Keeping Our Eye On The Ball

While the Congress enacts mass transfers from working people to the very rich we can't let ourselves forget why this is happening and how it happened.

This kleptocratic government that's screwing us is set up along the lines of Russia's kleptocracy. The rubles that Putin is using to buy our government was first stolen from his own people. Now it's our turn.

Why does Trump defer to Putin and act like he’s Putin’s poodle?

From NYMagazine: Trump defers to Putin like he's his boss

How Putin got his hooks into Trump, explained by former intel director

John McClaughlin in Politico

How Trump walked into Putin's web.

The Long Read from the Guardian

How Trump is being played by Putin…

In Vanity Fair

When our leader is under the thumb of an enemy power, this stuff happens… His administration puts our Russian embassy in the control of the Russians.

From the BBC: How Trump gave our Moscow embassy security operations to Putin's former KGB boss

Putin's control over Trump via an army of trolls. From Bloomberg

Why are open democracy’s vulnerable? From the New Yorker

Trump has fascist tendencies, says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian.

Trump is corrupt, therefore his administration is corrupt. It does as he does. Reported by VOX

There is a new media model out there to enable and empower dictators and suppress and manipulate people. Trump loves it.

The global armies of fake news trolls being used to fuck with democracy, reported in the Guardian.

With Trump in the White House, the mob is in control. But the mob is under his control. And he is under Putin’s control. And the control of the billionaire class. Only they get real information, by sucking it up via our social media. What they force back out on us via social media is disinformation. Which is why they fear real journalists and real journals. From the NYTimes

The key to fascism is to routinely and vigorously poison the public discourse, make people fear and hate each other. Trump learned this trick from Putin.

In the New York Review of Books, the great Russia watcher Masha Gessen.

Why do Americans feel more stressed and afraid than ever? Because they can sense our democracy is in peril. Along with our entire planet. Reported out by APA

Trump And The End Of American Democracy

The authors of new books about Trump's degradation of American democracy appeared on Morning Joe today.

The Steel Dossier allegations are being corroborated making it clearer all the time that Putin had his hooks into Donald Trump from the beginning. That Donald Trump has been and continues to be a Putin puppet.

What does Putin want? Besides overturning the sanctions the US imposed on his oligarchs after the invasion of Crimea, Putin wants to create chaos in the U.S.

Where have we heard that before?

Chaos is Steve Bannon's brand

Steve Bannon has compared himself to Lenin, which is odd enough for a right wing operator. His overarching theory or goal is to create chaos. He has said this repeatedly in his safari jacket TED style talks. He sees this moment as his “Fourth Wave” where the whole system is overturned. He thinks of himself as a Robespierre figure, a Lenin, an agent of mass destruction tearing down democratic institutions he doesn’t like. His goal, apparently, is to create a new American dictatorship with himself at the top, securely fastened there by his connections to shadowy billionaires whose fortunes came from disruption.

We see the damage he’s doing in every government department where Trump has appointed disruptors to top positions. The nominees may just as well have been sent from Moscow. The Dept of Energy, which safeguards our nuclear stockpile, is run by a doofus who wanted to shut down the department. His Health chief was a pawn of big Pharma. His Environmental Protection chief built his career on defending and lobbying for polluters. Their mission is focused on destruction and dysfunction.

Putin whispers in Trump’s ear and Trump insults our allies, undermines our alliances, rubbishes our treaties, exits global agreements American leadership crafted, seeks to pit one ally against the others. And then Trump gives big warm kisses to the worst dictators and kleptocrats around the world. He admires and envies the skill with which democracies have been destroyed and coups have been accomplished. He envies the mass murders of Duterte in the Philippines. He does nothing when Turkish dictator Erdogan brings his dark-suited thugs into the heart of Washington to attack and brutally beat peaceful protesters. This is the style Trump admires and envies. This is how Trump has disgraced the American brand and degraded American leadership in the world.

The Trump junta has had a plan from the start: destroy American democracy and the American way of life, create an angry mob, and ride that angry mob into dictatorial power.

Russiagate Is Like Rosemary's Baby

The Trump presidency, with all of its bizarre manifestations and plot twists, has made Americans feel like we are watching a familiar movie.

A horror movie.

Appropriately enough, since the president is a sexual predator, it's a horror movie directed by a sexual predator.

It's Rosemary's Baby. We are all living in Rosemary's Baby, all living in creepy apartments at the Dakota, listening for the tiptoeing of witches, or is it Russians?

Here is a useful Who's Who...

The White House is the Dakota Apartment House.

Trump is Guy Woodhouse who sells his wife to Satan for greater fame and financial gain.

Putin is Beelzebub/Satan.

Roman Castevet is either Steve Bannon or Paul Manafort.

Kellyanne Conway is Minnie Castevet, played by Ruth Gordon without the charm.

Jeff Sessions is the absentminded witch played by Patsy Kelly. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders is understudy.)

General Flynn is Dr. Sapirstein.

Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, Omarosa Manigault, Jared Kushner, Melania, Ivanka, Roger Stone, Donald Jr., Carter Page, etc. play all the other devil-worshippers in the room at the end...

Actually the whole Republican Party is in that room. (This new version of Rosemary's Baby really needs to be a cable series, there are so many wonderful parts. I see crowd scenes filled with Nazis carrying tiki torches. And everybody at FoxNews should have cameos. Not sure who should get William Castle's cameo as the guy waiting for the pay phone.)

Ben Carson is Dr. Bombay and is obviously in the wrong story.

Soviet ambassador/spymaster/bullfrog manquée Kislyak is Dr. Shand.

Jeb Bush is Donald Baumgart (the actor who goes blind to advance Guy Woodhouse’s career.)

James Comey is Dr. Hill (the naive "good guy" who unwittingly hands Rosemary back to the Satanists.)

Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook Jr.) is played interchangeably by the major network anchors.

Barack Obama is Rosemary's loyal friend Hutch, who the Satanists are determined to rub out.

Hillary is Rosemary’s friend Terry who gets thrown out of an upstairs window (very Russian.)

Neil Gorsuch, as far as I can tell, is the baby. (What have they done to his eyes?)

We are Rosemary.

The Russians Have Always Preferred American Presidents Who Are Corrupt

One of Alistair Cooke's BBC letters from America has this interesting paragraph, written in 1973, about Watergate. During that earlier scandal, Nixon (like Trump) had a defender in Moscow, who said the charges against the American president were a conspiracy and a hoax cooked up by "reactionary” liberal elements.

How Big Data and Russian Spies Rigged Our Election (With Republican Help)

These new revelations about Kushner and Don Jr. and Manafort meeting with a Russian lawyer and (now reported) a guy from Russian intelligence begins to answer the questions raised tentatively back in March and April and May: how did the Russians know how and where to tailor and target their disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton?

Article in Newsweek raising the question about Jared Kushner's involvement in the weaponization of the Russian propaganda.

Similar article in The Guardian

Analysis from TechCrunch

Another prescient article from TIME magazine

Like the legendary double play infield of a century ago, we need to see how the process went so devastatingly from Mercer (for the big data used for targeting the Russian disinformation) to Bannon (Mercer’s guy who ran Breitbart––a key disinformation supermarket–– and then ran the Trump campaign and now runs the White House) and Kushner (who was Trump’s deputy for handling the technology of gaming our democracy) and finally to the Republican operatives in swing states who put the Russian bots and the propaganda to work. In baseball this is admired as an art form, but deployed in an election it becomes a conspiracy, a conspiracy with a foreign power, a conspiracy with a foreign enemy.

This McClatchy article back in March examined how neatly the operations of fake news site InfoWars and propaganda site Breitbart and the Russian propaganda networks were coordinated to elect Donald Trump and block the election of Hillary Clinton. With the reins being handled at the top of the Trump campaign. And it appears, the Trump campaign being managed from the Kremlin and from a secretive big-data company called Cambridge Analytica, owned by billionaire Robert Mercer. This Atlantic article outlines Mercer's "big plans" for America.

Mercer is the evil genius who steered the UK out of Europe. How he did it there may help us see how it was done here. Article on Mercer's Brexit hijack from The Guardian.

It has been Mercer’s genius to persuade large sophisticated populations to ignore facts and logic and instead accept and obey the subliminal messages Mercer’s big data machinery puts into their brains. This article, originally published in Das Magazin from Zurich, explains how the Mercer Mindfuck works.

The Trump phenomenon is about mind control on a national scale. It’s hard for citizens of advanced western nations to comprehend this. It’s the sort of mindfucking Orwell warned about. The mass hypnotism used in communist countries. Think North Korea and now try to picture Americans engaging in these mass choreographed rallies worshipping the Dear Leader––only now the Dear Leader is an orange faced senior citizen with delusions of mastery. The mastery isn’t Trump’s, and it isn’t Kushner’s either. It’s Mercer’s and Bannon’s genius––and Rupert Murdoch’s for that matter. And the late Roger Ailes' who dreamed up the idea of a GOP propaganda television network back in the Nixon White House. The Russians have been playing a long game but it never worked until they found eager accomplices running one of America’s major political parties. And the party apparatus showed equal eagerness to follow and obey. They are still obeying their foreign masters.

Your Daily Trump––How Did America Fall In Love With Putin's Candidate?

We used to admire people like Hillary Clinton. No woman has topped Gallup’s most admired list as many times as she has. And there are reasons for that. There is one reason her positives have gone down: She announced her candidacy. There are people in the world who hate the idea of a woman president, and hate all Democrats. Those people own networks and newspapers and have a ready audience. So the smear began. We should admire someone who could endure that, someone willing to endure that. We used to admire guts and endurance and unflappability and grace under pressure. What’s happened to us that we no longer admire admirable people but suddenly are entranced by a con man and a liar?

The National Observer examines the anti-Hillary prejudice and how we now hate what we once admired.

A lot of the negative feeling about Hillary has been manufactured by FoxNews. They would have smeared anyone they thought was likely to win the Democratic nomination. This has been the Republican approach for years: go after the opposing side's strongest candidate.

What’s weird is the Republican Party and Fox are suddenly allied with the Russians. Why? Because they prefer fascism and don't mind U.S. submission to a Russian dictator? They think that’s better than electing a Democrat. They will collude with an enemy dictator if it helps them gain power.

Why does Wiki Leaks only target Hillary Clinton? For the same reason Roger Ailes targeted her.

The Russia/GOP/Wikileaks alliance explained at VOX.

Because she’s the strongest presidential candidate we have. Assange wants to pull the whole U.S. government down. His sponsors, the Russians, also his sources on this information, want to pull the U.S. down. Hillary Clinton would oppose that. Assange and Putin would like our security agencies dissolved. Hillary opposes that. And she’s the strongest choice for president. Assange and Putin oppose that.

She’s the sane one, the experienced one, the competent one, the one who’d strengthen Russia’s age-old enemy, the U.S.

Remember Wikileaks hacked information about the DNC and the Clinton campaign. They didn’t leak anything about Trump because Trump is their guy. The Russians own Trump. He owes them millions.

He’s gotten almost as many millions from the Russians as he has leeched out of the pockets of U.S. taxpayers. This story is worth reading. American Prospect reports on Trump the Parasite Who Lives Off the Taxpayer.

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?