Tag: Oleg Deripiaska

For Republicans, It’s All Or Nothing Now — They Will Destroy The Republic Or Go Down In Flames Of Treason And Infamy

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

If there was any doubt as to what Republicans are really up to — and how extensive the corruption is inside the GOP — Chief Justice John Roberts made it explicit Monday evening when the SCOTUS (in a 5-4 conservatives v progressives decision) sided with the Wisconsin Republican Party and forced Wisconsin to holds its primary yesterday — despite the health threat it posed — and while refusing to extend any vote-by-mail deadlines (regardless of the fact that many Wisconsinites had not received their mail-in ballots). The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court gave Wisconsin permission to throw out THOUSANDS of legal votes — the most egregious act of voter suppression by a party who suppress Democratic votes the way most people breathe.

The Republican Money — the Kochs, the Mercers early on — saw demographic oblivion in their future and decided the only way to prevent it was to destroy American democracy. Relying on We The People was going to result in extinction. We The People had to be either removed from the equation or limited in our voice if we did remain in the equation. With Mitch McConnell walking point for them, the RW Money began hijacking the judiciary during the Obama presidency. There was real long-term purpose behind McConnell refusing Obama so many life-time appointments to the Federal bench.

The GOP didn’t love Trump. He compromised them. Played even dirtier than they did. Being cynical, greedy and power-mad, they hitched their wagon to the bigger bully — fully aware that that bully was himself deeply compromised by Vladimir Putin. Seems just enough Republicans were already compromised themselves (Mitch himself has taken MILLIONS into his campaign coffers that came from Russia). Russia poured lots of cash into other Republican campaigns via the NRA and a network of Russian retirees living in America, their small pensions suddenly brimming with cash intended for donation to Republicans. How convenient.

GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy famously said to then-Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan during the 2016 Republican convention “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump” to which Paul Ryan famously (per the Washington Post), “… instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: ‘No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here’.”

Meanwhile, remember, convicted felon Paul Manafort was handing Oleg Deripaska (he of the GRU — Russian military intelligence) proprietary polling data from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That polling data was weaponized by Russia and sent back to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as propagandized Facebook ads that showed up — exclusively — on the personal Facebook pages of Democratic voters — many African American or other People of Color. The ads wanted their readers to believe that Hillary Clinton was a racist on the down low.

The point of the exercise — make voters decide to stay home instead of voting. It’s election fraud — carried out with the direct assistance of a hostile foreign government. And it’s entirely illegal.

The GOP may not have known how Russia was going to pull off their theft of election 2016, but once the “win” was Trump’s? They did nothing to address the eight thousand pound gorilla sitting in the room — the total incongruity of Trump’s “win”. There are myriad reasons Trump and the Republicans have resisited every attempt to investigate election 2016. They all have to do with culpability.

Fact: the entire Republican Party is as guilty of election fraud, obstruction of justice and treason as Trump is. They all knew or at the very least suspected what was happening. They were all obligated — legally — to say something. That they didn’t made them guilty of conspiracy.

That means every single Republican has a legal problem. And that’s where America’s problem begins.

For Trump, it’s a matter of staying president forever or probably going to prison forever — his list of crimes is that long and that bad. Robert Mueller — in his team’s report — pointed out their obligation to follow a DoJ “rule” (not a law) created while Spiro Agnew was veep (to keep him from pardoning Nixon — per “The Bagman” — the very good, very deep dive podcast by Rachel Maddow) that would not allow them to indict a sitting POTUS. That’s why the SDNY couldn’t indict Trump along with Michael Cohen for paying Stormy Daniels to keep quiet. As we sit here today, Trump remains “Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1”.

Trump knows: the instant he stops being POTUS, he’ll become INDICTED Co-Conspirator #1. And that will be just the start of his legal problems. And Trump also knows — his legal problems are so deep and so far-reaching, he could lose every single property he owns to seizure. And have we mentioned “treason”? Trump cannot stop being POTUS. That’s his bottom line.

Because it’s Trump’s bottom line — it’s the whole GOP’s bottom line too. If Trump’s crimes get exposed, theirs will get exposed too.

And everyone’s crimes have just gone nuclear because of our coronavirus response. Republican criminality has now KILLED thousands of Americans. Literally. Talk about criminal!

Norms have not mattered for a decade now to the GOP. Mitch McConnell destroyed every norm while Obama was POTUS. The Republican Senate destroyed Congressional oversight when it refused to convict Trump on impeachment. Now Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the IG’s and all possible oversight to how he doles out billions of tax-payer relief dollars. We already know that Trump himself is PROFITING from the very (unproven) cure — hydroxychloroquine — that he’s been pushing during his daily “coronavirus briefings” even as Dr. Fauchi shakes his head in alarmed disapproval.

The Republican Party is so far beyond corrupt they can’t even “corrupt” from their houses anymore.

It’s time for us — for the NEWS MEDIA especially — to stop treating Republicans as honest actors. It’s time to start treating them as what they are: CRIMINALS intent on building upon a criminal act — the stolen 2016 election — to shove permanent minority rule down the majority of Americans’ throats. It’s a rape fever dream by a Party that understands rape intrinsically. If you can vote for a rapist, it’s because you approve of the rapist — and you approve of his raping whoever he likes.

That’s who the Republican Party are — rapists. And they will destroy America rather than face the consequences of their crime.

Here’s the hopeful part. There’s more of us than them. Way more. Way, way, WAY more. As a percentage of the electorate, Trumpanistas are a mere 16%. Fact. And what Trump has steadily done to the military (undermining their purpose in Northern Syria, betraying our Kurdish ally — that doesn’t sit well with “brothers in arms”, firing Brett Crozier, the captain of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt who went public to save his crew from a rising coronavirus threat onboard their ship) will not get him the loyalty he’ll need to turn the military against the American People. It only takes having a few balk at the audacity of a full-on military coup d’etat to make the whole enterprise fall apart.

Trump will try to further rip apart the very voting procedure he always uses: vote-by-mail. But once the Post Office is spared — and we make sure EVERY American GETS their vote-by-mail ballot — the real day of reckoning will begin for Trump & the GOP. It’s way, WAAAAAAY harder to suppress voters when they vote by mail. And if We The People can make vote-by-mail how most Americans vote this November?

As Trump himself said (out loud) this week — the more people vote, the worse it is for Republicans. Agree, Don-Don. Agree completely.

Let’s make that a stone cold reality.

HELP! We’re Trapped In A False Narrative & Can’t Get Out!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The most painful part of listening to or watching the news channels these days is the constant barrage of false narratives.

The biggest false narrative of all, of course, is that Donald Trump got elected. He may have been given the victory but he lost the popular vote by over 3 million votes (it would have been lots more if not for voter suppression); as for Trump’s EC victory, the Mueller Report hints at what became of the internal polling data Paul Manafort gave Oleg Deripaska in August 2016. Deripaska and the Russians weaponized it and turned it back on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

We don’t know empirically if Manafort giving Russia proprietary polling data resulted in any votes being changed. That is, we don’t know if we know. No one outside of Twitter, far as I can tell, has bothered to ask. No one’s done any official forensics on the machines in those states. We don’t know if they were hacked and their vote totals tweaked. We do know there are anomalies in several Pennsylvania counties (keeping in mind that between PA/WI/MI Trump eked the win by less than 70,000 votes combined!) There are counties in northern Pennsylvania apparently where the vote totals are suspiciously similar, defying mathematical probabilities.

If just ONE vote was changed because of this? That’s a crime same as if it were MILLIONS. The fact that we may not see it that way — it’s on us. You don’t get to a what we’re living through without the steady drip-drip-drip that starts with us shrugging off ONE vote being illegally denied.

“One altered vote doesn’t matter” is a false narrative. It does matter. Of course it matters!

Our problem is, we live in so many false narratives already that we’re inured to getting sucked into one more. Think about it — think about all the false narratives that we take for granted. The most obvious one is religion.

A person who earnestly believes that a sky deity had magical sex with a human female and produced a man-god whose job it was to “absorb” all the rest of the humans’ sins is living inside a false narrative. No such thing ever happened. To pretend that it did — and then live your life a certain way because you’re determined (lack of evidence be damned!) that this thing did happen — is living inside a false narrative.

If you make life choices based on that false narrative — you’re doing it for the wrong reasons and it could very easily bite you in the ass. Would you agree to let a surgeon work on you who’d never been to med school but knew his beatitudes almost by heart? Of course not — that surgeon’s living inside a false narrative — that he’s a surgeon.

A person unaware their spouse is cheating on them (they think their marriage is just fine) — false narrative.

Same goes for a guy who doesn’t know his business partners are cheating on him. False narrative.

The inhabitants of Pearl Harbor slept the morning of December 7, 1941 believing we were at peace with Japan. We weren’t. Japan had unofficially declared war on us. The fact that we didn’t know it didn’t mean it wasn’t so. We were living in a false narrative.

If you get right down to it, Christmas is a false narrative — the story it celebrates never happened. Ditto Easter. And Passover. The story the seder’s rituals tell never happened; Jews as slaves in Egypt, though it sounds good, simply doesn’t appear anywhere in the historical record. It’s a false narrative.

A lot of America’s history is false narrative. We tell ourselves we’re a bastion of freedom — but that’s only true if you’re a white, Christian man. For everyone else — that’s a false narrative. The Thanksgiving story? Mostly false narrative. The Salem Witch Trials? Extremely false narrative.

“All men are created equal”? Nice words but no one actually lives that way. Anyone who thinks they are? False narrative. How could that narrative NOT be false when our Constitution (written by the same clique of men) allowed for slavery? A slave isn’t a citizen’s equal — not in the citizen’s eyes.

Manifest Destiny? Rubbish. The White Man’s burden? Only in the White Man’s racist mind. Racism itself is a false narrative — racists think their race is better. No, it ain’t. But your narrative sure is false.

We’ve lived inside a false narrative from the instant Donald Trump was declared the “winner” of election 2016. We knew at the time that something smelled rotten — Trump winning felt like a false narrative. It’s never stopped feeling that way.

Mitch McConnell refusing to give Merrick Garland a hearing wasn’t a false narrative — though it was bullshit. The false narrative was every bit of McConnell’s determined lie that he was justified in doing it. It’s a false narrative that McConnell is any sort of patriot; he’s a traitor who sold out America for the benefit of the Koch Bros, his backers. Mitch hitched his wagon to Russia because the demographics spell certain doom for Republicans.

Every day, our news media act as if Donald Trump is a normal potus doing normal potus things. They continue to explain away this madness with a shrugged “but America voted for him”. Did we? I seem to recall it differently. The majority of Americans did NOT vote for Trump – or any of this bullshit.

The fact that Trump won the Electoral College (did he though — I believe that’s under investigation; it says as much in the Mueller Report?) points to the fact that our Electoral College, by its nature, tells a false narrative. By handing a presidential victory to Donald Trump, it seems to be saying that the majority of Americans chose him over Hillary. It’s not even remotely true — as we know.

The Electoral College creates a false narrative in our minds — that the Will Of The People is being done. it’s not true.

I genuinely believe we’re living inside the Giantest False Narrative of all that Donald Trump “won” the presidency. The publicly available evidence says Donald Trump conspired with Russia to steal the presidency. That means — per his own projecting — his presidency has been illegitimate from the get-go. That shouldn’t be a revelation.

The fact that we’ve so willfully refused to vacate this false narrative — that should be shocking to us.