Category: False Patriotism

If Brett Kavanaugh Is Still Working As A SCOTUS Judge, That Means The Rule Of Law Is NOT Working

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The Rule Of Law is kinda like a soap bubble made of iron. In and of itself, it’s incredibly solid — it’s made of iron, isn’t it? But it’s still got the delicacy of a bubble. There’s no “slightly popped”. There’s popped and not popped.

The Rule Of Law is a radical notion if you think about it — it survives only by our mutual agreement to follow it. The chaos consuming us now flows directly from the fact that while some of us still do follow The Rule Of Law, one of our two political parties has revealed that they don’t (and never really did). The Rule Of Law says if you break it, you pay.

It says everyone gets treated equally by The Rule Of Law. And everyone who breaks it — they, too, will be treated exactly the same regardless of how many zeroes there are on their weekly pay stub. Brett Kavanaugh was NOT treated equally at any point during his confirmation hearing. Brett, rather, was shown extraordinary privilege.

He was allowed to perjure himself in fact — and even get belligerent about it as if HE were the one who’d been sexually assaulted. It doesn’t get more (white) privileged than that.

The Rule Of Law says if you lie, cheat or steal to achieve something, you haven’t achieved it — rather, you’ve broken the law and should be punished for it. If you broke the law, say, to become president — it means you’re not actually the president. How could you be? You didn’t meet the basic requirement of “winning an election”. Cheating does NOT equal winning — EVER.

When we finally get to do a deep, deep dive into Mitch McConnell’s actions leading up to the election (especially Moscow Mitch’s refusal to let We The People in on the secret that Moscow was putting its thumb on our election scale for Trump), we’ll have to pick apart Mitch’s real reasons for denying Merrick Garland so much as a hearing. That unprecedented SCOTUS seat grab was DESIGNED to steal the judiciary as a means to force permanent minority rule down the country’s throat. Was it illegal? That will depend on what we nail Mitch on.

By all rights, Merrick Garland should be sitting where Neil Gorsuch sits. We The People voted for Barack Obama — and part of why we voted for him was so he could — while still in office — choose SCOTUS judges to the liking of HIS voters. Mitch’s bullshit about wanting the American voter to get to choose — one has to wonder if Mitch knew anything about the machinations Russia was gearing up to throw at us.

Then again — in Mitch’s “defense”, he did say that if Hillary had won, he’d have refused to fill any vacancies — even if every single justice suddenly dropped dead.

The Rule Of Law says thieves — after they’re caught, prosecuted and convicted — do NOT get to keep the loot. In the case of Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS seat, you don’t get to gut the “advise and consent” part of the process — lying through your teeth every step of the way — and then KEEP the SCOTUS seat. It sets a terrible precedent otherwise.

When the whole point of the exercise is destruction of the judiciary in order to install permanent minority rule? It makes the thievery extra rotten.

As we learned from the NYTimes today, the White House killed the FBI’s investigation into Deborah Ramirez’s corroborated accusations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh. If the FBI had interviewed the 25+ witnesses and filed that report, Brett Kavanaugh would not be a SCOTUS judge today — that had to have been the GOP’s calculus.

If our highest court is tainted by corruption, it ceases to be viable. The only way to make sure it is and remains a bastion of fairness would be to expunge every bit of Trump or McConnell influence. In the end, it should be as simple as this: If Trump cheated to become POTUS — which he absolutely did — then he has no authority to “be” POTUS. Not being POTUS, he has no authority to nominate anyone for anything.

Not a single Trump nominee can stand because the man who nominated was not AUTHORIZED to do it. I know — chaos. I don’t give a shit.

The Rule Of Law is all or nothing.

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This Is That Point In The Movie Where The Villains Decide To Go All Out…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

No writer could have written what we’re still living through and gotten away with it. No one would have bought it — way too unbelievable. Yet here we are.

Perversely, the villains in this piece operate by the exact same rules by which a Bond Villain operates — power & money cos why not? With Vlad Putin, throw in a heavy dose of Russian nationalism and old fashioned Crusader-thinking.

With Donald Trump, it’s all greed. Greed and a sociopathological personality desperate for daddy-love that he can never have.

With Mike Pence, it’s the power lust of the religious charlatan. He can never be a primary villain. He’s too empty.

With Mitch McConnell, it’s power & money but more than that? It’s the Revenge Of The Nerd. Same goes with Stephen Miller. Mitch is a “man” insecure in his manhood (for shits n giggles, shout “SODOMY” right in Mitch’s face and see how he reacts). You know he was picked on relentlessly in every schoolyard he ever sat in — unfortunately. Most people deal with it through therapy or alcohol. Moscow Mitch had the Constitution at his disposal — and he disposed with it.

Back during the 2016 Republican Convention (it was reported FFS!), current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously walked into a meeting of the Republican muckety-mucks and said (this is his direct quote): “There’s …there’s two people, I think, Putin pays: [California Representative Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump … [laughter] … swear to God.”

Instead of responding, “If you really think that, we should call the FBI right this second!”, then-Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan “…immediately responded: ‘This is an off-the-record … [laughter] … NO LEAKS … [laughter] … alright?!”. That is literally what he said.

The Republican hierarchy KNEW. They might not have known all, but they knew some. If they knew ANY, they were obligated to pick up the phone and report it. As we’re learning though — too slowly for our own collective good — is that lots of these Republicans were in Mitch’s boat — they’d already been bought out themselves by the Russians.

When Russia gives you money, it comes with strings. When Russia gives you an aluminum factory and hundreds of millions of dollars, it comes with ropes.

Just like Donald Trump will never pivot, neither will the Republican Party. They can’t now. They committed to Mitch McConnell’s plan (imagined not by him but by the Koch-Mercer money behind him) to install permanent minority rule in America first by j=hijacking the judiciary. Can you say “Merrick Garland”?

If The Rule Of Law is going to be truly viable again then there can be no exceptions to it. Any Republican who even suspected what his co-partiests were up to was legally obligated to report it. They didn’t and we have to ask “why?” Whose interests were they protecting — when they took an oath to uphold the Constitution’s?

I fear, Republicans having nowhere to go but prison, that this ending will indeed be like one of those Bond movies where it takes 80 shots at the villain to finally kill him. It already feels that way, doesn’t it? The bombshells going off every day — the reveals of staggering corruption and debauched greed — that never result in the bad guys even breaking stride — it really does feel like bullets bouncing off a bad guy’s magical force field of pure evil.

It’s wired into our culture that just before it’s too late, a white knight rides to the rescue. We’ve convinced ourselves that the good guys ultimately win in the end. That’s all ooga-booga we made up.

Here in Real Life, truly anything can happen. Get too sucked into “normalcy” and you become the frog who gets boiled to death. The reason Uber Villains go for broke in the end is because something inside them suspects — if they can just outlast the good guy — they’ll triumph. It will be up to We The People to stop them. Because we’re the Good Guy.

I’m old enough to remember when speaking or writing in these terms would have been hyperbole on steroids. But then, I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t write this story and get away with it.

Dear America: We Are Living Through World War III And Don’t Even Know It

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who thinks it takes bombs and bullets to win a war will lose every single war they ever wage going forward. Right now, that would be us — still thinking that Donald Trump is anything other than a literal weapon, fully loaded and pointed directly at our heads.

If Russia wanted to (hell, a bunch of countries could probably do this — Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Israel), they could shut down our electric grid today — and leave us in the dark, disconnected from the internet and social media and our lives. We’d sue for peace in a heartbeat. That’s a whole war waged — successfully — without a single shot being fired.

We know for a fact (it’s in the Mueller Report and it’s part of the reason he eats prison dinner every night) that Paul Manafort gave Oleg Deripaska (oligarch & “Pal O’ Putin”) proprietary polling data for Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan & Pennsylvania. We know for a fact that that polling data was processed inside the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) then weaponized — and returned to those states (PA/WI/MI especially) in the form of highly personalized Facebook ads that showed up (especially) on the FB pages of African American voters.

The point of the exercise is voter suppression — the use of propaganda to dissuade a voter from voting. Every voter dissuaded from doing their duty as a citizen (think ANY of these voters vote Republican?) is as good as a vote for their opponent. The fact that such activities aren’t already massively illegal is a testament to how much Republican corruption we’ve already normalized and how deeply institutional racism runs.

Like the skilled cold warrior he is, Putin knows how to make big plays in the secret realm that, strangely, never get any attention.

I’m not the first or only person to see us living in a second Pearl Harbor — in the hour or so before 7:15 when the Japanese Imperial Navy arrived and started attacking us. That however is a painfully ironic description of where we are. Putin & Russia have attacked us from the worst possible direction — from within.

Being unable to beat us economically or technologically — or even ideologically (since Putin’s only ideology is greed, power & corruption), Putin, calling on his mad intelligence officer skills, has declared war on us in the only way available to him — via espionage: info war, cyber war.

We don’t know yet the full extent to which our very perceptions of election 2016 were colored by propaganda, misinformation and disinformation originating from outside the country (Russia but also Saudi Arabia, Israel and who knows where else). How much Hillary Hatred was actually Russia?

As its first act of open war on us, Vlad Putin took the truth out back and busted a cap in its head.

It’s incumbent on us — if we want our Democracy back — to finally see the war that’s been declared on us in secret for the war that it is. More important? We need to see all the Fifth Columnists & outright TRAITORS who’ve thrown in with our enemies — because they saw that as a cynical pathway to permanent power.

I’m talking to YOU, Moscow Mitch McConnell.

That’s the other painful irony — it isn’t just enemies from without who’ve declared war on us, there’s an enemy within. The Extreme Christian Right and its money — Kochs, Mercers et al — saw that the demographics were going to mean an eventual end to their hold on this country. They declared cultural & political war on the majority — and, using gerrymandering & voter suppression, have done everything they can to install permanent minority rule — THEY being the minority.

That, too is undeclared war. It doesn’t make it any less real — or its effects any more painful and permanent.

“Conservative Thinking” Is An Oxymoron

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

What’s in a name? Everything. I’m a Progressive. I prefer the term “Progressive” because it’s more descriptive than “liberal” which (being less descriptive) can be twisted around to mean even its opposite. As a “Progressive”, my political philosophy is all about progress and progressing into the future.

Conservatives, by the same token, want to CONSERVE exactly as their name says. Considering as the future doesn’t exist, you can’t want to “conserve” it. So, what conservatives want to conserve is the present but, really, the past. To most conservatives, the present is already unacceptable.

Whereas progressives set their minds to creatively solving future problems, innovating wherever necessary, conservatives set their minds to taking us backward in time — to a time when white men ruled without fear of being questioned. We’re talking the 50’s — the 1850’s.

You don’t have to think to want to make that happen. If you could think to begin with, you’d see the impossibility of the task. But it’s not about what is, it’s about what “should be” in the conservative’s mind. And, to them, what should be is a world where they rule with total cultural and political hegemony.

It’s hardly a coincidence that, in America, conservative thinking is deeply racist. Conservatives have convinced themselves that THEY are “American Exceptionalism”. Talk about bullshit. The United States was the first country ever to be a product of immigration instead of long-term tribal occupancy. White men may have made up the rule-making class but that wasn’t because others weren’t interested. White men made the rules. White men benefited more than any other group from those rules.

A typical white, Christian conservative answer to immigration is to build a wall on the Southern border. Stone age technology to keep people out. Conservative thinking doesn’t care about the root cause of people leaving where they are to come to America. It only cares that they’re here and, so, devises cruel scare tactics to encourage them to leave.

White, Christian conservative thinking doesn’t concern itself with the violence at home that sent all these refugees fleeing north. It doesn’t care that the drug violence terrorizing them was born on the streets of America — Los Angeles especially. Conservative thinking, most of all, wants to moralize on your ass. They want to tell you how superior they are to you.

They’re simply not capable of “Doing Unto Others”. They’re not capable of caring enough. They’re not capable, frankly, of even thinking it.

Yesterday’s Twist – Trump’s Deutsche Bank Loan Docs Were All Co-Signed By Russians – Makes a “President Pelosi” entirely possible.

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

A lot of us have eaten through our stomach linings waiting for Nancy Pelosi to come onboard with impeachment.

On the one hand, how many times does Donald Trump have to violate his oath of office to warrant being held accountable for it? On the other, this is virgin territory: a traitor president beholden to a very hostile foreign power and his equally treasonous political party obstructing justice because they’re complicit while the Main Stream News Media gawps at the whole mess, unable to make sense of it because they can’t imagine the very story they’re supposed to be reporting.

For all their years and experience, Nancy Pelosi nor any Democrat can claim to be relying on experience as they deal with the ongoing crisis that is Donald Trump. None of us has been here before. Anyone looking to the past for answers to this is an idiot. I suspect that what’s driven Madame Speaker’s reticence so far isn’t lack of desire to impeach or lack of will, it’s the stone, cold knowledge of what even beginning the impeachment process will unleash on us all.

I bet Speaker Pelosi knows that a significant chunk of this country simply will not accept the truth about Donald Trump. Their fear of losing white cultural hegemony is so strong and so acute that they will almost certainly become openly seditious. It’s entirely possible that, anticipating this, Speaker Pelosi has sought to make her case to all those people in the fuzzy middle who always need extra convincing to do the right thing).

Or, maybe, alternatively, Speaker Pelosi — having access to more docs & secrets than we realize — has anticipated that timing how & when the big bombs drop could lead not only to Trump’s impeachment in the House, but actual conviction in the Republican-controlled senate. Either Republicans will have to (finally) do the right thing or stand in the glare of explaining their own treason-y attitudes.

I experienced a proud moment about a year ago. I was visiting the East Coast & got to spend some quality time w a niece who works for the government and has a security clearance. She pitched me an idea — how Nancy Pelosi could become POTUS — which I ten tweeted. That tweet, strangely, found its way onto MSNBC’s air as a nutty but cool “What if…?” tossed in at the end of an hour to close it out on a lighter note.

Pelosi’s path is simple and straightforward. Trump gets impeached & convicted and so does Mike Pence. There is no way in hell that Mike Pence becomes POTUS. Remember — Paul Manafort brought Mike Pence to the VP table. Manafort was a criminal working with Russian criminals in order to circumvent the voting will of the American people. Does anyone with the least bit of critical thinking skill not grasp that the LAST person a criminal like Manafort would want to bring into their very criminal tent would be a goody-two-shoes who’d rat them all out the instant he heard Russia was helping Trump win?

Mike Pence is compromised. Deeply. Madame Speaker already knows that, I bet. She may even be anticipating Pence trying to pardon Trump et al if ever he got to be POTUS. Mike Pence can get no closer to being president than his pecker ever gets to a woman (Mother especially). Any move to impeach Trump will have to also impeach Mike Pence.

As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi is third in line of presidential succession. She knows that. She knows how angry a President Pelosi will make some crazy RW-ers. Angry and dangerous. She knows, too, I bet, that if she gets handed the presidency via impeachment and conviction, there will be a backlash — undeserved but inevitable.

We’ve still only just scratched the surface of this epic shit show. I hope our stomachs can take what’s coming.

Dear American Main Stream News Media: There’s A Difference Between “COMPLEX” & “COMPLICATED” — Trump-Russia Is Complex; It Is NOT Complicated…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Let’s try and make this simple. Love is complex but it should never be complicated because the act of loving, itself, is simple (regardless of how complicated some people make it). Same token — the Trump-Russia story. It’s staggeringly complex with a million moving parts and (by design) lots of layers to make connecting all the dots challenging if not impossible.

But the motivations underlying the Trump-Russia story are NOT complicated. It all comes down to GREED.

Nothing complicated about greed.

Vladimir Putin might just be the richest man in the world. That, apparently , is not good enough. He also carries grudges. Being a former cold warrior, Vlad’s been licking his wounds since his beloved Soviet Union bit the dust. Putin grew up a Soviet but a Russian Nationalist first. His dream — restore Greater Russia to its glory years.

There’s another facet to Putin (because he’s a complex character though a simple man: religion. Though he grew up, in theory, a godless communist, Putin sees the Russian Orthodox Church as an essential component of All Things Russian. As this piece from the Catholic Herald pointed out in 2015, “In his speeches [Putin] presents himself as defender of Christian values abandoned by the degenerate West… More recently the president has presented himself in a new role – as the potential saviour of Middle Eastern Christians.” The man thinks he’s a bloody crusader taking back the Holy Land from the filthy Moor.

So — WHY Putin would attack us — 1) National Pride, 2) Religion, and 3) Greed. See? Simple. Complex but simple.

Putin’s a spy by nature. He understands how to run intelligence ops. He knows you need to layer relationships and targets so as to create as much deniability as possible. The espionage world is extremely complex. But its goals are always very very simple. Uncomplicated.

Donald Trump was born a greedy pig and a sociopath. He grew up unloved by a racist, criminal father and a cold mother. He has no capacity for empathy — none. That makes Trump another complex character with uncomplicated motivations. Greed, lust, more greed. Donald Trump is that simple.

The Trump-Russia story has layers of complexity to it. But each layer is uncomplicated. Trump wants a Trump Tower Moscow. He’s been laundering money for Russian mobsters forever (the whole point of his casinos) because Trump is a criminal on pretty much every level. Simple.

Putin wants revenge. He wants all the sanctions lifted. He wanted them lifted especially while Rex Tillerson was still Secretary of State (the whole point of moving Tillerson from Exxon-Mobil to State was so that America would help Putin get richer by pumping his gas for him.

Mitch McConnell wants power and money. He, too, is owned by Russia (having taken millions from them into his PAC). Mitch is also owned by he big RW donors — especially the Kochs & Mercers. They wanted Mitch to hijack the judiciary from Obama — and he did.

The RW money wants to create permanent minority rule because they see that white, Christian male hegemony is over. If White, Christian men want to hold onto power in America, they’re going to have to cheat to keep it. Hello, voter suppression and gerrymandering — all meant to circumvent the will of the majority.

Nothing here — motive-wise — is complicated — as complex as it is.

And yet — our Main Stream News Media cannot seem to tell this story… can’t seem to figure it out. They can’t even decide for themselves if he’s a racist — they keep asking whether or not he is. Wait till they really have to wonder aloud if Trump is a traitor.

That sound you hear is their heads exploding — in the future.

Let’s Say We DO Put Donald Trump Behind Us — Okay… What Then?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

We want to believe that, in the end, Good will triumph over Evil.  But just because we believe something, that doesn’t make it true.  Humans used to believe the earth was the center of the universe.  Fortunately, enough humans learned (via scientific curiosity and scientific discovery) that we are in fact nowhere near the center of the universe.  Having learned that fact, most of us put ignorance behind us.

Trumpism is Republicanism on steroids.  It’s permanent minority rule meant to bake racism, bigotry, misogyny, corruption and even treason into our culture so we can never escape them.  Mitch McConnell has stated openly that his proudest achievement was denying Barack Obama is rightful SCOTUS pick.  That wasn’t just Obama, Moscow Mitch denied, it was WE THE PEOPLE — the MAJORITY who voted for Obama BECAUSE we wanted HIS SCOTUS pick.

Mitch McConnell is a big part of Trumpism. If Mitch doesn’t blackmail Obama at the September 2016 Gang of Eigjht WH Meeting — insisting that if Obama told We The People that Russia was attacking our election on Trump’s behalf that he’d accuse Obama of politicizing the intelligence — We The People would have approached election 2016 differently.  We’d have known, as we voted, that we were under cyber attack.  I bet that would have changed the conversation going INTO the election and (even with Trump’s cheating) would have likely changed the election’s (stolen) outcome.

I have faith that the massive influx of women into our electoral system and politics will change the culture drastically.  Male, unilateral “I alone can fix it” thinking has brought us to the edge of destruction.  2020 won’t put an end to male unilateral thinking, but it should make it harder for that thinking to dominate ever again.

We can’t just get through this, heave a sigh of relief and get on with things.  That will invite repetition.  We need to deal with this right here, right now.  We need to investigate, indict, prosecute & punish every single person who conspired in any way, shape or form with Donald Trump.  That means almost every single Republican.

This mess flows directly from allowing Republicans to compromise The Rule Of Law.   Having The Rule Of Law back means following it 100%.   That means if someone violated The Rule Of Law, they must be punished.  It means that anyone who KNEW the law was being violated — and did nothing — they also must be punished since their silence was complicity if not obstruction of justice. 

So — to fix this mess, first we have to stop the criminals from doing criminal things.  We have to stop Donald Trump from committing treason as he sits in the White House.  We have to stop Trump and the GOP from obstructing our ability to investigate their wrongdoing.  We have to learn EVERYTHING about what Russia (and Saudi Arabia and Israel and Turkey and the UAE) did and are doing to violate our sovereignty and integrity.

Once we understand the full nature of what was done, we must begin to UN-DO it.  None of it can stand or remain.  NONE OF IT.  That’s not just because I don’t like it — it’s because it has no legal standing to remain.  If Donald Trump did not legitimately WIN election 2016 (if he cheated — relying on Russia to MAKE him POTUS), then he is not now and never actually was president.  A guy sitting in YOUR car in YOUR driveway, honking the horn is NOT the car’s owner no matter how much he says he is.  YOU are. YOU have receipts establishing your ownership.  He has nothing.

Our Democracy cannot survive having the will of the people subverted.  If we do that, we’re not a Democracy anymore; the majority has no power over the minority — no power to see their will enacted, legislated, made real.  When the point of the exercise is to keep the majority’s will from EVER being made real — that cannot be us.

To right our Ship Of State, we have to batten down the hatches.  We have to acknowledge that we are at war — under attack by a hostile foreign power bent on destroying us.  We must see that our crisis is extra-Constitutional; just as the Constitution fails to anticipate a treasonous POTUS, We The People will have to look outside the Constitution for our remedy.

This has never happened to us before.  There is no precedent.  The only thing close to it is slavery.  We continue to pay for our Constitutional compromise with slavery.  We cannot make a second such compromise and survive.  In order to guarantee ourselves that “this” never happens again, We The People must:

·  VOID Every Last Election 2016 Result if won by a candidate who cannot account for every penny of their campaign’s financing; if any money from any foreign power found its way into their coffers? They’re gone.

·  VOID every single judge Donald Trump nominated (and every judge Mitch McConnell shoved through the Senate). As Trump never had the authority to nominate those judges, they have no “authority” to sit.

·  VOID every last piece of Republican legislation enacted since Trump was sworn in. That includes his tax cut for the rich.

·  VOID every last change to every federal agency. We reset the meters to the moment before Trump was sworn in and start rebuilding and legislating from there.

·  CREATE STRONG, BINDING, IRONCLAD LEGISLATION that makes it flat out ILLEGAL to “steal data, traffic in stolen data, buy stolen data, sell stolen data or USE stolen data. Same goes for receiving ANYTHING from ANY foreign government.

·  QUICKLY CRAFT & ENACT LEGISLATION that overrides Citizens United and removes as much money as possible from our politics. We blow up the revolving door that sits between government work and lobbying.

·  ENACT TERM LIMITS on Congress. 3 or 4 terms for Congress, 2 for the Senate.

·  LIMIT THE POWER OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH.

·  ACKNOWLEDGE that WE ARE AT WAR WITH RUSSIA.

·  We aggressively PURSUE restoring every relationship with every ally.

·  We SANCTION the shit out of Vladimir Putin & Russia.

·  We AGGRESSIVELY PURSUE every asset Donald Trump & his family own or have a stake in. We PROSECUTE Trump & his family to the very fullest extent of the law. Wherever possible, we seize Trump’s property either use it for the American people or sell it — and use the funds to begin paying for the giant bloody mess Donald Trump has created.

That’s just for starters.  The more we learn through investigating these scumbags, the more, I’m sure, we’ll need to investigate, prosecute and punish.

If we really want our country back, it’s incumbent on each and every one of us to do everything WE can to MAKE it happen.