may not be intellectually or emotionally capable of knowing when he has lost, and decide to pull everything down around with him, a Samson-smash, a bid for failed glory.

Still, it’s not hopeless. The “Unite the Right” movement has failed so utterly that even Trump worked up the courage today to condemn Nazis. The huge demonstration in Washington attracted only a few dozen—and thousands of anti-fascist counter demonstrators.

Trump needs extremes and extremists to promote himself. His entire political career is modeled, after all, on “New World Order” by A. Hitler. Obviously America isn’t ready for Nazism.

He needs plutocrats, and they need him only if they profit, and dismay at his economic policies is growing rapidly as trade wars and increasing tensions work to isolate and ruin America financially.

Still, for America, that is not a good solution. After all, if plutocrats and the trash right turn on Trump and destroy him, it leaves the country beholden to the same groups that created him in the first place.

Best answer: the people must vote in November, and drive the Republicans far from the reins of power, and reinstate democratic freedoms and sanity.