God bless the public servants and whistle blowers who are bringing this to light.
Note that even 1% of this tsunami of treason would have stained the American left fatally, back in the 1950s. And Stalinists tried! Read about how - in 1947 - the democrats and liberalism were saved and became the primary forces for containing Russian expansionism and communism.
Remind your mad uncles that their hero -- Vladimir Putin -- called the fall of the USSR "history's greatest tragedy." If there are any sane or patriotic Americans left in the GOP, now is their time to snap out of the trance. No more excuses or rationalizations. If you watch Fox, you are clutching Moscow-brewed incantations.
== Let's Make a Deal ==
Donald Trump tried his mafia tactic -- take hostages and hurt people till you get what you want -- but what worked in casinos and organized crime hasn't worked once in government. So ask yourself, fellah, what would get you your wall?
Simple: first remove hostages from consideration by fixing DACA and refugee families.
Only then make an actual political deal. Democrats should offer him not $5.7 billion, but TEN billions for big, beautiful walls, if he and McConnell agree to pass the anti-corruption House bill HR1, which would reduce cheating in American politics. End gerrymandering. Enforce transparency of donors. Offer matching funds for small donations. And combat the open war against our institutions by foreign powers.
They can't allow it -- without cheating and corruption, today's GOP would collapse overnight. So go ahead and make the offer!
== Party of Cheaters ==
What happens when the U.S. states – our “laboratories of democracy” become tools of oppression and cheating? Throughout history, the power invested in the states has allowed all sorts of anti-democratic abuses to flourish, e.g. the Jim Crow system. This article is interesting… but ignores how much “laboratory” work is done by the other side, where Blue States are pioneering better election laws, support for science, and getting out of the insane War on Drugs.
If Obama and Holder succeed in arm-twisting Maryland and Illinois to abandon gerrymandering, that horrific, treason-level crime – rejected by Democratic voters in most blue states -- will be one purely associated with the Republican Party. No longer the GOP but POC – Party of Cheaters.
Doomed to repeat history? You might be interested in the “Know Nothing” Party that surged briefly in the 1850s. Volcanically populist, “it was primarily anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and hostile to immigration, starting originally as a secret society. The movement briefly emerged as a major political party in the form of the American Party. (See the diCaprio movie "Gangs of New York.) Adherents to the movement were to reply "I know nothing" when asked about its specifics by outsiders, thus providing the group with its common name.” It didn’t fit any modern “left-right” spectrum… (in fact, neither do democrats and republicans today, since entrepreneurial markets do far better under the former and the GOP is the party of fiscal-mad deficits feeding into feudalism.) Notably, the Know Nothings favored more rights for women, amid a general agenda of prejudice and hostility toward people who “know.” One of these maps onto today’s confederatism. Guess which.
An interesting proposal for how to fix the Supreme Court in ways that will improve its process and outputs while returning us to a less partisan approach that is more sagacious.
== Provocative evidence ==
"It’s amazing enough that any U.S. president would retrospectively endorse the Soviet invasion (of Afghanistan). What’s even more amazing is that he would do so using the very same falsehoods originally invoked by the Soviets themselves: “terrorists” and “bandit elements," writes David Frum in The Atlantic.
Read this. Aloud to your aunts. (Your uncles are too far gone.) Putin's parrot now completes the passage of the American Confederacy 180 degrees into a cult defending the USSR. "(Putin) cares a lot about the image of the U.S.S.R. In 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as ...“the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” He later vowed revenge on Clinton, Obama and Soros for "stealing the Ukraine" from Russia's rightful sphere of dominance. All of these are now demons to the mad-treasonous US right. who devote themselves to service to Lenin-raised KGB mafiosi.
Oh, Putin is a genius. his new Iron Curtain stretches from Moscow, Crimea and Ankara through Syria, Iraq and Tehran to the Straits of Hormuz, where his puppet has ordered a vulnerable US carrier strike group to serve as a sitting duck temptation to trigger a US-Iran "war" that can only be won by Russia. (Despite our hard-won energy independence from economic dependance on that awful region.)
We may never know how many attempted pretext incitements the Navy has quietly dealt with, frustrating those eager for a "Tonkin" or "Gleiwitz." But God bless the brave, skilled men and women out there with presidentially assigned targets on their chests.
In the 1860s, the Confederacy never got its desperately wanted foreign ally. In this phase, the confederacy has embraced treason-complicity with foreign fascists and mafias actively waging war against us. This truly evil coalition has taken Washington. We - the Union - may need to march to the sea.
Read this. Aloud to your aunts. (Your uncles are too far gone.) Putin's parrot now completes the passage of the American Confederacy 180 degrees into a cult defending the USSR. "(Putin) cares a lot about the image of the U.S.S.R. In 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as ...“the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” He later vowed revenge on Clinton, Obama and Soros for "stealing the Ukraine" from Russia's rightful sphere of dominance. All of these are now demons to the mad-treasonous US right. who devote themselves to service to Lenin-raised KGB mafiosi.
Oh, Putin is a genius. his new Iron Curtain stretches from Moscow, Crimea and Ankara through Syria, Iraq and Tehran to the Straits of Hormuz, where his puppet has ordered a vulnerable US carrier strike group to serve as a sitting duck temptation to trigger a US-Iran "war" that can only be won by Russia. (Despite our hard-won energy independence from economic dependance on that awful region.)
We may never know how many attempted pretext incitements the Navy has quietly dealt with, frustrating those eager for a "Tonkin" or "Gleiwitz." But God bless the brave, skilled men and women out there with presidentially assigned targets on their chests.
In the 1860s, the Confederacy never got its desperately wanted foreign ally. In this phase, the confederacy has embraced treason-complicity with foreign fascists and mafias actively waging war against us. This truly evil coalition has taken Washington. We - the Union - may need to march to the sea.
== Saving civilization from high debt and slow growth? ==
I confess an ulterior motive for praising this cogent article by Tim Morgan. It begins with daunting news -- it's not only in the developed world that prosperity growth has stalled. The fast-rising upper half of the developing world has been the engine of the world economy for 20+ years, but that boiler is apparently cooling. And when you lack growth, then the fast-rising rate of debt - fueling rentier asset bubbles - becomes more than just a problem. It becomes a poison.
(To be clear, the Republican Party raved that Supply Side ("voodoo") tax gifts to the rich would both stimulate growth and reduce public debt. How many times must you prove 100% diametrically wrong before you lose credibility?)
Morgan is not without hope. There are ways to fix this, and they are rooted in what's worked ever-better for 200 years... entrepreneurial enterprise that is kept truly competitive by thoughtful-adaptive regulation that limits inevitable oligarchic cheating, of the sort that Adam Smith denounced and that our parents in the Greatest Generation wisely outlawed. And so we get to my favorite paragraph:
"The good news is that we’re not going into this new era wholly lacking in knowledge. The trick is to understand what that knowledge really is. Keynes teaches us how to manage demand – or can teach us this, so long as we don’t turn him into a cheerleader for ever bigger public spending. Likewise – if we can refrain from caricaturing him as a rabid advocate of unregulated and unscrupulous greed – Adam Smith tells us that competition, freely, fairly and transparently conducted, is the great engine of innovation. More humbly, or perhaps less theoretically, but surely more pertinently, experience tells us that the “mixed economy” of optimised private and public provision works far better than any extreme."
Several members of my blog community have linked to this, asking if I wrote it originally, so consistent is it with my own drums -- the study of Adam Smith and fiscally responsible Keynsianism, along with the spectacular success story of public investment in research, education, health and infrastructure, which can only be denied by the hysterically delusional.
No I didn't ghost write that -- (I lived in Britain for a couple of years, but would never spell "optimised" that way, shudder.) But I do recommend having a look. Tim Morgan continues:
"Going forward, we should anticipate the collapse of the “everything bubble” in asset prices, and should hope that we don’t, this time, go so far into economic denial as to think we can cure this with a purely financial “fix”. I’m fond of saying that “trying to fix an energy-based economy with financial fixes is like trying to cure an ailing pot-plant with a spanner”. We should understand popular concerns, which seem to point unequivocally towards a mixed economy, extensive redistribution and an economic nationalism that needs to be channelled, not simply vilified."
"Going forward, we should anticipate the collapse of the “everything bubble” in asset prices, and should hope that we don’t, this time, go so far into economic denial as to think we can cure this with a purely financial “fix”. I’m fond of saying that “trying to fix an energy-based economy with financial fixes is like trying to cure an ailing pot-plant with a spanner”. We should understand popular concerns, which seem to point unequivocally towards a mixed economy, extensive redistribution and an economic nationalism that needs to be channelled, not simply vilified."
None of this will happen unless the last remaining Knowledge Castes who cling to the mad right finally acknowledge what the scientists, teachers, journalists, civil servants, skilled workers, and almost every fact-using profession - including the maligned "deep state" protectors - all know. That the worldwide mafia-oligarchy is not friend of anything we value. They are the Olde Feudal Enemy of every type of freedom and progress. And it will take all of us to achieve what the Greatest Generation did, a whole human lifetime ago Save civilization.
== Again, the greatest judo move Pelosi could pull... ==
While the reform package that will be passed by Democrats for the U.S. House of Representatives consists of all good things that will help improve ethics, efficiency and fairness, it's still fairly minor stuff. Democrats should pass rules that really change the dynamic, like permanently giving some power to the minority!
Why do this, when that minority party is the Republicans? Because Democrats will be out again, sooner or later, silenced and impotent... unless they set precedents now!
== Again, the greatest judo move Pelosi could pull... ==
While the reform package that will be passed by Democrats for the U.S. House of Representatives consists of all good things that will help improve ethics, efficiency and fairness, it's still fairly minor stuff. Democrats should pass rules that really change the dynamic, like permanently giving some power to the minority!
Why do this, when that minority party is the Republicans? Because Democrats will be out again, sooner or later, silenced and impotent... unless they set precedents now!
My top proposal? Give every member of the House one subpoena per term, that can compel anyone to testify for 2 hours before a committee.
Sure, some GOPpers will use such a power to irritate and pursue grudges (virtually the only use to which they put subpoenas and hearings, when they were majority!) So? That means they'll be approving this minority right, institutionalizing it. (Maybe make that vow a necessary part of using that subpoena.) But other Republican legislators will wait, hoping to use their one subpoena to benefit the home district. And why not? Pulling them away from their caucus?
We've seen how the lack of such a minority power kept Congress from meaningfully exercising any meaningful oversight, when the only grownups (Democrats) had zero power to investigate anything at all. Envision how just 200 hours of such testimony, this last term, would have empowered Dems to apply accountability, even from a minority.
We've seen how the lack of such a minority power kept Congress from meaningfully exercising any meaningful oversight, when the only grownups (Democrats) had zero power to investigate anything at all. Envision how just 200 hours of such testimony, this last term, would have empowered Dems to apply accountability, even from a minority.
The crux: letting goppers vent blowhard-steam when they are in minority is a small price for letting demmies apply real accountability, when they have their minority turn.
It would also vest individual members with a measure of autonomy that might possibly lift their gaze from pure partisanship.
It's one of several proposals in my FACT Act.
And finally....
Fascinating. During the harsh winter of 1776, in the wake of George Washington’s disaster at New York, but before they could learn about his triumphs at Trenton and Princeton, volunteer soldiers at Fort Ticonderoga fought a brief, one hour battle between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts bivouacs. More of a nasty brawl, because, despite slashing sabers and blazing muskets, no one died and order was re-established. Never knew this!
