Worrisome directions for democracy

See what one of our top Paladins for democracy – Lawrence Lessig – and his colleagues have been doing, over at Equal Citizen. In one case, they are pushing to enable presidential electors to vote their conscience. 

Speaking of whom… The coming Unrig Summit - March in Nashville - will thrash out how to "un-rig" our democracy, eliminating cheats that have crept in or been crammed in by cheaters. Wish I could present my *simple* fix for gerrymandering that answers every excuse used by John Roberts to sidestep the issue. ("Minimal Overlap") or my FACT Act. But my Futurist Cred, while substantial, is spread too thin. But Lawrence Lessig and others will be there, standing up for our bold revolution against 6000 years of feudalism.

One fight-back just occurred to me. For ages it's been proposed that black citizens of Alabama move next door to Mississippi, especially to a few carefully chosen counties where some millionaire or NGO surreptitiously buys-up inexpensive property, using now gerrymandered districts to their advantage. Same with S. Carolina and Georgia.But even easier. A well-sited Google Research Center in Wyoming could draw in enough other companies to an advanced research town where tens of thousands might stay 6 months for voting residency and... You work it out. What? Wyoming would object?

== No Witnesses ==

Your “no-collusion!” uncle would have been in hysterics by now, if Obama had done 0.01% of any of this. There are no detailed records of five personal meetings President Donald Trump has had with Russian President Vladimir Putin -- Trump has gone to "extraordinary lengths" to keep the specifics of his conversations with his Russian counterpart under wraps.

“On at least one occasion, President Trump took possession of his interpreter’s notes after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. officials said. There is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with Putin over the past two years, the officials said.”

Remind your mad uncles that Vladimir Putin called the fall of the USSR the “greatest tragedy in history.” And we’re supposed to trust Lenin-raised ex-KGB agents turned billionaire mafia oligarchs, because a pussy-grabbing slumlord and his casino-owner pals say so? 

The time has come to call these uncles and confederates by their true name. Commies.

== Short Takes you need to know ==

ROUNDUP!  Too many news items! You may have seen some of these, but you need to know all of them. Like:

- National Security Adviser John Bolton called on the Pentagon to provide military options to strike Iran, exactly as I said he would, as Trump desperately seeks a distraction and Putin plans to scoop up all the prizes. (No other outcome from a US-Iran “war” is remotely possible.) But with our protector caste fully alert, it will be up to Putin to supply some clever pretext. Beware fellah. Our folks are clever, too. God bless the U.S. Navy.

And more…

- … like Whole Foods snapping up a hundred defunct Sears/KMarts (see this map) giving Amazon a huge footprint. Especially ironic since, if Sears had just held on to its 100 year old catalogue two more years, in 1993, Sears would have been Amazon and owned half the planet, by now. Whoever made that catalogue decision goes down in history as the stupidest-ever manager. Hire Science Fiction author consultants!

 - …. I thought this was a joke about heavenly punishment… “Fire damages MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN studios in D.C. as Mike Pence scheduled to appear.” But yeah, they are in the same building. And it took an accident for us to learn this weird coincidence.

- …like “A senior Russian official has canceled a planned visit to the United States, claiming he feared a second civil war being waged by opposing political forces there.”

"Rogozin is not the first to raise the prospect of a second Civil War amid the polarized political climate in the U.S. In June, former Trump adviser Roger Stone warned of a potential civil war in an interview with Newsweek and, days later, University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Reich argued that "serious social unrest" may be on the way, even if an actual civil war remained unlikely. Later that month, Republican Congressman Steve King tweeted, "America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry" and "After that comes Ft. Sumter," referring to the Confederate raid on the U.S. fort that sparked the Civil War. Amid all this talk of Civil War, a poll that same month found 31 percent of likely U.S. voters thought the prospect of a second such conflict breaking out in the next five years was likely."

Addendum: Note where I have long spoken of this, only we are in phase EIGHT of a culture struggle that goes back to 1778.

By the way, Harpers Ferry was more than just an abolitionist radical trying to lead a slave revolt. It was retaliation for 8 years of raids by squadrons of southern irregular cavalry that had been rampaging across northern states since 1852, burning and kidnapping and even killing, supported by a southern-owned federal government, causing northerners to radicalize, arm themselves and restart their militias… and elect Abraham Lincoln, who Fox would today dismiss as a “leftist.”

And more…

- …like there’s a lot of talk about Tucker Carlson’s veer toward populism in some of his rants, on Fox. He appears to be demanding an accounting from Wall Street and other uber oligarchs, for screwing middle America. How populist!  Only… Tucker Carlson knows his job. It is to stay slightly ahead of the curve and steer some of it. He knows that white, lower-middle-class America is on the verge of finally realizing they've been screwed by oligarchy’s Republican-Foxite tools. Instead of even trying to defend oligarchy, anymore, their one chance is to mix it with other "elites" and keep just a teensy bit more rage aimed at the "Deep State" and at intellectuals and Fake News and every other fact-using profession.

Were he sincere, Carlson would have started not with Wall Street, but the anti-science Denialist Cult that might kill us all. Or else start with Vladimir Putin. He won’t. He can’t.

… aaaand the Keystone Pipeline, abruptly re-ignited by Trump upon entering office, is now revealed to be heavily engaged with a Putin-ally Russian oligarch. And you’re surprised that the same people who shrieked over a Canadian Uranium company owned by Russians being distantly linked to Hillary Clinton have nothing to say about this? 

== President Pence ==

Members of the pundit-o-sphere keep softballing the notion of a Pence Presidency. This op-edder in the NY Times,for example, jests about Pence not dining alone with any unchaperoned woman, but at least they’d bring pets back to the White House! Sure, the Pences are homophobes, but history has left them in dust and besides, he spent 12 years in Congress without passing a single piece of legislation. So what? Me, worry? Clearly noxious but likely harmlessly ineffectual, compared to Putin-puppet Donald Trump, right?

Carumba. There is one huge fact about Mike Pence that we are PC-banned from ever raising or mentioning – his devoutly central and all-consuming theology. The wing of the Republican Party that dominates it now -- except in areas that the oligarchy cares about, like taxes and the environment -- is Dominionism, a radicalized branch of fundamentalist Protestantism that has made the Book of Revelation the sun that its members revolve around. We are talking Handmaid’s Tale levels of fiery-apocalypse fixation. Moreover, if you corner a dominionist with good, leading questions, he or she will proudly avow to praying daily for doom-events described BoR to come to pass, and as soon as possible.

You need to educate yourselves. Learn what that means. This no longer has anything remotely to do with a bearded-beaded, sandal-wearing, forgiveness-preaching ecumenical-socialist Galilean rabbi. This is what they believe… and desperately want, ASAP. 

Torture and pain for 99% of their neighbors in this real world, followed by their damnation and exponentiated torment for all eternity. An end to all democracy. An end to all argument and competition, all ambition and curiosity. An end to any and all further generations of children. And a clear, explicit end to the United States of America. This is no exaggeration. It is literally and explicitly what they seek. And yes, there comes a point when theology is acceptably a subject for voter consideration, especially when allocating the keys to nuclear weapons.

Right now, much to Vladimir Putin’s dismay, the Trump White House is vile, but ineffectual. It leaks like a sieve and the entire American Protector Caste is on alert. Take him down? You’ll replace all that with a Pence Administration that’s packed with utterly disciplined dominionists, crooning smoothly to draw relieved military and intel officers back from the cold… while seeking implacably to achieve their one and only goal. The literal end of our world.

Oh, you who so desperately howl for the impeachment of Donald Trump, you have cause! Only consider Trump’s impeachment insurance. A fellow like Ol’ Two Scoops will demand company when he falls. If he goes down, so do we all.

== States of Emergency ==

Interesting article from The Atlantic about states of emergency and the vague and very broad powers that might be within reach of an un-“stable genius.”

“Unlike the modern constitutions of many other countries, which specify when and how a state of emergency may be declared and which rights may be suspended, the U.S. Constitution itself includes no comprehensive separate regime for emergencies. Those few powers it does contain for dealing with certain urgent threats, it assigns to Congress, not the president. For instance, it lets Congress suspend the writ of habeas corpus—that is, allow government officials to imprison people without judicial review—“when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” and “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

And: “Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976. Under this law, the president still has complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration—but he must specify in the declaration which powers he intends to use, issue public updates if he decides to invoke additional powers, and report to Congress on the government’s emergency-related expenditures every six months. The state of emergency expires after a year unless the president renews it, and the Senate and the House must meet every six months while the emergency is in effect “to consider a vote” on termination…. By any objective measure, the law has failed. Thirty states of emergency are in effect today—several times more than when the act was passed.” (Hey, dig the diamond studded cufflinks, in one of the images!)

Elizabeth Goiten goes on to describe the powers apparently given by a 1942 law that might let a president use an emergency declaration to control the Internet. Even scarier: “The Insurrection Act of 1807 provides the necessary authority. As amended over the years, it allows the president to deploy troops upon the request of a state’s governor or legislature to help put down an insurrection within that state.”

Mind you, this is the sort of imagery that rightwing nut-jobs howled about Obama’s intent to bring in U.N. Black Helicopters and set up concentration camps. And anyone who believes that today’s U.S. military officer corps would go along with such things has been watching too much Info Wars and/or The Handmaid’s Tale.

Though yes, I have relentlessly called upon US citizens and others to read up on past use of pretexts for seizing emergency powers. 

The Tonkin Gulf and Gleiwitz incidents might be repeated in the Straits of Hormuz, by a president desperate for a nice, tidy U.S.-Iran “war” that would distract at home while giving his Moscow master all the marbles. The Reichstag Fire should come to mind, too. It certainly was on Margaret Atwood’s when she portrayed a fundamentalist terror strike on DC then giving them an excuse for a putsch.

And now add Venezuela.

The article ends with a similar, scary scenario. But I think our skilled professionals would protect us from anything so blatant. I am less sure that they’ll be so vigilant if the same thing is tried by a smoothly-soothing-voiced (and spectacularly more-dangerous) President Mike Pence.