Poison Tag

We are watching a game of "poison tag" being played out in Washington.

Poison tag being a game we played as kids. One kid is poison, and if he tags you you are poison too, or you are poisoned, depending on how it's being played. Shrieks and running around are involved. In the DC game of poison tag the game begins when the Republican Party declares someone is poison and everyone runs from them. Anyone who touches this person or is touched is out of the game. The Republicans have declared Christopher Steele poison. Why? First, it isn't a game. It's very serious national security business and Steele is one of America's most reliable friends. Why make Steele a pariah for everyone to shun?

Steele ran the Russia desk for MI6, the intel agency of our closest ally. A serious professional who did serious work for many years keeping the free western democracies like Britain and the U.S. and our NATO allies free of interference from the Russian spies we all grew up fearing because of James Bond novels. Russia is no longer communist but it is now ruled by a former KGB boss, Vladimir Putin. Steele has a well-earned dislike of Putin having seen what he does. Example: since the Russian involvement in hacking our election became known several witnesses to it, western sources of information and Putin critics, have wound up suddenly violently dead. One of them was poisoned twice––not a game––and survived to talk about it.

The reason Steele is being maligned and shunned by half of Washington is simple. He saw an alarming pattern of contacts and business dealings and involvements, some of them possibly very compromising, between the Republican candidate for president of the United States and the Russian government and its spy agencies and President Putin's closest allies, the oligarchs. He did what any friend would do: he told the FBI about this. He did so knowing it would not be a good thing for America to have a president who was on the hook to the Russians. Steele discovered this in 2016, and the more he looked the more he discovered, and the more worrying it was. Why was he looking? He was hired by a research firm, FusionGPS, a respected firm founded and led by former Wall Street Journal investigative journalists.

Full disclosure: the Wall Street Journal is a very right wing newspaper, but it has a highly respected newsroom. Did this make observers concerned that FusionGPS might have a right wing bias? Apparently Fusion was hired by Republicans during the Republican primary to find out more about Donald Trump. Republicans were worried about Trump. Let's face it, he is a dodgy character, with longtime mob ties, multiple bankruptcies, suspicious sources of financing, a long history of sexual misbehavior, etc. Who wouldn't be concerned. Republicans were concerned, but as soon as Trump won the nomination they dropped their research and let FusionGPS go.

FusionGPS was subsequently hired by the Democrats who were running against this dodgy character named Trump. It was at this point that the Fusion research team realized they needed fuller information about Trump's Russian connections, and who better to hire than a former MI6 Russia desk chief named Christopher Steele. Steele had gone into private business after he was thrown out of Russia by Putin for treading on Putin's toes. Spy career over. At least Putin didn't assassinate him the way he does others who tread on his toes.

Why is Steele "poison" today? Don't we like James Bond? In the Bond movies there are lots of characters who are operating illegally or dangerously in the Russian orbit. America doesn't usually run one of them for president. In fact that would make a great Bond novel. (I would cast Christopher Walken in the movie.) Why is James Bond now the bad guy? Why is this Bond villain being run by the Kremlin the hero?

This is a bizarre game of poison we're playing. What is right is wrong. What is legal is illegal. What is patriotic is treason and what used to be treason is now the urgent instruction coming from the party. In this case it's the Republican Party, the least likely group to be suspected of favoring the Russians in a war with the FBI.

Everything is upside down.

A trusted former counterespionage official from Britain calls American law enforcement and reports a possible crime in progress. Because he is a professional in these matters it's more than a possible crime, it's likely, and he is deeply concerned. He shares information with the FBI. He shares all he knows, suspicions that have been confirmed and those bits that are just raw intel. He does not edit out the worrisome salacious bits because the Russians have a long history of using honey traps to lure Americans into compromising situations for blackmail purposes. The FBI listens. They listen with greater interest because Steele's "dossier" overlaps with much of what the FBI has learned in its own investigations. The FBI began investigating on their own, having heard from their Australian counterparts that a member of the Trump campaign was boasting about having important and useful connections with the Russian government.

This kind of broadly corroborated information is not the sort of thing a counterintelligence agency discards out of prudery. They don't stop following the trail because it gets embarrassingly close to a major party presidential candidate, but that is what the Republicans are saying they ought to have done. Apparently, by Republican standards, NO information that shows a Republican presidential candidate––god forbid a Republican president––has become a puppet of the Russians should EVER be believed or disseminated.

Such information should be disbelieved at once! Anyone who discovers such a crime in progress must be shunned and discredited at all costs! Even if the person with this urgent information about a crime in progress is a career professional in counterintelligence from our oldest ally, Great Britain, he must be shut out! He is poison! Don't listen to him!

The Republicans are saying that the reliable friend who is reporting this ongoing crime against America is himself the criminal. This is the game of "poison" the Republicans are playing.

Republicans are upending various kinds of illogic to peddle this poison. They are not saying that a Democrat phoned in the crime report, they say a professional investigator of good standing hired by a company that was paid by a Democrat phoned in the crime report. If being hired by a company hired by Republicans but now paid by a Democrat discredits you, we have a problem. It discredits an awful lot of people. It means more than half of all Americans cannot expect to be believed when they call law enforcement, either because they are Democrats or because they know someone who is. And if they have their neighbor phone the FBI for them the FBI will be expected to hang up––because if the FBI believes the crime report or seeks to verify it they will be complicit in a crime, so the Republican argument goes.

The FBI believed Steele (Republicans hadn't called him poison yet) because his information corroborated much of their own information discovered in an investigation begun independently. But the Republicans are saying that the FBI's investigation is fatally biased and all its warrants are fatally biased because the FBI answered the phone when Steele phoned in the warning that Russians were involved in multiple ways with the Republican presidential candidate. The warrants the FBI obtained required something called "probable cause", but the Republicans are discrediting those warrants because they say "probable cause" means the FBI was biased against Donald Trump. Finding credible evidence of wrongdoing, the Republicans say, creates a fatal bias in the investigating agency. Oddly this is not something Republicans charge when Arizona sheriffs count the brownness of a suspect's skin as probable cause.

What this all means is this: if you want to commit a crime and avoid investigation and prosecution the safest thing to do is be a Republican candidate for president or a member of his campaign, because these things make you immune to all suspicion and invalidates any investigation that might be opened or may have already been ongoing into your dodgy business practices that look like money laundering or fraud or conspiracy, especially your pattern of conspiring with Russian spies. Probable cause to seek evidence of crime means you are too biased to investigate. Only law officers who swear everlasting fealty and loyalty to the Leader are to be trusted. Everybody else must be fired.

James Bond supposedly had a license to kill. Not really true but it made a good story. He did have a license to investigate Russians, though, and he knew how to do this. But Bond's license to investigate Russian conspiracies is hereby suspended because he had the gall to investigate a Republican. Mr. Bond is persona non grata. Poison. Nobody should talk to him or listen to him or believe what he says. If you do nobody will believe you either. The crimes Bond is reporting are not crimes at all. Mr. Bond is a criminal. The Russians do issue licenses to kill and without any friends in America Bond, I mean Steele, had better not come here anymore because the president who used to be very "mobbed up" is now very "Russianed up" and you never know when they might arrange for someone to fall out of a high window or meet with an accident on the sidewalk. All of this sounds like something dreamed up by Ian Fleming (too bizarre for John LeCarré) but it's now true. Because false is now true.

Good is now evil. Bad is good. Criminal is legal and the crime-fighters are now the criminals. Treason is now patriotism and what used to be patriotism is now treason. Republicans sleep with Russians and this is a good thing. If you oppose the surrender of American sovereignty to the man in Moscow you are unAmerican, because that is what Trump has done and what Trump does is now the rule. It doesn't even matter if Russian prostitutes were filmed doing strange things with Mr. Trump in Moscow because the American Evangelicals, our highest authorities on superChristianity, have given President* Trump a license to do strange things with prostitutes or wives of his friends or complete strangers exactly as he sees fit. God help us all.

Republicans Are Learning To Enjoy The Taste Of Fascism

While the vandals holds the White House they also hold the Congress and the Judiciary as hostages. We can change the Congress. The courts are more permanent.

The New Yorker reports on Trump's plan to nail his regime into place via lifetime court appointments.

In Newsweek, Robert Reich describes how Trump's regime is using strategies used against organized crime to shut down the free speech of his opponents.

In the Guardian we learn that Session's DOJ is using video produced by the bogus propaganda outfit Project Veritas as evidence against people who protested at Trump's inauguration.

Recognizing the ironies won't save us. Irony is passive. We need outrage.

Think Trump is too outrageous for most people’s taste? He may win out by becoming ever more outrageous, the way Roy Moore has done, the way many outrageous autocrats have done down through history, by outrunning norms, by harnessing the anger of a minority to cow everybody else. By turning “He won’t do that” into “He did that."

At this point the Republicans in Congress seem uncomfortable with him but they are enabling him. A year ago when he boasted about sexual assault they abandoned him then quickly crawled back to him, a process they have repeated several times since as he has said and done increasingly outrageous, hateful, and insane things.

The Republicans are creeping toward fascism. They are saying they dislike it but are obviously trying very hard to get used to the taste. Soon they will ask for seconds. Then they will put it on the menu. Then it will be the only menu item. Then the menu will be made compulsory.

By refusing to seat judges appointed by an elected president for two years they violated norms. By seating and supporting this president (who the evidence increasingly indicates gained office with the help of a foreign enemy, who boasts about sexual assault, who lies daily, who hurls insults at our foreign allies and flatters foreign enemies, whose businesses have apparently engaged in massive money laundering for decades, who obsesses over conspiracy theories any ten year-old would know are bogus, who is loudly racist, who admires Nazis and Klansmen and foreign dictators, who appears to be losing his mind) the Republican Party is engaged in a bizarre ritual. They say they abhor the behaviors of this president then they solidly support and defend him.

As if they have discovered a gang rape in progress––for the past year they have said they are not in favor of what is going on and plan to halt it… just as soon as they have had their turn…

Gift Ideas for Republicans in Congress

Early in the year a game designer who worried about the fascist tendencies of President* Trump sent his new game about the rise of Hitler to all the members of the US Senate.

Reported in AdWeek

I suspect it had more of an effect on Democrats. Republicans may not love Trump but they think they can work with him, can get what they want through him…. that, by helping him, he will help them. Like business leaders said about Hitler “He’s a man we can do business with."

This is disturbingly reminiscent of the complacency shown by German liberals and non-fascist conservatives in the 1930s. Of course after Hitler got these enablers to pass the Enabling Act of 1933 a lot of them wound up in concentration camps. The Nazi juggernaut had begun.

Should we be sending games to members of Congress?

Or should we send books? Will they play the games or read the books?

Gift Idea #1: HITLERLAND

Gift idea #2: HITLER––THIRTY DAYS TO POWER

Gift Idea #3: HITLER'S SECRET PARTNERS

Gift idea #4: WHO FINANCED HITLER?

Or is Godwin’s Law so fixed in people’s minds that they think Nazi comparisons are verboten. In fact Godwin himself has said the comparisons are indeed valid.

From the Independent

From Esquire

Trump is Hitlerian and growing moreso. His followers are fascists and bigots, there’s no mincing words about that. This is not a time to be polite about it. We are re-entering the 1930s.

Since Christmas is coming, maybe it would be persuasive to send a book this year. Send a book about the unlikely and avoidable rise of Hitler to our Republican friends who seem blind to history.

It is a teachable moment among liberals and Democrats too. In 1933, it wasn’t only right wingers who helped Hitler gain power, it was also Goldilocks liberals and leftists who demanded purity and perfection and refused to compromise with each other and refused to work together––who wound up promoting the monster on the other side. They wound up in concentration camps, many of them dead.

Maybe we should be sending hundreds of cautionary books to our political leaders this holiday season. It can happen here. (It almost happened here in 1933 too. See below.)

Another book that describes a crucial year in this country is Lawrence O’Donnell’s new book “Playing With Fire” which describes how liberals and Democrats failed to coalesce around their candidate and let Nixon win. In the Trump comparison game I think Trump is much closer to Hitler than he is to Nixon, but he does have Nixonian impulses. What kept Nixon from being worse was the strength of our traditions and institutions that stood up to him in both parties. Those political traditions and safeguards are absent on the Republican side today. The GOP is very Weimarian in that respect. Very much like the conservatives who thought they could manage the tyrant until he took full control of them.

To get a glimpse of Trump’s fascist tendencies look at his embrace of tyrants around the world. Duterte, the brutal murderer/dictator in the Philippines. Erdogan, the autocrat who has snuffed out liberalism in Turkey (who Trump’s national security advisor worked for during and after the election.) The various right wing monsters vying for power in democracies from Ukraine to France and the UK and elsewhere. The new Saudi dictator who spent the weekend jailing his cousins and uncles. And Putin, who murders his opponents in Russia and abroad, who corrupts and directs the political process here, who seems to have appointed several members of Trump’s cabinet.

Our only counterweight against fascism is a Congress that’s now dominated by Republicans who seem increasingly fascist. Maybe there are still some Republicans who can be saved… Send a book.

Fascism almost triumphed here once before, in 1933-34. Reported in this BBC radio documentary

Sinclair Lewis wrote a book about what almost happened here. He titled it “It Can’t Happen Here.” He demonstrated that it could and it might.

Philip Roth wrote a more modern and accessible novel on the same basic idea, called “The Plot Against America.” It was about a very real movement led by a Minnesotan named Charles Lindbergh, wrapped around the idea they called “America First.” Sound familiar?

If you prefer movie versions, the best American movie about the rise of Hitler is on TCM this week, on Wednesday evening, November 8th. THE MORTAL STORM stars James Stewart and shows what fascism does to liberal societies.

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.

Republicans Again Targeting The Poor And The Sick On Healthcare Access

Lawrence O’Donnell played the Kimmel monologue a bit early last night so prime time audiences could hear Kimmel tell how Cassidy (of Graham-Cassidy) "lied right to my face.” Kimmel then urges everyone to phone Republicans in the Senate to tell them how evil this bill is.

202 224 3121

Again, the swing Republicans on this issue are Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona, and Susan Collins of Maine. Try to explain to them why this bill is so hard on the most vulnerable Americans, and why it is so damned unfair and cruel. Because they have a hard time comprehending it.

Earlier, Cassidy went on Kimmel’s show and smiled and promised his Obamacare repeal would not target the poor and the sick. It does target the poor and the sick. It cuts funding for the poor and the sick more aggressively than the previous Republican bills did.

Republican Senator Cassidy quickly responded to Kimmel's charges by saying Kimmel "just doesn't understand..." Saying his plan does indeed cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Reported in The Hill newspaper

Sure it does––but it allows insurers to jack their premiums sky high to punish them for being sick. What a cynical liar. Just as all Americans have the right to live in million dollar homes all Americans do have the right to buy decent health insurance––but they can’t afford it. Obamacare forced health insurers to stop offering junk coverage and also forced them to stop penalizing the people with preexisting conditions. The Republicans keep trying to push the poor back onto junk coverage that doesn’t really cover anything serious, and their plans keep punishing the sick for being sick.

The Republicans are rich. The Republicans represent the rich. The Republicans, like all members of Congress, have paid guaranteed Cadillac healthcare coverage for life and don’t give a damn about anyone else because they don’t comprehend what everyone else faces.

Here is President Trump’s healthcare advisor’s reasoning on the issue (via John Harwood): Trump adviser Moore on unfairness of the healthy subsidizing the sick: “People want insurance for their own families, not other peoples’ "

Which misses the entire point of health insurance, that the many who are healthy help support the few who are sick or in fear of their life. The Republican excuse is similar to their refusal to vote for hurricane relief because their districts weren't hit by the hurricane. (Until they were hit and then they demanded it.) The whole reason for covering everyone is the cost advantage of economies of scale.

It’s the familiar Republican refrain “I got mine. Fuck you.” Which they usually phrase more delicately.

So we need to flood the Senate with phone calls again: 202 224 3121

Because as long as they control the Congress they will keep trying to screw the poor and the sick.

It seems more likely the Republicans will kill our much improved healthcare system this time because they are being bribed/blackmailed by the giant money teats, the Koch Brothers, who have threatened to withhold cash from Republican candidates in 2018 unless they deliver on healthcare (removing millions from it) and tax “reform” (tax cuts for billionaires).

Koch blackmail on healthcare vote reported in The Guardian

Here is a discussion with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut earlier on Ari Melber's program

The Republicans are also attacking access to healthcare in another way, by drastically defunding the assistance poor Americans need to afford it: Analysis of how the GOP Reinsurance Plan would end up screwing the poor and the sick, from the StarTribune

Need more evidence that there’s something sinister about the Republicans’ healthcare strategy? News that a Russian oligarch (read mobster and Putin ally) is working with Washington insiders to invest millions of rubles in American healthcare.

Russian mob money targeting American healthcare reported by Bloomberg

Why? Because Republican healthcare is what’s known as a Killer Business Model.

The Republicans want to re-weaponize our healthcare system against us for profit.

The Three Card Monte of Republican Tax "Reform"

Republican tax reform [sic] always means tax cuts, first of all.

Tax cuts means tax cuts for the rich, not for working people or the middle class, at least not significantly, and certainly not guaranteed.

So the Republicans negotiate a "Tax Reform" bill with Democrats, who demand that it contain some benefits for working people and the middle class, things that will help restore the economic balance, fixing the imbalances caused by the top-favoring of 35 years of Republican tax and labor policies.

After the bill is passed, if it is passed, there are mechanisms in the bill, put there by “strict budget disciplinarians” to claw back any benefits that are judged "unaffordable." (Insincere Sad Face)

These middle class benefits in the tax reform [sic] bill will be judged unaffordable when, quelle surprise, it turns out tax cuts do not actually result in revenue increases. So obligations to working people are always unaffordable and promises made to working people are always contingent and easily backed out of. Benefits to rich people are always sacred and guaranteed. This became true in the years since 1980 when Reaganomics became an American religion, a fake promise.

This fake promising is similar to the way back-end participation works in Hollywood: you are promised profit participation on the profits of a blockbuster film but these profits are carefully wiped out by the payouts distributed to the producers further up the food chain, after which there is seldom any left. (Insincere Sad Face)

It is also similar to the way Donald Trump’s many many independent contractors were left unpaid by Trump Inc. “Sorry. None left. Sue me.” (Trump doesn't pretend to be sad he can't pay, he just smiles.)

When this kind of scheme enables the Republicans in government to screw the working people and pay off the rich it has twin benefits (for Republicans): it makes the rich clientele very happy and likelier to share their booty in the form of campaign donations and lucrative jobs on retirement, while making working people hate government, which is the second most important objective of the Republicans, who hate government.

There is the phrase Republicans once used to demonize Democratic tax policy: the Two Santa Clauses. The Democratic Santa offers government help to the less fortunate. The Republican Santa offers tax cuts to the more fortunate, but also to the middle classes who feel the tax burden and buy the idea that lower taxes raise dividends.

But the Republicans have turned this on its head. They do deliver like Santa to the rich, but they also benefit by turning the Democratic Santa into a Democratic villain who demands taxes, who gouges the middle classes via taxes, and whose payout to the middle class and working people is unaffordable because the Republicans have already paid it out to their clients. And the Republicans make damn sure the taxes on Democrats rise every year as the taxes on Republicans go down, or at on least rich Republicans. When Republicans see their taxes go up they ALWAYS blame Democrats.

So the benefits of tax cuts and easy evasions and wonderful tax subsidies to the rich are ironclad and eternal whether the federal budget is fully funded or short of cash. Cuts are sacred and guaranteed.

Meanwhile the benefits to the people who work for a living are contingent upon how well the budgets balance out, similar to the way Trump screws his contractors and film companies screw the less preferred classes of producers and profit participants. The phrase “Sorry, but we can’t afford it” is often used. And the middle class being screwed understands the phrase. It's too familiar. It's a part of the game.

The rich are entitled to their tax free ride because their entitlement is figured out first. Once they’ve eaten their fill the leftovers are counted out for the less rich and there is seldom enough left to fulfill those obligations.

Again. Rich entitlements are sacred and guaranteed. Payouts always begin at the top.

Working class entitlements are contingent and often reneged on. The way Trump screws the people he hires. The way the rich have screwed working people for centuries.

Promise and fail to deliver. This is done in a planned and deliberate way.

This ritual doesn’t stain the rich who ate all the working class entitlements (who demanded to eat those entitlements, who demonized those entitlements in careful ways over recent decades) it stains the government, helping to teach generations of working people that government is not to be trusted., that government is a thief, that government is the enemy.

After all, it was the government who stepped in and began passing laws to hoist the workers out of permanent poverty. That is how the rich learned to hate government: because it was a better Santa Claus than the rich employers were who tossed out niggling scraps at Christmastime but screwed the poor the rest of the year. The rich needed to make their benefits immune from workers’ hatred and opposition and needed to kill the liberal/progressive Santa Claus of government, who was more than a gift giver, he was also a Superman, a hero, a protector, a guarantor of fair play in the economy. Fair play was and is anathema to the rich and their Republican agents.

The Dark Holes Fascism and Racism Crawl Out From

Many sides? That's how Trump tried to defend his followers in the white supremacist fringe.*

There are two distinct sides in this, just as there were in 1941, when one side attacked peaceful neighbors and exterminated millions, and the other side (the Allies) opposed fascism and defeated it.

There were two clear sides in 1861; one defended slavery and bigotry, the other side opposed these evils. This film from the 40s states what our values were after we fought and won WW2, when we knew the difference between good and evil.

The WW2 era film explaining why we fought fascism can be seen via The Atlantic

But the Nazi flags are back, carried by people who think they are great patriots upholding a better America, a pure white America. Seeing the Nazi and Confederate flags together carried by armed mobs shouting bigotry and hate down the public street is disturbing, especially because these people believe themselves to be patriotic––while telling us that the United States should have been defeated in WW2 and the Civil War. They believe American values of democracy and tolerance should not prevail. They believe that the men and women who died for those values died for nothing, or, worse, that they died for false values. They may carry the U.S. flag along with their enemy flags but they are not patriots.

Here’s another video making the rounds, from the NRA. This is the organization that arms the Right and inflames their dreams of “purifying" this country the way Germany “purified” itself in the 1940s, by force of arms. The NRA urges “real Americans" to arm themselves against “the other”, the person who looks or thinks or worships differently. Note that it was the Nazis and Confederates who came to Charlottesville armed.

You can watch the virulent NRA hate propaganda spot here at ThinkProgress

It appears that the NRA gets considerable support and aid from Russia, America’s longtime global foe and Trump’s greatest ally.

The NRA's coziness with Russia is discussed here, at Medium

Fascism, bigotry, authoritarianism, violent suppression of people's rights. These strains crawl out of the same hole. It turns out the Nazis got many of their ideas from the American South.

Business Insider goes into how the founders of Nazism looked to the American South and its race laws to devise the Nuremberg Laws that looted and repressed and finally exterminated the Jews of Europe

*It's being argued that Trump derived the points his more aggressive statement yesterday from the predominant right wing propaganda machine in America today, FoxNews. This is laid out in a video comparison from MediaMatters.

Angry 70 Year Old Man Barricaded In DC Mansion

We wake up every morning wondering if it’s still true. Is Trump still president. If a President Hillary Clinton had presided the way Trump has these 100+ days she’d be on her way out. Congress would have had bills of impeachment prepared before she’d given her victory speech on November 9th. The pitchforks and torches and nooses were out for Hillary from the moment she announced her candidacy. From that date on the Republican Congress had busied itself with hearings and subpoenas. The investigative committee chairs had installed a teleport to transport them quickly onto FoxNews the moment they left the floor.

Jason Chaffetz was one of the most dogged accusers. He never let up. His goal in life was to jail Hillary Clinton. When FBI director James Comey found “carelessness” but no criminality, the Republicans were furious. They felt betrayed, as if they had a contract promising them that the investigation would serve her up to them. The line in Alice In Wonderland is “Sentence First. Verdict Afterwards.” Jason Chaffetz embraced the role of the Red Queen. He’d turned his congressional seat into a prosecutor’s office, an inquisitor’s office.

So when the Trump presidency debuted with its own palpable and juicy prosecutable charges hung round the president’s and his staff’s necks you’d expect an eager prosecutor would get to work.

But Chaffetz seemed bored with the allegations against Trump. Betraying our country to Russia? Meh. Using the presidency to enrich himself? Who cares. Chaffetz’s response when asked about Trump’s many disturbing and possibly incriminating financial entanglements and the glaring conflicts of interest was especially peculiar:

“He’s already rich.”

Meaning? The only meaning we can deduce is that Jason Chaffetz and his fellow Republicans believe it’s OK for a rich person to engage in criminal behavior. A rich person is allowed to enrich himself further by illegal means. A rich person is allowed to turn the Oval Office into a moneymaking machine. When a relatively middle class person enters the White House, say a Bill Clinton, it’s a different matter. Then they investigate. Republicans are immune. Rich people are immune.

Reported in The New Yorker

Reported at greater length in The Atlantic

The danger Trump presents is increased because the Republicans in Congress are so craven, so obedient, so partisan. James Fallows writes about this in The Atlantic, giving five reasons why Kremlingate is worse than Watergate.

This article from The American Interest examines Trump’s Russia entanglements.

"Whatever the nature of President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship with President Putin, he has certainly managed to accumulate direct and indirect connections with a far-flung private Russian/FSU network of outright mobsters, oligarchs, fraudsters, and kleptocrats. Any one of these connections might have occurred at random. But the overall pattern is a veritable Star Wars bar scene of unsavory characters, with Donald Trump seated right in the middle. The analytical challenge is to map this network—a task that most journalists and law enforcement agencies, focused on individual cases, have failed to do.”

It appears that Donald Trump has been a very useful asset in a massive and long-running Russian money laundering scheme.

Vanity Fair explains why a note from your lawyer won’t get you off the hook, especially if that lawyer was named Russia’s Lawyer of the Year.

When I heard Trump promise that a “certified letter” would clear him of any wrongdoing I laughed. As if the Post Office, for an additional fee, will certify the truthfulness of a letter. (That joke appeared on SNL last night so I wasn’t the only one who thought of it.)

This Dutch documentary goes into Trump’s deep ties to Russian mobsters. All Russian mobsters still living operate as Putin henchmen.

Google Trump and Bayrock and Russia and you find some interesting stories, all about money laundering, the looting of the Russian economy, and the rescue of a bankrupt Trump over the years. There's more than one way to launder a ruble.

This one's from the Guardian.

The reliably conservative Chicago Tribune has this to say:

“We have the tin-pot leader whose vanity knows no bounds. We have the rapacious family feathering their nests without regard for the law or common decency. We have utter disregard for values at home and abroad, the disdain for democracy, the hunger for constraining a free press, the admiration for thugs and strongmen worldwide.”

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson analyzes the problems Trump created in his Lester Holt interview.

Trump’s business dealings are under scrutiny by the Senate. From the New Yorker.

Mother Jones gets down to the facts in the Russia story.

The White House staff meanwhile is in turmoil. Staffers responding with “Jesus!” when they see Trump’s latest tweets. From The Daily Beast.

We Are All In Putin's Pocket Now

In the early 19th century, when Britain ruled much of the world, their king was cuckoo. Maybe it was because he’d lost the American colonies. He was nuts. And his young son was appointed Regent to handle the duties his incompetent father was unable to handle. The Prince Regent was not cuckoo but he was thick as two planks and very irresponsible.

We are in a similar situation now. Britain wasn’t actually ruled by their monarch even then; they had Parliament, and their Parliament was not a houseful of poodles. Our president has awesome powers and an obedient Congress, and he is still not in control. He is cuckoo and irresponsible and impulsive and delusional and corrupt and a liar.

Weirder still: the oddball scenario of Trump huddling with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador (spy master really) in the Oval Office, with the American press barred but the Russian press invited. If it sounded like a script written in Moscow it’s because it was. It was Putin who demanded the press exclusive at the high level meeting. Putin set the guidelines. Trump is not in control. Putin is. I was joking yesterday about how this is all completely normal, how it’s routine for Russian assets to have regular sit downs with their Russian spymasters. Joke, no joke. Our president is being operate by remote control from Moscow. Persuade me this isn’t true. Since we don’t have any American press coverage of the meeting we will not be able to observe the Russian technicians installing the listening devices.

How did we get here? The Washington Post gives us a picture of the president’s latest temper tantrum. How it happened and what it means.

The only thing that Russia’s press exclusive with Trump did not publish was the photo of Trump kneeling to receive commands from his master.

Politico describes the Russian tete a tete yesterday as a Russian victory dance. The Comey firing is only part of this Russian operation. Previous to this president the Russian prpresident did not have the power to fire American FBI directors.

Do we feel diminished yet? Do we feel like a Russian satellite yet? Do we feel as stupid as we look to the rest of the world? A new Quinnipiac poll asked respondents what word they would use to describe President Trump. (Via NY Magazine.)

The number one response by 8 percentage points was IDIOT.

Next in line: INCOMPETENT.

Next: LIAR.

Fourth place was a tie: 25% are still brainwashed and responded with LEADER. But 25% also responded with UNQUALIFIED.

The White House is lying about the Comey firing. Slate counts the ways.

Via Business Insider: A former CIA deputy director explains why it was dangerous to let the Russians bring their news [sic] crew into the Oval Office.

Constitutional Crisis? The New York Review of Books thinks it is.

Charlie Pierce: "Really, unless a fresh crop of spines suddenly sprouts within the Republican congressional majorities, nothing is going to happen. Unless a fresh crop of balls suddenly sprouts within the federal bureaucracy—hey, there are even more parking garages in D.C. now than there were in 1973—the odds are that the White House is going to skate on this.” Pierce also draws parallels with Watergate. But as I've been saying: Nixon at least hired domestic spooks. He didn't hire the KGB to secure power.

From Rolling Stone: Trump’s few Republican critics are not confronting him. Why?

Michael Tomasky goes through the five key players who might checkmate the Russian puppet in the White House

The Republicans are acting strangely. Like a police chief holding back to make sure the bank robbers finish looting the bank and put the money safely offshore before he does anything. As long as the Russians seem to be in control how much strategic information are they collecting? Which did they steal first, the keys to our nuclear arsenal or the keys to our economic infrastructure? Maybe the keys to the Federal Reserve. They may soon have our entire country in their pocket.

The Meanness Of Republican Policies

Is there something about being a Republican that makes you anti-woman and anti-working people?

Jonathan Chait of NY Magazine summarizes the Republican mindset pretty well: "Conservatives have made all kinds of practical arguments for the Republican health-care bill. They have made a smattering of moral arguments, too, such as the principle that people with more expensive medical needs have failed to make healthy choices and deserve financial punishment for their failings. What is telling about the gender debate is that it lacks even the pretext of personal responsibility. There is no case to be made that women ought to pay more for insurance because they chose to be female. There is no principle at all except that people who have more ought to keep it."

There seems to be a simpleminded self-centered misanthropy in Republican thinking, or at least in the thinking of the Republicans writing our laws right now. I say right now because Republicans used to be cheap without being mean. I know it's not just racism, but racism is in there. It's not just sexism but sexism is in there. Consider some of the shit these Republican white men say about people who are not white men. People who are not white men come in for a lot of abuse from Republicans, and their voters seem to like this about them. It gets them elected.

"We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle.” ~Rep. David Eastman (R/Alaska)

"Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us.’ There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves. Just, like, homeless people … I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care. The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging…” ~Rep. Roger Marshall (R/Kansas)

(Oh, but he is judging.)

Meanwhile, in the Senate, a whole parliament of judgmental and punitive white men are figuring out how to fix healthcare in America in a way that covers white men but not other kinds of people.

Fixed the way you might fix a dog, is what they are planning.

The Language of the Right

From Buzzfeed, a glossary of memes and codes popular among right wing trolls

Who knew that placing three parens before and after a person's name was a derisory way of labelling them as Jewish.

"(((Echo))) Parentheses: When used around someone's name, a means of indicating that they are Jewish. The "echoes" are a reference to some old gobbledygook about Jews "echoing through history," but the parentheses are a handy tool on Twitter for anti-Semites to signal to one another when someone they dislike is Jewish. Once the tactic was exposed, some Jews and non-Jews started adding them to their own Twitter usernames as a way to subvert the practice and make it less powerful."

From ATTN, a glossary of commonly used phrases that have racist origins or overtones

It includes an interesting entry from Encyclopedia Britannica about the "Grandfather Clause". The concept of "grandfathering" someone into legal status after a period of time has its roots in the Jim Crow South:

"It provided that those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1866 or 1867, or their lineal descendants, would be exempt from educational, property, or tax requirements for voting. Because the former slaves had not been granted the franchise until the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, those clauses worked effectively to exclude black people from the vote but assured the franchise to many impoverished and illiterate whites."

Not that using the term today makes a person racist, but it's interesting to know. Just as it would be good to know that the term "Thug" that is now verboten has its roots not in white Americans' fears of gangs but in white British imperialists' fears of gangs in India, specifically the gangs that engaged in Thuggee, a violent killing ritual that targeted travelers, native Indians mostly, along the Great Trunk Road in northern India.

The weaponization of words is a major issue today, poisoning conversations and relationships. Groups have always used coded language to exclude people but this behavior entered the mainstream of party politics in the nineties with the rise of Newt Gingrich and his political guru Frank Luntz. Luntz helped Gingrich gain a Republican majority in the House and one of his weapons was a lexicon included in a GOPAC memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) reported on the memo in 1995.

Luntz taught Gingrich and Gingrich trained the Republicans to use language like a tar brush to smear the Democrats and make people feel suspicious and angry about them. Their caucus members followed the playbook.

"Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

"decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis… urgent(cy)… destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… liberal… they/them… unionized bureaucracy… “compassion” is not enough… betray… consequences… limit(s)… shallow… traitors… sensationalists…endanger… coercion… hypocrisy… radical… threaten… devour… waste… corruption… incompetent… permissive attitudes… destructive… impose… self-serving… greed… ideological… insecure… anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs… pessimistic… excuses… intolerant…stagnation… welfare… corrupt… selfish… insensitive… status quo… mandate(s)… taxes… spend(ing)… shame… disgrace… punish (poor…)… bizarre… cynicism… cheat… steal… abuse of power… machine… bosses… obsolete… criminal rights… red tape… patronage"

This list of words has remained in use ever since, and it's helped destroy the polity or traditional courtesy that used to make our political system function. Language helped make our democracy dysfunctional. When Obama was elected president most Americans polled said they were sick and tired of the nasty partisanship in Washington, yet they kept re-electing the same right wing cohort who'd poisoned the well. Americans wanted civility but in 2010, after two years of fierce Republican opposition and outright racism, they restored the Congress to the Republicans.

The Republican Drive To Destroy The Environment

Trump plans to run the EPA by executive order. The most ignorant man to ever occupy the White House will now dictate environmental policy.

From Reuters

Republicans have begun their effort to gut the Endangered Species Act which saved the Bald Eagle and the Timber Wolf

Reported by The Week

A bill has been proposed to eliminate the EPA altogether

Reported by CNBC

In early January Jason Chaffetz offered a bill to sell millions of acres of federal land. It was later withdrawn.

From the LATimes

The bright siders say the extremely anti-environmental aggressiveness of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress may galvanize environmentalists.

But why do we need to refight wars? Is it a good thing to redirect energies to saving what was saved already and telling people what everybody has known for the past 20 years?

The world has known about the dangers of climate change for longer than that actually and instead of reaching consensus on it we lost consensus.

Because fossil fuels were simply too profitable and its corporations were too greedy and the politicians they owned were too needy.

The Russian/Republican Coup––With Jokes

Colbert explains how fun it will be to have a president who is a Russian asset.

A less humorous take on the Russian playing of the American electorate from the BBC. The implications are dire.

From the BBC

This explains why the Republicans are hurrying to confirm everyone Trump has nominated to run government departments. They don’t mind being tools of Putin as long as Putin lets them sit in the driver’s seat once in a while. Strange, isn't it? American sovereignty used to be important to Republicans. Right now the Republicans are quickly breaking our government into inoperable pieces before the public stops them. Is that vandalism what Putin asked them to do or is it their own idea? How can we tell the difference?

From The New Republic

The quick ObamaCare repeal doesn’t fix anything, it just undoes all the careful mechanisms of our healthcare system, especially the guarantees to people who need healthcare. Now we are all just fish in a barrel which Big Pharma and the healthcare giants can suck dry.

Oh… and it delivers a massive tax cut to rich people. I hope un-rich Trump voters will think about what they can do to fix this.

Reported in SLATE

The Republicans also passed a law that cancels all Federal authority to regulate important things like food safety and air quality and banks’ habit of defrauding people and stuff like that. This reminds me of how Enron (whose CEO was a key member of the Bush administration in that first disastrous year) gamed the California energy market, shutting off power to whole areas and hiking electricity charges sky high and laughing about the grandmas in Fresno who had to deal with it. That sort of thing will now be OK again, thanks to the Republicans. Consider it a late Christmas gift.

Reporting by Talking Points Memo

If Russia were controlling our new regime isn't breaking down the government the first thing they might do?

Oh, by the way, those true blue lefties who shunned Hillary because she wasn't pure enough? You were played by the Russians too. The Daily Beast details how Putin trolled the far left and helped split the liberals to elect Trump.

CIA: Russians Hacked Election To Give Us The President They Wanted

This Washington Post story broke late last evening, reporting that the Russian government and its proxies hacked our election system with the deliberate goal of putting Donald Trump into power. The CIA reported this to leaders in Congress but the Republicans blocked any release of this information prior to the election. The Republicans opposed informing the public that the Russian government was helping them to win the election. There are multiple outrages here.

The Russians hacked our political system. Why?

To install someone in the White House who they could manipulate and control, someone who would not stand up to them, who would do what they told him to do.

The Republican leadership knew about the Russian spy agencies hacking our election well before the election but they prevented a bipartisan release of the information to the public. Why?

Two possible reasons. Because they welcomed the help of the Russian spy agencies to get their man into the White House. Or––since we now know the Russians didn’t only hack the Democratic Party but hacked the Republicans as well––perhaps the Russians blackmailed the Republican leadership into collaborating with this violation of our system. Compromising information is useful as leverage only if it is withheld. The Republicans either allowed this Russian intrusion into our election or collaborated with it. Either explanation amounts to treason.

SLATE reports on the Republicans preventing public disclosure of the Russian rigging of the election in their favor.

Retired CIA agent Robert Baer says that if this had happened in any other democracy in the world, if the intelligence agencies of an enemy power had hacked the outcome of a national election, they would re-hold the election.

CNN interview with retired CIA agent Robert Baer

We now know that the Russians hacked the Republican Party as well, but didn’t dish out the most embarrassing material bit by bit to damage the party’s candidate and its standing in the polls. Because they wanted the Republicans to win. They wanted Trump to win. Once he was in power they could use this information as leverage to control him and control our government.

We have no idea what financial or other kind of hold the Russians may have over Donald Trump because he has hidden his financial information. He owes many millions of dollars around the world. We don't know the extent to which he is vulnerable to foreign pressure.

We don’t know what kinds of damaging material the Russians hacked from the Republicans databases, but it is not hard to know why they didn’t release it.

They wanted the Republicans to win, and they likely have information that gives them power over the party that won the election, who they helped win the election. They didn’t release the information. It seems very possible, perhaps likely, they planned to use it for blackmail purposes. Once Trump reached the White House and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress this information would hold them hostage.

It becomes increasingly apparent that the Republican Party accepted the help of a foreign dictator to gain power. And once they had gained power the levers of that power would have been in the hands of the foreign dictator who assisted them. It is difficult to understand this any other way. The kindest judgment upon the Republican leaders and Donald Trump would be that they were fools or powerless to resist. If you believe they are not fools they must be willing collaborators, before and after the event.

The Daily Beast reports on the likelihood that the Russians blackmailed the Republican Party into going along with the Russian interference and keeping it from the American public.

Michael Tomasky’s trenchant analysis of this latest development

What do we call this?

Did the Republican leadership engage in treason? Did they collaborate with an enemy power to seize control of our political system? (In France, after the liberation, collaborators had their heads shaved and were marched through the streets.) During the American Revolution an ambitious general collaborated with the British (a far less sinister enemy than Putin's Russia) by handing them the keys to the fort at West Point. Down through American history anyone convicted of treason against this country became a "Benedict Arnold."

If the Republicans did their best to ignore what the Russians were doing to subvert our election, does that make them dupes? Did they guess that the crime would benefit them and simply let it unfold? Or were they certain that the Russian government was working for their benefit? Did they know. You become a criminal accomplice if you benefit from a crime you have allowed to happen. If that crime is a betrayal of your country you are a traitor. This part is not complicated.

The likeliest explanations for why the Republicans kept this secret suggest that they were complicit. The explanations for why the Russians worked to elect Trump suggest that both Trump and the Republican Party engaged in a criminal enterprise to subvert our democracy and to give a foreign enemy control of our government.

During the debates when Hillary Clinton suggested that Trump might be a puppet of the Russians, Trump's reply was both juvenile and very revealing. "Puppet!. Puppet! You're the puppet!" he said, like a child denying an accusation he knows he is guilty of.

The statistical anomalies revealed last month indicate that it wasn’t simply subversion of public opinion, but likely a careful hacking of key mechanics of the voting in key states.

Reported by The Independent newspaper in London.

One remedy offered by legal expert Lawrence Lessig and reported in The Independent suggests that since Hillary Clinton is now 2.83 million votes ahead of Trump in the final tally, a revote may not be necessary.

Hypocrisy In The News

The Republican Secretary of State in New Mexico was elected on a Stop Voter Fraud platform. She is now under indictment on 65 counts including fraud, embezzlement and money laundering. She is also being charged with identity theft. Hm... It’s a shame Republican voters don’t understand irony or hypocrisy... The LATimes has the full story.

The state of Alabama was very pleased when the Supreme Court said nobody needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act anymore because bigotry and prejudice were over with. So Alabama did two things. They added a requirement that all voters have a photo ID to vote, and they closed offices where these photo IDs could be obtained in majority black counties. Hm… Anybody phoned Chief Justice Roberts for comment? Maybe just phone the Department of Justice... The Root has a full report on this story.

A hurricane just dropped several feet of rain on South Carolina causing the dozenth “thousand year flood” in the past few years. All their Republicans in Congress loudly demanded disaster relief, and they’ll get it too, because it’s what Americans do to help other Americans in trouble. Trouble is, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, New Jersey and the rest of the northeast every one of these South Carolina Republicans voted against federal aid. Hm… Sometimes hypocrisy is so ripe you have to hold your nose... This story is all over the news; here's Salon's article.

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Civilization, meaning everything in history that comes after we learned to farm, in fact all of history, is founded upon reliable climate, reliable rain and growing seasons. Climate change caused by the greed of fossil fuel billionaires fucks all of that.

Some places will be warmer, some colder, some will have longer growing seasons, some shorter, most will fluctuate meaning farmers will have to guess and hope even more than they do now (imagine the crop insurability problem then).

The changes will be dramatic. Some places will be too dry to support life. Some will be washed away in huge floods or flattened by huge storms. Things like this that happened in the Bible were interpreted as God’s punishment for wrongdoing––our wrongdoing this time is stupidly placing ourselves in the political grip of fossil fuel billionaires.

Think we can solve these problems by shipping grain from one lucky continent to another? Picture all of our functioning and extremely expensive port facilities under water and no longer functional.

Weird how the big insurers haven’t cottoned to this huge risk overhang. I think it’s because most big insurers think of themselves as investment companies investing the premiums they collect rather than insurers of risk, and right now at peak oil their biggest investments are with the oil companies. Colossally stupid. Stupid on top of stupid, which should help disprove the free market capitalist’s religion that says money is smarter than any of us. Money is mostly just greedy.

The greed of the top 1% may doom all of civilization, murdering millions. We should mind.

There is a local weatherman where I live who hosts “documentaries” that explain why Climate Change and Global Warming are stupid hoaxes. He says it’s hard enough to predict weather two weeks out, so it has to be impossible to predict what will happen in two decades. This sounds persuasive if you don’t think about it. Children are unpredictable too. We can’t predict what they’ll do tomorrow, but we have a pretty good idea what they’ll be up to over time, and we can be pretty sure in twenty years they’ll be twenty years older, with average luck. With average luck they'll live lives like ours, with better than average luck, better lives. Throw that average luck out and what happens?

Climate stability gives us average luck that we can build on. Climate instability takes that away: no predictability, no reliable averages to plan our complex civilization around. Climate scientists are warning us about the risks of enormous changes in our children's lifetimes. What changes exactly? It's hard to say, and that is the danger. Unreliable climate destroys civilizations and has ground many into dust over the centuries. Usually it happens slowly. Previously the climate changed slowly. Not this time.

The well paid attractive telegenic criminals who are distracting us from this enormous danger are being paid to distract us and dissuade us. 97% of all climate scientists agree, but we are being persuaded by smiling weathermen and ignorant politicians to ignore science.

These shills are being paid to help shore up a dirty 19th century industry that threatens us all. They are being paid to help us confuse Weather and Climate. Weather is if it’s raining outside. Weather is a discussion about whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow. It’s not deep stuff. Climate change is as deep as life and death for our nation, the happiness or misery of our descendants' lives, the arc of history itself.

Climate is the reason we have a prosperous nation. We are lucky to have a good, reliable, moderate and predictable climate. Climate Change is why there are dead civilizations buried under the sands of North Africa. Usually climate changes slowly. We are changing it radically and quickly and lethally unless we decide to stop changing it by changing the way we fuel our lives.

The Real VA Scandal

The Republican half of Congress wants government to fail.

So they do everything they can to make it fail. To make the systems break down, to make Americans angry at their government, the government Republicans hate, the government Republicans now control through filibuster and obstruction.

In February Republicans did everything they could to block a major funding bill to help the VA deal with the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan wars. And block it they did.

Call it a hostage situation. Republicans want to remove democratic government and replace it with a corporate structure run by their clients for making money.

Republicans are delighted with the VA scandal, because they set it in motion.

They started a war eleven years ago. Wars create veterans. Wars cause many thousands of amputations and other traumatic injuries which need to be treated. But Republicans in Congress didn’t want to pay for that part of the war, the aftermath.

They like veterans for parades but don’t like to pay for their healthcare.

When you defund veterans programs just when they’re needed most you are either cynical, unpatriotic or stupid. Take your pick.

Outrage Over the VA

Reading about the spreading outrage over the VA systems failures and the coverup of said failures ought to make us think.

It sounds a lot like the school systems where test cheating was going on. Wrong, yes. But might it also be a logical response to impossible standards, huge demands and reduced budgets? The VA and our vets have both been victimized by the budget cutting mania. So have all parts of the public sphere, schools, roads, regulatory bodies like the IRS and FDA and SEC and EPA, all have been put on a crash diet. But their jobs have gotten bigger.

It's illogical to raise standards and reduce budgets at the same time, but this kind of magical thinking is far too common these days. It's part of our national love affair with businessthink. It's always about getting more for less, an impractical idea to begin with. Running engines without oil isn’t good for those engines, but it saves money in the short run. There are consequences. We shouldn’t be surprised when it ends in catastrophe..

We had an unfunded, off-budget, poorly audited, unnecessary war, waged with insufficient manpower and poor planning. It sent men and women with insufficient body armor and inadequate equipment into a catastrophe that should have been foreseen and might have been avoided. (The pre-planning was more about the oil than about the people.) The whole disaster was then covered up, the consequences ignored and denied, the human damage hidden and the liabilities passed on to the taxpayer or onto the veterans who were permanently harmed, and onto the next president. The costs were not fully disclosed until Bush had left office, and then the payment of those costs was blocked by the Republican side of Congress who had helped him launch the war.

This is a fiasco but we shouldn’t be surprised by it any more than we ought to be surprised by an unrepaired bridge falling down or an unprepared student failing an unreasonably rigorous examination.

The VA is as full of flaws and insufficiencies as our infrastructure. Of course we blame the infrastructure. We should blame the jerks who shifted the necessary dollars into tax cuts to billionaires for the past fifteen years.

It is a religious dogma among Republicans that no problem exists unless it costs money. So if you ignore a problem it doesn’t exist. Ignore the VA’s need for funding and there’s no problem. Road repair spending is the problem, not the holes in the roads or the fallen bridges. Healthcare spending is the problem, not the poor health of Americans. Poverty programs are the problem, not poverty. Paying people a living wage is a problem, so cut their pay and there’s no problem. If poor people could just hide themselves we would have no poverty at all. If maimed veterans could suffer quietly in a dark room the consequences of this stupid war would stop embarrassing all of us, but more importantly it would stop costing taxpayers money, especially the wealthy taxpayers who complain to their Republican proxies. They are the ones we most need to take care of, aren't they?

After a war we should expect a rising cost in veterans’ care, but damned if Republicans will agree to pay for that care. Costs are the problem, not the lack of a leg or the serious unending repercussions of brain injuries caused when a soldier was blown up in an insufficiently armored vehicle. So they cut the costs; problem solved. That is the contradiction faced by many government departments. It’s not wasteful to give enormous tax cuts to billionaires so they can own a dozen luxury homes, but it is apparently wasteful to fund the VA sufficiently.

It’s false economy to calculate efficiencies with a bias against the people who do the work, but that is the new religion in this country. Whatever saves billionaires a dime is efficient. Whatever supplies necessary care or service or pay to someone at the other end of the income scale is automatically inefficient because it subtracts from the billionaire’s tax savings. Hell, most of those billionaires evade taxes already. We pay for them.

Americans are angry at the wrong people. It isn’t the first time.

The Self-Reinforcing Conspiracy Theory

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’

This excellent piece from Ezra Klein's VOX got me thinking. What is it about Benghazi that has Republicans so obsessed? Does the time they've spent digging make them more certain there is something there? Did they begin digging with a certainty in their heads?

Fitting our conclusions to our preconceptions is bad philosophy. It’s illogical. It’s what made Galileo recant his discovery about the solar system. It’s stupid. But that is the guiding principle of modern Republican thought. Eisenhower, TR, Lincoln, every admired Republican in the party’s long history would be embarrassed. The leaders of the party should be ashamed of where it’s got to.

There seems to be a greater habit among Republicans to fit conclusions to preconceived ideas, to shape policy around an unproven belief system. To take one example, denying science while at the same time criticizing the public education system for the way our students are failing at science. (Bill Moyers takes a look at this tendency towards stupidity.)

Republicans seek government office, run for it, or buy it, and then they use it to make government stop working. Why? Is it because they believe government is automatically and a priori bad? Do they believe this so much they have to make it true? What does it mean when they spend their lives in government trying to make it fail? (New Yorker piece: the Republican War on Competence.)


Why do Republicans oppose everything Obama does, even when he proposes a health care reform their own Heritage Foundation devised? You reach the unavoidable conclusion that it’s because Obama is black. They cannot bear it that a black Democrat is so much more intelligent and capable than their hapless George W. Bush was. White superiority has become an unspoken but deep principle among Republicans. It’s their secret handshake. It too is a preconceived notion that doesn’t fit with reality.

Or is this a preconceived notion? Here are some statistics about it from Nate Silver's 538 blog. Unsurprisingly the racial bias is higher among white Republicans than white Dems, but not that much more. How much information is suppressed in these answers? Which group is more likely to hide its “inappropriate opinions” in a public forum? Which party is likelier to act on inappropriate opinions in concert with their like-minded friends?

Or is that just a conspiracy theory of mine?

OMG––Norquist Wrote His Tax Pledge When He Was 12

From Daily Show reporter Samantha Bee, who is a pretty great interviewer.

OMG.

I'm not kidding. He says he actually did. Right on camera.

Our entire country is heading toward Greek style default because a 12 year-old in 1968 decided to rebrand the Republican Party around one simple and stupid idea. The idea of holding his breath until he got what he wanted. This may explain the brainpower problem they have.

This also explains why the GOP side of the aisle in the House is full of 8th grade boys.

Yuck.

Dumb and Dumber-Republicans on Camera

Heck, it's Friday. Here's a short collection of the stupidity of the Republican presidential field. Our allies and friends must really wonder about us.

Rick Perry's goofy speech in New Hampshire

Rick Perry's oops moment in the recent debate

Herman Cain's prolonged inability to answer foreign policy question in Milwaukee

Michele Bachmann's long list of gaffes and misstatements

How do choose one Sarah Palin gaffe from among so many? Here's the goofiest.

Here's some choice Gingrich. The man is funnier when he's wrong because he's so arrogant about it.

Romney, the robocandidate, always seems prepped and memorized. Or is it a microchip? He's still consistently and woefully out of touch with average Americans. Here's a recent instance reported in The Week.

Out of touch? Are we surprised? After all, Romney made his millions by leveraging and downsizing American companies and moving their jobs overseas, as this NYTimes story reported.

We've forgotten how inept a Republican president can be. I wonder sometimes if the ineptness is a blind, a way of diverting our attention so we don't see how hard and effectively Republicans work to degrade the middle class and cater to the very rich.

Bush had many excruciating moments. His father set a low bar when he vomited in the lap of the Japanese president, but Bush Junior had no trouble going lower. I remember his glassy eyed pauses best. I'm remembering one especially long pause in a 2004 debate. I'd describe it as a fugue state. He won re-election anyway, thanks to a few Diebold machines in Ohio.

These Bush gaffes are almost too numerous to catalog.

And another bit of pure Bush, on camera, on mike. Scary.

A carefully reported story about President Bush cheating during the 2004 debates was spiked by the New York Times. Why are Republicans shielded from serious reporting? Maybe the stupidity act makes the news media feel protective.