Did Russia Win The White House?

The American voters chose Hillary Clinton by more than a million and a half votes and the margin is growing as absentee votes are counted. The ongoing updated vote tally is shown here.

But Russia and the Russian spy agencies and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin wanted Trump and it looks like they got what they wanted.

Esquire's very readable and credible political reporter Charlie Pierce reports on the Russian connection here, and here.

The Hill newspaper reports on it here.

Mother Jones reports on it here.

The Russian government wanted someone weak, inexperienced, irrational, incompetent and vacillating and Americans who voted for Trump helped them achieve that.

With perhaps some additional help from voter intimidation and voter suppression and election rigging.

David Pakman addresses vote anomalies in key swing states

Published on Nov 14, 2016
--According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Hillary Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI and FL), but ultimately lost those states according to computerized vote counts

The data from TDMS Research

BBC journalist Greg Palast addresses these concerns more directly here

(This sounds like the kind of rhetoric Trump was shouting just before the election. But it isn’t rhetoric. It has to do not with predictive polling but with information collected as the vote was happening, which is less prone to deviations. The deviations are what alert the public to irregularities. That is what this information suggests may have happened.)

So there were a number of very disturbing forces pushing for a Trump victory.

Another mechanism that distorted this election was the way social media amplified and disseminated the lies being told. Because of the greater skepticism of progressive voters most of the fake stories that worked their way into this election were biased toward Trump.

The story from WIRED

Fake news sites sold more Americans on bogus negative stories about Hillary (I read one that reported that close associates said she emitted a sulphuric smell indicating she was in league with Satan. She does not, and she is not. People believe this crap because if it’s on the internets it must be true) and bogus positive stories about Trump (the one having the greatest effect may have been the one saying Pope Francis endorsed Trump, when in fact Pope Francis clearly and forcefully rebuked Trump and the hateful policies he calls for.)

Untrue stories and rumors are often in play during elections, but this year the untrue stories outplayed the true ones.

The story reported by Buzzfeed

(I realize Buzzfeed sounds a bit like a fake news source. This is actually a very well founded story.)

Trump benefited from the sad fact that many Americans base their most important decisions on feelings rather than facts. Which is ironic, because it wasn’t very long ago that Republicans were the party that prided itself on being rational and responsible. They derided liberals as being fact averse. That has flipped entirely.

Vox discusses the fact that conservatives believe the false stories far more than liberals do

One of the Big Lies cited in the Vox story was broadcast to the millions of gullible Trump supporters is now the top advisor in Trump’s White House, the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon.

One of the fake news creators discussed his filthy profession with the Washington Post. He seems to be enjoying the damage as much as Putin is, while frantically denying any blame for the millions of people he lied into voting for Trump. He has a point: if you can persuade a stupid person to drink poison the joke is on them, right? Too late to apologize now.

The Oxford English Dictionary announces a Word of the Year each year. This year’s word is “post-truth”. We’ve reached a point when what is true doesn’t matter to millions of people. This should be troubling. This is one of the first corruptions that occurred during the Nazi era in Germany. Now I realize Donald Trump is not Hitler because Hitler was a vegetarian, but apart from his eating habits there are a disturbing number of close similarities, not just in what Trump promises to do but in the kinds of poisonous rhetoric he used to get people out to vote for him. The only real difference is that Trump shouted these things in English and not in German.

The true story about "post-truth" via the BBC

Nothing we can do, right? Too late now, right? Let’s all curl up in fetal positions underneath our beds, right? They won’t find us there...

Actually? Actually there is something that might prevent the inauguration of President Trump.

Something called the Electoral College. It’s the old device the slave states put in place to increase their influence in Congress by adding electoral power for people they owned as property.

But it was also put in place to keep power from being given to dangerous people who catered to the mob. Not the Mob, as in the Mafia. The mob as in the unwashed and volatile public. The ignorant folk who are easily fooled by fake stories about an honest candidate being dishonest and a dishonest candidate being truthful. The Electoral College was created to prevent people like Donald J. Trump (con man, fraudster, tax evader, sociopath, fascist, incompetent) from gaining power.

And to avoid that outcome we can still hope that enough of these carefully selected Electoral College Electors will refuse to ratify the presidency of Vladimir Putin’s favorite.

I am recommending that everyone who knows rational people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida or any state that swung or squeaked by for Trump to phone them and ask them to write sincere and respectful personal letters to the Electors in their state. Other letters can be written to respected Republicans who might have some influence, who those Electors might respect.

One argument that might be persuasive is that Trump is erratic and irrational and likely to fail in a manner that will reflect very badly on the Republican Party. His errors and his poor judgment will be the party’s fault forever. The Republicans now own all three branches of government. They will own whatever unfolds whether they intended it or not.

Many conservatives have already disowned him. And are continuing to after the election.

The story from SLATE

Folks in the redder parts of the country tend to revere America’s military. You might inform these Republican in the Electoral College that our nation’s military rate climate change as one of the greatest security threats America faces today.

The story about the security threat from global warming via Scientific American

If Trump is inaugurated there are other things we’ll need to do. But let’s try to stop him before we get to that point.

Some therapeutic humor to be read while listening to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor

A bit of humor by Paul Rudnick in the New Yorker. Enjoy.

And on the lighter side, FoxNews goes meta while trying to back itself out of the story about their cowardly candidate fleeing from the stage because he was afraid of an anti Trump Republican holding a sign while being beaten up by Trump supporters.

Today Fox explained that this evil non-Trump Republican was even more evil than anyone thought because he had been engaged in voter fraud for the past 14 years, casting absentee votes for his dead mother. Fortunately the Guardian found and interviewed his mother, and she was indeed alive and eligible to vote.

The point being, as Fox has known from the start (and Trump has done with great skill), when one lie doesn’t work replace it with a larger one and repeat as often as necessary.

If you really want to listen to the song too, here it is.

Romney's Party Boat Flew A Cayman Islands Flag

In Tampa there are a lot of exclusive parties where the super rich meet to lay plans for a post-Obama tax climate. It was interesting to learn that the Romney party yacht at the GOP Convention flies a Cayman Islands flag. What's the message here? ABC broke this story.

"I think it's ironic they do this aboard a yacht that doesn't even pay its taxes," said a woman who lives aboard a much smaller boat moored at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina.

Romney defends his secret bank accounts in tax havens, saying: “There was no reduction -- not one dollar reduction in taxes -- by virtue of having an account in Switzerland or a Cayman Islands investment.” Why not keep his millions in American banks then? And why are these places––the Caymans, Switzerland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Luxembourg––called "tax havens"? Romney's words don't square with common sense or Americans' sense of fairness. This story appeared in the LATimes.

If you want to look more closely at Romney's complex tax evasions, Gawker has posted the most complete information about Romney's tax schemes online.

Gawker's John Cook: "Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company."

All of this may explain Romney's nervous chuckle on the stump.

But as much as we focus on Romney's tax secrecy, it's his plans for our taxes which ought to concern us most. His plan would lower his own already very low tax rate and put the burden onto the rest of us who work for a living. The story appeared in the Washington Post.

Romney responded to the criticism, but his response didn't add up either. A good analysis appeared in the Post.

There's also a very well researched analysis in the August Vanity Fair magazine.

There's a lot here about his various offshore schemes, but the most mystifying may be his IRA account.

"Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?"

How indeed.

Andrew Sullivan, a died-in-the-wool conservative finds the tax evasions of rich people like Romney to be repugnant. (Should we rename them The Repugnant Party?)

Sullivan: "Conservatives, it seems to me, should care about all of America, rather than seceding from it. Social and economic inequality are dangerous threats to social stability and democratic legitimacy. That is a conservative belief - and one utterly alien to the fanatics who now run one of our two major parties. If conservatism is to recover, this version of the GOP must be defeated. It's the only language they understand: the language of power." Amen. Remove this Republican Party and give us back the one Eisenhower presided over.

Tax evasion isn't the only theory about Romney's secret taxes. The other theory, reported in the Guardian newspaper, is that Romney is hiding evidence of voter fraud. Was he really living in his son's basement when he voted in Massachusetts? With six large houses do you really think he lived most of the year in a basement? With six houses it has to be a lot of work establishing residency.

How the GOP is Taking Away Our Right to Vote

During Reagan's rise to power Paul Weyrich made a speech disparaging good government and urging Republicans to make it harder for Americans to vote because the fewer the voters the more Republicans get elected. Paul Weyrich shaped the modern Republican Party around this subversive idea, wrapped it in the flag and went on to found the Heritage Foundation and other antidemocratic groups.

It's still happening. Republicans are attacking voting rights with all the billions of their monied allies. The goal is to reduce our democracy to a plutocracy, in which only the rich can decide policy, in which the rich evade taxes and enact laws to take rights away from workers, suppressing wages as well as voting rights. Imagine a world before Theodore Roosevelt. The bookends of this Republican coup d'etat are voter suppression and billionaires dominating politics via the recent Citizens United decision of the Republican flank of the Supreme Court. Pure politics.

This short video tells the story of an elderly woman's long hard effort to get the GOP-mandated voter ID.

This well-known Tennessee Democrat who left office in 2011 was deleted from the voting rolls in the district he represented for years. If it can happen to him it can happen to anyone.

An 86 year-old veteran found himself barred from voting on Super Tuesday. One of the groups most targeted by Republican voter purges are the elderly.

Who's doing this and how is it being done? It's being done deliberately and concertedly nationwide. The GOP and its corporate allies, notably the multibillionaire Koch brothers and their organization ALEC, which writes voter suppression laws, invites state legislators on junkets to sunny resorts and instructs them how to get their laws enacted. Legislation by remote control.

The actual plan by ALEC to suppress voting state by state, as written by the Koch brothers and their corporate cronies.

A report from Mother Jones magazine

Voter suppression is being prosecuted in a few places, but the effort to hunt down nonexistent "fraudulent voters" is far more aggressive and widespread and it's been legislated and funded by Republicans. But voter fraud is a phony issue, a pretext.

This article is from Washington Monthly.

This is from American Prospect.

How big is this voter fraud boogeyman the Republicans are scaring everybody about? After an expensive investigation in Ohio, it turned out to have happened in fewer than one MILLIONTH of ONE PERCENT of all votes cast. and this is what the Republican Party and ALEC are using to disenfranchise millions of voters. Phantom crimes are useful to right wing politicians. imagined crime frightens people into giving away their rights. And again, there are billions of corporate dollars behind this.

This report from the Brennan Center lays out the pathetic and transparent cynicism behind the GOP's voter purges and voter suppression campaign nationwide. They want power back and don't care whose rights they trample to get there.

GOP Effort to Shut Down Voting

Republicans are moving aggressively all across the country to make it harder for people to vote. The effort deliberately targets the poor, urban voters, young voters, students and people of color. You can read more about it here.

(The Republicans have a funny reason for what they're doing. See below.)

I keep returning to this, but it's crucial and very few Americans know about it. Back in 1980 Paul Weyrich stated the longterm strategy of the Republican Party–––Make it harder for people to vote. (Here's the evidence. They filmed Weyrich's speech.) Prevent people from voting. Shrink the electorate. Shrink the democracy. Shut the American people out of decisions... unless they agree with Paul Weyrich––and are rich and white and right-wing and "Christian" enough.

Killing our democracy was the best way to guarantee Republican domination. Domination was and continues to be their goal.

This came on the heels of the GOP's southern strategy, designed to gather in all the white voters angry about civil rights, and keep them angry.

What's ironic is, the same party that sought to capture the poor angry white vote then set about limiting all voting, especially among households earning less than a few hundred thousand a year.

Doing so while waving a flag made it appear patriotic. But the goals embraced by the Republican Party since the late 70s are deeply antidemocratic.

While worshipping the founding fathers they have pushed an agenda that is fundamentally opposed to the ideals the founders put on paper.

If you don't think voter fraud is the biggest threat to democracy today, you should watch this report from Stephen Colbert. Laughing is permitted, but the GOP isn't a joke, it's controlling America right now.