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Gaetz and Poses – A government of gangsters

February 26th, 2019

As things continue to crumble for the GOP, and the lunacy and flat-out gangsterism that pervades the party has come into full view.

By way of example, Matt Gaetz, the thug representing Florida’s 1st District, tweeted Michael Cohen on the eve of his public testimony before the Committee Gaetz slithered on to Twitter, and wrote, “Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

In normal times, Congress would be deliberating whether to censure or expel Gaetz for such an illegal act. He’s trying to call it “witness testing,” but it is a clear case of witness tampering: “Talk, and your wifey learns all about that little piece of fluff you have on the side.”

The technical term for that is blackmail. It’s a crime. In fact, it’s a felony. When you use it to intimidate a witness, it’s an even bigger crime, and a major felony.

If Gaetz had enough brains to send that tweet from the floor of Congress, then he is exempt from the law, and only Congress can discipline or expel him. Whether Congress will is another matter: nearly all the Republicans are cowardly and criminal whores, and too many of the Democrats seem afraid of upsetting such vermin. Witness today’s vote in the House, in which only 17 Republicans mustered up the courage and patriotism to put country ahead of Trump.

But if Gaetz was stupid, and sent it from a restaurant or his apartment or whatever…well. Someone call the DA of the district he was in. Open-and-shut case, against a prestige dirtbag. All the DA has to do is show Gaetz sent it, and wasn’t on the floor of the House when he did so. DA s launch political careers convicting morons like Gaetz.

And yes, he’s a moron. Just take a look at his web page:

“Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida is one of the finest and most talented people in Congress. Strong on Crime, the Border, Illegal Immigration, the 2nd Amendment, our great Military & Vets, Matt worked tirelessly on helping to get our Massive Tax Cuts.” [bold text his]

OK, he may be one of the finest and most talented Republicans, but talk about a low bar. I guess he doesn’t know that those “massive tax cuts” don’t apply to the 99% of Americans that he doesn’t give a shit about. They got screwed on the deal. Most of the Republicans realize how close they are to getting lynched over that ‘tax cut’ and keep their mouths carefully shut in the hopes that an armed mob won’t give them credit for it.

As if that wasn’t enough, Trump announced what he calls the “Presidential Committee on Climate Security” This committee will exist to prove that there ain’t no sech thing as global warming. More to the point, the committee will stand for the civil rights of CO2 molecules everywhere.

The council will be headed by National Security Council senior director William Happer, and if you think that being on Trump’s NSC is a prestige position, reflect that against strong objections from members of his own transition team and the Obama administration, Trump named disgraced general and probable traitor Michael Flynn to the group, and, for a few days, the clownish buffoon Steve Bannon. National security isn’t exactly Trump’s top priority, and it shows.

But Happer himself is a real piece of work. He’s putatively a physicist, although at the age of 79, his days of physicking are pretty much in the past. Most of his “scientific expertise” is spoon-fed to him by such entities as the Heritage Foundation, or gleaned from websites such as wattsupwiththat. This enables him to say, with a straight face, things like “We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all. . . . We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth.” As you might have guessed, he said this at a gathering of the Heritage Foundation. If he had said something like that in front of any actual scientists who weren’t just clowns in lab coats stooging for the fossil fuels industry, he would have been laughed out of there.

CO2 is vital to survival, of course. Plants need it, and we actually have a direct need in that CO2 build-up in the body triggers the instinct to inhale. But too much CO2 is pollution. At above about 445ppm, most plants can’t process any more, and the “greening planet” theory has been shown to be false.

Put it this way: we need oxygen, Without it we can only survive about four minutes. Earth’s atmosphere is about 21% oxygen. If we emitted enough oxygen that that ratio climbed to 30%, we would die. If the wildfires didn’t get us, the corrosive effects of so much oxygen on our lungs and trachea would. Any substance, beneficial or not, is a pollutant if there is too much of it, and too much CO2 is drastically altering our climate. Even Happer can’t come up with a factor that would cause warming when the excess CO2 so neatly fits the bill.

But he previously came up with something that even the Heritage Foundation—which once compared climate scientists to the Unabomber—to possibly reject as too vicious and dishonest. Well, maybe they would.

Happer said this:  “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” and added that “carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: carbon and oxygen are two of my favorite elements, and many members of my own family consist of carbon and oxygen. And if a randy carbon atom wants to get it on with a couple of consensual oxygen atoms, well, where’s the harm. (I do have a problem with a monogamous relationship between one oxygen atom and one carbon atom for reasons to involved to go into here). I like CO2 in my soda, and I even exhale CO2 on occasion. I’m not a CO2 hater.

But I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that climate scientists have committed genocide against CO2. For one thing, CO2’s population is half again what it was in 1970.

And Jews, as a rule, tend to be life forms. Thank you for not asking about Joe Lieberman. CO2 isn’t a life form and can’t be murdered. I don’t happen to know what Happer’s opinion on Jews might be, but I think he’ll have to admit that a Jew and a CO2 molecule are not the same thing, even if the atoms that comprise both a) include oxygen and carbon and b) are immortal.

Now I’m used to fossil fuel stooges saying ludicrous things. They are paid to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence, and as a result often look and sound extremely stupid and ignorant. But I think Happer set a new standard of sorts, comparing warnings of climate change to the Holocaust.

So what becomes of a whorish moron like Happer in this age of Trump? He’s head of the Presidential Committee on Climate Security.

Perhaps he can persuade Trump to build a wall along the Gulf coast, around Florida, and up to Maine in order to keep huricanes out.

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Trumpenstag Fizzle – Even Coulter thinks he’s an idiot now

February 15th 2019

I usually don’t watch Trump on TV any more. It’s not just because he’s a vile jerk and a jackass—after all, I watched George Bush the lesser for eight years—but because he is so fundamentally dishonest the only way you’ll actually learn anything is if he has an unguarded moment and blurts out a truth of some sort.

Yeah, stopped clock and all that. Even the blind nut finds a squirrel.

Sure enough, Trump committed a MUT—Moment of Unintentional Truth, when he blurted out, “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

OK, so it’s not actually an emergency. It wasn’t an emergency for the first two years Trump was in office, and with nothing materially changing on the border in the month since, still isn’t an emergency. The only thing that made it an emergency was Congress changed hands, and Trump wanted to blame the Democrats for not getting his wall. But Trump has put it in terms that no court or Congressman can ignore: as an “emergency,” this is pure bullshit.

Ann Coulter, now the moral compass of the GOP, had her own MUT when she blurted during a radio interview, “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

Another blind nut, another squirrel. Will wonders ever cease?

I’m sure Ann has her own reasons for hating Trump, and I’m equally sure those reasons reside in an utterly alien universe, but it is sort of fun watching her and Trump get in a pissing match. Two baboons, feces at five feet. Duel of the century, folks. Gitcher popcorrn here.

As mentioned, I watched Trump for as long as I could stomach it. It was hilarious in the way that Rufus T. Firefly was hilarious, or Charlie Chaplin as The Great Dictator. Except this is real. Ann’s idiot, burdened with dementia and underlying personality disorders, is the most powerful man on the planet, militarily speaking, with the ability to kill us all.

But, overlooking his ability to ruin or end your life, it was pretty funny.

He spent a fair bit of time praising Rush Limbaugh, passé radio demagogue, for his ability to speak for three hours straight without taking a phone call. Apparently being able to rant for hours at a time is considered a virtue with Trump. Certainly some leaders have been noted for it: Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini all spring to mind. Limbaugh is only fair-to-middling long-winded by radio gasbag standards who are free to repeat themselves endlessly and make stuff up for the edification of their audience, whose IQs are generally measured in units of birdseed.

Trump claimed (falsely) that drugs flowed freely over the border in those areas where there is no wall. Since most drugs come in by plane or through border crossings, that’s sort of true, but Trump wants to stop drugs from flowing into the country, he says. To that end, of the $8 billion he wants to steal for his vanity project, $2.5 billion would come from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction program.

Very good, Donald. Next, you can shut down the IRS in order to pay for a committee on tax cheating.

Trump admits that his declaration would do poorly in the courts, comparing it to his fatwa against Islamic immigrants. It would lose in the ninth, and then the appeals (he got the order reversed, of course, but “We’ll end up in the Supreme Court and hopefully get a fair shake and win in the Supreme Court just like the ban.” Yup, you have two partisan hacks who owe you in the Court.

But it’s unlikely to even make it to the courts.

The House will take it up, probably today, and will probably pass a resolution negating the Declaration of Emergency in the following days next week. Already, Democratic congressionals are sidling up to their Republican counterpoints and whispering, “Say, I can’t wait for President Ocasio-Cortez to Declare a State of Emergency in order to make the Green New Deal the law of the land.”

The Republican’s face turns white and his pants turn brown at the thought of such a demonic presidential power unleashed. 2018 taught them the ability to steal elections is not absolute, and public will can thwart corporate design.

Most of them have already realized the only thing worse than having someone other than Trump as a candidate in 2020 is having Trump as a candidate in 2020. It’s an offal thought.

They will decide not to give Trump this power. I’m guessing the resolution might get 350 votes.

So it goes to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell can’t simply kill it by refusing to let it come up for a vote. The law mandates open debate and a public vote on this sort of resolution within two weeks.

Mitch had already crouched and urinated a profession of undying love for Trump and his Emergency declaration, so I’m predicting that Mitch is going to have a really shitty time of it, especially since many Republicans are either unwilling to give any president a blank check like that, and/or are thoroughly fed up with Trump and deeply apprehensive of what bizarre stunt he might come up with next.

So Trump will claim the $1.4 billion he got for border security is far better than the $1.57 billion he was offered in December, and far better than the $8 billion he wanted. That boy spins like the Tasmanian Devil on meth.

Winning is his! Medals for Everyone!

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False Alarm – Trump’s State of Emergency

February 14th 2019

By all accounts, Captain Pissmop is going to declare a state of emergency as a last-ditch effort to get funding for his foolish wall. If he doesn’t do that, I’m still covered: I can keep the main title and just write an entirely different piece. It’s all good.

It’ will probably work as well as his efforts to extort the wall out of the country by shutting down the government. The arithmetic on that one, even by GOP standards, was atrocious. Trump wanted $5.7 billion for a wall. The Dems offered to add $1.57 billion for ‘border security.” The Republicans in Congress thought that was reasonable, and voted for the bill. Trump then proceeded to shut down the government, a fiasco that cost the country $11 billion dollars, ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, and in the end, simply kicked the can down the road for three weeks.

The latest bill has $1.4 billion for border security with any mathematician will tell you is less than $1.57 billion. Bizarrely, the GOP and Trump tried to spin that as a victory for the Wallbangers, and when, for some inexplicable reason, that didn’t work, Trump tried vacillating on signing the bill. The Republicans in Congress, who just spent the past two months getting massaged with sledgehammers over the shutdown, elected to not play along. Which led to Pissmop’s final gambit: this state of emergency.

The idea is that Trump can use the declaration to strip funds away from other emergencies, such as Puerto Rico’s hurricane relief, or the fires in California.

Even by his standards, it’s an unbelievably cruel, vicious, and dishonest tactic. Any person who supports him on this is a disgrace both as a person and as an American. At this point, if you support Trump, there is something deeply wrong with you, morally, mentally and intellectually. You have to be a sociopath, deranged, and stupid, or all three.

The question remains: how many Republicans will follow him into this new sewer of a rabbit hole?

There was an interesting exchange on the Senate floor this afternoon that suggests that even the corporate whores have lost patience. Chuck Grassley, a man seemingly willing to eat tons of turds for the GOP, was interrupted by Mitch McConnell, who breathlessly announced that Trump would sign the spending bill, and that he would issue a national emergency declaration to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

McConnell, the biggest whore in the Senate, declared proudly, “I indicated to him I am going to support the national emergency declaration.”

The party spin is that Grassley was having a bad hair day and was only annoyed, yeah, pissy, at being interrupted by the Majority Leader. Because Grassley has such a rich history of snarking at party leadership, you understand.

I’m guessing that Grassley knew exactly why McConnell was interrupting him and didn’t like it one little bit. Earlier this morning, at a prayer function of the sort that afflicts representative democracy, he said, “Let’s all pray that the president will have wisdom to sign the bills so government doesn’t shut down.” Note lack of support for the politically suicidal tactic of declaring a phony emergency so Trump can steal from victims of natural disasters. Grassley may be willing to sacrifice the country for the sake of the party, but he isn’t willing to sacrifice Chuck Grassley for the sake of the party. He knows that if Pissmop’s scheme to fuck over American victims for his vanity project ever came to pass, it would be the absolute end of the Republican Party and Chuck Grassley.

Hence his barely concealed disgust for the obsequious McConnell.

In an unrelated development, Atlantic magazine printed an excerpt from Andrew McCabe’s book, “The Threat”. McCabe was fired by a vindictive Trump just a day and a half before he was to retire for speaking out against the firing of James Comey.

McCabe wrote, “The president steps over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he encounters them. Everyone in America saw it when he fired my boss. But I saw it firsthand time and time again.”

That’s pretty damning, especially since he discloses that the Department of Justice heads were seriously discussing the possibility of the Cabinet declaring Trump unable to perform his duties and removing him from office. (Trump, perhaps uneasily aware that it could happen, had a spectacular Twitter meltdown today over that one.)

In a telling vignette, McCabe wrote:

Trump launched back into his speech about what a great decision it was to fire Jim Comey, how wonderful it was that the director was gone, because so many people did not like Comey, even hated him—he actually used the word hate.

Eventually he changed the subject. He said that he wanted to come to FBI headquarters to see people and excite them and show them how much he loves the FBI. He pressed me to answer whether I thought it was a good idea. I said it was always a good idea to visit. I was trying to take some of the immediacy out of his proposal—to communicate that the door was always open, so that he wouldn’t feel he had to crash through it right away. I knew what a disaster it could turn out to be if he came to the Hoover Building in the near future. He pressed further, asking specifically, Do you think it would be a good idea for me to come down now? I said, Sure.

He looked at Don McGahn. The president said, Don, what do you think? Do you think I should go down to the FBI and speak to the people?

McGahn was sitting in one of the wooden chairs to my right. Making eye contact with Trump, he said, in a very pat and very prepared way, If the acting director of the FBI is telling you he thinks it is a good idea for you to come visit the FBI, then you should do it.

Then McGahn turned and looked at me. And Trump looked at me and asked, Is that what you’re telling me? Do you think it is a good idea?

It was a bizarre performance. I said it would be fine. I had no real choice. This was not worth the ultimate sacrifice.

In this moment, I felt the way I’d felt in 1998, in a case involving the Russian Mafia, when I sent a man I’ll call Big Felix in to meet with a Mafia boss named Dimitri Gufield. The same kind of thing was happening here, in the Oval Office. Dimitri had wanted Felix to endorse his protection scheme. This is a dangerous business, and it’s a bad neighborhood, and you know, if you want, I can protect you from that. If you want my protection. I can protect you. Do you want my protection? Trump and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate.

For whatever reason, the visit to the FBI never happened.

No. It’s not going to get better from here. It’s going to get worse.

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Class War – America is fighting a class war, and losing

February 10th 2019

Gabriel Zucman is an Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Berkeley. Don’t let the “assistant” throw you off; he is one of the leading analysts of global wealth inequality in his field, and has co-written nine texts with the renowned Thomas Piketty, in addition to a large volume of other works.

Emmanuel Saez is an Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Berkeley, has also authored dozens of papers on wealth inequality, including with both Zucman and Piketty. He advocates a high marginal income tax rate (70-90%) on incomes over ten million as a way of equalizing the huge disparity caused by runaway capitalism.

How bad is that disparity? Zucman released a working paper the other day in which he showed the richest 0.00025 percent of the American population now own more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent.

The obscene increase in wealth for the 400 richest Americans came at the harshest expense of that bottom 60% of the country. Their share of the nation’s wealth dropped from 5.7% in 1987 (and that was one of the worst rates of inequality in the developed world) to just 2.1% now. They have less than half what they did 32 years ago, and it all went to those undeserving billionaires.

It’s perhaps not surprising that both economists are working as advisors for the Elizabeth Warren campaign. She sees wealth inequality and the subsequent twisting of the rules as the biggest threat to America. While she advocates for a high marginal income rate for the highest earners (77% on $10 million/year or more) she also proposes a 2% wealth tax on estates worth more than $10 million, 3% on estates worth more than a billion. Zucman and Saez estimate that such a plan would raise about $275 billion a year on average in its first ten years.

The pushback has been frantic and immediate. The Private Bank of JP Morgan snapped that such a plan was unconstitutional, overlooking the fact that wealth taxes were about the only form of taxation available to the federal government prior to 1917. Property tax is perhaps the best known example of a wealth tax. So is the estate tax.

Other flacs for the rich declared that the tax wasn’t feasible because it was so difficult for a rich person to know how much his assets were.

Um, No. Just No. You don’t get to be a billionaire without hiring some very smart people who know exactly where every dollar of those assets lie. And you have a raft of other very smart people who can ensure the highest possible return on investment for all that money.

The fact is the ultra-wealthy have stopped having any positive affect whatever on the general economy (and it’s always been questionable as to how beneficial they actually were) and have now become voracious and parasitic, a risk to their host. Even the ultra-wealthy who are uneasily aware of the destructive nature of their class, such as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, can’t give back anything near what they take. Most simply take, and give one half of one percent of their income to charity to try and justify their presence. They spend more in the system of legalized bribery that is the American elections system than they do on actual Americans, and have bought a large portion of elected officials, zombie representatives who oppose high marginal tax rates, wealth taxes, universal health care, workers’ rights, environmental protections, public transportation, a strong social safety net, and anything else that might stand between them and a high appreciation of their already obscene wealth. And to hell with all the rest of us.

The disparity of wealth is already the highest its been in American history. It’s as high was it was in France in the 1780s, or Russia in the 1910s. That’s a very dangerous place for any society to be, especially when the rich overreach and make it nearly impossible for most people to make a decent living.

That’s when you start getting revolutions, and trust me, nobody wants that. No sane person who understands history. The satisfaction wrought by the guillotine is only transitory, and it takes a while for conditions to improve to where they were before the revolution. Even the “successful” revolution in America needed thirty years for the colonists to enjoy the standard of living they had before they broke away from England.

Polls show that between 70% and 85% of Americans approve of Warren’s plan. Similar numbers support similar plans by Bernie Sanders, or the one proposed by Ocasio-Cortez.

Tell everyone not to vote for any multi-millionaire candidates, or any candidate who receives “dark money” from PAC—they are not on your side, cannot be on your side. They work for the people who are trying to take everything from you.

The people are speaking loud and clear, It’s time for the ultra rich to listen, and consider options that they can live with.

The alternative, horrible as it is, is absolutely inevitable otherwise.

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70% — Go Suck Lemons!

January 27th 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lit a match under the collective arses of American plutocracy and their ‘umble servants in the right wing media last week by proposing a new top marginal income tax rate of 70% on income over ten million.

One assclown, purportedly one of Trump’s top economic people, got on TV to ‘explain’ that a little girl selling lemonade at a dollar a pop would have to turn around and give 70 cents to the government. Oh, the horror!

Well, the wealthy class hire the very best fools and liars to safeguard their interests, don’t they? Since right wing economists don’t know anything about the actual economy and prefer to scare folks instead, let’s explain what really happens to that little girl in the hellish socialist landscape of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In the real world, the one where kids set up lemonade stands, it’s usually a one-day thing. If it’s a warm day and the kid has a good location, she might sell 20 or even 30 cups of lemonade. She pockets all the money which she will proceed to blow on ALEX toys or, if she’s responsible, save toward a cruiser bike. Mom and Dad, who provided the stand, the lemonade, the cups and the water, are just happy to acquaint their kid with the notion of working to earn money. Unless the kid happens to be African-American and has some really vile neighbors who try to shop her for selling food without a permit (yes, this has happened) officialdom will take no notice. The IRS will not be coming around to seize her glitter and her plush toy unicorns.

So what are the circumstances under which the kid might have to shell out 70% on a cup of lemonade?

Well, none, actually.

In the real business world, she has to buy the lemons, sweeteners and cups, pay the water bill, amortize out the cost of the stand, pay various permits, plus social security and unemployment, and pay rent on the place she sets up her stand. After she’s done all that, she’s maybe making 30 cents on each lemonade sold. The overhead is all deductible, and she doesn’t have to pay taxes on that.

So if she was in the 70% bracket on income, she would be shelling out 70% of 30% on each dollar of revenue, or 21%. That’s still pretty steep, and she would have to cut back on the pink glitter fingernail polish. That seems an awfully cruel thing to do to a little girl.

But it turns out that even Republicans aren’t that malevolent. You see, under the present tax schedule (and AOC isn’t proposing any changes there at this time) she doesn’t pay any tax at all on the first $9,699 of her income from sales.

To make $9,699, she would have to sell 32,330 cups of lemonade. Assuming she takes Sundays off, that’s a bit over 100 cups a day. That would be quite an accomplishment, especially if she lives in, say, Milwaukee, where January sales might be less than brisk.

When she sells that 32,331st cup of lemonade, she’ll will owe income tax. The tax rate is 10%, so she would actually owe seven cents.

But there’s a personal deduction. $12,200 for a single taxpayer. There’s higher brackets for married and head of household, but we’re talking about a non-empancipated minor here.

So after she is sold 40,773 and one third cups of lemonade, she finally has a federal tax liability! Seven cents! Alert the bankruptcy lawyers!

Let’s suppose she made $520,000 from her lemonade stand. At this point, even Kramer would have trouble imagining that it’s just one little girl at one stand. She would be busier than the Deadwood whore house on payday!

So she’s opened new stands and hired people to run them. On the other hand, she’s enjoying economies of scale, so it’s likely she still makes 30 cents on each lemonade sold. Even if the money is coming in without her lifting a finger for most of it.

There’s all kinds of legal and otherwise tax dodges available for someone who is hitting the current top bracket of $510,000, as she has, but let’s suppose she’s very grateful to President Trump for giving her this incredible opportunity, and wants to pay every dime that she’s liable for on paper. Her federal tax burden would be $159,544. To get to that point, she will have sold 1,700,000 cups of lemonade. An enterprise that vast would be fully automatic, and it’s probably been six months since she even touched a lemon. She has people to do that for her. My god how the money rolls in! All she has to do is phone her head accountant once a week. And she’s paying a federal income tax of about nine and a third cents per cup. Mind you, she’s very patriotic and doesn’t want to take further tax relief, even though her account is telling her she can cut her tax liability in half through legal means.

So when does this hypothetical 70 cents per cup of lemonade kick in?

Well, it never does. She can sell up to two and a third million cups of lemonade per year and federal tax is about 9-10%. But when she sells that 2,333,334th cup, watch out! That’s when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pounces! That’s when the dread 70% marginal rate kicks in. For each cup beyond that, she will owe 21 cents. Not 70 cents. 21.

Keep in mind she already pulled in ten million bucks and is working a half-hour a week on her business if she’s conscientious. She got college covered, paid her parents’ mortgage, and a couple of new cars, and she still has plenty left over to buy the local plush unicorn toy store franchise. She can afford to pay twenty one cents per cup of lemonade sold!

Most economists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan. It’s not as steep as the 70% top marginal rate under Reagan (which started in the $190,000 range) or the 93% under Eisenhower, a time of unparalleled growth in America. Paul Krugman thinks the top rate should be 80%, and some economists have gone further, suggesting a tax of 100% on annual income over $100,000,000.

So when some weird right wing fruitcake solemnly declares that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to turn America into Venezuela or Cuba, show them this, and ask them why they don’t mention other failed economic hellholes like Kansas or Wisconsin, which enjoy every low tax rates, even on lemonade.

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Opening Day – A Light at the End of a Cave

January 25th 2019

Just the other day, I wrote, “First, he [Mitch McConnell] may have decided he could keep 40 Republicans in line, effectively filibustering the bill. Given that would be the same forty Republicans who voted for that very same bill five weeks earlier, only to have Trump double-cross them, dumping them into a nightmare of rising public fury, it’s unlikely that even the goose stepping discipline for which the Senate GOP is renowned could keep them all in line…Second: McConnell finally convinced Trump that the wall was nothing but a loser from the GOP standpoint.”

Turns out in the end that it was something of a combination of the two. He had the two votes, and while they didn’t actually do anything, they sent a clear message: Republicans in the Senate were far more interested in a “clean” (no wall) continuing resolution to open the portions of government closed by the idiotic impasse than they were in securing funds for the wall, or whatever it is Trump is calling it this week.

After the votes, reports leaked of mounting Republican fury and desperation in the Senate, shared by McConnell himself, who snapped at one cohort, “Do you think I’m enjoying this?”

Still, the Senate, the Republican half especially, is something of a kabuki. An experienced Senate Majority Leader isn’t going to permit a vote which shows large cracks in his caucus unless he wants someone to know those cracks exist.

Even the Idiot Trump had to know that six Republican Senators voting for a clean CR meant they were never going to vote for the wall.

Another such vote might result in a 66-34 vote. There’s an element of kabuki in Senate votes, and while 66 Senators would have voted for the CR, the final vote needed to make the vote veto-proof, which almost certainly would have to be cast by a Republican, would be hard to get.

However, public rage was mounting by the day. Republicans, blindly in love with their delusion that voters want them to eliminate government so they can have all that common wealth all to themselves, were quickly realizing that the voters had a different opinion on the matter. And while most of the public blame was correctly aimed at Trump, the Republican Senate was seen, at best, as his lackeys, and at worst as his co-criminals.

I think Americans have finally lost patience with the GOP tactic to using extortions such as government shut downs to get things they want but which lack the political and public support. That’s my hope. Time will tell.

But for now, all the poor bastards who missed meals and saw their credit scores plummet because of der Trumpenfuhrer’s little games are going to get their back pay, and the even poorer bastards who did contract work for the government are still fucked. Lots of damage done, and for utterly insane reasons, but at least it stopped getting worse.

Another reason for the Trump Cave came from Robert Mueller III. He grabbed his scoop and a plastic bag and got Roger Stone last night. Stone, one of the sleaziest and most vicious political operatives in the country, is believed to have had a central role in the three way tryst between Trump, Wikileaks, and Russia. And probably a whole lot more.

Trump’s tweet reaction was…less than lucid. It read, “Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! NO COLLUSION! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers are treated better. Who alerted CNN to be there?” Sounds like a Speak N’ Spell with rabies, doesn’t it?

I’m sure the mental image the tweet created, of an American President, naked, smeared in his own feces, screaming and ineffectually urinating in the direction of the CNN building, is a bit less than reassuring. But have no fear: Ann Coulter stepped in to reassure him and calm him down.

She tweeted, “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”

That’s right: She kicked a recently-dead guy to take a shot at a volatile moron over losing a no-win situation that she helped precipitate in the first place. History will remember you kinda, Annie.

She went on to say, “Obviously the gov’t shutdown hasn’t gone far enough if the corrupt & incompetent FBI still has funds for a Keystone Cops stunt like the pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone….Sure feel safer today, with the feds taking Roger Stone off the streets. No need for a border wall now. Nothing to fear from MS-13.”

Gotta say, Annie, I feel a lot safer with Roger Stone in jail. Truth be told, I think the average MS-13 member has higher moral and ethical standards than Stone—or you, for that matter.

But the upshoot of the Mueller action this morning shows that for Trump, the walls are closing in like a Star Wars trash compactor. (Ann as Princess Leia: shudder!)

The continuing resolution is good through Feb 12th, whereupon we find out if the Republicans and Trump want to play some more of their extortion games, or if they finally realized that particular tactic has passed it sell-by date, and the public is well and truly fed up with it.

Meanwhile, Trump will be able to give his SOTU speech, if perhaps a week or two late. I hope the Democrats don’t waste any time being polite to him. He does not deserve respect, or even polite courtesy.

Boo the lies, people! If they can do it in Parliament, they can do it here!

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Shut down – Shut up, Donald—Grown ups are talking

January 22nd 2019

News broke tonight that the Senate is going to take up two bills Thursday regarding the government shutdown.

The first is Trump’s compromise: he gets $5.7 billion in return for extending a grace period for the Dreamers. Like all things Trump, it’s utter bullshit: three courts have already ruled that Trump is legally obliged to continue the DACA program, and just yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that they weren’t going to interfere with the lower court decisions. So Trump is offering something he has to do anyway.

Even worse, the “compromise” essentially eliminates America from honoring its treaty obligations to refugees and asylum seekers. Nobody expects honesty from this administration, but this is particularly egregious, even for them. The “compromise” shows the duplicity and moral bankruptcy of Trump, nothing more.

The second bill, introduced by Schumer, is more promising. It simply finances the portions of government that have been closed through February 8th, and promises open debate on the wall. It’s interesting that McConnell, who had been rejecting consideration of any bill that didn’t include financing for the wall, allowed this one to reach the Senate floor.

Yes, the shutdown is extremely unpopular, and McConnell is seen as first in line behind Trump as being responsible for it. He’s probably realized that the party that caves on this is finished, but Republicans and Trump will remain widely hated no matter what happens. In normal circumstances, a Majority Leader in this position would look frantically for a bill that could resolve the issue while giving him a figleaf. This bill meets that criterium. If it passes, he can claim they haven’t finished the battle for the wall, but merely deferred it for a few weeks. He may even be delusional enough to hope that when the next continuing resolution comes along and Trump digs his bone spurs in, any subsequent closures would be blamed on the Democrats.

But these aren’t normal times. With the party leader in the Oval Office an unstable sociopath, McConnell knows that if it somehow, some way saves his ass from the scandals threatening to tear him apart, Trump will be perfectly happy to sacrifice not only the country, but his own party. There’s precious little evidence that McConnell cares much about his country, but his party? His wonderful, precious party? Nay! Dishonor before Death! The Party must live!

So, there’s three courses of thought he might have followed before deciding to let Schumer’s bill to the floor.

First, he may have decided he could keep 40 Republicans in line, effectively filibustering the bill. Given that would be the same forty Republicans who voted for that very same bill five weeks earlier, only to have Trump double-cross them, dumping them into a nightmare of rising public fury, it’s unlikely that even the goose stepping discipline for which the Senate GOP is renowned could keep them all in line. They have absolutely nothing to gain from continuing the shutdown, and a lot to lose. And most of them don’t even want the fucking wall in the first place.

Second: McConnell finally convinced Trump that the wall was nothing but a loser from the GOP standpoint. Two Republicans in Congress have already announced they won’t be running in 2020, one of them is quitting immediately. While that one probably has a major scandal about to break, there’s little doubt that Republicans are looking at the shifting landscape and realizing that if they didn’t do something now, they would be extinct by 2021. McConnell, a political animal, knows this, and perhaps he’s gotten Trump to agree to fight the wall battle another day. After all, Trump managed to go two years without the wall; he can go a little bit longer.

That’s actually the most likely of the three scenarios, and Mitch, if he has any actual religion, must be on his knees right now praying that the crazy fuck in the White House doesn’t cross him up again.

The third scenario is that he has decided to tell Trump to go fuck himself. That’s the bloodiest of the scenarios. In this one, Schumer’s bill passes in the Senate, but not by 66 votes. Trump vetoes it.

Public outrage swells. The national mood shifts from outraged to flat-out dangerous.

House Minority Leader McCarthy and McConnell take the unusual step of permitting the bill to come up again, and release their membership from party discipline on the vote. The bill passes both houses with veto-proof majorities, a massive humiliation of Trump and one that immediately brings down the temperature of the public, giving the Republicans faint hope for the future.

Between Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee (which, unlike the previous House Intelligence Committee, has been reasonably honest and non-partisan in its investigations into Trump) and various committees in the new, Democratically-controlled House, various houses of generally quite large sizes are going to begin landing on Trump. His own lawyer, Rudy the Risible, has blabbed enough to put Trump’s ass in jail. Just imagine what the people who aren’t on his side are going to come up with.

McConnell is probably betting that he can defuse this and it won’t matter how much is pisses off Trump, because Trump is going to be up to his ass in alligators in another week or so (Trump hired THIRTY-FIVE lawyers two weeks ago to start preparing his defense).

Both votes are scheduled for Thursday. Stay tuned.

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Down 0-63 After One Quarter – For Trump, only losing six yards on a play is doing good.

January 20th, 2019

Back in 1916, there was a football game between a powerhouse team coached by John Heisman, and a college that had actually already disbanded its football program, but was contractually obliged to play this particular game. So, lacking an actual team, they sent a pack of frat boys, lambs to the slaughter.

There wasn’t much doubt about who would win: it was the score that made history. Cumberland 0, Georgia Tech 222. It was the most lopsided game in history, and observers suspected Tech wanted revenge for a 22-0 baseball drubbing by Cumberland earlier that year. Tech took a 63-0 lead in the first quarter, and built on it for a 126-0 lead at the half. Heisman solemnly warned his squad during the break to be wary of a possible comeback, but the fact was Cumberland was deader than Queen Victoria. Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, noted that Cumberland’s moment of glory came in the second half, when they had a running play in which they only lost six yards.

The stats were cringeworthy: Tech outran Cumberland by a net 564 yards, capitalizing on 15 turnovers. Oddly enough, Cumberland had the better passing game. They went 2-18 for 14 yards, while Tech never even attempted one pass. The score actually fails to show just how lopsided the game was.

So why am I talking about a football game from over a century ago? I mean, I’m not even a football fan!

Well, I was watching Pelosi and Trump this week, and that ancient rogering came to mind.

Trump has been reeling from one self-inflicted catastrophe to the next, and on his best days, he only suffers an embarrassment, and every so often, he has a great day that is merely disappointing.

I watched the televised meeting between Trump and Pence (who knew what as coming and simply went tharn) and Pelosi and Schumer, and my first thought was “It’s Boris and Natasha versus Moose and Squirrel.” Those Russian agents never had a chance.

When Trump crowed that “I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck.” I knew he had lost this one, no matter what he did.

At the time, I figured he would back down. His silly burst of braggadocio had seemingly ensured that he couldn’t shut the government down and evade blame for it.

But I actually underestimated Trump’s craven and easily-manipulated personality. He managed to publicly fold in the face of disapproval from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. A fringe pair. A has-been and a sociopath. Even most Republicans dismiss them as a pair of dips. Outside of the GOP—which is to say among the other 72% of Americans—they are regarded as two of the more loathsome examples of what crawls around under damp American rocks.

Depending on the approval of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to stiffen public support is a bit like plotting to win the Indy 500 by entering a Yugo. Or getting a pickup squad of 19 guys—three of whom subsequently get lost en route to the game—to play Georgia Tech.

Pelosi must have looked at the political dynamics at play and resolved to not show the pity Trump seemed to demand, since Trump would never show her any pity. Pelosi, after all, is human.

On the other hand, Trump was hurting a lot of people and actually endangering the country in order to suck up to a pair of fringe loons who represent the worst America has to offer. Knowing that probably helped Pelosi to decide that she really didn’t have to play nice with the vicious fool in the Oval Office.

Everyone knows about the subsequent interplay: Pelosi told Donald he wasn’t going to give the State of the Union in front of a Joint Session of Congress until he reopened the government, citing security concerns. I’ll bet any amount of money Trump immediately turned to Miller and screeched, “She can’t DO that! Can she?” No constitutional scholar, he. She can. She did.

Trump responded by canceling her planned trip to NATO allies and Afghanistan via military plane, citing security concerns. It was a pretty feeble riposte, petty tit-for-tat, but it might have actually held water had Melania used a military plane to travel—alone—to Mir-a-Lago that afternoon. OK, granted, Trump probably wouldn’t care much if she died in a plane crash. But then two days later, he exposed and scuppered plans by Pelosi to go ahead with her planned trip via private plane.

Then he announced a big, important announcement for noon yesterday. Now, Trump has taken us all to that particular rodeo many times before, to the point where when he gave a “big announcement” a few weeks ago, the Chuck-and-Nancy rebuttal actually got higher ratings. I wasn’t going to bother watching, simply because the Trump sideshow has gotten so tiresome.

Pelosi felt the same way, I guess. She rejected his offer before he even made it. Oddly enough, I didn’t hear any Republicans accusing her of jumping the gun.

Trump did offer to provide a temporary respite to Dreamers—there’s already court orders telling him he must do so by law—and that was it. The offer didn’t fool any sane Americans, and pissed off the haters on the fascist/Nazi right. So aside from getting a very public slap-down, all he did was harden resolve against him, while chipping away at his loathsome base.

Now there’s open talk among Democrats of impeachment, and outside Washington, talk of a national general strike.

Last night I mentioned on one blog that once Nancy Pelosi gets her fur up, she can be quite formidable.

The same, of course, could be said of the American people.

Donald came into this quarter trailing 63-0. Things don’t look to improve. It’s unlikely that even Heisman is going to be warning anyone of a Trump comeback on this one.

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Barr None – He hit all the right notes, but…

January 15th, 2019

I watched the William Barr hearing this morning, and came away with mixed feelings. He hit all the right notes, vowing not to interfere with the Mueller investigation (but not swearing to recuse himself) and agreeing that the investigation was valid and important and needed to continue.

He agreed that a primary role of the DoJ was to prevent foreign interference in US elections, but undercut it by saying that Russia “appeared to interfere” in the 2016 election. That’s a bit like saying Boston appeared to have won the 2018 World Series. The equivocation is pointless, and leaves one with the unsettling feeling that Barr doesn’t really understand the nature of the investigations against Trump. At best, that’s what he doesn’t understand.

He also had a weird equivocation about the Emoluments Clause, appearing uncertain as to whether it could pertain to Trump. It reads, “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” An emolument is “profit, salary, or fees from office or employment; compensation for services: Tips are an emolument in addition to wages.” OK, Trump is holding an office of trust, and is getting gifts and kickbacks from a variety of foreign states. Seems pretty straightforward. And it would be insane to pretend that presidents are above the law on conflicts of interest, bribery, self-dealing or misuse of office for profit. All of which Trump is demonstrably guilty of.

The Founders wanted a chief administrator, not a Divine Right King.

That a former Attorney General and lifelong Constitutional lawyer would profess uncertainty about this is troubling. At best, it’s disingenuous.

Barr also equivocated on whether he would allow Mueller to indict Trump. This, too, is troubling, since on a previous occasion he interfered with an investigation that would quite possibly have led to indictments of then-President George Bush and former President Ronald Reagan. As reported here:

“Mr. Mueller indicated to Mr. Rivera and to me as well that they would prefer that our indictment — that we work aggressively on it as much as possible… I received a phone call a little bit before noon on August 22 from Denis Saylor who indicated to me that I was directed not to return the BCCI indictment. And I asked who was directing me not to return it, and he said Attorney General William Barr…” (US Atty Lehtinen)

“As Robert Mueller III, the Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department now in charge of the BCCI investigation, testified in October, 1991: BCCI was not an ordinary bank. It was set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs are extraordinarily complex. Its offers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection” (“The BCCI Affair A Report to the Committee on Foreign RelationsUnited States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank BrownDecember 1992“) https://archive.org/stream/TheBCCIAffair/The-BCCI-Affair_djvu.txt

It’s important to remember that in 1991-2, Barr was a very partisan lawyer, one who helped Bush write a series of last-minute pardons that effectively destroyed the Iran-Contra investigation, something that threatened to throw some 80 members of the Reagan and Bush administrations, including Reagan himself, in jail.

And now he is in a position to potentially short-circuit Mueller again. Yes, this is cause for concern.

It didn’t help that he was mouthing administration talking points on the wall, immigration in general, and indicated a willingness to make marijuana illegal again.

Well, it’s not like Trump was going to appoint a liberal. It couldn’t have been easy, searching someone who combined plausible credentials with the type of selective moral, ethical and legal blindness needed to serve under Trump.

It may be that it doesn’t matter. Mueller is close to end game, and in any event, even if Barr decided to be a Bork and fire or impair Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee could simply subpoena Mueller’s records and go from there.

It’s possible I’m being unfair. Yes, Barr was a partisan ratbag in 1992 and contributed to the vast amount of damage the corrupt Reagan and Bush regimes did to the country by making their criminals exempt from the law.

But that was 26 years ago. People change, mature, develop some ethics. Sometimes. Perhaps Barr did, and perhaps he was sincere, if overly lawyerly in today’s testimony. Perhaps the equivocations were those of a man used to dotting eyes and crossing tees.

Perhaps. But Barr needs to know this going in: This isn’t the America of 1992. If he, and the GOP, try to evade justice and put themselves outside of legal reach though obstruction and misuse of the pardon, they won’t walk away. America will come after them.

They aren’t free to spit on the country the way they did in 1992. It’s a different world, and people have learned about the nihilism of the far right.

If Barr lied, he will end up in jail.

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Coda – The end is near

January 14th, 2019

We’re at the point now where there can be no reasonable doubt that Trump’s involvement with the Russians went far beyond normal business contacts, or that he improperly maintained such connections after announcing he was going to run for office, or that he used those contacts to influence the election in his favor.

Now the evidence is mounting that he has been, at the very least, compromised by the Russians, and at the very worst, is an agent for the Russians. The FBI apparently has been investigating him as a possible Russian agent—yes, the President of the United States—since three days after he fired FBI Director James Comey.

That isn’t just opinion: his own words, beginning with his famous, “Russia, if you are listening…” campaign speech, indict him.

It’s becoming evident that his crimes went beyond enlisting the aid of a adversarial foreign power in order to win the election. Since becoming president, he has had at least five secret meeting with Putin, destroying all records of the meeting and forbidding the translator—the only American witness—from discussing what transpired during those meetings. Further, he is known to have transmitted classified material to Putin directly, in one instance doing so in front of cameras, apparently unaware that he was committing a felony.

By the standard usage of the term, he is a traitor, and needs to be immediately removed from office and put on trial. So why hasn’t he?

In a word, Republicans.

They are just now beginning to crumble under the public outrage generated by Trump’s disastrous move to shut down the government over his vanity wall, but in reality if they were loyal Americans with any courage and ethics, they would have impeached him a year ago. Instead, they had a commission, headed by the contemptible Devin Nunes, to actively cover up his crimes. Nunes should be in jail for obstruction of justice. That he took the extreme measures he did to try and protect Trump makes it manifestly clear he did not believe he was protecting an innocent man.

A large number of prominent federal-level Republicans stand to be implicated—and destroyed—by the emerging evidence that they sold their country out to Putin in an effort to cling to power. Pence will go down. And many others.

Mitch McConnell, it turns out, got nearly $3.5 million in dark money from a pro-Putin Ukrainian named Len Blavatnik. This was in additions to the $7.3 million he got in open donations from the Russians through PACs. Interesting fact: McConnell wasn’t even running for office in 2016. Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and Marco Rubio also received smaller amounts of money from Bavatnik. It does explain the servile, toadying behavior of Cruz, Graham and Rubio, doesn’t it?

The NRA laundered nearly $35 million through to the Trump campaign from a Russian group calling itself “Right to Bear Arms.” You have to be a particular kind of stupid to believe that Putin supports or even allows groups that advocated unlimited gun ownership in Russia. The NRA, in turn, gives Republicans marching orders, among which out be to protect the Russian asset, Donald Trump.

Not all elected Republicans are traitors or subversives, of course. Some close their eyes to Trump’s blatantly compromised position and hope he can somehow survive all this and lead the Republicans to permanent white male power in America.

So you have dim bulbs/patsies such as Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, to claims the Steele dossier was commissioned by Democrats to smear Trump. The problem is it wasn’t: New York hedge fund billionaire and Never-Trumper Paul Singer commissioned Steele on behalf of Ted Cruz, and sold it to the Democrats when the Washington Free Beacon, a right wing outfit acting as go-between, pulled out. Johnson’s main defense will be that he really is that stupid.

Vilifying your own intelligence agencies is never a good idea, and even Trump has to sense that denigrating the agencies and smearing and destroying the careers of senior members might not result in kid-gloves treatment, but Republicans are obediently herding behind the lunatic “deep state” conspiracy theory in which only by destroying Trump can the corrupt elites keep control.

No, kiddies, destroying Trump would mean there is just one less corrupt elite.

Republicans are hoping their base is ignorant and stupid enough to keep their purblind support going. There’s evidence that support is cracking, between the unpopularity of the shutdown, and the growing mountain of evidence of “the Russian thing.” Sorry, Ted Cruz, but people outside the beltway do care about collusion. By the way, buy a weedeater. You look like you rimmed a silverback gorilla.

It’s been pointed out that if partisan ratfucker Bob Barr (who helped engineer the midnight pardons of most of the Iran/Contra felons) becomes AG, he’ll fire Mueller. Appointing Barr at this point would nearly be a criminal act in and of itself. You see, all the House Intelligence Committee has to do is subpoena Mueller and all his works, and it all comes out anyway.

There are reports that the Committee already has a lot of damning evidence, suppressed by Nunes but now in the hands of people who aren’t in the pay of Putin and are still loyal to America. A lot of Republicans need to be in prison for a long, long time.

Supporters need to examine their own common sense, loyalties and values. They’ve betrayed themselves at the least, and the rest of us at the most. Adam-Troy Castro wrote a brilliant piece condemning them, available at.

It’s very nearly over. Stay tuned.