Tag: Treason

If Trump’s Presidency Was The Direct Product Of Criminality & Treason, Then It Was Never A “Presidency” & Nothing It Did Can Stand

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Check the law. I think this still applies in most of America. If a guy steals your car, gets caught in it, gets tried & convicted for stealing it — he doesn’t get to keep your car. If he hasn’t already chopped it up for parts, he gives it back.

Because it was never his.

Let’s put this in terms even Trump might comprehend. If the winner of a beauty pageant is found to have cheated, she doesn’t get to keep her crown. Same goes for all the other prizes that went with it. When we strip you of your “win” because you didn’t achieve it legitimately, you don’t get to keep any part of what the actual winner is entitled to.

The same goes for presidents.

As I’ve said here before, the rule of law did not let us down here. We (yet again) let IT down. That’s an important distinction. The rule of law is the only possible arbiter between us. It’s the only way that everyone gets treated equally and fairly. Its one real weakness is it can’t enforce itself. The rule of law relies entirely on us to do the heavy lifting.

It’s time we started building a little moral muscle mass. When we reassert the rule of law as our true guiding principle, the first thing the rule of law will demand we do is punish those who violated it — meaning those who broke it relentlessly during the period when we weren’t enforcing it. Meaning those who broke it with the intent of destroying it.

The rule of law will be clear-eyed. It will see how Donald Trump slowly corrupted the entire Republican Party. How Russia corrupted it. How greed and the fear of rapidly changing demographics corrupted their thinking — especially how their “money” thought.

Based entirely on what’s already been established via actual evidence (hell, just follow Cambridge Analytica’s trail!), we know that Russia hitched its wagon to Republicans and Republicans hitched their wagon to Russia. Money poured into GOP coffers from myriad directions — filtered through Russian emigrees living here whose retirement checks from Mother Russia suddenly doubled or tripled. Lots was laundered through the NRA. Some landed via totally legal PAC donations. Legal, that is, until we peel back the cover on them. If those donations are part of a larger crime? They’re not quite as “legal”.

Current GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy may have been surprised to learn there were two people Putin paid — Rohrbacher and Trump — just before he walked into that meeting of Republican muckety-mucks during the 2016 GOP convention. The response he got from then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan — “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here” suggests Paul Ryan wasn’t surprised.

He didn’t respond “What? Why do you say this, Kev’? What is that based on?” He didn’t frown and say “Geez, somebody get the FBI on the phone. We have a real problem here!”

No, Paul Ryan said “Let’s keep it secret”. It. The thing they all knew was illegal: the very presidential campaign they were all part of.

You don’t have to be a willing participant in treason to be a traitor. Knowing about it is where your problem begins. Suspecting it even. Having a vague suspicion even — and not doing anything. We have to ask “why?” Why did you say or do nothing?

Citizenship, as the rule of law will remind us, has benefits but obligations too. Voting, for instance. But also standing up for the rule of law — enforcing it ourselves as citizens by reporting gross violations when we see them. Don’t want to take your fears to the “proper authorities”? Fine. Take them to the news media. The Fourth Estate is the one job mentioned in the Constitution — as the final check on power. When we excise “both sides do it” from the journalism school curriculum, they too will begin to work as designed.

The news media, more than anyone, has perverted our thinking. In the same way that they accepted “Mexicans are rapists”, they accepted that cheating to win is just another way to win. Here we are — in a presidential race — where one of the candidates is the first sitting POTUS ever to run having been IMPEACHED. For cheating in the very election he’s running in. And the news media can’t seem to remember that fact. FFS, it should be the STARTING POINT for telling the election’s story: for the first time in history, one of the two candidates HAS BEEN IMPEACHED.

It’s not just weird that Trump’s impeachment has already faded into distant memory, it’s obscene.

Take Russia out of the equation entirely and Donald Trump doesn’t even run for president. Take Russia out of the Trump equation entirely and Trump lost everything years and years ago. He didn’t get rescued out of his bankrupted casinos. He doesn’t get an ounce of help from a single Russian mobster. He doesn’t find $55 million in his pocket (via a white elephant mansion in Florida), convinced it came from Putin directly. If Russia never sinks a kopek into Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump pisses away everything Fred Trump ever made. Donald Trump ends up broker than broke.

He certainly doesn’t get re-invented by Mark Burnett as some genius businessman. Even a bullshit artist like Burnett couldn’t re-invent the king of skid row as “the great negotiator”.

Everything about Trump, his life, his accomplishments — it’s all absolutely phony. That includes his presidency. Well, just like the car thief and beauty pageant cheater, Trump will not get to keep the stuff that came with his “win”.

He won’t get to be POTUS anymore for starters. But, more importantly, everything that happened during his presidency must now be seen through the lens of “Donald Trump never had the authority to do ______”. Remember — we’re not revoking Trump’s authority, we’re pointing out that he never had the authority to begin with. The authority to be POTUS flows from the Constitution and the rule of law. It flows, ultimately, from We The People — and this self-governing government of ours — warts and all. You cannot legally steal that authority. If you even attempt to steal it in any way, shape or form then whatever authority you acquire is not legally yours.

And whatever you did — while illegally having that authority — is just as illegal. It lacked the authority that was never legally given over.

It’s just a stone cold fact. A stolen presidency cannot and does not have the authority to do anything whatsoever. It can’t craft legislation for the Congress to consider (in its capacity as the executive). It can’t issue “executive orders” or decrees. It can’t nominate judges.

Judges, after all, are the whole point of the exercise. The Right Wing money saw demographic destruction in their future. A diversifying population — diversifying and progressive by nature — spelled the end of white hegemony. The RW money (the Kochs, the Mercers) got that except for outright theft, the executive branch was going to be forever Democratic. The House of Reps? Too untrustworthy to invest in (especially when you have to pony up every two years for re-elections vs four for a POTUS and six for a senator). The Senate seemed a better bet — especially with a master politician like Mitch McConnell.

Make no mistake: Mitch McConnell is one of the worst Americans ever. He’s corrupt to his bone marrow. He’s racist as hell, petty and treasonous. But he’s also skilled at the game of politics. The RW money spent wisely on Mitch McConnell. If anyone was corrupt enough to try and see their hijacking through, it was going to be Moscow Mitch.

But, Mitch, too, has Russian connections. Mitch has taken plenty of Russian money into his campaign coffers. He lifted the sanctions on Oleg Deripaska in order to get Deripaska’s $400 million for a Russian aluminum factory in Dirt Poor, KY. Those sanctions, BTW, were put there because Deripaska actively participated in Russia’s theft of the 2016 election result.

Just watch when Mitch finally gets put under oath, his teeny-tiny turtle testicles in a vice grip.

Just watch when every one of these treasonous bastards gets put under oath.

It will be hard for us — after that happens — after the full, terrible truth of what happened here gets fully outed. Most of it will especially after all the co-conspirators begin turning on each other, looking for a better deal.

Now, think about this — as the criminals who did this to us begin to point fingers at each other — describing grander and grander schemes to defraud us of the electoral outcome we ACTUALLY voted for? Do you really think we’ll be inclined to let these pirates keep what they stole from us — from our children and their future?

Not if I can help it they won’t.

A Call For Moral Journalism

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

It is immoral to equate Truth with bullshit. Yet that is what the bulk of our news media does every day. They equate the stone cold facts of what Donald Trump has done and is doing to our democracy with the utter bullshit of his denials.

This morning, Trump’s White House is trying to contain a PR disaster. The Atlantic reported that multiple sources say Trump has called our military “losers” whose willingness to put their lives on the line to defend the country he finds unfathomable. The reporting is solid, multi-sourced.

These are facts therefore.

But, on MSNBC, their White House stenographer, Kelly O’Donnell reported that Trump vigorously denied saying any such thing.

What are we, the news audience, to make of this? On the one hand — solid reporting of a newsworthy transgression by a president dedicated to committing transgressions. That’s also a president newsworthy because he lies about literally everything. On the other hand? Kelly O’Donnell insisting that Trump says it isn’t so. Zero context from Kelly about, you know, all the other stuff the rest of us know already.

Kelly O’Donnell wants us to accept what she’s telling us as truth — or a possible truth — that Donald Trump never said what all those witnesses said he said. In the face of the Truth, Kelly O’ wants us to believe that bullshit could still be true.

NBC News’ White House Reporter Kelly O’Donnell. A nice enough person no doubt, but an immoral journalist.

That is immoral. And that is the problem with far too much American journalism.

When we finally begin to put what’s left of America back together again, we need to launch an investigation into who or what started “both sides do it” journalism.

Trump couldn’t have done what he did to the country without the full-on complicity of nearly the entire Republican Party. And the GOP couldn’t have done what it did — allow Trump to take America to the brink of catastrophe — without the news media cutting them all the slack they needed to drive us here.

It’s understood that covering Trump is unlike covering anyone else. He’s deeply sociopathic, a narcissist’s narcissist, incapable of any sort of self analysis. He’s utterly shameless. And willfully cruel — even to his own family. He says anything that comes to his mind, no matter how outrageous and untrue. But then, none of that is a secret.

The press has reported it since he slithered down that golden escalator into the lobby of Trump Tower and insisted that “Mexicans are rapists”.

That, of course, is not true. Virtually nothing Trump says about himself is true — except perhaps that he has a thing for young girls. And his own daughter.

Trump wasn’t “kidding” when he said that, by the way. Trump can’t kid. He can’t joke about things because he has no sense of humor. When Trump does “make jokes”, he’s not actually “making jokes” — he’s bullying. The tell whether you have a sense of humor or not is “can you laugh at yourself?” If the answer is no — as it absolutely is with Trump — you have no sense of humor.

It is a false narrative to ever say Trump is joking therefore. But then, Trump is a collection of false narratives and, for some reason, our news media prefers false narratives to real, verifiable ones.

“Donald Trump, Successful Businessman” is verifiably untrue. Yet our news media chose to accept that false narrative without checking it out. Checking it out would have meant acting like a news organization and doing some scut work. Kind of like how Fusion GPS did after the republican-owned, Jeb Bush supporting Washington Free Beacon hired them to do oppo research on Donald Trump. Fusion was co-founded by two former Wall Street Journal reporters.

When he was hauled before the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee on August 22, 2017 — by Republicans desperate to undermine the integrity of the Steele Dossier — Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson testified that the first thing Fusion did upon being hired was their due diligence. They got their hands on every piece of publicly available material about Donald Trump. They haunted Amazon and physical book stores. They got ahold of magazine stories, videos, audio recordings. Everything Trump said in a public environment, everything anyone wrote about him.

What Fusion saw, Simpson testified, convinced them that Trump had, at the very least, used his (now bankrupt) Atlantic City casinos to launder Russian mob money. To violate the law.

Worst of all — Fusion saw that Trump was deeply compromised in ways that made him vulnerable to Russia. No one with half a brain thinks Russia wants anything good for us. Matter of fact, we already know that Putin has drawn up plans for cyber war against us. Gosh, if all the journalists working the Trump beat had been aggregating everything they know (from their own reporting) about Trump, he’d already by in federal prison.

We know Trump violates the rule of law and the Constitution because we’re watching him do it — in real time! It’s not as if finding Trump’s criminality requires much heavy lifting. FFS, just quote the guy and you’ve got him nailed. When journalists go deep into Trump, they always come up with treasure. The deeper they go, the more valuable the treasure. And yet, they demur… It boggles the mind.

It makes one wonder — why do they refuse to tell Trump’s story? Is it fear of losing access? Trump needs the press way more than the press needs Trump. He knows he can’t rely exclusively on Fox to spread his toxic messaging. That means the press doesn’t have to let Trump frame his story his way. THEY should never have let him do it to begin with. But, going forward, the news media could absolutely frame Trump correctly — based solely on the collective reporting of the American news media.

It’s baffling why a guy like Seth Abramson doesn’t get more news media attention. He’s the ultimate aggregator of the story the news media itself is trying to tell. If only they’d look at the perspective they themselves have created about Trump. Our starting point, every day wouldn’t be “Trump, the normal POTUS, running a normal re-election campaign”, it’d be “Trump, the corrupt, soulless, criminal, impeached president who committed treason to steal his first term in office and now wants to keep committing treason in order to remain in power forever because the moment he stops being POTUS, he’ll be indicted and sued out the wazoo”. That should be where all reporting about Trump BEGINS.

So — how does our news media heal itself?

First, it must open its eyes and truly look at itself. Regardless of whether “both sides do it” infected them in journalism school or later via contact with infected journalists, all journalists need to disavow “both sides do it”. They need to atone for equating skepticism — that thing all journalists are supposed to have in their tool kit — with cynicism. Cynicism assumes that everyone’s a rat bastard who deserves what they get.

That’s bullshit. Not everyone is motivated by self-interest. To brush everyone that way is despicable. Worse, it’s immoral.

Worst of all? It ain’t journalism — not the way journalism needs to be practiced going forward. From here on out, American journalism needs to stop equating political neutrality with neutrality. No one can remain neutral in the face of evil — even at its most banal. If, say, a reporter knows someone is doing something terrible in real time, they are obligated to stop it from happening if they at all possibly can.

Not as a journalist, AS A HUMAN BEING.

Journalists need to remember who and what they are first — before they take on the mantle of “reporter”. They’re humans living amongst other humans in (we hope) a civil society. They need to follow those rules first.

They’re also Americans — whose interests, while diverse, also hew to a particular set of rules. Citizenship doesn’t just come with benefits — voting, an American passport (for what that’s worth these days) — also it comes with responsibilities. Voting. But also an obligation to stand up for the rule of law. It can’t stand up for itself, you see.

We The People need to be the rule of law’s guardian. We need to defend it because that’s what our whole system of government is based on: a mutual understanding of the rules that keep us from killing each other. Journalists aren’t just another segment of We The People — which they are part of — they’re also charged with being the last check on power. That’s what it says in the Constitution; journalists are the only actual “job” enumerated in the Constitution. Journalists have a double obligation. But then, they chose journalism as much as it probably chose them.

Because we failed to prosecute or enforce the rule of law equally, the rule of law seems to have broken down. It hasn’t. We’re the thing that’s broken down. The moment we go back to enforcing the rule of law (this time properly)? It will begin to work for us. So long as we don’t extend any special treatment to anyone, just by enforcing the rule of law again, we’ll feel our sails begin to fill with forward momentum toward justice. If we can get there, not only will we fulfill our mutual obligation to give every single one of us the same chance to achieve our maximum potential, we’ll have helped America achieve the potential it aspired to back at its founding — minus all that white, Christian, European male Chauvinism that hogged all that potential for itself.

A Great Moral Reckoning is coming to America. It sure would be nice to see our news media actually riding that wave — atop its crest even. The way they’re going right now, they’ll be watching it from the shore.

A Win Achieved By Cheating Is Not A “Win”; It’s Cheating

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
Donald Trump gives “the boss” the kind of smile he gives no one else.

To describe what happened in 2016 as “Donald Trump won the election” is to frame the election from cheating’s point of view. Let’s be clear: Trump didn’t just cheat We The People out of our clear ballot box choices, he cheated the rule of law itself.

That’s significant. Dear American News Media — take note.

From the rule of law’s point of view, in order to be a legitimate win, the winner must follow the rule of law. If the “winner” didn’t follow the rule of law to achieve their win then their win “isn’t”. It can’t be — because they broke the rule of law to achieve it.

The moment we understood that Donald Trump cheated to become president in 2016, we should have reclassified his “win” as something other than a “win” — and his presidency something other than a presidency. That’s just the rule of law speaking. That’s important because the whole basis for our system of government is the rule of law. If Trump’s presidency was not achieved via the rule of law?

It’s not a presidency — which means (again, according to the rule of law) that Trump never had the authority to do anything a legitimate POTUS does. Like nominate lifetime judicial appointments including SCOTUS seats. The authority to do things like that flows from the rule of law. Step outside the rule of law and the authority no longer flows. If you violated the rule of law from the get-go (and Trump was deeply compromised before he ever declared his run) then nothing you ever did had any actual authority.

If we throw in a motive — in Trump’s case corruption and treason — then the nature of his judicial picks must also speak to motive. The whole point of choosing the judges Trump chose — after violating the rule of law in order to “win” election — was to stop the rule of law from having any capacity to stop Trump ever again. The rule of law cannot enforce itself. That’s our job. The perverse irony is that those breaking the rule of law in order to destroy the rule of law have a distinct advantage over those who refuse to break the rule of law — even to save it.

Had we enforced the rule of law equally before now, we wouldn’t be in the mess that we’re in. It’s not too late however. We The People are an overwhelming majority compared to the tiny cabal of rich, Christian white men who are trying so desperately to hang onto power. Proof that massive protest can stop them is in front of us.

Want to know what scares Donald Trump more than another pregnant mistress he’ll have to pay off? More than daddy’s anger at him? More Vladimir Putin even? The rule of law.

Trump thinks he can negotiate his way out of trouble with Putin (boy, is he wrong!). He knows he can’t do anything to negotiate his way out of trouble with the rule of law. That’s why he needs to make sure we never practice it ever again. The second we start enforcing it again (that’s an important distinction — the rule of law never stopped being in force; we stopped enforcing it), Donald Trump will be in legal jeopardy for the rest of his life and he knows it. Trump will be investigated, indicted, sued, indicted some more, convicted and sentenced to life behind bars. So will his children (not that he cares about them). What’s worst of all to Trump — he’ll lose everything. Literally.

Once the investigating begins in earnest — the rule of law will insist — every last piece of real estate Trump owns will be in play. Between tax fraud & money laundering, it’s all tainted one way or another. We’ll wash all that off after we seize it. I hope we have the good sense to put most of the money we make from the sale of everything Trump owns into a super fund that will begin to pay for the damage Trump did to the nation and to individual Americans. To individuals outside America too.

Donald Trump hasn’t just been bad for America, he’s been bad for the whole planet.

By cheating to gain the presidency, Trump did more than violate the rule of law. Our hearts may want to punish him for all the abuse our sense of decency has suffered. We’ll have to legislate decency in the future. For now, we’ll have to deal with facts. Donald Trump broke the rule of law in order to become POTUS.

That means Donald Trump is not now and never was legitimate President of the United States.

The moment we remove Trump (and the whole rest of the GOP) from power, real winning can finally begin. A win for the rule of law is a win for America and every single American.

The “Republican Brand” Is Now As Toxic As Cancer

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
Cancer Salesmen insisting that cancer is good for us, good for America!

Imagine if cancer had a “brand”. You don’t have to — it’s the same as the GOP’s. Republicans suck at governing mostly because it’s their mission to prove that government doesn’t work. So, whenever they get into power, they turn government into a branch of their own corrupt enterprise.

Donald Trump IS the Republican Brand. So’s Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr and Mikes Flynn, Pompeo & Pence. Greed is the Republican Brand. And Corruption and conspiracy and — here’s the big one: TREASON. Yes, treason is absolutely part of what one should think of when one thinks “Republicans”.

Republicans MADE treason their brand when they took all that Russian money into their campaign coffers in 2016.

Republicans made treason their brand when they embraced Donald Trump — KNOWING that he was taking money from Russia.

Republicans made treason their brand when they did everything possible to obstruct every investigation into Russia’s involvement with Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Republicans made treason their brand when they refused to convict Trump for trying to pull the same treasonous bullshit with Ukraine in 2020 that they pulled with Russia in 2016.

Republicans make treason their brand each time they look away when Trump & Putin communicate sans notes, note-takers or anyone overseeing what exactly Trump is giving away.

It’s the treason that drives the rest of Republican corruption now. It has to. Once the GOP committed themselves to Trump, once they hitched their wagon to him — albeit reluctantly at first — the game was over. There couldn’t be any coming back — ever.

While the news media continues to scratch its head, unable to fathom why Republicans still only reluctantly disagree with Trump, the business world has already begun to separate themselves from Trump and the GOP because they care about their brands. The exodus didn’t just start however. Twenty-First Century Fox — the corporation that oversees Fox News — made a decision back in 2017 that reflected the reality that’s thudding hard into the Republican Party right now — they fired Bill O’Reilly.

O’Reilly, remember, was Fox’s cash cow before Tucker Carlson. The sexual misconduct accusations that ended O’Reilly’s tenure weren’t the first. And, in another time, the accusations might have been ignored as they always had been. But Twenty-First Century Fox’s board of directors saw red flag warnings ahead and chose to change course. The warnings came via their advertisers — who said they would no longer support O’Reilly with their ad dollars. And the advertisers were reacting to the most important fact in their universe: the majority of buying decisions in most American households were being made by women.

The advertisers needed women to like their brands so that they’d buy them. They knew however that women don’t care for men who sexually harass or abuse women. They won’t buy products from men like that — or companies that stand with abusers. Women, the advertisers understood, were the key. And, if women weren’t going to support Bill O’Reilly, neither would they.

That spelled the end of Bill O’Reilly at Fox. The toxicity of his brand did him in.

Branding can take years — decades even — to create yet moments to destroy. Guys like Kevin Spacey are terrific actors with remarkable bodies of work. But, in the public’s mind Kevin Spacey’s brand isn’t acting anymore. It’s sexual deviance. Yeah, Kevin beat the rap on one charge but that charge against Kevin didn’t happen in a vacuum.

No one wants to work with Kevin anymore. If Kevin signs on to a movie or TV project now, everyone else will bail on it. Welcome to Pariahhood, Kevin.

Give the GOP a few months — the day after election day — and they’ll know exactly how Kevin feels.

Even if the Republican Party cheats on an even more massive scale than they did in 2016 and comes away with a “win”? It won’t play like a win — not this time. This time, the cheating will have to be so staggeringly obvious that even our press will have to check their “both sides do it” heads at the door.

“Live with it” is how Republicans want to brand their coronavirus response. “Die because of it” will be the way the American public “brands” it however.

But then, what kind of branding did we expect from a death cult?

Quick Reminder — Donald Trump Is No Less A Traitor Just Because He’s Screwing Up Our Coronavirus Response & Killing Americans Via Incompetence

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’m hypomanic — so, living in Trump World where things are always rocketing around at a million miles an hour, going in every which direction, doesn’t feel that different from my normal reality. The News Media wants to believe that Donald Trump lurches from catastrophe to catastrophe as a way to keep the rest of us off balance.

While Trump does live in a constant state of “making it up as he goes along”, he does it less as a deliberate “strategy” than as the only way he knows how to be. Trump’s neither bright nor curious. If not for having a rich daddy, Trump would be living in the dankest part of Queens, running the local operation for some local crime boss. He’s a criminal by nature — and not a very organized one.

The picture that’s emerging of how exactly the coronavirus and Covid-19 erupted across the globe — but with extra explosiveness in parts of America — paints a distinct and clear picture of how corruption plus coronavirus equals catastrophe. Trump’s refusal to actually use the Defense Protection Act to force big companies to support the efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus is not a mystery. It’s Trump using the pandemic to declare war ON America.

While watching the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths skyrocket — numbers skyrocketing BECAUSE of Trump’s actions (and inactions) — it’s vital to remember that Trump does not stop being the corrupt TRAITOR we knew him to be BEFORE coronavirus and Covid-19 took our attention away. Trump’s election fraud in 2016, his continuing obstruction of justice — and the inarguable fact of his ongoing treasonous behavior (in multiple ways) continue apace, unabated.

Even now, Trump’s still firing the watch dogs still in place.

Trump’s got a bottom line — of course he does. He can’t ever stop being president. The moment Trump stops being POTUS, he stops being protected by the silly-assed (and bullshit) DoJ policy (a kind of “rule” but in no way a LAW) that says you can’t indict a sitting POTUS. In the Michael Cohen trial, Trump will automatically go from being “Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1″ to INDICTED Co-conspirator #1” — and that will open the floodgates. In a heartbeat, Trump will become the most sued & prosecuted man in America.

Sociopath that Trump is, he still knows that what he did was illegal. That’s why he keeps it secret and swears everyone else to keep that omerta. Trump knows for a fact that if he ever gets prosecuted — under oath — in a real court of law — he’s screwed. For good.

Trump knows he has nothing to stand on defense-wise. He’s got bullshit and bluster while the prosecution has whole mountain ranges of receipts. What scares Trump most? He knows down deep he could lose everything. Literally every property he owns could be seized. I bet that happens too. I, for one, am going to scream and shout my head off until that DOES become a reality.

While, in my heart of hearts, I would love to see pictures of Donald Trump, homeless, hungry and desperate, living on the street in a cardboard box with a yellow (not gold) “T” scrawled on its side, I’m open-minded enough to be happy with pictures of Trump sitting in his federal prison cell — horrified by what happened to him & horrified because this is the rest of his life.

It’s sooooooooo easy to get distracted in the age of Trump. We need to think of it like staying indoors because of coronavirus. Donald Trump is now and always will be a traitor.

There — I’ve done my “Patriotism Push Ups” for the day.

If The Question Is “But, What Can We DO To Stop Trump?”, The Answer Is “Let’s Start By Agreeing: Donald Trump Was NEVER The “LEGITIMATE POTUS”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

A schoolyard bully who steals your lunch money and claims it was always his, is wrong. Not just morally but factually. The lunch money was never his.

Same token — a person who cheats on their bar exam or pilot’s license isn’t actually a lawyer or a pilot. They never actually qualified for it and therefore never really had rights or privileges that were given them UNDER FALSE PRETENSE. Get that last part — the FALSE PRETENSE part? Stick a pin in it. We’re coming back.

The guy cutting you open may call himself a doctor — and the scalpel in his hand is horrifyingly real — but he is not, in fact, by our mutual agreement (because we have created standards for our mutual benefit and safety) that thing he’s calling himself — be it doctor, lawyer, pilot — or POTUS.

Now, I’m simply going by the Rule Of Law here — and, as always on this blog, I assume we’ll find a way back to a world where the Rule Of Law “is” again because the overwhelming majority of us prefer it that way. Maybe that’s why I remain hopeful (if uneasily so) — though Americans should have taken to the streets en masse many insults to human decency ago, there will be a point where even the most apolitical American gets up on his hind legs and says “STOP!”

The majority of Americans do not like being told what to do by “outsiders”. They love their creature comforts — a lot. They want simple lives, yes, but simple lives of comfort. Trump’s impact on this country is only just playing out in full-assed Technicolor. It’s been building to this from the day Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump.

We’re not talking about the Trumpanistas. They’re “never-wozzers” where Democracy is concerned. They’re a more malignant version of the 29% of Americans who still approved of Nixon on the day he resigned because of Watergate — the last Republican power grab that we managed to stop just in time. We’re talking about the 40% or so of Americans who never or rarely engage with politics.

These are the cynical ones — never instilled with civic pride because we just don’t teach it. Civic pride doesn’t instill itself, ya know. To a degree, their cynicism is understandable. Money has always had a louder voice and bigger vote. They got that. But, that was the whole point of “giving money the vote” — to further empower the money and further disempower the actual voter.

2018 began something — a very real awakening. The surge of women into politics will continue unabated because women finally cannot tolerate living in a male-dominated world. That won’t merely effect the sex of the people doing the legislating, it will effect how those people legislate. They’ll do it like women. They’ll do it more multi-laterally than unilaterally. In fact, it’ll be the rare decision that ever gets made unilaterally at all. Because women’s bodies are designed to bear children, they know in their atoms — no one can have or raise a child by themselves. They can try — and they might not die. But they absolutely will not thrive.

Women know a lot about legitimacy. I don’t mean as it pertains to kids with married parents, I mean how it pertains to who deserves what and who doesn’t. Women have had to fight damned hard to get a fraction of what men get in the marketplace — not because their ideas are worth less or their skills less — but because they’re women. Glass ceilings are completely illegitimate. They’re not a legitimate thing. They don’t represent a legitimate reason to exclude women and their talents from the game.

Legitimacy matters.

I believe women will refuse to accept Trumpism going forwards because they will have rejected it in their guts from the get-go. Trumpism is built on a gross, male lie — “I alone can fix it”. If I want to stick my dick somewhere, I’m sticking it there.

That’s not legitimate — except as a rape threat.

We must see EVERYTHING now in its totality. We cannot see all these isolated bits and pieces of the mosaic — Mitch McConnell denying Barack Obama all those lifetime federal judges especially the SCOTUS seat — Mitch McConnell refusing to let Obama tell us that Russia was all in to make Trump POTUS — Every Trumpian lie about Russia — Trump Tower Moscow — Every Republican lie about Russia including the fact that they’ve always known about (starting with “I think Putin Pays Rohrbacher & Trump”) — every time Trump has attached himself to Putin’s anus like a limpet to a shark — every sledgehammer blow to our system of government — we have to see every single corrupt shard as part of a gigantic corrupt whole: Treason.

People who commit TREASON to become President of The United States? They can’t BE President. They’ve already broken the main rule. Remember False Pretense? You cannot “win” the presidency of this country under it.

It’s a contradiction of terms therefore to say you’re president when, in fact, you are not.

Donald Trump did not clear the most basic hurdle of becoming LEGITIMATE POTUS. He did not win the presidency legitimately.

Once we make that the foundation — our starting point for all facts going forward — then first fact we have to acknowledge is Donald Trump is not now — nor has he ever been — the legitimate president. Not being the legitimate POTUS, he never had ANY of the rights, privileges or the authority to do what legitimate POTUSes do — create legislation, represent our country abroad, nominate judges.

I’m not authorized to make air traffic decisions. I might show up and claim I have the authority and even bring along powerful friends who agree with me — that I do. But I don’t — and clearly I’m not making air traffic decisions because I care about safety in the skies. I’m not sure why I’d lie about being an air traffic control person but I know exactly why I’d lie about cheating to become POTUS.

How can the victims of a crime — that’s what We The People are in this instance — be forced to endure a lifetime of the criminal getting away with it? Who says that has to happen — when we can prove how utterly criminal the criminal here is? An election result was stolen from us. That’s not an abstraction.

We The People voted for open-minded, progressive-leaning judges — that’s who the people WE THE MAJORITY voted for. We got fascists instead. That’s not our democracy working, that’s our democracy being hijacked.

We do NOT have to listen to hijackers. We do not have to do what they say or let them win. We can turn — right now — and look these criminals right in the face. They won’t meet our eyes — of course they can’t. They’re guilty little boys who’ve been caught out again. And this time we caught them doing something diabolically bad.

That’s why they’re fighting so hard to kill our democracy dead. If the Rule Of Law is still a thing? Every last Republican (okay — save, MAYBE a few) is going to prison for the rest of their lives. Traitors deserve nothing less.

What can we do to stop Trump & the Republican Party? Let’s start by calling them what they are — TRAITORS. Let’s also make it clear that we view 2016 as not an election but a crime scene. The election result needs to be inspected in far greater detail. We The People want the facts — as best we can reconstruct them.

We want to know what REALLY happened in 2016. If Trump — or ANY Republican — worked with Russia IN ANY WAY to facilitate Trump’s “win”, we cannot say that election was free or fair. Considering what we KNOW Russia was up to — and why?

Tossing the results of election 2016 is a big ask. But how else can we possibly proceed from a starting point of “DONALD TRUMP WAS NEVER LEGITIMATELY PRESIDENT”?

Why on earth would we insist on legitimizing what we know was treasonous? Who the hell could that possibly serve?

Oh, wait — I think I know…

But, At The End Of The Day — It’s STILL A Damned Coup D’Etat!

~ A L Katz ~ 1 Comment

Today is slated to be one of the very worst in American History. Today, the corrupt-to-its marrow Republican-controlled Senate will acquit the most corrupt POTUS in American History of charges he’s corrupting this year’s election.

Think about that. We stand poised at a Treason Trifecta — A treasonous president, a treasonous Senate and a judiciary MADE treasonous by the treasonous Senate. Keep in mind, We The People did not vote for this. We did not choose this. We did not want this. In fact, the majority of us voted AGAINST this. Our majority would have been significantly larger, of course, but for massive voter suppression efforts carried out by the GOP. Quick note — only one side EVER works to suppress the other side’s voters. That’s not a coincidence.

If not for Russia’s direct assistance, Donald Trump would not be president today. That is a stone cold fact. We don’t know yet exactly how impactful the proprietary polling data Paul Manafort handed to Oleg Deripaska was. Deripaska took that polling data — which should never EVER have been given to a foreign person let alone a foreign person with a well known background in spying & intelligence as Deripaska has — and converted it into propaganda that showed up as weaponized Facebook ads on individual Democratic voters’ Facebook pages. Especially African American Democratic voters. A lot of those ads spewed disinformation claiming Hillary Clinton was a closet racist.

We know — we’ve witnessed it — one vote can change an election’s outcome. ONE VOTE. That means EVERY VOTE COUNTS. You screw with one vote — you screw with the election’s outcome. The tolerance therefore for voter manipulation of any kind is ONE VOTE.

We know — because there’s reporting — at least one Democratic African American voter stayed home, successfully dissuaded from voting because of the propaganda. That means voter fraud happened. That voter fraud was part of a larger, coordinated effort to cheat the election. That voter fraud was a clear collaboration between Trump’s campaign & Russia.

You cannot cheat to become POTUS. It’s the law. Therefore, if you DO cheat to become POTUS, you are NOT POTUS. How can you be if you broke one of the basic rules of “how to become POTUS”? That means Donald Trump has never been the legitimate president. He’s been aware of that fact from the start; he’s projected it regularly — as he’s projected every last bit of his guilt. His party has known it all along, too. That’s why they’ve worked so hard to COVER UP THE TRUTH about how exactly Trump “won” — who was behind the “win” and what’s happened since to keep all that ugly Truth from seeing the sunlight.

This didn’t just “happen”. To a degree — but only a degree — it was planned. Mitch McConnell certainly had a plan. He’s been slowly hijacking the judiciary — denying Barack Obama lifetime appointments including Merrick Garland’s seat on the SCOTUS and then using his Senate majority to cram young RW nitwits & scumbags down our throats. Mitch has taken gobs of Russian money into his campaign accounts for years.

No doubt — because it was Mitch’s PAC and because the money all got laundered one way or another — it all seemed perfectly legal at the time. Ah, but context… We now know WHY Mitch was so open to Russian money. He saw Russia as an ally in his (and the RW Money’s) plan to deny the coming demographic Republican apocalypse. By partnering with Russia, Mitch & the RW money saw a way to keep from going the way of the Whigs into extinction — at least for a little while.

Mitch wasn’t the only one hip to the game. There’s that famous moment at the Republican convention in 2016 when now Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy walked into a meeting of GOP Muckety-Mucks and announced “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan “…immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.”

In theory, Paul Ryan’s response should have been “You think WHAT? Have you got any proof of that? Holy shit — somebody call the freakin’ FBI!” But, Paul Ryan didn’t say that. Instead, he swore everyone to SECRECY — as if there was a SECRET that needed keeping.

Hmmmmmm… A SECRET, ya say…

I’m willing to give the GOP this — rotten intentions aside, a lot of what’s happened over the last 3 years has been “seat of the pants”. The Republicans knew what they were involved with but they had no idea their Russian partner could pull off what they managed to pull off. As surprising as I’m sure it was to the Republicans — to find themselves the winners of an election even they were certain they’d lose — it was equally confounding. Their nominee had “won” the White House. The problem — the Republicans had just committed TREASON.

We can document that Mitch McConnell knew as early as September 2016 when Obama called a Gang Of Eight meeting so that our Intelligence Community could brief the rest of our political leadership about the very real, very grave threat that Russia was posing to the INTEGRITY OF OUR ELECTIONS. McConnell flat out refused to let Obama tell We The People that OUR election system was under threat.

Now, WHY, I wonder, would Mitch McConnell do that?

The instant Trump “won”, if Mitch McConnell — or ANY Republican — had had an inkling that Trump’s win might be tainted — by Russian influence FFS! — they should have said something. They did not. WHY?

Yeah, okay — it’s a loaded question. We know why. Mitch & Paul & Kevin were all playing ball with Russia. They’d been compromised already — each of them — and there was no way to stop what was now in motion — an illegal attempt to change the outcome of an American election. To deny the American electorate its will.

That’s the bet the Republican Party made — that they could get away with corrupting our elections permanently — to seize power and to hold onto power. That, by definition, is a coup d’etat. The illegal seizure of power. Most coups are military. Ours was special that way. The Republicans didn’t need the military — they needed the press. And the press — by not seeing what the Republicans were doing — spread bullshit legitimacy over clear corruption.

Today the Senate Republicans will deny evidence & witnesses to clear criminality — all bent on further subverting the will of the American People.

If Americans — and our news media — didn’t grasp how very real a coup d’etat this was, this must serve as their (and our) wake up call. Never mind Nancy Pelosi tearing up a copy of Trump’s lie-filled SOTU address. Trump’s whole SOTU was him shredding the Constitution.

My Sexual Assault Survivor Spidey Senses Are Tingling Like Crazy: What The GOP Is Doing To America Is Exactly Like A Sexual Assault

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

No one really “recovers” from being sexually assaulted. You can live with it, of course. You can make a kind of uneasy peace with it. But you can never accept that it happened to you.

The disease that comes with being sexually assaulted is believing that you deserved it. That’s what keeps you silent. In my case, I kept it so silent that I almost forgot WHY I had come to believe later in life that every bad thing that happened to me was my fault. I still believed then that being sexually assaulted was my fault.

It wasn’t of course. I was 14. The man who assaulted me — twice — was the religious director at the synagogue where my family belonged. The only thing I did “wrong” was not report him after he assaulted me that first time. But, like lots of victims, I began to question myself. I even questioned whether the assault had actually happened. It was surreal — a grown man rubbing his erect penis between my ass cheeks — through our clothes (he kept his underpants on, ya could say!) while supposedly coaching me on how to perform a haftorah at a Saturday morning Shabbat service. How could those two things go together?

I said nothing after it. That meant that when it happened again to me — when I again allowed myself to be in the same place at the same time as my sexual assaulter — all alone with him — it must have been my fault. Yehuda (that was his first name — he’s died since) knew that I hadn’t told anyone. He wasn’t in jail.

And since I was back — it obviously meant I’d say nothing this time too. I’d keep our secret. The moment that second sexual assault began, I was done. I was deep in both a hurt locker & a self-blame locker. Self-loathing was a natural outgrowth. Mine came within literal inches of killing me.

In getting better — and I am getting better — I have learned that it’s important to see things for what they REALLY are. Yehuda was a criminal perpetrating a crime upon 14 year old me. I was both a victim of sexual assault and a survivor. I have carried the scars with me since it happened. That’s over 45 years. I think we can safely say now that my sexual assault is part of my architecture.

I know with terrible certainty what those feelings are — when that pricking starts on the back of your neck. What I wake up feeling every day — even more so while the Senate Republicans sexually assault the Truth with abandon — is exactly what I felt the second time Yehuda stood behind me and rubbed his erect adult penis between my 14 year old ass cheeks. We are being assaulted.

Sexual assault isn’t “sex” the same way rape isn’t “sex”. It’s a crime of violence committed using sexual means. It’s a man using his penis as a weapon. It’s about power — his over you.

That is exactly what the whole Republican Party is doing to America, to The Rule Of Law, to the Constitution and to every single American who voted against this — in other words THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS.

Don’t give that Electoral College nonsense. Yeah, yeah — Trump, the GOP & Russia gamed our system perfectly. They even told us (focus on PA/WI/MI) to win. Not because they intended to win more votes there but because they knew Russia was going to cheat in every way it possibly could for their benefit.

Why don’t Republicans want the truth to be told? Puh-lease! Because the Truth is, the Republican Party has its pants down around its ankles. It’s got its dick in its hands and is actively trying to force it on us. We keep saying “NO!” and they keep ignoring that fact.

They keep forcing Republican policies they KNOW the majority doesn’t want just like a rapist forcing his flesh into an unwilling victim’s. No means no means NO.

Rapists and sexual assaulters don’t stop being rapists and sexual assaulters just because they can’t rape and sexually assault people 24/7. They have to eat & sleep. They have to pay the rent. But a rapist eating and sleeping — going to his job — is still a rapist. He dreams of rape. He craves rape. Rape is how he solves all his problems.

A rapist feels entitled to rape people.

Just like Republicans feel entitled to cheat Americans from what THEY voted for — and force THEIR awfulness where it ain’t wanted.

Our Constitutional Crisis (Yeah – We’re In One!) Didn’t Just Start – It Began The Moment Trump Took His Oath Of Office – And Violated It In The Very Same Breath

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Lots of Chicken Little running around the media landscape have finally bought in — America’s in a Constitutional Crisis! Yeah, we are, Chicken Little. Where were you Inauguration Day?

The Rule Of Law is or it isn’t. Same goes for the Constitution. Either we have one — and we follow it — or we don’t. And the very same goes for oaths that we take where we promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Either we mean what we say or the whole notion of oath-taking is now officially rubbish.

Want to know what first class entertainment would be? Watching Donald Trump take an oath to tell the truth — then literally lying with every word he said. That’s what happened, mind you, when Trump took his oath of office. He lied while taking it. He swore to uphold the Constitution — to defend it from all enemies domestic and foreign — while KNOWING that he, personally, was doing the diametric opposite.

Even on a smaller scale, Trump violated his oath as he took it. He was using his properties all around the world — and especially there in DC — to take in and solicit bribes. He was taking emoluments hand over fist — even as he swore NOT TO. Yeah, I know — thievery is small potatoes compared to treason.

But today’s treason started as thievery. Trump saw — on day one — that no one cared if he violated part of his oath of office. What did he have to lose seeing how much further he could push the corruption envelope? Yes, indeedy — Donald Trump has put us into a full on Constitutional Crisis. But that Crisis did not start today or yesterday.

It’s been on-going since Day One.

Quick analogy: You wake up to realize your house is on fire. Old wiring has shorted somewhere behind a wall and the entire structure is aready engulfed in flames. You hurry to get your family out safely. As you watch everything you own succumb, you need to grasp: the fire that just burned you out may have ignited a little while ago, but it didn’t “start” today. The circumstances that led to ignition started the day those wires were embedded in the walls. Maybe it started earlier even — on the day that flawed piece of wire was manufactured.

Indeed — if that’s what started the fire that burned down your house, the proximate cause of that fire began on the day the thing that will start the fire came into existence. In a very real sense, the circumstances for your tragedy started somewhere far away from you.

In the case of the flawed wire, there was nothing you could do about it. If the wire was put into the house years before you were even born (I like living in old houses), there’s still nothing you can do — except have that fact about your house in your head. Hooking a modern space heater up to wiring from 1908 could definitely cause unintended consequences.

But there’s your house — now on fire because earlier in the day — or days before — a weakness in already weak wire began to break down. Each time you turned the space heater on (unbeknownst to you), you took another step closer to causing a fire — behind the walls in wiring you knew was there but didn’t know was failing.

Tragedies rarely just happen. They’re built on mounting circumstances that, being tragic, seem inevitable. But nothing’s inevitable except death. If you’re rich (in America), taxes are off the “certainty list” for now. Death itself is a process that starts far earlier than we realize.

Think about it — the only question about any of our deaths is the when & where. The fact that it will happen is not in dispute.

In a way, death is like our Constitutional Crisis. It won’t begin the moment we realized we’re dying. It will have begun eons ago — the moment we were conceived. As always in Life, it sucks being the last to know.