Tag: Russian Propaganda

This Should Be Simple — If You Took Any Russian Money In Order To GET Elected? You Did Not Legally Get Elected

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The law is pretty simple: Political campaigns are PROHIBITED from receiving ANY kind of contribution from a foreign national.

That means any political campaign that takes ANYTHING from a foreign national is breaking the law. You cannot break the law to win political office. Breaking the law to win disallows your win. In fact, because you broke the law, you DIDN’T win.

We already knew that Russian money flowed into the NRA for distribution to Republican candidates. That means — any Republican candidate who took one penny from the NRA needs to PROVE that that penny didn’t flow from a Russian source. Can’t prove it? We will now assume that that money DID flow from Russia. And you TOOK IT.

We know that Russian retirees, living in America, saw their retirement check’s from Russia suddenly bumped from mere kopeks a month to thousands of dollars a month. That largesse wasn’t intended for the retirees, it was intended for Republican campaign coffers. The retirees were laundering money Russia wanted to donate to Republicans. Voila — “Mission Accomplished”.

We already knew that Russian money flowed into Mitch McConnell’s PAC — same as it did lots of other Republicans’ PACs. The way those dollars flowed was all within the letter of the law. But the spirit of the law will haunt them. Innocent foreign dollars one moment, Treason Cash the next.

Russia, we keep learning, waged a complex, multi-faceted, multi-pronged attack on our election and election systems. They pounded us with propaganda and disinformation. We don’t know yet if or how Russia flipped actual voting machines. It doesn’t matter. If Russian disinformation (gleaned via proprietary polling data, handed from Paul Manafort to Oleg Deripaska to Russian Military Intelligence for weaponizing back into personalized Facebook ads on individual voters Facebook pages) caused ONE African American voter to stay home when they intended to vote, then Russia changed the outcome of an American election on Donald Trump’s behalf.

One vote is all it takes to be election fraud. I don’t see where the Rule Of Law keeps a score sheet with a threshold.

If The Rule Of Law is back as “A Thing” then every Republican who received money from Russia broke the law. They broke it in order to WIN their elections — which means they didn’t win. You can’t break the law in order to become the law’s protector — that’s a contradiction.

If you steal something, it’s not actually yours. Regardless of how much you like driving around in a stolen car, the car STILL belongs to the guy you stole it from. In the case of election 2016, Trump, the Russians & the GOP stole the desired (voted upon) outcome We The People wanted and stole not only the Highest Office In The Land but every other electoral “win” below it.

If the Rule Of Law is really back then every last bit of Election 2016 must be voided. That means Donald Trump was never actually POTUS. He was never legitimately authorized to do the things he did — like pick judges. Every judge Trump picked was picked by someone unauthorized to pick judges. That means they must be voided — since, in point of fact, Hillary Clinton was the legitimate POTUS.

If we end up doing this right? This shit’s gonna get M E S S Y !

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Corruption, Thy Name Is GOP

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Politics is the art of compromise. Republican politics is the art of making compromise unnecessary because the other side is powerless to stop you.

To the GOP’s credit, they saw from a distance that they had a problem and actively did something about it. Post Reagan, as America’s demographics trended with greater rapidity away from old, Christian, white male power, the GOP — the party of old, Christian, white male power — made a conscious decision to undermine the growing majority’s political power.

Behind everything, of course, is The Money. Money always wants to protect itself — and make sure that whatever else happens in the world, IT always “is”. The rich intend to stay rich. To do that, they must retain power. To do that, GOP Money like the Kochs & the Mercers have invested heavily in politicians like Moscow Mitch McConnell. Mitch understands his role completely. If doing everything in HIS power to keep his real constituents IN power means the Republic itself dissolves into an authoritarian hellhole? That’s okay to Mitch.

It’s okay to entire Republican Party — because THEY get to hold onto power forever — regardless of how small a minority they become.

Mitch & the Republican Brain Trust understood that the Executive Branch was probably gone forever — unless the Electoral College could be more fully manipulated. Keep in mind — the whole point of the EC is to over-empower rural (slave-holding, conservative, white Christian) America while under-powering urban, populated, more diverse and therefore more progressive America. Republicans have been working to suppress black and Latino voters forever and ever and ever.

Ask yourself — if all those immigrants fleeing (American-caused) drug violence were reliably future Republican voters, would Republicans oppose their humane treatment as they do now? Of course they wouldn’t! If Republicans thought Puerto Ricans were reliable Republicans, Puerto Rico would have been a state yesterday.

For all the Republicans’ constant hang-wringing about election fraud, the only election fraud going on is perpetrated by Republicans.

Mitch & Team Treason knew — while the Executive Branch could always be within reach (via cheating), they couldn’t count on it.

They also recognized that the Legislative Branch was going to be hard to control. The Senate would be easier because, by design, it’s meant to empower the minority over the majority. Wyoming has the same power in the Senate as California does. That’s stupid. But, again, it was a system designed by white, Christian men who never imagined a modern Republican Party.

The House of Representatives was the Lost Cause. It is, after all, the Peoples’ House. Still, the Republicans had a tool in their belt — GERRYMANDERING. While Democrats also have been guilty (I grew up in Maryland), they’ve never been guilty to the extent the GOP’s been guilty. Not even close.

No, both sides don’t do it — not like this. The whole point of gerrymandering is to undermine the will of the majority by diluting it. That’s why we get districts that look like mindless doodles. They’re not mindless. They’re designed — to over-empower the Republican voters and under-empower the Democrats.

Again, to the GOP’s credit, they did their homework. Back during the Reagan years, they attacked local power structures all over the country. They ran for and won school boards and city council seats and statehouses. It wasn’t so much that they appealed to huge swaths of voters — they didn’t. They appealed to the voters who showed up — theirs. The ones who were motivated to show up — because they had a larger agenda.

The effects of minority rule are insidious. When the majority feels like their votes and their voices don’t matter, they stop voting and voicing their opinions. That’s the point — to make the majority feel powerless.

Republican Politics.

Between gerrymandering, indirect voter suppression (voter ID laws meant to make even getting ID hard) and direct cheating (working with Russia to win 2016), Republicans have taken corruption to places corruption probably never thought it would rise to. To maintain power, they’ve committed to destroying the Republic if that’s what it takes.

To maintain power, Republicans will do WHATEVER it takes. You can’t GET any more corrupt than that.

Maya Angelou Had It SOOOOOO Right – When People Tell You Who They Are…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

If you want me to be your friend — but, the fact is, you hate Jews on sight — I’m not seeing a future for our relationship regardless of how much you tell me MY being Jewish isn’t an issue for you. That’s not the point, right? You’re an anti-Semite. It’s who you are.

I feel the same way about Religionistas. If you tell me up front (and thanks for being honest) that the whole basis for your belief system — the foundational core of why you do what you do — is based on a fiction (in other words, you’ve bought into the story instead of its point) — then I’m not inclined to take ANYTHING you say seriously. Why would I?

If you honestly believe — and insist on its veracity — that a sky creature had reproductive sexual relations with a female “virgin” who then bore a man-god who, at the last second gets repurposed with dying for all of humanity’s sins (if that wasn’t his purpose from the start then what’s the issue with him dying — since that was his whole mission in the first place?) but rises from the dead to “prove” that by “following him” you, too, can live forever… see where I’m going? That’s a whole lot of preposterous to accept as real.

It’s Magical Thinking. Magical Thinking is great when you’re five and you’re trying to decide what soda to have with your hamburger. It doesn’t work as well when you’re an adult and you’re sending women to prison because you don’t understand even the basics of biology — because you prefer Magical Thinking to science.

When you turn around then and tell us that you don’t believe in climate change — we get the context.

The same applies to Trump supporters. Yeah, yeah — bamboozlement. Lots and lots of bamboozlement — Russian propaganda and Trumpian pomposity — gobbled up and shit back at us by our own News Media. But lots of people got it. Lots of people saw this from the outset for what it was — a treasonous coup d’etat.

Donald Trump has never been shy about telling us who he is. The onus is on us for refusing to listen to him. All those people who thought Trump would “pivot”? Magical Thinking. All those people who still think Trump is a great potus? The very worst kind of Magical Thinking — Authoritarian Magical Thinking.

Anyone still saying they’d vote for Trump? They’re telling us something. Anyone not disgusted to their neutrons & electrons by Trump? They’re telling us something, too.

Let’s do ourselves a kindness — and believe them.

Help! We’re Living Inside A False Narrative & Can’t Get Out!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

From the moment we “accepted” that Donald Trump had “won” the presidency, we’ve been living inside a False Narrative — that Donald Trump won. The implications have been devastating.

From the get-go, Trump himself has defensively knee-jerked the word “legitimate” into the conversation. As in “No collusion, my presidency’s legitimate!” If Trump wasn’t a serial projector of his innermost truths, we might could get suspicious. He’s told us all along (in his own way): he did not “win” the presidency. If anything, it was stolen on his behalf.

The Mueller Report touches on this very subject on page 140.

We know that Manafort handed proprietary polling data to Kilimnik. We know Kilimnik is Russian intelligence. What’s not here in the report though is another piece of information we’ve always known: 10 days before the 2016 election, Paul Manafort — who had left the campaign because of his associations with Russia, returned to the Trump campaign with this directive: Concentrate on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

As we know — those three blue states flipped red, stunning everyone. But here’s the thing — Trump won those three blue states by 77,000 votes combined. Talk about close. Talk about suspicious. No one, by the way, has ever done an official forensics on the machines. Unofficial audits turned up strange anomalies across Pennsylvania; for instance, counties that all voted with the exact same percentages.

But even if the machines themselves weren’t touched, if a single Russian propaganda ad placed on a Clinton-voter’s Facebook page had its desired effect — and misinformed that voter into NOT voting, the effect is exactly the same as not counting their vote.

Keeping in mind that Team Mueller’s purview was extremely limited — Russian hacking and any cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia — plus the attempts to obstruct justice to keep all that from getting out. Team Mueller was never charged with answering the whole Russian question — only a small part of it. Everything else they’ve bumped into, they’ve farmed out to other jurisdictions for prosecution or continuing investigation. And we still don’t know much about the heavily redacted intelligence investigation. What we already know about this story leaves absolutely no doubt that Donald Trump — and probably the bulk of the republican party — conspired with Russia to steal election 2016.

The question Trump kept putting out there — about his legitimacy — it’s a thing. A very real “thing”.

We have been living inside the False Narrative that is The Trump Presidency. It’s real, all right. But its existence is based on a lie. It shouldn’t exist at all.

False Narratives unfortunately are powerful things. They seduce with their reasonableness (relative to their environment). In Nazi Germany, it became “reasonable” that Jews were the cause of Germany’s problems. It became acceptable to burn their shops, beat them in the street, humiliate them in public. Germans were living inside a false narrative that this wasn’t barbaric.

But it was barbaric.

It was a false narrative that cannabis caused black men to rape white women so therefore should be illegalized. Parts of the country — and most of the world — still lives inside the false narrative that says any of that is even remotely true.

It was a false narrative that Jesus was a literal “son o god”, that (if he ever actually existed), he was the product of a virgin birth. It was a false narrative that Jesus turned water into wine and bread into his body. It was a false narrative that Jews killed him.

It’s a false narrative that America is a center-right country. When more Americans vote, they vote Democratic. In fact, they vote more progressively.

I could go on. And on.

We live inside plenty of false narratives. We may think it does us good — we’re living inside another false narrative if we think that.

Donald Trump is not the president of the United States. You know that is.

If Bullshit Had A ‘Hall Of Fame’…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Bullshit comes with being Human.  We don’t know yet if Bullshit comes with being sentient; do other animals capable of conscious thought LIE to each other when necessary?  Why would we assume they didn’t?

I’m just saying — Lying and Bullshit seem so natural to us that it could be an organic outgrown of having a ‘sense of self’, an imperative to protect that ‘self’ from harm, and an impulse to alter the Truth in order to protect from harm.

Lie to a dog — about whether or not you’ll give it a treat — and you’ll see a mind grappling with bullshit.  Ever watch a Nature Program where a pack of wild dogs hunt?  It’s all about deception — that’s the nature of setting a trap:  the trapped think safety lies in one direction when it doesn’t.  It’s the creation of a legitimate fear for a bullshit reason (‘Run THIS way not THAT or you’ll get eaten).  Next thing you know — you’re eaten.

Bullshit is powerful stuff used on the fly.

It’s even MORE powerful when given time to ‘cure’ like concrete.  Just like concrete, as BULLSHIT hardens, it becomes more difficult to destroy.  After a while — if it continues to stand, it becomes foundational — a thing that’s always been so it must be true…

Today’s Featured Player – “THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION”…

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First published in Russia in 1903, the ‘Protocols’ want you to believe that a bunch of Jews got together and — having already planned World Domination — decided to get it all down in writing (bad writing).  It ain’t even a good story.

If you really want to hate another group of people, please, Anti-Semites, have a little self-respect.  Just go and hate.  Don’t try to embellish with nonsense like this — it’s ‘unbecoming’…

C’mon, Jew-Haters — if you’re really THAT into hating Jews, why would you need an excuse?  Isn’t your capacity to hate good enough for you?  You need Bullshit Reasons for hating?

Chrissakes — don’t tell me even Bigotry has been wrecked by the Age of Trump…