Category: Mitch McConnell

The Problem With “Doing Nothing”…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Got a problem? Doing nothing will not solve it. That’s a stone cold fact. That’s not to say you can’t get lucky — and time resolves what your inaction didn’t. But that wasn’t you solving your problem, that was you hiding from it until a solution presented itself. Not the same thing.

One of the roadblocks Big Business regularly threw up early in the Climate Change conversation was the cost of cutting down our carbon output. Big Business was going to have to see its profits go down so it could help maintain the planet’s long-term health. That would be the long term health of Big Business’s marketplace.

Saving the planet for all the living creatures in it (it’s not just humans who get profoundly impacted by the mess we’ve made of the planet) won’t be cheap. But if you consider the alternative — from a cost-benefit analysis — doing nothing, it turns out, is a thousand times more expensive. Doing nothing about the climate already has resulted in appreciable sea rise.

Seen photos of Venice? Seen the mess Hurricane Dorian made of the Bahamas? Right now, those are the cost of doing nothing. Doing nothing isn’t “free”. Cleaning up and rebuilding is expensive as hell — if you can clean up (ask Puerto Rico what that’s like). Resources used for rebuilding can’t be used for other things. Same goes for the money. There’s a bigger hidden cost staring at us all. What if places like Venice simply can’t “be” anymore — because they’re under water? Imagine that THAT costs.

Doing nothing on the climate will produce tens of millions of refugees fleeing the coasts for safer refuge inland. The costs will be incalculable. Where are those people going to live? How are they going to feed themselves? More to the point, who is going to feed and shelter them — and where is that money going to come from (while we’re also paying for the cost of the destruction itself?)

Doing nothing in the face of climate change is a terrible idea.

Doing nothing in the face of what Donald Trump and the Republican Party are doing to America is equally terrible (and not unconnected). Yet that’s what plenty of people — politicians and pundits — still want us to do: nothing. They want us to wait for the next election — so the American People can have their say.

Lovely thought but fatally naive. The American People did not get their say LAST presidential election. 2016 was stolen from the American People — certainly from the majority. HRC won the popular vote by upwards of 3 million votes (lots more, I bet, if all the suppressed votes were counted). If we take Russia out of the equation — they’ve never even heard of Donald Trump — he doesn’t enter the race and he certainly doesn’t make it through the primaries.

Without Russia, Trump wouldn ‘t be POTUS. I have to wonder now (with retrospect and a year of meaningful oversight now under our belts) what Mitch McConnell knew about Russia’s efforts on Trump’s behalf when, at the September 2016 Gang Of Eight meeting at the White House, Moscow Mitch McConnell told President Obama that he’d accuse Obama of politicizing the intelligence if Obama told the American People the TRUTH — that Russia was actively engaged in trying to make Trump president. Was THAT why Mitch insisted again and again that “the American people” deserved to name Scalia’s SCOTUS replacement? Because Mitch knew the American People would have limited say in that election’s outcome?

Russia is engaged in a cyber war with us. It doesn’t matter if we accept it or even know it. It’s happening. We’re exactly like the residents of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941 — in the minutes BEFORE the Japanese attacked. They have no idea a state of war exists — it absolutely does; they’re about to be attacked ffs! But war does exist — and it is coming for them whether they like it or not, whether they KNOW it or not.

Donald Trump isn’t just a corrupt POTUS, he’s a traitor. He’s been the most devastating active measure in the whole history of espionage. He and everyone around him are betraying us each and every day. How can we possibly let that stand for another moment — never mind till the next election which the republicans fully expect to steal just as they did election 2016.?

The cost of doing nothing is we lose our Republic.

Sorry. Not acceptable.

We are compelled not just to do “something” but to do EVERYTHING in our power to stop what the republicans are doing. We may survive the republicans decimating the greatest experiment in human self-government ever, but we won’t like what the republicans replace it with.

Doing nothing, ironically, will absolutely positively cost us everything.

Donald Trump Has NEVER Been The Legitimate POTUS; Everything Needs To Flow From That Fact

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

If I steal your car then – just to be an even bigger asshole – sit outside your house at four in the morning, the expensive stereo cranked up high, pounding the horn, it doesn’t make me the car’s owner. I can take the registration from the glove compartment and cross out your name (with a sharpie, like Donald) and scrawl in my name instead.

It STILL doesn’t make me the car’s owner. COS I STOLE IT FROM YOU!

To circumvent the Will Of The People is to steal their choice from them. Gerrymandering is (“was” hopefully) legalized circumvention of the majority’s will. Voter suppression is another form of legalized circumvention. That, too, needs to be relegated to the dust bin. The only reason to not want every eligible voter to vote is because you fear how they’ll all vote. IF you thought they’d vote FOR you — you’d drive them all the polls yourself.

That’s not what’s happening here. Do we really have to ask why?

Republicans have been forced into a corner by America’s rapidly changing demographics. Without literally cheating, they cannot win a presidency. Without the Electoral College tying the Democrats’ hands behind their backs, literally handing Republicans political power not merited by the actual slice of America they represent, Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near winning a presidency.

The GOP — the GOP’s money actually (so we’re talking the Kochs & Mercers etc using Mitch McConnell as their point turtle) — hitched their wagon to Trump even KNOWING how compromised he was. No one’s stupid in this group. Steve Bannon surely hipped everyone with the money (he worked with the Mercers at Cambridge Analytica) — all of them having strange, dark religious bents — to the fact that Vladimir Putin’s end game wasn’t so far removed from theirs.

Make no mistake: the grand plan Vlad Putin launched against us worked better than even he expected only because he founds such a willing collaborator in the far right wing of the Republican Party. Because they let the Russian money flow freely down to every local election (can anyone say where ALL of the NRA’s Russia-originating money landed?), they corrupted every single race every single Republican ran in. Elections are free & FAIR or they ain’t. There’s no middle ground here.

Let’s not worry about voting machines here. No one’s examined them (officially). Lots of hard evidence exists that says those machines are almost instantaneously hackable. No one’s really looked at the strange way 77,000 votes across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin line up with the proprietary polling data that Paul Manafort handed Oleg Deripaska (of the Russian GRU) that covered Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Let’s worry instead about HOW that weaponized polling data was played back onto DEMOCRATIC voters in those three states (plus Minnesota apparently) as propagandized ads on their individual Facebook pages. A voter who does not go to the polls — because they’ve been lied to in their homes ffs — is a vote for the other side. It is no different than CHANGING their vote in its impact relative to what that voter wanted from the election.

If we don’t get hip to the sophisticated weapon being used against us, we should just turn off the lights now. Before the Russians do it for us.

Look at election night and the way the news of Trump’s victory played in Trump’s own camp. They, too, were shocked by the win — not because they thought they’d pulled it out but because they were suddenly faced with the monstrosity they were now part of — A STOLEN ELECTION.

As Trump himself keeps harping on — an “illegitimate” election. Why, you have to ask, has Trump himself always worried about his own legitimacy.

Because he knows he has none.

Can we please, please, PLEASE cut to the end of THAT chase?

If Donald Trump stole the election — stole the Will of The American People from them, then he does not own either a “winning” outcome or anything that flowed from that “win” that wasn’t his. He can’t claim ownership to our car just because his Russian pal found a way to put him behind its wheel.

If Trump was never actually POTUS then he never had the authority to do what POTUSes do — like nominate judges to lifetime appointments.

And — by the way — every Republican who benefited from that same stolen outcome? Their “wins”, too, need to be seen in the light of treason.

Oh — it is very definitely treason. This is war time — cyber war. I’m quite clear this is World War Three we’re all living through. We just don’t know it yet because we still think wars require bombs, bullets & outright declarations.

If we keep thinking that, we’ll lose every war we ever fight going forward — starting with this one. Russia doesn’t think that — know what I mean?

A presidency stolen because of treason (and greed and stupidity and lots more greed) is not a presidency. Rules made by that presidency have no legitimacy and — like the judges — must be voided outright as if they never existed. They never had a “right” to exist.

If we’re really going to bring the Rule Of Law back — for real and for good — there can be no exceptions ever. It’s exceptions that break the Rule Of Law.

The Rule Of Law is pretty clear: thieves do not get to keep what they stole. I won’t get to keep your car after I’m caught and Trump (and the Reapublicans) shouldn’t get to keep what THEY stole either.

To Void Election 2016 Or Not To Void — THAT Is The Question (It Isn’t Really — VOID IT!)

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

In fairness, it’s hard to get one’s mind around what’s happening to us. Russia launched an aggressive intelligence operation against us and election 2016 that succeeded beyond its wildest hopes. They literally MADE Donald Trump president.

C’mon — take Russia out of the Trump equation and he doesn’t get through the primaries. Take Russia & Wikileaks off the table (so there’s no document dumping) and Trump’s “Pussy grabbing” finishes off what “Mexicans are rapists” should have. There’s no rescue, see?

No Russia, no Trump. Can we vote tally our way to a “smoking gun” that says “Hey, wait a minute, Trump lost the vote count in PA/MI/WI too!”? Of course not. But there’s circumstantial evidence out the wazoo starting with the 77,000 votes across three states that made the difference between Hillary Clinton becoming POTUS and Trump “winning” instead.

That’s three states for which Paul Manafort handed Oleg Deripaska proprietary polling data.

It’s so much simpler than we’re making it. The law says you cannot break the law to win an election. Therefore if you broke the law to win an election then you did not win. Donald Trump and the Republican Party BROKE THE LAW to win election 2016. They broke the law repeatedly. They took copious amounts of Russian money (by dubiously legal means now revealed as ILLEGAL) and even allowed Trump’s campaign to make a change the the GOP’s 2016 Party platform that’s now the subject of intense investigation — the betrayal of Ukraine.

Ukraine-gate is just the next chapter of Russia-gate. The fact that we have a next chapter is because we didn’t burn the book after finishing the last chapter. This is literally Trump brazenly trying to close the deal (and close the book on American Democracy). The Republican Party is desperate to help him succeed.

If, as part of our righting the Ship of State, we re-establish The Rule Of Law as “a thing”, then we need to abide by The Rule Of Law’s most basic tenet — it IS. It applies evenly and fairly to all, no exceptions.

Under The Rule Of Law, thieves do not ever get to keep what they stole. If it’s returnable, it gets returned. If restitution needs to be paid instead, it gets paid. The Republican Party stole election 2016 from the American People. We voted one way, the GOP (with Russia’s considerable help) created the illusion that another result happened. It didn’t.

Take Russia out of the equation — Trump loses. He loses badly. And so does every last bit of his legislative & judicial agenda (Mitch McConnell’s & the Heritage Foundation’s judicial agenda actually). If Donald Trump was never legitimately president then he never had the right to nominate anyone for anything — especially SCOTUS judges.

Hell, without the illegitimate presidency, Trump probably couldn’t get onto the White House grounds. The bloated orange jackal turd couldn’t even pass a basic background check, could he?

If I steal your car, that doesn’t make me its rightful owner — even if I sit outside your house at five in the morning and lay on the horn till you come outside so I can flash you the finger as I peel off in a hail of screeching tires and road grit. The car’s still yours.

The same goes for an election. We The People voted one way but got the result Russia wanted instead. That cannot stand.

We learned the hard way what happens when you don’t fix problems at the get-go. We should have killed slavery dead. We didn’t and like a zombie it has hungered for our brains ever since. We fought the Civil War over slavery. Because Andrew Johnson helped kill Restoration, we’re still fighting the Civil War. We’re still battling over slavery.

If we don’t void the stolen results of election 2016, we will head down the same terrible path — with the same terrible results. How can we possibly “agree” to let the stolen results of 2016 remain if we KNOW for a fact they don’t reflect the Will Of The People but, rather, the will of Moscow?

How can we possibly allow that to “be”? How can we allow the car thief to keep what he stole?

We can’t.

It really is that simple.

What If The Truth Is We CAN’T Handle “The Truth”?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

A core question we each have to wrestle with: what’s our personal relationship with “The Truth”? You know what I mean — the TRUTH: the stuff we know about ourselves (being ourselves) that no one else could ever know or will ever know. The stone, cold TRUTH we all know down deep. Who we really are, what we really want, why we’re really miserable.

Now let’s talk about the Truth we’ll talk about.

We can all see the scene in our heads. Still — it’s so compelling — let’s watch it together:

Great speech. It perfectly encapsulates the yin-yang of what we wish it took to have order and what it really takes to have order.

The Truth, in sausage terms: no one ever walks away from a sausage factory feeling good about sausage.

A couple of cold, very hard Truths are staring us in the face as we all sit here: Donald Trump is a flat out traitor. That’s A Truth. Serious people loathe to even think the word “treason” have entertained the idea that Donald Trump isn’t some hyperbolic traitor, he’s a very real one. They’re not doing that because of politics. They’re doing it because of treason.

There’s a strange thing the news media does along these lines. In their need to be even-handed, letting their readers decide, they’ll give Trump the benefit of the doubt (still) that everything he does has some actual relationship to his being president — ignoring that he’s never, at any time during his presidency, acted “presidential”. Trump is always reported as if yesterday’s outrages, like those from the days before, never happened. He woke up this morning a normal potus doing normal potus things.

Except, of course, he didn’t. Still — of the three possibilities that could explain the past 3+ years — he’s completely innocent is one possibility. In the abstract.

Second possibility: He’s kinda guilty — some combination of bad intent and stupidity that explains away continuing acts of criminal behavior and obstruction of justice. From an odds point of view — you’d at least figure the explanation for everything could live here. In quasi-guilt.

But there is a third possibility — the one our MSM won’t ever go near — even though it’s very definitely a possibility, too: Donald Trump is completely guilty.

Let’s pretend this was a murder instead of treason. Let’s say Trump actually shot one of his supporters — just like he keeps promising to do.

We have Trump saying he could do it. We have the murder weapon. We have Trump’s bloated, orange fingerprints all over the weapon. We have a murder victim. We have everything we need to say a crime was committed. But our MSM would look at all the evidence and insist no one could know for sure if a crime was committed or even if the dead guy was really dead.

What’s wrong with the Truth?

That’s what every day feels like. Turn on the news — hear Trump’s latest treasonous behavior — hear the news media act as if Trump’s just a slightly unusual potus being potus in a slightly unusual way. No — that’s not it at all. He’s not unusual — he’s a criminal who didn’t “win” an election, he got Russia to steal it for him. Literally.

When Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson was called before the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee (August 22, 2017 — they were trying to undermine the Steele Dossier but failed), he described how Fusion, before getting too deep into the oppo work the conservative, Jebb Bush-supporting Washington Free Beacon had hired them to do, did its “due diligence”: they got ahold of every piece of publicly available material on Donald Trump — be it book, magazine, radio interview or TV appearance. They got it from Amazon, from used book stores and even from Amazon. What Fusion found there — in material anyone could get their hands on — convinced them that Trump had been laundering Russian mob money through his Atlantic City casinos. That, Simpson testified, is why Fusion sought out Chris Steele, former head of the Russia desk at Britain’s MI6.

The Truth has always stared at us with a moon face: Trump is a traitor. He’s a criminal. So’s the rest of his family. So’s the rest of his administration. How much criminality does one have to witness, read about or have rubbed in one’s nose before you’re allowed to fight back?

Okay — the Truth is: Donald Trump is a traitor who betrayed the nation. The Truth is without Russia’s direct assistance, Donald Trump is not POTUS, Hillary Clinton is. Let’s start there: Donald Trump is not now and never has been the legitimate POTUS. If it violates the Rule Of Law to cheat to become POTUS then Trump’s cheating disqualifies him.

If Trump cheated to become POTUS then he won nothing. Having not won the presidency, he was never authorized to 1) take the oath of office or 2) execute any part of his Constitutional because he wasn’t POTUS. Trump had no more right to pick judges than I do. He has no more right today. He’s not actually POTUS.

The Rule Of Law is pretty simple in its fundamentals: It either is or it isn’t. You can’t have 90% of the Rule of Law (what would the other 10% be — organized chaos?) just like you can’t have 90% of your integrity. Is v isn’t.

If the Rule Of Law IS then The Truth is even that much more important. It’s the one thing we should all be able to agree on.

America won’t like any of the Truth they’re about to hear about Donald Trump. It won’t get any better than it already is.

But I bet America handles the Truth about Trump just fine. It won’t make us happy — not one bit. But we’ll batten down the hatches. We’ll handle the Truth about Donald Trump just fine. For sure, We The People will handle the Truth far, far better than Trump will.

Integrity Is An All Or Nothing Proposition

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
What Zero Integrity looks like — en masse

Nothing is funnier than a Republican drawing himself up, having just been asked a serious question about his integrity. He knits his brows, purses his lips and goes all “earnest” with his voice.

Mitch McConnell talking “patriotism” — having just lifted the sanctions punishing Oleg Deripaska for changing the outcome of election 2016, say. That’d be Mitch insisting he’d done something great for the people of Kentucky (while betraying them and everyone else in the country).

Your average Republican thinks THAT’S “Integrity”. Acting like you have it.

When you have no integrity, acting like you have it is as close to having integrity as you’re ever going to get.

What Republicans especially don’t seem to grasp — integrity while iron-clad at its core, is built of gossamer. It’s a soap bubble, easily punctured. And just like a soap bubble, once popped? It’s popped for good.

There’s a reason we don’t say things like “Ya know, that Kevin McCarthy — the GOP Leader — he may not have all his integrity, but 70%’s okay with me!” The moment Kevin slipped below 100%, that should have been the end of it. How can you trust someone almost completely but not completely? That means you DON’T trust them because even when you do, you really don’t.

That’s how integrity works. It is or it isn’t.

Can we all please, please, PLEASE agree? When it comes to integrity, if you still have an “R” next to your name? While Donald Trump’s a Republican? If you stand in any way, shape or form with him?

You can’t even spell “integrity”.

These Are Desperate Times, Mrs. Lovett, And Desperate Measures Are Called For

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Sweeny Todd got it right. These ARE desperate times we’re living in. What if it’s already be too late for desperate measures?

What measures come after the desperate ones?

A lot of us sensed it election night 2016 the way animals can sense a temblor coming. Trump “winning the election” (he didn’t, Russia did) wasn’t going to be the worst of it. It was going to be the start of it.

When I ran Tales From The Crypt for HBO, I took pride in the fact that I murdered people for a living and got away with it. I’ve spent my career imagining terrible, terrible things that could happen to people. I’ve written scenes that would make your average person squirm to watch, never mind actually endure.

But nothing I’ve written — or could write — can compare with or compete with Donald Trump. There’s nothing special about Trump except for the fact that he’s the embodiment of evil. Evil — real evil — isn’t special; most of the time, it’s pretty banal. We prefer our evil to be beat-you-over-the-head obvious. Unfortunately, that’s not how evil works.

There is nothing exceptional about Donald Trump. And yet, this unexceptional man has done something, well, exceptional — he’s very nearly destroyed the greatest experiment in human self-government ever. He’s had help, of course — Moscow Mitch McConnell (starting with his mission to hijack the judiciary as a means to impose permanent minority rule), Bill Barr (the most corrupt AG ever – and that includes John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG!), Mike Pompeo (the most corrupt Secretary of State since whoever Trump’s last Sec State was) and GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (whose worry that Russia was paying Dana Rohrbacher & Trump was put to rest with a simple “Let’s keep that in the family” by then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan).

The only thing that’s even remotely exceptional about Trump — his capacity for banal evil. That, apparently, is bottomless.

Republican Jesus Wasn’t “Born” Rotten, He EVOLVED That Way…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

People in the media ask a lot these days — how can evangelicals stand with Donald Trump, the most corrupt, most immoral, least Jesus-like person to ever walk the planet?

It’s simple. Evangelicals & Fundamentalists don’t believe in “Jesus The Teacher”, they believe in “Jesus The Mascot”. Jesus the Maestro of Merch.

Doing unto others isn’t even taught in most churches. It’s too left wing. Too working class. But, misbehave yourself in one of a thousand different ways? They’ll “do unto you” so fast your head will spin.

True Fact: No Evangelical would recognize Jesus — even if they stopped mid-way through nailing Jesus to a cross to stop and spit in Jesus’ eye.